Declan (Saltwater Kings MC #15)

Prologue

Declan

The light goes gold at the end of every good day, and today was a good day, so I let myself stand in it.

The yard is empty. The brothers have gone home or gone to The Crow's Nest, and the last customer pulled out of the lot an hour ago in a thirty-foot Grady-White that runs clean now because I made it run clean.

My hands smell like diesel and citrus solvent.

My back aches in the specific places it has ached for twenty years, the lower vertebrae that took the weight of a thousand outboards, the right shoulder that never set quite straight after a winch let go in 'ninety-eight.

I don't mind the aches. They're a record.

A man my age either has a body that tells stories or he hasn't lived enough to write any.

I'm forty-four years old and I am standing in my boat yard at sunset, alone, and I am content. I want to be clear about that, because of what comes after. I want it on the record that before any of it started, I was a man who had made peace.

The Saltwater Kings boat yard sits at the working end of Anchor Bay, where the marina money thins out and the real labor begins.

Behind me, the travel lift straddles a sailboat I'll splash on Thursday.

To my left, the open bays yawn dark, the rolling toolboxes locked, the air compressors ticking as they cool.

The harbor is flat tonight, the kind of flat that comes before weather, and the masts in the mooring field stand still as a forest with no wind in it.

A heron works the shallows by the fuel dock.

The marina cats — there are four of them, none of them mine, all of them mine — are circling my ankles because they know what time it is.

I crouch and shake kibble into the bent hubcap I keep by the office door. "Don't tell anyone," I say to the orange one, the way I say it every night. He doesn't tell anyone. That's why we get along.

I was born nine hundred feet from where I'm standing, in the apartment above what used to be Harte Marine and is now a kayak rental place with a neon sign.

My father fixed boats. His father ran charters.

I held a wrench before I held a baseball, and I held a baseball before most kids hold a crayon, and somewhere in there I decided that the inside of an engine was the most honest place in the world.

Everything in there has a reason. Everything connects to something.

When it breaks, it breaks for a cause, and the cause can be found, and the thing can be made right.

I have spent my whole life around people, and I have never once understood them the way I understand a fuel injection system.

People break for no reason. People break and tell you they're fine.

I patched into the Kings at twenty, back when the club was a half-dozen guys with bikes and grudges and a clubhouse that was really just Dominic's uncle's garage.

We were misfits then. We're a brotherhood now — a charter, a charity ride, a name that means something in this town that used to mean trouble.

I watched it grow. I helped it grow. My patch has more road on it than most of these kids have years, and I've earned the right to stand at the back of the room and say nothing, which is my favorite thing to do.

My wife left me twelve years ago.

I say that flat because that's how it sits in me now, flat, a closed seam.

Miranda was tired of the club, tired of the docks, tired of a husband who came home smelling like the bilge and fell asleep at the kitchen table with his hands still black.

She wasn't wrong about any of it. She wanted a life with edges I couldn't give her.

She found a man in Charleston who wears clean shirts and has opinions about wine, and I signed what there was to sign, and I have not seriously been with a woman since.

People ask why, the ones rude enough to ask.

I tell them I'm busy. The truth is plainer and uglier: I looked at what it cost to let someone in, and I decided I couldn't afford it twice.

Some men get cheaper as they age. I got more expensive.

So. Boats, bourbon, and the company of men who don't ask me about my feelings. That's the inventory of my life and I have audited it carefully and I have found it sufficient.

The orange cat finishes and walks off without thanking me, which I respect.

I'm wiping down the last of the bench when I hear the bike.

I know it before I see it — Dominic rides a stripped-down softail with a lope to the idle you could pick out of a thousand engines, and besides, nobody else would come down to the yard at this hour.

He pulls in, kills it, swings off. Dominic Vale is the only man alive I'd take an order from without thinking, and I've followed him into worse than a sunset.

"Thought you'd gone home," I say.

"Thought the same about you." He looks around the yard the way he always does, taking inventory of his own, then leans against the bench beside me. "Good day?"

"Splashed the Pearson. Fixed the Grady. Told a man with too much money that his engine doesn't need rebuilding, it needs cleaning, and watched him decide whether to believe me."

"Did he believe you?"

"They never believe you when it's cheap."

Dominic huffs the thing he does instead of laughing. Then he's quiet for a beat, and I know him too well, and the quiet tells me he didn't ride down here at sunset to ask about the Pearson.

"We need another mechanic," he says.

I keep wiping the bench. "We've got me. We've got Rhett when he's not chasing tail. We've got the kid, Toby, who's gonna be good in five years if he stops dropping sockets in the bilge."

"The expansion went through. The marina's tripling our slips by spring. Tripling the slips triples the work, Dec. You can't do triple. You're good, you're not three of you."

He's right. I hate it, but he's right. I've felt it coming — the schedule already pinching, jobs backing up into next week, the kind of pressure that makes a man rush, and rushing is how mistakes happen, and mistakes on a boat are how people drown. I set the rag down.

"Find me somebody good," I say. "Not a kid. Somebody who's turned a wrench in salt water, knows diesel and gas, doesn't need babysitting. I don't have time to raise anybody."

"Already found them." Dominic pulls a folded sheet from inside his cut and holds it out.

"Applied last week. Available immediately.

More certifications than you've got, and I checked — they're real, not the weekend-seminar kind.

Worked yards from the Keys up to Wilmington. References that don't blink."

I take the résumé. I unfold it. I read it the way I read everything, top to bottom, no skimming, and Dominic's right — the qualifications are stacked.

ABYC certified, marine diesel, marine systems, corrosion, electrical.

Eight years in working yards. Recommendation from a Keys outfit I actually know, a hard place that doesn't hand out kind words.

Then I get to the name.

Josie Reeves.

And the year of birth.

I do the arithmetic, which doesn't take long, because the difference is exactly the kind of number that wants to be done. Eighteen. Eighteen years between her birth and mine. She was learning to walk the year I patched into the club.

"She's a kid," I say.

"She's got more certifications than you," Dominic says, not even bothering to look at the page. He's already read it. He reads everything. That's why he runs the club and I run the yard.

"She's twenty-six. Half my crew are older than her grandfather."

"Your crew is two guys and a teenager, Dec."

"Hire her for the marina. Tatum's always short. Put her on slip work, fuel dock, whatever. She'll be plenty busy."

Dominic pushes off the bench and stands square in front of me, and now he's not leaning, now he's the president, and the difference is in his shoulders.

"I'm not hiring her for the marina. I'm hiring her for the yard.

She's the best application we've had in three years and the yard is where the skilled work is and the skilled work is what's drowning you.

" He claps a hand on my shoulder, the bad one, on purpose, the bastard. "She's yours."

"Dominic—"

"She starts Monday. Be decent. Or at least be quiet." He swings back onto the softail. "And feed your cats. You think I don't know about the cats?"

He rides out. The lope of the engine fades up the hill and the yard goes silent again, except now the silence has a different texture, the way water looks different when you know there's weather coming.

I stand there in the last of the gold light with a stranger's résumé in my hand. Josie Reeves. Twenty-six. Mine.

I should feel nothing. I should feel the mild administrative irritation of a man whose schedule is about to change. That's all this is — a schedule change, a new name on the time clock, a body to train into the rhythms of my yard.

Instead I feel something I have not felt in a long time, and it takes me a moment to name it because I'm so out of practice, and when I name it I almost laugh at myself, a forty-four-year-old man spooked by a piece of paper.

It's the feeling you get on a flat harbor at sunset when the cats won't settle and the herons go quiet and the masts stand too still. It's the feeling of a barometer dropping in your bones.

It's the certainty — bone-deep, weatherwise, the kind I've never once been wrong about in four decades on this water — that my carefully ordered life is about to become very, very complicated.

I fold the résumé and put it in my pocket.

I lock the office. I go home to my bourbon and my quiet house, and I tell myself it's nothing, the way you tell yourself the flat water means nothing, right up until the morning the storm arrives wearing steel-toed boots and a chip on its shoulder, parking a battered pickup in my lot like it owns the place.

But that's Monday's problem.

Tonight I let the light go gold, and I stand in it, content, for the last evening I will ever be content with so little.