Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Dean
“Mayday. Mayday. Mayday.”
I freeze with a dock line in my fist as the radio at my belt crackles. What idiot saw the wall of clouds approaching and thought, yeah, let’s go sailing?
Jesus.
“This is sailing vessel—this is Abel Merrick. Vessel in distress. Position approximately two miles northwest of Port Haven breakwater. Taking on water. Engine failure. Two souls on board. Mayday.”
Everything in me goes cold. Abel. On the water. In this.
Why?
He knows better. He fucking knows this is not weather you fuck around in.
The weather station’s been calling gale every ten minutes. I checked it myself.
“Abel,” I bark into the portable, already untying the bow. “Say again your position. Who’s the second soul on board?”
There’s a silence, then a burst of static. “Scarlett,” his voice blares, high and thin with panic. “It’s—she’s the other. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, Dean.”
The wind shreds the next words. I don’t hear them. I’m already running back toward the office. The only thing in the world is the sound of her name, flickering between static.
She’s out there, somewhere in the black sweep of the Sound, and I have to get to her before the cold or the waves or whatever sentient malice the Merrick family conjured tonight finishes the job.
I throw open the office door and trip over Doug’s throne on my way to the wall phone. Bodhi took Doug and Captain to the farm to ride out the weather, and the office is empty, eerily still, other than the howling of the wind.
The marina office radio sits on the counter behind me, volume cranked to compete with the storm.
The Coast Guard response comes through a half-second later, crisp and controlled: “Abel Merrick, this is Coast Guard Station Port Haven. Copy your Mayday. Stand by for position confirmation.”
I snap up the wall phone and dial Zade—
Headlights splash through the window, and I turn in time to see Zade’s truck rocking to a halt in front of the office.
I drop the phone and shove out the door. The dock pitches under my boots. Wind shoves me sideways. I grab the rail. The harbor is chaos—whitecaps, boats heaving against their lines, the breakwater a dark smudge through the gray.
Dean
That’s the right call — Zade as the brake, Dean as the one already past caring. Keeps Dean’s protocol-vs-the-person tension live without making him the one who has to recite the numbers. Here’s the exchange:
Zade’s Coast Guard jacket is dark with rain, hood up, his face sharp under the dock lights. “Shea called, said Abel claimed you were hurt.” He scowls. “You don’t look hurt.”
“That’s because I’m not. It was a setup. Abel lured Scarlett out onto the water.”
“On whose vessel?”
“One of Jasper’s runabouts.”
“Fuck. This storm will rip that boat apart.”
“It already is. Abel called in a Mayday. Two miles northwest, engine failure, taking on water.”
Zade looks out over the harbor at the whitecaps slamming against the breakwater. “We won’t get to them by boat.”
“Then we call the station. Get the helo up.”
He checks his watch. “Winds are at forty, gusting fifty-five. That’s past launch threshold, Dean. They won’t authorize it.”
“I don’t give a shit about the threshold.”
“I know you don’t.” He says it flat, not arguing. “Doesn’t change what the duty officer says when I call.” He exhales a long, slow breath. “But I know a pilot crazy enough to attempt it.”
The Coast Guard base sits a quarter mile north of the marina.
We run. Boots on wet asphalt. Rain in our faces.
The base gate is manned by a kid in a rain slicker who takes one look at Zade’s credentials and waves us through.
The hangar bay doors are open. Inside, the helicopter sits on its pad, rotors still, lights dim.
Crew Morrison stands under the tail boom with a clipboard, arguing with someone on his radio.
“—understand the conditions, sir. I’m telling you we have a Mayday with two souls—”
Zade takes the radio from Crew’s hand. “This is Master Chief Haven. I’m authorizing the launch. Paperwork to follow. Morrison, preflight. Now.”
“I’m going,” I say.
Crew looks at me, and his eyes widen under the brim of his U.S. Coast Guard ball cap. “Dean? I thought your swimming days were behind you.”
They’ve never been behind me. I still train daily, rain or shine. I still see the ghosts of every goddamn search and rescue that went wrong. “I’m going.”
Crew holds up his hands. “Far be it from me to tell the great Dean Kinsella what to do.”
Then he turns and starts barking orders at the two crewmen by the fuel pumps.
The hangar erupts into motion. Someone hands me a drysuit that’s too small.
I cram into it anyway and strap on a harness.
Zade throws me a helmet. The comms unit crackles to life as Crew climbs into the pilot’s seat.
Zade takes the hoist operator position. I strap into the jump seat behind them.
The aircraft lifts. The floor falls away. My stomach lurches. The hangar doors slide open, and the storm hits us like a wall. Rain hammers the windshield. The helicopter tilts, corrects, pushes into the wind.
“Whew, she’s angry today, gentlemen,” Crew calls into his headset. “This is gonna take more than a bit of sweet talk.”
I stare at the black, churning water below. Scarlett is down in that. In a boat taking on water. In the dark. She’s—
No. I lock down the panic and focus.
We clear the harbor in under two minutes.
Crew takes us out low and fast, hugging the black line of the coast. Every time the wind shifts, the bird jitters under us.
I grip the harness so hard the webbing bites my palms. Zade’s on the radio, voice steady as he coordinates with the district desk and the search vessels already scrambling in the Sound.
“Visual on the target?” Crew barks, flipping toggles. The rain turns the glass into a Jackson Pollock. “I can’t see shit.”
“Nothing on FLIR,” Zade says. “Try the northwest quadrant again.”
The ocean below is chaos. Whitecaps explode against one another, then vanish, then return, a battlefield of moving targets. I search for any sign of the runabout—a reflection, a sliver of hull, anything—but all I see is water and more water and—
A flash of blue.
“There!” I shout, pointing. “Port side, eleven o’clock.”
Crew banks left. The helicopter torques so violently I nearly lose my breakfast, but we drop hard and fast toward the target.
I catch a better glimpse: the boat’s belly-up and half-submerged.
No bodies clinging to it. No one waving for help.
Just the empty shell of the hull and, ten feet to starboard, something bright floating in the wash.
A head. Pale. Light hair plastered to a skull.
Abel.
He’s face-down in the water, arms loose. Not moving except for how the water moves him.
“Starboard,” Zade calls. “One hundred meters farther out.”
I turn and see the flash of a reflector in the helo’s searchlight.
Scarlett!
She’s wearing a life jacket, but the current’s got her, dragging her away from the wreck, away from Abel, out toward the open sound where the water gets deeper and colder and more vicious.
In a storm like this, you can still drown in a life jacket.
Two people.
One of me.
Just like the last time.
The basket deploys. The cable whines through the hoist. I stand in the open door and wind tears at the drysuit. Rain drives into my face. The water below looks like hell made liquid.
“Abel first,” Zade says.
I want to protest. I want to say “fuck him” and swim after Scarlett. But I know Zade’s right. It’s protocol, and protocol’s the only thing keeping me glued together at this point, so I follow it because otherwise everything inside me detonates.
Zade catches my arm again before I jump. “Are you sure? You haven’t done this in years.”
I meet his gaze. “I need to, Z.”
He nods and backs off. “Swimmer ready.”
I take one more deep breath and step out of the helo, dropping into the storm.
The noise is impossible. Rain hits like thrown gravel.
The rotors thunder overhead, wind slicing every direction at once.
I keep my eyes on Abel, track his drift, and time the entry.
My boots hit water. It opens up around me, cold as death.
The drysuit’s a joke against it; the shock knifes through anyway.
I fight the surface tension, fight the suit, and break upward.
Abel’s head bobs toward me, pale and slack, eyes closed.
I reach him. He’s limp—no resistance as I roll him out of the water, cradle his chin back so he can breathe.
My gloved fingers find the pulse at his throat.
There. Weak, flickering, but I have it. Above, the basket lowers.
I wedge my shoulder under Abel’s arm and haul him upright.
He’s waterlogged and heavier than himself, but I know this weight, know how to turn dead water into backward leverage, and I get him to the basket with fingers that aren’t entirely mine.
The harness is next. I remember the rhythm.
I get him buckled, lock the restraints, and give the ready signal.
Zade’s voice hisses over the comms: “Cleared to hoist.”
Then Abel is rising, chest and limbs flopping, and I have exactly three seconds to brace before the next wave damn near bowls me under.
Scarlett.
I spin, water blinding me, and search for her. The searchlight sweeps the surface and—there. Barely a smear of color in the chaos: orange lifejacket, small, arms wound tight around herself as the current chews at her, shoving her farther from the wreck, farther from the helicopter, farther from me.
Some part of my brain knows the protocol: swimmer always stays within line of sight of the aircraft, keeps to the perimeter, doesn’t ever, ever go off-mission for a secondary target when there’s a risk of losing both.
I don’t even bother listening to that part of my brain.
I rip the comms plug from my collar and swim hard, keeping low, letting the drysuit and my own bulk take the brunt of the next wave.
Every reach feels like trying to claw through stone.
The cold slices the little bit of skin at my face, and my arms are numb before I’m halfway to her, but I lock onto the flicker of the lifejacket and the desperate, stubborn way she’s still fighting.
I can see her face, when the rain lulls for just long enough to give me a look: eyes wide, teeth clenched, hair gone colorless and slicked to her scalp.
She sees me coming. She opens her mouth, but whatever she says is lost to the storm.
She kicks toward me, and for a second, I’m thirteen years old, swimming against a tide on Whidbey Island, and my whole universe is the sound of my father yelling from shore.
I shake the memory off and swim harder; the world tunnels down until all that exists is her face, her hands, the distance between us and whether I’m fast enough to close it.
I’m not.
The current’s got her, and she pinwheels, losing ground. I overshoot, almost, and have to lunge awkwardly sideways, snatching at her shoulder and catching only a handful of jacket. She’s ripped from my grip, and goes under.
My last rescue plays behind my eyes. The fishing vessel. The storm. The basket compromised. The woman’s face as the current took her. I’d chosen wrong then.
I’m not making that mistake again.
I dive under the surface, but I can’t find her.
I pop up, take a breath, and go back down and, this time, my hand finds her.
I grab the collar of her jacket and yank, hard, dragging her against me.
She thrashes until she registers who’s got her, then freezes for half a second, just long enough to meet my eyes in the gray, and that’s when the next wave dumps a thousand gallons of Pacific straight into our faces.
She twists in the jacket, tries to fight the water, and I clamp her under one arm and kick us both toward the surface.
For one insane, idiotic heartbeat I wonder if she’s going to punch me for dragging her.
Instead, she clamps her arms around my neck and hangs on for dear life, choking, hair in her eyes.
Up above, the helicopter’s spotlight stutters over us, hunting.
My head breaks water and I scream, “Here! Here!” and then go straight under again because the current’s decided to fuck with us until we’re dead.
I don’t let go of her. Not now, not ever. I hang on to her and kick and kick and finally surface again, this time with enough air to scream up at the bird above us.
Zade’s voice shouts in my ear: “Hold. Hold. Basket inbound, swimmer. You got her?”
“I got her,” I scream. My teeth hurt from clenching. My arms already feel like rebar, and the cold’s starting to stall my brain, turn everything into a slow-fading tunnel.
But I’m not letting go.
I get a hand under Scarlett’s chin, tilt her face up, keep her above the chop.
The basket comes down. It swings on the wind, pendulums out thirty feet, and I know Zade and Crew are doing their best, but the gusts are tossing it everywhere. I time the heave of the water, get us close enough that I can use the wave to heave her in.
She’s almost in, but then the basket lurches, the wire cable yanking it away and nearly pulling her with. I grip the back of her jacket, haul her belly-flat onto the rim, and wedge her legs in myself until she’s locked in place. She’s gasping, eyes wild, but alive.
“Hoist!” I roar. My voice is shredded. “GO!”
The basket rises. She’s in it, face up, staring at me, one hand reaching out before the wind pulls her away. She mouths something—my name, maybe. I hope so. Could be “asshole.” Either way, I’d take it.
I go under again, and when I resurface, the basket is on its way up with Scarlett in it.
The helo hovers, keeping station—barely, but holding.
I grit my teeth and swim toward the tail rotor, and then the light dies, and there’s nothing above me but black ocean and a sound in my ears like a train barreling straight down.
The cold is shocking. The drysuit is failing somewhere along the seams—a freezing trickle races down my neck, under the collar, and the salt stings my eyes open wide.
I’m still holding the cable, still trying to keep myself oriented to where the bird is, but the current’s dragging me sideways, and my legs aren’t kicking like they should.
I exhale. Suck in a lungful of air and only get half of it, because my ribs are locked up and the water’s in my mouth, my sinuses, my ears.
My whole world is wet and noise, a soup of rotor thunder, wave crash, radio static, the bone-deep ring of adrenaline drowning out everything else.
I try to shout, try to signal, but the comms are full of nothing but hurricane.
The harness is heavy; my arms are bricks.
Gotta fight. Gotta—