Chapter 4 Holt
HOLT
The coast guard operations room had a particular kind of energy that Holt recognized from years of working in spaces where everything depended on the next decision being the right one.
It wasn’t panic. Panic was useless, and the people in this room knew better.
It was the compressed, humming quality of people holding themselves at a specific level of readiness, not moving until there was somewhere useful to move to, not speaking unless the words served a purpose.
Holt understood that energy. He had lived inside it for most of his adult life.
Tonight it was harder to inhabit than usual.
Holt stood at the operations board with Lieutenant Reyes and worked through the coordination sequence for the third time in forty minutes, because the conditions had shifted twice since they arrived, and each shift required a reassessment of the launch window, the approach route, and the extraction order.
The Coast Guard had two crews standing by.
Local search and rescue had a third unit at the harbor’s southern dock.
Dean had been on the phone with every private pilot and charter operator within range, and Zane had been coordinating with the fire department’s water rescue unit, which had the equipment for a shallow-water extraction if the boats couldn’t get close enough to the island’s eastern shore.
It was a solid response. Well-organized and properly resourced.
But none of it could launch until the weather allowed, and the weather wasn’t allowing.
“The system is tracking northeast at approximately eighteen miles per hour,” Lieutenant Reyes said, her finger moving across the screen.
“If that track holds, the worst of it clears across the Sandy Shore zone in roughly ninety minutes. And we can only launch at the first safe window. I won’t risk it beforehand. ”
“Ninety minutes is the optimistic read,” Holt said. It wasn’t a criticism. It was the same calculation he had already run in his head twice.
“It is,” Lieutenant Reyes agreed. “The conservative read is closer to two and a half hours. We’re watching it in real time, and we’ll move the moment we can move safely.”
“Understood.” Holt looked at the screen. Two miles of water between the harbor and the island. In ordinary conditions, a twelve-minute crossing. Tonight, in the dark, in these seas, it might as well have been the open Atlantic.
Holt stepped back from the board and pulled out his phone.
He’d called Rad’s number seven times since they’d arrived at the station.
Each call had gone straight to nothing, not even a voicemail connection, just the flat digital silence of a signal that didn’t exist. He tried again, now out of the same stubborn, irrational compulsion that made a man check a door he already knew was locked, just in case this time something had changed.
Still nothing.
Holt put the phone back in his pocket and turned toward the window.
Carmen was at the side table with a coast guard officer, going through the medical supply inventory for the extraction boats, working with the quick, methodical efficiency of someone who dealt in emergencies the way other people dealt in ordinary days.
She’d already called the clinic and arranged for Lucy to have two trauma bays cleared and ready.
She caught his eye as he moved toward her.
“Does Lucy know about Rad and Margo going out?”
Carmen looked at him steadily and nodded. “Yes, Lucy has been informed.”
Holt nodded. “That’s good, at least she can be prepared.”
“I agree,” Carmen said. Then, after a beat, more quietly. “How is June?”
Holt looked across the room.
June was standing near the far window. She’d been standing there for the better part of an hour, not pacing, not on her phone, not performing the restless, displaced energy that most people defaulted to when there was nothing to do and everything to fear.
June was simply standing. Still and composed, and looking out at the storm with the expression of someone who was thinking rather than merely enduring the wait.
Holt had watched June do this in the past. Not in circumstances like these, nothing quite like these, but in other high-stakes moments, in courtrooms and depositions and the compressed, pressurized hours before a verdict came in.
June, under pressure, wasn’t June falling apart.
June, under pressure, was June distilled down to her most essential self.
Quiet, precise, and enormously, quietly strong.
It was one of the first things Holt had ever loved about her.
The thought arrived without warning or invitation, and he let it stand for a moment before he filed it back behind everything else.
“She’s holding up,” Holt told Carmen. “You know, in typical June style.”
“She’s terrified,” Carmen replied.
“Yes,” Holt agreed. “She’s doing both at the same time.”
Carmen looked at him with an expression he couldn’t entirely read. Then she went back to the inventory list.
Dean appeared at his elbow twenty minutes later with the particular energy of a man who had exhausted every option in the room and was working his way back to the beginning to try them all again.
“There’s a break in the southern approach,” Dean told Holt without preamble. “Lieutenant Reyes won’t see it yet because the modeling lags the actual conditions by about twelve minutes. I’ve been watching the anemometer readings. The gusts are spacing out.”
Holt looked at him.
Dean wasn’t a man who exaggerated. He was also not a man who had come this far by reading situations recklessly. Dean had spent his entire career making decisions in dangerous conditions and had the record to show that those decisions were, more often than not, correct.
“Show me,” Holt said.
They crossed to the monitoring station, and Dean walked him through the wind speed data, pointing to the pattern he had identified in the gust intervals, the slight but measurable increase in the time between peaks.
It wasn’t dramatic. It wouldn’t look like much to someone without Dean’s specific background or experience.
But, to Holt, who had spent many years learning to read the difference between the evidence and the story people wanted the evidence to tell, it looked like a man who knew exactly what he was talking about.
“I’m taking this to Lieutenant Reyes,” Holt said.
“That’s why I came to you first,” Dean told him. “She’ll listen to you.”
Holt wasn’t certain that was true, but he took the data to Lieutenant Reyes anyway, and the conversation was precise and professional.
She looked at the readings for a full two minutes without speaking before she turned to her second in command and said something in a low voice that Holt didn’t catch. Then she turned back to him.
“We’ll reassess in twenty minutes,” Lieutenant Reyes said. “If the interval pattern holds, we’ll move the launch window forward.”
“Thank you,” Holt said.
He walked back toward the window.
June turned when Holt was still a few feet away, as if she’d heard him coming despite the noise of the room and the storm beyond the glass. June looked at him with a question on her face that she didn’t put into words.
“Dean spotted a possible break in the southern approach,” Holt told her. “Lieutenant Reyes is reassessing the launch window.”
Something moved through June’s expression. Not relief, not yet, but the slight easing of someone who had been holding a weight at arm’s length for a long time and had just been told they might be able to put it down soon.
“Dean has good instincts,” June replied, her voice flat and devoid of emotion.
“He does,” Holt agreed and stood beside her at the window.
The rain was still heavy against the glass, but he could see what Dean had been talking about in the intervals between the hardest gusts.
The harbor lights were still swinging, but the arc had reduced slightly, almost imperceptibly, just enough to be real.
“I can’t believe after everything that’s going on in Sandpiper Shores, now we’re dealing with this.” June’s jaw clenched and her eyes never left the window as if she was trying to find some hope there. “They’ve all been through enough already.”
“I know, it’s like life is trying to make things exceedingly difficult for us right now,” Holt said. “But, like the investigation, we’ll get through this too.”
June didn’t look at him as she continued to stare out the window.
“Margo nearly died in Teacups. She found out she’s been a target for months.
And then she gets into a motorboat in a storm to go after people she loves.
” June drew in a breath. “Then your son, without even thinking, and after getting dragged into a cold case he had nothing to do with, for people he barely knows, risks this storm.” She finally turned and met Holt’s eyes. “They are brave and remarkable people.”
“Yes, they are,” Holt agreed.
He thought about Rad at the bow of a small boat fighting these seas and felt the thing he’d been holding at a careful distance for the past two hours push forward against the barrier. Holt stubbornly pressed it back.
He wasn’t going to be useful to anyone if he let fear run ahead of function.
Holt had learned that lesson the hard way, more than once, over more years than he cared to count. Fear had its place. It sharpened attention, accelerated decision-making, and told you when the stakes were real. But fear, running loose and unmanaged, did none of those things. It only consumed.
Holt looked at the water beyond the glass.
Rad was out there somewhere in the dark, in a small boat, in conditions that made Holt’s chest tighten every time he let himself picture it clearly.
His son, who had grown up without a mother and never complained, had become a good man.
And a darn good detective and a good father through a combination of inheritance and sheer determined effort, and mostly on his own.
“We’re going to get them back,” June said again. “I’m sure they are all together in the cave.”