Squall's Salvation (Blood of Patriots MC #2)

Chapter 1

The hauler's truck sat half-loaded in the dry-dock lot with its tailgate down and a ramp propped against the bumper, and that told Squall everything he needed to know before he killed the engine.

He swung off the Dyna and stood in the gravel, reading the scene the way he used to read a sky going green over the water.

Boat trailer hitched and chained. Toolboxes already in the bed.

A stack of tie-down straps thrown on top like the man had been moving fast and sloppy, because he had.

Cody Firth owed the club four thousand dollars on a trailer deal he'd stopped returning calls on two weeks ago, and now here he was at six in the evening loading his whole operation onto a flatbed pointed at the highway.

Squall walked his bike forward and parked it crossways behind the hitch.

Firth came around the cab with a ratchet strap over one shoulder and stopped dead.

He was a thick guy, sunburned and balding, the kind of man who moved heavy things for a living and thought that made him hard.

He looked at the bike, the cut, the patch, and the exit he no longer had, and his face went through about four bad ideas before it settled on the worst one.

"I was gonna call you," Firth said.

"No you weren't."

"I just need another week. I got a job lined up in New Hampshire, and once I—"

"You had three weeks." Squall closed the distance without hurrying.

He didn't raise his voice. He never had to.

The calm was the thing — the same flat steadiness that held a crew together in thirty-foot seas, repurposed now for a man who thought he could skip town on a handshake deal.

"You took the trailer. You made a price.

You stopped answering. And now you're loading. "

Firth's hand tightened on the ratchet strap. "Look, man, business has been—"

"Not my weather." Squall stopped three feet from him, close enough that the size difference didn't matter, close enough that what mattered was the look in his eyes.

"The club fronted you that trailer because Torch said your word was good.

You made Torch wrong. You want to think real careful about what that costs. "

The ratchet strap slid off Firth's shoulder and hit the gravel.

"I don't have four grand on me."

"Then you've got the trailer and whatever else closes the gap." Squall nodded at the flatbed. "Unhitch it."

Firth stared at him. Squall waited. He was good at waiting.

He'd spent whole watches on the water doing nothing but watching the horizon and knowing exactly when the weather would turn, and he could stand in this gravel lot until the sun went down and the man in front of him understood that leaving wasn't one of his options.

Firth unhitched the trailer.

It took twenty minutes to settle the rest. Squall inventoried the toolboxes, priced them against the debt, and took what closed the number.

He did it calm and thorough, the way he'd done every settlement the club had asked him to run since Torch put the VP patch on his chest — no heat, no theater, just the quiet certainty that the deal was going to land where the club said it landed.

When it was done, Firth stood in his half-empty lot looking like a man who'd just learned something expensive about geography.

"You want to work this coast," Squall told him, "you work it honest. Next time Torch won't send me. He'll send Anvil."

He left Firth standing there and rode south with the trailer hitched to a prospect's truck behind him, the last of the evening light cutting bronze across the harbor as the road dropped toward Sable Harbor.

The Atlantic opened up on his left, gray-green and restless, pushing swells against the breakwater in the low steady boom that meant the tide was running hard.

He could smell it — the brine and diesel and mudflat funk that got into the leather and never came out, the smell of home and work and the only stretch of coast that had ever been worth a damn to him.

The prospect, a kid named Talley who'd been riding six months and still gripped his handlebars like they'd buck him off, pulled alongside at a red light near the harbor mouth.

"Hey, Squall. You hear about the freight thing?"

Squall looked over. "What freight thing."

"Down at the fuel docks. Couple of the fishermen were talking about it at the Gaff. Crates coming off trucks that don't match any boat's manifest. Like, pallets of stuff getting unloaded after hours and nobody knows who's receiving."

The light changed. Squall rode through it, but the information stuck to him the way a bad weather report sticks — not panic, just the quiet registration that something was off and would need watching.

"How long?" he asked at the next light.

"Couple weeks, maybe? Denny Falk said he saw a box truck down there at two in the morning last Thursday. No markings. Two guys unloading into the old bait shed near pier four."

Squall knew that shed. He knew every shed, every dock, every mooring on this waterfront.

He'd fished out of this harbor from the time he could bait a hook, and he'd run the club's waterfront business since the day his boat went to the bank and he traded one crew for another.

Unmarked trucks and midnight unloads didn't fit anything that belonged on his water.

"You tell Torch?"

"Told Diesel. He said tell you."

Right answer. Freight moved on roads, and roads were Diesel's territory, but the waterfront was Squall's. Had been since day one.

They pulled into the lot behind the Gaff and Squall backed the Dyna into the row of bikes already lined up along the salt-scoured wall.

The roadhouse squatted at the harbor mouth like it had grown out of the granite — low-roofed, plank-floored, the windows so fogged with salt spray you couldn't see in from the street.

A dozen brothers' bikes sat chrome-to-chrome in the fading light, and the jukebox was already rattling the walls with something loud enough to drown out the gulls.

Inside, the air was warm and close — beer, leather, the permanent ghost of cigarette smoke that lived in the wood.

Diesel was at the bar with Breech, the two of them bent over a map of the coast roads that Diesel kept folded in his cut like other men kept wallets.

Wraith sat by the door facing the entrance, which was the only place Wraith ever sat.

Anvil stood at the pool table not playing pool, just standing there like a wall someone had forgotten to take down, his arms crossed and his eyes on nothing and everything at once.

Squall dropped onto a stool next to Diesel and took the beer the bartender slid over without being asked.

"Firth's square," he said.

"Course he is." Diesel didn't look up from his map. "You go collect, people pay. It's your whole thing."

"Talley says there's freight moving funny at the fuel docks."

That got Diesel's head up. Breech's too.

"Unmarked trucks," Squall went on. "Crates that don't match any manifest. After hours. Old bait shed near pier four."

"How long?" Breech asked. His voice was the same as his hands — precise, unhurried, already sorting the information into categories.

"Couple weeks at least."

Diesel traced a finger along the coast road on his map. "I've been running the routes clean. Nothing weird on my end. Whatever this is, it's coming by road but it's landing at the water."

"Which means it's mine." Squall took a long pull of his beer and set it down. The foam ring on the bar was the same shape as the feeling in his chest — circular, contained, but spreading. "Somebody's using our waterfront to move stock that shouldn't be here, and nobody asked."

Breech adjusted his glasses — the reading pair he only wore at the bench, which meant he'd been working before he came in. "You want me to pull anything? I can check if any of the dock boys have seen hardware moving through."

"Not yet. I want to know what it is before we touch it."

That was the captain in him. You didn't haul a net before you knew what was in it. You didn't steer into fog before you'd checked the chart. He'd lost his boat but he hadn't lost the instinct that kept boats off the rocks — the patience to read the water before he committed the hull.

Wraith spoke from the door without turning around. "Pier four's been dead six months. Whoever's using that shed picked it because nobody goes there."

"Somebody goes there now," Squall said.

He finished his beer and rode back to the compound with the harbor falling away behind him and the dead mill rising against the last gray light.

The Sable River ran black alongside the road, carrying the cold smell of old iron and deep water, and the mill's brick walls caught the last of the sky like rust-stained teeth.

The freight bothered him. Not the way a fight bothered him — he'd been in enough of those to know they came and went.

It bothered him the way a swell from the wrong direction bothered a man who knew the water.

Something was moving through his harbor that didn't belong there, and the fact that it had been moving for weeks without anyone flagging it meant whoever was running it knew how to be quiet.

Quiet was more dangerous than loud. Loud you could see coming. Loud got stupid and swung first and went down. Quiet meant planning, meant patience, meant someone who understood the territory well enough to use its blind spots.

Squall parked at the mill and walked through the yard past brothers working on bikes in the last of the daylight, past the loading dock where the cookout smoke still hung from last weekend, past the great room where the loom-iron bar was already collecting the evening crowd.

He climbed the stairs to his room and stood at the window that faced the river and the harbor beyond it.

Every hull in that harbor, he could name. Every captain, every crew, every boat that fished or hauled or ferried. He knew what belonged on this water the way he knew what weather a cloud carried — by instinct sharpened into certainty by twenty years of looking.

Something didn't belong. And it had been there long enough to settle in.

He pulled his phone and called Torch.

"Firth's done," he said when the president picked up. "We're square. But we've got something else. Freight moving through the fuel docks that nobody's claiming. I want to sit on it a few days, see what picture comes together."

Torch's voice came back low and unhurried, the way it always did. "Your water, brother. You see something, bring it to the table."

Squall hung up and looked out at the dark harbor. The breakwater boom carried up through the night air, steady as a pulse, and the running lights of the last boats coming in traced thin lines across the black water.

He'd bring it to the table. But first he'd know what he was looking at, because a captain who steered blind didn't stay captain long.