Chapter 5
The hauler's name was Polk, and he talked the way all men talked when they were pinned between two things that scared them — fast, sloppy, and hoping the truth would buy him the exit.
Squall had found him at the fuel docks loading crates onto a box truck with no markings, which was exactly the kind of thing that stopped happening on this waterfront without the club knowing about it.
Diesel had spotted the truck on his route map and called it in, and Squall had ridden down to the docks with Wraith on his six and waited until Polk was elbow-deep in a pallet strap before stepping out of the dark.
Now Polk was sitting on a dock piling with his hands on his knees and his eyes bouncing between Squall and Wraith, who stood six feet behind him facing the water and doing absolutely nothing, which on Wraith was its own kind of threat.
"It's a guy named Meer," Polk said. "Roland Meer.
He runs the whole thing. Crews hit freight off the trucking routes inland — warehouse lots, distribution centers, loading docks.
Tools, electronics, machine parts. Bulk stuff, nothing flashy.
They bring it to the coast, and it goes through shops that make it look clean. "
"What shops?"
"Businesses with paper trails. Receiving docks, parts rooms, legit inventory systems. The stock comes in looking like a regular delivery, gets logged under the shop's name, and goes back out the other side clean. Nobody checks a marine supply order coming through a sixty-year-old repair shop."
Squall looked at the crates on the truck. Unmarked, heavy, the kind of thing that could be anything and was meant to look like nothing.
"And you run the crates."
"I move what they tell me to move." Polk's voice cracked on the edge. "I don't steal the freight. I don't pick the shops. I just drive."
"You drive stolen goods through my harbor." Squall kept his voice level. Didn't need to push. The man was already falling. "How long?"
"Six weeks. Maybe two months."
"And Prescott Marine?"
Polk's face told him everything. The flinch, the way his eyes dropped, the swallow that moved his whole throat.
"Meer wanted it bad. It's the best spot on the waterfront — trusted name, clean books, receiving dock right on the water. He sent his guys to make an offer and she turned them down, so he—"
"Burned her parts room."
Polk nodded, miserable.
Squall stood there with the harbor dark behind him and the diesel stink of Polk's truck filling the air and put the picture together.
It wasn't complicated. A cargo-theft ring that worked the inland routes and needed the coast to wash the goods clean.
A man named Meer who ran it with enough crew to steal in volume and enough patience to lean on shop owners until they broke.
And a repair shop at the harbor mouth that was the perfect laundry — except the woman running it had said no and meant it.
"How many people does Meer have?"
"I don't know the exact—"
"Guess."
"A freight crew that does the actual hits. Maybe eight, ten guys. An enforcer — cold guy, older, name's Deane. Handles the shop owners who don't cooperate. And there's a hothead named Vasco who runs the grab crews. He's the one who—" Polk stopped himself.
"Who what?"
"Who likes fire."
Squall looked at Wraith. Wraith didn't turn around, but the set of his shoulders said he'd heard.
"You're done hauling for Meer," Squall told Polk. "As of now. You see his people, you call this number." He pulled a card from his cut — the club's burner line, nothing traceable. "You drive your truck through this harbor again with unmarked freight, I'll have Anvil explain it to you. We clear?"
Polk took the card like it was made of glass. "We're clear."
Squall left him on the piling and rode with Wraith back up the coast road toward Prescott Marine. The sun was dropping behind the mill stacks inland, throwing long shadows across the harbor, and the wind off the water carried the coming cold of a night that would taste like October by morning.
"Meer," Wraith said at a stoplight, the first word he'd spoken in an hour.
"Yeah."
"Organized."
"Enough to burn a shop and squeeze a supply chain. Not enough to know whose ground he's standing on."
"He'll find out."
"That's the plan."
Dana was in the working bay when he pulled into the lot, bent over an outboard on the bench — not the club's Yamaha, a different one, something she'd taken on since this morning.
Her coveralls were tied at the waist, her arms bare, and there was a grease streak running from her wrist to her elbow that she hadn't bothered wiping.
The shop smelled like engine oil and the fading ghost of last night's fire, and she was working like neither one of those things had any bearing on what she was doing right now.
She looked up when his boots hit the concrete. Looked at him, looked at Wraith still sitting on his bike in the lot, looked back at him.
"You've got a face like you found something," she said.
"Name's Roland Meer. He runs a cargo-theft ring — steals freight off the inland routes and uses waterfront shops to launder it. Your dock, your parts room, your books. That's what he wanted. When you said no, he sent a guy named Vasco to burn you into saying yes."
Dana set down her wrench. Not fast, not slow. Deliberate. The way a woman sets something down when she wants her hands free.
"And?"
"And he's got an enforcer named Deane who handles owners who don't fold. And he's got enough crew to keep stealing freight in volume. He's not going away because you told his guys to leave."
"I didn't ask if he was going away. I asked and what — what does knowing his name change about the four boats I need to finish today?"
Squall blinked.
She picked the wrench back up. "I've got a water pump that's been sitting on this bench since two o'clock, a bilge job coming in at five, and parts arriving from three different suppliers tomorrow morning that I need to be here to receive.
So unless Roland Meer is going to show up in the next four hours and rebuild this water pump for me, I need you to either hand me that nine-sixteenths or move, because you're in my light. "
He looked at her. Grease to the elbows, hair escaping from under her ballcap, standing in a half-burned shop with a stolen-freight operation aimed at her receiving dock, and her primary concern was a water pump and a bilge job.
He handed her the nine-sixteenths.
"Thank you," she said, and went back to work.
Squall stood at the bench beside her and watched her tear into the water pump with the same focused intensity she brought to everything — fast, competent, no wasted motion.
Her hands moved through the work like they were having a conversation with the engine that didn't include him, and he found himself tracking the way her fingers wrapped around the wrench, the way the muscles in her forearm shifted under the grease, the way she tilted her head when she was listening to something he couldn't hear.
"Stop staring at my hands," she said without looking up.
"Wasn't."
"You were. You've been standing there for two minutes watching me work instead of doing anything useful."
"I'm being useful. I'm staying out of your light."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh if she'd let it finish. "Barely."
He moved to the other side of the bench and picked up the club's outboard where he'd left off yesterday — new rings seated, just needed the reassembly.
They worked in the silence that had already become their silence, the comfortable kind that didn't need filling, broken only by the sounds of tools and the harbor filtering through the open door.
His phone buzzed. A text from Diesel: Spotted two of Meer's guys sitting on the coast road across from the shop. Watching the receiving dock. Timing deliveries.
Squall read it, deleted it, and kept working.
"Something wrong?" Dana asked.
"No."
She gave him a look that said she knew he was lying but wasn't going to push it. Smart woman. She'd push when it mattered, and she knew the difference.
He finished the outboard, helped her close up the bilge job, and rode back to the compound as the last light bled out of the sky. At the mill, he found Diesel in the great room and pulled him aside.
"Put Talley on the shop. Overnight, starting tonight. Park down the street, not in the lot. She sees a prospect sitting on her shop, she'll come out with a wrench and run him off herself."
Diesel grinned. "She would, wouldn't she."
"Just do it."
"You going to tell her?"
"No."
"She'll find out."
"Then she'll find out." Squall poured himself a whiskey at the loom-iron bar and drank it standing.
The burn settled in his chest, warm and steady, and underneath it was the other heat — the one that had been building since he'd watched her plan a reopening in front of a burning building, since she'd proven him wrong about the outboard and enjoyed it, since she'd told him to hand her a wrench or get out of her light like he was any other man taking up space in her shop.
She wasn't any other woman. He'd known that since the fire, and the knowing was getting louder.
He pulled his phone and called Wraith. "I need eyes on the receiving dock at Prescott Marine. Meer's people are clocking deliveries. I want to know how often, how many, and when they rotate."
"On it," Wraith said, and hung up.
Squall finished his whiskey and stared at the bar's scarred surface, where a hundred brothers had set their glasses down and left their marks.
Meer had a name now, and the name had a shape — a ring, a crew, a map.
The club would take it apart the way they took everything apart: directly, with blood, until the problem stopped being a problem.
But first he had to keep her safe while she refused to stop working long enough to be kept safe, and that was going to be the hardest part of this whole thing.
He poured a second whiskey. Didn't drink it.
Set a prospect on a woman's shop without telling her. She'd kill him when she found out.
He drank the whiskey anyway.