Chapter 16
They hit the fish plant at dawn.
Squall rolled the Dyna to a stop on the back road behind the processing plant and killed the engine. Dana's arms loosened around his waist but didn't let go — her hands resting on his belt, her body pressed against his back, warm and steady and exactly where he'd told her to be.
With him. Not behind, not in front. With.
The plant sat at the end of Harbor Road where the pavement gave out and the gravel started, a long cinder-block building with a corrugated metal roof gone orange with rust. The loading dock faced the water, just as Dana had said.
The back road gave vehicle access through a chain-link gate, and the padlock on it was exactly what she'd described — new hardware, wrong brand, a fresh lock on a dead building.
Diesel pulled up beside him and cut his engine. Anvil behind. Breech and Wraith coming in from the harbor side on foot, having parked a quarter mile south and walked the shoreline. Five brothers and one woman against whatever Meer had left, which — if Breech's numbers were right — wasn't much.
Squall put his hand over Dana's on his belt. Squeezed once.
"Stay on the bike until I call you in."
"I know."
"I mean it."
"I know you mean it. I also know where the electrical panel is in that building, and if you need the lights killed, you're going to need me."
He turned his head enough to see her face over his shoulder. She looked back at him with those dark, steady eyes that had stopped arguing and started stating facts about three days ago.
"If I call," he said.
"If you call."
He let go of her hand and swung off the bike.
The gate padlock took Diesel four seconds with the bolt cutters.
They moved through single file, crossing the gravel lot in the gray half-light, boots crunching on frost. The building was dark — no work lamps visible, no vehicles in the lot.
But the gate had been locked from outside, which meant someone had been here recently enough to secure it, and the tire tracks Dana had noticed were fresh enough that the gravel still showed the tread pattern.
Wraith materialized at the loading dock — already there, already scouted, standing at the roll-up door with two fingers raised. Two men inside. He'd seen them through a gap in the corrugated wall.
Two wasn't a crew. Two was a skeleton.
Squall hand-signaled Diesel and Anvil to the loading dock. Breech covered the back entrance. He took the side door — a steel fire exit, unlocked, the handle worn smooth from recent use.
He went through low and fast.
The plant floor opened up in front of him — a gutted industrial space where the processing lines had been ripped out years ago, leaving anchor bolts in the concrete and dark stains where the cleaning chemicals had eaten into the floor.
The cold-storage room Dana had mentioned was at the far end, its heavy insulated door standing open, light spilling from inside.
Two men in the cold room. One sitting on a crate, scrolling his phone. The other standing at a folding table, sorting papers.
The one at the table was Sport Coat.
He wasn't wearing the sport coat today — just a dark pullover and jeans, dressed down, diminished.
But Squall recognized the build, the tan, the smooth self-assurance that showed even in the way the man stood at a table.
This was the man who'd walked into Prescott Marine and told Dana her reputation had a price.
The man who'd smiled when she said no and told her everyone was for sale eventually.
He was sorting documents. Manifests, from the look of them — freight logs, shipping records, the paperwork that made stolen goods look clean. The business end of Meer's operation, still running even with the warehouse gone and both enforcers dead.
The loading dock doors crashed open.
Diesel and Anvil came through like the building was falling on itself — the metal doors slamming into their tracks, the sound booming through the empty space and rattling off the cinder-block walls.
The man on the crate dropped his phone and scrambled for the back of the cold room.
Sport Coat looked up from his documents with the expression of a man who'd always assumed he'd have more warning than this.
Squall stepped out of the shadows and let him see the cut.
"Remember this shop?" he said. "You walked in and offered to buy her dock.
She told you no. You came back and burned her parts room.
You sent your man to take the old man off his porch.
You sent your crew to tear her shop apart.
" He crossed the floor toward the cold room.
"And here you are, sorting the receipts. "
Sport Coat's composure held for about three seconds. Then his hand moved toward the table's edge, where something sat under a stack of manifests — something dark and angular that wasn't paper.
Anvil got there first. He flipped the table with one hand, and the gun and the manifests and everything else went airborne. Sport Coat stumbled back and hit the cold room wall, and Anvil stood over him like a building that had decided to relocate.
The second man — the phone scroller — made a break for the side door. He got four steps before Wraith appeared in the doorway and put a forearm across his chest that stopped him like a clothesline. He went down gasping.
Squall walked into the cold room.
It was exactly what Dana had described — the size of a basketball court, insulated walls still functional, the refrigeration units dead but the space intact.
And it was full. Crates stacked along every wall, pallets of electronics and tools and machine parts, more stock than the warehouse had held.
Meer hadn't just relocated. He'd consolidated.
Everything his operation had stolen was in this room.
Sport Coat stood against the wall with Anvil blocking any path that wasn't through a concrete surface.
"Where's Meer?" Squall asked.
"I don't know."
"Wrong answer."
"I don't — he doesn't tell me where he—"
"You run his books. You sort his paper. You walked into a woman's shop and smiled at her while you priced her dock for a man who burns down businesses that say no." Squall stopped two feet from him. "You're his voice. His face. The one who makes it sound reasonable. So where is he?"
Sport Coat's eyes went to the gun on the floor, ten feet away, under the overturned table where Diesel was already standing with his boot on the barrel.
"He moves," Sport Coat said. "He doesn't stay in one place. After the warehouse, he — he was furious. He said the club didn't understand what they'd started."
"We understand fine. The question is whether your boss does."
"He'll come for you. He's got people you haven't seen yet. The calls he's been making—"
"Providence, Fall River, and Boston. Yeah, we know about the calls." Squall watched the information land. Sport Coat's face went gray. "What else?"
"He's got a meeting. Two days from now. The people he's been talking to — they're coming to see the operation, and if they're satisfied, he gets the crew he needs to—"
"To what? Hit us again? Burn another shop? Grab another old man?" Squall shook his head. "That meeting's not happening."
Sport Coat swallowed. The tan looked wrong on him now — like paint on a wall that was cracking underneath.
"I just do the books," he said.
"You just do the books." Squall took one step closer. "You walked into her shop and told her everyone's for sale. You looked at a woman who built her life with her hands and told her that her reputation was inventory. And when she said no, you helped burn it down."
"That wasn't my call. Meer—"
"Meer's not here. You are."
Squall drew his weapon.
Sport Coat's mouth opened. Whatever he was going to say — a plea, a deal, another deflection — didn't make it past his teeth. Squall fired once, and the sound in the cold room was enormous, a flat concussive crack that bounced off the insulated walls and came back doubled.
Sport Coat slid down the wall and sat on the floor and stopped being a problem.
The quiet after was the industrial kind — the hum of empty space, the drip of condensation from the dead refrigeration, the breathing of men standing over a completed job.
Diesel was already on his phone, calling Talley to bring the van.
Anvil zip-tied the surviving crew member, who'd gone limp and compliant on the floor with Wraith standing over him like a monument.
Breech came in through the back entrance and started photographing the freight — every crate, every pallet, every manifest that had survived the table flip.
"This is everything," Breech said, scanning the room. "His entire stock. Without this room, Meer's got nothing to sell and nothing to launder. He's a man with a phone and a grudge."
"And a meeting in two days," Squall said.
"Not anymore."
Squall walked out of the cold room and through the plant to the side door and the gray morning light. The harbor was waking up — boats moving, engines catching, the first gulls working the pier. He stood in the gravel lot and breathed air that didn't smell like gunpowder and looked at Dana.
She was still on his bike. Sitting upright, watching the building, her hands folded on the tank in front of her.
She hadn't moved. She'd stayed where he'd asked her to stay, and the fact of that — the trust it represented, the control it cost her — hit him harder than anything that had happened inside.
He walked to the bike. She looked at him, reading his face the way she read weather and engines and everything else.
"Done?" she asked.
"Done."
"The man from my shop. The one with the smile."
"Yeah."
She was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded — a single, precise motion, like closing a file.
"What's left?"
"Meer. Just Meer."
He got on the bike in front of her and her arms went around his waist, tighter than before, holding on with a strength that said she understood what had just happened and was choosing not to look away from it.
They rode back to the compound in convoy — five bikes and a van loaded with Meer's entire operation, rolling west along the coast road with the morning light cutting gold across the water.
At the mill, Squall parked and sat with Dana's arms still around him and her cheek pressed against the back of his cut, and for a moment neither of them moved.
"Two days," he said. "Meer's expecting people from Providence and Boston. They won't come now, because there's nothing to show them. He's alone."
"So finish it."
"Tomorrow. Tonight we plan. Tomorrow we end this."
She let go of his waist and got off the bike, and he watched her walk toward the mill's entrance with her shoulders straight and her head up and the specific certainty of a woman who'd chosen this life with her eyes open and wasn't going to blink now.
He followed her inside to start the last plan he'd need to make about Roland Meer.