Chapter Two
Beau
CAL HAD HIS BOOTS ONthe desk and a bottle of Topo Chico sweating onto a stack of invoices when I walked into The Bridge.
The ops loft sat above the main bay of the old cannery, walled in glass on three sides so you could see the water from every angle. Below us, the boat bay held S&S's two patrol boats in their slips, hulls ticking against the bumpers in the evening current. He worked by desk lamp after hours, which meant the bay below sat in shadow and the water through the open doors caught the last copper light off the marsh. The whole building smelled the way it had since we'd moved in: diesel, neoprene, and the salt-and-creosote bones of a structure that had spent sixty years standing in tidal water.
"So." He didn't look up from his laptop. "She take the paperwork?"
"Eventually." I dropped into the chair across from him and stretched my legs out. "After she called me a bouncer, explained why her twelve publications made her more qualified than the entire Historical Preservation Office, and suggested a creative destination for the shut-down order."
His mouth twitched. "Charming."
"She's running a research setup on that boat that's better organized than half the funded labs I've worked with." I rubbed the back of my neck. "She's not some hobbyist with a toy metal detector, Cal. Her sonar work is solid. She's cross-referencing shipping manifests with bathymetric surveys going back three decades, and her overlay of historical harbor records on modern charts—I watched her frequency notations. She knows what she's looking at."
"And she's doing all of it without a valid permit in a federally protected heritage zone."
"Yeah." I leaned back. "That too."
Cal looked up. He wore the expression he put on when a situation was about to get more complicated than the job justified: calm, assessing, already running contingencies two moves ahead of the conversation.
"You sound impressed."
"I sound like someone reporting what I found." I picked at a callus on my palm. "The brief said reckless civilian diver. What I found was a reckless civilian diver who happens to be brilliant and backed by research that would hold up in a federal review."
"That doesn't change what we're here to do."
"Didn't say it did."
He went back to his laptop and I went back to the callus, and for about thirty seconds the only sounds were the water under the building and Rhea's coffee maker doing its best impression of a dying outboard.
The thing was, the brief hadn't mentioned the rest of it. The rapid-fire arguments delivered with hand gestures and enough direct eye contact to qualify as a tactical engagement. The dark curls escaping the woman's braid in the wind off the channel. Freckles across her shoulders, visible past the collar of her rash guard, sun-stamped and earned. The way she'd planted herselfon that deck and told me where to put my paperwork without so much as a blink. The line of her throat when she'd tipped her chin up to look me in the eye, and the specific way my pulse had answered—not fast, just heavier, like something shifting low in my chest that had no business shifting during a service call.
I'd clocked all of it. Stored it where it didn't belong and couldn't stay.
It wasn't staying stored.
I shifted in the chair. "I'll send confirmation of delivery tonight. After that, the clock's hers."
"Do that." He took a drink of his Topo Chico. "And Shark—"
"Yeah?"
"Don't let her cloud the picture."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
I left The Bridge before he could read whatever was happening on my face. The stairs down to the bay were steel grating, and my boots rang on every step in a building that had gone quiet for the night. I passed the dive locker, the gear room with its racks of regulators and BCDs hanging in neat rows, Rhea's whiteboard schedule by the door with tomorrow blocked in red: RUTLEDGE—HEYWARD SITE, 0800 STATUS.
Outside, the heat met me at the threshold. Late May in the Lowcountry doesn't cool down so much as shift registers. The brutal daytime sun trades off to a thick warm pressure that sits on your skin and doesn't lift until three in the morning, if it lifts at all. Cicadas had started up in the live oaks along the access road, a solid drone that vibrated in my chest if I stood still long enough.
PROFESSIONAL DUE DILIGENCE. That's what I told myself pulling into the lot at twenty-three hundred. The papers wereserved, the report sent, everything on timeline. There was no reason for me to be sitting in my truck at the public marina at eleven o'clock at night watching the dock where a thirty-two-foot cabin cruiser sat dark in its slip.
No reason at all.
The marina after dark ran on a different frequency. Pier lights threw amber pools across the water, and the boats in their slips had settled into the gentle rock that meant the evening tide was still making up its mind. The fuel dock was locked, the bait shop shuttered, and the only signs of life were a light on in one of the charter boats and the orange glow of a cigarette on a sailboat three slips down. In the marsh beyond the breakwater, a chuck-will's-widow was cycling through its three notes, relentless and hypnotic, the soundtrack the Lowcountry played whether anyone was listening or not. The tide was dropping, pulling the pluff mud smell up from the flats—thick, organic, so ripe it practically had a pulse. I cracked the truck window and let it in. That smell had been the first thing I'd missed overseas and the last thing I'd stopped dreaming about when I was trying to sleep in places where the air tasted of dust and concrete and nothing growing.
I'd grown up on these docks. My father had run his shrimp boat out of this marina until I was twelve. I'd spent half my childhood on these planks—baiting hooks, sorting bycatch, learning to read the tide by how the pilings sat at different hours. The wood underfoot was newer, replaced after the last hurricane, but the marina itself hadn't changed. Same channel markers. Same particular quality of salt air that meant home, whether I'd been gone twelve months or twelve years.
