Read Chapter 18: The Expansion

The shepherd’s hut smelled of limewash and old smoke. Jack stood at its single window, watching the gray Atlantic roll against the headland while Molly tacked a fresh canvas tarp over the hole in the roof. Below, through the scrim of morning fog, he could just make out Elias’s boat slipping through the channel mouth, its wake a pale scar on the black water.

“You’re staring at nothing,” Molly said. She dropped the hammer into her apron pocket and came to stand beside him. “He’ll be back by noon with the signals fixed. You said that yourself.”

“I said he’d be back by noon.” Jack turned from the window. “That doesn’t mean I believe it.”

“You believe it enough to stack three hundred cases in his cove.”

Three hundred cases. Even saying it in his head felt like a lie. Two weeks ago he’d been counting bottles by the dozen, scraping together enough to keep Gus Moran from breaking his knees. Now he had a cove the Coast Guard didn’t chart, a fisherman who knew every shoal and sandbar from Cape Ann to Nantucket, and a warehouse of whiskey that had doubled his take in a single moon cycle.

The money moved through his hands faster than he could count it. That was the problem.

“I need a front,” Jack said.

Molly raised an eyebrow. “You have a front. It’s called ‘the night.’“

“Legitimate. Something Turner can drive past and see nothing wrong. A reason for trucks coming and going at odd hours, a reason for men on the water who don’t fish.”

She considered this. The wind caught a loose strand of hair and whipped it across her face. She tucked it behind her ear with a gesture that had become familiar to him over these weeks—quick, efficient, no wasted motion. Like everything else about her.

“Fishing,” she said.

“Too obvious.”

“Not a fishing boat. A fishing *business*. Buy a trawler. Paint a name on the side. Register it with the harbormaster in Gloucester. File for a wholesale license. You sell fish to the markets in the morning and whiskey to the speakeasies at night. Same trucks, same route, same men. The only difference is what’s in the crates.”

Jack let the idea settle. He’d seen front companies before—laundries, barber shops, funeral parlors that shipped twice as many caskets as they buried. But a fishing concern had a particular beauty to it. The harbor was full of them. They came and went at all hours, their schedules dictated by tide and weather. No one questioned a trawler heading out before dawn, and no one questioned a truck leaving the dock at three in the morning with ice packed around its cargo.

“I know a man in Gloucester,” Jack said slowly. “Runs a wholesale operation. If the price is right, he might let us use his dock—and his license.”

“How much is right?”

“Two hundred a month. Maybe three, if he smells desperation.”

Molly’s mouth curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Then don’t smell desperate.”

---

They moved the operation over the next ten days. Jack bought the trawler from a bankrupt fisherman in Marblehead—a forty-foot boat named *The Marigold* that smelled of mackerel and tar—and paid a sign painter in Salem to add “Malloy Fisheries” to the hull in peeling gold letters. The trucks got new paint, too: white with green trim, the words FRESH CATCH DAILY stenciled on the doors. Thomas, the driver who’d survived the storm with him, learned to curse the gulls and joke about the price of ice like he’d been selling fish his whole life.

And it worked.

The first week, they moved two hundred cases through Elias’s channel and sold them to a speakeasy ring in Providence that paid top dollar because their usual supplier had been pinched by Turner’s men. The second week, that ring’s competitor came to Jack directly, offering cash up front for a monthly guarantee. The third week, a man from Worcester showed up at the Gloucester dock with a suitcase full of bills and a list of names that read like a directory of every club and roadhouse in central Massachusetts.

Jack took the money. He counted it in the back room of the fish market he’d rented, stacking the bills in neat columns while Molly worked the ledgers in her precise, unhurried hand.

“Fourteen thousand,” she said. “After expenses.”

“That’s more than I made in a year on the docks.”

“That’s more than most men make in five.”

He should have felt triumphant. Instead, a cold thread of unease wound through his chest as he looked at the stacks. A man who made this much money this fast was a man being watched. The question was by whom.

---

The answer came on a Thursday, when Frank Russo’s boy Ronnie showed up at the fish market with a smile like a cracked window and a message that made Jack’s blood go cold: *The Man from Chicago sends his regards.*

“I don’t know any men from Chicago,” Jack said.

Ronnie shrugged. “He knows you. Says he’s been watching your operation from a distance. Likes how you’re running things. Wants to meet.”

“Where?”

“The warehouse on Fulton Street. Friday, midnight. Come alone.” Ronnie turned to leave, then paused at the door. “Mr. Malloy—he’s not the kind of man you keep waiting.”

The door banged shut. Jack stood in the sudden quiet, the smell of fish and brine filling his nostrils, and felt the walls of his new empire shift under his feet.

Molly came out of the back office, her ledger pressed against her chest. She’d heard everything.

“You’re not going,” she said.

“I have to.”

“Jack, you don’t even know who this man is. What he wants. What he’s capable of.”

“I know exactly what he’s capable of.” Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it with a match he struck against the counter. “Men from Chicago don’t send greetings to bootleggers on the Atlantic coast out of politeness. They come to collect, or to eliminate. There’s no third option.”

“Then we fight.”

“We can’t fight Chicago.” He took a long drag, letting the smoke curl around his face. “Not yet. Maybe not ever. We’re a fishing company with a side business. They’ve got armies.”

Molly set the ledger on the counter. Her voice was quiet when she spoke. “What about Gus? You still owe him for the lost cargo. If Chicago finds out you’re in debt to Moran, they’ll use it against you.”

“I know.”

“And Frank. When he hears you’ve got Chicago’s attention, he’ll see it as an opportunity. He’s been laying low since the hijacking, but that won’t last.”

“I know.”

“Then what’s your plan?”

Jack crushed the cigarette under his heel. He thought of Elias, alone in his hut on the headland, waiting for the next night run. He thought of Danny and Petey, swallowed by the sea in a storm that had almost taken everything. He thought of the stacked bills in the back room—his future, his escape, his death warrant, all tangled together in one thick rope.

“I go to the meeting,” he said. “And I find out what Chicago wants. But I don’t go alone. I bring Elias’s boat—the fastest thing on this coast. And I bring you.”

“Me?”

“You said you wanted to be a deeper partner. This is what it means. You’ll be my eyes—watching the room, reading the faces, catching what I miss. And if things go wrong, you get to the boat and you get out. You don’t look back.”

Molly pulled the locket from beneath her blouse—the one he’d given her for safekeeping weeks ago, its gold surface worn thin with handling. She pressed it into his palm.

“In case you need a reminder,” she said. “Of what you’re fighting for.”

Jack closed his fingers around the warm metal. It felt heavier than it should have. He slipped it into his breast pocket, close to his heart.

“Friday,” he said. “We’ll be ready.”

But as he walked out of the fish market into the gray afternoon, he couldn’t shake the feeling that ready had nothing to do with it. Men like the one from Chicago didn’t wait for you to prepare. They simply arrived, like a storm, and swept everything away.