Read Chapter 7: First Run

The water was black glass under a moonless sky, the only sound the low thrum of the engine and the creak of the hull. Jack stood at the helm of the *Malloy Girl*, knuckles white on the wheel, watching the rust-streaked shape of the *Sable Queen* take form out of the dark. She was a tramp freighter, twenty years past her prime, riding low in the water with a load that had nothing to do with the manifest.

Frank stood beside him, arms crossed, jaw tight. He hadn't said a word since they'd left the dock at two in the morning. Jack could feel the weight of that silence like a second passenger.

"There she is," Jack said, more to break the quiet than anything.

"I can see her."

The *Sable Queen*'s running lights blinked once, twice, three times. Jack cut the engine and let the boat drift the last fifty yards. A rope ladder dropped over the freighter's side, and a man's voice, hoarse from too many cigarettes and too little sleep, called down. "You Malloy?"

"Yeah."

"Took you long enough. We got a schedule."

Jack grabbed the ladder, handed the wheel to Frank, and climbed. The deck smelled of fish oil and diesel and something older, like rot that had been painted over so many times it had become part of the ship's bones. A man in a stained pea coat met him at the rail, a cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth.

"Twenty cases," the man said, jerking his thumb toward a stack of wooden crates lashed to the deck. "Good Scotch, not that bathtub piss. You got the money?"

Jack pulled the roll from his coat—the last of the O'Malley money, less than he'd hoped after the boat repairs. He counted it into the man's palm, watching the bills disappear into a greasy fist.

"Pleasure doing business," the man said, not sounding like he meant it. "Now get your cargo and get gone. The Coast Guard runs this channel at dawn."

They worked fast, Jack and Frank hauling the crates down the ladder, stacking them in the forward hold of the *Malloy Girl*. Each case was heavy, solid, worth more than Jack's father had made in a year on the docks. By the time they finished, sweat was running down Jack's back despite the cold.

Frank fired up the engine and pulled away from the *Sable Queen* without being told. Jack watched the freighter shrink into the dark, then disappear entirely. For a moment, there was just the water and the sky and the hum of the motor.

And then the searchlight hit them.

It came out of nowhere, a white lance of light that pinned them like a bug on a board. Frank cursed and threw an arm over his eyes. Jack's heart stopped, then kicked back to life at double speed.

"Coast Guard," Frank said, his voice flat. "They're on the channel."

Jack could see the cutter now, a dark shape maybe four hundred yards off their starboard bow, its searchlight sweeping the water. The light had caught them, but they hadn't moved yet. Maybe they were still deciding whether the small boat was worth the chase.

"Kill the engine," Jack said.

"What?"

"Do it. Now."

Frank cut the motor. The *Malloy Girl* lost way, settling into the water, bobbing gently on the swell. The searchlight swept past them, paused, swept back. Jack held his breath, counting the seconds, feeling the crates below deck like a weight pressing on his chest.

The light moved on.

The cutter's engines rumbled to life, and Jack watched it slide past them, three hundred yards off the port beam, its wake sending small waves rolling under their hull. No one hailed them. No questions. Just the quiet dark and the sound of a ship moving on.

Frank let out a breath he'd been holding. "Jesus Christ."

"Not yet," Jack said. "Give it five minutes, then start the engine. Slowly. No running lights until we're past the point."

"You want to run dark? That's how you get rammed."

"Better than getting caught."

They drifted for five minutes that felt like an hour. Jack kept his eyes on the cutter, watching its lights grow smaller and smaller until they were just a pinprick on the horizon. Then Frank restarted the engine at low throttle, and they crept back toward shore, hugging the coastline, staying in the shadows of the headlands.

It took two hours to reach the fishing shack where Frank had agreed to store the goods. It was a ramshackle structure on a stretch of beach that belonged to no one, hidden by scrub pines and a decade of neglect. They unloaded the crates in silence, stacking them in the back room behind a pile of nets and floats that hadn't moved in years.

Frank stood in the doorway, watching Jack stack the last case. When Jack turned, Frank's face was unreadable in the dim light of the single lantern.

"Three hundred feet from the outbound channel," Frank said quietly. "That's how close they were."

"I know."

"You knew they ran night patrols?"

"I knew they might."

Frank shook his head slowly, the way he did when he was trying to decide whether to walk away or stay. "You said you had this figured out. That you knew the route, the timing, the risks."

"I do."

"Then how come we nearly got caught with our pants down? You didn't have a plan for the Coast Guard. You had a hope."

Jack dusted off his hands and walked past Frank, out into the salt air. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east, the first hint of gray bleeding through the black. He could feel the exhaustion in his bones, the ache of a night that had been closer to disaster than he wanted to admit.

"You're right," he said finally. "I didn't have a plan. I had a boat and a load of nerve and a loan I can't afford to default on. That's all I had."

Frank came up beside him, hands in his pockets. "And now?"

"Now I know better." Jack turned to face him. "We need someone who can warn us when the Coast Guard changes their patrol schedule. Someone who sees the teletypes before they go out. That means the harbor master's office. Or someone in it."

"The harbor master," Frank repeated. "John Callahan. You know what he charges for that kind of arrangement?"

"I know what it costs me if I don't get it."

Frank was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "I'll make some inquiries. Quietly. But Jack—this is going to eat up whatever margin you thought you had. You're going to be paying Callahan, paying the O'Malleys, paying me. And that's if nothing goes wrong."

"Nothing's going to go wrong."

"You just watched it almost go wrong an hour ago."

Jack looked at the horizon, where the first orange light of dawn was starting to bleed through the clouds. The crates sat in the shack behind them, twenty cases of Scotch that would sell for three times what he paid for it—if he could get it into the right hands without losing it or his freedom in the process.

"I'm not stopping," he said. "Not now. We've got product. We've got a boat. We've got a buyer. The only thing standing between us and a real operation is fear, and I've been poor my whole life. I'm not afraid of that anymore."

Frank studied him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "The harbor master's name is John Callahan. His son sells bicycles on Atlantic Avenue, and I hear the old man keeps a woman on the mainland. He's got his weaknesses."

"And I've got money," Jack said. "At least for now. That's a good match."

They walked back toward the beach together, the first rays of morning painting the water gold. Jack's mind was already working, spinning out the next move—who to talk to, what to say, how much to offer. The Coast Guard had given him a scare, but it had also given him a lesson. He wasn't going to run scared anymore. He was going to run smart.

The shack disappeared behind them as they rounded the point, and Jack let himself imagine, just for a moment, what it would feel like to not have to look over his shoulder. To have the money, the power, the safety that came with it.

Then he remembered Patrick's letter, still warm in his memory even though he'd burned it days ago. His brother was alive, somewhere across the ocean, and he had no idea that Jack had already written him out of the story.

That was a problem for another day. Right now, Jack had a harbor master to meet and a business to build, and he couldn't afford to let anything—or anyone—get in his way.