Chapter 232: Jake
We’ve been at it for over an hour. An hour of running hot, throttles high, zigzagging through a grid that feels like it’s unraveling in our hands. Every time a boat checks in—“negative contact, south lump,” “nothing off the bell,” “clear by the outer moorings”—we sheer off and aim for the next gap like we can stitch the ocean closed if we move fast enough.
The wind has come up. Rain needles the wheelhouse glass, the wipers shriek and skip, and whitecaps slap the bow hard enough to ring my teeth. Reid hasn’t taken his eyes off the water in forty minutes; he’s driving like a man who knows where God keeps the emergency exits. Cruz started calm—radio voice, checklist brain—but even he’s grimmer now, scanning the chop, jaw tight.
Half the harbor emptied for her. Voices stacked up on sixteen at the start—old-timers I’ve known since I could walk, summer kids on dad’s skiffs, a husband-and-wife team from two coves over. Someone said, “That sweet girl helped me carry traps to my truck last week and fished my damn hat out of the water—no way we’re leaving her,” and it cracked something open in my chest. But fuel is fuel, and patience is a thin blanket. One by one some peel off: “Low on diesel, I’m heading in.” “Whiteout on my end, can’t see past my bow.” “We’ll sweep again at first light.”
Reid looks like he might cry.
I don’t think I’ve seen that. Not ever. Not in thirty years. I can feel the same pressure building in my own throat, hot and unfamiliar. But we know these waters. They’re not a backdrop; they’re our blood. This is our home, our job, our element. There is no universe where some unlicensed asshole outruns us in our backyard. There isn’t.
“I alerted local authorities before we left,” Cruz says, quiet, like he’s trying to lay sandbags with his voice. Then, after a beat, “Boys… if we don’t have anything in ten, we may need to reset. Pick up fuel. Coordinate—”
Reid cuts him a look so sharp it could skin a fish. He doesn’t say, Don’t, but it sits there between his teeth.
The radio pops. A young voice, tight with nerves. “Sir? Captain Anderson?”
I grab the mic. “Go ahead.”
“It’s Noah on the Grayling,” he says. He’s nineteen, maybe twenty—grew up on these docks. Good kid, good eyes. “Can you confirm the Vigil’s got a… a scrape under the port-forward cleat? Kinda looks like a crescent? Saw it once when you were docking in weather.”
A spark hits dry tinder inside my ribs. “Yes. Yes—copy, that’s ours.”
“I think I’ve got her,” Noah says, breath ghosting the mic. He rattles off bearings off the shoal and the bell, coordinates that slam into place in my head like pins in a map. Reid is already swinging us that way, pushing the throttles until the engines answer with a low, furious hum.
“But, sir—” Noah adds, voice wavering.
“What’s wrong?” My mouth is dry.
“There’s… there’s no one in the wheelhouse,” he says. “No one at the helm. I can’t see anybody on deck at all. She’s beam-on to the swell and getting thrown. Looks bad.”
Hope flares—and gutters.
Did they both go overboard? Did he throw her— No. No.
I feel Reid’s foot go heavy; the bow lifts and slams. Cruz braces a hand on the dash, the other on my shoulder, hard enough to hurt. “Stay with me,” he says. I don’t know which one of us he means.
“Grayling, keep eyes on and keep your distance,” I bark into the mic. “Do not try to board. There's maybe a criminal on board. We’re three minutes out.”
“Copy,” Noah says, small. “I’ll hold her in sight.”
The shoreline shaves down to a smear; the bell looms and we clear it tight, spray ripping sideways. My hands find the dash and don’t leave it. I am not a man who prays. I do it anyway—anything, everything, to whoever’s listening.
Keep her breathing. Keep her aboard. Keep her anywhere I can reach.
“We’re going to lose the vessel if you keep fighting the sets,” I shout at Reid over the engines. “Work with the waves or they’ll roll us—and if we go over, there’s no helping her.”
Reid’s jaw knots. “I’m going to kill him,” he snarls, voice shredded. “I’m going to fucking kill the asshole.”
Cruz doesn’t say a wird. He gives Reid a look that says he understands in a way I wish he didn’t, then braces a hand to the dash as another whitecap shoulders the bow and spits across the glass. I see Reid's eyes for a second, and fully believe he would be capable of killing someone right now.
“Quarter the swell,” I tell Reid, calmer now because if I let myself match him, we die. “On the port bow—ride the backs, slide the troughs, don’t take them beam-on.”
He snaps the wheel a degree and the boat stops slamming and starts working—climbing, easing, shouldering, running. Still fast. Smarter fast.
Two minutes—maybe less—carved off my life later, the rain thins enough to make shapes out of smears. There: one small hull squatting, bow yawing as it idles in the chop; and beyond it, bigger, heavier, taking the sea wrong and hating it—
The Vigil.
The Grayling isn’t far—close enough that I can see four silhouettes on her deck, two with binoculars, all of them shouting. I grab the mic. “Grayling, Anderson. Report.”
“Come, please, you have to come—fast,” Noah yells, his voice cracking on the last word. “We can see the girl—we can see her—but we don’t know how to approach without knocking the Vigil onto her side. There’s nobody at the helm—she’s just… she’s just—”
“Keep to windward and hold your distance,” I bark. “We’re two minutes out.”
“I don’t—sir, I don’t know what to do,” he says, panic starting to own him. Wind whips the words thin. The VHF carries everything: boots on fiberglass, the slap of rain, the grind of a loose locker, breath coming fast. “How do we help her? How do we—”
In the background, men’s voices explode, not directed at us. “Leave her alone!” someone bellows. “Step away from her! Hey—HEY!”
My spine goes ice. Reid shoves the throttles; the engines answer like they want to tear free. Cruz plants a palm on my shoulder, steadying or anchoring or both, and I don’t shake him off.
“Grayling, keep eyes on and keep shouting,” I say, but the mic shakes in my hand. “Do not board. Do not ram. Hold the line.”
“Copy,” Noah says, high and breathless, and then the radio fills with more shouting I can’t separate from the weather.
The Vigil lurches, slews, shows us her beam like a dare.
We push faster.