Chapter 2 - The Red-Eye SpecialThe splintering sound of the front door was followed instantly by the heavy, rhythmic thud of combat boots hitting the braided rug in the hallway.
Eli Cross was moving before the wood had even finished falling.
In a motion so fast it registered only as a blur of dark fabric and kinetic intent, Eli drew a compact SIG Sauer P365 from an internal holster, pivoting around the doorframe with his shoulders squared and his weapon leveled at the narrow hallway.
"Stay down!" Eli barked, his voice dropping into the low, lethal register he used when someone crossed the boundary line.
In the hallway stood two men in black tactical rain-gear, wet from the coastal downpour, their faces obscured by neoprene balaclavas. The lead man held a suppressed MP5 submachine gun pointed toward the ceiling, but his eyes were darting rapidly through the open kitchen threshold, locking immediately onto Roman Bellamy.
"Bellamy," the lead man barked, his voice distorted by a throat mic. "Step away from the table. Hands where we can see them. Boss wants a word about the cargo manifest from Tuesday."
Roman didn't move. He hadn't even stood up from his small ladder-back chair.
The yellowed piece of paper with Clara’s handwriting was still clutched in his right hand. The warmth of the kitchen seemed to curdle, replaced by the metallic tang of ozone and fear.
"How did you find this address?" Roman asked. His voice was dangerously calm, the kind of quiet that precedes a storm surge.
"Ports don't keep secrets, Bellamy. Not when the state police are on our payroll," the gunman sneer-laughed behind his mask, taking a step forward. "Move. Now."
He made the fatal mistake of looking past Eli, fixing his sights on Evelyn Pruitt, who had quietly stood up from her chair and reached for the heavy cast-iron skillet sitting on the back burner.
Eli didn't hesitate.
Two suppressed pops—phut-phut—punctuated the small room like heavy raindrops hitting a tin roof.
The lead gunman’s right knee buckled backward at an unnatural angle as a 9mm hollow-point shattered his kneecap. He dropped the MP5 with a metallic clatter, screaming behind his balaclava as he hit the braided rug.
The second man raised his rifle, but Eli was already inside his guard. A brutal, piston-like left hook caught the second intruder squarely under the jaw, lifting him off his feet before he crashed backward through the drywall of the hallway, taking a framed portrait of a schooner down with him in a cloud of plaster dust.
Silence rushed back into the kitchen, heavier and more dangerous than before.
Mara hadn't screamed. She sat frozen with her spoon in mid-air, her green eyes wide behind her smudged glasses, staring at the man groaning on the hallway floor.
Evelyn didn't drop the skillet. She simply set it back on the stove with a heavy, deliberate thud.
"They tracked the toll pass on your car, didn't they?" Evelyn asked, looking directly at Roman. Her voice didn't tremble. She sounded like a woman who had cleaned up after storms her entire life.
Roman stood up slowly. The small chair scraped against the floorboards. The grief and shock that had paralyzed him a moment ago were gone, burned away by a cold, black fury that smelled of cordite and vengeance.
"No," Roman said, his eyes fixed on the writhing gunman in the hall. "They didn't track the car. The toll pass is encrypted. Someone inside the harbor commission gave them my location."
He looked at Eli.
"Check his comms," Roman commanded.
Eli crouched over the groaning lead gunman, sliced the tactical harness away with a pocketknife, and ripped the throat mic and radio pack from the man's vest. He pressed a button on the side, listening to the static-laced frequency bleeding through the earpiece.
A voice was coming through the tiny speaker, tinny and panicked:
Team Two, status? Did you secure the target? Report! If Bellamy is still breathing when the tide turns, your contracts are null—
Eli held the radio out so Roman could hear it.
The voice on the other end was unmistakable. It belonged to Arthur Vance—the Port Haven Harbor Commissioner, the man Roman had backed financially for three consecutive elections, and the person Roman had scheduled a closed-door meeting with at noon to discuss the missing shipping containers from Marseille.
Roman stared at the radio for three seconds. Then he reached out, took the device from Eli’s hand, and crushed the plastic casing under his heel until the circuit board popped and died.
"Pack a bag, Evelyn," Roman said, turning to the old woman.
Evelyn stopped wiping her hands on her apron. "I've lived in this house for forty-two years, Mr. Bellamy. My husband is buried in the churchyard three miles up the hill. I'm not running."
"You aren't running," Roman said, his tone absolute, carrying the immovable weight of a man who owned the land they stood on. "You're relocating. Because within the hour, Arthur Vance is going to send every professional cleaner between Boston and Bangor to burn this lane to the waterline to cover his tracks."
He walked over to Mara, who was still sitting at the table, her spoon finally resting in her empty mug.
He dropped to one knee so he was eye-level with the little girl. For the first time, he saw the stubborn tilt of her chin—the exact same angle Clara used to give him when she caught him smoking behind the boatyard sheds.
"Mara," Roman said softly, reaching out to gently brush a stray lock of brown hair behind her ear. "Do you like road trips?"
Mara looked at the unconscious man in the hallway, then at Eli wiping blood off his knuckles, and finally up into Roman’s intense, storm-gray eyes.
"Are we going to see the gulls in the city?" she asked.
"We're going to see whatever you want to see," Roman promised. "And nobody is ever going to knock over your grandmother's clams again."
Mara considered this for a moment, then slid off her chair, grabbed her muddy sneakers by the laces, and held one out to him.
"Can you tie these?" she asked. "The dog chewed the aglets off, and they're floppy."
May you like
Roman took the dirty shoelaces in his large, calloused fingers.
Outside, the first police siren began to wail through the coastal fog—not the local Port Haven patrol cars, but the low, high-speed whine of state troopers on the payroll, arriving precisely where Arthur Vance had told them to be.
