Chapter 6 - BLOOD ON THE TIDEThe smoke inside the cabin was suffocating, but through the infrared camera feed, we saw the horrifying truth:
The armchair was empty. A dummy draped in Dad’s heavy flannel jacket slumped forward, riddled with bullet holes.
Evan realized it a fraction of a second too late.
From the dark hallway behind him, a shadow stepped out.
Dad didn't have a tactical vest. He didn't have a high-powered rifle. He had a forty-inch heavy steel dock-hook—the tool he had swung for forty years on the Tacoma piers.
Before Evan could turn his handgun, Dad swung the steel hook with brutal, practiced velocity.
CRACK.
The hook smashed into Evan’s wrist, sending the gun flying across the hardwood floor and shattering Evan’s forearm instantly. Evan let out an animalistic scream of agony, dropping to his knees.
“You hit my daughter,” Dad’s voice boomed through the open audio mic, sounding like a demon rising from the deep. “You broke her ribs in front of my grandson.”
Evan scrambled backward across the slick, glass-littered floor, cradling his crushed arm, his eyes wide with unadulterated terror through his mask. “Art! Wait! Wait! The bank transfer—it’s done! Look at your phone! It went through!”
Dad stopped three feet away, the heavy iron hook dripping with Evan’s blood, resting on his shoulder.
“I don’t care about the money, Evan,” Dad said coldly. “I never did.”
“The police are outside!” Evan wheezed, backed against the shattered deck railing over the roaring ocean waves below. “You execute me here, you go to prison for the rest of your life! Noah grows up with a murderer for a grandfather!”
Dad raised the dock-hook slowly.
“Dad, NO!” I screamed into Miller’s radio handset, tears streaming down my face. “Dad, don’t do it! Don’t let him win! Noah needs you! I need you!”
Inside the room, Dad froze. His ear twitched slightly, as if hearing my voice through the radio receiver tucked into his collar.
He looked at Evan—a sniveling, bleeding coward cowering on the threshold of the dark Puget Sound.
Dad slowly lowered the iron hook.
“You’re right,” Dad whispered. “I’m not killing you.”
Evan let out a desperate, mocking laugh, wiping blood from his lip. “I knew you didn’t have the gut—”
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Dad stepped forward and delivered a devastating, heavy-boot kick directly to Evan’s chest.
The impact sent Evan flying backward through the shattered railing, plunging thirty feet down into the freezing, turbulent, black currents of the tide below.
