Page 16 of Christmas Harbor Secrets
Her chin lifted, pride flaring for a beat, but then she nodded once. Small. Enough.
A sharp pop cracked down the dock, ten slips over. Blue fire spat into the night, a new pedestal coughing sparks. A neighbor cursed, lights flared, gulls scattered in a screaming cloud.
Rone moved, extinguisher back in his grip, body angled to shield Isobel without thinking. Echo launched at his side, nails hammering wood.
A third caught fire.
Somebody wanted war on this dock.
Al, a dock employee and resident, came running down in Christmas pajama pants and t-shirt.
“Echo, with me.” Rone’s voice came low and even. The shepherd tucked to his knee and flowed where Rone flowed, all tendon and judgment.
Two slips down, another spit of light flared blue. Then a fifth, farther along the main dock, the kind of stuttering glow that said somebody had popped breakers open with a screwdriver and dared the marina to catch up.
Al took the farthest one while Rone took the one closer to him.
A woman shouted for help. Somewhere, dogs barked. Everyowner on the docks knew where the extinguishers lived, but piecemeal wasn’t going to beat this.
Cut the snake at the head.
Rone sprinted. Boards thudded underfoot—heat, damp, the brackish iron smell that rode Estero Bay at night. He vaulted a coil of line, felt Echo’s shoulder brush his shin, and blew past a weathered sign that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY like it had authority. The marina’s main breaker panel crouched in the shadow of the utility shed—locked, obviously. The padlock was cheap, hardware-store brass, scored where somebody with more time than he had had taken a run at it and quit.
“Stay,” he told Echo, and the dog braced like a doorstop.
Al appeared out of the haze, coughing. “If you were aiming to light up the marina for Christmas, you nailed it. Maybe next time start with the on switch?”
“Got the key?” Rone asked.
Al shook his head.
Rone yanked the pry bar from its hiding place under the lip of the fish-cleaning table—some habits weren’t legal but they were useful—and jammed it into the hasp. The metal shrieked protest; his shoulder answered with a grind that remembered too many doors and too many bad nights. He gave it one more mean, decisive jerk. The hasp tore. The locker yawed open on a breath that smelled like dust and ozone.
One glance, and his fingers went to work—sequence, not speed. Left bank first, then the right, then the main. Orange died up and down the dock like somebody had snipped a string of Christmas lights in one slice. Voices rose—confused, relieved, mad—while the water went back to reflecting stars instead of emergency.
He didn’t let himself feel anything like victory. The nights that let you feel it were the ones that took it back.
“Go,” he told Echo, and ran for the nearest living flame.
The pedestal they’d hit first sulked now under a dusting of powder. The second smoldered. The third—two slips beyond Isobel’s—was new fire, real hungry, chewing on the lip of a piling where old varnish met fresh. He hammered it with the extinguisher’s last breath, the nozzle biting his palm. He thought he felt his skin give with heat, but he ignored it. He always had. Hands were for work, and work sometimes burned.
When the flame guttered into a blackened crescent, he turned to scan the dock, the way you do when you know you’re not alone.
There—down the far run, smoke veiling the walkway in a dirty curtain—Isobel. Small against the glow, quick and sure, an extinguisher at her hip, another in a pair of hands beside her. Lucky, he thought, catching the angle of shoulders. Lucky from the Jefferson forty-eight in C-row—skittish as a crab and twice as unpredictable. But Lucky didn’t help people. Lucky hid and prayed storms passed. Rone lifted his chin, looking for the lazy line of Lucky’s gray ponytail, the neon flip-flops he wore like a joke.
No ponytail. No neon.
A second flame coughed high near Isobel’s knee, and she doused it with a precision that said she’d been coached once and listened. The man with her didn’t move like a recluse. He moved like a decision.
Rone started. Echo hovered at his heel, the dog’s breath steady, his weight coiled. The wind shifted. The new man’s scent rode it—cologne where there shouldn’t be any, the sour thread of someone who’d been running.
Not Lucky.
“Echo.” Rone’s hand flattened by instinct. The dog’s gaze locked on Isobel, then on the stranger, then back to Rone like a question with teeth.
“Protect.” The word came out of a part of Rone he didn’t let talk much. It didn’t ask. It commissioned.
Echo launched—clean, quiet, a streak of purpose. The shepherd’s nails clipped the boards twice and vanished into smoke.
