Page 32 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

A pause, one beat, and then the sound of a man deciding which rules tonight is for. “Yours. Slip nine. Delgado’s spare kit’s in the locker. I’ll square the task force. Vance—” The pause again. He’s known me two years. He fed me a sandwich on a dock when I was a man made entirely of quiet, and he never once asked a question I couldn’t afford. “Bring them back breathing. All of it, everybody, breathing. That’s the whole order. Don’t make me say the other version.”

“Copy,” I say, and I mean it, and the cold thing files it under conditions.

Behind me the medics are loading Delgado, who’s swimming back up through the concussion mad as a wet cat, gripping my wrist as they carry him past: “Gray inflatable. Two. She clocked me on the way out, boss—yelled ’tell Noah northeast.’” His grip tightens. “She wasnavigating, Vance. Zip-tied, and she was navigating.”

Of course she was. She reads water now. I taught her rip lines on the good gold evenings, and she taught me everything else, and the men on that boat have no idea what they’ve carried aboard.

Slip nine. Delgado’s spare kit. I gear up on the move—vest, comms, med pouch—while Rafi’s voice works the net in my ear, patched through the handheld clipped at my shoulder.

“Task force fast boat’s loading now. Coast Guard cutterKingfisheris coming around the point to cap the channel—nothing gets past her to open water. Vance, your beacon track’s holding steady, eleven knots, bearing zero-four-five. If they were running, they’d run harder. They’re heading somewhere.”

“Rendezvous,” I say, casting off the bow line. “They’re taking her to the buyer’s boat. The broker wants the questions asked in person by somebody who knows which questions.”

“That’s the task force read too.” A pause, keys, another radio bleeding through. “Which means a window. While she’s in transit, she’s cargo. Cargo gets kept whole.” He doesn’t finish the other half—what happens to cargo after delivery—because we’ve both read the same files.

I bring the engine up and idle out past the no-wake markers, everything in me screaming to firewall the throttle, holding to the crawl because a marina wake at 2140 draws eyes and eyes cost minutes.

“One more thing,” Rafi says, quieter, just for me now, off the net. “The kid at the cottage post—Delgado’s conscious. Refused transport until he’d given the description twice. Two men, a gray inflatable, and Vance—he says she was talking when they walked her out. Not screaming. Talking. Lecturing the big one about his grip.”

Something unclenches half an inch in my chest, the first air I’ve gotten since the open door.

“That’s my read on her too,” I say. “She’ll keep. She’s the best cargo they’ve ever mishandled.”

“Go get her,” Rafi says, and I clear the last marker and put the throttle through the gate.

The water at night is the oldest language I speak.

The patrol boat runs dark, up on plane, hull slapping the leftover storm chop, and I hold the beacon’s bearing while the shore lights fall away behind me. Somewhere ahead: a boat I already know—has to be theMariposa, the sister charter, the one that went quiet two weeks ago—and on it, a woman who is at this moment, if I know her at all, annoying her captors beyond the reach of their training.

That’s not a joke. It’s the tactical picture. They took her to find out what she knows, which means they need her talking, and God help them, she will be. She’ll be lecturing the deck crew about bycatch. She’ll be reading the boat the way she reads everything, cataloging, because the cataloging is contagious—she’ll know their names, their tells, which one’s scared. She’ll keep her feet under her, because she’s been scared all month and never once let it move her off her data, and every minute she keeps them managing her mouth is a minute nobody’s managing something worse.

Somewhere behind me, theKingfisher’s lights wheel across the channel mouth, methodical, sealing the door. The task force channel mutters call signs and coordinates, the machinery of two agencies turning over, and it’s good machinery—but machinery holds position, and positions are for after. I count what matters on one hand. Eleven knots. Four miles. One beacon, dressed as a datalogger, in a bag she grabbed while men were zip-tying her wrists, because she listens to every briefing she pretends to argue with.

She teased me for days about that beacon. Called it my “paranoia tamagotchi.” Fed it batteries anyway, every Sunday, without being asked.

Hold the mile, Doc. I’m coming.

The radio mutters—task force fast boat eight minutes behind me, Rafi running the net like a man conducting with both hands. Overhead the clouds have shredded and the stars are out, hard and close, and the beacon bearing holds steady, and I run the approach in my head the way I’ve run a hundred approaches: dark-side line, engine cut at four hundred meters, drift the last stretch on momentum and current, board at the transom where the deck lights are blind.

My hands are steady on the wheel. That’s the strange grace of it. Ten years I’ve treated the cold thing like damage—the residue of the worst night, the proof I shouldn’t be trusted near anything living. Ten years of boats and dawns and rationed words, keeping it in the hold, feeding it nothing.

Turns out it was never damage. It’s the part of me that goes to sea when someone has to come home. It just needed the right cargo.

Four miles out, the beacon track goes stationary.

I read it three ways in as many seconds, throttle already easing. They’ve arrived at the rendezvous—worst case, clock accelerates. They’ve found the beacon—worse than worst case. Or they’ve simply cut engines to wait, drifting on the outgoing tide like every smuggler who’s ever been early to a meet.

“Track’s static,” Rafi confirms in my ear. “Task force is twelve minutes back of you.Kingfisher’s on station at the channel. Vance, their orders are to hold for the assault team.”

“Their orders,” I say. “What are mine?”

A pause with two decades of protection work inside it.

“You’re a subcontractor conducting a marine survey,” Rafi says blandly. “Survey anything you want.”

TheMariposa’s stern light rises out of the dark ahead, right where the bearing says—hull dark, deck lights doused except the stern, engine silent, a boat trying to be a hole in the water. One silhouette on the aft deck, cigarette cherry flaring and falling. Amateur. A cherry like that kills your night vision for four minutes a drag, and I’ll be aboard in three.

Two hundred meters out, drifting, I hear it across the water—faint, carried on the offshore breeze, unmistakable.