Page 32 of Crosscurrent

Across the table, Gabe's phone buzzed again. He didn't check it this time. He was reading the monitor, jaw set, already doing whatever math he did when something landed that he hadn't prepared for.

She knew that look. She'd seen it on the bluff, and in the bakery, and a dozen times in this basement.

He was going to need to deal with David by tonight. They were both going to need to deal with what was on that monitor. The overlap between those two problems was not comfortable.

She poured him a fresh coffee and set it beside him without comment.

He didn't look up, but his hand found the mug. He raised it to his lips, his gaze taking in the team, and their two temporary members. “Sounds like we need a serious plan.”

11

The bluff trail started a quarter mile north of the marina and climbed through scrub pine and salt-tolerant grass to parallel the highway out to the Overlook. Gabe had been walking it daily since he took the Haven Cove chief position. He stopped once today, at the bend where the trail cleared the pine line and the harbor opened below, because he wanted to be sure he had time to think before the wind off the bay started doing the thinking for him.

He looked down at the town, noting the familiar landmarks: Sugar and Salt’s blue roof at the south end of Main Street, the Saltwater Grill’s red awning, the harbor, the breakwater, and the marina office. His town now, in the small way you owned a place by paying rent in it and walking it daily and learning every dog’s name.

And it had been Neptune’s ground the whole time.

He started walking again. The Overlook had a flat rock that the bluff had volunteered for whoever needed to sit. Gabe had sat on it most mornings since the spring he’d finished moving his last box out of the rental he’d taken when he first arrived as interim chief. He’d done sums on it. He’d prayed on it. He’d watched the surf below and counted the gulls and tried, more than once, to figure out what the next thing he was supposed to do with his life looked like.

Today he sat on it knowing the surf below had carried a marshal’s body up onto the rocks Wednesday morning, and that the place he’d been making his peace from was the same place a hunted woman had chosen for sanctuary because her enemy had picked it first.

He let his elbows rest on his knees.

Father.

The wind shifted. The smell off the water was kelp and diesel and the sour-sweet of the rockweed at low tide.

Father, we have been swimming in their water and didn’t know.

He let that sit.

He had spent years carrying the badge that let you make a phone call to anyone who would pick up, and finding that almost always somebody did. He had retired the badge of his own choosing four months ago to do a different kind of work — the kind that didn’t owe its first loyalty to chain of command. He had not, until today, fully understood what he was giving up.

A man with a badge could call Tyler Price for a favor. A man without a badge could call Tyler Price for a friendship. Both were real, but they were far from the same thing.

He breathed out, slow.

Either Ray hadn’t known what he was standing on — which meant he had been protecting Skye in a place that would have killed them both by accident sooner or later — or Ray had known and had counted on Neptune’s confidence in its own ground. The safest place to hide a Marshal’s witness is the place the enemy trusts enough to ignore. He suspected the truth was somewhere between the two, and that Ray had picked the gamble that felt least like surrender.

Either way, Skye had spent four years under Ray’s bet, putting a yoga studio together with a deposit Ray almost certainly raised through channels Gabe could no longer ask about.

Lord, take care of him. He earned it.

He felt his pulse in his thumbs. Grief for somebody he’d never met.

Behind him, the trail crackled.

He didn’t turn. He had heard her four switchbacks ago.

Cara came up the last stretch with the careful pace of someone who didn’t want to be the reason a prayer ended. She stopped at the upper edge of the rock.

He caught the cinnamon from her morning’s batch even at this distance. He raised his hand.

She came over and sat next to him, crossing her legs. Their first quiet moment alone since the week began.

They watched the water together for a long minute. Wheeling high and diving hard at the cliffs, the gulls were on patrol. A rust-streaked fishing boat crawled north toward the breakwater. The wind off the bay was the same wind it had been at six AM and yesterday and every other Friday since he’d lived in this town.

Cara brushed a strand of dark hair out of her eyes. “How are you holding up?”