True North

Chapter 6

By the time they made it back to the cannery, Jo had stopped being quiet about her fury.

She paced the length of the workbench twice before she rounded on Gideon. “He knew our timing down to the minute, and you froze at the door with a gun in your hand and did nothing. Explain that to me.”

“I didn’t freeze. I read the room. Four armed men and Wren himself, and you wanted me to start something we’d have lost in about eight seconds.”

“I wanted you to at least look like you were going to.”

“Maybe if the dead man’s kid hadn’t turned tonight into a magic show, Wren wouldn’t have had a reason to show up in person and gloat about it.” Gideon’s voice was rising now too, some of the earlier respect from the sparring mat curdling back into something closer to blame. “You’ve had him ten days, Jo. Ten days and half trained instincts, and you sent him into a building Wren clearly already had eyes on.”

“Maybe I did,” Jo snapped back. “Doesn’t mean the leak came from him instead of from one of the six other people who knew the schedule tonight, including you.”

“That’s enough,” Nolan said, and something in the flatness of it made both of them stop.

They looked at him.

“Blame me if it makes this easier,” Nolan said. “I don’t care right now. But we’re not finding out how Wren knew by yelling at each other in a fish cannery. Give me one more lead before you write me off completely. One. If it goes nowhere, I’ll walk, and you won’t have to argue about me again.”

Jo studied him a long moment, some of the fury draining into something more considering. “One lead,” she said. “Where do you even start.”

He didn’t have an answer, not really, not one his conscious mind had put together. But something surfaced anyway, the way it kept surfacing lately, a single unbidden fragment, his father’s voice saying a name once, quiet and certain, like it mattered more than anything else in the sentence around it.

“Otis,” Nolan said. “I don’t know why. I don’t know a last name. Just Otis.”

Jo went very still. “Farrow,” she said. “Otis Farrow. Old broker, works a stretch of the wharf nobody’s bothered cleaning up in twenty years. He deals in exactly the kind of black market tech that could build a device like the one Wren used tonight.” She was already moving toward a drawer, pulling out a burner phone in an evidence bag, the same one Gideon had lifted off one of Wren’s men weeks earlier and nobody had managed to crack. “Half the operations on this coast have bought something off that man at some point, and never once has he been stupid enough to get caught doing it. If your father knew that name, there’s a reason. Can you get into this?”

Nolan took the phone. His thumb moved across the lock screen without waiting for permission from the rest of him, numbers surfacing the way the safe’s combination had surfaced, and the screen unlocked on the fourth try. A short list of contacts sat inside, most of them numbers with no names attached, one of them flagged with a pin drop three blocks from a stretch of harbor Jo confirmed, grim faced, as Farrow’s.

“Tonight,” Jo said. “Before Wren realizes what you just did with his own phone.”

They scouted it after midnight, headlights off for the last half mile, the harbor road narrowing between warehouses gone dark for the night. The buildings slid past featureless and quiet, water lapping somewhere close enough to hear but not see, and for a few minutes it was almost peaceful, almost enough to make Nolan forget why they were out there at all. Then some old alarm tightened in his chest, and he’d barely opened his mouth to say something was wrong when a second car came out of a side street fast and clipped their rear panel, sending them spinning into a guardrail hard enough to crack the windshield.

Doors opened before the car had even finished rocking. A man reached in through Nolan’s window, grabbing for his collar, and Nolan’s hand found the man’s wrist before conscious thought caught up, twisting it at an angle the joint wasn’t built for, the gun clattering free before it had ever really been a threat. Jo was already out her own door, one shot placed low and precise, and a tire on the second car sagged flat with a hiss loud enough to hear over the shouting.

“Go,” Jo said, sliding back behind the wheel, and Nolan didn’t need telling twice. The car limped forward on three good tires and pure momentum, fishtailing once before finding the road again, until the shouting behind them faded into the dark and didn’t follow.

Back at the cannery, both of them still breathing hard, adrenaline burning off slow in the quiet, Jo reached into her jacket and held something out to him. A keycard, plain black, nothing printed on the face but a six-digit number.

“That’s not a test,” she said. “That’s Undertow issued. It gets you through three doors in this city that most people don’t know exist.” She closed his fingers around it the way she had with the blade, though gentler this time. “You earned it tonight. Not the compass, not the safe. Tonight.”

Nolan looked at the card a long moment before he pocketed it, something in his chest loosening slightly for the first time in days. It was the first thing anyone had handed him since the divorce that hadn’t come with a catch folded into the fine print.

-----

Across the city, Genevieve was still awake when Renee called with an update on tomorrow’s Sterling briefing, some minor scheduling note that barely warranted the call at all. Renee mentioned it almost as an afterthought, the way people mention things that don’t seem important yet.

“Also, one of the smaller shipping partners, the Halloran account, had a car run off the road out near the old harbor bend tonight. Nobody hurt badly, but security’s asking questions. Probably just kids, or somebody’s bad night.”

“The harbor bend,” Genevieve repeated, for no reason she could immediately name.

“That’s the one. Anyway, the briefing’s moved to nine instead of eight, if that works.”

Genevieve said it worked. She hung up a few minutes later and sat with her phone dark in her hand, telling herself it was nothing, a coincidence, a stretch of road that plenty of cars used on plenty of ordinary nights. She almost believed it. But something about that particular bend, a stretch she and Nolan used to drive together back when driving somewhere together had been an ordinary thing they did, settled under her skin anyway and stayed there, small and persistent, the kind of thing she knew she’d keep pressing on like a bruise long after she should have let it go.