Page 35 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“Copy that last,” Noah says into the radio, and I feel the words rumble under my ear.

“Was that a joke? Did you make a radio joke?”

“It was an operational acknowledgment.”

“It was chowder logistics, Noah. You did comms about chowder.” I burrow deeper into his side, foil crinkling like applause. “The town’s going to eat you alive, you know. You boarded a smuggling vessel alone for the turtle lady. Gus is going to have it painted on the water tower.”

“Rafi’s already drafting the incident report title.” His chin comes down to rest on top of my head, and I feel the exhale go all the way through him, the long one, the one he’s maybe beenholding since a cottage door stood open on an empty room. “I proposed ’Marine Survey, Extended Scope.’”

The stars are ridiculous out here. The whole channel is strobing blue and red behind us, theMariposalit up like a crime-themed carnival, and ahead the shore lights of Sunbreak Harbor sit low and warm on the waterline, the whole silly beloved town of it waiting.

“So,” I say, muffled, into his sternum. “Was it the beacon or the lecture that saved me? Be honest. I need to know which skill to invest in.”

His chest moves under my ear. It takes me a second to identify the phenomenon, because I’ve never heard it from inside before.

Laughing. He’s laughing.

“Both,” Noah says, and kisses the top of my foil-wrapped head, and steers us home.

Chapter 14

Noah

The paperwork takes three days, and I use every hour of it for cover.

Statements to the task force. Statements to the Coast Guard. A debrief with Rafi that’s supposed to run one hour and runs four, because it turns out that when your operator boards a hostile vessel alone, ahead of the assault team, on the authority of nobody, agencies want that narrated in triplicate. The network comes apart like wet cardboard—the voice on the phone turns out to be a logistics broker in Savannah with a nice house and a nicer lawyer, and Anchor Tattoo and Sid are auditioning for witness cooperation before the sun comes up.

The broker’s lawyer lasts until Wednesday, which is when the task force plays him the recordings off his own burner—every call routed through a relay he paid for monthly, like a gym membership for felonies—and the plea discussions begin before lunch. Bryce, the larval one, turns out to be twenty-three, a community college dropout with a cousin named Marco and no priors, and his cooperation agreement runs eleven pages. The AUSA tells me, off the record, with the weary fondness of a man describing a rescue dog, that the kid drew them anorganizational chart from memory and apologized twice for his handwriting.

Eighteen months of federal work, cracked open in a week, because one woman with a GoPro couldn’t mind her own business, and one crew got nervous enough to prove everything the footage couldn’t.

She’s fine. Medically cleared night one—wrist abrasions, mild dehydration, no other injuries. She gave her statement with a cocoa in her hands and made the stenographer laugh twice. She checks her nests in the morning with Delgado, who’s concussed and insufferable about the beacon working, and the town closes around her like a hand around something precious: Marnie’s got a drink named after her by midweek, the Abby Special, and it’s lavender, and Gus won the pool after all and framed the twenty.

I know all of this the way I know weather—from instruments, at a distance. Delgado texts me updates I don’t ask for. Rafi forwards me the task force summaries with subject lines like FYI and, by day three, like READ THIS ONE, VANCE.

Because here’s what I did with the three days. I signed thethreat neutralizedassessment. I rotated the protection detail down to zero. I packed my kit bag out of a cottage that had gotten dangerous—not to her, to me, the whole red-lit warmth of it—and I told her it was temporary, just logistics, just paperwork, while they process the scene and the case winds down. I kissed her goodbye like a coward, gently, on the porch, with the manatee chimes turning, and I went back to my apartment across town.

And then I stopped answering like a man and started answering like a scheduling conflict.

Long debrief today.Task force needs me early.Don’t wait on dinner.

Her replies come back the way everything comes back from her—generous, warm, and armed.No problem! Delgado helped with the gear haul. He cried at nest 40, there were only THIRTY hatchlings, wait till 41 goes.Then:Mrs. P made you a pie. It’s on your side of the fence. That’s not a metaphor, there’s an actual pie, but it’s also a metaphor.Then, day three, just:You know I know what you’re doing, right? Take your time. Not too much time. The pie has a shelf life and so does my patience, but neither one of us is going anywhere.

I read that last one nine or ten times, sitting in my truck outside the federal building. I don’t answer it. A better man would answer it.

A better man wouldn’t need to be told the pie was a metaphor.

Mrs. Pruitt catches me on day three, because of course she does. I come by the cottage at noon—deliberately noon, Abby’s mid-tide window, she’s never home at noon—to drop off the spare cottage keys like the world’s most cowardly burglar, and Mrs. Pruitt is on her porch with two glasses of tea already poured. Two. Poured before I turned into the lane. The woman runs better surveillance than the task force.

“Sit,” she says, patting the second rocker like it’s a foregone conclusion, because it is.

“Ma’am, I’m due at?—”

“Harold used to try that voice too. Sit.”

I sit. The tea’s sweet enough to stand a spoon in. Her tomatoes have recovered; the whole garden’s gone riotous with August, and we look at it together while I wait to find out which of my organs she’s after.

“I was married fifty-one years,” she says, conversational, to the tomatoes. “You know what Harold did, after the Coast Guard pulled him and two others off that shrimper in ’79? Wouldn’t come in the house for a week. Slept on the boat. His own bed, his own wife, right up the dock—and he chose the boat, because he’d scared himself. Not the storm. Himself. How bad it could’ve gone. How much he had to lose. A man gets a good clear look at the size of his own stake and it puts him right on his back.”