I froze. “What second map?”
“The one your dead teammate hid in the photo backing. Walker, listen to me. There’s another cache. Names. Dates. Payments. A whole chain. And Ellie says her mother told her if anybody used the word unstable, that meant the leak was inside oversight, not outside it.”
Peacoat heard enough to understand we knew more than he thought.
He broke then.
No smile. No calm voice. He shouted to his men, “Take the packet and the woman.”
There it was. The clean version stripped away.
A forklift parked beside the loading bay gave me an idea so stupid it barely qualified as one. I dragged Nora lower, handed her my sidearm, and sprinted three steps through flying splinters to the machine. The keys were hanging in it. Port workers get careless when the weather turns ugly.
I jammed it alive and dropped the forks hard.
The engine screamed.
Then I drove straight into the stack of bait crates between us and the shooters.
Wood exploded. Ice-packed boxes burst open. Fish and slush and plastic went everywhere. The lane disappeared under a sliding mess of broken pallets and silver bodies. One operator lost his footing. Cole was on him before he hit the ground. Reyes kicked another weapon out under the truck. Peacoat backed off fast, one hand inside his coat now, done pretending this was an escort job.
Nora, half-propped behind the pallets, had my sidearm trained on him with both hands.
Steady.
Of all the things that should have shocked me that day, that was the cleanest. Eight years gone, half-bleeding out, and her hands were still steadier than mine.
“Tell them,” she said to him. “Tell them what Red Harbor was.”
His face emptied.
I didn’t know the name.
Reyes didn’t know it either. I could see that much.
Which meant it was older or darker than anything in our surviving files.
Peacoat looked from Nora to me, then to the warehouse entrance where distant sirens had finally started to rise from town. Maybe port security. Maybe county. Doesn’t matter. Noise is poison to operations built on silence.
He made his choice.
He stepped back, gave one sharp signal, and his remaining men started retreating toward the trucks.
Not running. Organized withdrawal.
This was not over.
Cole moved to pursue, but Reyes stopped him with one word. “No.”
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Right again. If they wanted us stretched, chasing was how they’d get it.
Peacoat opened his truck door, then looked back at me.
“You think witnesses protect you,” he said. “Witnesses just widen the cleanup.”
Then he drove.
The other vehicle followed.
The dock went quiet except for the forklift engine coughing itself down and Nora trying not to black out. I got back to her just as the gun slipped in her grip. I took it, slid an arm under her shoulders, and lowered her carefully against the pallet stack.
“You’re not dying here,” I said.
She gave a weak laugh. “You don’t get to order me around anymore.”
“Good. Because I’m not asking.”
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