After my husband hurt me, I lay on the kitchen floor while our five-year-old son watched. My little boy grabbed my phone and called the person his father had tried to keep out of our lives. “Grandpa, please come. Mom needs help.” Minutes later, my husband returned and spotted the phone. “Who did you call?” he demanded. My father’s voice answered through the speaker: “Me.”

The tide was halfway out when Clara’s Subaru bounced over the rusted railroad spurs that cut through the port flats.

Down here, Tacoma didn't look like the city of glass museums and craft breweries that the brochures advertised. Down here, behind the pulp mills and the scrap metal yards, the city was made of creosote-soaked pilings, corrugated zinc siding, and black mud that smelled of rotting kelp and sulfur.

The Sea Sprite was moored at the end of Slip 4, an ancient finger pier made of heavy fir timbers that groaned with every surge of the incoming swell. She was a forty-eight-foot converted troller, built in 1964 out of Alaskan yellow cedar, her hull painted that specific shade of dull, lead-based white that seems to absorb the gray light of the Pacific Northwest rather than reflect it.

Dad had bought her when my mother was still alive, back when the salmon runs still paid for fuel and groceries. Now she was mostly a floating workshop, her fish holds converted into dry storage for old block-and-tackle gear, spare rope, and three decades of tools that had no place in a suburban garage.

As Clara killed the engine, the headlamps cut across the gangway.

Dad was already there.

He was standing on the narrow deck behind the wheelhouse, wearing an oilskin apron over his coat, a heavy steel deck brush in one hand and a five-gallon bucket of fresh water in the other. A single halogen floodlight, clamped to the boom mast, threw a harsh, conical beam across the wet timbers of the slip.

He didn't come up the gangway to meet us. He waited until Clara helped me down the steep, slippery incline of the aluminum ramp, his hand reaching out to catch my good arm the second my boots touched the deck.

His grip was like an iron cleat. He didn't ask how the hospital was. He didn't look at the white bandage on my cheek. He just pulled me gently toward the companionway hatch that led down into the main cabin.

"He's in the lower berth," Dad said, his voice competing with the low, persistent slosh of the tide against the hull. "Ate half a tin of saltines and went out like an anchor. He’s got your mother’s wool blanket."

I stepped down the three steep steps into the belly of the boat.

The cabin was warm—almost hot—heated by a tiny, cast-iron Dickinson diesel heater mounted against the forward bulkhead. It smelled of kerosene, dry cedar, and the peppermint oil Dad used to keep the spiders out of the corners. In the narrow V-berth at the bow, Noah was curled into a tight ball, his green dinosaur pajamas barely visible beneath a heavy, red-and-black Hudson’s Bay blanket. His thumb was tucked into his mouth, his breathing slow and heavy, his face completely peaceful in the amber glow of the heater's mica window.

Beside his head, sitting on the small mahogany shelf where my mother used to keep her navigation charts, was his one-eared bear and my cracked phone, plugged into a twelve-volt marine charger.

"You should sleep," Clara whispered behind me, her hand resting lightly on my good shoulder.

"I can't lie down," I said. "The sling pulls if I'm flat."

"Sit in the captain's chair," Dad’s voice came from the hatch. He had climbed down behind us, leaving his wet deck boots at the door. He was in his heavy wool socks, his shoulders filling the narrow cabin like a bulkhead. He moved past me to the small galley counter, pulled a battered tin pot from the stove, and poured three mugs of black tea that had been steeped until it looked like used motor oil.

He handed one to Clara, set one on the shelf beside my right hand, and took the third to the small dinette table.

"Higgins told you about the truck?" Dad asked, looking at me over the rim of his mug.

"They found it at the gravel pit," I said, lowering myself slowly into the swivel chair by the chart table, my teeth gritted against the ache in my collarbone. "He thinks he went up to Marcus’s cabin."

Dad took a slow, deliberate sip of his tea. "He didn't go to Marcus’s."

Clara frowned. "How do you know that, Dad?"

"Because Marcus is an idiot, but he’s not an outlaw," Dad said flatly. "Marcus has three years left on his teamster pension at the rail yard. He’s got two kids in community college. He’s not going to take an accessory charge for his brother over a broken chair and an emergency protection order."

"Evan could have forced his way in," Clara argued.

"Evan doesn't force his way into places where there are grown men with deer rifles," Dad said. The contempt in his voice was so thick you could have scraped it off the bulkhead with a putty knife. "Evan picks targets that don't weigh more than one-twenty. He’s down here."

The tea in my mug suddenly seemed to vibrate. I looked down at the dark surface, watching the tiny concentric rings form and break.

"Down here?" Clara whispered, her head snapping toward the dark companionway hatch. "In the tideflats?"

"He knows the boat," Dad said, setting his mug down with a dull clunk against the mahogany table. "He came down here two years ago when he wanted to borrow my pneumatic nailer for that cedar fence he was putting up. He knows I keep the diesel tank full. He knows there’s five hundred dollars in cash in the emergency kit behind the barometer, and he knows that if he can get his hands on the keys to this rig, he can run her out past Point Defiance and be in Canadian waters before the Coast Guard gets a cutter off the dock at Port Angeles."

"He doesn't know how to run a commercial troller, Dad," I said, fear cold and greasy in my stomach.

"He doesn't need to know how to run her well," Dad replied. "He just needs to know how to turn the starter key, drop the lines, and point her northwest. A monkey can run a diesel troller down the channel if he doesn't care about the bottom."

Dad stood up. He walked over to the small locker behind the galley stove—the one that had had a brass padlock on it for as long as I could remember. He reached into his Carhartt pocket, pulled out a small, flat key, and turned the tumbler.

The door swung open with a dry squeak.

Inside, resting against two felt-lined blocks, was an old Remington 870 twelve-gauge shotgun. The bluing on the barrel was worn down to silver around the slide, and the walnut stock had the dark, greasy patina of forty years of damp duck blinds and salt air. Beside it sat a green cardboard box of high-brass four-shot shells.

Clara gasped, taking a half-step back against the galley sink. "Dad! No. Higgins said—"

"Higgins is four miles away sitting in a warm patrol car drinking gas station coffee," Dad said without looking back. He picked up four shells from the box, his thick fingers moving with that same slow, terrifying precision he used when splicing steel cable. Click. Clack. Click. Clack. The shells disappeared into the magazine tube beneath the barrel. He didn't rack the slide; he left the chamber empty, setting the safety with a sharp, distinct snap of his thumb.