Chapter 8 - Crossfire at the Wharf
Pierce Rowan walked up to Declan Cruz, kicked the fallen pistol thirty feet into the scrub brush, and pressed the muzzle of his sidearm against the center of Cruz’s forehead.
“Don't,” Beckett said from the mud.
Pierce looked over, surprised. “Boss?”
“Don't kill him,” Beckett said, slowly getting to his feet. His knees were black with mud, his hands bleeding from gravel scrapes, his clothes soaked through with freezing rain. “Tie him up. Hand him over to the federal prosecutor in Portland along with the shipping manifests from Mile 40. Let him spend the next twenty-five years in a six-by-eight cell in Terre Haute thinking about how smart he was.”
Pierce nodded once. “Understood.”
Beckett turned toward the bunkhouse.
The ladder was on the side of the house. Laurel did not use it. She swung down from the low eaves with the agility of the dock girl she had been twenty years ago, landing lightly on her feet in the wet grass.
She held the Winchester in the crook of her arm, barrel pointed at the earth.
Beckett stopped ten paces away. He didn't try to close the distance. He didn't step forward with open arms. He stood like a prisoner awaiting sentence before a magistrate whose jurisdiction he could not challenge.
“Arthur Vance is alive,” she said, her voice clear and level over the wind. “Declan’s boys tied him up in the chandlery. Pierce, go untie him before he freezes to death. He has an extra key to the supply locker.”
“On it, Laurel,” Pierce said, signaling two men to follow him toward the harbor road.
Beckett and Laurel were left alone in the clearing.
Between them lay the debris of an empire: spent brass casings, the shattered grill of a hundred-thousand-dollar car, and the bloody footprints of men who had thought they could steal what sixteen years of shared blood had built.
Beckett reached into his coat pocket.
His fingers were shaking so violently he could barely manage the zipper. He pulled out the two rings—the emerald-cut diamond and the ninety-four-dollar gold band from Newark. He held them in his open palm, extending his hand across the space between them.
“I was stupid,” Beckett said. The words were small, stripped of all the baroque arrogance of the Shaw name. “I was arrogant. I thought... I thought because we had won, because we were rich, that nothing could touch us. I thought I had to prove I was the king, even to you.”
Laurel didn't look at the rings. She looked at his face. She looked at the hollows under his eyes, the blood on his forehead where a piece of flying glass had nicked his skin, and the rain washing through his hair.
“You hit me, Beckett,” she said.
The sentence hung in the cold salt air between them like a naked blade.
“I know,” he whispered. “And every night since you left, I’ve looked at this hand and wanted to take a cleaver to the wrist.”
“A cleaver wouldn't fix it,” Laurel said, stepping closer. Her boots made a soft squelching sound in the grass. “Pain doesn't balance pain, Beckett. That’s the rule you live by, and it’s why Cruz nearly had your head on a pike. You think violence is a ledger. You think if you bleed enough, you’re forgiven.”
“Then tell me what to do,” Beckett begged, his voice cracking, the tears finally cutting tracks through the soot and mud on his cheeks. “Tell me what the price is, Laurel. If you want me to leave the syndicate, I’ll sign every dock, every warehouse, every dollar over to Pierce and walk away with the clothes on my back. If you want me to leave the country, I’ll get on a boat and you’ll never see my face again. Just... don't look at me like I’m a stranger.”
Laurel stopped two feet from him.
She reached up. Her fingers, cold and rough from rifle steel and Atlantic wind, touched his right cheek—the exact mirror position of the mark he had put on her face four nights ago.
Beckett closed his eyes, his breath hitching, leaning his face into her palm as if her touch were the only thing keeping him from falling into the gravel.
“The syndicate is dead, Beckett,” Laurel said softly.
Beckett’s eyes opened. “What?”
“I liquidated the northern holding accounts two days ago,” she said, her voice carrying the calm, absolute authority that had built his fortune. “The shell companies in Zurich have been dissolved. The deeds to the dry docks are in a blind trust for Pierce and the men who stayed loyal. The federal prosecutors have enough on Cruz and the Montreal outfit to keep them busy for a decade. We are finished with the blood, Beckett. I will not be the queen of an abattoir, and I will not sleep beside a man who needs thirty bodyguards to eat breakfast.”
Beckett looked into her sea-glass eyes. He saw no compromise there. He saw only the horizon—clean, cold, and vast.
May you like
“Then what are we?” he asked.
“That,” Laurel said, taking the thin, scratched 94-dollar gold band from his palm, leaving the million-dollar diamond sitting alone in his hand, “depends entirely on whether you remember how to be a man without a gun.”
