T he human spirit is a funny thing. A kid who has every reason to give up keeps going, and a man who has half a dozen reasons to keep going can’t shake it off.

As I untied Wayward from the dock, then motored her out of Long Bay, I pretended to have nothing on my mind. But the thought of losing my wife and Flor haunted me—and feeling so bothered by it made me feel guilty. What right did I have to be upset? Why did I feel entitled to sulk? When I was in the service, one of my commanding officers, Captain Evans, wouldn’t have sulked if he were in my shoes. When others depended on him, he did his job, and as lofty a goal as it was, I had to live up to him.

We anchored about half a nautical mile southwest of Havensight Point, where I had a clear line of sight to the shattered back door of my house. On Wayward’s flybridge with a pair of binoculars, I maintained watch on my house. I ate breakfast, lunch, and supper on the flybridge settee, then took a cup of coffee and a kiss from Alicia in the helmsman’s chair after sundown. All the while, the names of the fallen men I’d served with bumped around my head.

Sleep didn’t come that night. Not that sleep had come easily to me at any point in the last six years. Regardless, I had to keep watch.

I stayed on the flybridge, maintaining light discipline, with only the required anchor light on the masthead turned on. I left my post only when I couldn’t relieve myself over the side of the boat, or to grab a stack of protein bars around three a.m., when I got too hungry to concentrate. Other than that, I never looked up at the blanket of stars, or laid my head back in the helmsman’s chair and listened to the waves passing beneath our hull to fall upon the shore. I didn’t let my mind wander into the misty darkness.

I had to stay ready. My lack of readiness had almost cost Alicia and Flor their lives. I wouldn’t be caught unaware again.

When the sun came up over the eastern edge of the ocean that morning, I barely paid it any attention. My eyes were dry and weak, but still, I watched my house.

Around seven that morning, I saw a man wobbling up the deck stairs. My eyes had trouble picking out the details at first, but when he approached the back door, I noticed the blood on the back of his T-shirt. A big, crimson drape clung to his body, revealing the wiry muscles beneath.

It was DJ. I was still pissed at him, but that didn’t stop the cold finger running down my spine.

I spun my chair back to the helm console, then picked up my phone and mashed my finger on DJ’s entry in my contacts.

Through the binos, I saw him fumble around his hip until he got his phone out of his pocket.

“Yeah?” DJ didn’t sound himself. That one word sounded like it took the better part of his energy to form and spit out.

“It’s Jerry. Stay where you are.” I jumped up from the chair and hurried for the steps down to the cockpit. “I’m coming to get you.”

“You what? I’m at your house.” He laughed, half-crazy. “It’s been a hell of a night, man. For both of us, I guess.” Glass crunched in the background.

“We’re on Wayward , just off-shore,” I said. “Sit tight. I’m coming to evac you.” I hung up. I practically leapt to the aft settee, then unfastened Wayward’s dinghy like we were taking on water.

“Alicia!” My voice echoed off the trees on shore. “Alicia! Get up!”

Once I had the dinghy in the water, I turned around and ran into the salon, then hooked a hard right, and jumped down the stairs into the starboard hull.

My wife was sitting up in our bed, rubbing her eyes.

“Were you up all night, Jer?”

That wasn’t important.

“DJ’s at our house,” I said.

She blinked hard. “He’s what?”

“He’s hurt.” I grabbed her by an ankle, and tugged, trying to get her out of bed faster. “I need an IFAK and the advanced trauma kit.”

Alicia’s eyes went wide. The individual first aid kit was one thing, but the advanced trauma kit wouldn’t come out unless something serious happened. We kept it packed with the kind of stuff used to tackle a variety of more serious medical emergencies like broken bones, puncture wounds, births—the kind of stuff that, if we were hours away from land, couldn’t wait.

“Where is he?”

“At our back door,” I replied.

We kept a pair of IFAKs and the advanced trauma kit in my hanging locker since I had fewer clothes. Our advanced trauma first aid kit was a medium-sized duffle bag packed to bursting. The smaller, more transportable IFAK was about the size and thickness of a small laptop and included a Velcro strap that wrapped around a thigh or hooked into a tac vest. I wrapped it around my thigh.

“What did he do? How bad is he?” Alicia lugged the advanced trauma kit over the lip of the hanging locker, letting it thump onto the floor.

“I’m not sure, but he’s bled a lot. The back of his shirt is covered. He said he had a wild night.”

“Then he’s responsive.”

“He’s slurring,” I said. “I don’t know how much blood he’s lost.”

She nodded. I didn’t have to tell her this was going to be a dicey one.

“Where do you want me to set up?” she asked.

“Cockpit,” I answered. I turned to leave, then stopped myself, circled back to Alicia and pecked her lips. “I love you.”

“I love you too.” She slung the advanced trauma kit’s strap over her shoulder, and almost fell sideways. I reached out to help her get it through the door. “I got this,” she said. “You go get DJ.”

“I will.” I spun on my heel, then took all three steps into the salon with one stride.

“Jerry,” Alicia called.

I stopped. “Yeah?”

“Slap him once for worrying me.”

“If he doesn’t come willingly, I’ll have no choice but to knock his ass out,” I said.

“Don’t do it too gently,” she said, the advanced trauma kit audibly dragging on the starboard hull’s floor.

I ran out of the salon door and leapt to the swim platform. Within seconds, I was in the dinghy, twisting the outboard’s throttle, cutting for my house, not thinking about how I felt both tired and wired, not realizing I heard Captain Evans’s voice telling me I wasn’t responsible.

All I thought about was DJ.

I hit the shore, jumped out, and ran. Looking up through the trees toward the back door, I couldn’t see DJ. Except in my mind’s eye, where he’d collapsed on the deck, lying on shards of broken glass.

When I came sprinting up the stairs, I was relieved to be wrong.

DJ sat on one of our Adirondack chairs, one hand tucked behind his head, his face turned to the sunlight, his eyes closed. His skin was the color of bar soap left in a gas station bathroom.

“DJ?”

One eye peeled open, a hint of a smile crossing his features. A drop of blood plopped to the deck.

“Look who came crawling back.” His lips had trouble keeping up with his words.

I unstrapped the IFAK from my thigh, dropped to a knee beside him, opened the kit on the wood decking, and pulled out a pair of nitrile gloves.

“Jesus, DJ,” I said as I snapped them on. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Hey, man, no cavity search, all right?”

I frowned at him. He reeked of alcohol. “Can you lean forward?”

“When the mood strikes me.” I noticed his right hand clamped to the arm of the chair and his fingers let go, so I assumed he tried to raise his arm, but a grimace arced across his face. “Suppose I’m not feeling it right now.”

“How about I help?”

He looked up at me, then looked away. Normally, I would’ve let him be. If DJ wanted to be a pain in the ass, it wasn’t my place to stop him. Luckily for him, this wasn’t normal.

So, I moved my hands behind his shoulders, trying to lay them flat on his shoulder blades to help roll him forward, but as soon as I got my left hand in place, DJ yowled like a tomcat.

“Jesus, Joseph and Mary, Jerry!” He bowled over, rocking forward in the chair, and I caught a glimpse of the dime-sized hole in his shirt over his right shoulder blade.

“If you had just told me—”

He shot an angry look at me. “Not exactly in the talking mood, man!” A cord of slobber dripped down his goatee.

“If you stay hunched over just like you are, we’re good.” I got down on a knee and fished through my pack, then pulled out a pair of trauma shears. I cut down the back of his T-shirt, from neck to waist, getting the fabric clear of the wound. “Who shot you?”

“Nobody important,” he said through his teeth. “I didn’t know him. A bodyguard, I guess. I told him I didn’t have any beef with him—I just came to see his boss, but I guess everybody’s so damned worried about keeping their paychecks.”

“Or they’re worried about the strange guy with a gun.”

With his shirt out of the way, I saw the wound clearly; a crescent-shaped break in his skin, about an inch long. At first blush, it didn’t look deadly serious. My assessment was that the wound was too wide for his body to clot. Combine that with the alcohol in his system, and all the blood on DJ’s shirt must’ve slowly leaked out over a period of hours.

Wind shook the tree branches, and a dapple of sunlight skimmed across DJ’s back, revealing a lead shard in the wound. Once I had that out, Alicia could stitch him up, and that’d be the worst of it.

“Any idea what the bodyguard got you with?”

“Handgun of some kind. Probably a nine,” DJ said. “I think it was a ricochet.”

The wound did look smaller than what I had seen from 9mm or .38 caliber bullets. Too small to be anything bigger than that. Maybe a .22, but it didn’t seem to me like a professional bodyguard would carry a .22 caliber handgun. A ricochet seemed likely.

I put the shears back in the IFAK, then slid out a packet of sterile combat gauze and an antiseptic towelette. I opened the towelette’s package and snapped out the sheet.

“Grit your teeth, buddy. I’m gonna clean you off a little, then pack your wound and put pressure on. It’s gonna hurt, but it’ll feel rather good compared to what we’ll have to do on the boat.”

“Jesus, Jerry, your bedside manner is piss poor. You know that?”

“That’s why The Snyder Clinic is free.”

“Just do it already.”

“You got it.” A lot of the blood on his skin was already dry, but with a few strokes, and minimal wincing from DJ, I had a good, clean ring around the wound. I packed the wound with a single packet gauze, watching for a moment to see if the blood soaked through.

“How much have you had to drink?” I asked.

“Don’t come down on me about booze, man. Not right now.”

“You’d be a lot less bloody if you hadn’t drunk so much.”

“I’d be in a lot more pain, too.”

Fair point. Didn’t seem to matter anyway. DJ’s blood hadn’t come through the gauze, which was a good sign.

“You’re patched up for now,” I said as I Velcroed my IFAK shut. “How do you feel about getting to the dinghy on shore? Think you can walk it?”

DJ creaked upright, his lips twitching and fresh beads of sweat running down his face.

“I can walk it,” he said, sitting tall.

“Let’s see.” I motioned for him to stand with me. He gave me a glare that would’ve scared off a less determined man. “Don’t give me a dirty look, Dudley James—on your feet.”

His glare deepened. “Where in the hell did you find out my name?”

I grinned at him. “I think we’ve got more important things to worry about, don’t you?”

“That’s a family name, all right? And I didn’t have a say in picking it.” DJ scooted to the edge of the Adirondack and planted his left hand on his left knee, his right arm hanging loose. He pushed, trying to lift his butt off the wood slats, but never rising more than a fraction of an inch.

Rather than let him struggle, I reached down. He looked up at me and shook his head. So, I dropped my hand and let him try to stand up on his own again. No progress. In fact, he might’ve sunk a little lower in the chair.

I put my hand out again. “Come on, DJ.”

He pursed his lips at me. If he spat on my hand, it wouldn’t have caught me unaware. At least I was wearing a pair of nitrile gloves.

This wasn’t about offering a hand to help him walk. It wasn’t even about me being overly concerned with DJ’s safety. Our problems were deeper than that. When I looked into his sunken eyes, I saw a man stuck on shore, cursing the ocean, and kicking the sea foam. A raving mad bastard daring the water to take him into oblivion, fully aware that his mortal flesh and bone could never hold back the sea.

The waters took his dare. He held to his soggy piece of land. As if we were the same person, I felt the seafoam rise past our knees, smelled the brine in our nostrils as it crawled over our upturned face, coming together an inch beyond our lips. Our hair wafted in the current like seaweed.

We shared those feelings because he and I both knew what it meant to keep our feet firmly dug under the muck. The same tides that swallowed him swallowed me.

Looking back on it, we both sensed that about each other, I think. Since Stockwell’s meeting on Ambrosia , sure, or before that, when the Onayans wanted to force-feed Alicia and me to a swirling school of hammerheads.

The exact moment didn’t matter. What mattered was that we’d never acknowledged it, we’d never treated each other honestly. Was it both of our faults? Probably. I don’t know. I couldn’t control DJ; I could only control myself. I could only make myself do the right thing.

I crouched down and scooped my arm across DJ’s back, getting his left arm to rest on my shoulders.

“All right, partner,” I said. “We’ve got a long road ahead of us. You ready to get the hell out of here?”

DJ squinted at me. I wondered if the gulf between us was too deep to be bridged. Then he nodded, and I knew we had a chance.

“On three?” I asked.

“Let’s do it, man.”

I got in a squat position, my feet under me. DJ’s pulse tapped my shoulder.

“One, two, three!” I lifted off. DJ was much lighter than I’d expected, and the two of us got him standing without much trouble.

We negotiated our way down the steps and across the yard. On the beach, I lowered DJ onto the floor of the dinghy. We had just enough space to lay his head on the inflated bow, with his legs going under the single bench. I shoved us into the water, then hopped in, started the motor, and guided us back toward Wayward’s swim platform.

Alicia came down from the flybridge, looking at me as if I’d pronounced DJ dead on the scene.

“He’ll be fine,” I called out to her. “He’s lost some blood, and he drank himself stupid, but his wound is not life-threatening. I’ve got it packed with a small amount of gauze.”

She combed her hair back from her face and blew out her cheeks. I tossed the line to her and she pulled the dinghy in. With her help, I got DJ onto a settee in the cockpit.

He and I had a lot to talk about.