Page 59 of Christmas Harbor Secrets
“Eyes,” he breathed. “Remote.”
Blake’s mouth flattened, the acknowledgment of a man who’d just lost the luxury of hope. If the camera had pushed images, someone knew they were here. If that someone had a scope to the west, the first shot would come from a distance where good shooters wrote poetry in exit wounds.
“Hard north, now,” Blake said. “We’re out of the cone if we hug the east tree line.”
They hugged it. The hiss of the lake stayed in Rone’s left ear. The soft thump of Isobel’s breath stayed on his right. Two hundred yards crawled by. Three. The ranger station’s deck would be a rectangle black against a blacker space when it came; he’d run operations against enough abandoned federal outposts to feel their haunts.
The station presented like a rumor—a shadow that didn’t move where all other shadows breathed. The hurricane had taken the roof at one corner and peeled it back like a sardine lid;the remaining shingles sat like scales. The observation catwalk still girdled three sides, low railing a suggestion. A sign leaned at a stupid angle in the palmetto:AREA CLOSED—FEDERAL PROPERTY. The letters were shredded by storm and sun.
Blake signaled the pair to fan. The kid with the quiet feet took east. The other man drifted west three paces, no farther. Rone kept to center, Isobel at his hip. He would’ve put his body between her and the world if it would’ve worked. It wouldn’t.
A shape broke the station’s rectangle—a small black square where there should’ve been empty rail. Rone’s NV gave it edge but not story. He didn’t need story. Box. Wrong. He opened his mouth to warn and felt Isobel’s fingers press against his sleeve with a pressure that saidI see it too. He swallowed the word and instead hissed, “Trip,” because Laurel didn’t leave boxes alone unless boxes did things.
Blake was already angling them left. They slid under the deck instead of mounting the stairs, bellies brushing sand, the space full of old webs that felt like hair on skin. The station’s pylons stood like knees. A raccoon skeleton lay under one, its grin turned sideways. Isobel’s breath hitched. She was better and stronger than she knew.
Halfway through, the undercroft gave them cover, and the world above them made a sound—so soft most men would’ve missed it. Not the pop of a trip. Not the first note of a gun. A click, like plastic surrendering a little.
Rone didn’t think. He shoved Isobel into the shadow of a piling with enough force to bruise, rolled over her, and the next sound was air snapping, a tiny, vindictive cough from the west. The wood above their heads spat sawdust. A line hissed as the round cut through something high on the deck and split it into two somethings that fell.
“Sniper,” Blake breathed, reverent and furious at once.
No muzzle flash. No second shot. Laurel’s rifleman was good, patient—counting heartbeats, watching for panic. He’d have marked the trail-cam image, mapped approach vectors, assumed amateurs. He’d assumed wrong about some of that. Not enough to matter yet.
Blake tapped his wrist twice, then the north pylon—station your weight, then move. He pointed to the right—up and over, straight into the station’s belly. Rone shook his head once. West line. That’s where the rifle would have the best arc. They needed to go where the math turned ugly for a shooter: inside, low, broken lines of sight. He pointed to the busted corner where the roof had peeled back and daylight would have left a weak seam even in night-vision. Blake’s mouth shaped a silent curse, but he nodded.
They rolled the last six feet on elbows and knees and popped up through the gap like spirits being born into a house that didn’t want them.
The ranger station smelled like wet plywood and old paperwork. A map still clung to one wall, its corner flapped and torn—Cayo and Cabbage Keys etched in sun-faded blue. The desk had been bolted down once; the bolts remembered their purpose, the desk didn’t. A coffee mug lay shattered beside an overturned chair.
Isobel crawled to the map and touched where Pelican Bay would be if the map hadn’t lost that part of itself. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. Rone felt the same stupid ache—homes for people who knew water and wind, taken apart in slow motion.
Blake crouched, eyes up, scanning cutouts where windows had been, where a shooter’s scope might make a dark circle in a darker square. His men mirrored him, one facing east, one south, their NV making their faces unreadable. The green world hummed.
“Clear—” the kid said, and that was when the woods answered.
Not gun. Not gator. A rustle with weight to it, from the north line. Then a low, guttural whuff that was not human, not quite—like a dog trying hard not to bark.
Rone’s skin flashed cold. He lifted a hand to still everyone. Isobel leaned into him and dragged a breath that shook at the edges.
“Echo?” she mouthed. Her eyes shone a little too bright in the phosphor glow.
Another whuff. Closer. Then a scrape—paw pads on plywood.
Rone brought his pistol up and kept it low. Laurel would use noise that sounded like hope if they could. They’d throw a whine on a speaker and let your heart walk you into their kill box. He didn’t believe in miracles. He believed in what he could touch.
Footsteps—human this time—crunched in leaf litter outside the north wall. Slow, confident. Blake’s head turned a fraction, listening in a way that said he was counting bodies by stride weight. Two. Maybe three. A fourth farther back.
Rone’s heart found that old, terrible calm again—the kind that made room for small choices that determined whether men breathed or bled. He reached back until his hand found Isobel’s shoulder. Squeezed once: stay. Her fingers closed around his wrist: I’m here.
The whuff came again—from inside the station now, from the dark run of the hallway that cut east-west. A low shape moved in the green, head low, ears forward, tail carried neutral.
Isobel’s hand crushed his wrist. He almost said the dog’s name out loud.
Then the shape stopped and lifted its head, and the eyesweren’t the warm ember-amber he knew; they were dull disks of glass.
Rone’s mouth flattened. Decoy. Laurel Tide had dragged a training dummy in here and rigged it with weight to scuff and a small speaker at the throat. He could pick out the seam even through the NV once he refused the lie.
“Back wall,” he breathed. “They want us to break cover.”
