Page 26 of Baby, It's Cod Outside
“And the piece on the Santa Claus Parade?”
Jackson waves vaguely. “Working on it.”
“Sure you are. Don’t forget to mention the reindeer who shit on the mayor’s boots last year. That’s the kind of local color the people want. Maybe we could do a ‘where are they now?’” He disappears toward his office, footsteps heavy on the worn carpet.
Jackson presses the heels of his hands into his aching eyes until the sparks behind his lids blur and fade. The tabs open on his screen are all MarineSelect.
Not politics.
Not parades.
Just rot.
He’s working the MarineSelect angle the only way he knows how, slow, thorough, and a little bit obsessive. The documentation tells a compelling story. MarineSelect restructured under a new LLC three years ago. The old name, Maritech Environmental Solutions, was quietly dissolved after a string of sanitation complaints in two coastal towns and one upstate bottling facility. Buried in the digital sediment: mentions of unreported waste quantities, inconsistencies in hazardous material logs, and one redacted email from a local commissioner who expressed‘concern about falsified disposal weights.’
None of it’s definitive. But the bones of the thing are here, if you knew where to dig.
He’s still good at this. After everything Boston took from him, after the way it ended there, he hadn’t realized how much he missed this particular clarity: the rush of knowing where to look, what to pry, how to pull a narrative together and sharpen it to a steel point.
For the first time in more than a year, he feels like a reporter again, not some washed-out exile typing around the edges of relevance.
He switches over to local environmental watchdog blogs. Niche stuff but compelling. One entry mentions missing waste and after-hours hauling allegedly linked to Maritech. Another post speculates about scrubbed EPA audits. A blogger in Connecticut claims a Maritech affiliate moved in and gutted a local recycling program. The pieces are scattered, but anyone bothering to look could connect them.
What sits on his desk, though, is the kind of evidence you don’t get unless someone trusts you. Ben’s binder.
Ben probably doesn’t realize how damning it is. No, that’s not fair; he does. He’s not stupid. He’s just too trusting, doing the only thing he knows how: trying. Trying to keep the plant afloat. Trying to protect the people under him. Trying not to disappoint a father who probably hasn’t earned half that effort.
Trying not to fall apart.
From exhaustion. From fear. From the brittle, beautiful act of faith that comes with handing over something delicate and hoping you’d given it to the right person. Ben’s trusting Jackson to do right by him.
For a moment, Jackson had let himself feel good about that. Now all he does is worry about how he’s going to let him down. Boston lingers, not in the details, but in the scar tissue. The reminder that even when you think you’re doing everything right, that you are playing with lives and reputations.
He leans back in his chair, presses two fingers to the bridge of his nose until the ceiling’s a smear of gray panels. Then he sits forward again, opens a new tab and types: ‘how to help someone through a panic attack.’
He scrolls for a while, skims a few articles. There are lists of grounding exercises, tactile cues, and breathing methods. He scans the list of don’ts: Don’t overwhelm. Don’t vanish. Don’t minimize. There’s a simple script on what to say. He bookmarks them all.
Then, it’s back to MarineSelect.
Jackson starts mapping out names, timelines, annual EPA reports. The deeper he digs, the more connections surface. He spots a small, forgettable company name on a few of the documents, ClearBay Logistics, and pulls their filings. The address is a PO box in Atlanta, but the listed officer? A former Maritech employee.
He cross-references other vendors, scanning for overlaps: addresses, tax IDs, familiar names. Each one leads backto MarineSelect through a labyrinth of dummy corporations, shadow companies with hollow websites registered out of storage units in Georgia, Nevada, and Delaware. Recycled contact emails that ping back undeliverable. Client companies’ official EPA disposal records quietly contradicting Maritech’s reported totals by thousands of pounds.
This isn’t just one shady shipment; it’s a sprawling network built to conceal illegal waste disposal by funneling responsibility downward. Layer upon layer of misdirection, a shell game played across state lines, ensuring no one at the top ever pays.
When Jackson publishes this, it won’t stay a local story. It’s bigger than Silver Shoals. It’s a pattern. A playbook. A full-scale nation-spanning environmental cover-up. And if he can lay it all out, expose it for what it is, it’ll be a bombshell.
Problem is, bombshells, by design, don’t detonate cleanly. They leave collateral in the wreckage.
He flips through the MarineSelect contract again, slower this time. Reading like a lawyer. Looking for the fine print. There:The company accepts full liability for waste disposal practices, as well as responsibility for any legal penalties or charges resulting from disposal by MarineSelect or its subsidiaries.The blame for this doesn’t rise. It rolls downhill. Straight to Whitaker Seafood.
To Ben.
The perfect fall guy. Just enough power to be blamed. Not enough to fight back. The owner’s son. Young, rich, in over his head. Exactly the kind of patsy people love to hate. They’d be right a lot of the time, but they haven’t met Ben.
They won’t ask if he knew. They’ll assume he did, and if he didn’t, they’ll say he should’ve. Negligent at best. Complicit at worst. He won’t stand a chance against the media narrative.
If someone else breaks this, Ben gets flattened, no question. The story can’t just be about the contracts, it needs to be about the person who put Ben Whitaker’s name on them.
