Chapter 6: The Exit

The blood on Marcus’s knuckles had already begun to tack, a dark, sticky map of the mistake he’d just made. He stared at the back of the service exit door, the heavy steel vibrating with the muffled, rhythmic thump of the bass from the club’s main floor. Behind him, the hallway smelled of stale grease and industrial-grade bleach, but all he could taste was the metallic tang of his own adrenaline.

He didn’t look back at the slumped figure he’d left near the ice machine. He didn’t need to. The way the man’s head had bounced off the tile was a sound that would sit in Marcus’s marrow for the rest of the month. 

Marcus wiped his hand on his dark denim jeans, leaving a smear that matched the indigo dye. He pushed the crash bar. The night air hit him like a physical blow, humid and thick with the scent of the Cypress Bend swamp—rot, damp earth, and the sweet, cloying perfume of night-blooming jasmine. It was a sensory assault after the sanitized, neon-soaked interior of the club.

He took three steps into the gravel parking lot before he stopped to breathe. His lungs felt like they were full of wet wool. He reached for his cigarettes, but his fingers were shaking—not from fear, but from the sudden, violent plummet of his heart rate. He was thirty-two years old, and he was still letting the ghost of his father dictate the speed of his fists.

"Marcus."

The voice came from the shadows of a parked delivery truck. Low, gravel-strained, and entirely too familiar. 

Marcus didn't turn. He closed his eyes and let the lighter flame flicker until it singed the tip of his cigarette. "I’m not in the mood, Elias. Whatever you’re about to tell me, save it for someone who still thinks this town has a heartbeat."

Elias stepped into the amber glow of the single flickering streetlamp. The old man looked like he was made of driftwood—weathered, grey, and tougher than the salt-crusted docks they’d both grown up on. He dragged a hand through his thinning hair, his eyes scanning the service door Marcus had just exited.

"They’re going to find him in about five minutes," Elias said, nodding toward the door. "And when they do, they aren't going to call the Sheriff. You know who owns this place now."

"I know," Marcus snapped. He finally looked at Elias. The older man’s face was a topographical map of bad decisions and long winters. "I know exactly who owns it. That’s why I was in there."

"Then you’re stupider than the boy I used to haul out of the marshes," Elias spat. He moved closer, the smell of cheap tobacco and salt-spray clinging to his wool coat despite the heat. "You think hitting a mid-level bagman is going to change the price of haulage in this bend? All you did was mark yourself."

Marcus took a long drag, the smoke burning his throat in a way that felt like an anchor. "He was talking about Sarah. He was saying her name like it belonged in his mouth. I didn’t plan it. It just… happened."

"Nothing just happens in Cypress Bend, Marcus. It's a closed system," Elias said, his voice dropping an octave. He reached out and gripped Marcus’s forearm. His hand was like a vice, a reminder of the strength still dormant in the retired fisherman. "You need to get to the boat. Now. Don't go back to the house. Don't go to the bar. Go to the slip and wait for the tide."

Marcus pulled his arm away, the skin underneath Elias’s grip throbbing. "I have things to settle. I’m not running."

"You aren't running. You're repositioning," Elias countered. "There’s a shipment coming in through the East Channel tonight. Something quiet. Something that isn't on the manifests. If you’re at the docks when it happens, you're a witness. If you’re on the water, you're a ghost. Which one sounds better for your longevity?"

Marcus looked down at his knuckles. The blood was almost black now. Elias was right, though admitting it felt like swallowing glass. Cypress Bend was a town built on the silence of its people, and Marcus had just screamed at the top of his lungs. 

"The East Channel?" Marcus asked, his professional interest overriding the anger. "The water’s too shallow this time of year for anything larger than a skiff."

Elias gave a grim smile that didn't reach his eyes. "That’s why they’re using the flat-bottoms. And that’s why you need to be gone. The men running those boats don't like company."

Marcus tossed the cigarette butt into the gravel. He could hear the faint sound of voices inside the club now—shouting, the scrape of a chair. The discovery was happening. 

"I’ll go," Marcus said. "But if Sarah calls—"

"I’ll tell her you’re working the night shift at the refinery," Elias lied easily. "Now move. The shadows are getting shorter, Marcus."

Marcus didn't say goodbye. He turned and broke into a jog, his boots crunching on the shells and gravel. He headed away from the neon glow of the Strip, down toward the smell of the salt and the whispering reeds of the marsh.

As he ran, the geography of the town shifted. The paved roads gave way to cracked asphalt, which gave way to packed dirt. The houses here were raised on stilts, their underbellies exposed and rotting. This was the part of Cypress Bend the tourists never saw—the part that didn't make the postcards. 

He reached the marina in ten minutes, his breath coming in jagged bursts. The *Siren’s Call* was tied to the end of Pier 4, her white paint peeling like sunburnt skin. She wasn't much, a thirty-foot trawler with a temperamental engine and a cabin that smelled like diesel and old dreams, but she was the only place Marcus felt like he wasn't a guest in his own life.

He jumped the rail, the boat rocking gently under his weight. He didn't turn on the lights. Instead, he moved by touch, navigating the cluttered deck with the muscle memory of a man who had spent more time on the water than on dry land. 

He slipped into the cabin and reached under the pilot’s seat. His hand found the cold steel of the lockbox. He keyed the code—0-4-1-2, Sarah’s birthday—and felt the click. Inside was a heavy envelope and a 9mm Glock. He left the gun. He took the envelope.

He sat on the bunk, listening to the water lap against the hull. The silence out here was heavy. It wasn't the silence of peace; it was the silence of a predator waiting in the tall grass. He thought about the man in the hallway. He thought about the way the man’s eyes had rolled back, showing the murky whites. 

He realized then that he wasn't shaking anymore. He was cold.

A sudden flare of light caught the corner of his eye. He looked out the small, salt-crusted porthole. Across the water, near the mouth of the East Channel, a single white beam swept the treeline. It was brief, a signal rather than a searchlight. Then, the low, guttural thrum of an engine echoed across the bay. 

It wasn't a fishing boat. The rhythm was too fast, too aggressive. 

Marcus stood up, his heart hammering a new, frantic rhythm against his ribs. Elias had said the shipment was quiet. That engine wasn't quiet. It sounded like an invasion.

He scrambled out of the cabin and crouched low behind the gunwale. Across the dark expanse of the water, three black hulls were cutting through the channel, running without lights. They moved with a predatory grace, their wake phosphorescent in the moonlight.

Marcus reached for the binoculars kept in the deck box. His hands fumbled with the strap before he jammed the lenses to his eyes. 

The boats were loaded. Low in the water, tarped over with heavy industrial plastic. But it wasn't the cargo that made the air turn leaden in Marcus’s throat. It was the men standing on the stern of the lead boat. 

Even in the dark, even through the haze of the marsh mist, Marcus recognized the profile. The stiff, military posture. The way he held a radio like it was a sidearm. 

It was Julian Vane. The man who was supposed to be in Atlanta, overseeing the corporate merger that was "saving" the town. 

Vane wasn't saving anything. He was importing. 

Marcus watched as the boats veered away from the main docks, heading instead for the derelict canning factory on the north bend—a place that had been condemned for a decade. A place Marcus had played in as a boy.

He realized then that Elias hadn't been warning him to leave for his own safety. Elias had been trying to get him out of the way so he wouldn't see this. Everyone in this town had a role, and Marcus had just stumbled into a scene he wasn't supposed to witness.

He reached down and untied the mooring lines. He didn't use the engine. He used a long gaff to push the *Siren’s Call* away from the pier, letting the outgoing tide catch the hull. He needed to drift. He needed to be small.

As the current pulled him toward the center of the bay, Marcus looked back at the town. The lights of the club were still visible, a distant, mocking red glow. Somewhere in that glow, a man was waking up with a broken jaw and a grudge. 

But out here, in the dark, Marcus was looking at something much worse than a grudge. He was looking at the end of the world as he knew it.

The lead boat reached the factory dock. A dozen men swarmed the pier, moving with the synchronized precision of a strike team. No shouting. No wasted movement. They began offloading the crates, handles clicking into place as they moved the weight.

Marcus’s boat hit a sandbar, a soft, jarring thud that echoed in the silence. He froze. 

On the dock, Julian Vane stopped. He turned his head slowly toward the water, his silhouette sharp against the moonlight. He raised a hand, and the beam of a high-powered flashlight cut through the dark, carving a path across the waves.

The light swept left. Then right.

Marcus threw himself flat onto the deck, his cheek pressed against the rough, salt-gritty fiberglass. The beam passed over the *Siren’s Call*, illuminating the peeling paint and the name on the stern for a fraction of a second.

Marcus held his breath until his lungs burned. He waited for the sound of a motor starting up. He waited for the shout of a sentry. 

Instead, he heard the heavy, metallic screech of the canning factory’s bay doors opening for the first time in ten years. 

He stayed down for a long time, the tide eventually licking the boat free of the sand and pulling him further into the darkness of the marsh. By the time he dared to sit up, the factory was dark again, and the black boats were gone.

He looked at the envelope in his hand. He looked at the bruised, bloody skin of his knuckles. 

He knew now that he couldn't go to the refinery. He couldn't go to Elias. He couldn't even go to Sarah. 

Because the man he’d hit in the hallway hadn't been a bagman. He’d been the lookout for the very thing Marcus was now drifting toward in the dark.

Marcus reached for the ignition key, his hand steady now, his mind narrowing down to a single, cold point of survival. He turned the key, and the engine coughed, sputtered, and then roared to life, a defiant snarl in the quiet night.

He didn't head out to sea. He stayed in the shadows of the cypress trees, the moss hanging like veils around the boat as he steered toward the one person who hated Julian Vane as much as he did.

The town of Cypress Bend was sleeping, but Marcus was finally wide awake, and he was steering straight into the storm.

He steered the *Siren’s Call* into the narrowest part of the creek, the hull scraping against submerged logs. He didn't stop until the boat was hidden deep within the "Devil’s Elbow," a tangle of roots and silt where the water turned the color of tea.

He hopped off the bow into knee-deep mud, the smell of sulfur and rot filling his nose. He didn't care about the boots. He didn't care about the heat. 

He scrambled up the bank, his eyes fixed on the distant, pale glow of a cabin hidden behind a wall of weeping willows. 

He didn't knock. He kicked the door open, the wood splintering under the force of his desperation.

"I saw them," Marcus rasped, standing in the doorway, covered in mud and blood.

In the corner of the room, sitting by a single candle, a woman looked up from a map. She didn't look surprised. She looked like she’d been waiting for him to finally catch up.

"I know," she said, her voice as cool as the water outside. "Now shut the door before the light brings the wolves."

Marcus stepped inside and closed the door, the click of the latch sounding like the final turn of a key in a lock he could never reopen.