Chapter 4: Fire on the Water

I was down the stairs in my socks with my boots in my hand.

Ettore was already standing in the study doorway, shirt untucked, phone at his ear.

He'd heard my feet before I'd hit the landing.

"St. George pier," he said into the phone. "Everybody. Now."

He took my boots out of my hand, knelt and held the first one open.

"Put them on in the car," I said.

"Put them on now. You're no use to him with glass in your feet."

I shoved my feet in.

He drove.

He drove the hill road, and nobody at a light got in his way.

I saw the glow before I saw the water.

The night launch was tied at the end of my pier, fifty-eight feet of white hull I'd learned to dock at sixteen.

Fire was coming out of her wheelhouse windows.

Black smoke rolled off her stern and across the harbor toward the city lights.

The deckhand was on the pier with a fire extinguisher that had already run dry, still squeezing the handle.

"He's in the forward bunk!" he shouted. "The hatch is jammed, Captain, I couldn't get it!"

I didn't think about it.

I pulled Papa's pea coat over my head, soaked the collar in the bucket by the cleat and went over the rail.

"Marcella!"

Ettore's hand closed on air behind me.

The deck was hot through my boots.

The smoke was worse than the fire.

It came at me in a wall, thick and oily.

I went down on my knees under it, where the air was still thin and sweet.

The forward hatch was a step down past the galley.

I knew where every bolt on that boat was.

I found the hatch handle by feel and it burned my palm through the coat sleeve.

It was jammed, like he said.

Somebody had wedged a gaff hook through the latch from the outside.

I yanked it free and threw it behind me.

The hatch opened on a little square of smoke and an old man coughing in the dark.

"Up," I said. "Up, up, up, it's me."

"Cella." He'd called me that since I was eight. "I can't see the ladder."

"I can."

I got his arm over my shoulders.

He was sixty-six years old and heavier than he looked, and his shirt was smoking on one side.

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