“You can go,” he said weakly. “I’ll be fine here.”

She shook her head. “It’s not you I’m worried about, Burke. You ever see that dog try to swim?”

“Not many pools where I came from,” he said.

“Yeah, well, she hates it,” Jess said. “She hates the water something fierce, especially if there’s waves. The damn dog’s a diva, and I really don’t want to have to pitch her over the side.”

He met her eyes. “You won’t have much choice soon.”

“You shut up,” she said. “Me and Sweeney are going to row you two princesses to shore.”

Up forward, Sweeney had come out of the cabin soaked to the waist, holding a pair of black plastic paddles that would have struggled to move Ty’s skiff, much less a damn cabin cruiser. Jess sighed. “It’s just going to take a while, Burke. Bear with us.”

At this point there was no hope in making Neah Bay. Jess figured their best bet was to angle the boat toward the light at Chibahdehl, hope the waves brought them in through the rocks and landed them on the beach. She’d seen the rocks, though; they were as bad as Dixie’s, and they’d claimed as many ships. It was suicide going near them without a chart, full stop, much less trying to navigate through without power.

But what hope did they have? Jess took one side of the boat, Sweeney the other. They set up at the stern as the cruiser settled in the water more or less uniform, the breach in the hull clearly somewhere amidships. Jess leaned down into the water and paddled, and the water was closer than she’d expected, and the paddle flexed and nearly snapped with her first stroke. She swore in her head and knew it was useless, knew they were all going to die in that water, cold and black and unforgiving, the way so many from Deception Cove had died.

I guess it’s kind of fitting, she thought. But I doubt many guys from Deception died quite like this.

Lucy had curled up with Burke again. The dog was terrified, Jess could tell, and Burke was too weak to be of much comfort. She watched as Lucy got up and started to pace, her tail between her legs, her body hunched over and bent like a paper clip, and Jess’s heart ached. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to die, it was that she didn’t want the dog to die, not like this, that dumb diva dog who’d been kicked around by every manner of human scum on this earth, and who’d never wanted much more than a warm blanket to sleep on. The dog was going to drown, just like they all were, and the difference was that Lucy hadn’t ever chosen to get involved in this mess.