Spencer had low expectations for Stuart after seeing the sights on their way in through the inlet, but up close, the devastation took on new meaning. The scene before him was almost as unbelievable as the increase in temperature they were experiencing. The countless blazes raging around them and the lid-like atmosphere hovering what seemed like mere inches over their heads made for an environment that felt more like the inside of an oven than anything Spencer could have imagined.

  He searched for a familiar landmark along a shoreline he remembered very little about. A double row of queen palms stood out to him, and he suddenly recalled a neighbor’s house several lots down from Tom and Debbie’s property that boasted extensive landscaping. Most of the houses on the water displayed a manicured but open backyard between the residence and dock area, but not this one, and it stood out in his mind. The double row of well-manicured queen palms remained upright along the path to the boat dock. The crisp, scorched palm fronds fluttered in the rising heat-induced air currents, showing the results of their battle with the unnaturally hot and dry conditions.

  Spencer watched as Rob set his shotgun down and went prone across the bow, dipping his hand into the water and cutting a line through the inch-thick layer of ash that had accumulated on the surface.

  “Are you seeing this?” Rob gave Spencer a look that relayed his astonishment, then refocused his headlamp on the raft of debris they were motoring through.

  “That’s something you don’t see every day.” Spencer tried to play it cool, but he was as dumbfounded as Rob by the anomaly.

  Within the last thirty seconds, the river had transformed into something from another world. The oil-ruined water was no longer Spencer’s biggest concern. He cut the engine after a momentary lapse of logic while he tried to make sense of it all and what it meant. He couldn’t possibly run the engine in this stuff. And the closer they got to shore, the worse it was getting.

  Spencer let the tiller handle go and reached for the push pole held in place by the deck hardware. Rob saw what he was doing and facilitated the effort by releasing the forward holds.

  “We can’t run the engine in this. We’ll pole in from here. But that might work to our advantage. It’ll be a lot quieter.” Spencer mounted the polling platform over the outboard in one swift move, assuming a familiar position while planting the eighteen-foot push pole in the soft bottom.

  Normally, this was where he’d stand to infiltrate a feeding school of redfish when he didn’t want to risk scaring his prey with the boisterous two-stroke. Tonight’s approach required stealth as well, but for an entirely different reason, one that Spencer was reminded of everywhere he looked.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  With the outboard silenced, Spencer and Rob were treated to an array of sounds that had gone unnoticed over the cackling two-stroke Johnson engine. Everything from pops and bangs to small explosions combined with what must have been structures crumbling filled the air. Spencer’s idea that poling in would somehow mask his and Rob’s approach was well-intentioned but entirely unwarranted.

  He was tempted to fire up the outboard and expedite their approach to shore. And he might have pushed their luck if he knew where Tom and Debbie’s dock was. But speed wouldn’t help, considering they didn’t know where they were going. And with the amount of debris in the water, it was already a bad idea before it had even completely formed in his head.

  “This is a lot worse than it was in Marathon.” Rob turned to face Spencer immediately after he finished. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  “No. You’re right, it is.” Spencer dug into the river bottom and did his best to move them away from the smoldering remains of a house.

  The devastation was undeniable, surpassing even the scenes they witnessed in Marathon. Perhaps it seemed worse due to their days at sea, distant from such chaos. Though the fires had largely run their course, the landscape was still ablaze, with flames erupting from buildings in disarray. Gas lines, ruptured and unchecked, shot fire skyward, casting an eerie glow across the ash-crusted water. Amidst the ruin, the air hung heavy with smoke and the acrid scent of destruction, a stark reminder of the forces that had torn through this once-tranquil community.

  Spencer would have already lost hope of finding Tom and Debbie’s house intact if it weren’t for the handful of houses that remained standing. The sounds of generators running filled the voids of silence between the pops and bangs of who knew what.

  “Kate’s parents have a whole-house generator.” Spencer broke the silence as they took it all in.

  “Most of the places I see have solar panels,” Rob said. “The generator might be the reason they’re still standing, but I think it’s the solar power setup that got them through the initial surge. All the systems I’ve worked on utilize a main disconnect after the inverter. That’s probably what saved ’em. Of course, the systems won’t work anymore, but I guess that’s a small price to pay to keep your house.”

  Spencer sometimes forgot the man was an electrician, but what he was saying made sense, aligning with Damon’s theory as well.

  “Did, uh… Did Kate’s parents have solar?” Rob sounded as if he instantly regretted asking the question.

  Spencer forced a smile. “They do.”

  Rob nodded. “Well, that’s something.”

  It was a small consolation, and it might have bolstered Spencer’s optimism if he hadn’t seen so much evidence of the fires spreading indiscriminately. With the houses here packed so closely together, the condition of the neighboring properties was just as crucial. Tom and Debbie’s house sat on a large lot in an older subdivision, developed back when waterfront real estate wasn’t so scarce. Yet this hadn’t spared many of the homes they were passing. They were now within sight of where Kate’s parents’ house should have been, but it was nowhere to be seen.

  Rob must have read the expression on Spencer’s face. “Hey, man, hang in there. We’ll see for ourselves.”

  Spencer plunged the push pole into the water again, burying the end deep in the soft bottom, along with his doubts, as they slipped past another dock with a missing house on the other end. They must be close now. The place with the elaborate landscaping was only a few hundred yards down the bulkhead from Tom and Debbie’s. They would have been there by now if the water wasn’t so foul.

  “Looking for a Grady White center console.” Spencer searched for anything that could have passed for the outline of a hull through the off-white smoke drifting across the water in front of them, but he saw nothing. He glanced down at the compass. He’d stuck to the original heading since leaving the trawler. Maybe he’d miscalculated, but he didn’t believe he had. Spencer kept the skiff far enough out in the river to slide around the end of the docks sticking out into the water as he passed yet another pier. A half-sunken pontoon boat, still attached to the dock by its lines, bobbed lazily as the remainder of its canopy above the water line continued to collect falling ash.

  “Spencer. I see something.” Rob’s headlamp reflected off the polluted air for a second before he turned it off, realizing it was only making their visibility worse.

  “That’s it, I think.” Spencer sank the push pole into the mud and pressed the shaft against his hip, pivoting the Hewes toward the ghostly outline of the center console. “Yep, that’s Tom’s boat.”

  The sight afforded Spencer a very small amount of relief; he’d started to wonder if Tom had somehow gotten the boat running and taken the girls somewhere. But just because they’d found the boat didn’t mean Kate and her parents were here. What it did mean was that Spencer had finally made it.

  “Careful,” he cautioned. Rob was leaning so far over the skiff’s bow that Spencer was afraid he might fall into the water.

  “I think I… It’s there. The house is there!” Rob nearly shouted, lowering his voice quickly as he pointed.

  But there was no need for Rob’s announcement thanks to a hot breeze that whipped the smoke into a whirlwind of ash rising from the surface of the water around them. Spencer’s eyelids slammed shut as he held his breath, waiting for the flurry of debris to subside. When he no longer felt the tiny particles bouncing off his skin, he opened his eyes to a remarkably clear view of Kate’s parents’ house.

  He had pictured this moment countless times on the way here, but none of his ideas about what he might find compared to what he was looking at. In his mind, the house would either be standing or it wouldn’t, like most of what they’d seen on the way upriver. But the scene in front of them resembled a little of both.

  The light yellow stucco structure and the orange of the clay tile roof were no longer visible. To say the house was soot-stained would have been underselling the severity of the charcoal-like coating covering the exterior like a cocoon. The sprawling U-shaped ranch home had survived, but just barely, by the looks of the place. A neighbor’s large queen palm had fallen across the screened-in lanai and landed in the pool, but not before clipping off a chunk of the roof over the breakfast nook, spilling a waterfall of roof tiles through the broken trusses.

  Seeing the house intact should have been a reason to celebrate, but that was the last thing Spencer felt like doing. The house looked bad—bad enough that his initial impression was that it was abandoned. Spencer took all the comfort he dared in the fact that he could at least rule out the worst-case scenario: that Kate and her family had all been trapped inside and perished in a fire like so many others.

  “No wonder we couldn’t find it. It’s completely black.” Rob shook his head in disbelief. “But hey, it’s still standing.” He glanced back at Spencer and flashed a tight-lipped smile.

  Spencer dug deep with the eighteen-foot-long push pole and put everything he had into moving them forward. Two big strides later and they were cruising straight for Tom’s dock at a respectable pace and with enough momentum to see them all the way there. Spencer jumped down from the poling platform and stowed the push pole in one fluid motion, then grabbed his carbine and clipped it onto his sling before sliding the weapon around to his back.

  “Get ready with a line up there.” Spencer moved to the port rail, taking the coiled line at his feet with him.

  He was about to drop the fenders over the side but noticed they were sitting well below the looming dock’s height thanks to the skiff’s low profile and the ebbing tide.

  “We’ll put her under the dock, out of sight,” Spencer warned Rob but wasn’t sure the big man had heard him.

  Rob was busy checking in with Nat again, like he had done every so often since they left the trawler, to make sure the radios were still working. There was a lot of static, worse than before, which Spencer expected. But it was better than having no communication at all.

  “We need to go radio silent from here on out—unless it’s an emergency. And watch your head.” Spencer pointed out the dock twenty yards away.

  They’d both have to duck in order to squeeze the little flats boat under the extended finger pier, but Spencer didn’t mind the inconvenience if it helped keep the Hewes out of sight. He hated to cut Rob’s conversation with Nat short, but they were close to land and Spencer didn’t want to risk being found out before they even had a chance to unload. It also wasn’t completely unreasonable to think that someone else might have a working radio around here and could be listening to their conversation.

  Rob might think all these precautions were overkill, but Spencer didn’t really care. He wasn’t taking any chances now that the prize was within reach. He’d been through too much to risk blowing his shot at a reunion with Kate now.

  Spencer noticed the tail end of the dock line quivering in his hand and tried to steady his nerves. But there was no stopping the flow of adrenaline that was slowly infecting his body.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Spencer tied the stern line off to a piling on the opposite side of the dock with a quick bowline knot that would be equally as fast to untie. He made sure to leave enough slack in the line so they could push out from under the pier temporarily and climb out of the boat.

  “Hang on, I’ll show you.” Spencer crawled to the bow carefully, avoiding the deck joists and spiderwebs above his head. He took the line from Rob and tied another bowline knot around the piling off the bow, but at half the speed.

  “No matter how tight that gets, you can use this hinge here to untie us quickly.” Using his fingers, Spencer broke the knot with ease, then immediately tied the boat back to the piling. “That’s a bowline knot. Got it?”

  “Got it.” Rob drew a crooked line of soot across his forehead as he wiped away beads of sweat.

  Rob was nervous; Spencer could tell. But so was he. And they were about to leave the relative safety of the boat and venture ashore. He pulled his buff back up over his face as a fresh bank of smoke drifted over the pier and obscured the house and just about everything else from view.

  They both gathered their backpacks. Rob had agreed to carry several spare bottles of water and a small medical kit that Nat had put together for their outing. There was no telling what condition Kate or her parents might be in. But it was a good idea to prepare for the worst.

  Spencer grabbed the salt-treated joist over his head and swung the Hewes’s stern out from under the dock. “Go ahead.”

  Rob clambered up onto the deck boards, leaving his foot in contact with the skiff to hold it in place while Spencer joined him.

  “I got it.” Spencer gently shoved the boat back under the dock until the poling platform and the outboard were all that could be seen.

  “If it stays like this, we won’t have to worry about being seen,” Rob whispered.

  “Especially if we die of smoke inhalation.” Spencer adjusted his mask and brought his weapon around. “Come on, let’s go find her.”

  Rob removed the Benelli from his shoulder and nodded briskly at Spencer, no longer showing any signs of nervousness. “Let’s go get your girl.”

  Spencer led them down the fifty-yard pier through an almost opaque cloud of multicolored smoke that stunk of plastic and fiberglass. They’d agreed to leave their headlamps off for now, opting instead to find their way by the light of distant fires. He moved slowly until he felt grass under his feet, then looked back to make sure Rob was close behind.

  As Rob neared, Spencer heard a hissing sound below them at the water’s edge. He flicked his red light on and panned the stretch of dry sand at the bottom of the bulkhead that had been left exposed by the low tide.

  “Holy… Wow. We better remember that.” Rob’s wide eyes reflected the light of Spencer’s headlamp.

  Spencer left the light on for a moment as he counted a handful of six- to eight-foot alligators lining the riverbank, including the one directly under the dock below them. “They’re trying to get out of the water.” He shook his head; they’d probably die unless they could manage to get out to the ocean.

  “Can’t blame them for that,” Rob stated.

  “Come on. This way.” Spencer turned his light off and headed for the right side of the screened-in lanai that covered the pool area.

  There was a door on this side, and more importantly, there were no forty-foot palm trees in the way. As they came up to the house, Spencer noticed that Tom had the storm shutters deployed. The white, metal, accordion-style shutters were normally easy to see when in place, but they were as black as everything else now.

  Nearing the first window, Spencer thought about gently rapping on the shutter to try and get Kate’s attention if she was inside, but he also didn’t want to get himself shot. Tom had the hurricane shutters closed for a reason, and after a few days of defending the house, the man might have adopted a shoot-first, ask-questions-later policy. And by the looks of the neighborhood, that seemed completely reasonable.

  “I don’t hear anything or see any lights. Not that I expected lights, but I thought you said he had a whole-house generator?” Rob glanced around at their surroundings, tightening his grip on the shotgun.

  “He does. It’s on the other side of the house, but I don’t hear it.” Spencer wasn’t surprised, though. Tom wasn’t stupid. He would only run the generator as it was needed, and he’d also be mindful about attracting attention. Their house was only one of three that Spencer had seen standing in this area, so there was no question it would get attention from looters eventually.

  Spencer took a few steps into the lanai and stopped. The queen palm had fallen in a way that left most of its foliage at the top of the tree submerged in the pool, but the trunk had clipped the back corner of the breakfast nook. The fallen tree had sheared off several cinderblocks and collapsed a section of the roof, blocking the rear patio doors in the process with a cascade of fallen roof tiles and twisted metal supports from the screened-in lanai.

  A few feet onto the pool deck, Spencer realized they couldn’t get in this way. Even if they could, it might not be safe. The remaining lanai structure looked like it could come down any second; the surviving sections of overhead screen were loaded with enough ash to bow out the aluminum support columns.

  “We’ll have to go around front.” Spencer turned to head back out through the screen door, taking the lead once more. The sharp clap of a rifle, followed by a few more shots of a different caliber, split the night air, causing Spencer to freeze in his tracks temporarily and take a knee. Rob did the same right behind him.

  “At least it doesn’t sound that close,” Spencer stated.

  “It doesn’t sound that far away, either,” Rob added.

  “Just stay alert. Let’s go.” But before Spencer could get to his feet, a loud crash sounded from inside the house. In a knee-jerk reaction, Spencer was tempted to call out for Kate, but something wasn’t right, and he held his tongue. A few seconds later, he heard an unfamiliar and irritated voice. Spencer couldn’t make out what was being said, but it didn’t much matter—because it wasn’t Tom.

  “Was that Tom?” Rob whispered.

  “No. It’s not.” Spencer dropped his head.