Free Devil's Harbor by Alex Gilly Page B

surfboard, he’d been peerless; in class, however, he’d felt ashamed, angry, and ultimately bored by his own incomprehension. Years later, when Customs and Border Protection had obliged him to sit through Spanish-language lessons during training, Finn had felt the same shame and anger at his lack of proficiency at learning new words and conjugation tables as he had at school, and by the end of it he came out with only a tenuous grasp of elementary Spanish—only just enough to qualify for the job. It was only during on-water training that he’d felt competent. Out on the water, he always let his patrol partners handle the conversations with the people they intercepted. Finn figured his job was to handle the boat.
    He had thrived in the navy—its discipline had helped keep both the black mood and his drinking contained, and there’d been none of that Dr. Phil kind of talk. We don’t give a damn as long as you get the job done, the navy had told him. Which had suited Finn fine. He’d discovered that he was very good at getting the job done.
    From the navy’s Maritime Expeditionary Security Force to becoming a marine interdiction agent had been one small step—Finn had followed other guys into it; and even though the CBP was nominally a civilian organization, so many agents were ex-military that the culture had a militaristic feel to it, especially in the Office of Air and Marine, where, with its high-powered boats and planes and helicopters, the testosterone levels were especially elevated. Finn saw a lot of similarities between what he had done in navy gunboats guarding Iraqi oil terminals and what he now did in CBP Interceptors patrolling the waters off Southern California. Mona was forever trying to remind him of the differences, forever telling him he wasn’t in a war zone anymore, which was fine for her to say, but he was the one out on the water, and for him the similarities trumped the differences, no matter what she said.
    The difference that had the greatest consequence for Finn was that his job in the CBP had let him drink in a manner he would’ve found impossible while serving in the navy. People smugglers and drug traffickers put to sea at night, so that’s when marine interdiction agents went looking for them, and there was nothing unusual about Finn’s sleeping through the day. For years, his schedule had let him hide his binge drinking.
    Nor was he an alcoholic of the most hopeless variety. In some areas of his life, he retained complete control. He never let his drinking impact his work, for instance. Even after his worst benders, Finn abided by one rule: he never, ever stepped aboard a boat inebriated, or drank while at sea. His alcoholic father, of all people, had taught him that.
    Finn fared well at sea. It was ashore where he struggled, and before he was married he’d lived a fitful life, observing an iron discipline aboard the Interceptor, then drinking to blackout between shifts.
    Then he’d met Mona and fallen in love and they were married, and for the first few months he’d managed to keep his drinking in check.
    In law school, Mona had been pursued by a series of calculating and ambitious men who had wooed her with the same aloof self-interest with which they practiced contract negotiation. She’d made a point of avoiding corporate lawyers ever since, which hadn’t proved too difficult after she’d chosen to devote her career to immigrants’ rights.
    She’d met plenty of good men in the not-for-profit sector, and had even dated a few, only to discover that good men tended to leave her a tinge dissatisfied—90 percent satisfied, say, as though their good intentions prevented them from reaching that final 10 percent. She’d felt like she had an itch that was always just out of their reach.
    There’d been nothing calculating about Finn’s courtship. His pursuit had been frankly carnal, reckless even, and