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Falls Coast Guard office break room at the round table, and counted her poker chips. “Nobody ever said being in the Coast Guard is easy.”
    “It is when you’re winning.” Lt. JG Landon Adams, aka Landlubber, didn’t like to lose.
    Neither did Ens. Luis Sánchez, but he’d been stationed here longer than Adams. “She always wins.”
    “She cheats?” Adams sounded hopeful.
    “Kateri’s good. And she’s lucky.” Sánchez sounded sour, and resigned.
    Adams had recently transferred from New York Harbor, a busy, cushy job which he managed to wrangle (Kateri suspected) because his uncle was a New York senator.
    But nothing lasts forever. After the sex scandal, his uncle got voted out and now Adams was stationed on the rugged Washington coast, in a fifty-year-old station that had been built twenty feet above sea level on Virtue Falls Harbor. Here, the kid faced the kind of culture shock only a white boy from the East could face when confronted with the realities of the wild Pacific Ocean and a society of summer tourists, leftover hippies, hostile Native Americans, and speeding Canadians, along with a determinedly egalitarian attitude, socks worn with sandals, and an outright worship of organic vegetables.
    Washington State was an ongoing shock to poor dear Landlubber. He didn’t like anything, including his nickname … which of course inspired an even more determined use of it.
    Easterners really needed to climb out of their snotty little shells occasionally.
    Kateri shuffled the cards and smirked at her guys.
    They were bored.
    She was bored.
    This station was great in the winter: big storms, dangerous currents, commercial boats out fishing and crabbing, leaky foreign vessels passing by, lots of trouble, and plenty for the Coast Guard to do.
    In the summer, they could usually depend on some idiot tourist to get out on the water and capsize, or on some greedy dealer to try and smuggle in his carefully tended stash of weed. But now, in the dog days of August, when the sun shone, the weather was clear and warm, and the water was like glass, duty could be dull. Kateri likened it to being a fireman. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing … and then all hell breaks loose.
    So with three cutters in the harbor, eight guys on vacation, and nothing to do, they worked with sixteen Coasties on duty; a skeleton crew, but doable as long as they didn’t have to take all the cutters out at the same time.
    And they played poker.
    “I worked at the tribe casino as a dealer. I know my cards.” She looked at Adams. “But so do you, Landlubber. You’re good.”
    “I used to think so.” The guy’s color was high. He really didn’t like to lose.
    She really didn’t care. She dealt the cards and played them to win.

 
    CHAPTER FIVE
     
    At the Honor Mountain Memory Care Facility, Charles Banner sat in the dining room eating his dinner.
    Unlike a lot of the residents, he didn’t mind being confined. He’d been sent to the care facility directly from the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. After twenty-three years of prison life, he had diagnosed himself with early onset Alzheimer’s, and also diagnosed the probable causes: stress caused by his repeated attempts to get a retrial; anguish at knowing his little daughter, Elizabeth, had been traumatized and needed him; and the repeated head injuries he’d suffered in beatings at the hands of other inmates.
    The state had steadfastly denied him a retrial. The case was far too notorious for them to reexamine the evidence with an eye to injustice. As far as law enforcement was concerned, they had scored in a high-profile case and unless someone offered convincing evidence that his conviction was wrong, he was staying put.
    Over the years, he had interested different lawyers in his case, but each came to the same conclusion: there was no conflicting convincing evidence. None.
    The situation with Elizabeth was desperate; she was an intelligent, sensitive child who loved her