Page 2 of Lawless (Dauntless Island #2)

About twenty minutes later, I lugged a few bags up the long, creaking length of the jetty, two guys from the barge pushing a flat trolley with a squeaky wheel that was loaded with the rest of my stuff.

The guy from the barge had said he’d help get everything into the town, but “town” was a misnomer.

The cluster of sandstone cottages that clung to the curve of the harbour wall didn’t look like a town at all.

The road was unpaved, and there were no street signs—not that you’d need them given there appeared to be no actual streets—no street lights, and, from what I could tell, no actual indications of any businesses at all.

No cafes, no restaurants, no shops, no anything.

I hadn’t expected Dauntless Island to be exactly buzzing, but I’d expected something .

It wasn’t until we got closer to one of the houses that I noticed a small sign in the front window: Dauntless Island Museum .

And, in a handwritten sign tacked underneath: And historical society!

It even had a smiley face after the exclamation mark.

“Where’s your place?” one of the guys from the barge asked me.

Good fucking question, actually. I was saved from having to answer it when the door to the museum opened, and a guy burst outside in a flurry of limbs and plaid.

He was cute, with glasses and mussed-up dark hair that could have been bedhead but could have been intentional.

There was a baby carrier strapped to his chest, with a baby in it.

The baby had tufty reddish hair and a gummy grin.

“Hi!” the guy exclaimed, hurrying down the path to the street with his hand extended. “You must be the new copper. I was going to come down to the barge to meet you, but...” He looked down at the baby with a grimace. “Poo explosion.”

I shook his hand, hoping he’d washed it thoroughly. “Dominic Miller.”

“Eddie Hawthorne,” he said, wrinkling his nose so his hipster glasses danced a little.

“I run the museum and local historical society. We got an amazing grant a few months ago, and now it’s all shipshape.

” He paused like he was waiting for a reaction, and then blinked at me. “That was a mutiny joke.”

“Oh.”

“So far I’m the only member of the local historical society,” Eddie said brightly. “But maybe you’d be interested in joining?”

“Maybe,” I hedged. I really wasn’t. “So, um, can you tell me where the police station is?”

“I can do one better,” he said, pulling a set of keys out of his pocket. “I can let you in!”

We set off down the street, the baby babbling happily.

“You’re just on the other side of the church,” Eddie said. We passed the church, and then he gestured to a two-storey cottage. “Here it is!”

The new police station, though there was no signage that gave it away yet, overlooked the harbour. Its blue front door was bookended by matching shrubs with red flowers. It was two floors, with a sharply pitched tin roof and a chimney.

Eddie unlocked the door and pushed it open. “You’re probably going to want to get some new curtains.”

He moved aside and let me in.

The downstairs looked weirdly cosy for a police station, and I immediately saw what Eddie meant—the curtains in the windows were floral and chintzy and didn’t at all match the new station décor.

The front room was a foyer, with a dull beige couch, the usual “Stop it or cop it!” and recruiting posters already tacked up.

A laminate counter, obviously newly installed, looked totally out of place against the sandstone walls.

Behind the foyer there was an office and a cell, and a small kitchen at the back of the cottage.

The stairs to my private residence were between the cell and the kitchen.

I climbed them to discover two bedrooms upstairs, a tiny living room, and an even tinier bathroom.

The ceilings were low, and the stone walls were cool.

The living room and one bedroom overlooked the harbour—down at the jetty, pallets and boxes were still being unloaded.

The back bedroom and the bathroom overlooked my dilapidated garden, a sagging wooden fence, and the equally dilapidated back garden of the cottage behind mine.

I headed back downstairs to where the guys from the barge were unloading shit in the foyer.

“I’ll give you an extra fifty if you can get my bed upstairs,” I said. “Each.”

Eddie moved out of their way. “This used to be the mayor’s house,” he said.

“The mayor?”

“The ex-mayor,” he said. “Clarry. The current mayor is Red Joe. He was supposed to come and meet you, but he’s sorting out some issue with Katrina Finch’s chickens, because the dog got into one of the pens and ate a bunch of eggs.”

“That...that’s something the mayor has to deal with?”

Eddie wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, well, it’s his dog.

Well, technically it’s Joe’s sister Amy’s dog, but because Amy’s up to her arse in fish all day—she’s starting up this whole aquaculture thing on the western side of the island—Hiccup hangs out with Joe instead, and this little guy”—he patted the baby’s head—“hangs out with me.”

The baby gurgled happily at him.

The guys from the barge, with a lot of swearing, got the bits of my bed upstairs. I wasn’t looking forward to putting it back together. My knuckles were still missing skin from when I’d unscrewed it all a few days ago. Both the guys looked pretty out of breath by the time they got downstairs again.

“I’d offer you a cup of coffee or something, but I don’t know where anything is,” I said.

“We’re heading back anyway,” one of them said, and gave me a pointed look.

I dug my wallet out of my jeans and paid them, and they muttered their goodbyes before heading back along the harbour wall towards the jetty. I was half tempted to run after them and beg not to be left behind.

Eddie must have seen it in my expression. He flashed me a reassuring smile. “Dauntless is a little, ah, quirky , but you’ll get the hang of it eventually.”

“Nobody on the jetty would even talk to me.” I felt exactly as pathetic as that sounded.

Eddie winced. “Oh. Yeah. I know that feeling. They take a while to warm up to outsiders—I think some of them are still warming up to me, actually. And they really don’t like authority figures. It’s in their DNA.”

“Because of the mutiny? But that was?—”

“Two hundred years ago, yeah.” He laughed. “I’ve had this argument before, believe me. I still have it, at least three times a week. And I lose it every time.”

I listened gratefully while Eddie gave me a rundown on how things worked at the island, like where the shop was—and there was only one—where to pick up a handy map—the tourist information place or the museum—and what to do if the power went out—tell some guy called Buzzy Pete from the power house.

“Busy Pete?”

“No, buzzy.” Eddie wrinkled his nose. “I think there was an electric shock incident a few years ago.”

“Seriously?”

“You’ll get the hang of it, I swear,” he said.

I really wanted to believe him, but what was that saying about protesting too much?

* * *

A fter Eddie left, I started to make myself at home.

I unpacked my groceries first, and what had seemed like a shit ton of them when I was ten minutes from the closest supermarket suddenly seemed like a whole lot less.

Especially since Eddie had warned me about island prices, and also about the temperament of the lady who ran the store.

I figured she was the woman I’d seen down at the jetty haranguing the barge crew about broken jars.

I left the front door open as I worked, thinking that maybe someone would drop in and introduce themselves.

Weren’t small places meant to be friendly?

Or at least full of busybodies? But as the afternoon slowly wore on, nobody turned up except a scruffy looking long-haired cat with a torn ear and a murderous expression.

It stalked into the kitchen like it belonged there, and I frankly didn’t have the balls to tell it that it didn’t.

It glared at me, and I gave it some tuna from my stash of groceries and left the back door open so it could leave again.

I went upstairs and put my bed together.

Well, I lined up the pieces, couldn’t find my screwdriver, and decided that for now I’d sleep on the mattress on the floor.

I put some sheets on it though, and counted that as a win.

Then I looked at the rest of my stuff, decided to ignore it, and went back downstairs to sit in the station foyer and look out at the view.

I found a sign that said “POLICE” in one of the drawers, with some screws taped to the back.

Since I still hadn’t found my screwdriver, I tied a piece of string through the screw holes, then went outside and hung the sign over the doorknob.

It hung slightly askew, which seemed fitting.

When I went back inside to the foyer, the evil-looking cat joined me.

The view was incredible.

The late afternoon sunlight turned the ocean gold.

The air tasted like salt. Seagulls squawked—those rasping, discordant calls that should have grated, but somehow sounded perfectly pitched against the endless roll of waves on the beach.

I heard a few distant horns at one point, which I thought came from the fishing boats on their way back in—crowded-looking vessels that bristled with rods and poles—but if the horns meant something other than a greeting as they passed one another, I didn’t know what it was.

Okay, so my fantasies of being bothered by a steady stream of curious locals while I tried to unpack hadn’t exactly panned out, but that was okay.

I wouldn’t have got anything done if they had, right?

So the islanders took a while to warm up to new people.

That was fine. They’d come around eventually.

They had to, right? Just because I’d been left alone this afternoon in no way meant that they were actively avoiding me.

They were being nice , that was all—giving me a chance to settle in before they came to introduce themselves.

Anyway, it wasn’t as though they could just freeze me out for the entire three years I was here. That was ridiculous .

I was almost certain of it.

“This is good,” I told myself. “It’s all going to be great .”

The look on the cat’s face told me I was a deluded fucking idiot.