Cold Waters of Redemption by Alan Ealy
Title: Cold Waters of Redemption
Portland was always gray in Carter’s memory—gray skies, gray streets, gray veins. The city’s wet chill clung to his bones the same way heroin once had: slow, numbing, lethal. He had been a ghost of a man since seventeen, floating from squat houses to alleyways, chasing a high that dulled the scream in his head. But that day, slouched behind a trash bin outside the Water Street Fish Market, everything changed.
“Your problem isn’t the heroin,” said a voice, low and rough like gravel dragged over steel. “It’s that you’ve got no reason to stay clean.”
Carter blinked through the fog of withdrawal and pain. A thick figure in a black peacoat stood over him. The man’s face was seamed with age, but his eyes were sharp as fillet knives.
“Name’s Virgil,” he said, extending a calloused hand.
Virgil owned the fish market. He took Carter in—not out of pity, but because, as he said, “Everyone deserves one clean slate.” Virgil was a Vietnam vet, a hard man with secrets. Over time, Carter learned to gut fish, slice tuna so clean it looked like glass, and, eventually, wield a blade like a surgeon. But fish wasn’t all Virgil dealt in.
One night, after eighteen months clean, Virgil tossed Carter a folder.
“Guy in that file hurt a girl. Bad. Cops won’t touch it. You want to stay clean? Give yourself a purpose.”
The picture inside showed a grinning man in a suit and tie, an address scribbled below.
That was the beginning.
What followed were years of fire. Carter became a ghost again, but this time a weaponized one. Under Virgil’s tutelage, he trained: firearms, poisons, hand-to-hand. He worked his way through Vegas casinos, Dubai penthouses, cartel-run jungles in Sinaloa. Each kill paid well. Women came easily—models, wives, mercenaries—but Carter didn’t get close. He liked the silence of hotel rooms after a job, the cold glass of top-shelf bourbon in his hand, the knowledge that he hadn’t used in five years.
He never touched heroin again. Not once.
But temptation didn’t always come in needles.
One job in Prague, he met Lera, a Russian violinist with ice-blonde hair and a scar on her wrist. She didn’t ask questions. She listened. And Carter, for the first time, began to believe in something beyond blood and ghosts. He thought about walking away, about using the millions stashed in Cayman accounts to buy a vineyard in Tuscany.
But the ghosts weren’t done.
A file came through from a former client—a banker in Geneva with CIA ties. The target: Virgil.
Carter didn’t sleep for three days. The file was clear: Virgil had gone rogue, stolen something that couldn’t be allowed to exist—an encrypted list of every black-ops hit sanctioned off-book since the ‘80s. If the list went public, governments would fall. Hit squads were already in motion.
Carter tracked Virgil to a cabin on the Oregon coast. When he walked in, the old man was waiting with two mugs of coffee and a Glock on the table.
“You here to kill me, son?” he asked.
“No,” Carter said. “I’m here to find out why.”
Virgil’s hands trembled slightly. “Because they used us. You, me, all the ghosts. It was never about justice. It was leverage. And I’m tired of being their monster.”
“You’ll die for this,” Carter said.
Virgil nodded. “I already have.”
They drank in silence.
The next day, Carter uploaded the file to an anonymous server. It never went public. He used it to blackmail the CIA into erasing his name. Virgil vanished. Some say he died that winter in a hunting accident. Others say he’s still out there, somewhere off-grid.
Carter never picked up a needle again. He lives in Spain now, quiet, anonymous. He walks the coast every morning, the salt air clearing what the heroin once clouded. Sometimes he sees Lera, sometimes he doesn’t. But he keeps a picture of Virgil on his nightstand, next to a worn switchblade.
For a man who once lived for death, he’s finally learning to live.