Deception Cove

by Owen Laukkanen

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2019 by Owen Laukkanen

  Cover design by Allison J. Warner

  Cover photograph copyright © 2019 by Jill Battaglia / Arcangel

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Author photograph by Brady McCloskey Photography

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  Mulholland Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First ebook edition May 2019

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  ISBN 978-0-316-44869-7

  E3-20190410-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Also by Owen Laukkanen

  For Lucy, of course. And for Sassy May, too.

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  Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.

  —Ephesians 4:28

  Prologue

  Certain moments came back to her, or maybe they never left. Images, sounds. Marshall fumbling around on some shale slope at daybreak, looking for what was left of his leg, trying his best not to scream and give away their position. Hawthorne, dropped by a sniper as he came out of the latrine, dead before he could fasten his belt, the sound of the shot coming across the valley a split second after he’d fallen.

  It was Afia, though, whom Jess saw most of all.

  Sometimes it was different. Sometimes it wasn’t so bad. Sometimes, when Jess saw her partner again, it was when the sun was still shining. No snipers, no RPGs, no Taliban ambush.

  Sometimes it was Jess and Afia bonding over back issues of Betty and Veronica in Jess’s bunkhouse at the OP. Afia had confessed, teasingly, that she’d seen Jess as Veronica at first—the dark hair, sure, but she’d confused Jess’s quiet reserve for something more judgmental, condescending.

  “Of course, you’re Betty,” she told Jess six or seven months after they’d started working together. “Kind, cheerful, hardworking. I see it now, but when we first met…” She winced. “I was scared of you, Private Winslow.”

  “And you?” Jess asked. “If I’m Betty, who does that make you?”

  Afia cocked her head, thought about it, frowning everywhere but her eyes. “Jughead Jones,” she said finally. “A good meal is more interesting to me than any romance, definitely.”

  Sometimes Jess remembered Afia in a village down valley, sharing a joke in Pashto with a group of local women, then translating for Jess so she could laugh too—something about the gunnery sergeant in the platoon Jess was attached to, a southern guy named Atkins, his voice like a bleating goat when he got mad or excited.

  And sometimes she saw Afia with those same local women, cradling a baby, six weeks old at the latest, smiling down at him, cooing and singing softly—and then passing the bundle to Jess, who’d been surprised at first, apprehensive, afraid the women would take offense at an American sharing such an intimate moment. But she’d looked up at the women, at the baby’s mother, and seen nothing but warmth and community there, women who knew next to nothing about one another sharing the one thing they all had in common.

  It had been, perhaps, her favorite moment of that first deployment, of any deployment. She’d felt that little bundle in her arms long after she’d given him back, could picture his tiny hands, his scrunched-up face as he slept. She’d tried to write to Ty about it, in an email, but she hadn’t found the words, hadn’t been sure he’d understand anyway.

  She’d shared that moment, instead, with Afia, and Afia alone. Afia, whose husband had died in a mortar attack before they could start a family; Afia, who in her grief had vowed never to marry again, and who had taken advantage of the sudden vastness of time spread in front of her to learn English, to volunteer, to work with the American marines, and with Jess in particular, her conduit to the women in the valley and the secrets they wouldn’t share with men.

  Those memories of Afia were painful, sure, but it was a different pain: delicate, bittersweet. It was a pain Jess savored, no matter how much it hurt, because that was how she wanted to remember Afia. Those were memories she cherished.

  But mostly it was the last memory, that final, bloody day, that stuck in Jess’s head and kept coming back. Afia was gone, but every night in her dreams Jess saw her friend’s face again, saw the blood in the dirt and heard the screams, the screams she’d later learned were her own.

  Something had woken her. Just what it was, Jess Winslow couldn’t be sure, but she was awake now, wide awake and lightning fast, too,
like she was back in that OP in the Hindu Kush, strapping on her body armor as someone triggered the alarm, listening to the sound of mortars launching, waiting for the boom.

  Except she wasn’t over there anymore. She was here, America, home, sacked out on the couch under a Pendleton blanket, the TV blaring infomercials, and God only knew what time it was. Dark outside; no light but the moon.

  Lucy whined. Lifted her head from the floor, looked around, those big black ears perked. She looked up at Jess and whined a little more.

  Whatever it was, it had scared the dog, too.

  “Never mind, you big baby. It’s probably just a deer.” Jess sat up, rubbed sleep from her eyes. Found the remote and turned down the TV. “For a big, scary guard dog, you’re kind of a wuss.”

  Lucy grumbled like she wanted to contest the point, but decided better of it and laid her head back down. Kept her eyes fixed on the front door, though, and her ears at high alert.

  Though Lucy might have looked the part, the truth was she wasn’t really a guard dog. There wasn’t much that Jess owned that needed guarding. “Companion animal,” the VA doc had called her. “Something to help you keep your mind over here.”

  Lucy helped, sort of.

  She was a mutt, probably pit bull but not entirely; she had that square, blocky head and that big, dumb pit smile when she panted, but her body was long and more lean than stocky. A boxer, maybe, or some kind of retriever. Her hair was short and fine, jet black save a white snout and a stripe up her forehead, a patch on her neck and one on her belly, white socks on all four paws, and another patch like paint on the tip of her tail. She was a rescue, the lady at the agency had told Jess, a refugee from somewhere back east, from some assholes who’d aimed to fight her.

  The agency lady had sworn Lucy had never actually fought, the law having caught up to the assholes in question before they could actually chuck her into a pit. They hadn’t even snubbed her tail or clipped her ears, and for that Jess was glad. Lucy’s ears were her most distinctive feature: velvet smooth and floppy like a Labrador retriever’s, they channeled the dog’s mood better than her perpetually sad eyes or even her bullwhip tail.

  Right now Lucy’s ears were standing rigid. There was something outside. Jess could sense it out there, was 98 percent sure she wasn’t stuck in her head again, hearing phantom Taliban creeping through her front yard. Lucy whimpered once more, stood up straighter, glanced over at Jess, and took a couple of tentative steps toward the front door, and Jess knew neither she nor the dog was imagining anything. Whatever was out there, it was real.

  She pushed the blanket from her lap. Stood, the light from the TV casting a bluish glow around the small living room. She crossed the room to the window and peered out into the night, saw nothing but empty road and dark forest—and then she caught the glint of moonlight against American steel, thirty yards down the road and almost invisible.

  Jess stepped back from the window. Felt her heart rate ramp up. Hers wasn’t a road that saw much traffic, especially this time of night. It dead-ended about a quarter mile in the other direction, petered off into second-growth fir and cedar. Weren’t many other houses, either, not close by. The road wasn’t close to the highway, or even the water; unless you lived nearby, you wouldn’t think to come this far down—and that truck outside didn’t look like the neighbors’.

  Damn it, Ty. Her husband had promised her a new house when she came home from her tour, something closer to town, something better than this: one bedroom, one bathroom, and a patch of grass in the backyard, which she’d fenced in so Lucy could do her business without Jess needing to worry she’d run off after a chipmunk and never come back.

  Ty had been full of promises. A new house. A better truck. Hell, a family. Instead, Jess had come home a widow, come home to a load of debt and the same shack as ever, come home with not much more than bad memories and no clue what to do with herself next.

  She stole another glance out the window. The truck hadn’t moved. She squinted, looked hard, but it was too dark to see inside, look for a driver. Too dark to catch the make and the model, even. Maybe just some hunter got lost, she thought. Some kids hooking up or something.

  Beside her, Lucy was still staring at the door. And Jess saw the way the dog’s hackles were raised, saw the way she stood stiff, square, like she really was a guard dog, and she knew this wasn’t just a couple of horny teenagers fooling around. This was something else, something worse, and though Jess wasn’t sure exactly what it was, she knew Ty must have had something to do with it.

  Boot steps on the wooden porch interrupted that line of thinking. Heavy, slow, deliberate. Then a knock at the door, three knocks, the same measured pace. Like whoever was out there knew she was at home, knew she had nowhere to run.

  Beside Jess, Lucy began to growl.

  One

  A man goes into a cage for fifteen years and he’s bound to change inside, though in the end it’s up to him whether that change is for the better or the worse. Sometimes even he won’t know until he’s let back out into the world again, and at that point, there isn’t much that can be done but to stand back and keep watch, hope he isn’t broken beyond fixing.

  Mason Burke had been eighteen years old, a boy and a wild one, when he walked into the Chippewa state pen on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and when he walked out again, his time served and fifteen years passed, he was no longer a boy and no longer wild, but still a mile shy of manhood and not fully tame, either.

  He’d served his sentence quietly and without complaint, and he harbored no grudges. He was guilty of doing what the law said he’d done, what the courts had determined deserved fifteen years’ penalty, and in consequence he’d spent nearly half of his life a prisoner—though as far as he was concerned, he’d been treated fair.

  But he hadn’t enjoyed prison. He’d learned how to survive, and how to pass the time, but just surviving fifteen years had forced him to stifle parts of himself he’d once thought were fundamental. He’d walked into prison a human being, albeit a flawed, reckless one, and as he stood outside those gates for the first time in one full decade and another half, buffeted by a chill November wind that swept across the barren parking lot, Mason couldn’t even be sure of his own humanity anymore, couldn’t be sure his time incarcerated hadn’t reduced him to something lesser, something base, something unfit for the world that awaited him.

  He didn’t want to leave. That was the sickest part, the part that told Mason maybe something was broken inside him that could never be fixed. He wasn’t the first prisoner to have panicked at the first breath of free air, and he wouldn’t be the last, but as he stood gazing across that parking lot to the flat, dull land beyond, the whole world seemed impossibly large and alien, no walls and no boundaries, no structure, just a suffocating expanse of empty space and a lifetime’s worth of codes and social norms he’d missed out on learning.

  He wanted to turn around and walk back in through the gates, return his civilian clothes to where they’d stored them all this time, go back to his old cell and stretch out in that bunk and let the prison walls envelop him, protect him from the outside just as much as they protected the outside from people like him. He’d have said he was scared to be out in this world, except fear was a reaction you learned to hide damn fast on the inside. You learned to push it down, ignore it, until it just went away and you didn’t feel scared anymore. The guys who got scared were the guys who didn’t survive.

  But there was no turning back, and Mason wouldn’t have anyway, even if his sister hadn’t been standing leaned up against a dusty Dodge Grand Caravan, hands in her coat pockets, squinting across the lot at him, studying her younger brother as he took his first steps back out into the world.

  She took her hands from her pockets, gave him a little wave, shy and stilted. “Hi, Mase,” she said, avoiding his eyes as he came across the pavement toward her. “Looks like you made it.”

  “We thought you could live with us for a while, me and Glen and the girls,
” Maggie said as she drove out of the parking lot and set the minivan on a two-hundred-mile course to the south. “There’s a spare room in the basement you can stay in, rent-free, just so long as you keep out of trouble.”

  She was two years his senior, but it might as well have been twenty; she kept sneaking glances across at him like she was wondering who he was, wondering if he was still capable of doing the things he’d done long ago. Mason sat in the passenger seat and felt her eyes on him, and he looked out at the world as it passed his window. His stomach churned with the first stirrings of motion sickness.

  “Glen said he could line up a job for you too.” Maggie’s voice was all forced cheer and fragile hope. “He says they’re always looking for good, hardworking men.”

  Mason cleared his throat. “What does he do again?”

  “Glen?” Maggie blinked. “Well, he’s a real estate agent, Mase.” She looked at him again. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be like you were working for him, exactly, just they sometimes need people to clean the houses they’re selling, do minor repairs, that kind of thing.”

  “Clean houses,” Mason said.

  “I mean, it wouldn’t have to be forever, just until you got on your feet, right?”

  “I thought I might stay at Mom’s old place,” he said.

  Maggie’s look was half pity, half wishful thinking, like she and Glen had probably had a hell of a fight about giving Mason that spare room, and familial duty had only barely won out.

  “Oh, Mase,” she said. “We sold Mom’s place after she died, didn’t we tell you?”

  “I guess I must have just forgot,” he replied, more for her sake than his. Maggie hadn’t done much to keep him filled in on the family news while he’d been inside, and they both knew it.

  “It was all falling apart anyway, needed so much work. Glen got us a good price, and—well, anyway. You didn’t want to be fixing a bunch of plumbing and redoing a roof first thing after you got home, right?”

  There was only one right answer to that question, and that was to lie, so Mason just didn’t say anything. And Maggie waited long enough that his silence became an answer in itself, and then she sighed and reached for the radio, and Mason knew she was thinking the same thing that he was, that they’d driven just ten miles and they still had one hundred ninety more to go.