Deception Cove

by Owen Laukkanen

  Harwood smirked. “That a threat?”

  She didn’t say anything. Lucy tugged again toward Harwood, front legs off the floor, clawing at air. She was growling still, low in her throat. Harwood didn’t seem to notice.

  “You and Ty were always a pretty good match,” he said. “White trash, through and through. But Ty isn’t here to protect you anymore, sweetheart. And I’m not much given to negotiation.”

  He chuckled, as if impressed with his own cleverness, and Jess could see more than meanness in his eyes, could see hunger, too, like he’d just talked himself into something worse than he’d intended, something he’d been wanting for a long while.

  He made a grab for her shoulder. As she twisted away, Lucy wrenched forward, pulled out of Jess’s grasp to lunge up at Harwood.

  “Shit!”

  Harwood scrambled back, lost his balance, and crashed down hard to the floor, Lucy on top of him, faster than Jess had ever seen, jaws clamped on his blue jeans, tearing through denim and the soft flesh underneath.

  “God damn it! Get this fucking dog off of me!” Harwood squirmed to get free, but Lucy’s grip was too tight. Jess dashed forward, intercepted the dog. Bodied her off of the deputy and over to the corner.

  “Sit,” she said. “You sit down, Lucy. Sit down and stay.”

  Lucy sat. Didn’t look off from Harwood, though; kept growling, licking her lips. But she stayed put.

  Slowly, Harwood pulled himself up from the floor. The ass of his jeans torn to shreds, striped boxer shorts underneath. Jess couldn’t see any blood; most of it, she figured, was in the deputy’s face. He’d gone red with anger, and he turned around to stare at her, fire in his eyes.

  “That was a mistake, Jess,” he said. “That was a real big mistake.”

  “They came for her the next morning,” Jess told Burke. “Kirby, Dale Whitmer, and Cole Sweeney, the whole detachment. Said Lucy was a menace and she’d have to be destroyed. Took her away from me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop them.”

  “Nobody you could call?” Burke replied. “State police, even? You’d have grounds, the way he came after you.”

  Jess laughed. “What would I tell them? The deputy stole my dog? She bit him, Mr. Burke, that’s indisputable. The rest is my word against his.”

  Burke took this in. Studied the rug for a while. “And this thing with your old man,” he said. “You don’t know what he’s talking about?”

  “The hell if I do,” she said. “They’re looking for something, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is. Ty got into all kinds of schemes; that’s just what he did. He was a fisherman—salmon, like his dad—but that’s no way to make a living around here anymore. But he swore he was going to get rich, one way or another. Told me when I came back from overseas, he’d have built me a brand-new life.”

  Which he did, she thought. Just not the way either of us intended.

  “Sounds like some guys I might used to have known,” Burke said. He let another silence stretch between them, kept looking down at that rug, scratching his chin. “What about the dog?” he asked finally. “You know where they’re keeping her? Didn’t look to me like she was at the detachment.”

  “She isn’t,” Jess told him. “They couldn’t keep her there. And she isn’t at animal control on the reservation in Neah Bay, either.”

  “So where is she?”

  Jess shrugged. “Who knows?” Then she stopped. Felt, suddenly, the hopelessness of the whole situation. She’d already accepted that Harwood was going to put Lucy down. And in accepting it, she’d resigned herself to the notion that her own story was going to meet its end soon enough. She couldn’t survive without Lucy, not alone. Not for very much longer, anyway.

  But even if the dog wasn’t dead yet, so what? What was this criminal proposing to do, attack an entire detachment of deputies to save her? The whole idea was reckless, and stupid, and destined to fail. Lucy was as good as dead, and Jess figured she was well on her way to joining her. “Shit,” she said, wiping her eyes, turning away. “I think you’d better go.”

  Burke was looking at her. “You sure about that?” he said. “I’d be glad to—”

  “Just go,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  Burke waited a beat. Then she heard him stand, shuffle over to the door. “You think on where that dog could be,” he said as he laced up his boots. “We put our heads together, maybe we can spring her loose.”

  Eight

  The motel owner called out to Mason as he walked through the empty parking lot to his room. Night had fully fallen, and the rain remained, constant, making the gritty black pavement between Mason’s feet feel slick and oily and dappled with reflected yellow light.

  “Did you make it all the way to Jess’s place?” the older man asked when Mason had detoured over to where he waited by the lobby.

  “I did,” Mason said.

  “How’s she doing?”

  Mason lifted a hand to his stomach where Jess Winslow had hit him with her shotgun. He laughed a little bit. “She’s heavily armed,” he said. “And she kicked my ass.”

  The man looked him over. “Good,” he said. “You get what you want?”

  “Maybe.” Mason glanced down the long row of doors, then back toward the warmth of the lobby. “You got time to talk for a little bit?”

  The motel owner’s name was Henry Moss—Hank, he said, to his friends. He led Mason into the lobby, switched on the coffeemaker in the corner, and set himself up behind the front desk.

  “So,” he said, “what is it you want to know, Mr. Burke?”

  Plenty. “That deputy, Harwood. What’s his story?”

  “Kirby?” Moss laughed. “That’s a subject that’s ripe for examination. More or less the town’s prodigal son, hell of a quarterback back in his varsity days. Went off to the U. of Washington on some kind of scholarship, supposed to have a shot at the pros.”

  “Guess that didn’t work out,” Mason said.

  “No, sir. Kirby washed out after a year of not exactly living up to his potential. Came on back to Deception Cove, got himself deputized, and now we all figure he’s just marking time until Kirk Wheeler up in Neah Bay retires.”

  “Wheeler’s the sheriff?”

  “In name, anyway,” Moss told him. “Though he mostly concerns himself with fishing these days. He’s pushing seventy, been threatening to call it quits for years. One of these days he’s actually going to do it, and then Makah County is all Kirby’s.”

  “Kind of seems like he’s already assumed ownership,” Mason said. “Based on my limited interaction. You figure he’s an honest cop?”

  Moss studied him for a beat. Looked out over his shoulder at the parking lot behind. The lot was still empty, the highway, too.

  “There’s whispers,” the older man said. “Maybe you saw that truck he drives—”

  “The boat, too.”

  “The boat, too,” Moss agreed. “Hard to say how he’d scrape up that kind of cash on his county salary, but everyone has a theory.”

  “What’s yours?”

  Moss hummed something tuneless. “I mean, here’s the thing,” he said. “We have a bit of an amphetamine problem in Makah County. Now, I’m not saying Kirby’s directly involved, but he hasn’t exactly focused his efforts on curtailing the local operation.”

  Mason said, “Was Jess’s husband involved in that stuff?”

  “Ty?” Moss frowned. “I thought this was about a dog, Mr. Burke. What exactly are you thinking is going on here?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Mason said. “Just a couple things struck me as funny, that’s all.”

  The coffee machine burbled. “Just one second,” Moss said, disappearing into the back room. He returned a moment later with a bottle of Irish cream. He winked at Mason, poured them both mugs, spiked each with a splash from the bottle, and slid Mason’s mug over.

  “To your health,” he said, and lifted the mug to his lips. When he put the mug down again, his expression was
focused.

  “I don’t know much about Ty Winslow,” he told Mason. “We didn’t exactly run in the same circles, you know how I mean?”

  Mason tried his coffee. Surprisingly good, and hot enough to chase the damp cold that had followed him since he’d stepped off the bus last night.

  “Let me put it this way for you,” Moss continued. “There’s two bars in this town. We got Spinnaker’s, across from the government wharf. Tim Turpin owns that one, and Tim sees himself as a real gourmet-type individual, has the locally sourced veggies and the gluten-free bread, sustainable salmon, that kind of thing.”

  “And the other place?”

  “The other place is the Cobalt, and it isn’t the kind of spot you want to take your sweetie for dinner,” Moss said. “Kind of the epicenter for all the bad news in this town.” He took another drink. “See if you can guess where Ty Winslow did most of his drinking.”

  Mason nodded. “I think I get the picture.”

  “You want to know about Ty, you want to check out the Cobalt. Someone there will have answers for you, if you’re really interested.” Moss squinted at Mason. “Though I’m still not clear on why you’d care.”

  Mason hesitated. Tried to choose his words. Looked past Henry Moss to the picture the motel owner had hung on the wall, a younger Moss in combat fatigues, somewhere in the desert.

  “Jess Winslow’s husband was mixed up in something with the deputy,” Mason said. “That’s why the deputy came to bother her that one night, and that’s why he took the dog from her. He thinks she has something, and he’s using that dog as leverage to get it back.”

  Moss laid his hands flat on the counter. Leaned forward. “And what’s your play here, son? Are you thinking you’ll just wade right into the middle of this whole thing and rescue that dog?”

  “I was thinking about it,” Mason said.

  “Must be a hell of a dog.”

  “She’s more than a dog, sir. She’s a friend in a bad spot, and I can’t just sit idle while there’s still a shot at helping her.” Mason gestured past Moss at the picture on the wall. “That you?”

  Moss turned, checked out the picture like he was seeing it for the first time. “That’s me,” he said. “Forty-First Infantry, Desert Storm. Seems like a long time ago now.”

  “You see much combat?”

  “Did we see combat?” Moss laughed. “Son, we were first across the Saudi border, the tip of the spear. We saw plenty of combat.”

  “I guess I should have known that.”

  Moss waved him off. Drained his coffee.

  “Sounded like Jess saw her own share of action,” Mason said. “I must have been away a long time. I didn’t know they let women be marines now.”

  “I guess you never heard of a female engagement team,” Moss said. He caught Mason’s blank look and shook his head. “Yes, sir. For a Marine Corps that didn’t want to send women to the front lines, they sure as hell gave Jess her share of the loud and scary stuff.” He looked off again, into the parking lot. Pursed his lips.

  “Yes, sir,” he said again. “There’s a reason they gave her that dog when she came back, and it’s not because they figured the dog needed a friend.”

  Mason bid the motel owner good night. Retreated to his room, unlocked the door, switched on the light. Half expected to see Kirby Harwood waiting in the dark for him, and when the deputy wasn’t there, Mason wondered if Harwood’s presence would have unnerved him any more than the emptiness he found instead.

  Fifteen years in a cell. Three squares a day. Lights on, lights off. Doors open, doors closed. Fifteen years with no agency, no privacy, no personal space. He’d grown used to the structure, made his peace with his relative powerlessness. He’d matured in that prison cell, accustomed himself to the strange rituals on the inside, the hierarchies, rules written and unwritten. Fifteen years, nearly half of his life so far. He’d never been comfortable inside the prison, but at least he’d known what to expect.

  And now, on the outside, Mason felt the vastness of possibility like a heavy stone on his chest. There was no one to tell him what to do, a thousand paths to walk and no clear way to choose. He felt rootless, adrift, drowning in his freedom, surrounded by a population of normal, law-abiding people who all knew the roles, the social mores, who could look a person in the eye without feeling they were revealing their monstrous selves.

  Shit.

  He’d landed here, in this motel room at the end of the world, utterly on his own. He would wake up on his own, bathe on his own. He would choose what to eat, and where, and when. And he knew this was an incredible luxury, something he’d dreamed about over countless nights inside the Chippewa pen. He’d imagined eating at nice restaurants, going for long drives. Hell, meeting a woman, making actual friends. It had all seemed so simple when he was still inside. Now, on the outside, Mason Burke had no idea what he was doing.

  He needed structure. Mason knew, somewhere in his subconscious, that coming to Deception Cove in search of a dog wasn’t the sanest idea in the world. He knew it wouldn’t make sense to most anyone who knew what he was doing. The dog was just a dog, after all. And from the sound of it, the dog was mixed up in something a lot bigger than Mason had anticipated. He knew the sane answer was to turn around and go home.

  And do what? Where was home, exactly? What did he have in this world to look forward to? Where would he start? Cleaning houses?

  “Greater love has no one than this,” the Bible said, “that someone lay down his life for his friends.”

  The dog needed help. Mason needed a purpose. He undressed for bed and slipped beneath the sheets. He’d be sticking around for a while.

  Nine

  Mason had only ever seen the dog riled up one time.

  As with most fights inside prison walls, it started over something trivial. Something stupid. In this case, it was a chew toy.

  Less than a week left to go in the program, before the dogs would graduate out of the Chippewa pen and move on to a month or two with real trainers on the outside, men and women who would work with Linda Petrie to polish the dogs into genuine companion animals. In a few months, all things going well, Lucy would have a new home, a forever home, with someone who needed her, who deserved her a lot more than Mason did.

  It wasn’t like it didn’t hurt, just a little bit, knowing the dog was leaving, knowing he’d never see her again. She’d come a long way in the months they’d worked together; she wasn’t scared of her food bowl anymore, for one thing, had put on some healthy weight. She wagged her tail when he looked her way, covered him in dog-slobber kisses when he came to get her from her crate in the morning. She sat, she fetched, she heeled when they walked around the yard together. They were working on rolling over; they’d mastered high fives. The dog had found her confidence; she looked happy. She was going to be a good dog for somebody, Mason knew. But that didn’t make it hurt any less, thinking about saying goodbye.

  Heck, though, in six months or so he’d be out of this prison himself. He could find his own dog, train her like he’d trained Lucy. He figured he’d picked up a few tricks, and though it wouldn’t be the same bond as he’d built with this dog, it would have to do.

  Except he very nearly messed up his chances of getting out, and Lucy’s, over one stupid rubber tire toy.

  The tire, by rights, belonged to no one. It had come in the canvas bag of rope toys and tennis balls and stuffed animals that Linda Petrie brought with her each day, that she dumped in the middle of the yard for the dogs to play with when they weren’t learning how to behave themselves. The tire belonged to the group; it was fair game for anyone. But in practical terms, that tire belonged to Marques Alvarado and Meatball.

  Alvarado was a banger from somewhere in Detroit. He’d taken ten years on a manslaughter conviction and, like the rest of the men in the program, was due for release sometime within the next year. Alvarado palled around with a guy named Porter Trammel, who was serving five to seven for boosting cars down in Flint. Tra
mmel’s dog, Reggie, was a German shepherd from the slums. And Meatball was a big, beefy rottweiler.

  That tire belonged to Meatball, and when Meatball didn’t want it, Reggie took over. They’d wrestle over the damn thing all day if they could, and they generally did, and the rest of the dogs left them alone, left the tire alone.

  Until the one day, three days before graduation, when Lucy and Mason found themselves alone unexpectedly in front of the pile of toys, having finished the morning’s training before anyone else. Lucy saw the tire sitting there and, as best as Mason could figure, finally saw her shot and snatched it up and jogged away happily, tail wagging furiously and a gleam in her eyes, looking back at Mason every couple of steps to make sure he knew just what mischief she’d pulled off.

  She looked so damn happy, he couldn’t take the tire from her. And so he didn’t. He let her have her fun, played tug-of-war with her, let her sit down and chew the thing until it was covered in drool and a whole host of new bite marks, until Meatball and Reggie—and Alvarado and Trammel—finished their own training and discovered the tire was missing.

  Funny thing was, it wasn’t like the dogs gave a shit. Meatball found a piece of frayed rope she seemed to like just as much, and Reggie chased her off to a corner where they could gnaw on the thing together. But Alvarado saw Lucy, saw the tire, and Alvarado took it personal.

  “Burke.” Alvarado’s voice could turn heads across the yard, and it did. Mason heard him approach, knew what was coming. Turned and saw Alvarado and Trammel steamrolling across the yard toward him, and knew immediately that this wasn’t about a tire toy anymore.

  Confrontation at Chippewa, no matter the spark, burned over one fundamental question, and that question was power. Didn’t matter if it was the guy butting in on you in the cafeteria line, or a hard foul on the basketball court in the yard. Everything inside came down to which man was tougher, which man would give way. And once you found yourself challenged, there was no easy way out. There certainly were no points given for peace.