Deception Cove

by Owen Laukkanen

  Thirty-Three

  The Nigerian man appeared at Bryce Whitmer’s front door precisely on time. He was short and lean, well groomed, his hands freshly manicured, his black hair cropped close to the skull. He wore a suit, freshly pressed and onyx black, the white shirt beneath a stark contrast to his dark brown skin.

  His face was clean shaved and unblemished, save a scar he wore across his right cheek, a souvenir from another conflict, long ago, another precious commodity, another part of the world. He left a black Chevy Suburban parked in Whitmer’s driveway.

  Bryce Whitmer answered the door. He looked the man up and down. Took in the suit, the Suburban, and—of course—the color of his skin, almost a photonegative of Whitmer’s own wan complexion.

  “Guess you must be Okafor,” Whitmer said.

  The man smiled thin, a humorless expression. “My name is Joy,” he said. “I am here on Mr. Okafor’s behalf. May I come in?”

  “Okafor didn’t say anything about any Joy,” Whitmer replied. He hadn’t budged.

  Joy’s smile, small though it was, didn’t waver. He produced a cell phone from his pocket. “You are welcome to call Mr. Okafor to discuss my presence here, if you feel the need.”

  Whitmer looked at the phone like it was an alien artifact. Then, wordless, he stepped aside and let Joy through the door—taking care as he did so, Joy noticed, to reveal the Colt Python he held at his hip.

  Kirby Harwood, Cole Sweeney, and Dale Whitmer sat in the kitchen. They stood when Joy walked in.

  “You’re not Okafor,” Harwood said.

  Joy smiled his thin smile again. “No, I am not,” he agreed, “and that is a good thing for you and your friends. I am the man Mr. Okafor sends to clean up situations like that in which you find yourselves.” He met each of the men’s eyes in turn. “If you and I are talking, it means you still have hope. By the time you see Ateke Okafor, it’s already too late.”

  The men swapped looks with one another. Sweeney, the youngest, shifted uneasily. Harwood was first to speak. “Well, all right, Mr.…”

  “Joy.”

  “Mr. Joy.” Harwood nodded. “Welcome. We’re glad you came; this whole situation has us in a bit of a bind.”

  “Luckily for you, I am experienced in situations just like this one,” Joy replied. “First, of course, there is the matter of the fee.”

  The men swapped worried looks. Harwood cleared his throat. “We’re actually a little short on funds at the moment, Mr. Joy,” he said. “I’m sure you understand, we’d be happy to pay as soon as—”

  “Let me set your mind at ease, Deputy,” Joy interrupted. “It isn’t money Mr. Okafor requires, to purchase my service.”

  Bryce Whitmer snorted. “So what the fuck are we supposed to pay you with?”

  “Life, Mr. Whitmer.”

  The room went silent. Harwood cocked his head. Sweeney shrank back and looked miserable, like he knew whatever the punch line, it wasn’t going to be good.

  “Mr. Okafor requires that one of you dies,” Joy explained. “Who, it doesn’t matter, but it must be one of you, and it must be now. That is the price of my assistance.”

  “And if we refuse?” Dale Whitmer said.

  “If you refuse, I’ll explain to Mr. Okafor that you’ve refused his offer of assistance. And unless you have the money you owe, or the product, that will be bad news for all of you.”

  “What if we don’t let you walk out of here?” Bryce Whitmer said. “You think we’re just going to let you come into my fucking house and—”

  The pistol was out before anyone could react, and then there was a hole in Bryce Whitmer’s head, and blood and brain matter spattered on the wall behind him. The elder Whitmer fell to the ground as the gunshot resonated. The deputies stared for a beat, shocked stupid. Then Dale Whitmer reached for his gun.

  “I wouldn’t,” Joy told him.

  “You fuck—you fucking killed my brother. Why did you—what the fuck?”

  “I made my position clear,” Joy said, calm as death. “There was nothing to be gained from prolonging the negotiation. Now you’ve purchased my assistance. Shall we discuss how we’re going to solve your problem?”

  For a moment nobody spoke, and the only sound was that of Dale Whitmer’s breathing, hard and furious.

  Then Harwood reached out, put his hand on Whitmer’s pistol. “Stand down, Dale.”

  Whitmer didn’t respond.

  “It’s done,” Harwood said. “We can’t do anything for him now, you hear? Stand down.”

  Whitmer hadn’t taken his eyes off of Joy. “I’ll remember this,” he said through gritted teeth. “You’d better believe, I’ll remember.”

  Joy gave him that smile again. “Whatever gives you comfort, Mr. Whitmer,” he said. “Now, shall we talk?”

  Harwood set Sweeney on disposing of Bryce’s body, had the younger deputy take Bryce outside. He figured they’d have to burn him or something, chop him up and drop him off the end of the Grady-White somewhere far out in the strait. For now, it would suffice to get him out of the kitchen, away from Dale’s eyes. Harwood couldn’t predict how the younger Whitmer would react if he spent much more time around what remained of his brother, but he knew it wouldn’t much help their case with Ateke Okafor.

  They adjourned to the dining room. Harwood sat opposite Joy at the table, and Dale stood by the door to the kitchen. And Harwood talked.

  “It started like it was supposed to,” he explained. “Like every other time. We heard the clicks on the distress frequency as the ship came past Cape Flattery, three of them, one second in between. We’d been tracking the ship on the GPS, so we knew it was good to go, like always.”

  Joy drummed his fingers on the table and studied Harwood. “Except…not,” he said.

  “Well, no. It was a foggy night, kind of lumpy out on the water. Wasn’t the best night for a drop, but I wasn’t too worried, not with my boat. Except when I got her down to the launch and put her in the water, the damn engines wouldn’t start. Either of them.”

  Joy leaned back. Tented his fingers. “Aha.”

  “Turned out someone’d fucked around with the starter while the boat was on its trailer,” Harwood said. “They would have had to sneak into my backyard to do it, but there you go. Of course, I didn’t know that at first. All I knew was, I was crippled.”

  “Protocol would dictate you immediately call Mr. Okafor.”

  “And I did. Okafor said he’d call me back on a better line, and it took a while for that to happen. But when he did, he told me the guy on the freighter claimed he’d made the drop, there was a boat out there, knew the signs and everything.”

  “The signs.”

  “Yeah, the drop. We had a procedure. I show up off the stern of the ship, flash my lights three times. The guy chucks it back off the stern, fully sealed and, you know, taped up with flotation devices and a GPS so we can find it. Typically, it didn’t take much looking.”

  “But that night someone else intercepted the package.”

  “That’s right. And it took us a while to figure out who’d done it, but once we realized Ty Winslow’s boat was out of the harbor at the same time, we put it together. Ty didn’t deny it either, told us the package was safe somewhere, we could buy it back from him.”

  Joy nodded. “And where is this man now?”

  “Dead.”

  “You killed him?”

  Harwood spat. “It’s not like we were trying to do it,” he said. “We went and saw him down at the wharf one night, me and Dale, figured we’d press the issue. Then he made a try at escaping, but we’d beat him so bad he couldn’t hardly stand up. Fell over the side of the dock and drowned somewhere underneath, and they pulled his body out the next morning.” He shook his head. “Just bad luck, I guess.”

  “Perhaps,” Joy said. “Who else knew about your delivery arrangement?”

  Harwood and Sweeney looked at each other. Dale Whitmer glowered at Joy from the doorway.

  “Well, nobody,”
Harwood said. “Just us and Ty Winslow, I guess.”

  “False.” Joy set his pistol down on the dining table, hard. The sound reverberated through the house. Joy pushed back his chair and stood, paced the room in front of the men.

  “How did the thief know the specifics of your arrangement?” he asked. Raised his hand to quell any response. “Was this Winslow character often privy to your private discussions?”

  “No,” Harwood said. “Never. We never much dealt with Ty at all.”

  “Then how did he know that night was the night of the drop?” Joy said. “How did he know the signal to alert the man on the freighter? How did he even know you were accepting deliveries? Who else knew about your delivery arrangement, gentlemen?”

  Joy’s pistol sat on the table, within arm’s reach of the owner. Harwood couldn’t take his eyes from it. Couldn’t think straight, think fast enough, with that gun staring at him. Couldn’t stop thinking about what it had just done to Bryce Whitmer.

  “Shelby.” This was Dale. “Girl who answers the phones at the detachment. She’s always around.”

  “No way,” Harwood said. “She’s still a kid, damn it, and she don’t even know Ty Winslow. She wouldn’t do something like that.”

  “Was she in your detachment on the night of the failed drop?” Joy asked.

  Harwood searched his brain. Tried to remember. Then he did, and he felt it like a punch to the gut. “Yeah, she was,” he said. “She said she had to stay late, do a little tidying up.”

  Joy picked up the pistol, tucked it away. “There,” he said. “You see? It’s amazing what we can accomplish when we simply talk a problem over.”

  He walked to the front door, looked back at the men.

  “I think we need to talk to Shelby,” he said. “Would you agree?”

  Thirty-Four

  Jess could picture where she’d kept that letter from Ty, the one that showed up in Bagram out of the blue a couple of days after word came through the OP that Pfc. Winslow was suddenly a widow. She’d thought it was a joke at first, thought Ty was playing a prank—how can he be dead if he’s writing me letters?—before her common sense caught up and she realized the obvious: he would have posted the letter long before he fell off the side of his boat.

  She’d read the letter and reread it as she sat there at Bagram, waiting on the supply flight that would get her to Germany and on her way stateside. She’d searched Ty’s messy, uneven handwriting for any spark in his words, any reason he’d written this last letter by hand instead of sending an email. Any reason to hang on to this, her husband’s last communication to her.

  She could count on two hands the number of letters, actual letters, Ty had sent her. He’d emailed plenty, of course, talked on the phone when Jess could get access. He’d sent the odd care package, candy bars and a fresh toothbrush, socks. But letters? Ty wasn’t the type. So this letter was weird for that reason alone, and all the more so because it seemed so mundane.

  She’d carried it with her all the way home. Propped it up on the mantel beside the wedding picture, read it again when she came home from Ty’s funeral, thinking maybe his words would make more sense now—now that she’d returned to her old life, to Deception Cove. Hoping they’d make her feel less alone.

  They didn’t.

  She’d kept the letter with the rest of her keepsakes—a picture of her parents, a wedding invitation, the certificate she’d received with her Combat Action Ribbon from the corps. A few other odds and ends, the detritus you accumulate and assign enough importance to to keep in a shoe box at the bottom of your closet, if not to actually display or even look at anymore.

  The letter sat on the top of that pile, in that shoe box, under her dress blues and the few civilian dresses, sweaters, and blouses she owned. Jess could picture it lying there in its powder-blue envelope. For a second she’d been ready to tell Burke they could just run and get it.

  But they couldn’t, of course. They couldn’t because Kirby Harwood and his buddies had burned her little house to the ground.

  Burke was watching her. So was Shelby Walker, Lucy forgotten now. Jess knew they were waiting for her to tell them about the letter, about what Ty had written to her. She knew they knew the letter had all the answers.

  But Jess could only shrug. “I never really paid attention when Ty was talking about fishing,” she said. “He only took me out on the water with him a couple of times, and that was…”

  She stopped. She’d caught vestiges of a memory, her and Ty, not long after they’d started going together. The sun sparkling like diamonds on the surface of calm water, Ty’s little boat chugging along, Ty at the wheel, Jess on the back deck, sitting on the fish hatch, sunning herself in a halter top. Ty playing the radio loud enough to hear over the sound of the diesel.

  “Jess?” Burke asked, breaking the spell. “Where did he take you?”

  Even Shelby looked interested.

  “This place is my secret,” he’d told her, throttling down, aiming the boat toward rocky cliffs and verdant green forest. “I take you in here, you got to promise you’ll never tell anyone it exists.”

  And she’d been in love with Ty Winslow back then, and he was tanned and grinning and sexy at the wheel of that boat, and she’d promised right away, of course she had, and he’d pulled her close and kissed her hard, and kept aiming that boat for those rocks.

  He’d stayed on that course and kept kissing her, one mischievous hand creeping down to her ass, copping a feel without being shy about it, and she’d giggled and let him, until she heard the surf crashing and pulled back and pointed out the wheelhouse. “You’re going to wreck us.”

  This only made Ty smile bigger, and he gestured out over the bow at those rocks on the shore and the forest behind, that crashing surf. “Look again.”

  She did. She looked harder, and then she saw what he saw: there was a gap in the cliff, barely twice the width of Ty’s boat. It curled out of sight quickly, but it was there, and it was where Ty was aiming.

  “It’s called Dixie,” he said, both hands on the wheel now, focused. “You can only get through on slack tide. And even then, that’s only if you’re as good as I am.”

  Jess could see the letter now. She could see what Ty had written. “He told me the fishing was great,” she told Burke and Shelby. “Better than ever before. He told me by the time I got home, we’d be whistlin’ Dixie.”

  Burke and Shelby exchanged a look. They didn’t get it.

  “It was a place he took me once,” she explained. “A secret little cove on a little island out there in the strait. He said hardly anyone knew it existed.”

  “Whistlin’ Dixie?” Burke said. “And you think that’s where he hid the package.”

  “Dixie,” she said. “Dixie Lagoon. That’s the only place I can think of. It was his secret spot; he only took me the once, years ago. I’d completely forgotten.”

  “So there you go,” Shelby said. “And you didn’t even need me to help you.”

  Jess pushed back from the table. “We should go,” she told Burke.

  “You know how to find this place?” he said.

  “No,” she replied, “but I guess I’m going to have to remember.”

  She pushed her chair in, heard Lucy scramble to her feet under Shelby’s table. Burke was already turning to reach for the door handle. Then a car’s headlights raked through the living room window. An engine cut out, doors slammed shut. Men’s voices.

  Lucy whined.

  * * *

  “Damn it,” Mason said, peering out from the window’s edge at Shelby Walker’s front yard. Beyond, on the street, a Makah County cruiser and a black SUV sat parked at the curb. Four men stood talking, gesturing up at the house, and Mason could see they were armed.

  “They’re here,” he said, turning back to where Jess and Shelby stood in the kitchen.

  “Who, Kirby and his boyfriends?” Shelby scoffed. “Let them come. What are they going to do, arrest me?”

  “They bur
ned down my house,” Jess told her. “Killed my husband and tried to kill me and Burke. I think we’re a little past the right to remain silent.”

  Mason crossed the living room quickly. “We have to go,” he said. “All of us.”

  Jess already had the back door open. Lucy slipped through, ears perked. She disappeared into darkness, Jess’s hand on her lead the only thing keeping her from finding another chunk of Kirby Harwood’s ass to lay her teeth into.

  Shelby Walker was still standing by the kitchen table, though. She hadn’t moved. “What, and leave my mama behind?” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Jess appeared in the doorway. “Why aren’t we doing this?”

  “Her mama,” Mason explained.

  “She’s bedridden; I told you,” Shelby said. She gestured to the open door. “You all go. I won’t tell Kirby what she told us, I promise.”

  Jess stared at her. “Those men will kill you if you don’t, Shelby. They’ll do whatever it takes. This isn’t some game to them.”

  Shelby turned fast, surprising them all. “I know damn well this isn’t a game,” she said, and she went into the living room and came back holding a rifle. “My dad’s old thirty-aught,” she said. “About the only thing of value he ever gave to me.”

  “And what are you going to do with that? Kill them all?”

  Shelby fixed her with that look of hers, defiance and pride. Made sure Mason saw too. “I’m defending what’s mine,” she said. “You all run if you want to, but it’ll take more than a pack of limp-dick deputies to clear me out of this place.”

  Boots on the porch. A knock at the front door. Harwood’s voice. “Shelby? You in there?”

  Shelby reached into a cupboard, came out with a box of ammunition. Set the box down and began to methodically load her rifle. Another knock at the front door. “Shelby? Open up, now.”

  “Better go if you plan on going,” Shelby said. “Seems to me that option’s about to expire.”

  Thirty-Five

  Jess and Burke had nearly made the Blazer when she heard the first shot. Lucy stopped cold, held the pose for about a second and a half. Then the second shot boomed, and the dog took off, yanking the lead out of Jess’s hand and disappearing into the dark of the woods.