Deception Cove

by Owen Laukkanen

  Burke went stiff too. Stared back between the houses toward Shelby’s back door. Then he turned toward the Blazer and hurried over to it. Jess had her focus on getting Lucy back, didn’t really see Burke until he reached into the back of the Blazer and came out with her shotgun. It was then that she decided the dog could wait.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Burke slipped the shotgun out of its case. “Can’t just leave her in there,” he said. “You coming?”

  No, damn it, Jess thought. She’d done this before, over there, doubled back into a firefight with the odds square against her, gambled her own ass to try to save someone else’s. Difference was, she’d had marines with her then. And none of them had slept with her husband.

  Burke stopped and looked at her, and in the dark all she could see of him was the streetlight glint in his eyes.

  “I’m not leaving that girl to those deputies,” he said. “This isn’t something I can walk away from.”

  Then he was gone before she could answer, and she glanced back at the Blazer, searched the shadows for Lucy, heard more shots from the Walker house. She swore and hurried to catch up to Burke.

  * * *

  Harwood didn’t know what he’d been expecting when he showed up at Shelby Walker’s house with Cole and Dale and Okafor’s scar-faced psychopath, but he hadn’t figured on the little bitch opening fire, that was for sure.

  He’d gone up to Shelby Walker’s front door, nice and easy. Knocked and called her name like there was nothing the matter, like he’d just swung by because she’d left her purse at the detachment or something. He could see the lights on in the living room window, saw movement, knew she was home.

  But Shelby hadn’t played along. No matter how hard Harwood knocked, or how loud he called her name, the girl wouldn’t cooperate. And Harwood had looked back to the street and Dale’s cruiser, and to Joy’s big Suburban, and he could feel Dale’s eyes on him, and Cole’s and Joy’s, too, and he’d known his men were waiting on him to do something. He’d known Joy wouldn’t tolerate failure.

  Damn it.

  “Last chance, Shelby,” he’d hollered through the door. “We’re coming in, girl, whether you like it or not.”

  Still no response. Shadows shifting in the house, light flickering beyond the curtains, onto the front lawn. Harwood felt movement behind him, Dale coming up to join him. “Are we doing this, Kirby?”

  “I guess we are,” Harwood replied, and Dale stepped back, drew his weapon, and Harwood reared up and put his boot to the door.

  The door gave in easy. It was cheap, the lock cheaper, the wood splintering inward without resistance. Harwood kicked again, sent the door swinging clear of the threshold, saw Shelby’s living room, and the kitchen beyond, but no sign of the girl.

  And then he heard the shot.

  Damn, but it must have whizzed right over his head. Harwood swore, threw himself off the front stoop, landed in Mama Walker’s old garden, something thorny and brittle. Dale was somewhere on the other side of the stoop, a similar predicament, and behind Harwood lights were coming on in the few neighboring houses still occupied, faces appearing in windows.

  Harwood drew his sidearm. “God damn it, Shelby, what the hell are you thinking?”

  A little bit of a pause. And then Shelby’s voice, from somewhere within, tougher than Harwood could ever recall hearing before: “I’m defending myself, Kirby. What are you doing?”

  “You can’t just open fire on a sheriff’s deputy,” Harwood hollered back. “I mean, shit, you could have killed someone.”

  Shelby laughed. “That? Just a warning shot. When I want to shoot you, you’ll know about it. Now, you want to tell me what you’re doing busting down my front door?”

  “You know why we’re here, Shelby, you bitch.” Dale, beating Harwood to the punch, master of diplomacy. “You and that piece of shit Winslow stole something from us.”

  “Stole what, exactly?” Shelby called back. “Say it nice and loud, Dale, so my mama and my neighbors can hear you.”

  Dale didn’t answer. Harwood could see him on the other side of the stoop, his face drawn tight and contorted, smoke practically billowing from his ears. Harwood figured Shelby put a little too much faith in her neighbors; nobody in this part of Deception gave a damn about anything besides stretching the welfare check to the end of the month, and maybe finding a way to keep the rain from soaking through the ceiling. They sure weren’t about to stick their noses into official police business.

  But Harwood was still hoping he could talk this through. “Listen, Shelby,” he called. “No hard feelings, okay? Let’s all take a step back and cool down for a minute.”

  He waited. No answer.

  “We just want back what we came for,” he continued. “You point us to it, and we’ll be on our way. Heck, I’ll even pay for your door.”

  Another laugh. It wasn’t the kind of laugh that instilled confidence. “Well hey, that’s generous of you, Kirby. I wish I could help. But that package you want, that was Ty’s department. And he never even showed it to me.”

  “You’re lying.” Dale again. Harwood looked over, motioned with his hand, Calm the fuck down.

  “Am I lying, Dale?” Shelby said. “You think if I had any inkling where that package wound up I’d still be answering the goddamn phones for you all at the detachment? You think I’d still keep my mama here in this shit-hole town?” A beat. “You think, Dale, that if I had that package, I might not have tried to shake you down for money at some point? You think maybe that’s how it would have gone down?”

  “You must know something,” Harwood said. “Shelby, we just want to talk. How about you let us in, and we talk this over. Patch this all up, instead of shooting each other?”

  There was no answer, and Harwood took that as a positive sign. He pushed himself to his feet, brushed the mud and the brambles from his clothes, made to climb back onto the stoop and ease his way through the front door.

  The second crack from Shelby’s rifle chased that thought from his mind.

  “Damn it!” He was down in the muck again, thorns scratching bare skin, piercing through his shirt, his sidearm falling away and landing somewhere in the mud. “Look here, Shelby—”

  Dale cut him off, came crashing in beside him. Harwood hadn’t even noticed he’d moved, but his deputy had been busy. He held a jerry can and a handful of matches, left over from their extracurricular mission to the Winslow residence.

  “We gotta smoke her out, Kirby,” Dale said, and in his eyes there was already fire. “Get our hands on her, get her somewhere quiet. She’ll talk, boss, I can promise you that.”

  Harwood closed his eyes. Felt, for an instant, as if he stood on the top of a high bridge, poised to take the step that would put him over the side, send him careening out of control to the bottom.

  But he’d taken that step a long time ago, he knew. He was already falling, and about the only thing he could control was how hard he was going to land.

  Dale was waiting, breathing heavy, his eyes on Harwood. “You wait for my word,” Harwood told him.

  He stood as high as he dared. Looked back toward the street and the cruiser, to Cole. Looked beyond to the neighboring houses, the faces watching through the windows.

  “Cole,” he yelled back. “You make sure those neighbors keep their heads down, you hear? Make sure they know this is official police business.”

  Sweeney hesitated. “Yeah, Kirby,” he said finally. “All right, but…”

  He trailed off.

  “But what, damn it?”

  Sweeney didn’t answer. Just shrugged and pointed over to Joy’s black Suburban, still parked where Joy had left it.

  Joy was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  Joy had circled around to the rear of Shelby Walker’s house.

  He’d seen enough of the Keystone Kops show to know the deputies were miles out of their league. This wasn’t uncommon in Joy’s line of work, young men who wanted to pla
y gangster, men with a strong command of hip-hop lyrics and action movie tropes, an inflated sense of ability.

  Joy had worked with real men, before he’d come to America. He’d fought with killers over oil in his homeland, killers who would slaughter entire families before breakfast simply to prove a point. He bore his scars from this work proudly, badges of honor. He’d brought what he’d learned to America, where men like Kirby Harwood liked to pretend they were hard, and sometimes even believed it, right up until the moment when Joy showed them just how wrong they were.

  These men were not hard.

  They’d made mistakes, as people like Kirby Harwood always made mistakes, and they wouldn’t last long, not once Joy had solved this problem. These men had become a gross liability.

  But for now they were useful.

  Joy circled around to the rear of the house. Found the back door and paused in the shadows, drew his pistol. Then he crept up the back steps and tried the door handle, slow. The handle turned easily. Joy pushed it open and walked into the house.

  * * *

  Shelby gripped her dad’s rifle. Behind her, in the bed, her mama lay semiconscious, her eyes half-lidded and drowsy, her breathing heavy. Shelby could never figure out how much the woman gleaned about what went on around her these days. She wasn’t sure if she even knew she was still alive at all.

  She breathed, anyway. She sipped juice from a sippy cup, and she swallowed the warm soup that Shelby spooned into her mouth. She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t exactly move, but her eyes followed Shelby around the room sometimes, and when Shelby squeezed on her hand, her mama sometimes squeezed back.

  A door swung open, somewhere out in the main part of the house. Shelby sensed movement.

  “I’ll be right back,” she told her mama. Then she stole out of the bedroom and crept down the dark hall toward the living room. She could see darkness out the wreckage of the front door, the Makah County cruiser parked on the street beyond. This was not good.

  There were two ways out of the house. Harwood and his boyfriends had the front door covered. That left the kitchen door, and that wasn’t going to work either. Because as Shelby got to the end of the hall, she looked through the living room into the kitchen and saw the man there, the black man with the white scar on his face, the man she’d never seen before in her life. The man had a gun, and Shelby knew when she saw him she was in deeper shit than she’d realized.

  This guy wasn’t Kirby Harwood, or Dale Dumb-Ass Whitmer. This guy was on another level. And Shelby knew just from looking at him that she couldn’t outwit him so easy as she could the Deception Cove deputies. He wasn’t going to be scared off by a couple of potshots and a few angry words.

  She leveled her rifle. Took aim at the man. He hadn’t seen her yet. A couple of steps farther and he’d be clear in her line of sight. She tensed her finger on the trigger, waited, prepared to fire.

  Never got the chance.

  Before she could shoot the man, someone else shot first. Someone from the front door, Kirby or Dale, the shot catching her in the stomach and sending her staggering back. Now the man saw her, and he was firing too, backing her down the hall and out of firing position, backing her toward her mama’s bedroom again, Shelby swearing and stumbling and bleeding all over.

  And when she got to the bedroom, Shelby knew she was done.

  One of the dimwits—whoever wasn’t shooting at her—had come around the side of the house. Put a hole in her mama’s bedroom window, poured gas through. There was a fire starting to burn beneath the windowsill; as Shelby backed into the room, it had already caught on the curtains and was climbing its way up the wall. There was no killing this fire. No getting out through the window. Even if she could, there was nowhere to go.

  That was it, then. She hadn’t run from the bastards. She hadn’t run from her mama, turned tail on her home. She’d stood her ground, and shit, that was something to be proud of. One fucking woman against four or five men.

  The fire was getting hotter, smoke starting to billow. Shelby stuck her rifle out the bedroom door, fired a couple of shots down the hall to keep the men honest. Then she closed the door, firm. Turned back to the bed.

  “We put a hurt on them, Mama,” she said. “They won’t say we didn’t go fighting.”

  Thirty-Six

  The shots rang out, two of them. Across the backyard, Shelby Walker’s small house went still. There were no other gunshots.

  Then the kitchen door opened, and the scar-faced man stepped outside, the stranger whom neither Mason nor Jess had ever seen before. He walked down the steps and stood on the grass, slipping a sidearm into a holster on his belt and turning back to study the house with a preternatural calm.

  Crouched in the trees that lined the boundary of Shelby Walker’s property, Mason spoke to Jess without looking at her.

  “So that’s it, then,” he said, eyeing the unfamiliar man, little more than a silhouette against the house’s white siding.

  Jess didn’t answer right away. She didn’t move, either, and for a moment Mason imagined she’d slipped away somewhere. But then she sighed.

  “We weren’t going to save her, Burke,” she said. “That girl wasn’t leaving without her mother.”

  “We could have—”

  “We didn’t,” she said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Mason started to reply. Started to argue. Stopped when he saw the look in her eyes. It was anger, and it was hurt, and it mirrored how he felt exactly. She might not have liked Shelby Walker, he realized, but that didn’t mean she didn’t hate that the girl had to die.

  Mason raised the shotgun. Took aim at the man across the backyard, fifty feet away. At this range, he hoped, he could blow the man’s head off. At the very least he could be sure he’d do damage.

  But Jess reached out, put her hand on the barrel, and pushed it down toward the dirt. “Not yet,” she told him. “But trust me, Burke: soon.”

  * * *

  The fire department was on scene by the time Joy emerged from behind the Walker house. Harwood stood at the street by Dale Whitmer’s county cruiser, watching the volunteers roll up in their pumper truck, a line of pickups with Deception Cove Fire plates behind. The pumper came to a stop beside Whitmer’s cruiser, and four firemen jumped out. Three of them circled to the back of the truck, began unrolling hoses. The fourth was Brad Anderson, the Deception Cove FD’s lead volunteer. He came directly to Harwood.

  “Second fire today, Kirby,” Anderson said. “Is this town going to hell, or what am I missing?”

  “This one’s no accident,” Harwood told him. “We come out on a call, routine business, and that girl opened up on us. In the middle of the firefight, we started to smell the smoke.”

  Anderson looked up sharply at the house. “We got people alive in that house?”

  “No,” Joy said. Harwood hadn’t even seen him walk up, but here he was, acting like he belonged. “The girl and her mother, they did not survive.”

  Anderson stared at him. “And who the hell are you?”

  “Drug enforcement.” Joy had a smile on his face that might have seemed charming if you didn’t know what the bastard was capable of. “We had reason to believe Ms. Walker was involved in a trafficking operation. Unfortunately, she shot herself and her mother before we could bring her in for questioning.”

  Anderson opened his mouth. No words came out. He looked from Joy to Harwood to the house, dumbstruck. The fire had appeared in the windows, smoke beginning to snake out from the busted front door.

  “I don’t have time for this shit right now,” Anderson told Harwood. “I’ve got to save that house, if I can.”

  Then he was off, walking back toward the pumper truck, calling out orders.

  Harwood watched him walk away. Then he turned back to Joy. “You sure that was wise? That DEA stuff?”

  Joy’s smile was gone. “No less wise than setting the fire, Deputy. We could have used that information. If you’d allowed me, I could have retri
eved her alive. Now—”

  “You said she’s dead,” Harwood said, confused. “I heard the shots. You—”

  “She was dead when I found her, Mr. Harwood, one bullet to the head.” Joy looked at Harwood. “Self-inflicted.”

  Harwood swore. “Jesus.” He swayed on his feet, felt back to the truck behind him, leaned against it for support.

  What in the fuck are we doing here?

  Cole and Dale appeared, mud on their faces, guilt in their eyes. Joy ignored them. Harwood did too.

  “So, we lost Shelby,” he said weakly. “What happens now?”

  “The widow and her companion were here before we were,” Joy informed him. “Whatever information the woman had to share, we can assume that Ms. Winslow obtained it.”

  “How?” Cole. “I mean, how do you know?”

  Joy barely glanced at him.

  “Three glasses of whiskey on the kitchen table, two untouched, with ice cubes,” he said. “A dog’s muddy paw prints on the kitchen floor. They were here, gentlemen, not long ago. If you’d acted with more tact, we could have captured all three.”

  Cole and Dale looked at each other. Harwood stared up at the night sky. “Shit.”

  “I assume your professional duties will require you to remain here until this fire burns down,” Joy continued. “In the meantime, I’ll do what I can to see that this trail doesn’t get any colder. Pray, don’t keep me waiting too long.”

  With that, he was gone, walking to his big black truck. Harwood watched him climb inside, watched the headlights come on, watched Joy slowly navigate the mess of volunteer firemen and neighborhood looky-loos, and disappear down the block.

  Beside him, Sweeney and Whitmer did the same.

  “So what on earth happened?” Whitmer said when Joy’s truck was gone. “I was betting for sure we could smoke the girl out.”