You’re a killer already, he thought, in the eyes of the law. But he knew there was a difference, and he wished he wouldn’t ever have to find out what it was.
The man murdered Shelby Walker. He aims to kill you. But a shotgun would attract attention, wake people up and bring Kirby and his boys running. The shotgun would hamper Jess’s ability to get to Dixie.
Mason tugged Lucy deeper behind the shed until they’d reached the far wall. Turned the corner and strained to hear if the driver had followed, if he’d kept running into the trees and down into the ditch.
Beside Mason, Lucy squirmed, and Mason said a silent prayer that the dog would keep from whining. She did.
Around the far side of the shed, branches rustled, and then Mason heard rocks give out and slide and splash as the driver found the ditch and the creek at the bottom. And he knew this was their chance.
He nudged Lucy back toward the twin trailers and the road beyond, and together they ran fast across the grass and between the trailers to where the Suburban sat waiting in the middle of the street. The engine was running, lights on. Mason dragged Lucy to the driver’s side and hustled her into the cabin. Climbed in after her and shifted into drive and peeled away with the dog toward the harbor.
Forty-One
Mason followed the sound of a little marine diesel as he navigated the government pier and the spindly wharves on the water beneath. He’d left the Suburban parked at the foot of the pier, but there was no way to avoid it; Jess would be itching to leave, with or without him and Lucy, and he could only hope he’d bought enough time for a clean getaway, the driver still mucking about five or six blocks behind.
The wharf was three fingers, lit with lemon-yellow sodium lights. A handful of boats, and none of them looking seaworthy but one, tied up halfway down the last finger. Barely forty feet long, a rounded-off stern with paint peeling from the hull, a little cockpit where you’d stand to work the trolling lines. Ahead of the cockpit was a large box with a hatch on top that Mason surmised must access the fishhold, and beyond that was the wheelhouse, a squat, salt-stained structure that didn’t look much bigger than Mason’s living quarters in the state penitentiary. The wheelhouse windows were salt streaked; there was a tag taped to one, an outdated halibut license, and on the bow faded block letters read BETTER DAYS, and if that wasn’t a misnomer, Mason figured he didn’t know the meaning of the word.
But the engine was chugging, the stack belching black smoke. This was Ty’s boat, and Jess was waiting. She stepped out from the wheelhouse as Mason and Lucy hurried down the dock. Took in Mason, and then Lucy, and he thought he could see she was glad they’d both made it.
But there wasn’t any time for happy reunions. Jess took the shotgun from Mason and laid it on the fishhold. Then she reached over and helped him lift Lucy aboard, the dog grunting and struggling as though the whole operation were a personal affront to her dignity.
Then Jess climbed over the boat’s gunwale and onto the dock. She bent down to free the tie-up line amidships and gestured toward the bow.
“Cut her loose and then push the bow out,” she told him. “Don’t get left behind. I’m not coming back for you.”
Mason did as instructed. Loosened the bow line as Jess freed the stern. He chucked the rope over the troller’s raised bulwarks, then leaned on the boat and pushed, swinging the bow out from its berth as Jess climbed aboard and went into the wheelhouse.
He kept pushing until he heard her knock on the window, and then he hurried aft to where the stern still nudged against the dock. Stepped aboard and flashed Jess a thumbs-up through the wheelhouse doorway, heard the engine throttle up in response, the propeller churning wash as the boat slipped away.
“Made it,” he said when he entered the wheelhouse. It was warm inside, smelled of engine oil and kerosene and old clothes. On one side of the little room was a sink and a stove, a couple of cupboards, and on the other side was a table and a little three-sided settee. Up ahead was the captain’s chair, a panel of ancient electronics, the wheel and the throttle and the gear selector. There was a hole in the floor in a forward corner of the wheelhouse, same side as the stove, stairs leading downward.
Jess stood at the wheel, navigating the boat out from between the wharf fingers, aiming it across the harbor to the end of the rocky breakwater, where red and green buoys marked a channel to open water.
“I was beginning to think you all weren’t coming,” she said.
Mason found Lucy curled up in a corner of the settee, snoring already, her brush with danger tonight apparently forgotten. He scratched her behind the ears and sat down beside her.
“Wouldn’t have missed it,” he told Jess. “Just figured the dog needed a walk before we cooped her up on this boat.”
* * *
On the government wharf, Joy stood in the shadows and watched as the lights of the little fishing boat rounded the breakwater. The night was nearly pitch dark, but he could tell nevertheless when the boat had cleared the harbor; the lights on the mast began to rock with the swell as the boat motored out of sheltered waters and into the open strait. It plowed the waves and turned westward, carrying Jess Winslow and her companion with it.
The man and the dog had abandoned the Suburban by the time Joy reached the pier. But that was no matter. He’d hurried to the truck and heard the sound of a diesel engine in the boat basin below, and he’d known what the widow and the man planned to do.
He might have tried to intercept them, but he didn’t. He’d waited, hidden on the margins, away from the dim yellow sodium lights, and stared down at the little harbor’s three fingers, the derelict hulks moored therein.
For a few minutes he didn’t see anything. And then one of the hulks had moved, its propeller churning water, and Joy had watched as the little boat slipped away from the dock and out toward the breakwater.
The widow and her friend were gone now, and Joy wondered if he would regret not acting more assertively. He doubted it. Jess Winslow and her companion were on board a boat, a boat Joy could still see, those lights rocking in the black distance as the vessel bucked the waves.
The boat was headed west. That was all Joy needed to know.
Forty-Two
Jess would never have told Burke, but she was glad that he’d come. And it wasn’t just that he’d somehow brought Lucy back, or that she suspected she was going to need someone else to shoot back at Kirby Harwood when the time came. It was something else, too, something deeper than all of that.
And that scared her.
Something had changed between them, though Jess wasn’t ready to acknowledge what it was. There was a familiarity now, an unspoken intimacy, and whether it was the events of the day or simply the relief from watching Burke bring Lucy down the dock just then, Jess felt like they’d established something. No longer did she feel like she was fighting alone, like Burke was some guy who happened to share her enemies. If Burke had come this far, stuck around when he could have run, boarded this boat with her, he was all in, just as she was, and even if he’d been that way for a while, now was the first time she could actually feel it. She trusted him.
You trusted Afia. Afia trusted you.
She could feel real life disappearing again. The memories coming back, taking her into the valley again, hunkered in the OP under RPG fire, or out on some routine patrol—tired, hungry, unwashed, on edge—and this time she knew how it ended, all of it.
She was exhausted; that was part of it. She’d gone longer with less sleep in more trying circumstances, sure, plenty of times overseas. But apparently she’d gone soft since she’d come stateside; a couple of days of being hunted and she was pretty well spent. Now she was crashing. The adrenaline was gone, and there was nothing to do. The boat motored forward, into the swell, and she could do nothing but stand at the wheel and drink coffee and wait for the morning to come.
But it wasn’t just fatigue. It was déjà vu. It was that feeling of kinship, partnership, of liking somebody and putting your life
in his power, and him putting his life in yours. It was the fear that she would mess this up again, like she’d messed up with Afia and with Ty, and almost with Lucy. That because of her, Burke would get hurt.
He’s a grown man. He chose to be here. If he gets hurt, it’s his own fault.
Maybe. But wasn’t he also just a few days out of prison? Wasn’t he, in many ways, still learning how the world worked after fifteen years inside? She couldn’t shake the sense that she’d dragged him into this mess, that she was responsible for him now, and that, inevitably, she would fail in that responsibility.
She felt guilty that she was glad he was here.
So Jess tried not to be happy that Burke stayed awake with her, standing by the controls with his coffee in his hand, staring out at the night ahead, his legs braced against the swell rolling up the strait from the open ocean. She tried not to fixate on Burke’s proximity to her in the small cabin, the scent of soap and his sweat, the bulge of his muscles through his shirt. She tried to think about what happened next, what needed to be done—gaining access to Dixie, then finding Ty’s stash, then what? Returning it to Kirby? Calling the Feds?
She would think about that. She would think it through, instead of thinking about Afghanistan, watching Afia die. About how it could all happen again.
Beside her, Burke shifted. “You want to talk about it?” he asked her.
He must have caught the expression on her face, because he was frowning, his eyes soft, like he was trying to look gentle. And for a moment she considered being honest with him, unloading everything on him, just to see how he took it.
I’m going to hurt you, Burke. Worse than you’ve ever been hurt in your life.
But then she thought better of it.
She shook her head. Sipped her coffee. “No,” she told him. “I don’t.”
The sun rose behind them as they continued west, just a dim glow at first behind the clouds on the far eastern horizon, and then, suddenly, a burst of dazzling light, casting warmth over the water and turning the troller’s foamy wash golden. In her peripheral vision Jess watched as Burke walked to the Dutch door at the rear of the wheelhouse, opened the top half, and peered out across the stern, watching the sun climb over the clouds and the faint hint of land that lay many miles behind them.
“Might actually be a pretty good day,” he told Jess as he came back to the controls, rubbing his hands together for warmth. “Still cold as heck, though.”
“It’s always cold on the open water,” she replied. “Even in the middle of summer, it’s cold. But we’ll be turning back inland soon enough.”
She felt deadened by lack of sleep, clumsy and numb. Far from rejuvenating her, the sun’s return only served to make her more tired, as if inviting her to join Lucy on the settee, curl up and cuddle, take a nap for a while and let her worries slip away.
The dog certainly didn’t seem bothered. She’d been asleep since they rounded the breakwater, curled up in a pretzel in the far corner of the wheelhouse. Jess didn’t think Lucy had ever been on a boat before, but the dog didn’t seem to care; it was warm in the wheelhouse, and there was somewhere cozy to sleep, and sleeping was pretty well how Lucy solved all of her problems.
Close your eyes and pretend it’s all okay. Pretend you’re somewhere else, somewhere far away. Pretend there’s no one chasing you, and no one wants you dead.
Pretend you have no reason to be scared.
They’d passed the lights of Neah Bay in the night, off to port, and as the day found them, Jess could see Tatoosh Island up ahead, the northwestern end of contiguous America. There was a Coast Guard light there, to guide the big cargo ships out of the open seas and into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, point them down toward Seattle and Tacoma, and Vancouver, Canada.
Ty’s freighter had come in through here. Whoever’d made the drop had hailed Kirby as the ship passed that light on Tatoosh, and Shelby Walker had intercepted the message and passed it along to Ty, who’d disabled Kirby’s boat and set out in his stead, sealing his fate and Shelby Walker’s, too.
Jess wasn’t headed as far as Tatoosh. There was a bay on the northeastern tip of the cape, just before the mainland petered off into water. A place called Mushroom Rock. And just off that bay, about a mile from the rock, the island called Dixie sat lonely and uninhabited, the smallest of specks on anyone’s map.
It was a mile in circumference, maybe. Rock and a few trees, a little beach on the western side facing open water. Ty had brought her to the beach once they’d anchored in the cove, rowed them to shore in the troller’s rubber dinghy. He’d brought a bottle of wine and a basket of sandwiches; she could tell he was trying to be romantic, and it was romantic, even with the wind blowing and the sand getting everywhere, gritty and painful, as they lay on the picnic blanket and tried to make out.
She’d thought it was paradise, even with the sand and the wind. She hadn’t been able to believe her good luck.
The island was shaped like a letter C, the rocky shore curling around Dixie Lagoon like a protective embrace.
“You could hide out here through the worst weather imaginable,” Ty had bragged once they’d set the anchor in the calm waters inside. “Hide out from everything, for as long as you wanted.”
She hadn’t been able to imagine ever wanting to hide out, needing to hide out, not back then. She was in love; she was happy; she was going to be a marine—a combat marine, not some pretender behind the lines. She’d imagined she and Ty would come back to Dixie, not to hide out from the world but to celebrate. She had imagined they would grow older and it would always be their spot.
She had never come back, not after that first day. And as she’d grown older, the island and those memories had disappeared from her mind.
They were approaching the bay, and Jess could see Dixie Island now, distinguished from the deep-green, featureless shore behind. It was a quarter to eight in the morning, the sun getting higher in the sky, and by the time she maneuvered the boat to the head of the pass, she wouldn’t have much grace before slack water.
“You awake?” she asked Burke, who was leaning on the edge of the captain’s chair where it met the front of the settee. Burke looked alert; he looked ready. Clearly, the sun was having a different impact on him.
“I’m awake,” he said, straightening. “What’s the plan?”
She pointed forward through the windows. Dixie lay dead ahead, though she couldn’t see the pass yet, just a wall of rock and trees.
“We’re going in there,” she said, “and we don’t have time to mess around. I need you up on the bow watching where we’re going. If you see any rocks, you holler, and loud, understand?”
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“We only get one shot at this. There’s no road over there on the mainland, not close, and the current’s too strong to swim or paddle. We wreck, we’re stuck out here until someone comes out and finds us, and with our luck, it’ll probably be Kirby.”
“So we won’t wreck,” he said, and squared his shoulders, started back toward the door. “C’mon, Lucy,” he said, and as he whistled, the dog sat up, stretched and yawned, and followed him out to the deck.
Jess watched them circle up the side of the wheelhouse to the bow, where they stood among the anchor winch and the tie-up lines, the stay wires leading up to the mast. Lucy peered over the bow, peered down to the water, her ears perked and curious. Burke gripped a stay wire like an old-time pirate, one foot on the anchor winch, his eyes searching the shore.
It would have been a charming picture under any other circumstance.
As it was, Jess didn’t have time to be charmed. They motored toward Dixie, the pass slowly coming into view, just a break in the rocks, impossibly narrow, invisible unless you knew what you were looking for.
It was twenty after eight now. No time to get scared. Jess dug out Hank Moss’s chart and the tide table, spread them out before her. Knocked on the front window and signaled to Burke as she idled the troller closer to the w
all of rocks and white water.
Time to go.
Forty-Three
Mason looked out over the water at the tiny gap in the rocks and wondered how on earth Jess thought she was going to fit the troller through. The cliffs closed in around them, waves breaking white over jagged black, the pass barely twice as wide as the little boat and studded with more rock—cruel, unflinching obstacles—on both sides. Some peeked out over the high-tide waterline. The rest were visible only by the way the flood tide dappled and whirled as it passed overtop of them, invisible undersea mines just waiting to cripple the boat.
Jess kept the troller inching forward, the diesel engine at a low grumble, until the boat rested barely two lengths from the rocky threshold. She poked her head out the starboard window, called up to Mason.
“How’s the tide running?” she asked.
He peered over the bow. Beside him, Lucy did too. There was water flowing into the pass, but not much of it. The tide licked at the rocks and at the lowest of the trees that clung to the shore.
“Looks slow,” he reported back, though he really had no frame of reference. “Looks manageable.”
Jess looked dubious, like she’d just remembered he was a Michigan guy, likely hadn’t seen a high tide in his life. But she had no choice but to take his word for it; the dog wasn’t hazarding an opinion.
“I’m going to take it slow,” she said. “You keep your eyes up ahead, let me know if I’m going to run us up onto the rocks.”
He nodded. “Roger.”
“You see me heading into trouble, you holler at me, Burke.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
She peered out at the pass another moment or two, at the waves on the rocks to both sides of the little gap. Then he watched her retreat back into the wheelhouse, watched her through the front window as she gripped the wheel with her left hand, pushed up on the throttle with the other.
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