Deception Cove

by Owen Laukkanen

  The shipwreck was nothing but keel and sun-bleached wood at the beach end, but farther inland it grew more substantial, mossy and rotten, as the forest gradually reclaimed what had once been trees. Mason watched Jess push through the ferns and deadfall, lean into the loamy dark between the ribs and the trees surrounding. He waited, poking around in the tall grass on the other side of the wreck, and then Jess came back out into the sunlight and looked across at him and shrugged.

  “Guess I was right,” she said.

  The package was stashed underneath what had once been the bow of the ship, wedged into place such that Jess had to crawl into the underbrush to retrieve it. She dragged it out, and Mason leaned down and helped her, and together they carried it out to the grass.

  It was the size of a carry-on suitcase. Didn’t weigh a great deal—twenty, twenty-five pounds—and it was wrapped in plastic so thick it was impossible to see what was inside. Mason figured you didn’t need to be a genius to get that it was drugs, and a fair decent haul of them.

  They set the package down on the rough shingle at the edge of the high tide line. Jess produced a knife and cut into the plastic wrapping, a long slice down the top of it, and then they peeled back the plastic like they were doing an autopsy, peered in and studied what they found.

  Ten individual bricks, more plastic wrap, light tan substance underneath. From the color Mason surmised it was heroin, Southeast Asian or South American white, quality product compared with the Mexican black tar or brown powder. Ten bricks, each one probably a kilogram, each package stamped with a Playboy Bunny logo inside a black poppy. Nothing else.

  Jess stared at the logos. “That son of a bitch,” she said slowly. “That no-good, piece-of-shit son of a bitch.”

  Mason looked at her, waited until she met his eyes.

  “This stuff is from Afghanistan,” she explained. “Kandahar. I recognize the trademark from the briefings they gave us.” She gave him a beat to figure it out. “This shit,” she said, “is fucking propping up those same Taliban motherfuckers who’re fucking killing us over there. And that piece of shit Harwood is helping them do it.”

  Her voice was low and even, her eyes dark. Mason had heard some scary things, seen scary people in the last fifteen years, but he reckoned he’d never seen anyone as dangerous as Jess looked and sounded right now.

  “They grow this shit in the south,” she told Mason. “They ship it through Pakistan, and they put it on boats, and they send it around the world and buy guns with the profits. RPGs. Body armor. Trucks. Everything they need to make my life miserable. And meanwhile, Kirby’s at home with his monster truck and his big old boat, cashing in on this very same shit.”

  Mason didn’t say anything. There wasn’t much to say; he didn’t like Harwood, but he knew Jess had to be feeling another level of hate. This made it personal, even beyond the death of her husband. From what she’d said about Ty, Mason figured Jess had lost people she cared a heck of a lot more about overseas.

  He studied the package, and the smaller packs within. Tried to remember the jailhouse math. A brick of Southeast Asian white was worth about eighty dollars a gram, at least how he’d heard it. That clocked this package in at about eight hundred grand wholesale, far more on the street. But Kirby Harwood wasn’t selling on the street, and neither was Ty Winslow. The whole rotten mess had been the death of three people and counting, all for less than a million bucks.

  Jess was off in her world, staring out at the ocean, and Mason was going to try to do something, say something to comfort her. He didn’t have the first idea how, but he was going to try something anyway. And then they’d pack up the heroin and bring it back around the shore and find Lucy, bundle everything back up into the skiff and head back to the Better Days, and maybe he’d find something to cook on the gas stove for dinner and they could decide what to do next.

  He didn’t get the chance to do any of that, though, because before he could speak a word to Jess, she stiffened and looked up. She looked back into the trees toward the lagoon and the anchorage, and after a second Mason heard it too.

  The sound of an engine, a low, rumbling throb. At first Mason thought it was a boat, thought Harwood and his boys had somehow followed them up the pass. But it wasn’t the lazy chug-chug-chug of a diesel or the lawn mower whine of an outboard motor. This was something else, something more advanced, something ominous and deadly.

  This, Mason realized, was a helicopter coming near them, and he knew right away it was coming to the island. And at the same time, he knew those three bodies he’d been thinking about weren’t the only folks who were going to have to die for this shipment of heroin.

  * * *

  The helicopter came in low over the water toward Dixie Island, and Kirby Harwood looked out through the front windows and shook his head.

  “No way,” he told Joy over the sound of the rotors. “There’s no anchorage there but up inside the lagoon, and there aren’t but three or four men in Deception Cove who could get a troller up there.”

  Joy met his stare with eyes as black as polished stones. “Was Ty Winslow one of those men?”

  Harwood frowned. “Well, sure,” he said. “But his wife isn’t.”

  It was good enough for Joy. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder, gestured straight ahead. “We’ll survey the island.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Harwood said, but the conversation was over. He sat back and stared out the window toward the mainland, wishing he were anywhere but here.

  They’d cruised up the coast from Deception Cove, taking it slow, checking every cove and inlet all the way to Neah Bay, searching for any sign of Ty Winslow’s old boat. But it didn’t make sense for Jess to keep the boat so close; the state highway to Neah Bay ran right alongside the beach. She’d have been better served driving if she were staying close to shore.

  From Harwood’s perspective, there were two places the widow could have run to. First was Canada, just across the strait, where on the southwestern coast of Vancouver Island there were no roads and practically no people. If Ty hadn’t gone to Canada, Harwood expected he would have rounded Cape Flattery and gone down the west side of the peninsula, the open-ocean side, about thirty miles of wilderness and wildlife preserve, until you hit La Push and the Quillayute River. There were places to hide along that stretch of coast, Flattery Rocks and the islands around Point of Arches, and if Ty Winslow had been smart, that’s where he’d have gone.

  But there was something lacking in both of those options. Ty Winslow had aimed for a fast turnaround, hold the package for ransom and get paid off quickly, and a run across the border or around the cape would have stood to lengthen the process considerably. He’d have made things a lot easier if he’d stashed the package on Dixie, but Jess Winslow couldn’t think she could make it up that pass, could she?

  Could she?

  The helicopter flew closer, and Harwood saw the pass open up, a thin, jagged scar through the black rock and trees. The tide was going out now, rushing through that narrow opening and over semisubmerged rocks, and from the way it churned and roiled, Harwood decided only a maniac would attempt to head through.

  He turned to Cole Sweeney. “When’s high tide these days?”

  Sweeney, an avid fisherman, looked up at the roof of the helicopter and thought for a second. “About oh eight hundred, eight thirty,” he said. “Why, boss?”

  Because the timing works out, Harwood thought, if she was trying to make a move. But if she did, we’d see wreckage somewhere.

  But then the helicopter climbed a little bit to get over a rise in the terrain on Dixie Island below, and when it crested, Harwood saw the pilot point out through the forward window and descend again. He crowded beside Joy to look out where the man pointed, and there, smack-dab and sitting pretty in the middle of Dixie Lagoon, Ty Winslow’s old troller sat bobbing at anchor, everything peaceful, like it wasn’t no thing whatsoever to be in there at all.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Harwood said, more to
himself than to anyone else. “Jess Winslow, you’re just a constant surprise, aren’t you?”

  Forty-Nine

  “Put us down,” Joy instructed.

  The pilot shook his head. “Where?” he said, gesturing outside the helicopter. “There’s not a flat piece of ground on this whole goddamn island.”

  “On the boat, then.”

  “Can’t do that, either,” the pilot replied. “See that mast sticking up in the air, all those stay wires? We get too close to that crap, we’re crashing. Unless you want to jump, you’re not getting down there.”

  Joy wished he could strangle the pilot, but the man was right. The island, small though it was, was covered in trees, and what wasn’t trees was steep, jagged rock. There was no place for a helicopter to land.

  He studied the little fishing boat from the window. There was nothing moving aboard, no sign that the widow or her companion had noticed the helicopter. But they must have. The woman was a former marine. And she wasn’t going to simply surrender just because her adversary was airborne.

  Then the chief deputy, Harwood, touched his arm. Pointed out his own window at the western edge of the lagoon. “Look.”

  Joy looked. Saw what Harwood saw, an inflatable dinghy pulled up to the high tide line, half hidden against the shore.

  “They’re on the island somewhere,” he told the pilot. “Let’s have a look.”

  * * *

  Lucy.

  Jess’s first thought was the dog, and she could tell by Burke’s expression that he was thinking the same. Together they moved the package into the woods by the shipwreck and hurried back along the shore toward the table rocks, where they’d left Lucy.

  Somewhere through the trees, the helicopter’s engine roared like machine gun fire, and Jess knew it was Harwood, and she knew he’d seen the troller, and this was probably it. She clambered along the rocks after Burke, her rifle swinging against her back, her mind racing. The Taliban didn’t use helicopters. She’d never had to deal with this kind of assault.

  They rounded the shore to where the table rocks lay in the sun, and Lucy wasn’t there, and Jess panicked.

  “Burke,” she called out, and he looked back at her. “Where is she?”

  Burke pointed ahead, stepped aside so she could see, and she looked down across the sweep of the little beach and saw Lucy running best she could on the rocky, uneven ground, her tail between her legs and her ears flattened back. Shit.

  There was no sense in calling her. The chopper was too loud, and the dog wasn’t going to listen in that state. Jess and Burke hurried after her, down across more jagged rocks to the beach, and across the shingle to the other side. Lucy was trotting in circles now, scared, unsure where to go, and through the trees the chopper’s engine revved up, suddenly amplified.

  They were coming.

  Jess hauled ass to the dog, who cowered now against a rock face, all but given up. Jess reached her and pulled her away and into the forest just as the helicopter roared overhead, big and black and flying low, banking hard to trace the shoreline, the sliding side door open and faces peering out.

  Jess held Lucy tight to her, the dog shaking hard, resting her chin on Jess’s shoulder, the sheer weight of her blocky little head as surprising as usual. Jess held the dog close as the chopper disappeared down the shore. Knew it was a temporary reprieve at best.

  Beside her, the ferns rustled, and Burke appeared, shotgun in hand. “I don’t think they saw us,” he said.

  She replied, “Not yet.”

  * * *

  “They’re down there somewhere,” Harwood told Joy after the helicopter had surveyed the perimeter of the island. “We know that for sure.”

  “Indeed.” Joy’s expression was grim. “And we can assume the package is there with them.”

  “Definitely. We just can’t get down there.”

  Joy looked at him with those black eyes again, and Harwood looked away involuntarily. The sooner he didn’t have to deal with the Nigerian, the happier he’d be. Hell, he’d be perfectly content never to do business with Okafor again. There had to be easier ways to make money.

  “Call Mr. Whitmer,” Joy instructed. “Tell him to meet us here with your boat. We’ll attack from the sea, if we can’t do it by air.”

  The pilot had overheard. “I don’t have the fuel to hang around while your buddy sails his boat from Deception.”

  “He can drive to Neah Bay,” Harwood said. “Launch there.”

  “Still going to be tight. You want to risk it, that’s fine, but I reckon this helicopter’s worth a hell of a lot more than whatever you’re chasing down there.”

  Joy didn’t react visibly, but Harwood could feel the man’s anger burning. “Listen, they’re trapped in that lagoon until high tide anyway,” he told Joy, trying to diffuse the situation. “Means we have until dark at the very least to get our shit together, come back with a plan.”

  “They could paddle the dingy to the mainland,” Joy said. “Or swim.”

  “Not with those currents. Those tide rips are wicked through the strait. They’d get swept out to sea or capsized, real easy, and Jess knows it. Swimming’d be even worse.”

  Joy thought about this. “Call Mr. Whitmer,” he said. “Tell him to hurry.”

  “We’re going to wait?”

  “Not necessarily,” Joy replied. “But there’s no sense in dawdling, Deputy, is there?”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to keep the widow and her friend where we can handle them,” Joy replied. “If we can’t get onto the island, we’ll make sure they can’t get off.”

  * * *

  The helicopter had circled back to the lagoon, and Mason could see it through the trees as it dropped into a hover over Ty Winslow’s boat. Together with Jess and Lucy, he inched his way through the forest, keeping as low as he could, until he’d nearly reached the waterline. He unslung the shotgun and kept it close at hand as he stared out through the trees at the helicopter.

  The sliding side door was open. Mason watched the machine sidle down until it was directly alongside the little boat’s stern, a hundred or so feet in the air.

  “What are they planning?” he wondered aloud.

  Jess said nothing, her expression grim, just gestured back to the helicopter. Mason turned and looked just in time to see Kirby Harwood poke his face out from the open door. Beside him, the man who’d come out of Shelby Walker’s house was also visible. They both held long guns, aimed down at the troller.

  As Mason and Jess watched, the men opened fire.

  * * *

  The guy had a grenade launcher mounted on the bottom of his M4. Harwood didn’t want to know how or where Joy had obtained it, but shit, he sure did look comfortable with it.

  They raked the hull of the troller with 5.56 NATO rounds, the sound of their rifles erupting over the noise of the helicopter, the shells pitting the white hull of the boat, painting a crazy pattern, but not, to Harwood’s eyes, doing much damage.

  But he guessed that was what the grenade launcher was for.

  As Harwood turned his attention to the wheelhouse, shooting out every window in turn, Joy switched to the heavy artillery and dropped a grenade round plumb into the fish-killing cockpit at the stern. With a muffled thud and white water, the round blew a big hole out of the back of the boat, mostly below the waterline, and the painted BETTER DAYS, DECEPTION COVE, WA lettering was straight obliterated. With any luck, the explosion had destroyed the rudder and the propeller, too.

  Joy reloaded. He nudged Harwood aside and aimed another round at the wheelhouse, missing the windows but making a big hole in the superstructure. He reloaded again, put a last round through that hole—wreaking some kind of special havoc inside—and then he stepped back from the open door and shouldered the rifle, apparently having decided the troller was pretty well taken care of. Harwood hoped he was right, because it was just about then that Jess Winslow must have gotten fed up. A muzzle flashed in the trees,
and the helicopter rocked and jolted forward like a spooked horse. The pilot swore at the controls and veered skyward, nearly sending Harwood tumbling out the open door.

  Then Joy was pushing past him, to the door again, with that M4 of his, and Harwood thought the Nigerian meant to engage the crazy bitch down there, maybe put a grenade in her lap. But Joy had switched back to bullets, and he sent a sharp, fast barrage down at the inflatable skiff where it lay at the tree line. Then he reached past Harwood and tapped the pilot on the shoulder, and the helicopter was suddenly gaining altitude very quickly, Jess Winslow’s rifle sending parting shots skyward, none of them, to Harwood’s knowledge, connecting with shit.

  Joy slid the door closed. He sat back, laid his rifle across his lap, and looked across the helicopter at nothing.

  “There,” he said, and he wasn’t smiling, but damned if he didn’t look pleased with himself. “That should keep them contained until we’re ready to deal with them.”

  Harwood looked out across the channel to the mainland, whitecaps and swift current, knew there was no way Jess or her boyfriend could escape Dixie with their lives. Figured that meant she’d be right hopping mad when they came back in the Grady-White, hoped Joy was planning adequately for a pissed-off marine.

  They would find out, Harwood knew. One way or the other.

  Fifty

  Lucy was gone.

  Mason pushed himself to his feet, brushed dirt and pine needles from his knees, his chest. He picked up the shotgun and looked around the forest, listening to the drone of the helicopter fade away into nothing.

  Beside him, Jess stood as well. “Where’s the dog?” she asked.

  “Ran off.” He gestured to his right, along the south side of the lagoon, where the terrain rose gradually toward the pass and the dogleg. “Soon as that asshole blew a hole in your boat.”

  “Ty’s boat,” Jess replied absently. “Not mine.”