Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  “Maybe it does,” Mason replied. “But that doesn’t mean I want to smell yours around this dog.” The electricity was humming now, same as it did back in the Chippewa pen, where somebody looked at someone else wrong and some minor offense turned to bloodshed. Mason knew Boyd must be feeling it too, his own callback. Knew there was nothing in either man’s history that was going to prevent them from brawling.

  But Mason tried, anyway. For Jess’s sake, and Lucy’s. And for his own, for the sake of the man he’d worked hard to become, inside the prison and after he’d walked out of it. “I don’t want trouble,” he told Boyd. “Just stay away from the dog, is all.”

  Boyd didn’t respond. Mason turned, handed Rengo the paper bag full of Tim Turpin’s fish and chips. Reached around Boyd, giving the other man a wide berth, made to start untying Lucy’s lead from the guardrail.

  And then Boyd hit him.

  It was a sucker punch, awkward, given the way they were standing. Boyd swinging with a left-hand haymaker, either thinking Mason was making a move or trying to catch him off guard. Either way, the punch connected, and after that, it didn’t matter.

  Mason had tried to behave himself in Chippewa. He’d known that any fight behind bars would damn him in the eyes of the people who mattered, the people who’d cast judgment on his ability to reintegrate with the rest of the world. He’d avoided confrontation, aimed for diplomacy.

  But sometimes a fight was unavoidable. Sometimes you reached a point where you stood up for yourself or the whole block knew you were soft, and once they knew you were soft, they’d come after you, all of them.

  Instinct took over. Survival. You fought to defend yourself, so you wouldn’t have to fight again later. And as Brock Boyd’s million-dollar fist connected with Mason’s jaw, he knew the kind of fight he was in, knew he’d have to prove something to Boyd now, or the dogfighter wouldn’t ever give him peace.

  He rolled away from Boyd’s punch. Came up throwing fists of his own.

  SIX

  “Holy hell, Burke, what happened to you?”

  Jess caught sight of Burke’s eye about the moment she stepped inside the Nootka’s wheelhouse. He stood over the stove, cooking some kind of dinner—and to his credit, it smelled pretty good—but he couldn’t hide the shiner, or the bruise on his jaw and the way he favored his right arm. Heck, looking closer, she could see the cuts on his knuckles, and she paused in the doorway. Stared.

  Burke looked up from the stove, gave her a rueful smile. “I guess you’ll hear about it all when you get to work later,” he said. “I think it was Tim Turpin finally called the law.”

  “You—” She frowned. Shook her head, couldn’t quite process. “You got in a fight?”

  “It was Brock Boyd,” he said. “He found Lucy.”

  Jess glanced up toward the wheel, where Lucy lay curled by the stairs to the fo’c’sle. Jess made eye contact, and the dog’s tail thumped, but she didn’t stand, and for a moment, Jess thought—

  “He didn’t—”

  “No,” Burke said, reading her face. “He seemed like he just wanted to wrestle with her. But I didn’t want him anywhere around her, and I told him.”

  “And then you fought him.”

  He looked up at her, his expression earnest. “He threw a punch at me,” he told her. “Jess, I know it was wrong. I should have found some way to turn the other cheek, and I know it.”

  She didn’t say anything. She’d never known Burke to fight without reason. Even on the island, with Harwood and the others, Burke had pushed her hard for some kind of peaceful resolution. He would stand up for himself; she knew that. But he hadn’t seemed to Jess like the kind of man who saw any point to a fistfight, like he recognized how ridiculous the whole circus must be, grown men who couldn’t solve their problems with words.

  “He swung first,” Burke said. “I know that doesn’t matter, but it was one of those things. He’s been in jail for a spell himself.”

  Jess supposed it did matter, should matter, logically. And she’d heard about Bad Boyd, knew what he’d done to those dogs; she’d seen pictures, the ring in the barn out back, the kennels. She’d heard stories of what the law had found when they’d dug up Boyd’s property. And she’d heard some of the testimony too, what Boyd and his buddies had forced the dogs to do, what they did to the weak dogs, the ones who didn’t or couldn’t fight.

  She knew Lucy had been rescued from the same kind of situation, and she knew Burke knew it too, and she couldn’t fault him for standing up for the dog.

  But still. She felt queasy inside, just a bit, as though he’d just told her he’d been flirting with Darla Grey down at the Cobalt.

  Burke bent down and dug into a locker under the sink, where Jess knew he kept the bowls. But he sighed, and when he stood tall again, his hands were empty.

  “I’m embarrassed, Jess,” he told her. “I saw Boyd as a convict instead of a man, and I let my instinct get the better of me, and I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t need to apologize,” she said. “Not to me.”

  He studied her face like he could tell how she was feeling, like he could see himself through her eyes and knew he’d come up wanting, perhaps for the first time since they’d met each other.

  The silence stretched, and it was the kind of silence where normally Lucy would save them by snoring or farting or just rolling over and looking silly and giving them an excuse to smile and laugh together, but even the dog stayed still, and there was no exit, no escape.

  “Soup’s on,” Burke said finally, gesturing to the stove. “You hungry?”

  The food smelled delicious, damn it, some kind of Mexican stew recipe he’d picked up from God knows where, but Jess found she’d just about lost her appetite. “I ought to get to work,” she told him. “Gillies will be wondering where I am already.”

  Burke pursed his lips. Then he nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jess said. She snapped her fingers. “C’mon, Luce,” she called, and the dog sat up, stretching and yawning, and dutifully padded out past Burke to where Jess stood at the door.

  “Be safe tonight,” Burke said.

  “I will,” Jess replied, and she wanted to say more, but there was something between them now, something alien, something that hadn’t existed before. And Jess clipped Lucy’s lead to her collar and led the dog out and was conscious of Burke’s eyes on her, watching them go, and she wanted to stop and turn and go back to him, tell him it was okay and how they’d get through this together.

  But she knew that if she turned back, she’d see only the shiner on Burke’s face and the scars on his knuckles, the way he winced as he moved, and she knew she would watch him and wonder if maybe she’d been reading him wrong, if she maybe didn’t know him as well as she’d thought.

  It wasn’t three days later that she was staring down at Bad Boyd’s body on the shore at Shipwreck Point.

  SEVEN

  Ironically, for all the time Jess had spent in a war zone, the first corpse she ever saw was right here in Deception, just a few miles down the shore from Shipwreck Point. She was a teenager, going steady with Ty Winslow, and he’d taken her out on his little troller for a sunset pleasure cruise, a jog up the coast a ways to a spot where he dropped crab traps, where he swore those Dungeness came up as big as dinner plates.

  They’d figured out pretty quick that something was the matter, that old hauler on the back of Ty’s boat straining like nobody’s business to lift the trap from the water, and Ty had made a joke about how the trap must be stuffed right full of crab, and he hoped Jess was hungry.

  But he glanced at the hauler and how the line was drawn taut and he frowned, and Jess knew it wasn’t a surplus of crab that was holding the trap down.

  “Must be caught on something down there,” Ty said, scratching his head. “Tide carried it under a rock or something.”

  But that wasn’t right either.

  In the end, it took both of t
hem pulling, plus the hauler behind them, to drag the trap up from the bottom, and she screamed when she looked over the side and saw the face in the tangle of line, bloated and pale, looming out of the darkness like something from a nightmare.

  They tied off the line and let the trap dangle there in the water, and Ty took Jess into the wheelhouse and poured her a cup of coffee from the pot on the galley stove, splashed plenty of bourbon in there too, wrapped her up in a blanket, and got the Coast Guard on the radio. And they stayed in the galley, looking out at the sunset, until the little Coast Guard Zodiac motored into the bay, and then Ty went out and talked and Jess stayed put and poured a little more bourbon into the dregs of her coffee.

  He was a guy named Blind Ulrich; Ty had fished with his nephews once or twice. As best anyone could tell, he’d been poaching crab from Ty’s trap when the line tangled around him as he threw the trap back, dragged him down sixty feet to the bottom. The Coast Guard found Ulrich’s boat on the rocks the next morning, a big YETI cooler filled with prime crab.

  “Served the bastard right,” Ty said, grinning, when he found out. “Some kind of cosmic justice, what with him stealing our crab like that.”

  Jess hadn’t seen much of Blind Ulrich’s body, but she’d seen enough to remember. And for a while, she imagined that every body she saw would linger in her head the way Ulrich’s had.

  Then she’d joined the Marines, and that whole notion had quickly come to seem quaintly naive.

  She remembered the unusual deaths, of course. Men shot or blown up in ways she hadn’t imagined before. She remembered the first man she thought she’d killed—an insurgent with a Kalashnikov rifle, thirty yards away, him or her—and she remembered, of course, how her friends had died, how broken and waxy and artificial they looked, once they were gone.

  She remembered, all right. Friends like Afia, tortured and mutilated, she couldn’t forget. Not even with Lucy and Burke and a twice-weekly trip to the VA doc, Wiebe.

  And of course Jess remembered Ty. She hadn’t seen his body, not firsthand; she’d been overseas on her third tour when he drowned, but she’d still forced the old sheriff, Kirk Wheeler, to show her pictures anyway, just so she’d know what it looked like.

  She supposed, in some way, she’d been testing herself. To see if she cared at all, if she still had the capacity to care.

  She’d felt nothing when she looked at the pictures. Nothing but a burning desire to get back to Afghanistan and kill Haji some more.

  But that, the VA had told her, was out of the question.

  Ty had drowned. Blind Ulrich had drowned. Brock Boyd had come from the water, but he hadn’t drowned.

  Boyd lay on the coarse sand beside seaweed and jetsam, kelp tangled in that lustrous hair of his, the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead neat and tidy and bloodless; it almost looked natural. It didn’t much look like a suicide, either, from the placement of the wound; Jess figured there had to be easier ways to shoot yourself in the head, but she supposed she and the sheriff would have to wait for the county coroner’s opinion to be sure.

  At any rate, Boyd’s eyes were half closed, and if you looked only at his eyes, you’d have thought he looked peaceful, at rest below the tide line and oblivious to the clouds of flies that had gathered around him.

  But the rest of Boyd’s body was in pretty bad shape. He’d spent time in the water, that much was obvious; his clothes were ragged from rock and wave, and maybe from creatures too. Certainly the crabs had already discovered him. What exposed flesh Jess could see had been torn away, chewed on, whatever else.

  She’d seen many bodies before, but she could not recall ever seeing a man in this state, where the violence that had ended his life formed only a prelude to the indignities visited upon the body in the immediate afterward.

  Looking down on the ruined remains of Boyd’s once-movie-star-handsome face, Jess thought of Cable Proudfoot and his grandson, wondered how much the little boy had seen. Would Boyd stick in the boy’s mind the way Blind Ulrich had stuck in hers?

  She hadn’t known Boyd, but she could tell already that his body would be one she remembered, anyway, no matter how hard she tried to push it out of her mind.

  EIGHT

  The investigation of Boyd’s death brought an energy to Makah County that Jess couldn’t recall ever feeling before.

  “Guess we’re going to have to knuckle down on this, Winslow,” Sheriff Hart told her as they walked out of the county coroner’s office following Boyd’s autopsy. “This part of the world ain’t exactly a murder capital.”

  The finding: homicide by gunshot wound, .38 caliber, the toxicology report pending. Bad Boyd had been murdered, and neither the sheriff nor his deputy had any immediate suspects—or, indeed, any idea how he’d come to wash up on Shipwreck Point with the tide.

  The coroner’s office sat adjacent to the Indian Health Center in Neah Bay, the Makah County seat. It was a low, modest building, a single story with faded aluminum siding. Neah Bay rostered only about a couple thousand people; the county proper, less than ten thousand. The coroner wasn’t exactly the busiest woman in town, and she rarely had to rule on a homicide.

  Today, though, her parking lot was full, mostly TV news reporters dragging producers and panel vans behind them, and beyond them a collection of bystanders and looky-loos gathered from all over the county to hear tell of what had happened to Makah’s brightest star.

  Brock Boyd’s story was well told in these parts; even Jess had heard it plenty, and she’d been halfway around the world for most of the really juicy bits. Part Makah and part not, he’d found his way to a pair of skates—legend claimed—before he could walk, was filling the nets at the Neah Bay community ice rink by the time he was four. He’d dragged the Makah Screaming Eagles to consecutive regional championships as a teenager, then bolted for the big time just as soon as he was able.

  For a while, Jess remembered, the whole county had shut down whenever Boyd had a game on television, and the people around here weren’t even particularly interested in hockey. They just liked the idea that a person could make it out of here, find fortune and glory despite the odds stacked against them.

  And a lot of them, Jess suspected, appreciated how Boyd had made it with his fists.

  Bad Boyd was a fighter as much as he was a hockey player, consistently treading the margins between fair play and foul. But that wasn’t such a bad thing to his fans in Makah County or to the coaches who’d scouted him; hockey rewarded toughness, and if Boyd was prone to the occasional cheap shot, so be it. He scored plenty, and scared plenty too.

  A reporter stepped out of the scrum as Jess and Hart exited the coroner’s office. Jess didn’t recognize her, surmised she must have come from afar—Seattle, probably, or even farther. Maybe she was even one of those national reporters—ESPN or something. Boyd’s death was getting plenty of coverage, it being the culmination of an epic, drawn-out, tabloid-rag downfall.

  “Sheriff Hart,” the reporter called. “Can you give us an update as to the cause of Boyd’s death? Is there any truth to the rumor that this was a murder?”

  Hart’s gait hitched a little—not noticeable to the reporter but glaring to Jess, beside him. She realized the sheriff was probably feeling a little overwhelmed himself; this kind of thing didn’t happen much in Clallam County either, and certainly not with this kind of attention.

  “No comment,” Hart told the reporter. “We’ll set up a press conference when we have something to share.”

  “Do you have any suspects? Could this be connected to Boyd’s earlier legal troubles?”

  Hart forced a smile, nudged his way past the reporter. “No comment,” he said again. “Thank you.”

  Hart cleared a path through the crowd to where they’d parked; he’d driven his Super Duty three blocks from headquarters, while Jess had taken a county cruiser into Neah Bay from Deception. The reporters followed, and so did some of the gawkers, lingering just within earshot, waiting to hear what the law planned to do.


  Hart shooed them away. Then he gave Jess a tired smile. “We’re going to need to put a face to this thing,” he said. “Soon.”

  Jess nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I guess you never worked a case like this before.”

  She smiled; Hart knew she hadn’t. “No, sir.”

  “Better let me handle the heavy stuff,” the sheriff said. “You and Gillies just work your connections in town. Ask around about Boyd, figure out what he was into. Who he ran with, that kind of thing.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mostly, these things clear up quick. It’s usually pretty obvious from the outset. Usually someone close, someone holding a grudge.”

  Jess nodded. “I’ll ask around.”

  “Keep me posted,” Hart said. “I’ll do the same. Any luck, we can get this thing cleared in a couple of days.”

  They said their goodbyes, climbed into their vehicles, and Jess followed Hart out of the lot and as far as the detachment, where he signaled and pulled into the lot, waving to her out the window, and she continued up toward the highway.

  She hadn’t said anything to Hart about the scars on Burke’s hands, she realized, the fight outside Spinnaker’s. She wondered if she’d forgotten, or if she simply hadn’t wanted to tell.

  It didn’t matter. The sheriff would find out, sooner or later; there weren’t many secrets in Makah County. And Jess imagined there would be more than a few people in Deception who’d heard of the fight, and Boyd’s murder, and think the outsider from back east with his history of violence must have been the one who pulled the trigger. Heck, she might have thought it herself if she didn’t know Mason Burke like she did.

  Jess hoped Hart was right, that they could clear the case quickly. Otherwise, she knew, things were liable to get sticky for Burke, and damn fast.