Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  She still hadn’t moved, and he made to walk over to her, planning to hug her or hold her or at least help her with her coat. But when he stepped toward her, she flinched a little, like she didn’t know him.

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “Tell me about that fight you had with Boyd,” Jess said. “Down at Spinnaker’s.”

  She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the floor about five feet away from her, toward the bathroom. There was something in her voice like she’d been carrying the question around with her the whole day.

  “I guess I told you most of it already,” Mason said. “I come out the restaurant and he was petting the dog. I told him to stop, and he didn’t like it so much. We scrapped some but it was nothing big.”

  “Tim Turpin called Gillies at the detachment about it,” Jess said slowly. “Must have looked pretty big from where he was standing.”

  Mason shrugged. “Boyd’s a big guy—was a big guy. So’m I. Tim’s—well, you know.”

  Tim Turpin was not a big man. Nor was he the kind of guy, Mason supposed, who’d seen many fights in his life.

  “That the last time you saw Boyd?” Jess asked.

  Mason stared at her. Wondered if he’d misheard her, if he was misreading the subtext behind her question. “Look, what’s going on here?” he replied. “Where’s all this coming from, anyway?”

  “The night he disappeared: Where were you?” She still couldn’t look him in the eye. “You got someone can account for your whereabouts?”

  “What is this, Jess, an interrogation? Are you thinking I had something to do with—”

  “Where were you, Burke? That’s all I’m asking.”

  He let out a long breath. Sat back down on the bed and studied her. He supposed he ought to have known this was coming, though he’d have expected it to be Sheriff Hart who asked the questions, not Jess.

  “I was on the boat,” he told her. “You had the night shift. Me and Lucy ate dinner, and I guess we turned in early.”

  Jess didn’t say anything. Didn’t react.

  “Nobody to vouch for my whereabouts,” he said. “No alibi.”

  Still nothing. Mason watched Jess and felt numb, the weight of what she was asking like a stone on his chest.

  Finally Jess shifted. “Hart got an anonymous phone call,” she said. “Said you did it. Killed Boyd.”

  Mason barked out a laugh, incredulous, and Jess’s eyes flashed with life as she spun to face him. “You fought him, Burke. The day he probably died. And as best I could tell, it looked like he kicked your ass.”

  He felt it then, a cold kind of fear, the knowledge of just how alone he was out here in Deception, an outsider. How much more alone he would be without Jess. “You want to arrest me, Jess?” he asked, standing. “Are you seriously thinking I did this?”

  “Burke, no.” She brought her hand up, rubbed her face. “I don’t know. It’s just—Hart wants answers.”

  “He send you to bring me in?”

  Jess shook her head. “I didn’t know you’d be here. Our plans—I forgot.”

  Mason stared at her a beat. “So what do you want to do?” he asked finally. “I’ll go down and see Hart if you want, tell him—”

  “No,” she said quickly. He could see she was scared too. “You stay away from the sheriff, Burke, if you don’t have an alibi. Keep your head down until this blows over.”

  “I didn’t kill him, Jess,” he said. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  Jess said nothing. She couldn’t quite look at him. Was she scared for his sake or her own? Could she really believe he’d have done something like this?

  He waited, and Jess still didn’t say anything.

  “I didn’t kill him,” he said again, but the words sounded weak and insignificant on his lips, a flimsy barrier against the storm he knew must be coming for him.

  * * *

  Jess lay awake long after Burke was gone. Beside her, Lucy stretched out and snored and chased imaginary squirrels. Jess stared up at the stain on the ceiling and listened to the odd car pass by on the highway outside, and wondered what in the hell she was thinking.

  Dinner hadn’t happened, obviously. They’d agreed, half-heartedly, to take a rain check, and Burke had excused himself shortly thereafter, looking at Jess with a kind of urgency in his eyes that scared her, a plea for something she couldn’t quite bring herself to grant him.

  Truth be told, Jess knew some shady anonymous phone call was no good reason to start measuring Burke for handcuffs and a prison jumpsuit. There were people in Deception who didn’t like Burke, saw him as a threat who’d come through and caused violence, who’d contributed to the deaths of three good Makah County boys and put a fourth in prison for the next two or three decades. Burke had enemies, and in a county as small as Makah, people talked. Rumors spread.

  Still, though. Burke had fought with Brock Boyd on the day he’d been murdered. And it wasn’t like Burke was a stranger to violence. He’d killed for her before, on Dixie Island. Was it so impossible that he would kill for Lucy too?

  Jess couldn’t wrap her head around it. But if she was even considering the question, Jess knew damn well and clear that the rest of Makah must be too.

  Including Sheriff Hart.

  TWELVE

  Mason remembered the murder, every second. As far as he could tell, there was no way he would ever forget.

  * * *

  It was supposed to be a robbery; that’s how Dev had pitched it. Hell, at the outset it wasn’t supposed to be anything—another night getting fucked up and chasing girls, Dev with a lead on a couple of sisters he swore would be down for a party.

  Mason had swiped the keys to his mom’s rust-bucket Oldsmobile, peeled out around dusk before she could notice. Hauled ass across town to the house Dev was staying in, somebody’s couch on a glassed-in back porch. Dev was twenty-one, twenty-two; he’d been on his own for five years, maybe longer. As far as eighteen-year-old Mason was concerned, he was about the coolest person in the world.

  Dev climbed into the passenger seat, jacket clutched tight around him. Reached inside that jacket as Mason pulled away from the curb. Fumbled with something.

  “You want to have some fucking fun tonight?” he asked, and Mason nodded, sure, not seeing whatever Dev had stashed in his coat but knowing he wasn’t ever going to say no, whatever it was.

  “I mean,” Dev said, “like some real fucking fun.”

  “Yeah, man,” Mason told him. “Hell yeah.”

  Dev nodded. “Good. Let’s hit up that liquor store right there.”

  Mason had never seen the pistol before, not until Dev pulled it out of his jacket. They were parked in front of the store, engine running, and Dev showed Mason the gun and grinned across the car at him, his eyes already bleary from whatever he’d smoked at the house, his breath rancid.

  “Gonna scare the shit out of a motherfucker,” he told Mason. “Just you wait.”

  Mason had known at the time that this was fucked up. That he should be saying something, doing something, anything. Finding a reason to keep Dev from going into that liquor store.

  But you try saying no to your only friend in the world.

  Mason was eighteen and angry, and more than angry, he was lonely, his dad gone, his mom hopped up on Jesus. A high school burnout with no friends but Dev, no life but that which Dev shared with him, no choice but to go along with Dev’s schemes.

  No opportunity but right here, this car. That gun.

  He kept his mouth shut.

  The clerk’s name was Faraz Karim. Mason didn’t know that at the time, and he’d wager that Dev didn’t either. Karim was just a guy who happened to draw the night shift, some unlucky bastard with a kid waiting at home.

  It must have been only minutes, waiting out in that Oldsmobile, but to Mason, it felt like forever. He kept the radio cranked high and he sipped Steel Reserve and he waited, and the longer he waited, the more certain he was that something had gone wrong.
The look in Dev’s eyes as he’d handled the pistol. The unsteady lurch as he’d reached for the car door.

  The funny thing was, Mason never heard the shots. Didn’t really have a clear idea what had happened until the police hauled him in and showed him the security tape. Dev’s story was, Karim reached for something under the counter, made a move. Dev’s story was self-defense.

  The story on the tape was more like Dev shot him, cold-blooded. Karim with his hands up, talking fast, terrified. Dev talking back, waving the gun like a gangster, arm outstretched and tilted to the side. The security tape showed how Karim kept his hands high right up to the moment when Dev pulled the trigger.

  The security tape showed how Dev was a murderer. An old man across the street put the Olds at the scene, picked Mason out of a lineup, and that made Mason a murderer too. In the eyes of the law, anyway, and in his own mind as well.

  * * *

  He’d had fifteen years to think about what had happened. Fifteen years to remember Faraz Karim, to try to picture the clerk’s little boy. To think about how they’d taken a man away from his son.

  Dev had doubled down on the violence and the anger, and he’d died in a prison fight not long into his sentence. But Mason had chosen the other path. He’d taken responsibility; tried, as best he could, to live within the prison’s rules. He’d walked out of that cell into a cold Michigan morning believing the violence was behind him.

  But it wasn’t.

  He’d killed again, and this time directly. He’d killed to protect Jess and Lucy, pulled a trigger and watched a man fall. That the man had injured him too hardly made it better. That the man would have killed Jess was worth something, sure, but it didn’t change the facts.

  Mason Burke had been responsible for ending two lives. He’d once believed the man he’d been, the man who’d helped murder Faraz Karim, had wasted to nothing in the Chippewa state pen, believed he’d come out a decent, law-abiding man.

  But the violence was still inside him. The death of a man named Joy had proved it. The knowledge kept Mason awake nights; he could still see Joy’s eyes, almost five months later.

  If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

  Maybe the violence would stay with him forever, follow him around as faithfully as Lucy. Mason wondered if there was any use trying to shy away from it.

  THIRTEEN

  The morning after the canceled dinner, Jess sat in her Blazer in Spinnaker’s parking lot, watching the quiet restaurant and the open water behind it for a solid half hour, wondering what she was doing and if she even had a choice.

  Tim had barely unlocked the front door and was setting tables along the far wall of the dining room when Jess walked into the restaurant at 11 a.m. on the pin. A bell tinkled overhead to announce her arrival, and Tim was barely more than a silhouette as he looked back at her and stood straight and came over, wiping his hands on his apron and smiling a good morning to her.

  “Jess,” he said. “Welcome. Eating by yourself this morning?”

  She smiled at him, rueful. Tried to calm the nerves that threatened to set her whole body to shaking, thought semiconsciously how crazy it was she could walk into an enemy village or an outlaw compound without hardly any jitters at all, but ask her to walk into a hometown seafood restaurant and she was more scared than a fox in a snare.

  “I wish I was just here to eat, Tim,” she told the restaurateur, and she watched how his smile faded and an understanding came over his expression, and she surmised that he’d been waiting for her to come to him, waiting for the questions he must have known she would ask.

  * * *

  Tim flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED and they took a table by the windows, overlooking the strait and the breakwater and the boats moored in the basin just feet from the restaurant’s pilings. Tim poured two cups of coffee, handed one to Jess, and kept one for himself. He sat down opposite her and searched her eyes with his own, and his expression was something of pity, and Jess hated him for it.

  “I just need to know,” she told Tim. “How bad was that fight?”

  Tim winced, and she knew he was seeing her as Mason Burke’s partner and not as Sheriff Hart’s deputy, and she knew also that Tim liked Burke, that the men got along, and that this mustn’t be easy for him either.

  “It was bad,” he said finally. “It was—I mean, Jess, those men really went after each other. I had to call Miguel out of the back to get in between them, and even then…” He blew out a long breath. “If Tyner Gillies hadn’t showed up when he did, I was afraid they might have killed each other right then and there.”

  As opposed to killing each other later, she thought.

  Jess looked out over the water. She could see the Nootka in the boat basin beneath the restaurant, and though she knew Burke wasn’t there—he was working with Joe Clifford, building her house—she still felt his eyes on her, watching her betray him.

  “I haven’t told the sheriff yet,” she told Tim. “Gillies said he’d leave it to me. I’ve just been—” She met his eyes. “I’ve been hoping there’s some other answer.”

  “Do you think Mason could have killed him?” Tim asked.

  “You saw them fighting,” she replied. “What do you think?”

  Tim sucked his teeth and turned to stare out the window. He didn’t reply for a long while. “It was bad, Jess,” he said finally. “Those men didn’t like each other; I can tell you that.”

  FOURTEEN

  “How well do you know this guy, anyway?”

  The sheriff sat perched on the edge of Jess’s desk at the detachment, flipping through a thick file she knew belonged to Burke. The sheriff had set out for Deception, that file in hand, as soon as she’d called him, and Jess figured he’d probably been up most of the night memorizing its contents.

  The detachment was quiet. Gillies was sleeping off last night’s shift, and Paul Monk was home sick with some kind of head cold, he claimed, though it sounded to Jess like your run-of-the-mill hangover. Even the last few reporters had wandered away, grown bored with the lack of progress on the case, the whole story already gone stale.

  That left Jess and the sheriff to hash out the Burke problem. And now she’d gone and told Hart about the fight, and Jess knew that must make Burke the prime suspect.

  “Burke’s a good man,” she told Hart. “You know about the murder they convicted him for, the circumstances. Robbery gone wrong; his friend pulled the trigger.”

  Hart nodded. Regarded her thoughtfully. “Still makes him a murderer in the eyes of the law.”

  “It does, and Burke owns that,” she said. “You go ahead and ask him yourself, Sheriff. He’ll tell you he did his part to kill that man and that he served his time for it solid, without any complaint.”

  She could still feel the nerves alive inside her, wondered how the sheriff couldn’t tell she was shaking. Wondered what she was doing defending Burke, what she was doing betraying him.

  “Fifteen years,” Hart said.

  “Yes, sir. And the first thing he did, the moment he came out, was to make sure his dog was okay.”

  Hart knew the story about Kirby Harwood, of course. But Jess figured he might not be so well versed in how Burke came to be involved, which was to say, how he’d found out that Harwood had taken Lucy from Jess, how the deputy had planned to destroy the dog.

  He’d come out here, twenty-five hundred miles from his home, to save his dog. And he’d stayed because he’d seen how Jess was in trouble.

  “You know, Sheriff,” Jess said, “Harwood and his pals wanted to kill me. They’d have done it if Burke hadn’t been there to help.” She looked up at Hart, met his eyes. “Hell, it was self-defense, anyway. He nearly died on that island.”

  Hart held her gaze a short while. Then he turned back to the file. “Be that as it may,” he said, “that fight he had out at Spinnaker’s was more or less the last time anybody saw Boyd alive.”

  “Don’t forget about the woman,” Jess said. “T
hat lipstick stain on Boyd’s wineglass.”

  “Right,” Hart said. “The lipstick.” He closed the file. Let out a long sigh. “Been days now, Jess, and still no sign of that woman, whoever she is. Look, maybe she had something to do with this; maybe she didn’t. But your man Burke, he’s got blood on his hands, literally. I think it’s about time we brought him in.”

  She felt her breath hitch, and she started, wondered if Hart noticed. The way he was studying her, she could tell that he had.

  “Just to ask him some questions,” he told her. “Get his story on the record. Put a few more pieces together, that kind of thing.”

  She said, “Yes, sir.”

  He studied her another beat.

  “You have the makings of a damn fine deputy,” he said, “and I’d hate to lose you on this case. But if you don’t think you can handle this, Jess, you ought to recuse yourself now. There’s no shame in sitting it out.”

  Jess knew Hart was right. Knew if this were anywhere else—a bigger county, the city—there’d be no question: she’d be on the sidelines. But this was Makah County. Everybody knew everybody, and Hart’s staff was limited already. No way was she taking herself out of the game, not the biggest case the county had seen since—well, since Harwood.

  What the hell would I do with myself, she thought, if they took this from me now too?

  She’d been a soldier, and now she wasn’t allowed anymore. And while policing wasn’t exactly like the Marine Corps, there were enough similarities—the structure, the discipline, the reliance on your friends amid the ever-present threat of violence—that she’d grown, in this short time, to feel she needed the work. The badge and the gun, the sense of purpose.

  What would you do, she wondered, if you couldn’t do this anymore?

  “I swore an oath, Sheriff,” she told Hart. “If Burke did it, I’ll put him in cuffs myself. I just don’t think he could have done it, and I want to see he gets a fair shake, is all.”