Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  Fetridge sat on a couch in a trailer a few blocks from Deception Cove’s Main Street. He was a tall man and imposing, that broad, barrel chest and a healthy tangle of beard only now starting to gray. A lumberjack in the traditional model, a woodsman. An outlaw who held himself to a certain code.

  The couch and the trailer belonged to his friend Dax Pruitt, who sat in an easy chair opposite. The television in the corner—a forty-seven-inch RCA with a long crack in the screen—had belonged to a deadbeat no-account named Art Crosby, from whom Pruitt had liberated the set on Fetridge’s behalf. The television was tuned in to the Seahawks game, but neither Fetridge nor Pruitt was paying attention.

  “It ain’t happened yet,” Fetridge told Pruitt. “Somebody’s got to hang for this murder, before the boss lady gets scared.”

  She’d called Fetridge again, that afternoon, on the burner. Asking questions he couldn’t easily answer, running her mouth, the panic evident in her voice and in the fact she was calling at all.

  She’d made Fetridge’s head hurt, to be perfectly honest, made him wonder why he’d agreed to this job in the first place, nothing but headaches and fuckups right off the hop.

  Fetridge wondered why he even answered the phone anymore when the woman called, and in his darker moments, he wondered if there was something he could do to stop her calling, permanently, just erase that particular line of risk altogether.

  But the woman was insulated, holed away somewhere neither Fetridge nor Pruitt could reach her. And Fetridge still held out hope he could somehow solve the problem without jeopardizing the life he’d built for himself in Makah County.

  Outside the trailer, an old diesel engine rumbled up the road and eased to a halt outside Pruitt’s front door, and Pruitt and Fetridge shared a look and pushed up from the chair and the couch respectively, slipped into their boots and stepped out through the front door to where Chris Jordan’s familiar old 2500 sat chugging on the front lawn, Jordan in the driver’s seat and Doug Bealing riding shotgun, the same George-and-Lennie act as always.

  Jordan was a wiry guy, squinted like a mole, the same chip on his shoulder as nearly every short man Logger Fetridge had ever met. Jordan was a schemer, not a scrapper, though he’d never been particularly smart. As it was, he was mostly just a low-level dealer, ducking the law on account of his being on probation for, of all things, a kiddie porn charge.

  Chris Jordan wasn’t much, but he was Logger Fetridge’s nephew, and blood meaning what it did in Makah, that may have been his only saving grace in the world.

  Doug Bealing, on the other hand, was big and clumsy and dumb, and he seemed to have missed the memo that guys like him were supposed to turn out kind of goofy and good-hearted to make up for their intellectual shortcomings. But Bealing wasn’t goofy or good-hearted; he was the kind of guy who liked to shoot stray dogs for the fun of it, and then tell the whole crowd at the Cobalt how Fido had bled out all over the damn road.

  Logger Fetridge didn’t have a dog, but that didn’t mean he liked Bealing altogether very much, though at this point the four men were more or less wedded together inextricably.

  “Sheriff didn’t bite,” Fetridge told the men in the truck as Pruitt stood on the front lawn and watched. “Boss lady’s getting anxious. I need you to do something to expedite this process.”

  Jordan and Bealing swapped glances. Jordan frowned out at Fetridge, and his voice when he spoke was the kind of whine that made Fetridge want to slap him.

  “Why do we have to do it?” he asked.

  Fetridge exhaled, slow, cursing his sister for bringing this waste of space into the world. “Because you’re the reason,” he replied, “that we’re in this fucking mess in the first place.”

  He’d imagined that even his nephew could dispose of a body. He wouldn’t ever make that mistake again.

  “What do you want us to do?” Jordan asked. “Just march on into the detachment and tell them a story? We ain’t got no proof, Logger. They’ll start looking at us.”

  Behind the men, Pruitt cleared his throat. Fetridge’s partner didn’t speak much, but when he did, it usually made sense, and all three men turned to listen.

  “Sheriff ain’t found the murder weapon yet,” Pruitt said. “Seems like if he found that gun it’d go a long way toward establishing what happened that night.”

  For a beat, nobody replied. Then Fetridge turned back to the truck, to his sister’s kid and his pylon of a friend. “There,” he said. “What do you know? Do you think you dunces can handle that without it all coming back onto us?”

  Jordan and Bealing glanced at each other, though if Doug Bealing knew what day of the week it was, even, Fetridge would have been fully impressed.

  Then Jordan set his jaw.

  “Sure, Logger,” he said, puffed up like he was trying for once in his life to sound competent. “We’ll get on that right away.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The witness came forward the next morning looking for Sheriff Hart, but she’d turned up at the Deception Cove detachment. Deputy Paul Monk tried to keep her entertained, offered her coffee and a couple of limp comments about how bad it was raining out there, but the witness wanted no part of any of it; she sat on the bench just inside the front door, staring straight ahead at the bulletin board and the Wanted posters, the missing-cat fliers, for the thirty-odd minutes it took Aaron Hart to make it into town.

  When the sheriff arrived, he asked to conduct the interview in Kirby Harwood’s old office in the back of the building, the room Jess Winslow and Tyner Gillies mostly used for storage now that Harwood was gone. Gillies was on patrol and Winslow had the evening shift, so it fell to Paul Monk to give the sheriff his permission or lack thereof, and Monk didn’t quite know the sheriff well enough to withhold permission to anything. He found the spare key on his key ring and unlocked the door and stood aside as Hart ushered the young woman into the space.

  “Paul, you’d better come in here too,” the sheriff called out to Monk, who’d lingered by the door, unsure of his obligation in a situation like this. “Bring a couple of cups of coffee too.”

  It took Monk a few minutes to get the coffee put together, but he made up two mugs and brought in some packets of sugar and some creamers too, not knowing who of the three of them the coffees were for. When he came into the room, Hart was sitting not behind the big beat-up desk that dominated the room but in one of the two chairs in front of it. The witness sat in the other chair.

  And that’s how Paul Monk found himself in Kirby Harwood’s executive-level desk chair in the back end of the Deception Cove detachment, listening to a woman named Charlene Todd explain to the sheriff how she knew it was Mason Burke who’d killed Brock Boyd.

  The meeting took over an hour, and by the time it was finished, Tyner Gillies had come in and was standing at the coffee maker, brewing another pot and dripping rainwater all over the linoleum.

  Gillies looked up, surprised, when the office door opened and it was Charlene Todd and then Sheriff Hart and then Paul Monk who emerged; the witness ignored him, walked straight to the front doors and out into the rain, and Hart and Monk kind of stood there in the middle of the detachment, watching her go.

  “Well, Paul,” the sheriff began, when Charlene Todd had disappeared outside, “what did you make of all that?”

  Hart had a notebook in his hands where he’d written down everything Charlene Todd had told him, and he’d asked her to tell it a couple of times, run him through every detail until they both were sure she was telling it right. For Monk’s part, he’d done nothing but sit there and listen, watched how Hart walked the witness through the interview, watched how the witness worried her hands and kind of looked away, out the window, whenever Hart’s eyes were on her.

  Now Monk shifted his weight and kind of looked out the window himself. “I mean, I don’t know her all too well,” he said. “But I don’t see as we have any reason to doubt her.”

  Hart nodded. “No,” he said slowly. “I don’t think we do.”
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  He looked over at Tyner Gillies for the first time. “Deputy Gillies,” he said, “I do believe we need to rustle up a scuba diver.”

  NINETEEN

  Mason supposed he’d been expecting more visitors.

  One way or another, he was in the middle of this thing with Brock Boyd. The sheriff sure seemed to consider him a suspect. So whether it was Hart, Tyner Gillies, or some combination thereof, Mason knew the law wouldn’t leave him alone for long.

  The only person in the county Mason didn’t figure would pay him a visit was Jess, and he guessed he couldn’t blame her. Objectively speaking, there was plenty on the table to point to him killing Boyd, and she, being a deputy, had to pay attention to all of that. Mason couldn’t begrudge her for doing her job.

  But hell, it hurt anyway. Truth be told, he relied on Jess plenty, to help him navigate the town and the county beyond, to lend him an air of legitimacy when the rest of the populace seemed to want to see him as a menace. Now he didn’t have Jess, and he didn’t have Lucy, and Mason already missed them both something terrible.

  Either way, he knew Jess and the dog wouldn’t be coming back down here, to the boat, in any kind of a hurry. So when he heard boots on the wharf boards outside, the boat swaying a little and the late afternoon light starting to wane, he knew it wasn’t a romantic call waiting for him when he stepped out of the wheelhouse.

  Sheriff Hart led the parade. He had Jess’s fellow deputy with him, Tyner Gillies, and a man Mason had never seen before, who was carrying an oxygen tank and a duffel bag. Hart and Gillies stopped on the wharf beside the boat, and the third man set down his bag and his oxygen tank and peeled off his jacket, and Mason could see he wore a wet suit underneath.

  Mason watched the men through the galley window and thought about staying inside, making Hart come to him, but there seemed no point in prolonging the situation, so Mason walked to the wheelhouse door and pulled on a rain slicker and swung the door open.

  “Evening, Sheriff,” he said, stepping out onto the deck. “Deputy. What can I do for you fellas?”

  The question was a formality; Hart had brought a diver, and Mason knew that meant the sheriff thought he’d find something in the water, probably the gun that had killed Brock Boyd. What Mason wasn’t sure of, not yet, was whether the gun was down there or not.

  “Mason, this is Ed Aymar,” Hart said, motioning to the diver. “Ed’s just going to check out the bottom of your boat for us. That okay?”

  Mason shrugged. Whether it was okay with him or not, Aymar was going in the water, and everyone knew it. Mason pulled the hood over his head and stepped across the deck to the gunwale, watching how Gillies tensed every time he moved, like the deputy was waiting on him to run.

  “Go ahead,” Mason said, and Hart nodded to Aymar, who checked his mask and his regulator, flipped on a little flashlight, and slipped over the side of the wharf into the oily water beneath, leaving the three other men behind on the surface to watch the water and wait.

  The rain had slowed to a drizzle, though the wet still seemed to seep through Mason’s jacket all the way to his bones as he stood on the wharf beside Hart and watched the bubbles drift up from where Aymar was diving.

  As the late afternoon light continued to fade, the yellow sodium lights on the standards above flickered on, bathing the wharf and the boats and the men in some sickly light, and Mason could see, above and behind Hart, Spinnaker’s restaurant was doing good business, the dinner rush already picking up.

  “I guess you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think you had something,” Mason said to Hart after a while.

  The sheriff smiled a little bit. “We try not to waste anyone’s time.”

  “That’s thoughtful of you.”

  “Had a witness come in,” Hart told him. “Said they heard voices in the harbor—men’s voices, fighting—the night Brock Boyd was murdered. Said they heard a gunshot too.” He paused. “Then maybe they heard the splash as somebody threw a weapon away.”

  Mason looked down at the water where Ed Aymar was searching, and he knew that sooner or later the diver was going to come up with the gun the sheriff expected him to find. And he knew, as soon as that happened, he was done for.

  Gillies was watching him. The deputy shifted his weight and rested his gun hand on his holster and stood square in the center of the wharf, the only path back to the government dock and dry land.

  Mason closed his eyes. “You fellas bring that pistol with you?” he asked Hart, who chuckled and shook his head and didn’t bother to answer.

  “The way I see it, there’s two possibilities,” Mason continued. “Either you all are in on this too or you’re not.”

  “Burke,” Gillies said.

  “I’d like to think the law in this county is a little more honest than when I first arrived,” Mason said. “Which means you all aren’t the type to chuck a gun in the water just to pin this whole thing on me.”

  Neither Gillies nor Hart said anything; neither man looked at Mason.

  “Which means it was someone else put you up to this,” Mason said. “Whoever that witness is, either they chucked that gun away or they know the person who did.”

  “There’s a third possibility, Mason,” Hart said.

  “I didn’t kill Boyd, Sheriff.”

  Hart wasn’t smiling anymore, and he wasn’t laughing either, and Mason noticed how he, too, had unsnapped the holster on his belt. For the first time, Mason wondered if he would make it off this wharf alive.

  “Let’s just wait for the diver,” Hart said. “Could be there’s no gun down there in the first place.”

  But there was a gun down there. Mason knew it. He just wasn’t sure if Hart knew it too, or if the sheriff was simply playing someone else’s hand.

  The men waited there. Stood in the drizzle and got steadily colder and wetter as they watched the dark water. And time passed, and Mason couldn’t have said how long or how little, except that eventually his jeans and his shoes had soaked through and he was shivering, whether from the cold entirely or from adrenaline too, he didn’t know.

  Then the diver broke the water. About fifteen feet from the stern of Joe Clifford’s little troller, and halfway out into the channel between the two wharf fingers. He spat out his regulator and found Hart on the dock and held up something small and black and shiny in his hand.

  “Sheriff,” he said, “it’s a .38.”

  TWENTY

  There was no point in hanging around to argue.

  Hart and Gillies turned to Mason as the diver swam toward them, and Hart’s expression seemed to be one of regret or at least sympathy, while Gillies’s mouth was tight and he’d drawn himself up fully, blocking the only path off the dock.

  “Okay, son,” Hart said. “I think you can see how we’re going to need you to come back to town with us.”

  The sheriff advanced on Mason, slow, as if he was a wild animal. Gillies hung back maybe eight or ten paces, keeping a safe distance in case the situation turned ugly. Mason wondered if Jess’s buddy would shoot him on this dock, and decided he didn’t want to find out. There was no going through these two men, not without someone getting hurt.

  But there was no going with them either. He’d never breathe free air again if he did, and even Jess would believe that he’d murdered Brock Boyd.

  “Now, just turn around and lie down on that wharf,” Hart was saying. “On your front, slow. I’ll put the cuffs on you, and we’ll get you out of here, easy.”

  Mason turned around, like the sheriff wanted. Ahead of him, now, the wharf stretched another boat length or so, fifty feet, toward an abrupt end and the water beyond. In the distance, across the harbor, the breakwater and the light and the ocean. To his right, a channel for boats and then a pile of rocks and riprap, and the pilings on which Spinnaker’s stood.

  “Good,” Hart said. “Now, go ahead and lie down, Mason.”

  There was no hope but to go for it.

  Mason made as though he was going to lie d
own. Bent over a little, anyway. Then he made his move.

  He bolted ahead, ran for the water as fast as he could. Heard the sheriff behind him yelling, Gillies too, hoped they were decent enough they wouldn’t shoot him in the back in the time it took him to make the end of the wharf.

  They didn’t, and that was a small mercy, but it wasn’t much. Mason made the end of the wharf and dove before he could stop himself, arced out over the water and plunged in, the cold like a thousand knives stealing every last gasp of air from his body, late spring in Deception Cove but the ocean still frigid.

  Now they might shoot him. Mason aimed his body deeper into the water, pulling with his arms and kicking with his legs as hard as he could, trying to put distance between himself and the dock. He’d never been much of a swimmer, and the water was cold and soaking into his jeans, his shoes, and his slicker, weighing him down. But he didn’t have any choice but to keep pushing forward.

  He didn’t hear gunshots behind him, and he wasn’t sure if that meant the sheriff wasn’t shooting at him or if the water around him was muffling the sound. Either way, he couldn’t see how it would be a good idea to poke his head up and check, so he kept going, pulling and kicking as his lungs ached for air and his head began to throb.