Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  “You know why we pulled you over?” Jess asked Bealing.

  Bealing didn’t respond. He was shaking, she saw, his hands gripping the wheel tight.

  “Douglas,” Jess said. “Are you hearing me?”

  Still no answer, and Jess straightened, caught Gillies’s eye over top of the hatchback. Figured they’d have to haul Bealing out of the car, administer a sobriety test, no telling what kind of junk he was on.

  Then Bealing spoke. Clumsy and abrupt. “I got nothing to say to you,” he said. “I don’t know nothing about what he done.”

  Jess leaned down again. “What who done, Douglas?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”

  But Bealing just stared straight ahead. “I don’t know anything,” he said again. “Honest, he didn’t tell me he was going to do it, not that.”

  At the far side of the car, Gillies shifted his weight. Straining to hear. Jess kept focused on Bealing, her spidey sense going haywire.

  “Who’re you talking about, Douglas?” she asked. “What’s going on here? You want to step out of the car so we can talk about it?”

  “No.” Bealing was still shaking. “He doesn’t tell me anything,” he said. “Not until it’s done.”

  This was something. This was something, and Jess knew it, but she didn’t know what. And she didn’t know how to get Bealing to tell her.

  “Douglas,” she said. Kept her voice calm. “Why don’t you step out of that car so we can talk this thing through, huh? Get to the bottom of it.”

  She wasn’t aware of the pickup truck until it had pulled up beside her, in the eastbound lane, sandwiching her a little too close for comfort between the Chevette and its passenger door.

  “Problem, Deputies?”

  Jess straightened and turned, found the passenger-side window open on a Chevy Silverado, the face of Dax Pruitt leaning across and looking out at her, polite and nonthreatening, everything normal.

  Jess knew Pruitt, by sight and reputation. Older than Burke, pushing middle age, he might have been handsome, if he’d just cut his hair, shave away that awful goatee, put on a clean shirt every once in a while. Simple stuff, cosmetic changes.

  But there was nothing cosmetic that could chase the hunger from his eyes. The seedy look of desperation that spoke to how he’d mortgaged his principles, a long time running, how there wasn’t much anymore he wouldn’t do for a dollar. Nothing you could buy in a store would hide that.

  Pruitt wasn’t a bad man, not as Jess had heard it. But he wasn’t a particularly good man either.

  “Just a routine traffic stop, Dax,” she told him. “Nothing to concern yourself about.”

  Pruitt leaned farther, looked past her to the mustard Chevette. “That Dougie Bealing over there?” he called. “How’re you doing, Dougie? These deputies treating you okay?”

  Bealing didn’t turn to Pruitt. He continued to stare straight ahead and muttered something that might have been a yes or it might not.

  “You’re obstructing traffic, Dax,” Jess told Pruitt. “We’ve got this under control. Move along.”

  But Pruitt didn’t move. “You know Dougie, don’t you, Deputy?” he asked Jess. “Little slow, if you know what I mean. I’ll just hang around with you, make sure he’s all right. Sometimes it helps if he knows he’s got a friend waiting on him.”

  “That’s really not necessary—” Jess began, but Pruitt looked past her again and called out to Bealing.

  “I’m right here, Dougie,” he said. “Everything’s fine. I’m not leaving until these deputies are gone.”

  He shifted the Silverado into gear. Hit his blinkers and rolled forward, pulled onto the shoulder in front of the Chevette.

  Jess watched him park. Looked over at Gillies again, who shrugged.

  “Shit,” Jess said. She leaned down to peer through the Chevette’s window again. Dougie Bealing was watching the Silverado. She said, “Dougie,” and he flinched.

  “Just give me my ticket,” he whispered. “I got nothing to say to you.”

  This was a lie. Jess knew it, and Gillies knew it, and even Dax Pruitt would have known it had he heard Bealing say it. But Jess knew there was no way she’d get Bealing to reverse his course, not with Pruitt in that Silverado filling up Dougie Bealing’s windshield.

  She wrote her phone number in her notepad. Reached inside the Chevette and laid it on Bealing’s dash.

  “I’m going to let you off with a warning,” she told him. “You want to talk, now you know where to find me.”

  Bealing didn’t answer. Didn’t even look at the paper. Jess waited there another beat or two, trying to compute in her head whether anything Dougie Bealing had told her gave them cause to hold him, bring him in, search the car, anything. But she couldn’t see a way in, not that would hold up in court. And she could tell that whatever she tried, Dax Pruitt would be ready to fight her the whole way.

  Reluctantly, she straightened. Tapped the hood of the Chevette and glanced once more to the Silverado parked ahead, Pruitt watching her in his side-view mirror, their eyes meeting just once, for an instant.

  “Okay, Dougie,” Jess said, motioning Gillies back toward the cruiser. “I guess we’ll be seeing you.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  “The way I see it, we’ve got a few possibilities,” Mason told Rengo.

  They’d holed up back at Rengo’s compound, though for how much longer, Mason couldn’t be sure. He’d seen the state police contingent on his venture into town to find Charlene Todd, and now that Charlene was dead, Mason couldn’t imagine there were many folks left in Makah or the neighboring counties who weren’t aware of what was happening—or, for that matter, of his association with one Christopher Rengo.

  Mason knew the state police, sooner or later, were going to find their way up the spur line that led into the compound. And if Mason was here when they did, there was no way either man was leaving in anything other than handcuffs or body bags.

  It didn’t sit right with Mason, not at all, being in opposition to the law once again. He’d imagined those days had passed along with his prison term, that he would live out his life as a model kind of citizen, a man who played by the rules and stayed within the lines.

  Even when he’d fought against Kirby Harwood, he’d done it because the lawman was corrupt and he’d known he and Jess were right.

  Now, though, Mason knew that the men who searched for him believed they were doing good, believed he’d killed Brock Boyd and it was their duty to catch him. He had no issue with these men beyond that they aimed to imprison him, and he wished, fervently, to avoid confrontation.

  He’d wondered, again, if he might not be better off turning himself in, putting his faith in the law and avoiding the possibility of further violence. But Mason knew he couldn’t do it.

  If he wanted his name cleared, he would have to do it himself. And he would have to do it in a way that ensured no more innocent people were hurt.

  Rengo drank from a fifth of Wild Turkey. He was trying not to look scared, Mason could tell, but the kid was all of twenty, twenty-two, and if he didn’t show his face soon, he’d be a wanted man, the same as Mason was.

  “So out with it,” Rengo said. “What are we looking at here?”

  Mason replied, “First thing, you go on down the hill and turn yourself in to the state troopers. Tell them you haven’t seen me, and you don’t know where I’d run to.”

  “And what are you doing while I’m giving myself up?” Rengo asked.

  “Charlene Todd,” he told Rengo. “That’s the first thread I could pull. She lied to that sheriff, and someone put her up to it.”

  “And then someone killed her for doing it,” Rengo said.

  “It sure seems that way. I chase down who was leaning on Charlene, I maybe find my way to whoever’s trying to frame me.”

  “And then we’d likely know who killed Boyd. What’s the other option?”

  “The other option is Boyd himself,” Mason said. “Start at the beginning. Jess sai
d there was a woman he was with, sometime before he died. So far, they haven’t been able to find her.”

  “And you think we can? If the law—”

  “The law’s thinking I did it,” Mason said. “They’re not looking too hard at the alternate possibilities.”

  Rengo drank again from his bottle, and was silent, and Mason knew the kid wasn’t fully on board with the idea.

  Hasn’t exactly worked out so far, he thought, you tracking down witnesses and trying to find answers.

  “Look,” Mason said. “Someone killed Brock Boyd, and they had a reason for doing so. I’m not saying I need to find this woman, necessarily. But I would like to know a little more about Boyd, preferably a good reason or two why somebody would kill him. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Rengo set down his bottle. Stood, and on unsteady legs he walked to the door of his trailer and looked out across the litter-strewn compound to the forest beyond. “You keep saying ‘I,’” he said. “Like I don’t have a part in this too.”

  “We talked about your part,” Mason told him. “You go on down to Deception and disavow all knowledge of my whereabouts to the sheriff. Find somewhere else to sleep for a while.”

  Rengo looked out the door and didn’t respond. Mason could see how he gripped the frame of the door, gripped it tight, like he was trying to pull it free from the trailer. “It don’t work,” the kid said finally.

  “What’s that?”

  “What you’re saying. The plan. Me turning myself in.” Rengo turned back to Mason, impatient. “It just don’t work.”

  Mason frowned. “Why not?”

  “Because, Burke, you’re a wanted man, and everyone knows it. And you ain’t been in Makah long enough to know your way around here without getting caught. You think you can track down Charlene Todd’s people without the whole damn county getting wise?”

  Mason said nothing.

  “Secondly, you know jack shit about Bad Boyd,” Rengo said. “What, you’re going to march into the library and look him up on Wikipedia? You ain’t from around here, Burke. You want to stay here and solve this, you’re going to need someone who knows Deception.”

  Mason stared at Rengo for a beat, and Rengo stared back, holding his gaze, courage drawn from the bottle or maybe something more fundamental.

  “I’m not dragging you into this with me,” Mason said. “People are dying, and it isn’t your fight.”

  Rengo didn’t reply right away. When he did, his voice was lower, and his eyes weren’t meeting Burke’s anymore. “You stuck up for me,” he said. “This construction thing? You could have left me alone up here in the woods.”

  He paused.

  “I don’t have any friends either, Burke,” he said. “You’re it. And how I was raised, you don’t let your friends handle the tough shit alone.”

  Mason said nothing. Neither did Rengo. The wind rustled the trees outside the trailer and blew the clouds past overhead.

  “Goddamn it,” Mason said finally. “Just don’t get yourself killed on my account, understand?”

  THIRTY

  The plan was collapsing, and Dax Pruitt could see it happening.

  It was Pruitt who told Logger Fetridge how he’d run across Dougie Bealing on the highway into Deception, parked on the shoulder in that shitbox Chevette with the new deputy, Winslow, leaning in through the driver’s-side window.

  Bealing, who couldn’t be counted on to right weigh down a body. Who sure as hell couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret. Pruitt had taken one look at the man through the passenger window of his own Silverado, seen how Jess Winslow and her partner, Gillies, were perked up and on the hunt, and he’d known he and Fetridge were just about hooped. It had taken all he could muster to get Bealing out of the traffic stop without giving the game away then and there.

  Of course that wasn’t where the trouble had started. The trouble had started, Pruitt and Fetridge both knew, when they’d taken the job from the boss lady, and it had snowballed into something else when Jordan and Bealing couldn’t see to it that Bad Boyd’s body disappeared and never turned up again.

  At least then they’d had Burke, though, to take the fall for the crime.

  No, Dax Pruitt knew that the situation had really, really fucked up at the moment when Chris Jordan had the bright idea to murder Charlene Todd. He’d killed her and told Fetridge proudly what he’d done, as if another murder in Makah County was going to make anyone calmer.

  “Had to do it,” Jordan’d said, protesting when his uncle and Pruitt’d told him what a stupid piece of dead weight he was. “What if she talked, went back on her story?”

  “You slit her fucking throat, Nephew,” Fetridge had replied. “You wanted to kill her, you couldn’t slip her a dose?”

  Jordan’d had no answer to that, couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes, and Pruitt had the sneaking suspicion the younger man had used his knife because he’d wanted to, because in some sick way he’d enjoyed it. It turned Pruitt’s stomach, but it didn’t surprise him. Chris Jordan was a damaged man, and if his mother hadn’t been Floyd Fetridge’s sister, someone might ought to have killed him by now, spared Makah County further pain and embarrassment.

  As it was, Jordan was untouchable, and woe betide anyone who tried to teach him right from wrong. Anyway, Fetridge needed him to keep Dougie Bealing under wraps, being as how the big man hadn’t ever seemed willing to listen to anyone else.

  “Hide him,” the poacher’d told his nephew. “Don’t let him see daylight until the law catches up to Mason Burke.”

  As far as Pruitt was concerned, it was only Jordan’s dumb luck that Mason Burke had stumbled onto Charlene Todd’s body, and that Ernie Saint Louis had then stumbled on to Mason Burke. It meant the law was still focused on the ex-convict from Michigan and wouldn’t be looking too deep into the Charlene Todd situation.

  It meant there was still a way out of this mess, for Fetridge and Pruitt and even Jordan and Bealing. If they all kept their heads down and their mouths shut, and the next few days broke right. It meant they maybe weren’t as fucked as Dax Pruitt had thought.

  Still, Pruitt wasn’t quite ready to breathe easy just yet. Not when he knew what he’d done, and what Logger Fetridge had done, and what had been done in their names. Pruitt knew that kind of violence tended to seek an answer. He couldn’t quite shake the feeling there was a reckoning to come.

  THIRTY-ONE

  She missed him. She missed him more than she’d imagined she could, more than made sense when you considered how little, still, they knew of each other. She missed him regardless, and it ached like a hole in her chest.

  Mason Burke wasn’t a killer anymore. Jess simply couldn’t see how he’d do it, not to Charlene Todd. And she believed he hadn’t killed Brock Boyd either, though in truth, on that count, she couldn’t be as sure.

  He killed before, didn’t he? And didn’t you already prove you’re a piss-poor judge of a man’s character? Wasn’t your husband already the plain proof of that fact?

  You need proof, she thought. Something concrete.

  She missed Burke, anyway. And she wished for the time they’d had before, between Kirby Harwood and Brock Boyd, when she’d imagined, and Burke probably had too, that they could build a life together, peaceful and ordinary.

  She missed that time, and she knew it was gone, maybe forever. And so she searched for distraction and threw herself into her work.

  The home at the address on Dougie Bealing’s driver’s license belonged to his mother, Martha, who swore she hadn’t seen her son in weeks. She told Jess and Gillies he’d been living with a woman on Indian land. But when Jess and Gillies and a tribal officer drove out to the home in question, the woman—her name was Denise—more or less convinced them pretty quick that Dougie Bealing wouldn’t be coming around her place any longer.

  “You see that bastard, you go ahead and shoot him,” she told Jess. “Stole my TV and half my goddamn silverware. Plus I think he was putting his cigarettes out on my cat.” She glare
d at Jess. “On my fucking cat.”

  “You have any idea where he might be now?” Jess asked, already dreading the response.

  Denise shook her head. “None whatsoever,” she said. “But you all had better hope you find him before I do. Otherwise you’ll be digging him out of the ground.”

  Jess knew Tyner Gillies wasn’t especially on board with the goose chase she was leading them on, hunting down Dougie Bealing in hopes he’d have something to tell them that he wasn’t able or willing to say in Dax Pruitt’s presence. But Gillies stayed quiet and played along; if he had any reservations, he was keeping them to himself. And Jess, after that traffic stop, found she was pretty damn curious to hear what Bealing was talking about.

  But Bealing’s record gave no indication of where he might be hiding. The man had served time for a variety of offenses, ranging from assault to animal cruelty to possession with intent, but he’d never stayed in lockup more than a couple of years at a stretch—and he hadn’t been arrested, Jess read in his file, since his last release three years ago.

  Those three years coincided, of course, with the Kirby Harwood era, and though Jess wanted to believe that Bealing had cleaned up his act after his last stint in prison, she figured it was more likely he’d benefited from Harwood’s particular brand of lawlessness.

  She’d returned to her desk at the Deception Cove detachment, was procrastinating by running Bealing’s file on the National Crime Information Center database, when Mitch Derry wandered over to her desk, bent down to where Lucy lay on the floor, and gave her a good belly rub.

  “That’s a good girl,” he told Lucy, the dog rolling onto her side to give Derry better access. Then, to Jess, Derry said, “Boy, it’s hard not to be jealous, huh? Dog gets to pretty well sleep all day while we’re out here busting our humps.”