Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  She slammed another magazine into her pistol and swung around toward the ship again, and as she did she saw Dougie Bealing rise up with the shotgun from the main deck now, swinging that boomstick he was carrying down toward Burke. There was no time to think; Jess squeezed off as many shots as it took to knock Bealing backward, and as Bealing fell, that big shotgun fired off, and on the dock Burke flinched, and Jess thought, for a heart-stopping moment, he’d been shot.

  But Burke hadn’t been shot. He kept going. Dragged Gillies backward as the last echoes from Jess’s pistol and Bealing’s shotgun faded away. Jess kept the ship covered as she scrambled to the dock, meeting Burke at the threshold between gravel and lumber and helping him pull Gillies to the clearing.

  Gillies was alive, she saw, though he was hurt bad, bleeding through his county jacket through multiple wounds to the chest. Jess helped Burke lay him down, gasping, on the crushed gravel rock of the clearing, and before she could ask, Burke was slipping out of his own coat and tearing his shirt into strips, pressing it into Gillies’s chest to try to staunch the bleeding.

  Jess still wasn’t sure what Burke was doing here, but there was no time to ask questions, not now.

  “I have to call this in,” she told Burke. “I need an ambulance, stat.”

  Burke looked up from tending to Gillies. Met her eyes. “Do it,” he said. “He’s not going to last if you don’t.”

  She started, “But you—”

  “I’ll get out of here before they come,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.”

  She stared into his eyes a beat, mind racing, but she didn’t say anything. And then Gillies gasped again and looked up, and his eyes saw Burke and went wide. “Burke?” he said, weak.

  Jess stared at Gillies. Wondered if Burke had banked on this, on Gillies recognizing him. Wondered what he would do.

  But Burke didn’t react.

  “Just hold on,” he told Gillies. “Hold on, buddy. We’ve got help coming.” He looked up at Jess again. “Call it in,” he said. “Hurry.”

  * * *

  He waited until Jess had called in the shooting. Until she’d put down her radio and set to helping Gillies. Until it seemed as though she had the situation under control.

  Until she’d looked up and met his eyes over Gillies’s prone form, told him softly, “Go,” and he’d understood that whatever she thought of him, whatever she believed he’d done, she wasn’t going to turn him in to the law.

  Then Burke stood. He left Jess with Gillies, but he didn’t run for the trees. Not right away.

  He went back to the dock. Hurried down the length of it toward the wreck at the outer end, and it felt to Burke like crossing the Rubicon. He wanted to be with Jess. He was tired of being without her, tired of the death that had followed him since he’d arrived in this town. He didn’t want to do what he believed must come next, but he’d come here for a reason that he needed to see through.

  Burke reached the end of the dock and climbed the ladder quickly to the deck, where a pistol lay on the steel and a man lay beside it, flat on his back, struggling to breathe and bleeding from a hole in his chest. The man’s hands were pressed to the red blossom on his shirt, and Mason knew he’d be dead within minutes.

  Another man lay dead a few feet away, a big man with a scraggly beard clutching on to a shotgun. Mason looked at the men close and could tell the first man was Jordan, from the description Rengo had given him.

  He knelt beside Jordan. The dying man watched him, expressionless, his hands bloodied.

  “I need to know who killed Brock Boyd,” Mason said softly. “I don’t have much time, and neither do you.”

  Jordan stared up at him and struggled to breathe and said nothing.

  “I know you knew Charlene Todd and I suspect it might have been you that killed her,” Mason said.

  Jordan still didn’t answer, and Mason cast his eyes around the entryway for something he could use. He didn’t want to hurt this man, but he didn’t want to leave here and for this violence to have all been for nothing.

  “You tell me who killed Boyd,” Mason said. “Tell me why he’s dead.”

  Jordan exhaled, shallow and ragged. Wincing at the effort. He blinked and his eyes shifted and he seemed to be seeing Mason clearer. He muttered something and it came out soundless, just spittle and blood flecked on his lips.

  “What’s that you say?” Mason leaned down closer as Jordan tried to find another breath, and it took some time and was obviously painful, but eventually Jordan found it.

  He whispered, just barely loud enough for Mason to hear him, “Broomstick.”

  “Broomstick?” Mason repeated, hoping Jordan would find enough life left inside him to elaborate, but it was too late; the man’s eyes went glassy and still, and he stared up past Mason and said nothing more.

  And Mason waited, but Jordan didn’t move again, or breathe or blink, just lay there in silence with the hint of a smile on his face. Mason could hear sirens on shore now, shouted voices and slamming doors, the rev of engines and the squeal of brakes, and he knew he’d got all he could out of Chris Jordan and it was well past time to leave.

  He pulled himself to his feet and dropped down to the dock, and ran as fast and as quiet as he could to the shore and the junk piles and the safety of the darkness.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Gillies was alive when Jess surrendered him to the ambulance, to the paramedics and the other deputies and the swarms of state patrolmen who’d descended onto the clearing after she’d called back to Deception that she had a deputy shot. He was alive but unconscious and there wasn’t any time to ask would he survive, and Jess knew better than to ask, anyway.

  Chaos overtook the clearing and the wrecked freighter just offshore, but Jess seemed to have no part in it. She was good at the shooting and the gunfire and the violence, but this part, the afterward, was the part she couldn’t handle. This was why they’d kicked her out of the Corps.

  She could feel herself withdraw from the commotion, urgent voices and men in motion, spotlights shining on the hull of the ship, the sound of machines as more vehicles arrived and departed. She crouched against the abandoned fish tote and stared across at the freighter and saw nothing. She could feel herself slipping away to her nightmares.

  And then something crossed her face, warm and wet and slobbery, and Jess blinked and over there disappeared and she was back in the present with Lucy beside her, leaned in close and licking at her like she’d been trained to do, cutting off the nightmares before they could take hold.

  Jess pulled Lucy close, and Lucy obliged her, nuzzled up good and tight and warm and solid, wouldn’t stop licking her face until she couldn’t breathe, until she had to push the dog away for a moment, take a gasp of fresh air.

  “Okay, Luce,” Jess said. “It’s okay, girl. I’m all right.”

  Behind Jess was Sheriff Hart, holding Lucy’s lead and looking down at his deputy and her dog with concern and relief writ all over his face.

  “You’re okay,” he said. “Jess, thank God.”

  She petted Lucy one more time and pushed herself to her feet. Took the dog’s lead from the sheriff and saw how his eyes lingered on her hands, stained with Gillies’s blood and lots of it.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked her.

  She told him, as best she could. Felt the weight of the night pressing into her chest and fought through it, tried to explain. How Jordan had swung his weapon on them. How Gillies had put him down. How Bealing—and his shotgun—had caught them by surprise.

  Through it all, Hart listened, but his eyes stayed on her hands. On Gillies’s blood. When she was finished, he didn’t say anything right away.

  Then he met her eyes again. “You take care of them?” His voice was hard, but his eyes were wet, and Jess could see how the last week was starting to weigh heavily on the sheriff too.

  That’s Makah County. That’s Deception Cove. Even the strongest get broken down eventually.

  “Yeah, Sheri
ff,” she told him. “I put them down.”

  Hart nodded. Looked out at the ship. The dock. “You’re a hell of a deputy,” he said. “If Gillies survives—God willing—it’s thanks to you.”

  Jess hesitated. Heard her partner gasping, whispering Burke’s name.

  “No, Sheriff,” she said. “I didn’t save Gillies. That was Burke.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Rengo was waiting in the shadows on the turnoff to the loggers’ main line. He had his little Toyota truck parked so deep in the forest that Mason wondered if the kid would be able to drive it out again, but before he could say anything, Rengo nodded up the logging road and shook his head, grim.

  “We’re fucked,” he told Mason. “State police boys went up there about an hour back. Whole crew of them, everything four-wheel drive. Guess someone must have told them ’bout my hideout.”

  Mason followed Rengo’s eyes up the main line, and he knew the troopers would have a hell of a time getting into Rengo’s compound even with four-wheel drive, but it didn’t matter. They’d get in there eventually, and that meant there was no going back.

  Rengo was watching him. “I assume you all weren’t setting off fireworks down there,” he said. “So I guess things must’ve got heavy.”

  Mason filled him in. “I asked Jordan who killed Boyd,” he said. “Before he died. Only thing he told me was ‘Broomstick.’ That make any sense to you?”

  Rengo frowned. “I don’t know nobody calls himself Broomstick,” he said. “You sure you heard right?”

  Mason didn’t reply. It was late now, the wind blowing through the trees, bringing a chill from offshore. There was nowhere to go, and Mason was tired of running.

  Beside him, Rengo paced the turnoff from the highway to the main line, glancing up the muddy road every so often as though he expected to see the state troopers come back down already.

  Sooner or later, they’d come.

  “Come on,” he told Rengo. “Get that truck out of the bush and let’s go.”

  Rengo looked at him and then dug in his pocket for the keys. “Where are we going?”

  Mason wasn’t sure yet. “Anywhere but here,” he said.

  They found themselves on Brock Boyd’s property. A few miles east of Deception and at the end of another winding gravel road that Rengo said he’d never been down but he was sure was the right one.

  They left the truck hidden as best they could in the scrub on the shoulder of Boyd’s long driveway. It wasn’t fifteen yards from the front gate that the wind had blown a tree over, crushing the fence inward and creating a nice little hole; Mason clambered over first, Rengo right behind him, and just like that they were on Bad Boyd’s land, and nobody, as far as Mason could tell, was the wiser.

  They pushed back through the forest to rejoin the driveway, the house still not visible down the curving declination. Rengo had dug out an old flashlight from somewhere in his truck, and he gave it to Mason to navigate by its anemic beam while he lit his own way with his cell phone.

  The house must have been nearby, but Rengo tugged Mason’s sleeve before they reached it, gestured into the woods with the light of his phone, and Mason shone his own light and saw that the forest opened up in a space to his right, a two-track trail through the trees, and in the distance, a building that might have been a barn.

  Rengo led the way, and Mason followed. The trail was grown over, but there were signs it had been used, and used heavily, at some point in the past: felled trees lined its margins, mossed over now but with chainsaw marks still visible. Someone had put work into widening the trail, moving rocks to clear space, and where the trail opened up in front of the building, there were still signs of bare earth, mounds of dirt and gravel dug up and abandoned, neglected backhoe attachments and construction diggers. Almost like Boyd or whoever else had been looking for something here, and once they’d found it, left without repairing the land.

  The building was two stories tall, bare wooden siding weathered gray by the elements. It was perhaps fifty feet wide and double that in length, and it looked as though it might collapse at any second. Mason didn’t know why Rengo had brought him here, but when he slowed to glance back toward where Boyd’s house would have been, Rengo pulled his arm again and urged him forward.

  “Come on, Burke,” he said. “You’re going to need to see this.”

  The barn door wasn’t locked, and it swung open limp from its hinges when Rengo pushed it inward. Inside was coal black and smelled of abandonment—must and some insidious organic damp. Something else too, something vague and coppery that lingered in the air but seemed to disappear whenever Mason tried to place it.

  Ahead of him, Rengo aimed his cell phone at the walls of the building, and his light fell on a toggle shift covered in cobwebs. Mason watched the kid push the cobwebs away and try the switch, not believing Boyd would still have power running to this place, but when Rengo flipped the toggle, there came a low hum from somewhere above, and then, slowly, dim light, white and cold, began to illuminate the interior of the barn.

  It took maybe a minute for the lights to warm up enough that Mason could get a sense of what he was looking at, and even after he’d seen it, he still wasn’t sure what it meant, not right away.

  He’d expected a barn, and what he got instead was…an amphitheater? Bench bleachers, constructed crude and low and haphazard, lined two opposite walls of the barn. In between them was an enclosure maybe twenty feet by twenty, fenced in by low chain-link and surfaced with hard-packed dirt. Mason stared, and Rengo studied him, waiting.

  And then Mason wished he had killed Bad Boyd, and he wished he’d done it slow.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  “This is where they done it,” Rengo said, walking Mason deeper into Boyd’s barn as if he was selling the place, showing off the grounds. Mason followed on unwilling legs, his whole body rebelling, urging him to leave, as though he could erase the stain of evil just by turning around and walking out.

  He could see now there were kennels in the back, beyond the fighting pit.

  Mason could sense the ghosts in this space acutely, could hear the clamor of the dogs in their cages and the desperate, terrified violence within the pit, could hear the jeers and epithets and invocations that must have rung down from the bleachers, could smell the piss and shit and blood and human sweat that must have permeated this place on the nights when Boyd’s dogs were fighting.

  The dogs hadn’t fought here in more than three and a half years, as far as Mason knew. They may well have fought yesterday, and his stomach churned just to think of it. He pictured Lucy in a space like this, consumed with fear in the kennels in back, waiting on her turn in the pits.

  Lucy had been a runt. Bait. Her destiny had been as a blood sacrifice for the bigger dogs, the real fighters. Something to be torn apart to teach another dog how to kill. That she’d been saved made Mason grateful, but that didn’t help him now. Not here, where other dogs had suffered as Lucy was meant to. Where living beings had killed each other for a rich man’s pleasure.

  Mason had known Bad Boyd was a dogfighter, but he hadn’t really known, not until tonight. If he had, he suspected he might well have killed Boyd, like they all thought he did, and he wouldn’t have felt guilty in the slightest. Nor would he have run.

  They found nothing of use in the barn. The authorities would have taken anything they could use against Boyd when word of the fighting got out. That explained the unsettled nature of the land in front of the barn; someone must have dug the yard over in search of more evidence. Mason knew they’d have been digging for the dogs who’d fought and lost.

  The bleachers remained, and the pit and the kennels, but there was nothing in the barn to point to Boyd’s ownership. Mason was relieved when he and Rengo stepped outside again, through an empty doorway beside the kennels. He inhaled clean, cold air, gulped it down as though he’d been underwater and drowning, and his heart raced in his chest and his whole body shook.

  “Give me a minute,” he told Re
ngo, and the kid nodded and waited and paced off a few feet to give Mason his privacy. Mason wondered what the kid made of what they’d seen, if he knew how close Lucy had come to dying in some barn just like this one.

  Mason caught his breath back and forced himself to stand square, caught Rengo’s eye and gestured toward Boyd’s house and the ocean. They walked down the trail and away from the barn, and Mason hoped he would never have to return.

  The world seemed to open up when they reached the driveway again, the low canopy of overhanging trees receding and the sky above not the suffocating dark it had been inside the forest. Clouds scudded overhead, propelled by the wind, and beyond them Mason could see the dim light of the moon.

  They walked the remaining distance to Boyd’s house in silence. It wasn’t far. Down a little ways and around a corner, and then the drive opened up in front of a low concrete structure that looked like a bunker but that Mason surmised was the garage. The structure was built into the forest, camouflaged ingeniously in the landscape, as though it had always been here with the rock and the trees and the water—which cascaded against the shoreline somewhere to Mason’s right, far below the edge of an unseen cliff.

  “Let’s hope he turned off the burglar alarm,” Rengo said, feeling around on the ground for a rock. Mason wandered toward the building’s edge, toward the sound of the surf, using the thin beam of his flashlight to keep him from plummeting over the cliff. The house extended north from the garage doors, cantilevered over open space by a series of massive steel beams. From the glint of moonlight on glass, Mason could see how it was almost entirely windows, and he imagined the view from inside must have been astonishing.

  He wondered how a man like Boyd could surround himself with such beauty, could have everything he ever needed or wanted, and still turn to blood sport for his pleasure. It didn’t seem to make sense that a man who could build a house like this—so obviously in concert with the elements that surrounded it—could also own the barn behind it.