Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  “Broomstick,” Rengo said again. He’d been smiling, proud of his own cleverness, but that smile had faded. “Only played one year in Makah.”

  Rengo poured himself a drink. A healthy pour. “Then he threw himself off a cliff,” he said.

  Rengo didn’t know exactly how it happened.

  “Not really a sports fan,” he told Mason. He tried the scotch, tentative, grimaced as it went down. “But I guess I heard the story once or twice.”

  The Cody family had moved to Neah Bay, Rengo remembered, from somewhere over the mountains. Wenatchee or Spokane, the eastern part of the state. His dad had been a white-collar guy, insurance or accountant, something at a desk. His mom had been a schoolteacher and, as far as Rengo knew, might still be.

  “They split up, after Broomstick took his leap,” Rengo said. “Dad moved away, mom stuck around. Nobody was ever really sure why.”

  Levi Cody was a hockey player, the legend went, and a good one. He’d walked onto the Screaming Eagles tryouts at training camp, made the roster with ease, starting line, defenseman. Meant someone had to clear out to make space, and that someone was Fat Gerald Hemp, who wasn’t much of a hockey player, but who everyone liked.

  Rengo picked up a team picture, an older one. Pointed to a chubby kid in the front row, the only person in the photograph with a smile on his face.

  “The way the story goes is some guys took it personally,” Rengo told Mason. “Like it was Cody’s fault Gerald Hemp was a sack of shit on two skates. They saw it as their responsibility to make life hard for him.”

  Mason was starting to get the picture. “And one of those guys was Brock Boyd.”

  Rengo nodded. “Listen, I never went in for team sports,” he said. “I don’t play well with others. Plus it never rubbed me right, the way some guys would force you to do things. Like if you were new to the team and they didn’t know you.”

  “Hazing.” Mason hadn’t ever been one for sports either, could never afford the equipment or the dues. But he knew well enough how men form communities, how they deal with outsiders and those they believe to be weak.

  “I guess it happens in every sport, with every player,” Rengo said, “and that’s what the coach said when the whole thing came to light. ‘Team building,’ he called it. ‘Boys being boys.’”

  Rengo took another sip of scotch. Winced as he swallowed, and then he met Mason’s eye. “You can probably figure out why they called Cody ‘Broomstick,’” he told Mason. “Came from one of those team-building exercises.”

  Mason said nothing.

  “It was Boyd who took charge of it,” Rengo said. “On a road trip, down somewhere inland. Brought a few other guys and cornered Levi Cody in his hotel room, between games. And Boyd happened to be carrying with him a length of sawed-off broomstick.”

  Mason had known men like Brock Boyd, inside. He’d known men like Levi Cody too. In prison, it was the Boyds of the world who ruled. The Codys, in his experience, never lasted long. You could try to protect them, try to help them out, but you couldn’t try too hard, not while the other men were looking. You risked becoming a Cody yourself, and there wasn’t ever any escaping that. Sooner or later, they’d get you.

  Prison wasn’t exactly like being a teenaged hockey player. But Mason suspected there were more similarities than anyone would care to admit.

  “Word got out,” Rengo said. “Wasn’t long before the whole county knew the whole fucked-up tale. Hockey rink to high school, girls to grown men. I reckon Levi didn’t hear his first name spoke outside his folks’ house the rest of the season. Hell, even his teachers must have known him that way.”

  There’d been moments, early in Mason’s sentence, when he’d wondered if he would wind up like that. One of the broken, shrunken men who lingered on the margins, trying desperately not to be seen. The laughingstocks and worse, bruised and bloodied and black eyed, toothless.

  He’d heard them cry in their bunks at night. He knew what happened when the guards weren’t around. He’d pretended not to notice, not to care.

  He’d pretended not to hear them when they called out for help.

  “He didn’t last the summer,” Rengo said. “That nickname followed him after hockey season ended. Makah’s a small county, and Boyd was the big man in it, and from what I heard, everyone was more or less happy to let Boyd have his way. And that meant Broomstick Cody had to suffer.”

  They died, the broken men. They hanged themselves in their cells or they tried to fight back and were beaten to death.

  “They found him in the water off Cape Flattery,” Rengo said. “Western edge of the county. He’d left a note, explained everything. His folks raised a stink, and some people made noise, but it never really changed anything. Boyd went away and got drafted, made the pros. And they still put his picture on a goddamn billboard at the county line.”

  Sometimes families would ask questions. The warden would catch heat. Sometimes changes were made, symbolic and always temporary. Token gestures—more guards, more supervision. A reporting system in place. Weeks would turn into months, and those changes were scaled back. Life returned to normal. The Boyds of the world chose a new Cody, and you hoped and prayed it wasn’t you. You tried to keep your head down and serve your sentence in silence. You watched as another guy suffered.

  Rengo drained his glass. Set it down, heavy, and looked across the room at Mason. “So that’s the only Broomstick I can think of,” he said. “And I reckon he’d be a hell of a suspect for killing Bad Boyd. Only problem is, Burke, he’s been dead near fifteen years.”

  FORTY-TWO

  After Chris Jordan’s murder, Dax Pruitt saw how the reckoning would have to come to pass.

  Logger Fetridge met Pruitt at his trailer in Deception Cove. As yet neither man had any reason to believe the law suspected their involvement in any of the recent chaos, but that didn’t matter anymore. Not now that Fetridge’s sister’s only child was dead.

  Fetridge looked tired when he showed up at Pruitt’s trailer. The two men sat and drank bourbon and didn’t speak much about what had happened to Jordan and Bealing. Neither could say whether it was that the law had traced Jordan back to the murder of Charlene Todd or it was just stupid blind luck that had led the deputies to the abandoned freighter, but the answer to that question was moot anyhow. Jordan was dead and he was family to Fetridge.

  What Pruitt believed, though he’d never say to his friend, was that Jordan had earned what had come to him, and more of it besides. Logger Fetridge’s nephew was a pervert and a murderer, and though Pruitt’s own hands were far from bloodless, he drew a distinction between the things that he’d done and what Jordan had done to Charlene Todd.

  The man Pruitt and Fetridge had killed had deserved it; he’d made his own bed long ago. Charlene Todd had done nothing more than what Jordan had asked of her.

  But it made no difference. Logic rarely did, not in Makah County when blood relations were involved and grudges had to be settled. And though Dax Pruitt was no kin to Jordan or Bealing, he owed Logger Fetridge and would owe him for the rest of his life. And so there was no question that whatever Fetridge decided, Pruitt would walk beside him, no matter how tangled the road turned from here.

  “It was that bitch cop who done it,” Fetridge told Pruitt. “Winslow. The other one’s as likely to die in the hospital as he is to live.”

  “Winslow.” Pruitt had no quarrel with the young deputy. In fact, he mostly admired her, respected her for having fought for her country and then come back with her demons and still sought to do something right for her hometown. He’d have liked her even more if she’d kept her head down after clearing out Kirby Harwood, if she’d turned down the new sheriff’s offer to sign on as a deputy and instead just focused on, say, wood carving or basket weaving, but she’d sworn the oath, and that made her an adversary to men like Pruitt and Fetridge, no matter how either of them felt about her personally.

  “She’s law, Floyd,” Pruitt told Fetridge. “If you act on this
, there’s bound to be trouble. This, all of it, could come crashing down on us.”

  Pruitt knew there was still a good chance they could skate, on Boyd and the boss lady and everything else. Knew if Mason Burke just turned up and wore the coat Fetridge had cut for him that nobody in the sheriff’s office would ever think to look beyond the ex-con, think to sniff out the grand conspiracy. He knew that once he and Fetridge turned down this next road, there was a fair chance they wouldn’t come back.

  Fetridge knew it too; Pruitt could tell by his eyes. But that didn’t seem to be slowing him down.

  “My sister ain’t stopped crying since she heard the news,” he told Pruitt. “Chris was her only child, Daxon. You want me to tell her I didn’t do what I’m meant to?”

  There was the crux of it, and there was no saying no. In Makah County, you stood up for your kin. You fought for them, to the death if need be.

  “Bring Winslow to the mountain,” Fetridge told Pruitt. “We’ll deal with her up Lone Jack Trail.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Jess could feel them coming back. Helpless, bitter memories. Violent dreams and resignation. Numbness.

  Afia.

  She could feel her mind slipping, all the work she’d put in, the foundation she thought she’d built solid starting to crack beneath her like ice, exposing the dark depths below.

  They’d taken her badge and they’d taken her gun; they’d taken the man she loved, and they’d thrown her entire world into some new kind of chaos, the likes of which she wasn’t equipped to deal with, not even with Lucy beside her and a VA doc waiting in Port Angeles to tell her how to breathe.

  Jess could feel the numbness creeping back in, a numb born of trauma and surrender, of seeing horrible things done to people you loved, so many times and so often that you reached a point where you broke and you just couldn’t feel anymore.

  She might have been happy if she could have just died among other Marines.

  But the Marines didn’t want her, and so she’d come back. Come back to Makah County and Deception Cove and civilization, to her husband’s ghost and Kirby Harwood’s stupid games, to Lucy and Burke and some attempt at a normal life. Jess could feel it all slipping away again.

  She could feel how she had nothing to offer this world but her violence.

  Jess spent a short, sleepless night alone in her motel room, clutching Lucy close to her until the dog groaned and squirmed away to lie in a tight pretzel at the foot of the bed, her eyes on Jess and ears perked for any sign of a flashback. By then the light of dawn was beginning to filter in around the edges of the blackout curtain, and Jess could hear cars and trucks passing periodically on the highway outside, but she stayed in bed, tangled in her sheets and in the thoughts that raced, incessantly, through her mind.

  She went to the beach. It was the same beach that Brock Boyd had washed up onto, but before Boyd, it had always been the beach she’d gone to walk when she needed comfort, or clarity, or just a breath of fresh air. She took the dog, got in the Blazer, and drove west on the highway to Shipwreck Point, parking in the lot where Cable Proudfoot had pointed her to Boyd’s body, and she unclipped Lucy from her leash and followed the dog down to the rough, pebbly shingle, where the tide had gone out and there was nobody else she could see for miles.

  Lucy ran. She dug in the sand, chased driftwood, and ran in great, loping circles as though she’d never been allowed to run before in her life. This wasn’t true, but Jess had been too distracted to give Lucy a proper walk these last few days, and even then, she preferred to keep Lucy on her leash when other people were around.

  Now, here, the dog could run as she pleased, and she did, down the beach onto the damp, dark sand below the tide line, mucking about in the pools left behind, chasing the gulls who stood here and there like sentinels, sending the birds squawking high into the air as she leaped for them, her whole body outstretched and her tongue lolling from her mouth as though she believed she, too, could fly.

  Jess walked above the tide line, amid the rows of drying kelp and the great logs that had broken free of booms out in the strait and washed ashore here. She walked to where Cable Proudfoot had found Bad Boyd’s body, or somewhere close to it. The ocean and the elements had erased any trace that Boyd had lain here, that he’d ever existed.

  If only it were so easy, Jess thought. Because Brock Boyd had existed, and like a stone dropped into water whose ripples endure long after it sinks, he was still wreaking his peculiar havoc on his hometown, and the county unfortunate enough to call him its son.

  Jess stood at the spot where she’d stood over Boyd’s body, looking out over the gray, featureless water of the strait as she considered the sheriff’s hypothesis, that Mason Burke had killed Boyd in the boat basin, then fired up Joe Clifford’s old boat to dump the body out in the strait.

  Jess knew enough about the water from Ty to know it was folly to try to draw any conclusions from where Boyd had washed up. Men who drowned off Deception Cove sometimes appeared on the rocks at Cape Flattery, or farther inland toward Clallam Bay. Sometimes they even turned up in Canada, and sometimes they didn’t turn up at all. There was undoubtedly a science to the way the currents moved a body, but Jess didn’t need any of it. What she did know plain and clear was that Mason Burke wasn’t much of a sailor, and Joe Clifford’s old troller wasn’t much of a boat.

  Burke had hung around Deception Cove even when the whole county wanted him caught. He’d told Ernie Saint Louis about Charlene Todd’s murder. He’d helped Jess save Gillies’s life. He wasn’t behaving like a man who’d killed another, and he’d sworn to Jess he was innocent.

  Burke wasn’t the killer. But she would never convince Hart—or the state police—without proof.

  Lucy came trotting over. She’d worn herself out with the running, and now she panted happily, nuzzled up to Jess and then caught scent of something, put her nose to the ground and tracked it to a pile of dead kelp a few feet away.

  “Come on, girl,” Jess said, clapping her hands. “Let’s get you some water.”

  Lucy came back to her easily, that big panting pit-bull smile on her face, and together they walked back up the beach to where the trees parted at the trail to the parking lot, and Lucy led the way up to the Blazer.

  The tires on the Blazer were flat. All of them. Jess felt something cold and ugly work its way down her spine. She looked around the parking lot, but there were no other vehicles, was no sign of anyone, and she shook her head and looked at the truck again as though it must be some mistake. She walked to the front driver’s-side tire and leaned down and studied it as her brain struggled to process what exactly had happened.

  But this tire had been slashed. Behind her, Lucy growled, and then Jess sensed movement, and she turned and found herself face-to-face with a gun.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Behind the gun was Dax Pruitt.

  It was a pistol, somebody’s take on a 1911, and Pruitt held it like he knew what he was doing. He stood far enough from her that she couldn’t lunge at him, surprise him, not without him putting a hole in her before she got there.

  “Hi, Jess,” he said. “Awfully sorry about your tires.”

  She’d given Hart her service weapon. She owned a shotgun, a Remington 870 Express, but it was back at the motel, locked in Hank Moss’s safe. Wouldn’t do her a lick of good now.

  Lucy stood ten feet behind Pruitt’s right shoulder, her hackles raised and a growl in her throat, low and steady. She shifted her weight slightly, her muscles tensed and taut. Jess knew the dog could sense Pruitt’s intentions, knew it wouldn’t be long before she took it on herself to change them.

  “What’s this about, Dax?” Jess asked, as calm as she could.

  Pruitt glanced at Lucy. There was no fear in his eyes, just acknowledgment. Another threat. He wouldn’t let the dog surprise him. “Logger Fetridge wants to see you,” he told Jess. “Talk about what you done.”

  She supposed she should have known this was coming. “I guess this is abou
t Jordan,” she said. “What happened on that ship. He pulled a gun, Dax. It was simple self-defense—”

  “Logger wants to see you,” Pruitt said again. “You going to come along easy or do we have to get mean with each other?”

  “I’m an officer of the law, Dax,” she said. “You sure you and Logger know what you’re doing?”

  “He knows,” Pruitt said.

  Jess didn’t reply. That settled it; she could see how this was going to go. Lucy would jump at Pruitt, sometime soon and getting sooner. Pruitt would be ready for it, and he would spin and put a bullet in the dog before Jess could stop him. Jess would leap at Pruitt herself, try to protect Lucy, but Pruitt had the handgun and he’d probably get a bullet in her too before she could wrestle the weapon away.

  She could die here on this gravel parking lot beside Lucy or she could take her chances somewhere else with Logger Fetridge.

  “Lucy,” she said. “Look at me, girl. It’s okay. Calm down.”

  Lucy glanced at her, whimpered once, her ears flattened. She shifted her weight and she growled again at Pruitt and took a step toward him.

  “I’ll go with you, Dax,” Jess told Pruitt. “Just don’t hurt the dog.”

  Pruitt snorted. “Won’t have a choice if she jumps me, Jess,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt her, but that dog’s looking at me like I’m lunch.”

  He gestured her away from the Blazer, toward the turnoff from the highway, and now Jess could see where he’d hidden his Silverado, half blocked by the tree line that separated the lot from the highway.

  “Stay there, Lucy,” Jess said, holding up her hand to the dog. “You stay, okay?”

  Lucy whimpered again, her paws tattooing the ground, indecisive and scared. Pruitt held the gun at Jess and motioned for her to walk to the pickup, eyeing the dog from his peripheral with every other step.