Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  He was still too far away for Jess to disarm him. She slowed, and he outright stopped. “Problem?”

  He was good. Good enough, anyway.

  “If we have a problem, Jess, I will put one in your dog,” Pruitt said. “I consider myself a pretty humane person, but you see how I’ve got to keep you motivated.”

  She walked.

  “Don’t hurt the dog,” she said. “I’m going.”

  The dog had been trained, and trained well. First by Burke and then by professionals. But she’d been trained to forge a bond with her owner, and her owner was Jess, and there was no way Lucy was going to just sit there and watch some man she didn’t trust haul Jess away from her.

  Jess and Pruitt were about at the Silverado when Lucy made her move. Pruitt was distracted, fumbling in the bed of the truck for a length of rope, the gun still aimed square at the back of Jess’s head. Pruitt didn’t see Lucy coming, and neither did Jess or she’d have called the dog off, but by the time she saw Lucy, it was too late to matter.

  The dog let out a growl, loud and vicious, and the next thing Jess knew, Pruitt was staggering backward, Lucy hanging from his arm with her teeth tearing through his jacket, gripping tight to the flesh beneath as he tried to swing around with his other arm, his gun arm, as he tried to aim the pistol and just blast the dog off of him.

  Pruitt screamed, “What the fuck?” and Jess screamed too, wordlessly, knowing how this had to end. She pushed off the truck and tried to get between Pruitt and Lucy, tried to make a play for the gun, but Pruitt saw her coming.

  He swung the pistol around and made solid contact with the side of her head, as hard a hit as she’d ever taken; it knocked her nearly to the ground and sent stars through her vision. He hit her again and shoved her full to the ground, and she couldn’t see much of anything then, couldn’t make herself move. She heard Lucy growling and heard Pruitt swearing, and then the dog hit the ground somewhere not far away from her and she heard the gun roar and heard Lucy yelp, high-pitched and frantic.

  Then Pruitt fired again and Jess didn’t hear Lucy, and she wanted to scream but she couldn’t make her mouth work, her thoughts sluggish and her limbs going some kind of numb. She lay there and heard Pruitt swearing as he set down the gun and examined his wound, as he picked up the length of rope from the bed of his truck and knelt down beside her.

  “Goddamn you,” he said, his mouth close and his breath a cesspool of chewing tobacco and rot. “Goddamn you for making me do that, Jess.”

  Then he bound her arms, and she didn’t struggle, and he lifted her up as though she weighed nothing, dropped her in the bed of the truck. She couldn’t hear Lucy and she didn’t see her anywhere, and she lay in the bed of the truck, knowing that whatever Logger Fetridge aimed to do to her, it wouldn’t amount to anything next to what Pruitt had just done to Lucy.

  In the cab of the truck, Pruitt started the engine, and the Silverado drove slowly out onto the highway.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Levi Cody’s mother was named Linda, and she still lived in Neah Bay. It only took seeing her the once before Mason was sure she hadn’t killed Brock Boyd.

  Linda Cody was a wheelchair user. Her house had a ramp up to the front door.

  “Drunk driver,” she’d told Rengo matter-of-factly when he knocked on her door like a Girl Scout selling cookies, told her how he was a writer doing a story about Bad Boyd and his days playing hockey in the county, said he understood her son had been a teammate.

  Mason had been watching the encounter from across the street, sitting low in the driver’s seat of Rengo’s little Toyota, key in the ignition, foot poised to mash the gas at the first hint of trouble.

  But then Linda Cody had invited Rengo inside, and Rengo had glanced back at the truck and shrugged, kind of helpless, and disappeared after her.

  He related the rest to Mason later, once he’d come out again, excitement in his voice and a scrap of paper in his palm.

  “Said she got a good settlement when the drunk hit her,” Rengo told him. “But it messed up her memory something awful. Never mind how she couldn’t use her legs anymore.”

  Linda Cody’s house was outfitted with grab bars and low tables, not many chairs. The entire kitchen had been redone so she could cook from a seated position. Rengo had sat in her living room in one of the only chairs he could see in the house, while Linda sat across from him in her wheelchair.

  “I have a nurse who comes twice a day,” she told Rengo as they made small talk. “So I’m not entirely alone.”

  He asked when the nurse was due next, and she’d glanced at the clock on the wall and said not for a couple of hours. So Rengo relaxed and sat back in his chair, asked her was she aware that Brock Boyd was dead.

  She nodded; she’d heard something about it. “Wasn’t he supposed to be murdered?”

  “That’s what they’re saying at the sheriff’s detachment,” Rengo told her. “You have any thought as to who’d do something like that?”

  Linda Cody paused before she answered, a hitch in her breath. She was older, Rengo told Mason, but it was hard to tell her exact age. Like, she might be fifty or she might be sixty or she might be seventy, for all he could tell. Her body was thin and it was frail, her wrists all delicate tendons and translucent skin. She was a small woman, he believed, would be barely more than five feet tall standing up.

  “She might have been faking the wheelchair stuff, but I don’t think so,” Rengo told Mason. “And even if she wasn’t, she didn’t look like she’d have the strength to move Boyd even if she had shot him.”

  She didn’t drive either—couldn’t, considering her spinal injury and how it had cost her the use of her legs.

  “I saw that movie where the handicapped guy did it,” Rengo told Mason. “Like, he was faking the whole time and then he walked away clean at the end. But this lady, Linda? She ain’t it.”

  All the same, she’d paused a little before she’d told Rengo how she had no idea who might have killed Boyd. So he asked her did she still harbor a grudge, given what Boyd had done to her son. She closed her eyes and said nothing for a long time, and it was obvious she still hurt pretty bad over the whole situation.

  “That man took my boy, Mr. Rengo,” she said finally, opening her eyes to fix them on his. “He didn’t push Levi, but he brought him to the edge. So if you’re asking if I’m sorry Boyd’s dead, well, I’m not; I won’t ever be. But his being dead won’t ever bring Levi back, and I’m not fool enough to think otherwise.”

  Rengo couldn’t see how she could have done it, even if she’d wanted to. Moreover, he believed her that she wouldn’t have if she could. And so he’d thanked her, and was standing to leave, and that’s when he caught sight of the scrap of paper sticking halfway out of a paperback novel somebody had left on the mantel above the fireplace, far out of Linda Cody’s reach.

  Rengo kind of ambled over to the mantel, glanced at the book and the paper sticking out of it so he could see what it was, and then he looked back around the living room and saw the family snapshots on the wall, and he looked at the scrap of paper again, and eased it as stealthily as he could from the book, folded it up into his palm, and thanked Linda Cody again and got the hell out of her house, lickety-split.

  Mason was dozing in the driver’s seat, trying not to fall asleep but losing a battle with the exhaustion that tugged down on his body like a concrete block. He woke up fast, though, when Rengo came running down Linda Cody’s front ramp, bounding across the road to the truck.

  “It’s the sister,” he told Mason, half breathless, as he hurled himself into the car. “Levi Cody’s sister—it’s got to be her.”

  The scrap of paper in his hand was a ticket, good for one passenger and one vehicle, for the ferry that ran across the strait between Port Angeles and Victoria, Canada. The ticket was dated just before Brock Boyd’s murder. It was made out to a woman named Jana M—

  “Jana Marsh,” Rengo told Mason as he studied the ticket. “She must’ve got married
and given up her last name. But she was Jana Cody when Levi was alive. That’s his younger sister.”

  “You didn’t ask her?” Mason said, gesturing back toward the house. “About her daughter?”

  Rengo shook his head. “I didn’t think of it, Burke. I was too busy trying to get the hell out of there without the old lady seeing how I was stealing the clue.”

  Mason looked over the ticket again. It might be something, or it might be nothing. It certainly wasn’t enough to convince Sheriff Hart to drop the charges against him, go investigate some mystery woman. But, Mason figured, it was worth checking out all the same.

  “I don’t suppose you have a passport,” he said to Rengo, who laughed outright, sharp and incredulous, before he realized Mason was serious.

  “What, so I can fly off to gay Paree for the weekend?” he said. “Nah, Burke, I don’t have a passport. Do you?”

  Mason didn’t have a passport. Odds were he would never have one. There weren’t many countries eager to let men of his pedigree across their borders.

  “No,” he told Rengo. “I don’t.”

  FORTY-SIX

  Jess woke in the back of the truck, and the truck wasn’t moving. Above her was nothing but forest and sky, the faint hint of blue beyond the clouds. She lifted her head and felt groggy and nauseated, her temple throbbing where Pruitt had pistol-whipped her. The rope chafed at her wrists, and her arms were sore from being bent behind her. Her whole body ached, and she supposed it was the bed of the truck that had done it, no creature comforts and what must have been one hell of a rough ride up into the hills.

  She could hear birds singing. Movement, somewhere in the trees, but it was delicate, precise, not the ponderous, thrashing noises human beings made when they ventured out into nature. She shivered. It was colder here; they’d gained some altitude. May was still early spring in the high country of Makah County, and when the sun went down, the temperature might yet dip toward freezing.

  There was no sign of Pruitt. The cab of the Silverado was empty, and he wasn’t anywhere she could see nearby. Behind the bed of the truck, the road dropped down an uneven, precipitous grade into more forest, and Jess had no way of knowing how far they’d come. By the width of the road and its deteriorated condition, she supposed it was a logging spur line, half forgotten and never charted, up the contours of the low mountains south of Deception. There were hundreds of such roads on the Olympic Peninsula, remnants of loggers and miners, now mostly invisible, dying slow deaths as the forest claimed back its ground.

  The truck was parked in a clearing, Jess saw, just wide enough to turn a Silverado around in a five- or maybe eight-point turn. Ahead of the truck, the road continued as a steep trail through mature alder and young pine, impassable by anything wider than an all-terrain vehicle.

  She rested her chin on the rim of the truck bed and looked out at the forest and listened. It was, objectively speaking, a beautiful day.

  Her head ached. For once, it was almost too bright. Her thinking was foggy, and she probably had a concussion, but she remembered the noise Lucy had made when Pruitt shot her, and she leaned over and vomited in the bed of the truck until her stomach was empty and nothing else would come up.

  And then she pushed herself to her feet.

  Pruitt was gone, but he would come back soon, and Jess wanted to kill him for what he’d done to Lucy. Her wrists were tied behind her back and her vision blacked out for a moment or two when she struggled up from her knees to stand in the bed of the truck; she swayed a little bit and had to close her eyes, and she thought she might fall, but she didn’t.

  She looked around again and suspected that Pruitt had parked his truck as far up the trail as he could get it, but he must have needed some smaller vehicle to bring her up the last distance to where Logger Fetridge waited. Carefully, she stepped over the Silverado’s tailgate and down onto the bumper, and then, as her balance shifted, she jumped to the mud rather than fall, landing without grace but unhurt. Pruitt still hadn’t come back.

  She needed to get her wrists untied somehow. She circled the truck, looking for a rusted edge somewhere, some bare metal, some kind of sharpness she could use to cut the rope. But there was nothing on the Silverado that suited her needs, and no jagged rock on the trail or in the margin of the forest that would suffice.

  She was screwed.

  And she was weak. Her vision blacked out again, and she leaned against the side of the truck and waited for the nausea to pass. She needed to free her arms, and she needed to find a weapon, but hell, she could barely stand up on her own, and she was suddenly very thirsty.

  From somewhere in the forest above came the sound of high-revving small motors, at least two of them, and they were coming her way. Jess kept her eyes closed and felt the hint of sun on her face and listened for the sound of the birds in the trees, but the birds were gone.

  * * *

  It was Mason who saw the dog first.

  Shipwreck Point or just a little ways east, just past the parking lot at the beach. She was running along the side of the road toward Deception, half on the macadam and half on the shoulder, her ears flattened back and her gait awkward, hopping on three feet and favoring the fourth.

  “Pull over,” Mason told Rengo, and the kid saw the dog and did as instructed, slowed the truck just behind Lucy, who didn’t look back and didn’t stop running, not even when Mason stepped out of the car and whistled for her.

  “Lucy.”

  At the sound of her name, the dog stiffened. She stopped, at last, and turned around, slow, stared back at Mason with her eyes wide and the whites visible, her right front paw still dangling above the ground. Mason called to her again, took a step forward, but as soon as he moved, the dog spooked and started running again.

  What on earth? Mason thought, starting after her. Where the hell is Jess?

  There was no answer that was a good one, he knew. He jogged down the shoulder toward the dog, and Rengo followed behind in the truck. Every moment they were out here on the highway was a danger, the whole county looking for them and this the most well-traveled road east of Clallam County.

  They’d been trying to get inland when they spotted the dog, to find somewhere east of Makah to hole up and get rest before they drove the truck north to the Canadian line. Mason had heard the border wasn’t fenced or too heavily patrolled; it was a gamble, but he was hoping to get across somehow, somewhere there weren’t eyes on him, work his way back to the coast and the island across the strait, find Jana Marsh in Victoria.

  Truthfully, it wasn’t a plan with a very high probability of success, but Mason couldn’t see what else to do. He needed to keep moving, if only to stay sane. If only to remind himself that he hadn’t killed Bad Boyd, that he wasn’t the cold-blooded murderer this county thought he was.

  Now, though, Mason had other priorities. He caught up to Lucy around thirty yards down the road, the dog half limping, half running along, until he was almost on top of her, at which point she ducked down and cowered, hunched over like a paper clip with her tail between her legs, and Mason could see how she was shaking. There was blood on her paw.

  “The hell happened to you, girl?” he asked her, but his voice only made her shake harder, and he scooped her up, walked back to the truck, and hoisted her into the cab beside Rengo, then climbed in after her.

  “She okay?” Rengo’s eyes were wide, and he looked damn scared himself; the kid loved the dog almost as much as Mason and Jess did. “Where’s she coming from, Burke?”

  Mason held Lucy tight against the seat and picked up her hurt paw. Saw blood from a wound midway up her foreleg, a deep cut but small, something lodged in there tight that Lucy wasn’t about to let him remove.

  She squirmed and whined and licked at his face and her paw, and she settled and shook some more when he released her.

  “I think she’s okay,” Mason told Rengo. “Cut herself somehow. As for where she came from…” He twisted in his seat, glanced back down the highway. “Closes
t thing around here’s the beach.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  They found the Blazer in the parking lot shortly thereafter. Even from a distance, Mason could see something was wrong.

  “Shit,” Rengo said, pulling the Toyota up beside it. “All four tires are flat, Burke.”

  Not just flat but slashed well and good and unfixable, Mason discovered as he circled the Blazer with his hands on his knees. He could feel something cold in the pit of his stomach, some sense of all-encompassing wrong, and it made his knees weak and constricted his breathing.

  Where is Jess?

  “Stay in the truck,” he told Rengo. “Look after the dog.” Then he hurried down the path toward the beach.

  But Jess wasn’t on the beach. The shingle was deserted, about a mile in either direction, just the wind whipping in off the water and further agitating his thoughts.

  Mason ran the beach anyway. Had a nightmarish vision of Jess in the water, rolling facedown somewhere in the violent margin between the surf and shore. He thought she might be dead already, that whoever had found her here had killed her and dumped her body, and he ran west along the tide line as far as he could, until the beach turned to rock and there still wasn’t any sign of her. Then he ran back, past the parking lot and east toward Deception Cove, but she wasn’t anywhere. He was breathing hard when he slowed, and it wasn’t just exertion, and there were tears in his eyes, and it wasn’t just the wind.

  Where are you? he thought, and wanted to scream it. Where the hell are you, Jess?

  * * *

  She was in no shape to fight, and though she hated to run, Jess had no other option.

  The motors were close now, little Japanese engines strapped to dirt bikes or all-terrain vehicles, probably at least one of the latter. Pruitt was armed, and whoever he’d bring with him was bound to be carrying too, and here was Jess, tied up and most likely concussed, no weapon but her wits, and she hardly had those.