Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  The photographs were horrifying. Jess knew that. Charlene Todd’s throat was slashed wide open, and the lighting in Doc Trimble’s autopsy room didn’t conceal any details. Jana Marsh looked like she wanted to be sick.

  “That’s Charlene Todd,” Jess told her. “She lied and told the sheriff a story about how she heard my friend Mason Burke kill Brock Boyd. And then somebody cut her throat.”

  Jana pushed the phone away. This time Jess didn’t press it. “The law thinks Burke killed her,” she said. “Retribution or something. But Burke’s a good man, no matter what your accomplices think. I know Charlene was killed so she wouldn’t change her story, and I know it was someone named Chris Jordan who did it.

  “And I know Jordan did it,” Jess told Jana, “to protect you.”

  Jana Marsh didn’t say anything. She looked back toward the kitchen, the sunlight through the windows. Finally she shook her head.

  “I have a life here,” she said softly. “A husband.” She let out a breath, and then she looked up and met Jess’s eyes, and her gaze was as hard as steel, something fierce and determined. “I’m sorry about your friend. I really am. And I’m sorry about…Charlene.”

  “You can’t get out of this,” Jess said. “It’s too—”

  “You can’t prove anything,” Jana interrupted. “All you have is a wineglass and some half-cocked theories. That’s not nearly enough to sway a judge and jury, and if you think you can guilt me with your pictures into confessing, you’re fooling yourself. Brock Boyd deserved what happened to him. Hell, he deserved more.”

  The posh, put-on affectations were gone. She was Jana Cody now, speaking direct from Makah County.

  Jess let it sit there. Let Jana stew in what she’d said, let her words echo around this big fancy house, this tidy life. There was no appealing to her sympathy, not as it related to Burke or even Charlene Todd. Jess knew she’d played it wrong, trying to key on the other woman’s remorse.

  Remorse wouldn’t turn Jana Marsh; her anger had burned too hot, for too long, to let sympathy cool her. But Jess had one more bullet to fire.

  “Well, I want you to think about something,” she said.

  Jana sighed, impatient, shifted her weight as if to shuffle Jess out the door.

  Jess held up her hand. “No, hear me out,” she said. “This is something you’ll care about.”

  Jana looked at her.

  “Chris Jordan is dead,” Jess told her. She hadn’t talked this part over with Burke and Rengo and Hank Moss.

  “But I know neither Jordan nor that joker he ran with, Bealing, was smart enough to pull off a scheme like this on their own. And I know you wouldn’t trust a couple of no-account hillbillies with a job so big.”

  Jana Marsh said nothing. Her eyes drifted to the pictures on the walls, two beautiful boys. Cherubs, bright and beaming and innocent.

  “A man named Logger Fetridge tried to kill me the other day,” Jess told Jana. “Him and his buddy, a guy called Dax Pruitt. They’re the type I could make for an operation like this one, you know?” She paused. “And the real funny thing is, Logger Fetridge is Chris Jordan’s kin.”

  Jana still didn’t say anything, kept studying the pictures on the wall.

  “Wake up,” Jess told her. “You’re either ahead of this thing or behind it. It won’t be long before we’re hauling in Pruitt and Fetridge on charges that have nothing to do with Bad Boyd or your brother. But how long do you think, Jana, before they start looking to bargain? You think they won’t sell you out to save their own asses? You want to spend the next twenty years watching your boys grow up from behind prison glass, Jana? Is that what you want?”

  The other woman still hadn’t responded. But her attitude shifted, her posture. The defiance that had been there a moment ago was defeated, the confidence gone.

  “Now,” Jess said, pushing forward, “you want to tell me who really killed Brock Boyd? Or you want to wait until someone tries to make you for the whole sorry affair?”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  On the balcony, Boyd put his arm around her. It was cold out, and Jana was shivering, but the wine was working or maybe she was just getting used to the idea that this was the man she would help to kill tonight.

  Maybe it was the balcony, the view, knowing that her brother would have seen something similar, although in daylight and a few miles farther west, before he’d jumped. Maybe it was the feeling that Boyd had pushed Levi there, and appreciation of the irresistible symmetrical possibility of ending Boyd’s life in a similar spot.

  Or maybe it was just how Boyd reached for her and held her, self-assured and without hesitation. He’d always been given what he wanted. He assumed Jana was yet more of the same.

  She sensed movement behind her, and she pulled Boyd closer. He smelled of sandalwood, bourbon, and cigar smoke, of sweat and the dank, mildewed Cobalt; his hands reached for her and slid across her body over her dress. She could sense the hunger in his touch, and the entitlement, which made her hate him more.

  Then she felt Boyd go rigid against her. He’d been touching her, pulling her closer, mumbling something in her ear that was supposed to be seductive. As he tensed, she pulled away from him and knew this was the moment she’d planned for.

  Boyd was looking over her shoulder, and Jana knew that if she turned to follow his gaze she would see the man she’d paid to be here.

  She moved fully away, left Boyd alone on the edge of the balcony as the man with the gun stepped neatly around her, aiming the revolver at Boyd’s head and staying far enough back that Boyd couldn’t make a move against him.

  The dogfighter stood in half shadow, only partway lit from the light inside his house. What she could see of his features betrayed confusion, then anger; never fear. His lip curled and his eyes glinted steel and he looked at the gun and the man holding it, and he seemed to have forgotten she was there.

  “What the fuck is this?” Boyd asked. “Are you trying to fucking rob me?”

  The man with the gun didn’t say anything, but he nodded slightly in Jana’s direction, and Boyd slowly turned to follow. He glared at her, and she could see how he saw her, how she was less than human in his eyes, just a toy to be played with, could imagine his frustration that he would never get the chance.

  “What is this?” he asked her. “What the fuck?”

  She exhaled, knowing this was the moment she would replay in her head for as long as she lived.

  “Levi Cody,” she said.

  Boyd’s brow furrowed. There was no recognition in his eyes, no epiphany. He couldn’t remember her brother’s name.

  She took a step forward and wanted to hit him. Didn’t.

  “Broomstick, you fucker,” she said.

  Then she nodded to the man with the gun, and the man with the gun pulled the trigger.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Jess helped Jana Marsh concoct a cover story. For her husband and her boys. For the after-school babysitter she called, last minute, in a rush.

  There was an afternoon ferry that Jess wanted to catch. Back across to Port Angeles, then west into Makah County. They would take Jana’s Land Rover, but Jess would be driving.

  She’d listened to Jana’s story. All of it. Watched how Jana had seemed to become lighter in the telling, physically and mentally both. She stood straighter and wore relief on her face after she’d finished, as plainly obvious as her lipstick.

  Jana hadn’t named the men who’d helped her kill Brock Boyd, but she’d agreed to come with Jess. She’d agreed to tell the sheriff her story, and she’d agreed to tell who it was she’d hired to kill Boyd, but only on conditions. She had to know that she’d still be charged, that she wouldn’t ever walk away from this scot-free, but she must’ve known, too, that sooner or later the law was going to catch up to Logger Fetridge and Dax Pruitt, and that she’d be better off telling her story to the sheriff first, before the men had the opportunity to speak out against her.

  Jess figured Sheriff Hart would have his own opinion about J
ana’s stipulations, but she knew that getting the suspect across the border was a good start in and of itself.

  If nothing else, she might free Burke by doing this. And beyond that, nothing else really mattered.

  There was a cafeteria on the ferry, but Jess spent the entire ride on the afterdeck beside Jana Marsh, keeping an eye on the woman in case she decided she’d rather jump off the stern than let Jess take her home to Makah County.

  But Jana didn’t move. She stood stoic at the railing and stared out at the water, and did not say much to Jess as they waited. Jess wondered what she was thinking, whether she knew this was probably the last ferry ride she’d be taking for a while. Whether she even cared, now that Bad Boyd was dead.

  The Land Rover was a nice truck. Leather seats, heated steering wheel, a GPS-based navigational map in the center of the dashboard. It was dark by the time they drove off the ship in Port Angeles. Jess’s stomach growled. She knew Port Angeles pretty well, but she still followed the lines on the map as she drove the SUV away from the ferry terminal toward the state road, headed west.

  There was apparently satellite radio in the Land Rover too, but Jess kept that turned off. She and Jana rode in silence.

  They drove out of Port Angeles on empty highway and passed through Clallam Bay a short time later, and then they were nearing Makah County and the spot where the billboard with Brock Boyd’s face would have been. Jess slowed the Land Rover and peered into the trees at the edge of the road until she found her turn, a little dirt path cut through the pines to a clearing on the opposite side.

  The Land Rover made short work of the dirt and the bumps; Jess could tell it had been built for the hard stuff, heated steering wheel notwithstanding. In the clearing sat an old wooden gillnetter, all faded paint and rotten wood like everything else in this part of the world.

  The boat was called Esperanza, “hope” in Spanish. Jess couldn’t decide if that was an omen. Certainly the boat itself looked like it had run through its fill of hope, and then some.

  Jess parked the Land Rover and checked her phone, but there was no reception here. She killed the engine and sat and looked out at the boat, and listened through the trees for the sound of cars on the highway, waiting for the sheriff to arrive.

  They didn’t have to wait long. Hart pulled into the clearing in his Makah County Super Duty, parked behind the Land Rover as Jess reached for her door handle.

  “Come on,” she told Jana, and if there was the slightest bit of hesitation before Jana followed, it wasn’t much. She kept her head high as she exited the truck, chin forward and her expression blank.

  The sheriff climbed from his truck and took in the Land Rover. Made a noise in his throat like he was impressed. He came up to meet Jess and Jana at the front of his truck, looked Jana over.

  “You want to tell me what we’re doing out here, Jess?” he asked. “Why you called me all the way out of my jurisdiction with the whole county going to hell?”

  “Sheriff, this is Jana Marsh,” she told Hart. “Maiden name’s Cody.”

  Hart looked at Jana some more.

  “Cody,” he said. “I seem to recall we’ve got a Linda Cody out in Neah Bay. You’re related?”

  “My mother,” Jana said. “Levi Cody was my brother.”

  She said it as though Hart might know who he was, and from the look on his face, Hart didn’t, and it was how Jana’d said it that made Jess feel rotten.

  “Sheriff,” she said, “Jana’s got a story to tell you. And she’ll come back to Makah County and confess to her role in Brock Boyd’s murder, but I told her you’d listen to her first.”

  Hart looked from Jana to Jess and back again. His eyes goggled.

  “She?” he said to Jess. Then, to Jana: “You’re going to tell me, once and for all, how it was Bad Boyd was murdered?”

  Jana barely tilted her head: Yes.

  “Well, heck,” Hart said. “If that’s the case, then sure; I’d be glad to listen to your story, Mrs. Marsh.”

  FIFTY-NINE

  “I want immunity,” Jana said. “I’ll give you as much as I can on the men who killed Bad Boyd, but I don’t want to go to jail.”

  Hart snorted. “You’re not getting immunity,” he said.

  They’d reconvened in Hart’s county truck. Hart at the wheel, Jana riding shotgun. Jess perched on the middle seat in the back, listening to the conversation. Trying to keep from wondering about Burke.

  “You set up Boyd to be killed, and you’ll have to do your time for it,” Hart said. “But I’d be willing to go to bat for you with the prosecutor if you can give me the names of the men who pulled the trigger.”

  Jana didn’t reply. Hart met Jess’s eyes in the rearview.

  “That’s all I can offer you, Mrs. Marsh,” Hart said. “But whether or not you want to help me, you’ve still got to know you can’t walk away from this now.”

  Jana sat stone-still for a minute or two, and Jess wondered what was going through her head, whether she regretted letting Jess bring her back here, whether she’d always kind of known it was going to end this way.

  Then Jana cleared her throat. “That’s fine,” she said. And before Hart could say anything else, she told him in a clear, calm voice how she’d come to find the men who would murder Brock Boyd for her.

  * * *

  She’d been waiting in the pick-up line outside her sons’ school when she learned how Boyd was to be released from prison, how he planned to return to Makah County, to the house where the dogs had been made to fight, the house that looked out over the water. The article was small, two or three paragraphs, but Jana read it maybe fifty times, sitting behind the steering wheel of that Land Rover, oblivious to the children who’d piled into her car, to the horns blaring outside, behind her.

  She tried to keep her anger hidden. From her husband, her children. From her new friends in Victoria, who knew her only as another mom, an American transplant, a reliable carpool with a handsome husband and a beautiful home, a weakness for Italian reds. She took pains not to mention her brother’s name around them, lest her eyes or the tremor in her voice betray how she still grieved. How the anger burned in her, a fire that seemed only to grow with time.

  She went back to Deception Cove intent on killing Boyd herself. Rode the ferry over from Canada on the pretense that she was visiting her mother, and spent her time instead looking for Boyd.

  He was easy to find. That gaudy truck, and the crowd that seemed to follow him everywhere. He stopped her dead-cold, the first time she saw him: tall and rugged and lean, those sharp, cruel eyes, the mocking smile.

  She hung back from Boyd, always out of his line of sight. Always a few steps away from the athlete and his entourage, always hidden in a doorway, behind someone’s parked car. She didn’t know how she would kill him, didn’t own a weapon, but she knew she had to do it.

  After she’d followed him around for a few days, she drove back to Port Angeles. Bought a ten-inch carving knife from the Super K, paid cash. Then she drove back to Deception Cove, got drunk at the Cobalt, and waited for Boyd.

  * * *

  “So that’s what I did,” Jana told Jess and the sheriff. “I got a booth in the corner, and I drank until all I could see was my brother’s face in the bottom of the glass. And Boyd came in like he always did, got drunk and raised hell like he owned the place, and when he was good and shit-faced, he left to drive home, and I paid my tab and I followed him out.”

  “Boyd was shot,” Hart replied. “You said you didn’t have a gun.”

  Jana said, “I’m getting to that, Sheriff.” And then she told him how she’d followed Boyd to the parking lot, out to that Cadillac truck. How she’d slipped the knife out as she approached him, nobody else around. How she’d hoped he would turn around, see her, look into her eyes.

  How she’d hoped he would recognize her, but he didn’t.

  He never turned around.

  “I couldn’t do it,” Jana said. “He was bigger than I’d expected he’d
be, up close like that. Stronger. I knew there was a chance I wouldn’t actually kill him, not with that knife. And I wanted to be sure, when I did it.”

  “So you let him go,” Hart said.

  Jana nodded. “I let him go,” she said. “Boyd never even knew I was there.”

  * * *

  She wound up inside the Cobalt again. Couldn’t remember walking back through the door, couldn’t remember much more than the back of Boyd’s head and his brake lights, disappearing into the night.

  It was Dax Pruitt who found her. Pruitt, who ambled up to the bar beside her, three fingers raised to the bartender, another round. Who met her eyes in the mirror behind the bar and then kept looking at her, even after she turned back to her whiskey.

  She ignored him, knowing he was waiting for her to look up again, knowing he had some stupid line he was itching to try, hating to give him the satisfaction.

  Wishing he would just leave her alone with the knowledge that she could have killed Boyd, but she didn’t even try.

  “Say,” he said finally, after he’d figured out that she wasn’t aching for eye contact, “aren’t you Jana Cody?”

  She might have lied to him, or she might have just told him to go ahead and fuck off, but she didn’t do either; she looked up, slow, and met his eyes in the mirror.

  “Marsh,” she said. “It’s Jana Marsh now.”

  But she was lying. Her passport may have said Marsh, and her driver’s license, but she was a Cody still. Just not a very good one, not tonight. Not with Bad Boyd yet breathing.

  “Well, holy shit,” Pruitt said, holding his hand outstretched. Introducing himself, telling her, in case she didn’t remember, how she’d gone to high school with his youngest brother, how they’d maybe partied all together a couple of times. “What the hell are you doing in a place like this, Jana Marsh?” he asked. “Hell, what are you doing in Deception?”