Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  She’d come back to the Cobalt, she remembered, to forget. What she could have done outside to Bad Boyd, and she didn’t. What Boyd had done to her brother, to her family. She’d come back to drink until she couldn’t see straight, until she remembered nothing. Until she didn’t care whether she lived or died.

  Instead, the drink had done the opposite. It had strengthened her memories and strengthened her courage, to do what she’d come to do the next time she saw Boyd. And Jana Cody was drunk enough at that point that it didn’t seem to matter who knew about it; hell, they were all going to find out soon enough anyway. So when Pruitt asked her what she was doing in Deception, she met his eyes in the mirror and didn’t shy away from it.

  “I came here to kill a man,” she told him, and when she spoke the words, she knew there was no going back.

  SIXTY

  “I’d come prepared to go to jail,” Jana told Hart and Jess as they sat in Hart’s truck beside the beached troller Esperanza. “When I came over from Victoria to kill him, I knew that was the end, and I believed I’d be okay with it. I’d have avenged my brother, and there was nothing else I needed to do in this world.”

  Jess said, “Your kids.”

  “My husband,” Jana replied. “They love him, and he loves them. More than anything. I knew they’d be provided for.” She paused, looked out through the windshield, and Jess wondered what she was thinking. “I’d made my peace with it.”

  “But Dax Pruitt and Logger Fetridge convinced you otherwise,” Hart said. “They told you they could kill Boyd and you’d walk away clean.”

  “Twenty thousand dollars,” Jana said. “Boyd would be dead and I’d get what I wanted. And nobody would ever know what we’d done.”

  She twisted in her seat, glanced back at Jess, who sat still in the darkness. “I didn’t know they were going to frame your boyfriend for it,” she said. “That wasn’t part of the plan. Or that they would kill…that woman.”

  No, Jess thought. You just expected you would pay your money and everything would be taken care of. You could just wipe your hands clean and never think about Brock Boyd—or Makah County—again.

  She didn’t say anything, though, and neither did Hart, or Jana for that matter. The time stretched until it was almost tangible, a blanket laid over the top of the truck and enveloping all three who were inside it. And when Hart sighed and shifted, Jess knew that whatever he was about to say would break the spell and remove the blanket, that time would start to turn over again, and there was no way to stop it.

  “I didn’t know about your brother,” Hart said to Jana. “I’m not from Makah County, and where I’m from, we didn’t…” He paused. “The news didn’t make it that far, I suppose.”

  Jana didn’t say anything. She sat still, as she had done all afternoon. Like she was waiting for fate to reward her or punish her.

  “I’m sorry that it happened,” Hart continued. “I’ve known men to do things that way, whether schoolkids or deputies. I know how cruel we can be, and sometimes we don’t recover.”

  Jess had never known Levi Cody, but she remembered the stories. Remembered how a boy from Neah Bay had died by suicide—not the first and certainly not the last. She’d known the nickname that had followed him even after he was gone.

  “I guess what I’m saying is I understand why you did it,” Hart told Jana. “But that doesn’t mean I can just ignore that you did. You understand that, right?”

  Wordless, Jana nodded.

  Hart exhaled. “Okay,” he said. “So how about you tell me something that’ll help me track down Logger Fetridge and Dax Pruitt, and we’ll see if that can’t help your case a little bit.”

  * * *

  Mason had been sitting in that holding cell all day, and he wondered how much longer he would have to sit here. Had Jess made it to Canada, had she found Jana Marsh, had she made it back yet, had she convinced her to talk?

  He wondered if this entire situation was going to land on his head after all.

  Mason had had confidence in the plan when he walked into the Deception Cove detachment that morning. It was a Hail Mary, but he’d liked their odds, knew Jess was sharp and there was a good chance she’d find out something from Jana Marsh that might exonerate him.

  But now?

  Now, pushing twelve hours in this little box, a couple of tray meals of white-bread cheese sandwiches, baby carrots, and milk delivered with indifference by Paul Monk and Mitch Derry, the sound of a clock ticking somewhere, the intermittent squawk of a radio—now Mason had had plenty of time to rethink his decision. He’d had time enough to come up with more than a few reasons why turning himself in was the stupidest thing he’d done in a good long while.

  But there was no changing what he’d done. He would sit here and hope that Jess could get him out of it. Hope that Hart had sense enough to listen to her. Hope, sometime soon, he’d be a free man again.

  The door to the detachment opened, somewhere around the corner and out of sight of Mason’s eyes. He’d been listening to it open and close all day, Monk and Derry ducking in and out, Hart, a couple of the state policemen. The troopers had come into the back here to look at him, studied Mason as if he were an insect pinned inside a display window, some kind of rare curiosity.

  They were young men, and bored, and this case was a change for them. They looked in at Mason and pretended to be brave, kidded each other and jostled and told themselves he didn’t look half as mean as he was supposed to be.

  They spoke about Mason as though he wasn’t there, and Mason ignored them, knowing they were young, as he’d been young too: desperate to prove his manhood, show the world he wasn’t scared.

  But this time when the detachment door opened, it wasn’t the troopers returning for another look-see; it was Sheriff Hart. He carried a sheaf of papers in his hands, and when he looked at Mason, he looked at him thoughtfully. Waited for Mason to meet his eyes before he spoke.

  “What I have here,” he said, brandishing the papers, “is the autopsy report for Charlene Todd.”

  Mason watched Hart and wondered what this was about.

  “Prevailing wisdom in these parts had you a slam dunk for Charlene’s murder,” Hart told him. “But I guess I just wasn’t so sure. So I had Doc Trimble—that’s the county coroner—really key in on the time of death, knowing that Ernie Saint Louis had watched you walk out of Charlene’s room around quarter after eight in the evening.”

  Mason said nothing, though it seemed like Hart was waiting for some sort of reply. Finally Hart cleared his throat. Shuffled the papers.

  “According to the good doctor,” he said, “Charlene Todd had been dead nearly a full day before you walked out of her bedroom. And you don’t seem like the kind of man, Burke, who’d stick around with a body that long.”

  “I figure you’re probably right, Sheriff,” Mason replied.

  “We worked the crime scene pretty hard too,” Hart continued. “Found fingerprints all over the room matching those belonging to a man named Chris Jordan. I believe you might have met him once or twice.”

  Jordan. Mason blinked and saw Jordan dying on the bare-steel deck of the Amy Usen, struggling for his breath and wheezing out the nickname that had sent Jess to Canada.

  He kept his face noncommittal, for the sheriff’s sake.

  “What I’m saying, Mr. Burke, is that I don’t think you killed Charlene Todd after all,” Hart said.

  Mason nodded. “Well, that’s good. Because I don’t think I killed her either.” He studied the sheriff. “But that’s not going to spring me for what happened to Bad Boyd, is it?”

  Hart smiled, thin. “Not by itself,” he said. “Yet.”

  Mason heard the detachment door swing open again. Heard a familiar jangle that he knew must be a dog collar, heard the hurricane fwap as Lucy shook out her ears. And then Lucy came around the corner, Rengo in tow, the dog straining on her leash and her tail going full helicopter as she saw Mason inside the cell. The dog leaped at the bars, straining and
whining, and Mason stood and walked over to her, knelt and let her lick his face and paw at him.

  Then he looked up and saw Jess behind Rengo, and behind her, Paul Monk and Mitch Derry leading a woman who must have been Jana Marsh toward the cells, her hands cuffed behind her back, but her chin high.

  “I guess you talked to Jess already,” Mason said.

  Hart was already reaching for a key ring on his belt. “I guess I did,” he replied. “And it seems to me she had a productive little vacation.”

  He unlocked the cell door, slid it open. Lucy was halfway inside before the door hit the wall. Rengo released the leash, and the dog bolted forward, jumped into Mason’s arms and attacked him with slobbery kisses. Mason withstood the barrage, scratched Lucy plenty behind the ears, until finally the dog had calmed somewhat, and then he stood again and walked to the door, where Hart waited.

  “No hard feelings, I hope,” Hart said.

  “None,” Mason replied. “I’d have arrested me too, Sheriff.”

  “Good,” Hart said. “Then come on out of there already. We’ll be needing your cell.”

  The sheriff stepped aside so that Mason could exit, and Mason led the dog out just as Derry and Monk shepherded Jana Marsh inside in his place. Their eyes met briefly, Mason’s and Jana’s, and in the killer’s eyes Mason saw nothing resembling remorse, saw acceptance of a kind he’d witnessed only rarely among the men he’d known inside, a kind of peace he’d never seen staring back at him in a mirror.

  Then Jana Marsh was inside the cell and the sheriff was locking the door, and Mason was following Lucy toward where Jess waited, leaning against the wall in the hallway and watching him come near.

  “You must be a hell of a cop,” he told her. “And boy am I glad for it.”

  Jess smiled, but there was something behind it. “You did all the thinking,” she said as the dog in between them scrambled for attention of her own. “I just put the pieces together.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  But of course it wasn’t over yet.

  Burke was free to walk out of the detachment with his one hand in Jess’s and his other holding Lucy’s lead. By rights they could have turned toward the harbor and walked down to Joe Clifford’s boat and spent the rest of their lives making love on the water, or they could have walked up the hill to Hank Moss’s motel and done the same thing between the sheets of her bed.

  And Jess wanted to do it.

  But it wasn’t ever going to be that easy.

  There was still violence out there in Makah County. The men whom Jana Marsh had hired to kill Bad Boyd still lurked somewhere, at large, and neither Aaron Hart nor the state troopers had had any luck tracking them down.

  “We started looking for Pruitt as soon as Burke told us what he’d done to you,” Hart told Jess, with a helping of side-eye to tell her he wasn’t entirely pleased that she hadn’t reported the attempted kidnapping herself. “Best we can tell, though, Dax has flown the coop. His trailer’s deserted, and his truck’s missing too. Ditto for Logger Fetridge.”

  Jess was no longer a deputy; at least temporarily. Hart still had her badge and her gun, pending the investigation into the shooting deaths of Chris Jordan and Doug Bealing. But Hart still needed her help. She’d been up the mountains with Pruitt about farther than anyone, after all, and the sheriff was hoping she could point the way back.

  They stood at a table in the center of the detachment, Jess and Sheriff Hart and Mason Burke and Lucy, Chris Rengo and Paul Monk and Mitch Derry and a couple of the troopers crowded in besides. On the table in front of them was a topographical map, Makah County, and Jess pointed to Shipwreck Point and told them how Pruitt had ambushed her there. Burke traced a line from the bridge where he’d found her, up Iron Creek, and into the low mountains.

  “She came walking down from here,” he told the sheriff. “So wherever we’re looking, it ought to be close.”

  Hart pointed to a thin line on the map, winding south from the highway in line with the topography of the land.

  “Pruitt likely took you up the number 12 line,” the sheriff told Jess. “If it was Iron Creek you hiked down. You think?”

  Jess didn’t remember the ride, but she knew the 12 line well enough. “That road branches off pretty quick,” she said. “Used to be about eight or nine spur trails running off the first five or so miles, logging tracks and mining runs. All of them abandoned now.”

  “So we figure they’re holed up at the gnarly end of one of those trails,” Hart said. “Now we’ve just got to figure out which one.”

  Easier said than done, Jess thought. The whole southern half of the county extended into those low mountains, and it was, all of it, crisscrossed with four-wheeler trails and abandoned roads, old timber camps and mine shafts and hermit emplacements, hundreds of miles and none of it well charted. If Fetridge and Pruitt were up there, Jess knew, they could be looking for months.

  Paul Monk said, “Helicopter?”

  But Hart shook his head. “Too much ground to cover,” he said. “Too much of a goose chase. We don’t have the budget for a full-scale air assault, not if we don’t know where they’re hiding.”

  The room went silent. Men looked at each other. Jess caught Burke’s eye, then quickly looked away. Not before she’d felt the spark, though, that bolt of painful electricity that reminded her how good they’d had it, and what they’d risked losing.

  She could feel the heat rise in her face, and she hoped Burke and the other men weren’t looking at her. Wished someone would say something, anything.

  And then Jana Marsh spoke up from the holding cells.

  “What’s that you say, Mrs. Marsh?” Hart called.

  A pause, and then Jana spoke up, louder.

  “I said, Sheriff,” her voice piercing the stillness of the detachment, “that if you’re looking for Dax Pruitt and Logger Fetridge, you ought to try Lone Jack Trail.”

  SIXTY-TWO

  Pruitt could sense the law coming. Still far down the mountain but climbing, steady and unrelenting, even as the light died above and the first stars began to show in the clear, moonless sky. A quiet night, and peaceful—it would have been almost pleasant were it not for the sense of foreboding that had settled over the camp.

  The law was coming, and with it, the reckoning. Pruitt clutched his rifle tight, and listened and waited.

  Fetridge had a fire going, at the mouth of the mine shaft. Apparently the old timber thief felt secure enough this far up the mountain to show an open flame to the world, and who could blame him? The county was vast and the sheriff’s resources small. If anyone chanced upon them, it would be everyone’s bad luck.

  Fetridge was armed too; he kept a stockpile of weaponry in the old mine, long guns and small, and a mountain of ammunition. Pruitt wondered if his friend had always known this was coming, if he, perhaps, welcomed it. Certainly Fetridge didn’t look scared as he contemplated the fire, slowly cleaning his rifle. He’d catch Pruitt looking now and then, flash him a smile, his eyes a maniac-wild in the glow of the flames.

  “Just like old times,” he told Pruitt. “Just you and me and the mountain.”

  Old times.

  The old times, Pruitt figured, were why he was here. Why he felt he owed something to Logger Fetridge he could never repay. Why he sat by the fire on this mountain instead of running to North Dakota, something better. Why he’d tried to kidnap Jess Winslow.

  Old times, and the debt he’d accrued.

  It had been one of Fetridge’s timber-falling operations, years ago, dead-of-night stuff, outside the bounds of the law. Fetridge tended to operate alone when he poached, but sometimes he needed a hand. He asked Pruitt one night at the Cobalt if he needed a little cash and didn’t mind getting dirty.

  Pruitt had never minded getting dirty, and there wasn’t a soul in Deception Cove who couldn’t use a little more money. He agreed, and they met up later that night on some forestry road in the foothills, their trucks parked nose to nose outside a padlocked gate.

/>   Pruitt never was really sure just whose timber Logger Fetridge had decided to poach that night, only that his friend seemed damned determined that it must be these particular trees, on this lot. He clipped the chain with a pair of strong bolt cutters, swung the gate open, and nosed his truck through, Pruitt riding shotgun, and they followed a rocky two-track along the contour of the land for maybe ten minutes, until they stopped, deep in the bush.

  It was Pruitt’s mistake, how it happened. He’d never felled trees before, and he wandered into the fall line, nearly got himself crushed when Fetridge made the cut, sent a beautiful old-growth cedar tumbling down almost on top of him.

  He dived out of the way, but a branch knocked him down, pinned him to the earth, shattering his leg pretty bad in two spots, and left him howling and moaning and unable to move.

  And it was about then that they heard the shotgun blast, somewhere not too distant, and Pruitt could remember how Fetridge had looked stricken as his gaze shifted between Pruitt on the forest floor and the direction of the blast, and Pruitt could see how his friend was calculating, whether it didn’t make more sense to just bail, save his own skin and leave Pruitt for the proverbial wolves.

  Any man might have done it. Pruitt couldn’t have even blamed him.

  But Fetridge hadn’t bailed. He stayed and turned the chainsaw on the branch that pinned Pruitt, worked feverishly to free him as the shotgun boomed again from the dark, and men’s voices neared, shouting threats and warnings and punctuating every declaration with more buckshot.

  Fetridge had stayed, and they’d fled from those woods together, Fetridge half carrying Pruitt to his truck, speeding them back down that two-track to the forestry road, the shotgun shooting off one more time behind them, a farewell and a final warning.

  Pruitt had driven his own truck to the health center in Neah Bay, screaming in pain the entire twenty miles. And he and Logger Fetridge had never really talked about the mishap, except in that Pruitt believed Fetridge knew he could ask Pruitt for anything, that loyalty had been tested and found true on one side, and that one day it would come to Pruitt to return the favor.