Now, as Dax Pruitt sat by the fire high up Lone Jack Trail, he could feel the pain in his leg flaring up as it always did when he’d had a long day, and it throbbed in his thigh such that he could visualize the scar, jagged and angry and red, could imagine it glowing hot with implication. And he knew he was doing the right thing being up here with Fetridge.
Pruitt sat by the fire and held on to his rifle and thought about down the bottom of the trail, Deception Cove and the tidewater, and he wondered when the law would finally reach them.
Across the fire, Fetridge set the butt end of his rifle in the dirt and used it to push himself to his feet. His eyes met Pruitt’s through the flames.
“They’re coming,” he told Pruitt, as if he’d read his mind. “But I don’t reckon they’re ready for the surprises we’re about to give them when they get here.”
He grinned at Pruitt. Circled the fire and reached down to Pruitt, his palm open. “Come on,” he said. “Got us a few party favors for when they come roaring up that hill.”
Pruitt looked at Fetridge’s hand, dark with ash and dirt. At the gleam in the man’s eye behind it. He hesitated, just a moment, but there was no sense in dawdling. You made your bed, and you slept in it.
He clasped Fetridge’s hand in his own and let the poacher pull him to his feet.
SIXTY-THREE
She didn’t sleep well.
Jess wished she could have spent the night cuddled up with Burke and Lucy, watching something mindless on the TV and making up for the time they’d lost. Better yet, she’d have liked to have joined Sheriff Hart and the other deputies.
It was Sheriff Hart himself who’d forbidden Jess from joining the raid, in the Deception Cove detachment the night previous, after Jana Marsh had called out the name of the Lone Jack mine, where she swore Logger Fetridge and Dax Pruitt were hiding.
“Too dark to go up there tonight,” Hart had told the assembled, Mitch Derry already on the phone with Neah Bay, and the state troopers calling for backup of their own. “We’ll have to get up there first thing tomorrow.”
Then he’d turned to Jess.
“And by ‘we,’ I mean me and my deputies, Jess. Those of them who still carry a badge in good standing.”
She’d stared at him, thinking that what they were planning was just about the only thing in the world she was good at, an early-morning hike through forbidding terrain, a sneak attack on an entrenched enemy position.
“In case you forgot, Sheriff,” she said, “I was a US Marine. This is exactly the kind of stuff I was trained for.”
Hart nodded. “And I’d love to have you, Jess. But if I let you walk into this while you’re still on leave, it’s your career on the line, and mine. Don’t forget how those state boys are involved too.”
“So what?” she said. “I’m better up there in those mountains than anyone else you’ve got, Sheriff, and you know it.”
Hart sucked his teeth, and he looked at her. “Go home,” he told her. “I mean it. You’ve got a real bright future in this county, Jess. Don’t throw it away over a couple of bumpkin outlaws.”
She wanted to fight him, her whole being screaming that this was the showdown, the climax, that she deserved to be here for it, that it just wasn’t fair that she had to sit on the sidelines for the grand finale.
She wanted to tell him about Tyner Gillies and Chris Jordan and Doug Bealing. About the welt on her temple she bore from Dax Pruitt. About how she’d brought in Jana Marsh and how she’d made the connection between her and Jordan and Fetridge.
About how this was her goddamned bust.
But she didn’t, and maybe it was because she knew the sheriff was right, or maybe it was just how Burke touched her arm just then, and Lucy nuzzled up beside her and found the palm of her hand with the top of her head. Jess closed her eyes and forced herself to understand that it didn’t matter who put the handcuffs on Fetridge and Pruitt in the end. She’d proven herself a damn good deputy, and she’d cuff a good many more of these backwoods assholes before her career was through.
She’d exhaled through clenched teeth.
“Fine,” she’d told the sheriff. “But I’m only standing down under protest.”
By dawn, Jess had given up on trying to sleep. She kicked her legs free of the covers and swung her legs over and pulled on yesterday’s jeans as Lucy stirred at the foot of the bed, looked up, sleepy, those ears perked.
She was listening for trouble, Jess knew. Studying Jess, her senses attuned to any sign of a panic attack, any hint of an episode. Waiting to see if she was needed.
She was a good dog, and she cared about Jess deeply.
Stretched out around Lucy, Burke lay asleep, his head tilted back, one arm stretched over his head. He was snoring softly, oblivious to her movement. She wondered what he was dreaming about, if he was content.
She watched him sleep, and she knew he was a good man, and that if he woke up and saw her awake, he would come and hold her and listen to her worries, and never think to burden her by telling her his own.
She didn’t want to be held now, or comforted. It wasn’t yet the time.
Jess walked instead. She slipped out of the motel room and into the parking lot as the daylight came and brought with it fog from out over the strait. To the east, the sun was shining and the world was still by and large bright, but the fog lent a chill and a muteness to the air. As Jess walked across the parking lot, it seemed as though she could be the only person alive in the world.
She walked west on the highway, away from the intersection with Main Street that led down into town, and toward the lights of the ARCO gas station a quarter mile up the road. The fog seemed alive when it touched her, icy fingers trailing the bare skin of her cheeks and her hands, cold as death. The sun was behind her and it barely warmed her, still too weak this early. Jess huddled in her jacket and kept walking, watching her breath chuff out in front of her.
To the right was the ocean and to the left were the hills, and beyond the hills were the low mountains, and somewhere in the mountains were Logger Fetridge and Dax Pruitt, and Sheriff Hart and Mitch Derry and Paul Monk and all of the other actors, the entirety of the cast to which she, too, rightfully belonged, climbing the mountain toward the Lone Jack mine, setting themselves in harm’s way.
She’d left friends to die before.
Afia, her best friend, abandoned in some village in some other mountain valley, abandoned to an agonizing end. Her death Jess had seen; it was the agony she’d missed, days of torture before the insurgents had let Afia walk free, to stagger bloody and maimed back to the OP in which they knew Jess waited.
They’d let Jess see her friend, just a glimpse. Then they’d felled her with sniper fire from some hidden roost. And Jess had been left to cry over the body.
It was when she heard the sound of gunfire wafting down from the mountain that Jess knew she couldn’t stay out of the fight. The sounds were faint but unmissable, muted staccato drifting with the fog. They were gunshots, and many of them, and then something else, deeper: the kind of low rumble that seemed to shift her insides, made her stomach clench tight. An explosion.
She couldn’t just wait down here. Not while men she knew were up top, in the teeth of it. She’d led Tyner Gillies almost to his death, and there was still a chance Gillies could succumb to his wounds. Then she’d pointed more men into trouble, and she’d be damned if she was going to wait down here, warm and comfortable, while they fought.
Jess turned around and walked back to the motel, retracing her steps as the sun rose in her face, causing her to squint and see nothing but silhouettes as she walked. She made the motel and the door to her room, and she unlocked it and slipped inside again, and Burke hadn’t moved, and Lucy lay on the bed with her head between her paws, playing coy while her tail thump-thump-thumped its betrayal.
Jess patted the dog on the head and gave her a belly rub, absent and rushed. She loved the dog, but it was best if Lucy stayed here with Burke. She knew how Burke would
argue and ask her to stay and how he wouldn’t understand—not at first—that she needed to go.
And she knew that if he did understand, he would try to go with her.
She still kept the shotgun she’d bought to scare Kirby Harwood last year, a Remington 870 Express with a twelve-round capacity, and she dug it out slowly from its soft case underneath the bed, and shells too, taking care not to wake Burke or disturb Lucy too much as she filled her pockets with ammunition.
She went to the bathroom and filled a canteen with water from the tap, then came out again and stood at the foot of the bed, cradling the shotgun and regarding Burke and the dog one more time. The dog’s tail wasn’t wagging, and she looked back at Jess concerned, like she knew Jess was planning to do something stupid and she knew, also, there was no way to stop her from doing it.
Jess took the shotgun and went to the door again, glanced at Burke to make sure he was still sleeping, and also just to look at him.
Then she opened the door and set out for the mountain.
SIXTY-FOUR
Mason Burke woke to sirens. Woke, groggy, in an empty bed, sunlight filtering in around the blackout curtain, the dog lying awake by the door. No sign of Jess, and he assumed, first, that she was in the bathroom, but he could hear nothing moving, no water running, and from the way Lucy was watching him as he rubbed his eyes clear of sleep, Mason could tell something had gone wrong.
He’d been afraid of this.
He’d been afraid that the events of the last couple of weeks might have knocked Jess back a step or two, that the whole fiasco with Boyd and then the shoot-out with Jordan and Bealing might have hit her somewhere, dislodged something inside her that she’d been working to stop up. He’d been afraid that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—keep away from this fight, and from the look on the dog’s face and the soft-shell case lying half open, half underneath the bed, Mason knew he’d been right to be afraid.
He just hadn’t been sure what to do about it.
Sirens outside, and lots of them, screaming down the highway one way or the other, and Mason hadn’t lived in Deception Cove very long, but he’d been here long enough to know there was usually only one disaster happening at a time. And that meant the sirens had to do with the sheriff and his apprehension of Logger Fetridge. And that was bad news if Jess was trying to get involved.
Mason swung his legs over the side of the bed and reached for his pants as he pulled on his shirt. At the door, Lucy pushed herself to her feet with a look back at him as if to ask him why the hell he’d made her wait so long.
“I’m sorry, girl,” he told her, lacing his boots. “I should have been more on the ball.”
He didn’t have a vehicle, but Hank Moss did, an old F-100 pickup with a canopy on the back. Hank was awake and in the lobby, and he tossed Mason the keys without complaint or additional questions, except to ask whether Mason needed company, and Mason told him no.
“Plenty of lawmen up the trail already,” he told the motelkeeper. “I just have to see for myself she’s all right.”
More sirens outside as Mason unlocked the truck and helped Lucy inside, an ambulance screaming by headed east on the highway, away from the mountain and Neah Bay, toward Clallam Bay and the trauma center in Port Angeles, where Tyner Gillies still struggled for life. A couple of state patrol cruisers raising hell in the other direction, lights on and engines roaring, blowing past the motel and Mason in the truck as he nosed out of the parking lot to the highway.
None of this was any good.
Mason drove west in the wake of the state patrol cruisers, Lucy sitting rigid in the passenger seat, staring out through the front windshield like she was searching for Jess. Mason watched the road shoulders too, daring to hope, though he knew Jess was likely long gone by now, somewhere off the main highway and climbing up toward the action.
The state cops had the 12 line blocked off at the outlet, two cruisers nose to nose and men with long guns standing guard. A small cluster of bystanders already, pickup trucks and rusted hatchbacks parked along the shoulder up and down from the turnoff, men and women in oilskin jackets and hooded sweatshirts milling about a few paces from the cruisers, talking among themselves and casting suspicious glances at the men with the guns.
A news van too, a reporter and a camerawoman. Likely more of those on the way.
Mason nosed the truck to a halt behind someone’s old Pontiac, twenty or twenty-five yards from the crowd. He took Lucy’s lead and clucked his teeth, and she jumped down from the truck and looked around and immediately set to sniffing, nose to the ground and her ears perked. But Jess wasn’t here, and as far as Mason knew, the dog wasn’t much of a tracker. Not from this distance, anyway.
He recognized faces as he walked up the shoulder to the state patrol blockade, folks he’d seen in Deception, or at the stores in Neah Bay. From the looks on their faces, they recognized him too, but they didn’t speak to him, or even bother to nod. Those who didn’t turn away quickly just glared at him, muttered to each other, wouldn’t even look down to pet Lucy as she sniffed their hands.
The county didn’t like Mason, and he supposed it might never.
But it was Jess’s home and she loved it, and Mason had come to feel an affection for it as well, the rainforest and the ocean and the misty, brooding hills. He could understand why the people here hadn’t cared for him at first, but he’d hoped to change their minds, somehow, prove he was decent. This mess with Brock Boyd had likely washed away his hard work; he knew he’d be starting over from scratch when it ended, if he had the chance to start over at all.
The state patrolmen at the barricade eyed him blankly as he approached. If they recognized him from the manhunt, they didn’t let on.
“Wondering if you fellows saw a woman come up this way,” Mason asked them. “Deputy Winslow, out of Deception Cove. She would have been alone and she would have been armed.”
Neither patrolman changed his expression.
“Hasn’t been up this way,” one of them said. “We’re under orders; nobody in or out without checking with us first.”
The second of them said, “No one named Winslow’s been through here all morning.”
The troopers regarded Mason, looked closer, at Lucy too, like they were starting to wonder who he was and what he was doing here, why he was asking after the deputy.
But before they could say anything more, another ambulance came barreling around a highway curve, PORT ANGELES TRAUMA emblazoned on its flanks, and slammed to a stop beside the blockade and the crowd. The troopers set to work moving people aside, making space for the ambulance to park near their cruisers.
At approximately the same time, Mason became aware of the sound of an engine working hard through the trees, descending the 12 line toward the blockade. Within a few seconds he saw the headlights of a Ford Super Duty pickup appear at the crest of the closest hill, blinkers and police lights flashing, hauling ass down the grade with its big diesel chugging.
Mason stepped back as the truck came near, pulled Lucy away from the cruisers and the blockade and the ambulance. For an instant it looked like the truck wouldn’t slow, like maybe the driver didn’t see the cruisers or he just didn’t care.
The troopers tensed, and the crowd, and the young paramedics inside the ambulance, but at the last moment the driver of the truck hit his brakes and the truck careened to a halt in a cloud of gravel dust, not more than a couple of feet from the doors of the cruisers.
Mason watched as Sheriff Hart hurried out of the driver’s seat, circled the nose of the truck, and pulled the passenger door open.
“Medic,” the sheriff called over his shoulder, as if this were a battle zone, and the paramedics rushed between the cruisers to help Hart as he pulled a young man from the truck.
The young man was bleeding, and he’d been burned too. Hart was bleeding as well, a cut on his forehead leaking a thin river of blood down his face. The paramedics took the young man from the sheriff, shouldered him aside, half carried
and half dragged the victim to the back of the ambulance and a stretcher. As the victim passed by the cruisers, Mason got a good look and saw that it was Paul Monk who was injured, and badly.
The paramedics slammed the doors of the ambulance and it took off, siren wailing as it tried to turn around on the highway amid the mess of onlookers.
Mason called out to Hart. “Sheriff.”
Hart scanned the crowd for a moment before he found Mason, his eyes not quite focused, even when they’d landed on him.
“Sheriff,” Mason called again, and Hart gestured to the troopers that they should let Mason through.
Mason took Lucy and navigated between the cruisers. “You got Jess up there with you?” he asked.
Hart blinked, like it was taking a minute for him to comprehend the question.
“She ducked out of the motel room this morning,” Mason explained. “Took her shotgun. I’m afraid she might have gone up there to try and pitch in.”
Hart still said nothing, just stared at Mason, the look on his face like those of men who’d just come through a riot, who’d been beaten and gassed and somehow barely survived. “She’s not with us,” he said finally. “Not that I saw.”
“Not yet,” Mason said.
Hart stared out at the barricade. At the troopers and the crowd beyond, the crowd staring back in at him and some of them shouting epithets, calling for the sheriff to tell his men to stand down.
Logger Fetridge’s people, or Dax Pruitt’s, or just wilderness people who resented the law. Mason thought of Paul Monk in the back of that ambulance, and he wondered how Hart couldn’t think the whole world was going to hell.
The sheriff looked out at them, his constituents, opened his mouth and worked his jaw like he wanted to find something to say to them. And the crowd stared back and jeered and shouted and shifted, uneasy, and Mason saw the two troopers exchange glances as if they were preparing for trouble.
Lone Jack Trail Page 23