Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  Finally Hart glanced back at his truck. “Get in,” he told Mason. “If she’s headed up that mountain, you’d better come too.”

  Mason piled Lucy into the passenger seat and climbed in after. Waited as Hart shifted the truck into gear, pulled a three-point turn, and pointed the vehicle back into the hills. The sheriff stepped on the gas pedal without ceremony or preamble, and the truck chugged forward up the grade, and Hart drove in silence for the first little while, and then when he talked, he told Mason what had happened.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  The outlaws had been ready for them. They’d been waiting. And no number of lawmen—not even Hart’s army—would persuade them to surrender easily.

  “We moved on them at dawn,” Hart told Mason. “Just as I’d planned. Surrounded that Lone Jack mine shaft and hoped they’d be sleeping.”

  The sheriff gunned his engine as the grade outside the truck steepened.

  “But they weren’t sleeping,” he said. “They were waiting for us.”

  They’d booby-trapped the clearing in front of the shaft opening, improvised explosive devices of a style and ingenuity that would make the Taliban proud. Trip wires and punji sticks surrounding the property, fishing line strung at eye level between trees, rusty fishhooks hanging from it at intervals.

  “We managed to duck most of the traps,” Hart said. “The primitive ones, anyway. Once things started to blow up, though, it threw us.”

  Logger Fetridge had turned the Lone Jack shaft into a fortress, and the clearing around it his moat. Mitch Derry had been hit right away, stepped into a bear trap that might have claimed his foot. Derry’s screams drew a mess of state troopers toward him, and that’s about the time either Fetridge or Pruitt threw the first Molotov, a bottle of hooch and a rag and some gas.

  “They opened up with their long guns pretty shortly thereafter,” Hart explained. “Had decent position on us too, entrenched in that shaft.”

  The sheriff had called for patience, knew his men had the outlaws surrounded, outmanned and outgunned, knew if it came to a siege that his side would win, and in the meantime it boiled down to just keeping out of Fetridge’s range, avoiding the booby traps and ducking the shells that whizzed past overhead.

  But the siege didn’t last long. Little by little, Hart and his men had tightened the noose, reclaimed, inch by inch, the ground in front of the mine shaft. The shaft was dug into the mountainside, and he’d sent men above to look down and hurl gas canisters into the hole, aimed to incapacitate the outlaws, coax them out peacefully and without further violence.

  It hadn’t quite worked out that way.

  “Something exploded inside,” Hart told Mason. “Bigger than a Molotov. Those boys must have cooked in there, and they’d left flammables handy. As soon as those gas grenades exploded, the whole shaft turned into a fireball and it blew out toward us.”

  Hart and Mason had reached a clearing now, where the road petered off at the top of a steep grade, and a narrow four-by trail continued higher up the slope. Mason knew this must have been where Dax Pruitt had parked his Silverado and let Jess escape. Here now was a collection of lawmen all wearing the same dazed expression as Hart had.

  The sheriff parked his truck and climbed out, and Mason followed with Lucy, and the sheriff led them to a pair of four-wheelers parked at the foot of the trail, gesturing that Mason should take one and he would take the other.

  Lucy shied away from the machine almost immediately, but there was no way that Mason was leaving her. His machine had a basket in the back and he hoisted her into it, tied her leash to the rail good and tight, and by then Hart had already started his machine and was aiming toward the foot of the trail.

  Mason turned the key in his ignition and followed, shouting to Lucy over the howl of the motor, telling her not to be scared and knowing it was a futile effort. The dog wouldn’t easily forgive him when this was all said and done, but Mason had a suspicion he would need her.

  Jess is out here, girl, he thought. Just bear with me until we find her.

  Lone Jack Trail must have once been a road, but it hadn’t been for decades, and even before, it would have been a rough one. It rose steep and uneven, hemmed in by encroaching forest, and as Mason gunned his engine to keep pace with the sheriff, he was afraid he might tip the four-wheeler, roll it, or maybe just slam into a tree. He knew the dog must be hating her life right now, and he couldn’t blame her, but it took all of his focus just to keep the machine climbing steadily in the sheriff’s wake.

  He could not have guessed how long they followed that trail, but it must have been thirty minutes of climbing flat out. They reached a point where the forest seemed to shrink away and the trees were stunted and it was more and more bare rock and low brush. There were no further lawmen on the trail, coming down or going up, and above the forest the sky was a deep, flawless blue. The sheriff hadn’t finished telling Mason what had happened up at the shaft, and Mason wasn’t sure who was still alive and who wasn’t, if the bad guys were caught or they weren’t.

  Then the trail leveled out some, and ahead of Mason, the sheriff slowed his machine, and Mason pulled in tight behind him and found they’d reached a clearing, a great gouge in the side of the mountain. Beyond the clearing, yawning open and still pouring smoke, was the Lone Jack mine shaft.

  Mason had never been to war or even entered a war zone, but he imagined the clearing in front of the mine shaft more or less fit the description. Charred ground and smoke rising, empty shell casings and mangled machinery, a patrol’s worth of deputies and state troopers moving around the margins with urgency, their heads ducked low and their weapons at the ready.

  “Try and find yourself some cover,” Hart told Mason as the men dismounted. “We’re still not sure if Fetridge and Pruitt are dead yet.”

  They took shelter behind a boulder thirty feet from the cave mouth, and Hart explained the rest, how his men had rushed the entrance to the shaft after the explosion, how they’d found no sign of the outlaws, but then Paul Monk had gotten curious and poked his head into the shaft a little deeper, and someone had thrown out another Molotov and then shot him for good measure.

  Another shoot-out had transpired, this one in tight quarters and near darkness, a hellish confusion on uncertain terrain, punctuated by muzzle flashes and the deafening roar of gunfire at close range.

  “That’s when I decided we’d fall back and wait,” Hart told Mason. “I’ve got four or five men shot or burned or otherwise injured, and I’ll lose double that if we opt to play tag in that mine shaft.

  “We’ll wait them out,” Hart continued. “What I know of that mine, there’s only one entrance or exit. Sooner or later, they’re going to have to try a jailbreak.”

  “And no sign of Jess,” Mason said. He assumed she would come up here to where her friends were, and if she hadn’t made it yet, she would arrive sooner or later.

  “No sign of her,” Hart said, looking back from the boulder and scanning the surrounding forest with concern. “Not yet, anyway.”

  SIXTY-SIX

  Dax Pruitt still half expected to die on this mountain, but he hoped he could taste one more breath of fresh air first, before it all ended.

  He felt like he was suffocating. The air claustrophobic and warm and dark as a tomb, lit only by the weak flashlight Logger Fetridge carried ahead of him. The walls of the shaft seemed to close in around Pruitt, hugging him tight in some smothering death embrace, though sometimes when he reached his arms out, he found nothing beyond his fingertips but stale air. Other times the rock seemed to squeeze at him, intent on crushing the life out of him. And ahead, Fetridge staggered forward and didn’t slow down. There was nothing for Pruitt but to follow, lest he find himself alone in the black.

  Fetridge breathed heavy and his walk was unsteady, and Pruitt suspected his friend had been shot at least once, or maybe more. Pruitt, for his part, was burned and felt broken; he’d been hit by a rock or shrapnel knocked loose by the blast, may well have fractured a r
ib.

  Shot or not, though, Fetridge remained on his feet and kept moving. The poacher swore there was a second way out of this literal hellhole, another path broken through the skin of the earth, a secret escape they could find and be free.

  Pruitt wasn’t sure he believed his friend, suspected Fetridge might have been addled by the concussive effect of the vicious, tight-quarter shoot-out they’d just survived—not to mention the explosion that had nearly killed them both, all of Fetridge’s cook supplies turned to heat and flame.

  They’d sought cover in a secondary shaft dug off the main tunnel, watched the lawmen enter the cave, cautious, drew them in until there were four or five of them sitting plum, silhouetted in the daylight that filtered in from outside, off-balance and blinded as they peered into the darkness.

  At Fetridge’s signal, Pruitt had opened fire, knocked two or three of the men to the ground before Fetridge hurled another Molotov cocktail and hollered at Pruitt to fall back.

  So Pruitt fell back, following his friend through a labyrinth of rusted rail and rotting timber, past the chimney and the still-smoldering remains of the poacher’s lab, breathing fumes that were acrid and toxic and nearly overwhelming, choking and coughing and staggering as they passed.

  They ran. Deeper and deeper into the earth until the voices of the lawmen faded behind them and there was no light but what Fetridge carried, no sound but their breathing and their boots in the rubble.

  Ahead of Pruitt, Fetridge staggered onward, tripping on loose scree and larger cannonball rocks. Pruitt didn’t know how far they’d come, just that they’d taken a tunnel that Fetridge swore was the right one, and as the trail alternately dropped deeper underground or climbed higher, as it narrowed and widened, Pruitt tried not to think about the tons upon tons of rock above his head, about what little it would take to send it all crashing down atop him.

  Fetridge stank of chemicals, and Pruitt knew he must smell fairly awful himself. The poacher was wheezing as he breathed, his feet slipping and his hands scrabbling at the walls to keep himself upright. Pruitt wondered if his friend would die in this cave, and where would that leave him but to die also. He wasn’t sure he could find his way out the way they’d come.

  “Almost there,” Fetridge said, as though reading his thoughts. “Not too much longer to go now, old boy.”

  The trail underneath Pruitt’s feet had started to climb again. The walls tapered in so narrow that he had to turn sideways to slip through, holding his rifle ahead of him and sucking in his belly—afraid for a terrifying instant that he’d wedge himself so tight he could never escape.

  On the other side of the tunnel, Fetridge waited. He grinned at Pruitt as Pruitt squeezed through.

  “Bet you’re glad we been on tight rations lately,” he said, and then he turned and continued down the tunnel before Pruitt could answer. Before he’d even fully freed himself.

  Pruitt squeezed out of the narrows and hurried to follow. Tripped on a boulder and nearly fell flat, pushed himself up and kept going—and then he felt it: a coolness to the air that hadn’t been there before, seconds earlier. It wasn’t much, but it was noticeable in the oven-hot tunnel, and Fetridge’s pace seemed to quicken, and Pruitt’s behind him.

  The air continued to cool and grew fresher, the smell of rain and the forest. Perhaps the tunnel grew lighter too, or maybe that was just Pruitt’s imagination. It didn’t matter. The end was near.

  The end, as it was, was a small shallow cave, an overhang of rock so low it forced Pruitt and Fetridge to their knees to crawl beneath it, but Pruitt didn’t care; he could see again, more than the beam of Fetridge’s weak light, could hear birds in the trees and smell earth and life, and he emerged from the cave and stood tall and stretched, blinking in the sudden sunlight. And he felt, immediately, as though he’d been returned from the dead.

  As though he’d died in that tunnel with those lawmen, walked this tortuous path and been given new life.

  Beside him, Fetridge stood doubled over, clutching at a wound in his stomach that oozed black with blood. The poacher coughed and wiped his mouth and his hand came back bloody too, and Pruitt knew his friend was dying, but Fetridge didn’t seem to care.

  “Told you we’d get out,” the poacher said, and he straightened himself using his rifle as a cane. Surveyed the forest and began to walk again.

  The forest was overgrown and featureless, but there was a narrow trail leading away from the cave, leading down the natural declination of the land, though to where, Pruitt had no idea.

  But Fetridge was following the trail and seemed confident in its direction, so Pruitt shouldered his rifle and followed. He didn’t look back at the cave as he walked; what had happened back there was no part of him now.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  This was where she belonged. And perhaps it was the only place, but she was here now, and there was no point in thinking about anything else.

  The gunfire had stopped. It could have just been that the mountain was baffling it from her, that she’d hiked up the wrong side of a finger ridge that the sounds of the shoot-out couldn’t traverse, but Jess didn’t think so. She could hear sirens somewhere below, and sometimes the sound of cars and trucks on the highway through Deception. Faint, but she could hear them.

  Anyway, the forest seemed to have relaxed now. It was hard to explain, but in Jess’s experience, the land knew when there was violence nearby; the birds stilled and even the wind sometimes seemed to hold its breath, waiting for the anger to subside. Jess could hear birds above her, and the rustle of leaves. The forest had reclaimed its peace.

  Jess was drenched in sweat. She’d climbed up the mountain the way she’d come down, clambering mossy boulders along the path of Iron Creek. Her body wasn’t as broken as when she’d made the descent, but it was harder to climb anyway, even with the twelve gauge as a walking stick.

  The road was blocked off, the 12 line; she’d seen it. Twin state patrol cruisers and twin state patrol troopers, installed to keep out the looky-loos and the innocent. She’d watched ambulances scream past on the highway and the dark, unmarked state patrol trucks with their lights blaring, the few Makah County vehicles that weren’t parked somewhere up the mountain already.

  Jess didn’t know how far up Iron Creek extended, but she aimed to follow it at least to the point where she’d found it the first time. Then she intended to skirt up through the forest where Dax Pruitt had left her in his Silverado, follow the ATV trail to the mine shaft.

  She didn’t know what she would do when she got there, aside from pitch in and try to keep Pruitt and Fetridge from killing her friends. She knew the sheriff would be angry and that he probably wouldn’t give her badge back, but so be it. She wasn’t going to sit idle as more of her friends died.

  The hike was exhausting, and her muscles ached as she climbed, but she didn’t slow except to drink from her canteen and to strain her ears for the sounds of the battle. But the forest was silent, aside from the burble of the river and the birds in the trees and the drone of a helicopter, somewhere high above. Jess hiked up the boulders and gained altitude steadily, and when she stopped to rest, the air was cooler, and raw.

  Time passed. She didn’t know how far she’d come, but then, she’d had no idea how far she’d descended that first go-around. The forest looked familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, the boulders blending into one another. She couldn’t see the summit of the mountain, but she could see a spot high above where the forest gave way to bare rock and alpine terrain, and beyond which the sun traversed the sky.

  Jess climbed, and with purpose. Stopped to catch her breath one more time at the top of a rock formation, set down the shotgun, and dipped her head into the water, a shallow pool at the top of a small waterfall, drenched her head in the bracing cold, ran her fingers through her hair, and straightened again, refreshed, invigorated.

  Damn it, she was almost having fun.

  Then something hit her—hard—a kick to the chest, and a split second later,
Jess heard the shot ring out from somewhere above her. She staggered backward, fell, as the riverbank exploded around her, more shots and whizzing bullets and chipped, razor-sharp rock, as if she’d walked onto a battlefield without knowing.

  She lay back on a slab of rock, and she didn’t feel the pain yet, but she knew, dumbly, that she had to find cover. The shotgun lay beside her, and she reached for it and grabbed it and used it to push herself to her feet, stumbling away from the open ground of the river, toward the relative protection of the rainforest alongside.

  The shots echoed behind her, and Jess couldn’t know if they hit her or not, her adrenaline pumping and her survival instinct not letting her slow. She reached the forest and hurled herself into the trees and ducked low and just stayed there, unmoving, and the gunman or gunmen stopped firing, and the sounds of their shots reverberated down the mountain and then faded away, so that there was only the burble of the river and the drone of that helicopter somewhere that remained.

  It was as though, in that sudden silence, the gunfire hadn’t happened at all. But Jess knew better. First was in how the birds had stopped singing, and the wind seemed to have died.

  Second was in the hole in her chest, steadily staining her T-shirt with blood.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Fetridge had seen the woman first. He and Pruitt had followed the trail from the cave to where it met this creek, trickling down between two finger ridges toward the base of the mountain and the ocean. Fetridge was shot and he was struggling, blood soaking both the front of his jacket and the exit wound in the back; he stopped often to catch his breath and rest his legs, leaning against trees or rock or his rifle, his breathing labored and liquid and sickly.