Lone Jack Trail

by Owen Laukkanen

  But there was no slowing down. They continued on the trail until it reached the creek, and Pruitt could see that if you followed the boulders that studded the cascading water, you could pick a tenuous path down the mountain.

  And that seemed to be Fetridge’s goal, though the poacher slowed even more when the men began their descent. Pruitt watched his friend struggle and saw the futility of the effort, knowing there was no way Fetridge would survive to the bottom, knowing all the same that he owed it to Fetridge to stay beside him until the man dropped.

  And that’s what Pruitt did. He descended ahead of Fetridge, and below every boulder he stopped and waited and let Fetridge lean on him as he made his own drop. And at every boulder they would stop and Fetridge could catch his breath, and at every boulder Fetridge’s breath seemed that much harder to catch, and the bloodstains on his jacket grew larger and darker.

  “There’s money hid down there,” Fetridge told Pruitt, gesturing in a vague way toward the base of the mountain. “The Cody woman’s money, ten thousand dollars.”

  He paused again for breath, and Pruitt waited, and Fetridge grinned at him with teeth stained too, by blood.

  “Stashed it in the spare tire,” he said. “My cousin Thumps’s van.”

  Pruitt worked his jaw and he thought about this, tried to catch his own breath, his thoughts dizzy now from exertion and lack of water and food. He could picture where Thumps King kept his trailer, could picture the old Dodge Caravan beside it. And he could picture the money, Fetridge’s share of the twenty thousand dollars Jana Cody had given so that they would kill Bad Boyd for her, dispose of the body, and keep her name out of it.

  Pruitt could see now how Fetridge aimed to play it. How he hoped to make his getaway when he walked off of this mountain.

  But Pruitt watched his friend struggle and knew there was no hope that he’d ever see that money. “You’ll never make it,” he told Fetridge. “Not in your state. We ought to just set and rest awhile.”

  But Fetridge shook his head. Fixed Pruitt with a stare that seemed to encompass all of what they’d done, the history they’d created and the violence they’d wrought. “That cash ain’t for me, old boy,” he told Pruitt. “It’s yours now.”

  Pruitt looked for an answer and couldn’t find one, and before he could, Fetridge stiffened. Pointed down the chute of the river. “Shit,” he said, his voice raspy. “There’s the law.”

  Pruitt turned, slowly. Weary, wondering if his friend was hallucinating now, not expecting there was anyone at all within a mile of where they stood. But down the mountain, climbing toward them, maybe a hundred feet lower: Jess Winslow. Alone, with a gun.

  Fetridge was already steadying his rifle on the edge of a slab of granite. Muttering under his breath, taking aim at the woman. His finger tensed on the trigger, and then he glanced over at Pruitt. “Well, hell, come on, son,” he said. “Help me cut her down.”

  It didn’t seem right to Pruitt to just shoot the Winslow woman, not without at least giving her warning first, but Fetridge was already drawing a bead on the young deputy, and Pruitt told himself that Jess Winslow was armed and climbing toward them, and that if she’d seen them first she’d have opened fire too, and maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t. Then Fetridge pulled his trigger and there was no time to think anymore; the shot went out and Jess Winslow staggered backward and went down, and Pruitt opened up too, not aiming to kill Jess but keeping his shots close, chasing her out of the open and into the trees somewhere, hoping that would be enough to scare her off and at worst incapacitate her. Let him and Fetridge continue their descent, and maybe they’d make it to Thumps King’s minivan, that ten thousand dollars stashed away.

  But Fetridge had a different plan.

  “That’s the bitch killed my nephew,” he told Pruitt, and in his eyes there was new life and energy. “Let’s get on down there and pay her back for it.”

  SIXTY-NINE

  It was Lucy who first heard the shots.

  She’d been cowering more or less since Mason had untied her from the back of the four-wheeler, dragged her to cover at the edge of the clearing overlooking the Lone Jack mine. She’d curled tight around herself, her back hunched and her spine turned and wrapped in a paper-clip shape, her ears back and her tail tucked, refusing to make eye contact with Mason or anyone else, like she was hoping if she just sat still and waited, all of this would fade away.

  But then she moved—she’d heard something. The dog hated loud noises, from fireworks to slamming doors, tended to duck and cover whenever anyone so much as revved an engine. And she could hear from a distance too, knew instantly when kids from the high school were setting off firecrackers on Shipwreck Point Beach, or the freighters out on the strait were sounding their foghorns.

  Now Mason watched her ears perk, felt her start to shiver beside him again. He stilled his own movements and strained to hear over the drone of the state patrol helicopter high above.

  At first, he heard nothing. Then Lucy flinched again, and the sound reached his ears, distant but unmistakably gunfire, rapid and angry. Mason looked to the sheriff. “You hear that?”

  Hart cocked his head, frowning. “My ears are shot, son,” he told Mason. “Been a day of loud noises. What do you hear?”

  Mason said, “Guns, Sheriff. Someone’s firing off somewhere. Lucy’s getting it too.”

  Hart listened some more. Stuck his head above the rock they were hiding behind, looked in toward the mouth of the mine. “What,” he said, “in there?”

  Mason shook his head. Best he could tell, the sounds were coming from elsewhere. From down the mountain, far away.

  Then the gunfire stopped, though Lucy kept shivering. Mason listened and heard nothing, and tried to figure out what it meant.

  “You’re sure there’s no other way out that cave,” he said.

  “Far as anyone’s ever heard, there’s just the one exit,” Hart replied. “And we’re parked on it. Could be what you’re hearing is something unrelated.”

  There was no way to be sure, but Mason didn’t think so. He stayed behind that boulder and watched Lucy try to curl herself tighter, and he felt restless and urgent and aware of time wasting, as if he was dreaming and late for an obligation, couldn’t find the car keys or the right pair of shoes. He didn’t know Logger Fetridge, but he suspected the man wouldn’t simply just dig in and hide, not knowing what awaited him outside in daylight. If there was another way out of that mine, Mason expected the outlaw would find it.

  And if Fetridge found an exit, then he’d sure as hell take it.

  “Give me a flashlight,” Mason told the sheriff.

  Hart stared at him. “Now, hold up a minute—”

  “You can come if you want, or don’t; that’s your choice,” Mason said. “But Jess is still unaccounted for, and I’m hearing gunfire.”

  “Those outlaws will kill you,” Hart said. “I can’t let you do it.”

  Mason stood. “I’m going, Sheriff,” he said. “You hang back if you want. But if Fetridge and Pruitt made it out of that cave somehow, I need to know about it.”

  Hart studied his face and then looked toward the mine shaft again. Opened his mouth to argue. But then another gun sounded, somewhere far away, a resonant boom that even Hart could hear clearly, that seemed to rumble the earth beneath them.

  Jess’s shotgun.

  Mason stood and was running before the sound had died away, pulling Lucy behind him, the sheriff calling his name. Mason ignored him. He reached the mouth of the mine shaft and didn’t break stride. Pulled the dog into the darkness and kept running.

  SEVENTY

  Jess could hear the men coming. They didn’t exactly make a secret of their approach.

  She was shot bad, but not fatally, she didn’t think. The bullet had caught her high, but it hadn’t hit anything vital. She would never throw a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball, but if she could find her way down the mountain, she would probably live.

  Jess set her back against a
pine tree and wedged herself into the earth so she was looking out from the forest toward the river chute and the rocks, and she listened to the sound of scree kicked down the mountain as the men who’d fired on her made their way toward her.

  Upslope and blocking her view was a huge slab of mountainside completely bare of dirt; it rose at least twenty feet in a sheer, immediate climb, forcing the trees of the forest to skirt around it, away from the river. As it was, it made for decent cover, and Jess stayed beneath it and tried to make out by the sounds of the men how many of them were coming.

  It was Logger Fetridge who poked his head around the side of the face first. Jess had just enough time to recognize him before she pulled the trigger on her shotgun, sent him flying backward into the sunlight and the river. The sound of the shotgun echoed with an intensity that might have brought down the mountain; she braced herself for either landslide or counterattack, but neither was coming.

  Directly ahead of her lay Fetridge, flat on his back now and staring up at the sky, and she could see his chest moving and hear his labored breathing, and she knew he was dying and she didn’t feel remorse.

  According to Jana Marsh, it was Fetridge who’d done it, murdered Brock Boyd with that .38 revolver. He’d pulled the trigger and then he and Dax Pruitt had wrapped up the body in the back of Pruitt’s Silverado, tidied up Boyd’s house as best they were able. They’d taken Jana’s money and told her to go home, which she’d done, and they’d driven off and tried and somehow failed to make Boyd disappear.

  Twenty thousand dollars, Jana’d said.

  Jess thought about the other casualties: Charlene Todd, who’d had her throat cut by Fetridge’s men; Chris Jordan and Dougie Bealing, who’d played their own roles in this tragedy and died for it too. And Tyner Gillies, who still clung to life in that Port Angeles hospital. And who else had been claimed by the violence on this mountain this morning?

  Jana Marsh maintained that she hadn’t killed Bad Boyd, that it was Fetridge and Dax Pruitt who were responsible, but Jess knew that Jana was wrong. Jana’s money had killed Boyd, and the others too, and Boyd may have deserved it, but the others surely didn’t. Maybe not even Logger Fetridge.

  But there was no time for reflection, not now. Jess could hear the second gunman out there somewhere, could sense him in how the birds and the air remained still while pebbles shuffled on dirt above her head. She could sense the man as she’d sensed the insurgents who’d waited to ambush her team on patrols in the Hindu Kush; after a while, you tended to get pretty good at reading the land, picking out what belonged and what didn’t.

  Jess knew this second gunman wouldn’t be so careless as to leave himself open as Logger Fetridge had.

  She pushed herself to her feet—her wound hurt now, a hot poker of fire through her breastbone, but she stifled any complaint—and tried to move as stealthily as she could, back farther into the forest, to where the slope of the mountain outflanked the bare face, where she could pull herself higher using trees and exposed roots and handholds and footholds.

  She heard the man call out her name. “Jess?”

  It was Pruitt; she recognized his voice. She kept her mouth shut and didn’t reveal her position, climbed the slope of the mountain until she’d gained enough ground that she stood level with the lip of the bare face.

  “Jess, I don’t want to hurt you; I swear it,” Pruitt called. “You let me get past you, and I’ll be on my way. We’ll forget we ever saw each other, okay?”

  She couldn’t see Pruitt yet, and she didn’t answer. Didn’t know if the man was telling the truth or trying to game her and didn’t suppose it mattered. He’d tried to kill Lucy, after all, and brought violence on her friends and fellow lawmen farther up the mountain. She wouldn’t let him walk off of this mountain, not without confrontation.

  She edged out from the forest toward the rocky chute of the river path, swinging the shotgun left to right, slowly, in case Pruitt appeared. The forest ended in rocky spill, and she couldn’t see her target; he’d dropped, she surmised, while she’d climbed, and now he must be near the base of the cliff face, where she’d shot Fetridge.

  Jess edged out toward the lip of the face, intending to lean over the side and rain buckshot down on Pruitt from above. But then she slipped, slightly, her boot losing traction in the dirt and the dust, and she nearly bailed out and toppled over the edge, when Pruitt surprised her.

  He poked his head up from the other side of the outcrop, not down below as she’d figured but hiding just alongside it. Jess watched in slow motion as he swung his rifle around. She fought to regain her balance and turn the shotgun on him too.

  Pruitt fired first. Jess fired back. Heard Pruitt cry out and go down, and then she was falling too.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  Mason slowed only when he was sure the sheriff was following. He’d reached about the limit of daylight in the mine shaft, stumbling over the rusted iron rails set into the ground, the remains of tools and fallen timber and the detritus that Logger Fetridge and Dax Pruitt had left behind.

  There was nowhere to go but deeper into the dark, and Mason might have done it alone, though he knew it’d be foolish and futile. Fortunately, Hart was catching up to him, panting, gripping a flashlight in one hand and his rifle in the other.

  “Careful,” he told Mason. “These boys seem to have a fondness for booby traps.”

  The sheriff let Mason lead. Mason let Lucy lead. She may have been scared, but her natural curiosity seemed to win out, and she pulled at the leash at the edge of the flashlight beam, urging the men deeper into the abyss.

  And the mine was abyssal. Beyond a high chimney about a hundred feet in, Mason could sense no light or fresh air, though the narrow-gauge rails on the main shaft continued, and auxiliary shafts cut away in both directions every fifty-odd feet. The air was smoky and acrid and chemical, hazy even in the beam of the sheriff’s light. Mason scanned the ground ahead of him for footprints but saw nothing; the floor of the shaft was loose rock too coarse to keep an imprint of a man’s boot.

  “Where’s Jess?” he asked Lucy, and the dog glanced back at him with those ears on high alert, then scanned the dark beyond the flashlight beam. “Where’s your mom, Luce? Where’s Jess?”

  He’d never know if the dog understood, if she could somehow sense Jess or if it was simply dumb luck that set her and him and the sheriff down the right path. But Lucy came to a particular branch from the main shaft and turned down it without hesitation, and Mason didn’t argue but followed and let her lead, and behind them the sheriff followed too.

  The branch shaft narrowed and dug itself into the earth, and at points Mason felt sure that Lucy had led them to a dead end. But there was always a way forward, the dog nosing through, slipping between the tight confines of rock with a grace the men behind her could never match. At times Mason found himself ducking nearly doubled over; other times he had to turn sideways, make himself as lean and tall as he could, try and inch through the crevices with rock pressing into him, front and behind.

  It was at one of these narrows that Hart fell back. The sheriff was a wider man than Mason and the rock was unyielding, and there was no way the lawman could squeeze through. Mason stopped and looked back, kept the beam of the flashlight out of Hart’s eyes. Heard the sheriff mutter an epithet as he tried, one last time, to force his way through.

  Mason said, “We’ll go back.”

  Hart didn’t answer.

  “We’ve got some idea which way they headed,” Mason said. “If we hurry back, we can try and trace this tunnel aboveground, see if we can’t track where it comes out.”

  The sheriff grunted and backed out of the narrows, and Mason started to follow, tugging on Lucy’s leash to turn her around. The dog resisted, dug in her feet and bucked against the lead.

  “Come on, girl,” Mason said.

  But then Hart said, “Burke.”

  Mason looked, and the sheriff was holding out his rifle. Mason stared at it, dumb, for a moment.


  “We’re losing time on those boys,” Hart said. “If Jess is up here, then she’ll need us to get to her, fast.”

  “I can’t leave you alone in a cave in the dark,” Mason said, but Hart dug into his pocket and came out with a cell phone, an old one, a flip model.

  “It’ll do me,” the sheriff said. “But my battery’s low. So take the rifle and try not to kill anyone, Burke. Just find Jess and make sure she’s safe.”

  There was no time to argue, and Mason wasn’t really inclined anyway. He took Hart’s rifle. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Jess told me what you did,” Hart told him. “For Gillies. That man owes you his life, and I’m glad you were there to save it for him.”

  Mason shook his head. “It was mostly Jess’s doing, Sheriff, to be honest.”

  “Not the way she tells it,” Hart replied. “And somehow I suspect that she’s right.” He motioned Mason forward, deeper into the black. “Go,” he said. “I’ll try to circle around to you up top, if I can.”

  Then the sheriff turned and started back through the darkness, lit by the sickly green tint from his phone. Mason listened to the man find his footing, waited until his light had disappeared. Then he turned back to the way he was going, the way Lucy wanted to lead him. He slung the rifle over his shoulder and clicked his teeth for the dog.

  “Go, Lucy,” he said. “Find your mama.”

  SEVENTY-TWO

  Jess hurt. She still wasn’t sure if Pruitt had hit her when he’d shot at her, but she was in pain nonetheless. She lay in the scree at the bottom of that bare face of rock and tried to stand up and couldn’t quite make it work.

  She’d toppled over the side of the face as she’d tried to duck away from where Pruitt was swinging his rifle. Squeezed off an answering shot with her Remington, and then it was like the whole lip of the face gave out, and she was sliding off the edge and then falling and hitting hard, twenty feet below, the shotgun falling away somewhere and her body coming to rest against a piece of jagged rock.