Chapter One
A man goes into a cage for fifteen years and he’s bound to change inside, though in the end it’s up to him whether that change is for the better or the worse. Sometimes even he won’t know until he’s let back out into the world again, and at that point, there isn’t much that can be done but to stand back and keep watch, hope he isn’t broken beyond fixing.
Mason Burke had been eighteen years old, a boy and a wild one, when he walked into the Chippewa state pen on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and when he walked out again, his time served and fifteen years passed, he was no longer a boy and no longer wild, but still a mile shy of manhood and not fully tame, either.
He’d served his sentence quietly and without complaint, and he harbored no grudges. He was guilty of doing what the law said he’d done, what the courts had determined deserved fifteen years’ penalty, and in consequence he’d spent nearly half of his life a prisoner—though as far as he was concerned, he’d been treated fair.
But he hadn’t enjoyed prison. He’d learned how to survive, and how to pass the time, but just surviving fifteen years had forced him to stifle parts of himself he’d once thought were fundamental. He’d walked into prison a human being, albeit a flawed, reckless one, and as he stood outside those gates for the first time in one full decade and another half, buffeted by a chill November wind that swept across the barren parking lot, Mason couldn’t even be sure of his own humanity anymore, couldn’t be sure his time incarcerated hadn’t reduced him to something lesser, something base, something unfit for the world that awaited him.
He didn’t want to leave. That was the sickest part, the part that told Mason maybe something was broken inside him that could never be fixed. He wasn’t the first prisoner to have panicked at the first breath of free air, and he wouldn’t be the last, but as he stood gazing across that parking lot to the flat, dull land beyond, the whole world seemed impossibly large and alien, no walls and no boundaries, no structure, just a suffocating expanse of empty space and a lifetime’s worth of codes and social norms he’d missed out on learning.
He wanted to turn around and walk back in through the gates, return his civilian clothes to where they’d stored them all this time, go back to his old cell and stretch out in that bunk and let the prison walls envelop him, protect him from the outside just as much as they protected the outside from people like him. He’d have said he was scared to be out in this world, except fear was a reaction you learned to hide damn fast on the inside. You learned to push it down, ignore it, until it just went away and you didn’t feel scared anymore. The guys who got scared were the guys who didn’t survive.
But there was no turning back, and Mason wouldn’t have anyway, even if his sister hadn’t been standing leaned up against a dusty Dodge Grand Caravan, hands in her coat pockets, squinting across the lot at him, studying her younger brother as he took his first steps back out into the world.
She took her hands from her pockets, gave him a little wave, shy and stilted. “Hi, Mase,” she said, avoiding his eyes as he came across the pavement toward her. “Looks like you made it.”
“We thought you could live with us for a while, me and Glen and the girls,” Maggie said as she drove out of the parking lot and set the minivan on a two-hundred-mile course to the south. “There’s a spare room in the basement you can stay in, rent-free, just so long as you keep out of trouble.”
She was two years his senior, but it might as well have been twenty; she kept sneaking glances across at him like she was wondering who he was, wondering if he was still capable of doing the things he’d done long ago. Mason sat in the passenger seat and felt her eyes on him, and he looked out at the world as it passed his window. His stomach churned with the first stirrings of motion sickness.
“Glen said he could line up a job for you too.” Maggie’s voice was all forced cheer and fragile hope. “He says they’re always looking for good, hardworking men.”
Mason cleared his throat. “What does he do again?”
“Glen?” Maggie blinked. “Well, he’s a real estate agent, Mase.” She looked at him again. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be like you were working for him, exactly, just they sometimes need people to clean the houses they’re selling, do minor repairs, that kind of thing.”
“Clean houses,” Mason said.
“I mean, it wouldn’t have to be forever, just until you got on your feet, right?”
“I thought I might stay at Mom’s old place,” he said.
Maggie’s look was half pity, half wishful thinking, like she and Glen had probably had a hell of a fight about giving Mason that spare room, and familial duty had only barely won out.
“Oh, Mase,” she said. “We sold Mom’s place after she died, didn’t we tell you?”
“I guess I must have just forgot,” he replied, more for her sake than his. Maggie hadn’t done much to keep him filled in on the family news while he’d been inside, and they both knew it.
“It was all falling apart anyway, needed so much work. Glen got us a good price, and—well, anyway. You didn’t want to be fixing a bunch of plumbing and redoing a roof first thing after you got home, right?”
There was only one right answer to that question, and that was to lie, so Mason just didn’t say anything. And Maggie waited long enough that his silence became an answer in itself, and then she sighed and reached for the radio, and Mason knew she was thinking the same thing that he was, that they’d driven just ten miles and they still had one hundred ninety more to go.
The first thing Mason did at Maggie’s house—after he’d set his bag down in that basement spare room, after he’d enjoyed a cold beer and a scalding hot shower, scrubbed as much of that fifteen-years-in-captivity stink as he could from his skin—was to find a picture in his bag of a big black-and-white dog, set it on top of the nightstand beside his new bed.
Then he borrowed Maggie’s phone and placed a call, to a Ms. Linda Petrie at the Rover’s Redemption agency.
He’d kept Ms. Petrie’s number since the last time he’d seen her, about six months before his release, had spent that whole stretch of time plotting this phone call. But Mason still felt the nerves as he listened to the ringing, drummed his fingers on his thigh and couldn’t help pacing, knew this was probably against some kind of regulation, knew he should hang up the phone.
But Linda Petrie picked up before Mason could make that decision, and then there was no sense in anything but moving forward.
“Rover’s Redemption.” She sounded the same as Mason remembered: tough, take no shit.
“Ms. Petrie.” The name came out rough, like he was out of practice. Like it took something extra to speak as a free man. “It’s Mason Burke calling you.”
Silence. Then, “I’m sorry, Mason…Burke? I don’t—”
“I figured you might not remember,” Mason continued. “You probably work with a lot of guys like me. I was up in the Chippewa pen this last go-around. Lucy was my dog.”
“Oh, Lucy,” Linda Petrie said. “Yes, I remember now, of course.”
Mason waited, but she didn’t say anything else, and he could sense by her tone that she wasn’t exactly comfortable hearing his voice. He wondered if this was how he was going to feel for the rest of his life, like he was asking a huge favor just hoping people would look at him straight, have a conversation.
“Well, I was calling because I’m out now,” he said. “And I got that postcard picture you sent of Lucy, and I wanted to check in and see if you knew how she’s doing.” He paused. “You know, how she’s adjusting to her new home, and such.”
Another pause. Then Mason heard Linda Petrie suck in her breath. “I really can’t discuss what happens to the dogs after they leave the program, Mr. Burke—”
“Mason please, ma’am.”
“Mason,” she said, but there was still that something else in her voice. “I’m afraid I just can’t give you any information,” she said. “It wouldn’t be appropriate; I’m sorry.”
“Did she find a good home?” Mason asked. “I don’t need to know where she is or anything, just that I set her up okay for when she went out into the world.”
That long silence again. “I can’t be talking about this,” she said. “Not with you. They’d pull the program if they found out I’d given this information to a—to a…”
She wanted to talk. Mason could tell. Something had happened, something was wrong, and the trainer was itching to talk to him about it.
“Is she alive, at least, Ms. Petrie? Tell me she’s still alive.”
But she couldn’t even do that.
“There was an incident,” she said. “Your dog attacked someone. From what I understand, she had to be destroyed.”
“Destroyed.” The word hit Mason like a roundhouse punch.
Petrie breathed out. “Listen, whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault. Sometimes a dog just goes bad.”
“Not Lucy,” Mason said. “I know that dog. Something must have provoked her.”
Petrie didn’t say anything, and Mason realized he was pacing, his body tense, muscles clenched tight. He wasn’t willing to believe it, not his dog, not Lucy. Not the dog he’d trained.
“Mason?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“You just have to forget about this,” Petrie said. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out, but these things, you just have to move on.”
She sounded scared. Like she thought she’d made a mistake telling him, like he was going to run off and do something crazy now.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
He ended the call. Replaced the handset and went back down his sister’s stairs to his basement bedroom. Found the picture of Lucy he’d propped up on the nightstand, and sat on the edge of the bed and stared at it for a while.
Chapter Two
The dog wasn’t much to look at, the first time Mason saw her. Just a scared little black-and-white thing crammed up against the back wall of her crate with her tail between her legs, shaking, not making eye contact with Mason or anyone else.
She was a pit bull—at least partially, anyway—but she didn’t look like the pits Mason had seen growing up: solid, rough-looking dogs jacked front to back with heavy muscle, collared in chains, and boasting foul dispositions. The pit bulls Mason had known had been mean animals, goaded into aggression by owners who used the dogs to intimidate and impress—and, occasionally, to punish.
This creature, she wasn’t impressing anyone. And she sure wasn’t intimidating.
“That ain’t a dog,” Bridges Colson said, laughing, looking in at the little runt. “That there is fucking bait.”
Bait. They all had a laugh at that, the lot of them—hell, Mason included. Laughed all the way until Ms. Linda Petrie pointed him over to that crate, told him the little runt dog was his dog, no two ways about it.
Mason looked over at the other guys, their own dogs—puppies, yellow Labrador retrievers, German shepherds, a couple of gangly, hairy mutts—all of them strong, all of them happy as a TV commercial, big pink tongues lolling out, chasing balls, shaking paws, the whole doggie dream, and he looked in at his own little wretch and felt damn cheated.
But Linda Petrie was talking again, and there was something about when she talked, you wanted to pay attention. Like she didn’t give a shit, like she’d march right into the Chippewa pen and stand up in front of a couple of dozen hardened felons and not even worry if the two guards behind her would have her back if the whole show went sideways. And that’s pretty much how she did it.
“This won’t be happy hour,” she was saying. “And there’s nothing that says we have to keep you here, with these dogs. This is a privilege the warden has extended you, and if he or these two gentlemen behind me come to believe you’re abusing that privilege, well, hell, they’ll find someone else who appreciates the opportunity a little more. Are we clear?”
She looked hard at the men, each of them in turn, and when she looked at Mason, he nodded like the rest. Wanted to ask what happened if your dog washed out before you did, but Ms. Linda Petrie had moved on.
“This isn’t the start of some lifelong friendship, either,” she said. “You’ll work with your dog for six months, train them up, and then we’ll place them in homes with people who’ll care for them. You won’t get to see them again, so don’t bother asking. Anyone have a problem with that?”
Nobody had a problem. The trainer went over some other stuff, like from a script, how the Rover’s Redemption agency was truly grateful for their time and effort, and how if they let them, the dogs might just teach them something about themselves in the process, but Mason was kind of tuning the whole spiel out; he peered back into the crate at the pitiful creature within and wondered what in the hell this dog was supposed to teach him; it couldn’t even come out and say hi.
Wouldn’t last an hour on the yard, he thought. These hard boys would mess you straight up.
Beside Mason, Bridges Colson’s dog—a big, dumb golden retriever—was all over him, a real sight to behold; the meanest guy in the room, and he was giggling like a child as his dog gave him the most slobbery face wash Mason had ever seen.
Meanwhile, the little black-and-white runt at the back of the crate stared out at him, with big brown eyes that looked away fast when she caught him looking back. Must have weighed thirty pounds, tops.
The name on her crate said LUCY.
“Bit of a fixer-upper, that one,” a voice said beside him, and Mason looked up to find Linda Petrie standing there, didn’t even realize she’d finished her lecture. “Come out of a dogfighting sting down in Muskegon, about thirty dogs on the property, most of them too far gone to be saved.”
Mason looked at her. “They killed them?”
“Yup. Either too mean already, or too tore up by the mean ones. By the time we heard about it, they’d destroyed all but six.” She looked off into the middle distance a moment. Then she shook her head clear. “So you’re going to have to work a little harder with her, is what I’m telling you.”
“Why’d they even save her?” Mason asked. “She looks damn scared.”
“She’s scared, sure, she’s been on the bum end of the stick every day of her young life. But we’re going to show her she’s got better days ahead, right?” The trainer hunched down beside Mason, reached into the crate with both hands. “Lucy,” she said, her voice transformed to pure sweetness. “Come on out, girl.”
This was the closest to Mason a woman had been in fourteen years. He could smell the soap she used, feel the other prisoners staring, knew the guards were somewhere nearby, tensed up in case he should decide to do anything foolish. Knew the other guys would give it to him if he didn’t try a move. But somehow Linda Petrie had coaxed Lucy out of the crate, the poor dog hunched over and folded in on herself like a dang paper clip, long spindly legs shivering, eyes darting everywhere.
“There you go,” the trainer was saying. “There’s a good girl. No one’s going to hurt you out here.”
The dog wasn’t convinced. She tried to bust back into that crate, but Petrie had the door closed and locked, trapping her outside.
“There we go,” she said, standing. “Now you two can get acquainted.”
She walked over to Bridges Colson’s magazine-cover golden, left Mason sitting there with a dog who wanted nothing more in the world than to not get acquainted with anyone.
Mason put out his hand. “Hey, girl,” he tried. “Hey, Lucy.”
Lucy shivered. Backed away. Ignored the peace offering. She scratched at her crate like she was sure he was trying to kill and eat her. Mason looked at her some more. Rubbed the back of his neck.
“Damn,” he said, and he reached over and wrapped his arms underneath Lucy’s front legs, dragged her back to him squirming, lifted her off the ground, and held her up to face him.
“I don’t mean you any harm,” he told her. Tried to get her to meet his eyes with her own. “I’m here to help you, dog. Just a friend.”
Lucy looked at him, met his gaze briefly, and for that instant Mason could swear he maybe felt something, a connection, like the dog had heard what he’d said and understood, and for that one moment he felt like he knew why he’d been partnered with this dog, like this was something with some deeper meaning.
Then Lucy looked away, and Mason felt something warm on his legs, and he looked down and the damn dog had pissed all over his lap.
Chapter Three
“If you could spare a little money, I’d be grateful,” Mason said. “I’ll pay you back, soon as I can.”
Across the table, his sister swapped a glance with her husband. Set down her fork. “Girls,” she said. “Go finish your homework.”
Mason waited while his nieces pushed back their chairs and carried their plates into the kitchen. Brianna, ten years old, and Natalie, eight; they were Mason’s blood, but neither of them had known him before today. The girls looked at him like they were scared of their uncle, put off by his sudden appearance in their lives.
He couldn’t fault them for it. Just his physical presence alone was bound to be off-putting. He’d always been tall, even as a kid, and so many years in a prison gymnasium had built his body into a form that seemed cartoonish and threatening out here in the real world, a menace come to life who couldn’t even maintain eye contact.
And here he was, asking for money.
Mason hated to do it. He knew he was only giving life to his sister’s worst fears, her no-good brother come to leech as much as he could from the family before he did another bad thing and got himself locked up again.
But Mason had done more than just lift weights up in the Chippewa pen. He’d read a fair bit too, whatever he could find. Trying to prepare for the moment he stepped out from inside the prison walls and found himself a free man again; for the years that lay ahead of him; for what meager atonement he could seek for the damage he’d caused.
He hadn’t found answers; what he’d found were first steps. And though he wished he didn’t have to start the journey begging for a favor, he couldn’t see any other way to set about getting started, not as fast as he needed to go. He could only hope that his sister would see that this path of his was a true one, unlike so many of the paths she’d seen him walk before.
When the girls were gone, Maggie’s husband cleared his throat. Glen, a decent guy, kind of boring. He’d always been decent, always been boring, from what little Mason could remember, a clipped-beard, pleated-khakis kind of guy. But then, boring seemed to be Maggie’s type; she seemed happy, anyway.
“How much money are we talking, Mason?” Glen asked. Even the tone of his voice had a decency to it.
“However much you can spare,” Mason said. “There’s something I have to take care of, now that I’m out.”
“We’re giving you room and board,” Maggie said quietly. Eyes down at her plate. “A room to sleep in and hot meals. That isn’t enough?”
“I know I’m putting you out, Mags, and I’m grateful for all of it. But you don’t want me hanging around here forever. Sooner I can get my life together, the better for everyone.”
“So how much?” Glen said. “How much are you thinking you’d need to make a start, Mason?”
“A couple grand ought to do it, I figure.”
“A couple grand?” Maggie was looking at him now, half laughing, incredulous. “Where do you think you are, Mase? Trump Tower?”
“I’ll pay you back,” Mason told her. “I swear, I’ll be good for it.”
Maggie and Glen looked at each other again. For a long while nobody said anything.
Deception Cove, Washington. That’s where Lucy had gone.
Linda Petrie had given every inmate a photograph of “his” dog, taken by the new owner somewhere out in the real world. Mason had kept his close; the edges were rough worn now, and there was a crease down the middle, but there wasn’t any way in the world he would ever part with it.
In the picture, Lucy had filled out since that first day in the pen, put on some muscle. She was sitting in the grass in a sunlit field, sitting proud, head held high and that big, goofy smile on her face, that tongue lolling out of her mouth. She looked happy. She looked good, as good as Mason had ever seen her.
There was a note on the back of the picture. Linda Petrie’s handwriting. Lucy—with thanks, LP. That was all it said.
Mason had studied that photograph and that handwriting in his basement bedroom after the telephone conversation with Linda Petrie. He’d known Lucy six months, practically night and day, trained her, never known her to tend toward violence. Yet she’d gone and attacked somebody? That didn’t make sense.
There was a building behind Lucy in the photograph, across the grassy field. Looked like a school, one story, nothing special. A sign on the cinder-block wall, the words cut off in the middle: N COVE H.S. HOME OF THE RAVENS.
Mason had set the picture aside. Left the basement bedroom and climbed the stairs to the kitchen. His sister and her husband kept a computer in a den off the living room; Mason found the den, found the computer unlocked. Brought up an internet search window, typed: “N Cove High School Ravens.”
The results loaded: a high school, a small town in northwest Washington State, the Olympic Peninsula, way out on the farthest edge of the country. Mason ran another search, just the town name, got a few pretty pictures: the ocean, forest, a few fishing boats. An Indian reservation nearby, the Makah tribe, a big museum, and a few ecotourism outfits. The town of Deception Cove was too small to have its own animal control people, so Mason dialed up the Makah County seat in Neah Bay, figured he’d start with the central office.
“Calling about a dog,” he told the woman who answered. “Supposed to have got in an incident, bit someone.”
“Got more than a few dogs who’d fit that description,” the woman replied. “You want to be more specific.”
“Black-and-white dog, medium sized,” Mason said. “Name’s Lucy, or it was. This would have been over in Deception Cove.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “Yeah, all right. You’re talking about that pit bull who went and bit the sheriff’s deputy.”
Mason blinked. “She bit a deputy?”
“Yes, sir. Bit him pretty good, from what I heard. Left him in a whole mess of stitches.”
“A deputy,” Mason said. “I mean, dang. What were the circumstances?”
The woman sucked her teeth. “A house call gone bad, I guess. Who knows? The sheriff’s deputies down at Deception Cove handled that one themselves. We just heard it through the grapevine.”
“Who’s the owner?” Mason asked. “I mean, how’d he let this happen?”
“Some ex-Marine, and he’s a she. But like I said, I don’t know the specifics. Listen, what’s your interest in this dog, anyway? You writing a news story or something?”
“Just a concerned citizen,” Mason replied.
“Yeah, well, no cause for concern,” the woman told him. “That dog’s due to be destroyed any day now. I don’t know why they haven’t put her down already.”
“We aren’t exactly flush with cash at the moment, Mase,” Maggie said finally. “Glen’s business slows up in the winter, and with Christmas on the way—”
“I understand that,” Mason said. “I’m not trying to take food from the girls’ mouths. But you must have cleared about a hundred grand when you sold Mom’s place, right?”
Maggie glanced at Glen. Glen nodded, started to say something. Mason beat him to it. “You paid down the mortgage, I imagine. Probably socked money away for the girls to go to college, and I’m fine with that, Maggie. I’m not asking for half of what you made from that sale, or even a quarter. Just a couple grand to get me where I need to go, and you can count on getting that money back.”
Maggie looked down at her plate, seemed to be working out what she wanted to say next. Finally, without looking up, she went for it. “What do you really need that money for, Mase?”
Mason hesitated. “I’m done with all that old stuff,” he told Maggie. “I swear it. But I’ve got a friend from inside who ran into a jam out west on the coast. I need to head out there, try and make things right.”
Maggie raised her head to meet her husband’s eyes. But she didn’t say anything.
“It’s important, Maggie. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.”
Another long silence. Mason studied his sister. On Maggie’s other side, Glen was doing the same. Finally she closed her eyes. Shook her head, slight, almost imperceptible, as she blew out a breath and muttered, “Fine.”
“Thank you,” Mason said. “I won’t ask for another dollar.”
They didn’t believe him, he could tell. But they were polite enough not to say so to his face.
“The bank’s closed already,” Glen said after a while. “We’ll have to get the money to you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s fine,” Mason told him. “Early would be best.”
Chapter Four
“Do not withhold good to those to whom it is due,” Proverbs said, “when it is in your power to do it.”
Mason hadn’t grown up religious. His mom had dragged both him and Maggie to the local Baptist church when they were youngsters, and as far as Mason knew, his mother had kept going long after she’d given up trying to force her son’s attendance. He was already sloughing off the Sunday services by the time he turned a teenager; figured he’d given the Lord twelve years to make his gospel stick, and it hadn’t. There were better things to do on a Sunday.
Maggie had kept going, more to placate her mother than out of any religious fervor. Mason wondered how long she’d kept it up, if she still went, if she ever felt she gained anything from it.
The library at the Chippewa pen had been a limited one, but Mason figured he’d read every book in there at least a couple of times before he finally picked up a Bible. The library had had plenty of those.
By that point in his incarceration, Mason was through feeling sorry for himself. He was through wishing he’d done something different, through being angry: at the world for how it had raised him, at himself for all the ways he hadn’t resisted. He felt guilt, above all, and an encompassing shame, a desire to be better than the angry, violent boy he’d been when he arrived there.
He built his body in the gym, day after day. He kept his head down, and he stayed out of trouble. And he read, every night, from the Bible and anything else he could find, and little by little, he laid himself guidelines, a blueprint for living better when he was finally free.
“Let the thief no longer steal,” read Ephesians, “but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.”
The bus ticket to Deception Cove would cost Mason $161.50. Glen and Maggie drove him to the bus station directly from the bank, where Glen had handed Mason an envelope with twenty crisp hundred-dollar bills inside. Glen had played it cool, even cracked a joke, like, “You don’t have to count it, it’s all there,” but Maggie had shushed him, avoided looking at Mason as he climbed back into Glen’s Grand Caravan, and Glen had pulled out of the lot.
They were like a whole other species, Mason thought, watching his sister and her husband from the back seat of the minivan. Or Mason was the other species;
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