Lone Jack Trail

Book 2: Winslow and Burke Series

by Owen Laukkanen

Genres: Action & Adventure; Military Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

A veteran Marine and an ex-convict find themselves on opposite sides of the law in this propulsive new thriller from award-nominated suspense master and "damn fine storyteller" Owen Laukkanen (Kirkus Reviews).

Could your closest friend be a killer?

When a body washes up outside Deception Cove, Washington, Jess Winslow-once a US Marine, now a trainee sheriff's deputy-is assigned to investigate. But when she realizes it's "Bad" Brock Boyd, a hometown celebrity lately fallen from grace, things become complicated. The last person seen with Boyd was her own boyfriend, Mason Burke.

An ex-convict and newcomer in town, Mason is one of the only people who can understand Jess's haunting memories of her time in Afghanistan-and her love for Lucy, her devoted service dog. Finding one another in Deception Cove has been the best thing to happen to either of them in years. So Jess knows Mason could never be guilty of murder-doesn't she?

As the facts of the case point ever more squarely at Mason, Jess must face that everything she thinks she knows about him might be wrong. A thrilling sequel to Deception Cove, and a heart-pounding adventure all its own, Lone Jack Trail pushes Jess and Mason to a shocking confrontation and will test everything they've come to love and trust in Deception Cove.

 

Release date: August 11, 2020

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 352

Sample

Prologue

What remained of “Bad” Boyd washed up on the beach at Shipwreck Point on a pretty morning in the middle of May, three days after anyone in Deception Cove last saw him alive. Those three days away hadn’t been kind to Boyd, and neither had the Pacific Ocean; the crabs had taken to the body by the time Cable Proudfoot and his grandson stumbled across it, nibbling away at what was left of Boyd’s once-famous good looks.

Cable spotted the body before his grandson did, and for a split second that stretched to a couple of minutes, he debated with himself whether to just turn the kid around and walk in the other direction, down the mile or so of empty, windswept shoreline until the corpse was out of sight, pretend like he hadn’t seen it, and spend the day digging for clams and exploring the tide pools, searching for sand dollars as planned. He didn’t get to spend much time with his daughter’s boy, not now that they’d moved to Port Angeles, and Cable was hoping to make the most of it: the first beach day after a long, dreary winter, then Tim Turpin’s signature fried halibut and chips at Spinnaker’s in Deception Cove, and maybe an ice cream cone from the dairy bar back on the reservation in Neah Bay. Heck, he’d been looking forward to this day since the rains started, last November.

But the grandson was seven, and the grandfather nearly seventy, and it didn’t take the kid long to grow bored with the rock crab he’d captured by the tide line, to look up and hurry after Grand-pop, catch up with him and follow his eyes twenty yards ahead to the wet, stinking mound of seaweed and torn clothes and ruined flesh, surrounded by waves of hardy flies and tenacious crabs and even a few lingering seagulls—the whole tableau unmistakable, even to an old man and a little boy, as anything but human remains.

The boy saw the body. The boy began to cry. The boy knew, and Cable kissed any notion of fish and chips and ice cream goodbye.

  

Cable put the boy in the back seat of his truck and tried to speak calm and reassuring things as they drove away from the beach. There was no point in calling the police; cell service was spotty out here, on the cusp of the Olympic Mountains amid towering, second-growth timber. It would take just as long to find a signal as it would to drive the highway back to Deception Cove and inform the deputies in person.

The road wound through the trees and along the shoreline, and Cable drove the speed limit. There was no sense in hurrying; the body would stay dead, and the tide wouldn’t rise high enough to claim it back again for hours. Soon, the forest widened into open space, and then he passed the gas station and Hank Moss’s motel, and he turned north, down the hill on Main Street toward the ocean again and town, the boy in the back seat saying nothing, watching the world pass by his window, swinging his legs and humming softly to himself.

The Makah County sheriff’s detachment in Deception Cove sat in a squat, one-story building at the foot of Main Street, overlooking the government wharf and the little harbor beyond, the open strait beyond that, and Canada beyond all. Main Street was quiet, and there were a couple of vehicles parked in front of the detachment, a Makah County SUV and a black, two-door Chevy Blazer. Cable parked beside the Blazer and rolled down the windows partway for the boy, told him he’d be right back and don’t try and wander off anywhere.

A young Makah man in a deputy’s uniform that might still have had the tags on it sat at the desk inside the detachment doors; Cable recognized him as Lily Monk’s boy, Paul, and wondered at how the child had grown up so fast. Although maybe Paul hadn’t quite fully grown yet. The rookie deputy blanched as Cable explained the situation, barely waiting for Cable to finish before he craned his neck toward the rear of the detachment and called out Jess Winslow’s name. Cable watched Jess come out of a private office in the back and figured it was probably better that she take a look at the body anyway, figured Paul Monk could probably use a little more breaking in before he had to deal with this kind of thing.

Jess looked healthier than the last time he’d seen her, before all the trouble with Deputy Kirby Harwood and his buddies. She’d put on some weight, like she’d finally remembered to eat something now and then, and she didn’t look quite so pale, so haunted in the eyes. She listened to Cable, squared her shoulders and nodded, dug in her pocket for her keys, and told Monk to call the county coroner and tell her to meet Jess at Shipwreck Point. Monk picked up the phone as Cable turned to walk out to the vehicles and his grandson, and Jess looked back toward the private office and gave a whistle. Shortly, Cable heard a chain jangle and some kind of shake, and then the black-and-white dog ambled out of the office, sixty-odd pounds of pit mix and muscle, stretching and blinking like she’d just woken up from a nap.

“Come on, Lucy,” Jess called, and the dog shook herself one more time and walked over lazily. Jess clipped a lead on her and told her she was good, and then she straightened and met Cable’s eyes. “We’ll follow you out there, okay?”

  

Cable watched the deputy in the rearview mirror of his truck as he led her county cruiser back out toward Shipwreck Point. He’d forgotten about Lucy the dog, some kind of rescue, a “companion animal,” he’d heard, prescribed by the VA docs to help Jess deal with what she’d been through overseas. Cable looked at the dog—tongue lolling out the passenger window, enjoying the sunshine and the spring air—and wondered if he ought to have driven the extra few miles into Neah Bay, talked to the sheriff himself, wondered if another body might not send Jess Winslow back to the dark places, whatever she’d endured as a Marine that had scarred her so bad.

But he remembered how she’d been in the middle of the trouble with Deputy Kirby Harwood, how the dog had been there too. If she’d come through that strong enough that the new sheriff saw fit to deputize her, well, hell, maybe that dog was just her good buddy at this point and not some kind of mental-health necessity.

The parking lot at Shipwreck Point was still deserted, and Cable parked his truck where he’d parked it before, killed the engine, and climbed out and stood beside his door and watched as Jess pulled the cruiser in beside him. She got out of the cruiser, and the dog tried to follow, but Jess closed the door first, circled around to Cable’s side, and Cable pointed through the trees and back east toward Deception Cove.

“A couple hundred yards that way,” he told her. “You can’t miss it. If it’s all right with you, I’ll stay here with my grandson.”

Jess looked past him at the boy in his car seat in the back of the truck, and her mouth twitched and she nodded.

“You’ll tell the coroner where to find me when she gets here?” she said.

“I will,” Cable said. “Are you going to need me to give a statement?”

She shrugged. “Not sure yet.” Then she looked out through the trees and toward the water. “You get any sense who it might be?”

“Didn’t get close enough to tell,” Cable said. “I didn’t really want the boy to see any more than he already had.”

“Yeah, okay.” Jess started down the trail toward the beach. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough, anyhow.”

  

Cable waited, listening to the sound of the breakers crashing onto the beach and across the black jagged rocks that bordered the sand, and the wind in the trees and the gulls and a raven overhead. After a while he opened the back door of the truck and let the boy out of his car seat, and together they stood in a patch of sunlight and smiled at the dog in the passenger seat of the cruiser.

Jess returned, slogging up through the sand to the dusty parking lot with a grim look on her face.

“Maybe sit the kid down in the truck again, Cable,” she said. “I’m going to need to take your statement after all.”

The boy, once freed, would not go back easily until mollified with a book and a hunk of a candy bar. Then Cable returned to the front of the truck, where Jess waited with weary eyes.

“That’s Brock Boyd down there,” she told him, and she shook her head slightly and kind of smiled, though the smile was hollow and there was no humor in her words. “And judging by the hole in his head, Cable, I’d say he’s been shot.”

ONE

Two weeks earlier

Jess Winslow reached for the handlebar above the passenger seat, the truck rocking off-camber on the uneven road, its engine growling as it tackled the grade, its tires scrabbling for traction in the mud. In the driver’s seat beside her, Makah County Sheriff Aaron Hart kept his foot on the gas pedal and both hands on the wheel, guiding the big Super Duty pickup into a maze of old growth along the barest hint of a road, the truck hardly slowing for corners, the headlights piercing darkness.

There wasn’t any choice but to go fast, not tonight. Not on an operation like this one. Word tended to spread rapidly in Makah County, and when the sheriff and his deputies set out on a raid, it wasn’t long before the whole situation was public knowledge in every bar and back room between Deception Cove and Neah Bay. Sooner or later, word would find its way to the men in Hart’s crosshairs.

The new sheriff wasn’t the most popular man in Makah County, not among a fair chunk of the population. Hart was a transplant, not a native—an emergency call-up from neighboring Clallam County, come to keep order after Jess Winslow and Mason Burke had killed or put to capture Kirby Harwood and every other one of Deception Cove’s sheriff’s deputies, the collapse of law and order prompting Makah’s aging sheriff, Kirk Wheeler, to retire himself to his fishing boat in Neah Bay.

Under Wheeler and his corrupt deputy Harwood, Makah had grown into something of a haven for cooks and crooks and the otherwise criminally minded, but no more. Aaron Hart wasn’t old, and he wasn’t corrupt, and in the months since he’d taken the badge, he’d made it his mission to clean up the county—and when it came to Deception Cove, he relied on Jess more and more.

Hart was headquartered in Neah Bay, the county seat, at the very edge of the Olympic Peninsula and the continental United States. Only twenty miles of blacktop separated Neah Bay from Deception, but the towns might have existed on opposite sides of the globe.

Neah Bay was somewhat prosperous, a few thousand people in town and on the reservation next door, a healthy tourist economy, sport fishers and hikers and those come to gawk at the artifacts in the Native museum. The lighthouse at Cape Flattery was a good little hike, and some shipping companies paid to keep a tugboat and crew on standby in the harbor, year-round, in case of maritime emergency. Neah Bay wasn’t Seattle, or even Port Angeles, but it was a full-fledged town, anyway. You could see a future there, if you looked hard enough.

Deception, though, was something else. It had once been a vibrant place, lively, prosperous, fueled by salmon and halibut and the money the banks loaned to the men who could catch the fish. Then the fish had stopped coming and the banks quit lending money, and the town had surrendered to a long, inexorable atrophy, those who couldn’t afford to leave forced to eke out what existences they could as the rainforest gradually reclaimed its land. Deception Cove was a ghost town, full of the desperate and the slowly dying; it was no accident that Kirby Harwood and his friends had seen opportunity for malfeasance here.

Harwood was gone, though. Aaron Hart was the law now, and Jess Winslow beside him. And nights like tonight were just part of the cleanup.

  

Hart kept the truck rolling, clearing back-road miles as quick as he dared in the dark, the highway and the lights of Deception long gone behind them, no moon in the sky and only a handful of winking stars visible through the rainforest canopy.

The radio crackled between Jess and the sheriff, and she reached for it, answered, let Hart concentrate on the wheel and the road and the trees that reached out like fingers, scraping harsh and grating against the side of the county truck.

“Winslow,” Jess said.

“Gillies,” came the response. “We’re in position.”

Hart raised an open hand in Jess’s direction, five fingers pointed skyward. The truck slowed.

“Five minutes,” Jess told Gillies. “Wait for our signal.”

Off to Jess’s right, the land in its vague silhouette rose beside the road, the first of the low hills south of Deception that would grow into mountains if you followed them far enough. The road gained altitude as it hugged the hillside, and Hart slowed the truck further as they crested a small rise. Jess could see in the distance now, through the trees, the lights of a small single-wide trailer, the compound where local rumor said a man named Collier cooked methamphetamine.

Hart killed the headlights, let his foot off the gas, and as the truck rolled forward through the trees, Jess closed her eyes and felt those first familiar stirrings, an electric concoction of both fear and adrenaline to which she’d grown accustomed and maybe even addicted during her time overseas.

She’d completed two tours of duty with the Marine Corps in Afghanistan and started a third, most of it lodged in some woebegone northern valley as a member of a Female Engagement Team, brought in to liaise with local women, coax out information that might not have been forthcoming had there been only men on the ground.

It was rewarding work, but it was only half the story; team members were frontline Marines, like the men, expected to patrol and engage the enemy just like anyone else. Jess had never shied from the violence, and in the end she’d grown to embrace it. She’d seen action, and she’d killed her share of the enemy.

She’d seen her friends killed too. Good friends. And it had changed her. Enough that she hadn’t completed that third tour. She’d come home to bury her husband only to find herself with a medical discharge and a standing appointment with a VA doc in Port Angeles. With prescriptions for medications that made her feel numb, with nightmares and guilt and a pervasive, all-encompassing sense of hopelessness that she might have let overwhelm her.

With Lucy.

And now, with a man named Mason Burke, who’d served fifteen years for murder, who loved Lucy as much as she did, and who probably loved Jess too. Who’d be sitting awake somewhere back in Deception with Lucy, waiting on her, worrying, hoping she’d make it home.

At her best, Jess Winslow had been an excellent soldier. She’d lived for moments like this. The adrenaline. The action—decisive and final, no room for ambiguity. The violence.

It was everything else that she couldn’t comprehend. But she was working on that, with Burke’s help. With Lucy’s.

Sheriff Hart stopped the truck. Jess reached for her sidearm, checked the action, as Hart did the same. Then she nodded to Hart, and Hart nodded back, toward the radio.

You make the call.

With her free hand, Jess picked up the handset. Then she keyed the transmitter and exhaled, long and slow, to steady her breathing. Spoke to Deputy Tyner Gillies, somewhere out there in the woods, on the other side of Collier’s trailer.

“Go get him,” she told her colleague. “We’ve got your back.”

TWO

Sometimes Mason Burke dreamed he was still on the island. Still in the rainforest, tangled in deadfall and thick, mossy underbrush, listening to the waves crash against rock somewhere in the distance, the feel of the shotgun alien in his grip as he struggled through the woods toward Jess and the dog.

He’d spent fifteen years in prison and he rarely dreamed about his cell anymore. Nowadays when Burke slept, he dreamed of more recent violence.

Of the stillness of the forest and the staccato report of gunfire, somewhere nearby but impossible to locate. Of the feeling of helplessness, and of fear, for Jess and for Lucy and, indeed, for himself.

He dreamed of the faces of the men, those he’d killed or wanted to, and he felt guilt and remorse and knew one day he’d be judged for what he’d done. Though he knew also that he’d have done it the same, given the chance to try again, that the men he’d killed had been evil and had meant to harm Jess.

He knew this, but he dreamed of their faces anyway. And he woke with their names on his lips and his body drenched with sweat, reaching for Jess and for Lucy to see that they were all right.

When he dreamed of the island, it scared him, that what he’d done there lingered in his mind. That he still didn’t quite feel safe, whether awake or asleep, as though he’d left something on that island that would come back and demand a reckoning.

As though he’d awakened something he’d thought lay long dormant, as though he wasn’t the man he’d believed he’d become.

As though he was still the teenaged boy who’d stood trial for murder, who’d surrendered one decade of his life and another five years besides.

As though he was still a killer, and would always be.

  

It was nearly dawn when Lucy stirred on the floor beside Mason, stood and stretched and yawned, scratched her ear so the tags on her collar jingled, then padded to the galley door and whined, softly, to be let out.

Mason realized he’d fallen asleep, rubbing his eyes and swinging his legs out from the little dining settee. He’d left the lights on, hadn’t even bothered to make up the bed. Hadn’t planned to sleep much overnight, not with Jess out on a raid, but hell if he hadn’t passed out anyways, face in the book he’d been trying to read, still wearing yesterday’s jeans.

Hell if he couldn’t still hear the gunfire in his ears. The sound of Jess’s voice as she called to him, desperate, through the forest.

Lucy whined again, and now Mason could hear the footsteps outside that had roused her, moving steadily up the wharf, boots on treated lumber and the groan of tie-up lines and the lap of tiny waves as the neighboring boats shifted on their moorings.

“Yeah, girl, okay,” he told Lucy as the dog shifted again, the footsteps coming closer. “Let’s just make sure it’s her before we roll out the red carpet.”

The footsteps stopped, and Mason peered out through the galley window, straining his eyes through yellow sodium light, and reaching, semiconsciously, for the aluminum Slugger he kept in lieu of a gun.

He and Jess had killed men on that island, and those men had families. Makah County was a small place. Mason Burke was still an outsider.

The boat rocked on its lines, swaying in toward the wharf as someone pulled themselves aboard at the stern. Mason gripped the bat tighter and stayed in the galley’s shadows, waiting. He’d rented this boat, Nootka, from Joe Clifford’s people, a cheap place to stay in exchange for Mason keeping the rig afloat and helping out with the odd carpentry job around town.

Clifford was rebuilding Jess Winslow’s old house, rendered unlivable by Kirby Harwood et al., and Mason pitched in where he could there and wherever else Joe needed him. It would do to learn a skill if he was going to stick around here; fifteen years in lockup hadn’t taught him much but how to fight—and then, how to avoid it.

They were living apart, Mason and Jess, while the house was being built, Mason on this fishing boat and Jess up at Hank Moss’s motel by the highway. Still, they saw each other almost every day, ate dinners together, and mostly shared the same bed. As far as what they would do when the house was completed, well, they hadn’t come to that decision yet, had more or less avoided looking too far into the future ever since Mason had stepped off the bus home to Michigan and back into her arms again.

He hoped there’d be room in Jess’s new house for him someday. But Mason figured he knew better than to push the issue before Jess was ready to talk.

  

Lucy panted at the door, her tail wagging furiously, though that didn’t bring Mason any peace. The dog was a rescue, bred for fighting in some backwoods hell in Michigan, but as far as Mason knew, she’d been hauled out of that place and into his own life before she’d ever fought a round, and he was thankful for it.

Sixty-odd pounds and brawny, some kind of pit mix, she looked the part of a guard dog. But Mason had worked hard at training the violence right out of her, and by and large, he’d succeeded. Lucy was a gentle creature, more likely to smother you in sloppy kisses than bite you, the most dangerous part of her, her bullwhip tail—at least until somebody threatened Jess.

Someone whistled outside, a few soft bars of “Ramblin’ Man,” and that was the sign Mason had been waiting for. He set down the baseball bat and stepped out of the shadows and over to the galley door. Nudged it open to let Lucy slip out, just as Jess set her duffel bag down on the fish hatch behind the wheelhouse.

Instantly, the dog was all over Jess, tail wagging and tongue everywhere, leaping up to lick her face as though it had been months since last contact, when by Mason’s calculation they’d said their farewells no more than twelve hours ago. But maybe Lucy could sense when Jess was putting herself in danger; she’d whined and paced by the door most of the night, staring balefully at Mason as though it was his fault that she wasn’t allowed on the raid.

“Oh, I missed you, girl,” Jess was saying, bending over to scratch behind Lucy’s ears. “I missed you, yes, I did.”

She was still dressed for the raid: tactical pants and a Kevlar vest over a dark sweater, her long hair tied back in a ponytail, and Mason could see fatigue in the way she hoisted her duffel bag again and brought it toward where he stood in the cabin doorway.

“I thought you’d be asleep,” she said.

“I was,” he replied. “The dog heard you coming.”

She leaned in to kiss him, and then she stepped back again and looked him over, skeptical. “You’re still wearing the same clothes as the last time I saw you, Burke.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to sleep,” he said, stepping aside so she could walk into the galley. “But I slept all the same.”

He followed her into the cabin, where she stood at the captain’s chair to unbuckle her vest and pull out the elastic from her hair. She was beautiful, and he was glad to see her, and glad she was all right.

“How did it go?” he asked, and she shrugged and half sat on the captain’s chair and leaned down to untie her boots.

“We got Collier,” she said. “Plenty of product.”

“That’s good,” he said.

She didn’t look up. “Yeah.”

Mason studied her, watched her unlace her boots for a beat. He worried about Jess on nights like tonight, wondered if it was still maybe a little bit early for Sheriff Hart to be sending her off into the really nitty-gritty stuff.

But Makah County was starved for good deputies, and Jess had passed the exam, same as Tyner Gillies and the rest, and the VA doc in Port Angeles had given her his blessing. Who was Mason to second-guess?

“You feel okay out there?” he asked.

Jess kicked off her boots. Leaned back and ran her hands through her hair, blew out a long breath. “I felt fine,” she said. “Felt good. Felt like I maybe finally know what I’m doing.”

“That’s good,” Mason said.

“Yeah.” Jess pulled the sweater over her head. Then she nodded toward the settee. “You going to make. . .