Lone Jack Trail Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2020 by Owen Laukkanen

  Author photograph by Brady McCloskey Photography

  Cover design by Kirin Diemont

  Cover photograph by Andrew Davison / Arcangel

  Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: August 2020

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  ISBN 978-0-316-44876-5

  E3-20200709-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  SIXTY-FOUR

  SIXTY-FIVE

  SIXTY-SIX

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  SIXTY-NINE

  SEVENTY

  SEVENTY-ONE

  SEVENTY-TWO

  SEVENTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Books by Owen Laukkanen

  In loving memory of my grandmother, Mummi, whose strength and quiet resilience

  remain an inspiration.

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  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 det
achment 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.