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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 up a bed for us, Burke, or what?”

  * * *

  The bed took some doing to fit together just right, being as it was just the dining table removed from its stanchions and notched in between the bench seats of the settee. Burke set to work on it as Jess rummaged around in a locker for a bottle. Poured two fingers each of Old Grand-Dad and slipped off the rest of her fighting kit; she handed him his glass and reached for his belt buckle.

  “You’re overdressed,” she said. “Hell, Burke, you’re a mess. You had all night to get ready for me.”

  He sipped the bourbon and let her work on the buttons on his shirt. “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, we’ll see.” She pulled the shirt over his head, exposing broad shoulders and plenty of muscle; even out of prison, Burke stuck to his jailhouse workout routine, and the carpentry job didn’t hurt. “We’ll see how sorry you are.”

  She was amped up, still wired; she could feel it. The adrenaline from the raid was still coursing through her body, searching for an outlet, and Burke was going to have to deal with it. Not that he’d mind, she figured.

  It hadn’t even been much of a raid, all things considered. Textbook. Nothing like the raids she’d pulled before, over there. She’d come back amped from those raids too, and no outlet, at least until her friend Afia died. After that, Jess was as numb after the killing as she had been before, no matter how many rounds she fired in between.

  But this was different, and Jess knew it, as she pushed Burke back onto the fishing boat’s crummy galley bed and Lucy made her usual break for the privacy of the fo’c’sle. Burke was different. It wasn’t just the release of tension drawing Jess to the man who was now pulling her down on top of him; it was fear, too, that one day she’d find some way to lose him, same as she’d lost her best friend, and her husband.

  This was a celebration of life, and Burke seemed to know it too. He held her close and tight and firm, and his lips barely left her skin, as hers never left his. Her fatigue seemed to disappear. Burke rose up to meet her, and Jess leaned down and pulled him closer, and the boat rocked on the water beneath them and tugged on its lines, and neither of them cared at all.

  Afterward, they lay silent on their backs in the dark, their fingers entwined, both laughing as Lucy slunk back up from the fo’c’sle to resume her position curled up beside the bed.

  “Thanks for watching my dog,” Jess said. She nudged Burke a little, so he knew she was teasing, but it wasn’t necessary. The dog belonged to Jess, but she was Burke’s too, and Jess didn’t ever plan to make Lucy choose between them.

  “You might have to start paying me for it,” Burke replied. “I’ve been asking around. Dog sitting’s a lucrative business.”

  Now she elbowed him harder. “You’re compensated just fine.”

  “Is that what this is? Compensation?”

  Jess hesitated, the smile fading from her lips. She knew Burke was joking, but there was a kernel of truth to the question, besides, and Jess knew he had cause to ask it.

  She’d been avoiding the question, and others like it, pretty well since Burke stepped off the bus back to Michigan and decided he liked the idea she’d proposed to him, that he stick around Makah County a little longer and they’d maybe give romance a try.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t love Burke. It was just that she’d been married before, to Ty, her high school sweetheart, felt these same feelings, love and infatuation and blind, unbridled optimism. Her closest non-romantic relationship had felt familiar too, her best friend Afia, and in the end, both Afia and Ty had died, and died violently, and somewhere inside, Jess knew that she was partly to blame.

  She wasn’t sure she was ready to risk being hurt again. Though she knew, if anyone, she would risk it for Burke.

  But Burke hadn’t asked her to risk anything yet, not outright. So they danced around the topic and forded the awkward silences and tried to pretend like there was nothing they were leaving unsaid.

  Tried to pretend like that new house of Jess’s wouldn’t be finished, sooner or later, and that when it was done, those questions they weren’t asking wouldn’t be harder to ignore.

  Beside her, Burke said nothing, and he didn’t sigh or pout like another man might have done; he seemed to understand what she was thinking, and she knew he would give her all the time in the world if she asked for it.

  Jess rolled over and snuggled up against him, threw her arm over the expanse of his chest and pressed herself as close as she could to the warmth of his body.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Burke pulled her closer. “No need to be sorry,” he said. “No need at all.” And she took him at his word, closed her eyes, and let herself relax, drift off toward sleep, though she sensed how Burke lay there, staring up at the ceiling as the first hint of daylight appeared in the cabin windows, and she knew he was awake and would likely stay that way now, and she knew, too, that she couldn’t dodge the hard questions forever, whether Burke was asking or not.

  THREE

  It was nearly a week after the Collier raid when Mason Burke first laid eyes on the man who would wind up dead on Shipwreck Point.

  Mason dropped in on Chase Ogilvy’s marine supply store on Main Street, downtown Deception, hoping Ogilvy’s three messy aisles might spare him a drive to Port Angeles. He carried a shopping list, courtesy of Joe Clifford, and he’d brought a young guy named Rengo along with him. Clifford needed a good tarp and a new drill bit for the work on Jess’s place, and Chris Rengo needed work; Mason figured the kid might as well help out a bit, stay out of trouble.

  Trouble was where Mason and Jess had found Rengo four or five months back, at the ass end of a rough logging road, guarding a collection of trailers and assorted trash that had once belonged to Jess’s late husband. Rengo fancied himself a cook, though whether he’d actually produced any methamphetamine of his own, Mason couldn’t be sure. The kid was bone skinny and carried himself like the guys Mason had known in prison—young and probably good-hearted, overwhelmed by circumstance, determined not to be prey in an ecosystem stocked with predators.

  Mostly, kids like Rengo didn’t make it inside. They caved to the men who were bigger, rougher, older, and if they were lucky, they lived long enough to become hard themselves, brittle and truly dangerous. If they were unlucky, they broke before they had the chance.

  Lucy liked Rengo, anyway. And Rengo liked Lucy, looked at her like a kid would, all pretense of toughness disappeared from his eyes. Watching the two of them together, Mason had decided he couldn’t just leave Rengo to fend for himself in the forest. Figured he might as well try and make a difference in the young man’s life, step in at a time when nobody had done the same for him.

  To date, Rengo hadn’t proved to be much of a builder. But he showed up every morning, and he worked hard and didn’t talk back to Joe Clifford or Mason, and Mason was starting to realize he liked having the kid around. He didn’t have many friends in Deception Cove, and Rengo—ten, twelve
years his junior, rash and excitable to Mason’s prison-honed calm—was one of the few who’d even bothered to make an effort so far.

  Anyway, it turned out Chase Ogilvy had plenty of tarps, but he didn’t have the drill bit, and Mason was dragging Rengo away from the rifles displayed behind the counter, already dreading the hour-plus return trip to the lumberyard in Port Angeles, when Brock Boyd rolled past the store in a chromed-out Cadillac SUV, and even Rengo looked up from the Remingtons to stare.

  “Holy shit,” the younger man said. “Boyd’s back.”

  “You know that guy?” Mason asked as he followed Rengo out to Jess’s old Chevy Blazer. “Whoever’s driving that rig?”

  Rengo stared down Main Street to where the Cadillac was backing into a parking space outside Rosemary Marshall’s nameless diner, and the neighboring Cobalt Pub.

  “That looks like Bad Boyd’s truck to me,” Rengo said, and he started down the sidewalk. “Let’s go see.”

  The kid was halfway to the Cadillac by the time Mason got the tarps stashed in the back of the Blazer, and Mason glanced at his watch as he climbed into the driver’s seat, not wanting to waste any more of a good workday with Jess’s place still many weeks from completion.

  He coasted down the block toward where the Cadillac was parked and pulled around the far side of the SUV to find Rengo engaged in an animated, one-sided conversation with a man who might well have been a movie idol.

  He was tall and broad shouldered and handsome, his straw-colored hair worn longer than was typical in Deception, the kind of haircut that probably cost fifty dollars and came with a free scalp massage. The man wore a fitted leather motorcycle jacket, looked brand-new, and those jeans people bought to make it look like they’d been working, though Mason could tell that this guy, in those jeans, was no carpenter.

  In fact, Mason might indeed have mistaken the man for an actor or something, some kind of real celebrity, were it not for the thin white scar down the side of his cheek, and the clear and obvious fact that his nose had been broken, likely multiple times.