He said, “I don’t mind.”
“I was lying down there in my bunk, thinking about a whole bunch of shit I didn’t really want to think about,” Jess said. “But this isn’t the kind of shit I can just forget, either. Not any way that I know of, at least, and I’m about sick of trying.”
“So this was a distraction.”
She glanced over at him. “We’re probably going to die, Burke,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re thinking about this whole mess we’re in, but to me, I can’t see us walking away if those guys do too. This isn’t the kind of disagreement that gets resolved peacefully.”
He said nothing. He figured she was right, figured he’d known it for a while. He wasn’t ready to give the game away to Kirby Harwood, though, not yet.
“I don’t necessarily have a problem with dying,” Jess continued, in a voice that could have convinced Mason she was telling him the truth. “But if it’s going to happen, I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend my last days on Earth reliving all the foul shit I’ve seen. There’s better things I can do with my time, and as best I can tell, you shared my enthusiasm.”
He nodded. “I wish I could have given you a better time of it, though.”
“Hell,” she said, “I haven’t been this close to a man who knew more about me than my first name and adult beverage of choice since Ty washed up under that dock. If I’m dying tomorrow, at least I can say my last time was with somebody who actually gave a damn.”
“Gave a damn,” Mason said. “About what?”
“About anything, Burke,” she said, exasperated. “About Lucy. About me. About doing the right thing. You might be dumber than a box of rocks for sticking around in this mess, but at least you’re man enough to stand up for something. That matters a hell of a lot more than if you can give me a good ride for a couple, three minutes.”
He laughed. “That might even be generous.”
“Mason Burke.” She rolled her eyes at him. “You’ve got to get over yourself, dude. Look around.”
He did.
“We’re on a deserted island. You want to make something up to me, you’ve got plenty of time.”
She was still making like she was annoyed with him, but there was something playful in her eyes, and a warmth besides that Mason hadn’t seen before. She tilted her head up toward him, and this time he knew that she wanted to be kissed. He kissed her, slow, rolled over and pulled her closer to him.
Beside the settee, Lucy grumbled, stood up, and retreated down into the fo’c’sle—but at that point neither Mason nor Jess had any inclination to care.
Forty-Six
Kirby Harwood stared at the helicopter and wondered yet again how he’d taken so many wrong turns in his life.
Okafor’s man, Joy, had been waiting when Harwood and his men had finished filling out the paperwork for the Shelby Walker shooting. There was a shit ton of it too, took Harwood until dawn to get things squared away. And then Joy was waiting outside the detachment in that Suburban of his, spinning some yarn about Jess and her boyfriend had escaped on a boat.
There was no good way to spin what had happened last night. Harwood had sent a statement to Sheriff Kirk Wheeler in Neah Bay, and he knew there was a better-than-good chance that the state police would get involved, investigate the whole deal. Harwood had talked to the neighborhood, run through the official account—Shelby shooting first and all—and the neighborhood, by and large, had taken his word as gospel. Harwood had decent dirt on just about everyone on the block, and he knew for a fact there were a couple of households with outstanding warrants in Clallam County next door.
Nobody would cross the sheriff’s chief deputy, not to stick up for some tramp and her invalid mom. But if they did, Harwood knew he was screwed. And just that thought alone was giving him a bad case of situational acid reflux.
And now the goddamn helicopter.
They were standing on an airfield near Port Angeles—Harwood, Joy, Cole Sweeney, and the pilot, a stocky man in a leather jacket and a big, bushy mustache who looked more like a cop than anything else. They’d left Dale behind in Deception Cove to keep order, though if a Whitmer boy ever kept order in his life, Kirby had yet to hear about it.
Mostly, Harwood figured it was because Joy had spattered Bryce Whitmer’s brains all over the family kitchen. The shooter probably didn’t trust Dale not to do something silly in the aftermath, and justifiably so. If Kirby knew his deputy, Dale would find a way to make things right—even if it fucked the whole lot of them with the Nigerians.
“They sailed west,” Joy was saying. “I watched them go. You and your men were occupied, but no matter. We’ll find them.”
There was something absurd about using a helicopter to recover eight hundred grand’s worth of product—though, granted, that was the wholesale price. But Harwood figured it wasn’t about the product anymore; this was a grudge match for Joy and Okafor as much as it was for the Deception Cove deputies. It was just that Okafor had a bigger imagination.
“We’ll have the helicopter for two hours,” Joy continued. “The price will come out of your end, of course.”
“Of course,” Harwood agreed, though Joy didn’t look like he was waiting for agreement.
“We’ll find them. We will kill them. And we will recover the product.” Joy looked at Harwood, looked at Sweeney. “Any questions?”
Neither Harwood nor Sweeney answered, but Sweeney sure looked like he was having second thoughts. Joy picked up on it. “Something you’d like to say, Deputy?”
Sweeney went red. Kicked at the tarmac and averted his gaze, like he, too, was wondering how he’d wound up in this spot.
“It’s just one lousy shipment,” he said finally. “You couldn’t just, you know, write it off? Cost of doing business? You all look like you’re gearing up for a war right now.”
Joy studied the young deputy. Harwood waited, hardly daring to breathe, his right hand slipping down toward his holster just in case the drug man decided to get cute.
“One shipment, yes,” Joy replied. “One stolen shipment, and on its face, only a minor inconvenience to an organization like ours, yes?”
“Well, yeah,” Sweeney said.
“But an organization like this one has competitors, enemies,” Joy continued. “Ambitious men who’d like nothing more than to seize Ateke Okafor’s position at any sign of weakness. A stolen package, a missed delivery: these men wait to see how Okafor reacts. Is he a man who will tolerate incompetence? Is he a man who will brook thievery of any kind?”
Sweeney opened his mouth to reply. Joy waved him silent.
“This is more than one shipment, Deputy Sweeney,” Joy told him. “To Ateke Okafor—and, if you’re smart, to you and your colleagues as well.” He straightened. “Are there any other concerns?”
There were no other concerns.
Joy produced his car keys and pressed a button on the fob. The Suburban chirped, and the back gate opened slowly. There were boxes inside, hard plastic cases. Joy crossed to the truck, reached in, and opened the first box, and Harwood saw a couple of rifles inside, packed in protective foam.
Joy studied them for a moment. Then he closed the box, latched it, lifted it out of the truck. “Bring the others,” he told Harwood.
Harwood and Sweeney did as instructed. Each brought a box to the open sliding door of the helicopter, where Joy took them and placed them inside. The pilot was already aboard, the engine spooling up. Joy climbed into the chopper, gestured for the deputies to follow.
“Come,” he said. “The clock is ticking.”
Which clock he meant was unclear. But as the helicopter’s engines roared to life, and the rotors began to spin, Harwood decided the shooter could have been counting down for the helicopter, for Jess Winslow and Mason Burke, or for Kirby Harwood and Cole Sweeney and Dale Whitmer themselves, and all would have been accurate.
The clock was ticking. Somehow, Harwood knew, this would all be over soon.
Forty-Seven
Burke went up onto the roof of the wheelhouse and untied the three-person rigid inflatable skiff that Ty had kept stored by the dodger. He tied a rope to the bow and eased it over the starboard side of the wheelhouse, where Jess was waiting to help guide it down to the water. When the skiff was in the water, Burke handed down the rope, and Jess walked it toward the stern and tied it off, left the skiff to bob alongside the troller as she and Burke gathered supplies.
They didn’t talk about what they’d done. But they didn’t not talk about it, exactly; Jess could have predicted that Burke wasn’t the type to pour out his heart to a girl after he’d slept with her, but she could sense his mood in how his fingers traced her skin and how he smiled, self-conscious, when his eyes lingered on hers a half second too long. She didn’t regret what they’d done, and she could tell Burke didn’t either, though in the back of her mind that fear still remained, that she’d just dragged him deeper into the hole that would bury him, that by giving in to her impulses, she’d ensured he would never escape.
She pushed the thought from her mind and tried to focus on what came next.
They filled the skiff with supplies: tools for digging, enough food from the galley’s lockers to last a night onshore, warm clothes and blankets, matches for a fire. Jess had a good idea where Ty had hidden the package, but she decided it was better to plan ahead. They had a whole island to search, and the quicker they could cover ground, the better.
They brought the guns, too: Hank Moss’s supply, Jess’s shotgun, the pistol Burke had bought from Rengo in the woods.
“We’ll stick you with the shotgun,” Jess told Burke. “Easier to hit something at close quarters, and you look like you could handle the kick.”
He nodded, stoic as ever. “You mind giving me some pointers with those pistols?”
She could have fallen in love right there. Not that she particularly cared about teaching him to shoot a gun, but because he had the balls to ask. She hadn’t known many men who’d feel comfortable taking shooting lessons from a woman, and she’d known a hell of a lot of guys who couldn’t shoot half as well as she could.
“Of course I don’t mind,” she told him, handing Moss’s bag of guns down to him in the skiff. “We get to the island, I’ll set you up with some targets. We’ll make an Annie Oakley out of you yet.”
Lucy wasn’t sure about the rowboat, but they got her aboard. Jess hoisted her up to the gunwale, forklift style, and passed her off to Burke as she squirmed and snorted her complaints, Burke nearly swamping the boat, the whole process extremely undignified.
Jess laughed as Burke set Lucy down and the dog struggled to the bow of the boat, where she collapsed in a heap and stared back at them, traumatized. Burke steadied the boat, stood and held out his hand for her, and Jess rolled her eyes and passed down the oars, slipped into the boat while he was stowing them away.
“Don’t go getting chivalrous,” she told him, untying the line from the troller.
“No, ma’am,” Burke said. “I wouldn’t presume.”
She couldn’t tell if he was being serious or sarcastic. Figured that was going to be an ongoing problem.
She let Burke row anyway. Sat in the bow and comforted Lucy, the dog a lot less secure with this rowboat than she’d been on a vessel with a kitchen and bunks. She trembled the whole way to shore, cuddling up against Jess and licking at her face and staring out at the island in the distance like it was the very jaws of dog hell awaiting her there, instead of a nice patch of forest to sniff and a bunch of new places to pee.
But the dog’s fear disappeared when they hit the beach, Jess jumping out into water to her calves, pulling the bow of the boat in to the narrow patch of shingle on the western side of the lagoon. Lucy leapt off as soon as the boat scraped the bottom, landed on the beach, and immediately set to exploring, dashing off between the trees and vanishing into the forest, her collar jingling with every step, the sound diminishing but never quite disappearing.
Burke and Jess unloaded their supplies from the skiff, brought them up to the tree line, and stashed them there. They dragged the skiff up to the high tide line on the beach, tied the rope off to a tree at the edge of the forest. Then they armed themselves—Burke the shotgun, Jess the rifle, a pistol for each, and ammunition for all—and then Burke looked at Jess and asked, “Where do we start?”
“Follow me,” Jess told him. She shouldered her rifle and set off west through the forest, the narrowest part of the island, where the blue sky and open ocean were just visible through the trees, the surf plainly audible as it crashed on the black rocks. The island was maybe a hundred feet wide at this point, and there was a vague trail that bisected it, the product of locals like Jess and Ty escaping civilization for a deserted-island getaway.
Jess could remember following Ty through these trees, pushing the ferns aside and listening to the waves crash, the raven call, seeing Ty grinning back at her, and the sun hitting her face. It was a painful memory, but not as much anymore. Mason Burke was a better man than Ty Winslow; Jess knew it now for certain. If anything, she hated how young and naive she’d been to fall in love with Ty in the first place.
She pushed through the last of the trees, and then the forest was gone and she was staring out at the vast blue sky, ragged clouds racing overhead and sun rays shining down between them. The ocean spread out before her, darker blue than the sky and mottled with whitecaps, a bitter wind blowing in, the mainland extending out on her left like a finger of green, falling away at Cape Flattery. Here was the smell of tidal pools, salt water, and seaweed, the sound of the ocean overpowering now.
There was a beach here, a small one, sand ringed on either side by more black rock, sheltered farther out by half-submerged reefs. The waves crashed over them, sending white water exploding into the air with a sound like a mortar bomb. You could, conceivably, land a boat on this beach, though Ty said getting in through the maze of shoals was like suicide. You’d have to get lucky, or you could die pretty quick.
Burke stepped out of the forest behind her. He stood beside her and surveyed the vista, one hand shading his eyes, the other rubbing at the back of his neck.
“Jeez,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“It’s not so bad when it isn’t raining,” Jess said. “Just happens to rain about eight months of the year.”
“Those other four months, though.”
“Yeah, they’re something,” Jess agreed, and she meant it. She’d missed Deception Cove when she’d left it, every damn time. There’d been nothing to come back to but rain and rain forest and Ty’s damn schemes, but she’d never been able to find anything she liked better. Even now the prospect of leaving to flee Kirby Harwood made her anxious.
“Come on,” she said, starting up the beach. “I’ve got a hunch I know where Ty left that package.”
They picked their way through the rough sand and over the rocks, dodging tide pools filled with urchins and tiny hermit crabs. Worked their way north around the end of the beach, a little rock outcrop and a couple of flat rocks like tables where Ty said you could suntan if the weather was good.
The going got tougher when you got past the table rocks, the forest encroaching almost to the water, the overgrowth dense and the land beneath unforgiving. Jess and Burke had to edge their way over the booming surf; she looked back and saw Lucy on the table rock, staring after them, her big brown eyes wide and concerned. For a moment Jess feared the dog would try to follow, but the dog wasn’t that dumb; she circled a couple of times and lay down on the table rock, her head on her paws, watching Jess and Burke navigate the terrain and no doubt thinking how foolish
they were.
There was another rocky point up here, as the land curved north toward the top of Dixie Island’s C shape. The forest fell back a little, and there was a cradle of rock, and in the middle there was weedy dune grass studded with rocks and driftwood and dead trees. And there was something else, too, in the middle of that grass, something Ty had been eager to show her.
“Check it out,” he’d said, helping her down from the rocks and into the grass, leading her across to where the trees blocked the sunlight. “Did you ever see anything like this before?”
For a moment she didn’t see anything, just grass and rock and the forest beyond. But she looked closer, went into the shade and let her eyes adjust, and she realized that what she’d thought were dead trees were actually something else.
Ribs, they looked like, a massive, mossy rib cage, and for a second she thought Ty had found a whale’s skeleton. But the ribs were wooden, and here and there she saw iron. This was man-made. Farther into the forest, more and more planks of wood curved up from the spine. This was a ship, or it had been. Now it was a wreck, and a big one.
Burke figured it out much faster than she had. “Must have been some ship,” he said. “How old, do you figure?”
Jess shrugged. “A hundred years, maybe more. Ty said this was a secret wreck and not many people knew about it. I figure if he hid the package anywhere, it’d be here.”
“Makes sense to me,” Burke replied, setting down the shotgun and walking to the closest rib. Jess watched him peer underneath, and she shivered a little bit. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be right, wasn’t sure she wanted to find this package after all. But she knew she couldn’t bail out, not now. There was no good path forward but the one they were walking.
She set down the rifle. Followed Burke to the wreck.
Forty-Eight
Mason and Jess found the package easily. It didn’t take more than four or five minutes.
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