Deception Cove

by Owen Laukkanen

  They lay there together for a few minutes, but not very long. It was shortly thereafter they heard the sound of the motor.

  * * *

  Kirby was early. The tide wouldn’t turn for another half hour, but there he was; it had to be him, not too far away now, not if they could hear the motor with the wind blowing like it was.

  Jess hurried to get dressed in the cramped space of the cave, Burke doing the same beside her. Every now and then he’d glance at her, she could feel it, or she would glance at him, but they didn’t exchange words and barely even made eye contact. There was too much to do now, and they were running behind.

  She finished dressing and crawled to the edge of the cave. Peered out and across the rock and cocked her head and listened to the motor. It was a boat, that was obvious, and she couldn’t hear the helicopter. Maybe they were lucky, and Kirby had left the bird behind.

  Burke poked his head out beside her. “Can’t be in the pass yet,” he said. “That engine would be louder.”

  “Not yet, but soon,” she replied. “You have what you need?”

  He reached back into the cave, came out with the shotgun and two of the pistols. “What about Lucy?”

  “I’ll tie her up somewhere the fighting won’t reach her,” Jess said. “She’ll be okay. You just worry about doing your job.”

  He saluted, saying, “Yes, ma’am,” and she had to smile.

  “Go,” she said. “And stay out of sight until you hear me start shooting.”

  He hoisted the shotgun. Leaned over and kissed her, hard, on the mouth, and then he was gone, skirting the rock face to the forest and disappearing within. He would circle around to the northeast end of the island, wait to trap Kirby and the boys in the pass. If all went to plan, Jess didn’t think she would need him, but even if she did, the fight was going to end quick.

  She called for Lucy. Heard the dog stretch, and the jingle of her collar as she made her way out of the cave.

  “Good morning, girl,” Jess told her. “Things are going to get weird for a little while here, but I don’t want you to worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Lucy looked at her with worried eyes.

  “I promise,” Jess said. “We’ll take care of some business, and then we’ll get on back to the mainland and I’ll buy you a steak, okay?”

  Lucy licked her face, and Jess figured that was as good an agreement as she was likely to get. She reached over to the ruined inflatable, untied the line from the bow, and tied it around Lucy’s collar, and then, crouching low, she hurried the dog into the trees and circled up and around to the top of the rock wall, above the little cave. Found a nice little spot far away from where the shooting would happen, sheltered by rock and nestled in the ferns, and tied Lucy’s line to a tree.

  “You stay here,” she told the dog. “I’ll come back for you soon.”

  Lucy looked at her a beat, then took to surveying the area; she nosed up to a fern and took an exploratory bite. Jess watched the dog, suddenly reluctant to leave her. The damn mutt the cause of so much of this chaos—her very existence leading Burke here and thus leading them all to this island—and the dog was more concerned with eating her greens than with the reckoning that would come.

  Shit.

  She loved the dog, and she was glad Burke had come into her life to help get her back. She reached over and scratched Lucy’s flank, once, and then she straightened and studied the dog, and hoped they would see each other again. She couldn’t remember ever getting this hung up on a goodbye with a human being, but hell, who on earth needed proof that dogs were better than people?

  “Bye, dog,” Jess said. Lucy looked up, wagged her tail a couple of times. Went back to eating her fern, and Jess decided that was her cue. She turned and left the dog there, made her way back down toward the cliff overlooking the pass. The tide would be turning soon, and she needed to get into position.

  * * *

  Mason hurried through the dense forest, the shotgun in his hands and the pistols at his waist. He couldn’t hear the boat, but he knew it was out there, and he could see that the water in Dixie Lagoon was lapping at the tree line. He knew the tide was going to have to turn soon.

  He had no time to think, and no time to be worried about anything other than Kirby Harwood driving that little boat up the pass before he was ready. He made the isthmus and glanced west at the open water, big, rolling swells coming in, pounding the beach and the outlying rocks with surf. He pressed on.

  There weren’t any paths to the north side of the island, none that Mason could see, and the trees went right to the shoreline, so there wasn’t any beach to follow either. He had to slog his way through the middle of the forest, tangled overgrowth and deadfall, the ground muddy and soft beneath his boots, the trees saturated with rainwater. He was soaked through his jacket before he’d made it ten yards.

  It took him a full half hour to struggle his way around the top of the island to the point, the terrain rocky and uneven, rising and falling and rising again. He was winded by the time he was close, and he slowed down to catch his breath and so that Kirby and his boys wouldn’t hear him crashing toward them, wouldn’t see the trees move and know he was coming.

  The island stretched north and east a little farther from the entrance to the pass, but Mason figured he might not ever set foot there. He was only interested in the pass and the boat waiting offshore, fifty yards from the rocks.

  The Grady-White was almost as long as Ty Winslow’s troller, but it was sleeker, whiter. It sat streamlined in the water with its twin engines burbling. Mason ducked away as soon as he saw it. He’d seen men aboard, dark jackets clustered by the console and standing guard at the stern, but he didn’t dare stick around long enough to count them. It wouldn’t matter how many Kirby had brought with him, so long as Jess could catch them with their pants down.

  Mason backed away into the forest again. Retraced his steps along the north side of the pass until he found the outcrop he was looking for, a piece of rock he and Jess had spied from her cliff. From the outcrop Mason could see up the pass toward where Jess would be set up, but he’d be blocked from Harwood’s sight by the forest behind him. It was a good spot, and it was where he would set up to ambush the deputy.

  He looked west toward the face of the cliff, searched the top for any sign of Jess and her rifle. He wondered what she’d done with Lucy, whether she’d kept the dog close. He wondered what Harwood would do if he got hold of the dog again, and he wished he’d brought her to this side of the island instead.

  It was too late now.

  The noise of the boat’s engines increased. Mason looked again for Jess on the cliff, but he couldn’t see her, and he supposed that was a good thing. He ducked back into the forest and checked and rechecked his shotgun, listened to the boat approach, and waited for his time to act.

  Fifty-Five

  Kirby Harwood squinted up the narrow stretch of water as he idled the boat closer. Searched the shore for any sign of Jess Winslow or Mason Burke. He hadn’t seen them yet, but Harwood knew they had to be out there.

  Dale Whitmer came up behind him. Stood beside Harwood at the console. “Tide’s turning, Kirby,” he said, his hand shading his eyes as he searched the pass. “We’re losing our window.”

  On Harwood’s other side, Joy shifted and fixed Harwood with those unsettling black eyes. “What are we waiting for, Deputy?”

  Harwood didn’t answer right away. They’d set out from Neah Bay at first light, made Dixie Island with plenty of time before slack. It was rough in the strait, a small-craft advisory, but the Grady-White could take it and there wasn’t any other choice.

  If any man in Deception Cove wanted to go ahead and kill someone or rob somebody’s store, now was the day to do it. Harwood had brought his whole team. He’d armed Whitmer and Cole Sweeney with Remington model 700P rifles, deployed them to the stern of the boat, and told them to shoot anything that moved on the shore. Joy had brought the M4 with the grenade launcher, and
Harwood had an M4 as well. In the little galley up by the bow, they’d stashed the rest of Joy’s weapons—a couple of shotguns and some pistols—plenty of ammunition. By the numbers, the job sounded simple. Three cops and one scary Nigerian motherfucker with big guns and unlimited ammunition should have no trouble taking over the island. But by Harwood’s way of thinking, the math just didn’t add up.

  Whitmer nudged him. “Kirby.”

  “I heard you, Dale,” Harwood said.

  “We don’t move now, we don’t move at all, boss. We need to get in there.”

  Harwood scratched the top of his head. “Get in there, you mean?” he said. “Up into that pass?”

  He could feel Whitmer staring at him. “Where else?”

  “Take a look up in there, Dale,” Harwood said. “Tell me what you see.”

  Whitmer didn’t answer right away. Then he spat. “I see the tide’s turning, is what I see,” he said. “Now listen, Kirby, if you’re too chickenshit to—”

  “To what?” Harwood looked at him, hard. “That’s a US Marine waiting for us in there, Dale, and as best we can surmise, she’s heavily armed. When we get up in that pass, there’s no turning around, and if she’s half as smart as we know she is, she’s already figuring she can trap us in there, pick off each and every one of us from up on one of those ridges.” He cocked his head. “Are you seeing that, Dale? Because that’s the first thing I fucking see, and if I’m thinking about it, you can be damn sure the goddamn marine is thinking it too.”

  Whitmer went silent. He looked away, spat again. Joy picked up the thread. “You said that pass was the only way onto the island, Deputy.”

  “Maybe it is.” Harwood searched the rocky walls of the pass one more time. Couldn’t see movement, but he knew—just knew—Jess Winslow was out there, somewhere, waiting on them. “But we’re not going in there.”

  Joy made to reply. Harwood shifted the engines into reverse, drowned him out with one thousand horsepower.

  “I’ll find another way,” he hollered over the roar. “That bitch hasn’t seen the last of us yet.”

  * * *

  Mason heard the engines rev and realized quickly that something was wrong. He ducked off the outcrop and back into the forest, hurried up the pass to the entrance rocks, where the waves from Kirby Harwood’s wash were just hitting the shore. The boat itself was just curling out of sight south, tracing the edge of the island on a plane, pounding into the swell. Within thirty seconds, it would be gone.

  Mason counted the bodies aboard. Four of them. Too far away to figure out who, but by Mason’s count, there were five working against them—six if you counted the helicopter pilot. That meant at least one man was missing, and the other four were deviating from Jess’s expectations.

  Mason didn’t like it.

  He worked his way back through the forest to the rocky outcrop where he’d planned to back Jess up with the shotgun. Stood tall and waved the shotgun over his head toward the cliff down the pass, hoping to get Jess’s attention. But nothing moved on the top of the cliff. If Jess was up there, she wasn’t letting him know it.

  Damn it, Mason thought. Just what are those boys up to now?

  * * *

  Down the pass, Jess was thinking Kirby Harwood was either crazy or he was dumber than she’d thought.

  She was gone from the top of the cliff before the sound of the engines had stopped reverberating against the rock walls around her. Someone aboard Kirby’s pride and joy must have pointed out to him that idling up that long, narrow pass was probably going to end badly. And there was only one other place on the island even remotely worth trying to land.

  Now he’d be headed for the little beach on the west side of the island. And judging from the noise of those engines as he’d taken off, he was aiming to get there fast.

  Jess slung the carbine over her shoulder and hurried off the back end of the cliff and into the forest, beating her way down the rocky declination toward the isthmus, picking her path more confidently now, knowing the best route. She was thinking they might have to rename this island after her, or Lucy at least, assuming they made it out alive. There couldn’t be too many people who’d spent this much time marooned on these rocks and lived to talk about it.

  She peeled off toward the western shore before she’d fully reached the isthmus, found her way through the trees to where the forest gave up and the sheer rock took over. There wasn’t much margin between flora and a twenty-foot drop into the roiling surf; she picked her way carefully along the edge, looking out at the big, rolling swell coming in, breaking over the offshore shoals. She kept looking for Kirby’s boat and not seeing it.

  Then she rounded a little point to a rocky peninsula just wide enough for her to stand and look north toward where the island curved inland toward the beach. And there, a hundred yards off that beach, the Grady-White idled, rolling in the trough of what must have been six-foot rollers, pitching from side to side as the men aboard studied the beach.

  They hadn’t seen her. And though they were a hundred yards out from where they were thinking of landing, they were only about fifty yards from where Jess was standing on the peninsula. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder, surveyed the boat through the scope. There were four men aboard, all of them holding on for dear life as the swell had its way with the Grady-White. Jess studied all of them in turn.

  Kirby at the controls, gesturing inland. His nameless buddy with the helicopter and the grenade launcher riding shotgun, his expression eerily calm. Dale Whitmer, sullen as always, holding a long gun at the stern beside Cole Sweeney, who just looked seasick.

  They all would have looked ridiculous if they hadn’t been aiming to kill her. And Jess didn’t know the man beside Kirby, but she knew enough to know she would have to respect him. If the boys made it onshore, he’d be the one to watch out for.

  Well, she thought, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.

  She found the man in her sights again. Followed him as the boat rose and fell on another big wave. He was about Burke’s age, she figured. Slim, with a scar across his cheek and black, lifeless eyes. He carried that M4 with the grenade launcher below, and as she watched, he was saying something to Kirby, and she could tell from the way Kirby reacted that even the deputy was afraid of him.

  Let me do you a favor, Kirb.

  Jess kept the rifle trained on the newcomer. Slipped off the safety switch. Waited as the Grady-White dropped down into a trough, followed it back up again. Let out her breath as the boat seemed to hang there, waiting on the next wave, as time seemed to slow.

  Then she pulled the trigger and watched as the newcomer went down.

  Fifty-Six

  Joy was flat on the deck before Harwood’s mind had even processed the shot. The Nigerian gripped his shoulder, writhing at Harwood’s feet and cursing unintelligibly, and Harwood stood slack-jawed and stupid at the control panel, trying to piece it all together.

  The next shot shattered the Grady-White’s windshield, and Harwood didn’t hear that one either—the crash of the surf sounding like artillery fire—but he knew Jess Winslow wasn’t going to miss twice. He jammed the boat into gear and pushed the throttle full bore, knocking Sweeney and Whitmer on their asses at the stern, nearly sending Sweeney over the rail.

  The boat roared and launched forward, Harwood ducking down low, trying to figure out where the widow was shooting from. He guessed to his right, on the rocks that curled out from the little bay, but he couldn’t be sure, wasn’t going to risk his life. He knew they had to move or she would pick them off one by one.

  “Find her,” he hollered back at Sweeney and Whitmer. “Get off your asses and take the bitch out.”

  The boys were still rolling around back there, fumbling for their rifles, and Joy had pulled himself up into a sitting position, keeping pressure on the big fucking hole in his shoulder, still saying something that Harwood couldn’t decipher.

  Harwood had bigger questions to answer anyway. Like how the hell he was go
ing to get the boat through the shoals and to shore under heavy fire and on a huge, breaking swell. Even now, as the boat rocketed forward, Harwood could see white water in his path, washing over the jagged reefs that guarded the little bay, just waiting to tear the bottom out of his boat.

  If they went in the water, they were dead, Harwood knew. The surf would smash them to bloody pieces on the rocks, and if they somehow survived the trip, Jess Winslow would be waiting to cut their balls off on the beach. He had to dodge the rocks somehow and get the boat to shore. And he was only going to get a single shot to try it.

  Harwood pulled back on the throttle as much as he dared, felt the swell pick up the boat and carry it in toward the bay, the waiting rocks. He knew he couldn’t slow down too much, not with the waves carrying them; he needed to keep the propellers churning water if he wanted to maintain any kind of control. But damn if those rocks weren’t coming at him fast.

  Harwood dodged a nasty patch of black rock, skirting to the right as another wave caught them and hurtled them forward, the wave exploding against the rocks and soaking Sweeney and Whitmer with salt spray. But the Grady-White was clear of that first shoal, and Harwood didn’t look back. He kept the little boat moving, kept his eyes on the rocks, looking for a way through. The bay was a maze, choked with half-submerged hazards, but Harwood knew his boat, and he knew his own ability. He had ample faith in both.

  So long as that bitch doesn’t start shooting again, he thought, we might just be all right.

  As soon as he had the thought, though, he heard another shot ring out from shore—and this one caught Whitmer in the chest. The deputy swore and toppled overboard, disappeared in the wash, and Harwood called his name and turned around to look for him. He didn’t see Dale, but he damn sure saw the breaker.