Deception Cove

by Owen Laukkanen

  Something moved in the forest behind her, spooked her out of her reverie, and she spun with the pistol and curled her finger around the trigger and waited as the bushes rustled and a branch snapped, and then Lucy came out into the open.

  “Lucy.” Jess lowered the pistol, her heart pounding. “You nearly scared me to death, dog.”

  But it was Lucy who looked scared. She wagged her tail a couple of times, yawned nervously, looked into the woods and then back at Jess and yawned again and whined a little.

  “What’s up, girl?” Jess took a step toward Lucy, and the dog turned back the way she had come, started into the forest, and looked over her shoulder at Jess to make sure she was coming.

  Jess got the point. She followed Lucy off the trail and down from the cliff, but closer to the lagoon side of the land this time. Apparently, the dog had been over there, silent, as Jess had worked her way across to Dale Whitmer. Without her collar, Lucy didn’t jingle when she walked, and the forest was thick enough that Jess could have walked right past her and not seen.

  But she could see Lucy now, and she followed close, drawing her pistol and feeling her nerves start to wake up again. It had to be Burke, she knew, and the way Lucy was acting, it had to be bad.

  She found the other guy, Joy, lying slumped over a rotten stump a stone’s throw from the cove. He had his rifle slung around his chest, but he wasn’t a threat anymore; half of his head was blown off, and he’d taken a few more rounds in places the body armor wasn’t protecting.

  Jess hoped he’d died slow, the son of a bitch.

  Lucy skirted Joy’s body quickly, her tail between her legs. She hopped up onto a fallen tree and looked back at Jess again, waited until she’d nearly caught up, and then jumped down again. Jess made the tree, and began to step over. Then she stopped.

  On the other side was Mason Burke.

  He’d been shot too, at least a couple of times. His jacket was bloody, at chest level and lower. He lay nearly flat on the forest floor, his head resting against the trunk of a tall pine, and he wasn’t moving, and she thought as she looked at him that he was already dead.

  Of course he’s dead, stupid. That’s how this ends.

  But then Lucy went to him and licked at his face, whimpering, and Jess saw Burke smile weakly and open his eyes just a hair.

  “Hey, girl,” he said. Lucy wagged her tail fast and licked at his face some more. “Hey, girl, it’s okay,” Burke said. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  Jess stepped over the tree and came down close to where Burke lay, and he raised an arm weakly to fend Lucy off, looked up at her.

  “Hey,” he said.

  She swallowed. “Hey yourself.”

  “Are we winning?”

  “Yeah, Burke,” she said. “We won.”

  He smiled a little bit wider. Leaned his head back. “Good,” he said.

  Then he closed his eyes, and Jess felt her heart break a little bit.

  Sixty-Five

  Jess wasn’t going to let Burke go that easy.

  She left Lucy to keep an eye on him, figuring if the dog was nearby, he might think twice before deciding to die. She’d packed his wounds with dirt, wrapped them with strips she’d torn from her T-shirt, stabilized him as best she could. Burke needed more than battlefield dressings, though; he needed a hospital, no matter how many kisses Lucy gave him.

  She wrapped her jacket around her and hurried back toward the isthmus and the western beach, where Kirby’s Grady-White lay wrecked on the rocks, a few feet above the waterline now that the tide had fallen. She studied the hull as she approached, looking for any visible holes. She couldn’t see any, but that didn’t mean anything. She circled around the far side and climbed over the gunwale and into the cockpit, went down into the cabin to look for something she could use.

  What she found was a half-empty first aid kit, a flare gun, and a shot-to-shit radio. And in one of the plastic cases with all the guns, $10,000 in cash. Whoopee.

  The flare gun wouldn’t do much with no one around to see it. The first aid kit was barely more than a handful of Band-Aids and some Polysporin. The radio wouldn’t power up, and there wasn’t any way Burke would live to spend that ten grand unless Jess could figure out a way to keep him alive.

  Hell, Jess thought, I’m just as well giving Burke a hit from that package Ty stole.

  She came back up into the cockpit and looked out over the ocean. The tide had turned again; it was coming in now, but it would take several hours to refloat the boat. For all she knew, Burke would be dead by then.

  Jess pushed the thought from her mind. Focused on setting goals, things she could accomplish, things that probably wouldn’t mean squat in the long run but that would keep her occupied in the meantime.

  She took the first aid kit and a bottle of water and humped it back across to where Burke lay, not moving. He didn’t stir as she approached, and she cursed herself, thinking once again he was dead.

  But he was a strong piece of work, she had to admit. He opened his eyes a little bit and smiled up at her, and the dog looked at her and wagged her tail like she was hoping Jess had somehow brought the miracle cure.

  Jess gave Burke water, and she treated his wounds as best she could from the first aid kid, though her T-shirt bandages were doing about as well as any Band-Aid. Burke drank the water and didn’t complain as she checked up on him. When he’d drunk his fill and she was satisfied, she looked around and exhaled and pitched their only shot.

  “We’ve got to get you back to that boat, Burke,” she said. “It’s going to hurt like a real bitch, but there’s no other option.”

  He didn’t answer right away. Finally he forced out a laugh. “You sure don’t make it easy on a man.”

  “I can’t see us getting off this island any other way,” she said. “So you gather up your strength, and I’ll be right back.”

  She took off into the forest again, climbing up the southern side of the island to where she’d left Cole Sweeney. He hadn’t moved either, looked like he was sleeping. But he stirred when she approached, looked greedily at the water bottle she still carried. “You mind sharing that, Jess?”

  She held it just out of his grasp. “I need you to do something for me first,” she said. “I need you to get your ass up, and down this mountain to the beach and the boat. Can you do that?”

  Cole looked at his ruined leg. “What, like this?”

  She unslung the rifle from her shoulder. Emptied it, threw the shells into the woods. “There’s your crutch,” she said. “Only way off this island is using Kirby’s boat, and the tide is coming in. You’ve got a few hours, but don’t waste them.”

  Cole took the rifle. Looked at it, looked at her like she was crazy. Jess shrugged. “You’d rather wait here, be my guest,” she said. “I’m just giving you options.”

  “Can I at least have some water?” Cole asked. “I’m dying here.”

  “You don’t know what dying is,” she said, but she handed him the water bottle and turned and went back down toward Burke, figuring you can lead a horse to water and all that. If Cole made the boat by the time she was ready, good for him. If not, she wasn’t waiting around.

  Burke was sitting a bit straighter when she found him again. Lucy looked concerned, but what else was new?

  “I don’t know why you’re so worried, dog,” Jess muttered, bending down in front of Burke. “Only thing hurt on you is your feelings.”

  She shooed Lucy away. Spoke to Burke. “I’m a little out of practice with this ‘no man left behind’ stuff,” she said. “So bear with me.”

  She closed her eyes and got focused, sent her mind back to Parris Island, boot camp, a pissed-off drill instructor and a whole regiment of male recruits who didn’t think girls like her belonged in the corps.

  She sent her mind back to the defiance, the force of will, and the fear of failure that had pushed her to do the impossible over those thirteen weeks in South Carolina, and then she knelt down and hauled Burke over her shoulders,
and forced herself to stand, the weight nearly breaking her, suffocating her, driving her back down into the dirt.

  She leaned forward against Burke’s pine, his body draped all over her, and she counted to three and focused her breathing, and pushed off and started through the forest to the beach.

  It was slow, very slow, and it must have been torture for Burke. Jess had to stop every ten feet or so, adjust Burke’s weight, find something to lean on. She wished she hadn’t given Sweeney that water, wished Burke hadn’t done all those push-ups. When the shit got real hard, she almost wished Burke were dead.

  But that was a lie. She knew she’d rather be dead than live with Burke’s absence, live with the knowledge that he’d died for her. She knew she’d see him with Afia every time she closed her eyes, more guilt and this time compounded by the fact that Burke was the most decent man she’d ever met in her life, and she couldn’t even keep him alive long enough to tell him.

  This kept her going. Kept her struggling, slow and steady, through the dense underbrush, Lucy beside her and ahead of her and constantly underfoot (the damn dog), the wind in the trees and the sun sinking low, already touching the horizon. And the tide crawling over the rocks, slow and inexorable, coming to lift Kirby’s boat and take them away.

  Cole Sweeney caught up with them on the beach, limping along on that rifle of his, wincing every step of the way. His eyes went wide when he saw Jess and Burke; he stopped and stared and coughed a little bit, self-conscious.

  “I mean, you need a hand with him?” he asked.

  She didn’t look at him. “Can you stand up on that knee without toppling over?”

  “No,” he said. “But you—”

  “You just worry about you, Cole,” she said, gritting her teeth. “It’ll take us a while, but we’ll get there.”

  The tide continued to rise as they struggled across the beach. By the time they reached the rocks, seawater once again covered the shoal that had trapped Kirby’s boat. Jess waded through, exhausted, more tired than she’d been since Afghanistan, her head swimming and her mind fighting to keep focused. She nearly dropped Burke, staggered under his weight, fifteen feet to go and it felt like infinity.

  “Put me down,” Burke told her. “I can walk from here.”

  She snorted. “Bullshit. You’ll drown on these rocks.”

  Sweeney came alongside, then passed them, and she watched him hobble up to the side of the boat and throw his rifle over and hesitate and then pull himself up, heard him groan in pain as he rolled over the gunwale. All too late, she remembered there were guns on board, ammunition. If he wanted to, he could go down into the cabin and come back shooting, kill them all.

  But Sweeney only propped himself up in the cockpit and leaned over the rail toward Jess and Burke, his arms outstretched.

  “Bring him this way,” he told her. “I’ll pull him aboard.”

  She muscled Burke the last few feet, ducked low enough that Sweeney could wrap his arms around Burke’s armpits, and then she lifted with her legs as Sweeney hauled. Together they muscled Burke into the boat. Sweeney lay him down at the stern, crawled down into the cabin and came back with a couple of pillows and blankets, then tended to Burke like they hadn’t been trying to kill each other just hours before.

  Men.

  Jess picked up Lucy, who didn’t like it one bit and complained more than Burke and Sweeney put together as Jess hefted her over the side and dropped her into the boat. The dog gave Jess an aggrieved look, then went back to the stern and curled up beside Burke. Jess lifted herself aboard with the last of her strength, sat splayed in the cockpit, and wondered if she would ever stand straight again.

  There was nothing to do now but wait. The tide continued to flood, and Burke was still breathing, and all that remained was to hope the tide lifted the boat before Burke stopped breathing, and that the hull wasn’t too damaged to get them to the mainland.

  It was a ridiculous fantasy, but it was all Jess could cling to. She lay in the cockpit and listened to the water and waited as evening turned to night.

  Sixty-Six

  The rocks clawed at Harwood’s boat, but the rising tide lifted her. The twin engines turned over. And in near pitch-black conditions, Jess somehow managed to navigate the Grady-White over the treacherous shoals that ringed the little bay and out into the open ocean. All that in itself was a miracle, Jess knew. But their luck began to run out again midway across the channel.

  At least, she hoped they were midway. It was full dark by now; Dixie Island to the north was nothing but the sound of waves crashing in the blackness, and the mainland to the south was just more of the same. She’d been going easy on the throttle, sailing as fast as she dared but not so fast that Burke felt it every time they caught up with the swell. The engines weren’t running smooth, either; she could hear something was wrong with the port-side propeller, and there was smoke coming out of the motor on starboard. But the boat was moving, and if Jess could keep it that way, she knew they’d make Neah Bay in an hour.

  Then Sweeney ducked down into the cabin to look for fresh water, and when he came back, he was swearing, and he didn’t look right.

  “We’re flooded,” he told Jess. “There’s about a foot and a half of water in the galley, and it’s rising fast.”

  “Damn it.” She poked her head down the stairs and saw he wasn’t lying. If anything, it looked more like two feet of water down there. There was a breach in the hull somewhere, and from what Jess could tell, it was too late to do anything to fix it.

  “Guess we’re racing,” she told Sweeney, and opened up the throttle. “Go back there and make sure Burke is comfortable.”

  The boat’s engines roared, and not in a good way. The starboard motor sounded like death throes, and there was a rattle from the port side that didn’t portend good things. But the propellers churned the water, and the boat rose on a plane, punching through the swell with a violence that sent Lucy scurrying forward from where Burke was lying, to the stairs into the cabin and the rising tide.

  Jess could feel the boat wallow, how sluggish it seemed when she pulled on the wheel. She kept the wheel straight. She knew there were lights up ahead, somewhere, that would guide her into Neah Bay.

  But the water kept rising, even as she raced the boat up the channel and the navigation light at Chibahdehl Rocks came into view, midway between Dixie Island and civilization. The boat’s nose was planed so high she could hardly see the light, had to twist her head outside the cabin and peer forward to find it, choose her path. From the stern of the boat, Sweeney called up with a situation report.

  “These engines are almost drowned,” he told Jess. “We sink any farther, we’re going to start taking water on over the sides.”

  She glanced back and saw what he meant. The pitch of the deck was thirty degrees now, with Burke in his bundles wedged tight against the stern wall and Sweeney holding on for dear life.

  Jess eased back on the throttle, let the boat come down off its plane a little bit, redistribute the water in the hull farther forward. It was probably futile—the water was still flooding in and the boat was moving slower now—but she had to do something. They motored on like that for another five or ten minutes, the light at Chibahdehl gradually getting closer. Then Jess heard a cough from the engines astern, and Sweeney swore, loud, as both engines cut out.

  “They’re done, Jess,” the deputy called up, his voice fairly shaking. “Those engines are fried.”

  She forced confidence into her voice. “Guess we’re paddling, Sweeney. Go on down below and find us some oars.”

  Sweeney looked at her like she was crazy, but he did as instructed, and Jess took advantage of the sudden quiet to go back astern and check how Burke was doing.

  He still had a pulse, she discovered. He was tangled up in blankets and near soaked from salt spray, but he was alive, and he even opened his eyes a little bit, seemed to recognize her.

  “You can go,” he said weakly. “I’ll be fine here.”

>   She shook her head. “It’s not you I’m worried about, Burke. You ever see that dog try to swim?”

  “Not many pools where I came from,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, she hates it,” Jess said. “She hates the water something fierce, especially if there’s waves. The damn dog’s a diva, and I really don’t want to have to pitch her over the side.”

  He met her eyes. “You won’t have much choice soon.”

  “You shut up,” she said. “Me and Sweeney are going to row you two princesses to shore.”

  Up forward, Sweeney had come out of the cabin soaked to the waist, holding a pair of black plastic paddles that would have struggled to move Ty’s skiff, much less a damn cabin cruiser. Jess sighed. “It’s just going to take a while, Burke. Bear with us.”

  At this point there was no hope in making Neah Bay. Jess figured their best bet was to angle the boat toward the light at Chibahdehl, hope the waves brought them in through the rocks and landed them on the beach. She’d seen the rocks, though; they were as bad as Dixie’s, and they’d claimed as many ships. It was suicide going near them without a chart, full stop, much less trying to navigate through without power.

  But what hope did they have? Jess took one side of the boat, Sweeney the other. They set up at the stern as the cruiser settled in the water more or less uniform, the breach in the hull clearly somewhere amidships. Jess leaned down into the water and paddled, and the water was closer than she’d expected, and the paddle flexed and nearly snapped with her first stroke. She swore in her head and knew it was useless, knew they were all going to die in that water, cold and black and unforgiving, the way so many from Deception Cove had died.

  I guess it’s kind of fitting, she thought. But I doubt many guys from Deception died quite like this.

  Lucy had curled up with Burke again. The dog was terrified, Jess could tell, and Burke was too weak to be of much comfort. She watched as Lucy got up and started to pace, her tail between her legs, her body hunched over and bent like a paper clip, and Jess’s heart ached. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to die, it was that she didn’t want the dog to die, not like this, that dumb diva dog who’d been kicked around by every manner of human scum on this earth, and who’d never wanted much more than a warm blanket to sleep on. The dog was going to drown, just like they all were, and the difference was that Lucy hadn’t ever chosen to get involved in this mess.