Eight

The motel owner called out to Mason as he walked through the empty parking lot to his room. Night had fully fallen, and the rain remained, constant, making the gritty black pavement between Mason’s feet feel slick and oily and dappled with reflected yellow light.

“Did you make it all the way to Jess’s place?” the older man asked when Mason had detoured over to where he waited by the lobby.

“I did,” Mason said.

“How’s she doing?”

Mason lifted a hand to his stomach where Jess Winslow had hit him with her shotgun. He laughed a little bit. “She’s heavily armed,” he said. “And she kicked my ass.”

The man looked him over. “Good,” he said. “You get what you want?”

“Maybe.” Mason glanced down the long row of doors, then back toward the warmth of the lobby. “You got time to talk for a little bit?”

  

The motel owner’s name was Henry Moss—Hank, he said, to his friends. He led Mason into the lobby, switched on the coffeemaker in the corner, and set himself up behind the front desk.

“So,” he said, “what is it you want to know, Mr. Burke?”

Plenty. “That deputy, Harwood. What’s his story?”

“Kirby?” Moss laughed. “That’s a subject that’s ripe for examination. More or less the town’s prodigal son, hell of a quarterback back in his varsity days. Went off to the U. of Washington on some kind of scholarship, supposed to have a shot at the pros.”

“Guess that didn’t work out,” Mason said.

“No, sir. Kirby washed out after a year of not exactly living up to his potential. Came on back to Deception Cove, got himself deputized, and now we all figure he’s just marking time until Kirk Wheeler up in Neah Bay retires.”

“Wheeler’s the sheriff?”

“In name, anyway,” Moss told him. “Though he mostly concerns himself with fishing these days. He’s pushing seventy, been threatening to call it quits for years. One of these days he’s actually going to do it, and then Makah County is all Kirby’s.”

“Kind of seems like he’s already assumed ownership,” Mason said. “Based on my limited interaction. You figure he’s an honest cop?”

Moss studied him for a beat. Looked out over his shoulder at the parking lot behind. The lot was still empty, the highway, too.

“There’s whispers,” the older man said. “Maybe you saw that truck he drives—”

“The boat, too.”

“The boat, too,” Moss agreed. “Hard to say how he’d scrape up that kind of cash on his county salary, but everyone has a theory.”

“What’s yours?”

Moss hummed something tuneless. “I mean, here’s the thing,” he said. “We have a bit of an amphetamine problem in Makah County. Now, I’m not saying Kirby’s directly involved, but he hasn’t exactly focused his efforts on curtailing the local operation.”

Mason said, “Was Jess’s husband involved in that stuff?”

“Ty?” Moss frowned. “I thought this was about a dog, Mr. Burke. What exactly are you thinking is going on here?”

“I don’t know yet,” Mason said. “Just a couple things struck me as funny, that’s all.”

The coffee machine burbled. “Just one second,” Moss said, disappearing into the back room. He returned a moment later with a bottle of Irish cream. He winked at Mason, poured them both mugs, spiked each with a splash from the bottle, and slid Mason’s mug over.

“To your health,” he said, and lifted the mug to his lips. When he put the mug down again, his expression was focused.

“I don’t know much about Ty Winslow,” he told Mason. “We didn’t exactly run in the same circles, you know how I mean?”

Mason tried his coffee. Surprisingly good, and hot enough to chase the damp cold that had followed him since he’d stepped off the bus last night.

“Let me put it this way for you,” Moss continued. “There’s two bars in this town. We got Spinnaker’s, across from the government wharf. Tim Turpin owns that one, and Tim sees himself as a real gourmet-type individual, has the locally sourced veggies and the gluten-free bread, sustainable salmon, that kind of thing.”

“And the other place?”

“The other place is the Cobalt, and it isn’t the kind of spot you want to take your sweetie for dinner,” Moss said. “Kind of the epicenter for all the bad news in this town.” He took another drink. “See if you can guess where Ty Winslow did most of his drinking.”

Mason nodded. “I think I get the picture.”

“You want to know about Ty, you want to check out the Cobalt. Someone there will have answers for you, if you’re really interested.” Moss squinted at Mason. “Though I’m still not clear on why you’d care.”

Mason hesitated. Tried to choose his words. Looked past Henry Moss to the picture the motel owner had hung on the wall, a younger Moss in combat fatigues, somewhere in the desert.

“Jess Winslow’s husband was mixed up in something with the deputy,” Mason said. “That’s why the deputy came to bother her that one night, and that’s why he took the dog from her. He thinks she has something, and he’s using that dog as leverage to get it back.”

Moss laid his hands flat on the counter. Leaned forward. “And what’s your play here, son? Are you thinking you’ll just wade right into the middle of this whole thing and rescue that dog?”

“I was thinking about it,” Mason said.

“Must be a hell of a dog.”

“She’s more than a dog, sir. She’s a friend in a bad spot, and I can’t just sit idle while there’s still a shot at helping her.” Mason gestured past Moss at the picture on the wall. “That you?”

Moss turned, checked out the picture like he was seeing it for the first time. “That’s me,” he said. “Forty-First Infantry, Desert Storm. Seems like a long time ago now.”

“You see much combat?”

“Did we see combat?” Moss laughed. “Son, we were first across the Saudi border, the tip of the spear. We saw plenty of combat.”

“I guess I should have known that.”

Moss waved him off. Drained his coffee.

“Sounded like Jess saw her own share of action,” Mason said. “I must have been away a long time. I didn’t know they let women be marines now.”

“I guess you never heard of a female engagement team,” Moss said. He caught Mason’s blank look and shook his head. “Yes, sir. For a Marine Corps that didn’t want to send women to the front lines, they sure as hell gave Jess her share of the loud and scary stuff.” He looked off again, into the parking lot. Pursed his lips.

“Yes, sir,” he said again. “There’s a reason they gave her that dog when she came back, and it’s not because they figured the dog needed a friend.”

  

Mason bid the motel owner good night. Retreated to his room, unlocked the door, switched on the light. Half expected to see Kirby Harwood waiting in the dark for him, and when the deputy wasn’t there, Mason wondered if Harwood’s presence would have unnerved him any more than the emptiness he found instead.

Fifteen years in a cell. Three squares a day. Lights on, lights off. Doors open, doors closed. Fifteen years with no agency, no privacy, no personal space. He’d grown used to the structure, made his peace with his relative powerlessness. He’d matured in that prison cell, accustomed himself to the strange rituals on the inside, the hierarchies, rules written and unwritten. Fifteen years, nearly half of his life so far. He’d never been comfortable inside the prison, but at least he’d known what to expect.

And now, on the outside, Mason felt the vastness of possibility like a heavy stone on his chest. There was no one to tell him what to do, a thousand paths to walk and no clear way to choose. He felt rootless, adrift, drowning in his freedom, surrounded by a population of normal, law-abiding people who all knew the roles, the social mores, who could look a person in the eye without feeling they were revealing their monstrous selves.

Shit.

He’d landed here, in this motel room at the end of the world, utterly on his own. He would wake up on his own, bathe on his own. He would choose what to eat, and where, and when. And he knew this was an incredible luxury, something he’d dreamed about over countless nights inside the Chippewa pen. He’d imagined eating at nice restaurants, going for long drives. Hell, meeting a woman, making actual friends. It had all seemed so simple when he was still inside. Now, on the outside, Mason Burke had no idea what he was doing.

He needed structure. Mason knew, somewhere in his subconscious, that coming to Deception Cove in search of a dog wasn’t the sanest idea in the world. He knew it wouldn’t make sense to most anyone who knew what he was doing. The dog was just a dog, after all. And from the sound of it, the dog was mixed up in something a lot bigger than Mason had anticipated. He knew the sane answer was to turn around and go home.

And do what? Where was home, exactly? What did he have in this world to look forward to? Where would he start? Cleaning houses?

“Greater love has no one than this,” the Bible said, “that someone lay down his life for his friends.”

The dog needed help. Mason needed a purpose. He undressed for bed and slipped beneath the sheets. He’d be sticking around for a while.