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.
Mason rolled down the Blazer’s window. “Rengo,” he called. “We’ve got places to be.”
Rengo waved him off. “Come on out here a sec, Burke,” he replied. “Want you to meet someone.”
The man, whoever he was, looked markedly less thrilled to have come across Rengo than vice versa. He looked down at the kid with undisguised impatience, and there was an air about him that suggested this whole situation wasn’t unfamiliar.
Mason sighed and killed the engine, climbed out of the truck as Rengo stepped back from the newcomer, beaming and gesturing like he was auctioning a prize horse.
“Mason Burke, meet Bad Boyd,” the kid said. “Closest thing our shit-ass town ever had to a bona fide celebrity.”
So there: he was famous, and as Mason came closer, he pegged Boyd for a pro athlete. He was taller than Mason, for one thing—and that was no small feat. Built out too. And he carried himself in a certain way: precise, economical. No wasted movement as he stepped forward, hand outstretched, a politician’s smile everywhere but his eyes.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Burke,” Boyd said, and his grip was firm. He looked Mason in the eye, and Mason met his gaze and held it, as tough as that was. He’d spent almost half his life in a place where eye contact was a challenge, an invitation to fight, and even now, six months out of prison, he was still trying to teach himself a new code.
“Burke was in prison too,” Rengo said, catching both men off guard. Boyd dropped the handshake; his smile flickered a little, and there was something underneath, a glimpse of the real man behind the facade.
“Murder,” Rengo said, grinning at Boyd. “First degree, right, Burke?”
Now it was Mason’s turn to feel like the specimen on display. He started, “Kid—”
“Where’d you do your time?” Boyd asked, interrupting. “Wasn’t Coyote Ridge, was it? I’d remember you.”
Mason hesitated. The integrity of the upright guides them, he thought, but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity.
He’d resolved when he came out of prison that he’d be open and honest about his life when he talked about it, take responsibility for what he’d done and own up to the punishment he’d endured. He forced himself to take ownership, even when it was hard.
But this? This sounded like bragging.
“I was back in Michigan,” he told Boyd. “Upstate. The Chippewa pen.”
Boyd nodded. “How long?”
“Fifteen years,” Mason told him, and Boyd whistled. “Been out about six months now.”
“Well, hell,” Boyd said, grinning. “Compared to you, Burke, I’m just a baby. Served three and a half and I about lost my mind.”
“It’s tough,” Mason agreed.
They let that sit for a beat, Boyd still nodding and smiling and sizing Mason up, Rengo grinning like a fool between the two of them, and finally Mason figured he might as well ask, figured Boyd was waiting for it, figured this was what conversation between ex-cons was supposed to look like.
Figured it wasn’t much different from the way conversation was like on the inside.
“What’d you go in for?” he asked, and Boyd smiled wider.
“Hell, it was nothing like murder,” he said. “It was just a little bit of dogfighting.”
“He’s a hockey player,” Rengo said as Mason drove, tight-lipped, up Main Street toward the highway. “Was a hockey player, anyway, until the dog stuff happened.”
The dog stuff.
Mason didn’t say anything. Didn’t trust himself to speak, didn’t know what he would say, but it wouldn’t be pleasant. He’d seen how Lucy’d looked, the day the lady from the rescue agency brought her into the prison for training; the dog had been terrified, pitiful, too scared to come out of her cage, even.
It was men like Boyd who had done that, instilled the fear in her, and Mason had worked hard to cure Lucy of it. To hear the rescue lady tell it, Lucy had been one of the lucky ones; they’d found dogs in that fighting ring that had been treated so savagely there’d been no choice but to put them down.
Dog stuff, Mason thought. Just a little bit of dogfighting.
“He was a damn good hockey player too. Scored eighty points in the show one year, plus he could fight.” Rengo was rambling, happy, watching trees pass by the window without a goddamn clue. “A guy like that—tough guy, good hands—hell, he could have been a Hall of Famer. And then…”
Rengo trailed off, clucked his teeth like it was some kind of tragedy, and Mason busied himself concentrating on the road. Hoped the kid would run out his spiel and shut up for a change, put Bad Brock Boyd in the rearview.
The kid seemed to catch his expression. “Aw, hell, Burke,” he said. “It’s not like that; you don’t have to worry. Boyd wouldn’t do anything to Lucy.”
Mason kept driving. Winding two-lane road, the Pacific Ocean visible in glimpses through the forest, the truck’s engine revving coming out of the corners.
He focused on the road, on the turns of the highway. On the feel of the steering wheel in his hands.
“You’re right,” he said finally. “He won’t.”