The plan was collapsing, and Dax Pruitt could see it happening.
It was Pruitt who told Logger Fetridge how he’d run across Dougie Bealing on the highway into Deception, parked on the shoulder in that shitbox Chevette with the new deputy, Winslow, leaning in through the driver’s-side window.
Bealing, who couldn’t be counted on to right weigh down a body. Who sure as hell couldn’t be trusted to keep a secret. Pruitt had taken one look at the man through the passenger window of his own Silverado, seen how Jess Winslow and her partner, Gillies, were perked up and on the hunt, and he’d known he and Fetridge were just about hooped. It had taken all he could muster to get Bealing out of the traffic stop without giving the game away then and there.
Of course that wasn’t where the trouble had started. The trouble had started, Pruitt and Fetridge both knew, when they’d taken the job from the boss lady, and it had snowballed into something else when Jordan and Bealing couldn’t see to it that Bad Boyd’s body disappeared and never turned up again.
At least then they’d had Burke, though, to take the fall for the crime.
No, Dax Pruitt knew that the situation had really, really fucked up at the moment when Chris Jordan had the bright idea to murder Charlene Todd. He’d killed her and told Fetridge proudly what he’d done, as if another murder in Makah County was going to make anyone calmer.
“Had to do it,” Jordan’d said, protesting when his uncle and Pruitt’d told him what a stupid piece of dead weight he was. “What if she talked, went back on her story?”
“You slit her fucking throat, Nephew,” Fetridge had replied. “You wanted to kill her, you couldn’t slip her a dose?”
Jordan’d had no answer to that, couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes, and Pruitt had the sneaking suspicion the younger man had used his knife because he’d wanted to, because in some sick way he’d enjoyed it. It turned Pruitt’s stomach, but it didn’t surprise him. Chris Jordan was a damaged man, and if his mother hadn’t been Floyd Fetridge’s sister, someone might ought to have killed him by now, spared Makah County further pain and embarrassment.
As it was, Jordan was untouchable, and woe betide anyone who tried to teach him right from wrong. Anyway, Fetridge needed him to keep Dougie Bealing under wraps, being as how the big man hadn’t ever seemed willing to listen to anyone else.
“Hide him,” the poacher’d told his nephew. “Don’t let him see daylight until the law catches up to Mason Burke.”
As far as Pruitt was concerned, it was only Jordan’s dumb luck that Mason Burke had stumbled onto Charlene Todd’s body, and that Ernie Saint Louis had then stumbled on to Mason Burke. It meant the law was still focused on the ex-convict from Michigan and wouldn’t be looking too deep into the Charlene Todd situation.
It meant there was still a way out of this mess, for Fetridge and Pruitt and even Jordan and Bealing. If they all kept their heads down and their mouths shut, and the next few days broke right. It meant they maybe weren’t as fucked as Dax Pruitt had thought.
Still, Pruitt wasn’t quite ready to breathe easy just yet. Not when he knew what he’d done, and what Logger Fetridge had done, and what had been done in their names. Pruitt knew that kind of violence tended to seek an answer. He couldn’t quite shake the feeling there was a reckoning to come.