Chris Jordan was a short man, and ugly, that ugliness made all the more so by the sneer that marked his face and the condescension in his tone.
“Evening, Deputy,” he said to Jess, peering down at the dock from the main deck of the freighter, his eyes roving down her body and then up again. “What brings you out here tonight?”
Jess looked past him and up toward the hulk’s rusting superstructure. Smelled low tide and diesel and heard music still playing from somewhere inside the ship. No sign of Dougie Bealing.
She’d debated how to play this. By rights, she and Gillies could evict Jordan and Bealing from their squat on this freighter, cite them for trespassing and probably a hundred other things besides. Jess was certain that if she searched Jordan, she would find something illegal, some reason to violate his probation, knew she could drag him down to the Deception Cove detachment, and Bealing too, wherever he was, lean on them for answers the old-school way, sweat Bealing’s story out of him over the course of a few long, uncomfortable hours.
She supposed it might yet come to that, but she hoped it wouldn’t have to. Knew if she and Gillies came at the squatters strong, there was a possibility that violence might result.
She was hoping to get answers without anyone getting hurt. Later, she’d wonder at how naive she’d been.
“I’m looking for a friend of yours,” she told Jordan. “Dougie Bealing. He around?”
Jordan’s expression didn’t waver. “Not here.”
“That’s his car parked back there in the clearing, isn’t it?”
Jordan craned his neck out from the deck, scanned back over the dock to the rusted black pickup and Bealing’s Chevette just behind it. Jess could smell something on Jordan now, overpowering the scent of the water and the ship: alcohol and stale tobacco and something else, something chemical. Jordan’s eyes seemed calm; she couldn’t tell if he’d been using, but she was thankful for her sidearm anyway, and for Gillies behind her with his own.
“So it is,” Jordan said, rocking back on his heels and smirking down at her. “So?”
Jess glanced back at Gillies. The deputy stood ready, a wide stance and his hand on his holster. He watched her, waiting on a cue.
“Look, we could book you right now,” Jess told Jordan. “You’re trespassing on this vessel, and I’m sure you’ve got some things in there you’d prefer the law wasn’t aware of. All I’m asking is you let me talk to Dougie, then maybe my partner and I walk away and let you move off this wreck on your own time.”
Jordan didn’t say anything. He just grinned his unpleasant grin and let his eyes wander down to her boots and back up.
“You could almost pass for real law,” he said finally. “Dressed all up in your little uniform, asking your questions. Hell, it’s almost like you’re an actual deputy.”
“I’m real, Jordan,” Jess replied, “and so’s Deputy Gillies behind me. This isn’t a game.”
“What I don’t understand is how they let you walk around with that badge,” Jordan said. “Your boyfriend’s a fucking murderer, and you—ain’t you supposed to be fucked in the head?”
Jess didn’t say anything.
“Got that dog, don’t you? Supposed to keep you from, what, blowing your brains out? Hallucinating, seeing ghosts? How do you know I’m not a goddamn hallucination right now?”
Jess kept her mouth shut. Could feel a hot kind of anger simmering up inside her, was afraid of where it might lead her.
Then Gillies spoke up, before she could find out. “Forget this,” he said, stepping forward to the ladder. “Mr. Jordan, you have five minutes to get your ass off of this ship. Otherwise we’re coming up there and dragging you off ourselves.”
“No, the fuck you will not,” Jordan said, and something changed in his voice, a menace barely restrained. And then Jess saw the gun.
He’d had a pistol stashed somewhere, Jess didn’t know where, but she imagined it must have been tucked into his waistband, the small of his back, and it didn’t matter anyway where it came from. Jordan had a pistol, and that was a clear violation of his probation, and now, Jess realized, they had to take him in.
But something in Jordan had been triggered.
“You stay the fuck back,” he told the deputies as Jess pulled her own weapon and Gillies beside her hollered at Jordan to put the gun down.
“Chris,” Jess said, fighting to be heard. Fighting to break through the fog and malevolence in his eyes. “Now, just wait a second, all right? Let’s just talk this out.”
She could see in Jordan’s expression, though, that there wouldn’t be any talking, knew it even before the dealer raised the pistol he was holding and aimed it down in their direction. Jess saw it in slow motion, knew what must come next. But before she could call out or do anything, Gillies’s pistol was firing beside her, and then there was a hole in Chris Jordan, and the dealer was staggering backward and down to the deck.
And then the porthole beside Gillies blew out with a sound like artillery fire. Gillies stumbled back a few steps, eyes wide, and collapsed on the dock, and Jess knew that somewhere behind that porthole was Dougie Bealing with a shotgun.
She hit the dock and rolled, landed in the water and felt the shock of cold and rocks in her back, and she scrambled to stay afloat and wade her way back to shore, suddenly aware of just how perfectly the whole night had turned to shit.
* * *
Mason heard the gunfire, small arms and then the shotgun, and it was everything he’d worried he would hear. Two shots and then silence, and he ran into the clearing and the piles of junk that bordered the water, thinking he was bound to come across Jess filled with buckshot somewhere near the shore.
He heard a man cry out like he was in pain.
The wreck stood ahead, with enough light from the camp lanterns and Christmas lights on the ship to see the dock and the water and the body.
The shotgun blasted again from somewhere inside the ship, and the man on the dock tried to pull himself to some kind of cover, and he couldn’t—rendered immobile by the way he’d been shot.
The night flared as shots rang out beside Mason, and he looked over and saw Jess at the shore by the foot of the dock, opening up with her service pistol at the hull of the freighter. She was alive, and the power of his relief nearly stopped him where he stood, but he forced himself to stay focused.
“Jess,” he called out, during a break in the gunfire. She swung over with her pistol and damn near shot him, and in the light from the freighter and the moon overhead he could see her surprise and confusion.
“We got to get that man off the dock,” he told her. “Cover me.”
She stared at him a moment, blinked, like her thoughts were still trying to process just how and why he’d showed up here. But then Gillies screamed, and Jess seemed to get it; she nodded at Mason and took aim at the freighter again. He hurried to the edge of the dock, feeling naked and exposed and well clear of any usable cover, the dock stretching out long and open in front of him, and the man who’d been shot waiting at the end of it. Mason tensed his body to run and waited for Jess to start shooting again.