Jess woke in the back of the truck, and the truck wasn’t moving. Above her was nothing but forest and sky, the faint hint of blue beyond the clouds. She lifted her head and felt groggy and nauseated, her temple throbbing where Pruitt had pistol-whipped her. The rope chafed at her wrists, and her arms were sore from being bent behind her. Her whole body ached, and she supposed it was the bed of the truck that had done it, no creature comforts and what must have been one hell of a rough ride up into the hills.
She could hear birds singing. Movement, somewhere in the trees, but it was delicate, precise, not the ponderous, thrashing noises human beings made when they ventured out into nature. She shivered. It was colder here; they’d gained some altitude. May was still early spring in the high country of Makah County, and when the sun went down, the temperature might yet dip toward freezing.
There was no sign of Pruitt. The cab of the Silverado was empty, and he wasn’t anywhere she could see nearby. Behind the bed of the truck, the road dropped down an uneven, precipitous grade into more forest, and Jess had no way of knowing how far they’d come. By the width of the road and its deteriorated condition, she supposed it was a logging spur line, half forgotten and never charted, up the contours of the low mountains south of Deception. There were hundreds of such roads on the Olympic Peninsula, remnants of loggers and miners, now mostly invisible, dying slow deaths as the forest claimed back its ground.
The truck was parked in a clearing, Jess saw, just wide enough to turn a Silverado around in a five- or maybe eight-point turn. Ahead of the truck, the road continued as a steep trail through mature alder and young pine, impassable by anything wider than an all-terrain vehicle.
She rested her chin on the rim of the truck bed and looked out at the forest and listened. It was, objectively speaking, a beautiful day.
Her head ached. For once, it was almost too bright. Her thinking was foggy, and she probably had a concussion, but she remembered the noise Lucy had made when Pruitt shot her, and she leaned over and vomited in the bed of the truck until her stomach was empty and nothing else would come up.
And then she pushed herself to her feet.
Pruitt was gone, but he would come back soon, and Jess wanted to kill him for what he’d done to Lucy. Her wrists were tied behind her back and her vision blacked out for a moment or two when she struggled up from her knees to stand in the bed of the truck; she swayed a little bit and had to close her eyes, and she thought she might fall, but she didn’t.
She looked around again and suspected that Pruitt had parked his truck as far up the trail as he could get it, but he must have needed some smaller vehicle to bring her up the last distance to where Logger Fetridge waited. Carefully, she stepped over the Silverado’s tailgate and down onto the bumper, and then, as her balance shifted, she jumped to the mud rather than fall, landing without grace but unhurt. Pruitt still hadn’t come back.
She needed to get her wrists untied somehow. She circled the truck, looking for a rusted edge somewhere, some bare metal, some kind of sharpness she could use to cut the rope. But there was nothing on the Silverado that suited her needs, and no jagged rock on the trail or in the margin of the forest that would suffice.
She was screwed.
And she was weak. Her vision blacked out again, and she leaned against the side of the truck and waited for the nausea to pass. She needed to free her arms, and she needed to find a weapon, but hell, she could barely stand up on her own, and she was suddenly very thirsty.
From somewhere in the forest above came the sound of high-revving small motors, at least two of them, and they were coming her way. Jess kept her eyes closed and felt the hint of sun on her face and listened for the sound of the birds in the trees, but the birds were gone.
* * *
It was Mason who saw the dog first.
Shipwreck Point or just a little ways east, just past the parking lot at the beach. She was running along the side of the road toward Deception, half on the macadam and half on the shoulder, her ears flattened back and her gait awkward, hopping on three feet and favoring the fourth.
“Pull over,” Mason told Rengo, and the kid saw the dog and did as instructed, slowed the truck just behind Lucy, who didn’t look back and didn’t stop running, not even when Mason stepped out of the car and whistled for her.
“Lucy.”
At the sound of her name, the dog stiffened. She stopped, at last, and turned around, slow, stared back at Mason with her eyes wide and the whites visible, her right front paw still dangling above the ground. Mason called to her again, took a step forward, but as soon as he moved, the dog spooked and started running again.
What on earth? Mason thought, starting after her. Where the hell is Jess?
There was no answer that was a good one, he knew. He jogged down the shoulder toward the dog, and Rengo followed behind in the truck. Every moment they were out here on the highway was a danger, the whole county looking for them and this the most well-traveled road east of Clallam County.
They’d been trying to get inland when they spotted the dog, to find somewhere east of Makah to hole up and get rest before they drove the truck north to the Canadian line. Mason had heard the border wasn’t fenced or too heavily patrolled; it was a gamble, but he was hoping to get across somehow, somewhere there weren’t eyes on him, work his way back to the coast and the island across the strait, find Jana Marsh in Victoria.
Truthfully, it wasn’t a plan with a very high probability of success, but Mason couldn’t see what else to do. He needed to keep moving, if only to stay sane. If only to remind himself that he hadn’t killed Bad Boyd, that he wasn’t the cold-blooded murderer this county thought he was.
Now, though, Mason had other priorities. He caught up to Lucy around thirty yards down the road, the dog half limping, half running along, until he was almost on top of her, at which point she ducked down and cowered, hunched over like a paper clip with her tail between her legs, and Mason could see how she was shaking. There was blood on her paw.
“The hell happened to you, girl?” he asked her, but his voice only made her shake harder, and he scooped her up, walked back to the truck, and hoisted her into the cab beside Rengo, then climbed in after her.
“She okay?” Rengo’s eyes were wide, and he looked damn scared himself; the kid loved the dog almost as much as Mason and Jess did. “Where’s she coming from, Burke?”
Mason held Lucy tight against the seat and picked up her hurt paw. Saw blood from a wound midway up her foreleg, a deep cut but small, something lodged in there tight that Lucy wasn’t about to let him remove.
She squirmed and whined and licked at his face and her paw, and she settled and shook some more when he released her.
“I think she’s okay,” Mason told Rengo. “Cut herself somehow. As for where she came from…” He twisted in his seat, glanced back down the highway. “Closest thing around here’s the beach.”