Mason had tried to behave himself in Chippewa. He’d known that any fight behind bars would damn him in the eyes of the people who mattered, the people who’d cast judgment on his ability to reintegrate with the rest of the world. He’d avoided confrontation, aimed for diplomacy.
But sometimes a fight was unavoidable. Sometimes you reached a point where you stood up for yourself or the whole block knew you were soft, and once they knew you were soft, they’d come after you, all of them.
Instinct took over. Survival. You fought to defend yourself, so you wouldn’t have to fight again later. And as Brock Boyd’s million-dollar fist connected with Mason’s jaw, he knew the kind of fight he was in, knew he’d have to prove something to Boyd now, or the dogfighter wouldn’t ever give him peace.
He rolled away from Boyd’s punch. Came up throwing fists of his own.
SIX
“Holy hell, Burke, what happened to you?”
Jess caught sight of Burke’s eye about the moment she stepped inside the Nootka’s wheelhouse. He stood over the stove, cooking some kind of dinner—and to his credit, it smelled pretty good—but he couldn’t hide the shiner, or the bruise on his jaw and the way he favored his right arm. Heck, looking closer, she could see the cuts on his knuckles, and she paused in the doorway. Stared.
Burke looked up from the stove, gave her a rueful smile. “I guess you’ll hear about it all when you get to work later,” he said. “I think it was Tim Turpin finally called the law.”
“You—” She frowned. Shook her head, couldn’t quite process. “You got in a fight?”
“It was Brock Boyd,” he said. “He found Lucy.”
Jess glanced up toward the wheel, where Lucy lay curled by the stairs to the fo’c’sle. Jess made eye contact, and the dog’s tail thumped, but she didn’t stand, and for a moment, Jess thought—
“He didn’t—”
“No,” Burke said, reading her face. “He seemed like he just wanted to wrestle with her. But I didn’t want him anywhere around her, and I told him.”
“And then you fought him.”
He looked up at her, his expression earnest. “He threw a punch at me,” he told her. “Jess, I know it was wrong. I should have found some way to turn the other cheek, and I know it.”
She didn’t say anything. She’d never known Burke to fight without reason. Even on the island, with Harwood and the others, Burke had pushed her hard for some kind of peaceful resolution. He would stand up for himself; she knew that. But he hadn’t seemed to Jess like the kind of man who saw any point to a fistfight, like he recognized how ridiculous the whole circus must be, grown men who couldn’t solve their problems with words.
“He swung first,” Burke said. “I know that doesn’t matter, but it was one of those things. He’s been in jail for a spell himself.”
Jess supposed it did matter, should matter, logically. And she’d heard about Bad Boyd, knew what he’d done to those dogs; she’d seen pictures, the ring in the barn out back, the kennels. She’d heard stories of what the law had found when they’d dug up Boyd’s property. And she’d heard some of the testimony too, what Boyd and his buddies had forced the dogs to do, what they did to the weak dogs, the ones who didn’t or couldn’t fight.
She knew Lucy had been rescued from the same kind of situation, and she knew Burke knew it too, and she couldn’t fault him for standing up for the dog.
But still. She felt queasy inside, just a bit, as though he’d just told her he’d been flirting with Darla Grey down at the Cobalt.
Burke bent down and dug into a locker under the sink, where Jess knew he kept the bowls. But he sighed, and when he stood tall again, his hands were empty.
“I’m embarrassed, Jess,” he told her. “I saw Boyd as a convict instead of a man, and I let my instinct get the better of me, and I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” she said. “Not to me.”
He studied her face like he could tell how she was feeling, like he could see himself through her eyes and knew he’d come up wanting, perhaps for the first time since they’d met each other.
The silence stretched, and it was the kind of silence where normally Lucy would save them by snoring or farting or just rolling over and looking silly and giving them an excuse to smile and laugh together, but even the dog stayed still, and there was no exit, no escape.
“Soup’s on,” Burke said finally, gesturing to the stove. “You hungry?”
The food smelled delicious, damn it, some kind of Mexican stew recipe he’d picked up from God knows where, but Jess found she’d just about lost her appetite. “I ought to get to work,” she told him. “Gillies will be wondering where I am already.”
Burke pursed his lips. Then he nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jess said. She snapped her fingers. “C’mon, Luce,” she called, and the dog sat up, stretching and yawning, and dutifully padded out past Burke to where Jess stood at the door.
“Be safe tonight,” Burke said.
“I will,” Jess replied, and she wanted to say more, but there was something between them now, something alien, something that hadn’t existed before. And Jess clipped Lucy’s lead to her collar and led the dog out and was conscious of Burke’s eyes on her, watching them go, and she wanted to stop and turn and go back to him, tell him it was okay and how they’d get through this together.
But she knew that if she turned back, she’d see only the shiner on Burke’s face and the scars on his knuckles, the way he winced as he moved, and she knew she would watch him and wonder if maybe she’d been reading him wrong, if she maybe didn’t know him as well as she’d thought.
It wasn’t three days later that she was staring down at Bad Boyd’s body on the shore at Shipwreck Point.
SEVEN
Ironically, for all the time Jess had spent in a war zone, the first corpse she ever saw was right here in Deception, just a few miles down the shore from Shipwreck Point. She was a teenager, going steady with Ty Winslow, and he’d taken her out on his little troller for a sunset pleasure cruise, a jog up the coast a ways to a spot where he dropped crab traps, where he swore those Dungeness came up as big as dinner plates.
They’d figured out pretty quick that something was the matter, that old hauler on the back of Ty’s boat straining like nobody’s business to lift the trap from the water, and Ty had made a joke about how the trap must be stuffed right full of crab, and he hoped Jess was hungry.
But he glanced at the hauler and how the line was drawn taut and he frowned, and Jess knew it wasn’t a surplus of crab that was holding the trap down.
“Must be caught on something down there,” Ty said, scratching his head. “Tide carried it under a rock or something.”
But that wasn’t right either.
In the end, it took both of them pulling, plus the hauler behind them, to drag the trap up from the bottom, and she screamed when she looked over the side and saw the face in the tangle of line, bloated and pale, looming out of the darkness like something from a nightmare.