Across the street, a Greyhound bus idled outside the Shell station, waiting on a departure time that was approaching too quickly. Mason and Jess sipped their coffees and didn’t say much.

There wasn’t much left to say, Mason figured. The story was over; the book was closed. He’d passed out about the time the rescue boat arrived, heard from Jess it was Hank Moss in his old Hubert Johnson thirty-two-footer, spotlight shining blindingly bright on the wrecked Grady-White, a rifle on his shoulder.

“Hands up,” he’d called over the water. “Put them up, all of you, and no sudden moves.”

It wasn’t until he’d idled closer that Hank had figured it out, seen it was Jess and Burke and Lucy at the stern, and not just Cole Sweeney and the boys. He’d lashed his cruiser to the wreck and, with Jess’s help, wrestled Burke across the rail and into his cabin, a settee and a blanket. He’d helped Lucy aboard too, and Jess, and then—grudgingly—Sweeney, and they’d untied Kirby Harwood’s pride and joy and left it to drift or sink, and Hank had hauled ass for Neah Bay.

He’d told Jess he’d come to retrieve his guns, instead of reporting them stolen; he’d suspected Jess and Burke and Lucy might need a hand, given how every deputy in Deception Cove had vanished that morning. He’d set out from the harbor in the cruiser at dusk, made steady time, and was just about at Dixie Island when he happened to glance back and see the flare over the water.

“Luck,” he’d told Mason later. “Just dumb luck, all it was. Another ten minutes and you all would have been swimming.”

They’d woken up the nurse in Neah Bay, Sheriff Wheeler, too, and hauled Mason up to the Indian Health Center on the Makah reservation, beaten the door down and set about saving Mason’s life.

According to Jess, it hadn’t turned out to be much of a challenge, the bleeding all but stopped, and the rounds in his chest and stomach having missed anything too important. She was a marine, though, and her standards for “life-threatening” were apparently pretty high; he’d been out three or four days before he opened his eyes, and it was another three or four more before he was walking around.

Even now, sitting at this little table in a rare patch of sunlight, Mason could feel in his side where the first round had hit, shattering a couple of ribs and glancing off to parts unknown. He could feel in his stomach where the second round had passed, the entry wound like a bad itch when he shifted around, the exit wound dull and ever present.