Chapter Fourteen
He didn't wait for church.
Tamsin was still in the compound shower—washing boat fuel and lake water off skin he'd checked three times for bullet wounds—when Lockjaw found Tundra in the garage and said two words.
"Duane. Now."
Tundra didn't ask questions. Didn't argue about protocol or chain of command or waiting for Permafrost's blessing. He looked at Lockjaw's face, read everything he needed to, and grabbed his cut off the hook.
"Ironside," the VP said. "Get him."
Three minutes later they were rolling.
Three bikes on the logging road, heading north toward the lake access points Tamsin had marked on her maps weeks ago.
The evening sun threw long shadows through the pines.
Lockjaw rode point, jaw clenched so tight his molars ached, the image of Tamsin's shaking hands burned into his brain like a brand.
She'd been shot at. On the water. Her water. The lakes she'd paddled since the day she rebuilt herself from wreckage.
And the man who'd set the trap was out there right now, retrieving his boats like it was just another Tuesday.
Ice had called in the intel twenty minutes ago. A contact near the Vermillion access had spotted three boats being trailered at the DNR launch—the same launch Duane Solberg had used for twenty years, first with a badge and now without one. Old habits. Predictable.
Fatal.
They killed their headlights a quarter mile from the launch and rolled the last stretch on momentum, engines barely turning over. The access road was gravel, single lane, flanked by birch trees that glowed white in the fading light.
Lockjaw held up a fist. Stopped.
Through the trees, the launch. A flatbed truck backed down the ramp.
Two boats already loaded on a double trailer, a third still in the water with its bow line tied to a dock cleat.
And standing on the dock with a radio in one hand and a cigarette in the other, directing two men who were wrestling an outboard motor—
Duane Solberg.
Forty-five. Lean. The weathered look of a man who'd spent decades outdoors, first for the state and now for a gambling operation that paid better than any government pension.
He moved with the easy confidence of someone who owned this launch, this lake, this territory—former authority calcified into habit.
Two men with him. The boat handlers. Armed—Lockjaw could see holsters on both—but focused on the motor, not on the tree line.
Three targets.
Three Savages.
Math that worked.
Lockjaw dismounted and pulled the tire iron from his belt.
Tundra flanked left without being told, moving through the birch trees with the silence of a man who'd stalked through worse terrain in worse countries.
Ironside went right, his bulk somehow disappearing into the tree line despite logic insisting that was impossible.
They converged on the dock like a closing fist.
The first boat handler saw Ironside too late. The big Swede came out of the trees and hit him with a forearm that snapped his head sideways, dropping him off the dock and into the shallows. The splash alerted the second handler, who spun and reached for his holster—
Tundra's boot caught him in the chest. The man flew backward into the boat, cracking his skull on the gunwale, and didn't get up.
Duane dropped his cigarette.
He was fast—Lockjaw gave him that. The former DNR officer went for the radio with one hand and a sidearm with the other, moving with the trained reflexes of a man who'd carried a weapon professionally for two decades.
But Lockjaw was faster.
The tire iron hit Duane's gun hand with a crack that sent the pistol spinning into the lake. Duane screamed—short, sharp, more surprise than pain—and stumbled backward on the dock.
Lockjaw grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against the dock piling. Wood groaned. Duane's head bounced off the timber and his eyes went glassy.
"Three boats." Lockjaw's voice was flat. Dead. Every word a nail. "Three directions. Rifles on the water."
"I don't—"
Lockjaw hit him with the tire iron. Right knee. The cap shattered and Duane's scream tore across the lake, scattering birds from the birch trees in a white explosion of wings.
"You ambushed a woman on public water." Another hit—left knee this time, and Duane collapsed, hanging from Lockjaw's grip on his collar like a puppet with cut strings. "Shot at a civilian client. Turned a lake into a kill zone because your boss told you to."
"Pruitt—Pruitt ordered it—"
"I know Pruitt ordered it." Lockjaw crouched, bringing his face level with Duane's.
The man's eyes were wild with pain, tracking between Lockjaw and the tire iron with the frantic calculation of someone running out of options.
"What I want to know is everything else.
The lodge. How many men he's got left. Layout. Access points. Security."
"I can't—he'll kill me—"
"He's not here." Lockjaw tapped the tire iron against Duane's ruined knee. Lightly. The man convulsed. "I am."
Duane talked.
It poured out of him in gasps and whimpers, twenty years of local knowledge weaponized by pain and the dawning realization that his badge and his backcountry expertise meant nothing against men who didn't care about jurisdiction.
The lodge had six remaining crew. Down from twelve—Bryce's death and Eddie's assault had gutted Pruitt's manpower. The surviving muscle was consolidated at the property, running perimeter security and maintaining the appearance of legitimate operations while Pruitt figured out his next move.
The main building had three entrances—front, service, and a back door that opened directly to the lakeside deck. The basement card room was accessed through the service entrance, down a staircase reinforced with steel doors that could be locked from inside.
Pruitt's personal quarters were on the second floor. He hadn't left the lodge in a week. Scared. Holed up with his money and his remaining men, waiting for either the Savages to make a mistake or the heat to die down enough to bring in more muscle from Duluth.
"The lake access," Lockjaw said. "The one the floatplanes use."
"North shore. Private dock. There's a—a channel that runs behind the lodge property, connects to the main lake through a marsh. Pruitt's boats use it to move clients. It's not on any maps—"
"But you know it."
"I mapped it." Duane's laugh turned into a cough, blood flecking his lips. "Twenty years DNR. I mapped every waterway in this county. Pruitt hired me because I knew routes nobody else did."
"Draw it."
"What?"
Lockjaw pulled a folded map from his cut—one of Tamsin's, the hand-drawn route charts she'd been building for four years. He spread it on the dock beside Duane's broken body.
"The channel. The access points. Everything between here and Pruitt's back door."
Duane stared at the map. Then at Lockjaw. Then at Tundra, who stood at the end of the dock with his arms crossed, watching the tree line. Then at Ironside, who was zip-tying the two handlers with the casual thoroughness of a man who'd restrained hundreds of bodies, conscious and otherwise.
"If I tell you everything—"
"You're already telling me everything."
"If I cooperate. Will you—"
"No."
The word landed on the dock like a stone.
Duane's face crumbled. The last hope draining out of him—the gambler's hope, the cooperator's hope, the belief that information had value and value could be traded for survival.
"She's just a guide," Duane whispered. "Just a woman with a canoe. This wasn't supposed to—it was supposed to be simple. Scare her off. Pruitt said it would be simple."
"It was."
Lockjaw stood.
"You ambushed a woman on her own water. Shot at her with a client in the boat. Used everything you learned wearing a badge to build a trap designed to kill someone whose only crime was paddling past the wrong boat launch."
He looked down at Duane Solberg—broken, bleeding, sprawled on a dock he'd used for twenty years—and felt nothing but the cold clarity of a decision already made.
"That was simple," Lockjaw said. "This is simpler."
The tire iron came down once.
Clean. Final. The sound of it echoed across the lake and faded into the birch trees, absorbed by water and wilderness and the particular silence of northern Minnesota at dusk.
Duane Solberg stopped breathing on a dock he'd launched from a thousand times.
His DNR knowledge died with him.
Lockjaw folded Tamsin's map—now annotated with Duane's shaking hand, the channel and access points marked in blood-smeared pencil—and slid it back into his cut.
"Done," he said.
Tundra appeared at his shoulder. The VP looked at the body, at the map, at Lockjaw's face.
"He give us what we need?"
"Lodge layout. Crew count. Access routes." Lockjaw wiped the tire iron on his jeans and holstered it. "Including a water approach Pruitt thinks nobody knows about."
"Good." Tundra's mouth curved into that thin, dangerous line. "Permafrost will want to see that map."
"He'll see it tonight."
They left the handlers zip-tied on the shore. Let them work free eventually. Let them find their boss on the dock and carry the message back to Pruitt—another lieutenant dead, another layer of protection stripped away, the Savages getting closer with every body they left behind.
The ride back was quiet.
Three bikes on a logging road, headlights cutting through the gathering dark, pine trees standing like sentinels on either side. Tundra rode with the relaxed posture of a man who'd done harder things in harder places. Ironside's bulk made his bike look like a toy, steady and immovable.
Lockjaw rode between them and felt something shift.
Not in his shoulders. Not in his hands. In his jaw.
The tension that had lived there since the day he'd walked away from the repo life—the permanent clench, the locked-tight reflex that had given him his name and his reputation and the perpetually intense expression that made people nervous—released.
Not all at once. Not dramatically.
But somewhere between the dock and the highway, the muscle unknotted. The teeth unclenched. The ache that he'd carried so long it had become part of his resting face simply... eased.
Three of Pruitt's lieutenants dead.
Bryce. Eddie. Duane.
The gambling king had nobody left to send. Nobody who knew the territory, the waterways, the access points his operation depended on. He was alone in his lodge with six men and a fortune that couldn't buy what he needed most—time.
Because the Savages weren't giving him any.
Lockjaw's phone sat heavy in his pocket. He could feel it there—the weight of a message he'd send when he stopped, two words that would tell Tamsin everything.
Coming home.
Home. A word he hadn't used since before the repo life. A word that meant a compound full of brothers and a woman whose shaking hands had sent him hunting and whose fire had given him something worth burning for.
The compound lights appeared through the trees.
Lockjaw rolled through the gates with an unclenched jaw and a dead man's map in his cut and the certainty that what came next would end this.
Pruitt was out of lieutenants.
Out of muscle.
Out of time.
And Lockjaw was just getting started.