The Last Kind Word Read online

  “Gentlemen, this is where I leave you,” I said.

  “Here,” the deputy said. “Here?”

  “Your guys aren’t going to be looking for me. They’re going to be looking for you. First things first, right? It’s going to take a long time to find you here, GPS or not. By the time they do and turn their attention to me, I’ll be out of the country.”

  “Yeah? The average speed of a man hiking over unbroken ground is two miles per hour. How far do you think you’ll get on foot?”

  “All the way to where a car is waiting. Do you think I’m making this up as I go along, Deputy? C’mon.”

  “Dyson, you can’t leave us here.”

  “Us?” Skarda said.

  “You’ll be all right until help arrives,” I told them. “There hasn’t been a bear attack around here in, I don’t know, weeks.”

  “Us?” Skarda repeated. “You’re taking me with you, right?”

  “About that…”

  “You promised.”

  “No, I didn’t. Good luck to you, pal.”

  “Wait, wait, Dyson. What about the fifty thousand dollars? What about Plan B?”

  “Yeah…”

  “You can’t leave me here. I helped you before. I helped you, remember? Remember? Forget the armed robbery. Even if I beat that rap, they’ll send me to Stillwater for whatchacallit, aiding and abetting your escape. Right? Right?”

  “How about that, Deputy?”

  Olson’s eyes were like roadside caution lights flashing SEVERE ACCIDENT AHEAD. “I look forward to testifying at your trial,” he said.

  “You owe me,” Skarda said.

  “Actually, you’re going to owe me,” I said.

  I opened the back door and helped Skarda out. He was smiling when I unlocked his cuffs. The smile went away when I relocked them with his hands in front of him.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” I said. “The cuffs come off when I get the money.”

  “This’ll make it hard to walk.”

  “Yes, it will.” I shoved him more or less toward the northwest. “That way.” While Skarda stumbled forward, I turned toward the deputy. “It’s been a pleasure,” I said. “Sorry I couldn’t stay.”

  I locked him inside the patrol car and made a production out of dropping his car keys just outside the door where he could see them.

  “Damn you, Dyson,” he shouted. I turned and walked into the woods. “Goddamn you.”

  So far so good, my inner voice said.

  * * *

  I’m a city boy at heart. I can’t imagine living anywhere that doesn’t have a professional baseball team, jazz clubs, and a wide assortment of Asian, Mexican, Greek, and Italian restaurants. Still, there were times when the city boy loved to visit the Great Outdoors, fish in pristine lakes, hunt unclaimed forests, or just hike the countryside in search of wildlife you can’t see close to home, especially birds. I love the sight and sound of birds. I have a clock at home that announces each hour with the warble of a different avis. Trust me when I say it’s not the same as hearing them in the wild.

  The air was clean and warm in the forest, and I found myself breaking a light sweat as we walked. It would have been a pleasant journey if not for the constant whining of my companion—“The cuffs are too tight, it’s too hard to walk, where are we going, are we there yet?”

  “What are you, eight years old?” I asked finally. “Shut up and walk.”

  “I want to know the plan.”

  “The plan is you stop talking or I’m going to leave you here. Can’t you just enjoy the scenery?”

  “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  Skarda was not a bad guy unless you want to hold being a Green Bay Packer fan against him. He was born in Krueger, Minnesota, went to the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, and returned home to work in construction until the bottom fell out of the housing market. As far as I knew, in twenty-seven years he had never committed a single transgression against God or country until they caught him outside the ticket booth of a country music festival with a ski mask over his face and a Kalashnikov submachine gun in his hands. After he relived himself against the trunk of a tree, we continued walking.

  All the tricks the Old Man taught me about finding my way in the woods were as fresh in my mind as if I had learned them yesterday, including how to locate the points of a compass using nothing but the sun, a wristwatch, and a blade of grass. I didn’t need any of them, however. I had been over this ground before, and I knew exactly where I was going.

  Eventually we broke through the trees and found a narrow gravel road with a drainage ditch on either side. A Ford Explorer was parked on the shoulder about a quarter mile up from where we emerged from the forest. A man was sitting on the driver’s side of the SUV, his body twisted so that his legs hung out the open door. We were about a hundred yards away before he spotted us approaching.

  “I almost gave up on you,” he said. “Who’s he?”

  Skarda had worn a worried expression on his face ever since I met him, so I didn’t know if he was taken aback by my partner’s question or not.

  “Someone I picked up along the way,” I said. “Dave, Chad, Chad, Dave.”

  “Jesus Christ, Dyson,” Chad said. “We’re using names?”

  “Beats saying ‘Hey, you’ all the time.”

  I moved to the back of the SUV. Chad popped the rear cargo door. There was a nylon bag in the cargo bay, and I opened it to find several changes of clothes. I pulled out a pair of jeans and a shirt and gave them to Skarda.

  “You’ll have to wear your own shoes,” I said.

  Skarda held up his cuffed hands, a pleading expression in his eyes.

  “Okay,” I said. “But let’s not do anything stupid, all right?”

  To emphasize my point, I took the deputy’s Glock and set it where I could easily reach it but Skarda couldn’t before I unlocked one cuff. I left the other wound around his wrist.

  While we were changing clothes, Chad talked and paced, paced and talked. Mostly he was complaining about the change in plans, claiming that I was supposed to be alone. “Just you, you said. Just you. Everything’s planned for just you.” He was another guy who didn’t appreciate the beauty of his surroundings.

  After I changed out of the jail scrubs into a pair of blue jeans, a polo shirt, and Nikes—looking every inch like a tourist from the Cities—I picked up the Glock and turned toward him.

  “Someone once said that genius is the ability to improvise,” I said.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  I brought the Glock up, went into a pyramid stance, and fired three times. Tiny volcanoes of blood exploded out of his chest as he fell straight backward against the gravel road, his arms and legs spread as if he were attempting to make snow angels.

  Skarda screamed, screamed like a bad actor in a horror flick.

  “What?” I said.

  “You shot him.”

  “Of course I shot him. Are you telling me you wouldn’t have?”

  “He was your friend.”

  “If Chad was my friend, why did he sleep with my girl? Why did he turn me in to the cops and try to steal my money?”

  “He—he helped break you out?”

  “That’s only because the money isn’t where he thought it was. Chad broke me out so I would lead him to it, and once I did, he probably would have killed me. Are you paying attention, Dave?”

  Skarda looked as if every word would be indelibly etched in his brain forever and he wasn’t happy about it.

  “Stay here,” I said.

  I slid the Glock between my jeans and the small of my back and crossed the gravel road to where Chad had fallen. I grabbed him under the shoulders, dragged him to the far ditch, and rolled him in. Afterward, I bent to go through his pockets. The depth of the ditch effectively hid Chad from Skarda’s view.

  “That hurt,” Chad whispered. “No
w I know why stuntmen make so much money.”

  “How’s the deputy?” I asked. I was trying hard not to move my lips.

  “Upset that you took him the way you did. I explained that we couldn’t let him in on the scam for fear that he might give it away, but that we would tell his boss he agreed to cooperate with us so he won’t be embarrassed.”

  I took Chad’s wallet and stood up so Skarda could see me rifling through it. I pulled cash out and tossed the wallet away.

  “Lousy hundred and eighty-seven bucks,” I said. “What a schmuck.”

  Skarda was watching me closely, looking as if he wanted to run away very fast. I bent down again, and he moved to the door of the SUV, slid behind the wheel, and reached for the ignition. I stood up again, this time dangling Chad’s car keys from a ring around my pinky.

  “Hey, Dave?” I said. “Going somewhere?”

  “I was just—I was getting ready. We should leave.”

  “Yes, we should.”

  I glanced down at Chad, and he winked at me. I climbed out of the ditch, crossed the gravel road, and moved to the Explorer.

  “I’ll drive,” I said.

  Skarda scrambled out of the SUV and went around to the passenger side. When he was safely inside, I told him to lock the loose cuff around the handle above the window.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Good handcuffs make good neighbors.”

  “Huh?”

  “One of Robert Frost’s lesser-known works. Do it.”

  He did.

  I fired up the Explorer, put it into gear, and headed down the road.

  “Where are we going?” Skarda asked.

  “To see a girl,” I said.

  TWO

  The girl lived in White Bear Lake, not far from the former church that now housed the Lakeshore Players Community Theater. The city used to be a popular haven for the well-to-do who would travel twenty miles by train from St. Paul to vacation on the scenic lake that gave it its name. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about it; James J. Hill stayed there, and so did Pretty Boy Floyd and Ma Barker. Eventually the rich went elsewhere. Apparently they didn’t care to rub shoulders with the many middle-class citizens who moved to White Bear Lake once the roads improved and car ownership became common. To reach it, we made our way down to Sandstone and crossed I-35 again, this time going from east to west. From there I drove south. Skarda wondered why we didn’t take 35. I preferred to drive the succession of county roads that followed the original route of U.S. Highway 61, the legendary roadway that was made more or less obsolete between Duluth and St. Paul when I-35 was built. It was so much classier, although I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I told him it was safer.

  “The Minnesota Highway Patrol might be monitoring the traffic on 35,” I said.

  It wasn’t the only question Skarda asked. The man seemed incapable of being quiet for more than a few minutes at a time. He wanted to know what I had been busted for, why I was being transferred to Grand Rapids, if I had done time, where I was from, and so on and so on. I refused to answer. Nor did I ask any question of him, which was part of the plan. Still, when he wondered if the girl we were going to visit was the blonde who drove the red Honda Accord, I told him, “Actually, she’s a brunette, only there’s no disguising those legs, know what I mean?”

  Skarda said he did, yet I suspected he was only being polite because a moment later he asked if “the girl” was “my girl,” the same one Chad had slept with. I told him it was.

  “Are you going to kill her?”

  “What the hell, Dave,” I said. “Do I look like a homicidal maniac to you?”

  He assured me that I didn’t, and I thanked him. Just the same, by the time we reached the White Bear Lake city limits, I was humming “Delia’s Gone,” one of the last great songs recorded by Johnny Cash before he passed—the one where he claims if he hadn’t shot poor Delia he’d have had her for his wife. If Skarda hadn’t been cuffed to the handle above the door, I have no doubt that he would have jumped out of the car at the first stoplight.

  We drove through what amounted to downtown White Bear Lake, reaching Stewart Avenue and driving south some more. I told Skarda what to look for—a white Colonial with an old-fashioned porch on the left side of the street. As we passed it, I said, “Sonuvabitch,” and tightly gripped the steering wheel.

  “What?” Skarda asked.

  “Cops.”

  “Where? I didn’t see anything?”

  “That’s because you were looking at the house when you should have been looking at the street.”

  Skarda turned in his seat and looked behind us.

  “Don’t,” I said, and then, “Too late.”

  I stomped on the accelerator. The Ford Explorer surged forward. I pushed it up to fifty and took a hard left down a residential street. I did it the way they do in Hollywood movies and on TV—badly. I accelerated into the turn and braked to keep from losing control, which caused the back end of the Explorer to slide sideways and fishtail as I accelerated again. It was terribly inefficient but looked cool—that’s why they do it in the movies—and gave Skarda the impression of desperate flight. I blasted through a right-hand turn and then another left, actually making the tires squeal.

  Skarda got into it right away. “Unmarked cop car, a blue sedan, two blocks behind us,” he said.

  I hung another left followed by a right. I actually put the Explorer on two wheels, which was insane. SUVs have a higher center of gravity—do you know how easy it is to flip over one of those suckers? It shook me up so much that I actually made the next turn properly, slowing into the turn and accelerating out of it. Skarda kept looking behind us and didn’t seem to notice.

  “See anything?” I asked.

  “No, yes, a white van.”

  I took a right followed by a second right, followed by a left, sometimes pushing the Explorer up to sixty. The streets were quiet, thank goodness, although I did have to lean on the horn to keep a Toyota from backing out of a driveway in front of us. I took another turn, this one more slowly. A block ahead of us I saw two cars idling in the middle of the intersection, one facing south, the other north, and my first thought was that they were a couple of neighbors chatting with each other, not worrying about clogging the avenue because only neighbors used it. Skarda didn’t see it that way.

  “It’s a roadblock,” he shouted.

  I hit the brakes, slowing just enough so that I could safely turn down an alley.

  “The cops are everywhere,” Skarda said. “What are we going to do?”

  “Hang on,” I said.

  I managed a few more quick turns until we jumped onto White Bear Avenue. I made a big production out of weaving in and out of traffic at high speed until we crossed Interstate 694. The Maplewood Mall was on our right. I pulled into its massive parking lot and hid among the cars there. I turned off the engine. All we could hear was the ticking as it cooled.

  “I think we’re all right,” Skarda said. “I think we lost them.”

  ’Course, there was no “them”—it was just Skarda’s imagination running on overdrive. As for the white Colonial, it actually had belonged to a girl I once dated, an actor who went to Hollywood to try her luck about fifteen years ago.

  “Oh my God, Dyson,” Skarda said. Now that he thought he was safe, he was breathing hard and clutching his heart as if he were afraid it would leap from his chest. “That was close. When I saw the roadblock—I still don’t believe you got us out of that.”

  “It was nothing,” I said.

  “You’re a helluva driver, my friend.”

  “I expected something like this might happen,” I said. “Still … this makes it difficult.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My money—I can’t get to it. With Chad gone I figured my girl—my ex-girl—wouldn’t have the nerve to cross me again, only she did. She and Chad must have had a prearranged signal; probably he was supposed to call her, and when he didn’t she called the cops. None of that matter
s. What matters is I can’t get to my money now.”

  “Where is it?” Skarda asked.

  I gave him a hard look that suggested that was the dumbest question I had ever heard.

  “It’s safe, that’s all you need to know,” I said. “It’s safe. Only I can’t collect it until things cool down. In the meantime, I have exactly a hundred and eighty-seven dollars in my pocket.”

  “So, what are we going to do?”

  I patted him on the knee. “Dave, I like that you said ‘we.’”

  * * *

  I gave it ten minutes, started the SUV, and began exploring the back rows of the mall’s huge parking lot.

  “What are you doing?” Skarda asked.

  “Looking for a car to steal. This one’s hot.”

  “Why here?”

  “Store managers want to save the best spaces for their customers, so they usually have their employees park in the slots furthest from the mall. These are the people who’ll be last to leave once the stores close up, so we’ll be long gone by the time they report the theft. Ah, here we go. Useful and unobtrusive.”

  I slowed the Ford Explorer to a stop directly in front of a Jeep Cherokee with a swing-away tire carrier mounted on the back. After making sure there was no one nearby who could see us, I reversed a few feet, twisted the steering wheel, and eased forward until I nudged the Cherokee’s bumper.

  “Why did you do that?” Skarda asked.

  “To check for a car alarm. Do you hear anything?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then…”

  I got out of the Explorer and again searched the parking lot. Assured that we were quite alone, I walked around the Cherokee, trying all the doors. They were locked. I cupped my hands against the windshield and peered inside. After a few moments I returned to the Explorer. Skarda spoke to me through the open window.

  “Don’t we need tools? A screwdriver at least?”

  “The pen is mightier than the screwdriver,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”