The Last Kind Word Page 5

  Skarda stepped out of the bedroom wearing a pair of worn cowboy boots. He was carrying the county-issued sneakers in his hand. He dropped them on the floor and kicked them beneath a sofa.

  “I need a shower,” he announced.

  “That can wait,” Josie said. “Eat first.”

  Skarda sat at the table. Josie slipped packaged ham, American cheese, lettuce, and tomato between two slices of white bread, set it on a paper plate, and slid it in front of him. She served me the same. Skarda ate as if he had just discovered food. Me, not so much.

  “Coffee?” Josie asked.

  “Thanks, sis,” Skarda said.

  Josie poured a mug for both of us. It was so strong you could eat it with a fork. I told her it was excellent just the same. As I ate and drank, the old man moved between the refrigerator and the kitchen table. He opened the refrigerator and produced a can of cheap beer, which must have been tough to do because he was staring at me the entire time. He opened the beer and took a drink, then sat at the table across from me. He kept staring.

  “Something I can do for you, Dad?” I asked.

  “You look like a narc to me,” he said.

  “You look like a district court judge.”

  The remark caught him by surprise. It took him a few beats before he realized that I didn’t mean it. In the silence that followed, Josie drifted to Jimmy’s side and whispered in his ear. He gave me a quick glance and disappeared into a bedroom. After he emerged, he walked right out the front door without a word. He was carrying something in his right hand, but I couldn’t see what it was.

  “You want a beer?” the old man asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I don’t trust a man who doesn’t drink. Seems like he’s hiding something.”

  “I don’t trust a man who drinks too much. He doesn’t hide anything.”

  He thought long and hard about that before replying. “Are you calling me a drunk?”

  “Never crossed my mind.” I don’t think he believed me, possibly because I was speaking around a mouthful of ham and cheese at the time. “Tell me about this job of yours,” I said. “This great grocery store heist.”

  “None of your business,” Roy said. He was sitting on a sofa in the living room. I had to turn in my chair to see him. His young wife was sitting directly across from him. Her hands were folded in her lap and she was staring straight ahead. Her remarkable eyes now had the blank look of someone who had been gazing at an iPod too long.

  “I don’t know,” Skarda said. “Maybe he can help; give us some tips.”

  “Us? You’re not going.”

  Skarda turned in his chair and glared at Roy. “Who says?”

  “The job was planned for five,” Josie said. “Besides, what if someone recognizes you?”

  “In Silver Bay? No one’s gonna know me in Silver Bay.”

  “We can’t take the risk.”

  “Well, then, who’s going to be your inside man?”

  “Jimmy.”

  “Jimmy?”

  As if on cue, the young man entered the cabin. He was carrying a black box about the size of an old transistor radio with a collapsible antenna.

  “Car’s clean,” he said.

  Josie gestured toward me, and Jimmy stepped over and extended the antenna on his box.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “It’s a frequency finder that I bought on Amazon. We use it to detect GPS trackers and other bugs, hidden cameras, phone taps, that sort of thing. We once found a GPS transmitter in a bag of money we stole.”

  I stood without argument, spread my arms and legs wide, and let him move the antenna over me. At the same time, I glanced down at Skarda’s feet, noticing his boots again.

  “Nothing,” Jimmy said at last.

  “Good,” Josie said. “We don’t mean to offend you, Dyson, but—”

  “Now do your cousin,” I said.

  “What?” said Jimmy.

  “Do Dave. Check him out, too.”

  “C’mon,” Skarda said.

  “It’ll only take a second,” Jimmy said.

  Skarda stood, and Jimmy ran the antenna over him while watching the box’s black and gold face. When he finished, he said, “He’s clean, too.”

  “Well, duh,” Skarda said.

  “Everybody happy?” I asked. “How ’bout you, Dad?”

  The old man smiled at me. He was a happy drunk. I liked that.

  “Like I said, we don’t mean any disrespect,” Josie told me.

  “Please, don’t apologize,” I said. “This is the only smart thing I’ve seen you people do since I’ve been here.”

  “It’s just that David escaping the way he did, escaping with you so soon after he was caught by the police, and both of you showing up here, it’s such a coincidence.”

  “You have every reason to be cautious, although I doubt the cops would go to such extremes just to catch the Iron Range Bandits.”

  “You think you’re something special, don’t you?” Roy rose to his feet, although with his height it was more of an unfolding. He stood in the center of the living room, the legs straight without locking his knees, his feet about ten inches apart, his hands locked behind his back and centered on the belt. “If you’re such a master criminal, how come you got caught?”

  “I trusted a man who I thought was my friend. We all make mistakes.” I was staring at Skarda when I spoke, and I saw his Adam’s apple bob. I thought I also heard him gulp, but that was probably just my imagination.

  “I’m not impressed,” Roy said.

  “I’m going to lose a lot of sleep over that.”

  “I’m impressed,” Jimmy said.

  “This coming from a kid who wanted to start a marijuana farm in the Superior National Forest,” Roy said.

  “Claire liked the idea.”

  “Claire?” said Skarda. “Claire hasn’t got the brains God gave an aardvark.”

  Jimmy turned and looked me in the eye as if he expected me to defend Claire, whoever she was. Like I’m an authority on the intelligence of aardvarks.

  “I had a spot all picked out,” Jimmy said. “Deep in the forest where no one would have stumbled over it. I had processing equipment, packaging—in three to five months I would have been ready for distribution.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “No one in this family is going into the drug business,” Josie said.

  “That happened,” Jimmy said as he gestured toward his cousin.

  “We’re consumers, not dealers,” said the old man.

  Jimmy shook his head the way I expected Willis Carrier might have when his family pooh-poohed air-conditioning. He produced a laptop and plugged it into a phone jack. A few minutes later he had his browser up. He googled Nick Dyson and files appeared. The files were genuine. There really was a career criminal named Nicholas Dyson who specialized in robbing banks, jacking armored cars, and burgling the occasional jewelry store. We picked him because his physical description resembled mine—all we did was swap out his photo wherever we found it. The most recent file was from the Web site of the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper. It had booking photos of Skarda and me. In mine I had a scraggly beard and long hair that didn’t appear fake at all.

  “You get a haircut and shave after you were caught?” Jimmy asked.

  “Wanted to make sure I looked like a sober, law-abiding citizen if my case came to trial,” I said. “I was even going to wear a sweater like the one that guy wore in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

  “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” Roy said from the living room.

  He was being deliberately provocative, trying to goad me into a fight. Rushmore McKenzie would have ignored him, but then he had a job to do, and it didn’t include beating up middle-aged punks with chips on their shoulders. Nick Dyson, on the other hand, had a reputation to uphold. He was a bad man, and if these people were going to do what he needed them to do, he might have to prove it.

  �
�Roy,” I said, “do you really want me to go over there and fuck you up in front of your pretty wife? I know you’ll slap her around later to prove you’re a man, but she’ll see it and she’ll remember. So will everyone else.”

  To show I meant business I stood up, took the Glock from where I had holstered it between my belt and the small of my back, and stepped away from the table. Jimmy went to his sister and pulled her out of the line of fire. The old man dodged out of the way as well. Skarda sat in his chair and watched. Roy eyed me cautiously yet did not move. It occurred to me that I might have played my hand too hard, forcing Roy to go all in even though neither he nor I wanted to. Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed. Josie stepped directly between us, slowly looking first at Roy, then at me, then Roy, and finally back to me again.

  “I’m grateful for what you did for my brother,” she said. “But gratitude has an expiration date. Like a sack of donuts, after a while it just goes stale. You know?”

  “I’ll be out of your hair by this time tomorrow,” I said.

  Josie glanced over her shoulder at Roy. He found something on the wall that seemed to demand his immediate attention and was pretending not to listen to us.

  “Good,” she said. “On that happy note, I think we should be thinking about sleep. Jill, you’re with me in the master bedroom.”

  Jill drifted toward the doorway while watching her husband as if she expected him to stop her. When he didn’t, she disappeared into the bedroom.

  “Roy, why don’t you, Dad, and Jimmy take the bunk beds. Dave, you stay out here with Mr. Dyson.”

  “In case I decide to run off with the silverware,” I added.

  Jimmy grinned. He was the only one who did.

  Blankets and pillows were doled out. Jimmy, Roy, and the old man went quietly into their bedroom while the women went into theirs. Skarda bedded down on the sofa across from me. When he wasn’t looking, I took the county-issued sneakers he had been wearing when we escaped and pushed them farther back under the sofa where no one could see them.

  FOUR

  I couldn’t sleep; wasn’t sure I wanted to. It was well past midnight and Skarda was snoring softly when I rolled off my sofa, went to the refrigerator, and found a beer. It was in a blue and white can, the kind of beer I would ridicule even before I quit the St. Paul Police Department to collect a seven-digit reward on an embezzler. But I was stuck in a North Woods cabin with Fagin and his pickpockets, and beggars can’t be choosy. I took it out onto the deck, opened it, sat in a chair, propped my feet on the railing, and took a long pull. The air was crisp, yet I didn’t mind. A half moon hung in the sky, its beams reflecting off the borderless black water just visible beyond the trees.

  I drank slowly while my inner voice debated my options. It kept coming back to the same one—Jump into the Jeep Cherokee and get the hell out of here. Since becoming a man of leisure I sometimes worked as an unlicensed private investigator doing the occasional favor for friends. But the people I was working for, they weren’t actually my friends, and this was frickin’ dangerous.

  On the other hand, so far everything had gone exactly as planned. Besides, there was something exhilarating about being undercover, knowing that at any moment you could give yourself away. I understood why some cops like it so much …

  * * *

  I blamed Harry, real name Brian Wilson, special agent working out of the Minneapolis office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I called him Harry because when I met him five years ago he reminded me of the character actor Harry Dean Stanton. He had been working at the time with an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives named Chad Bullert. I blamed him, too.

  Three days ago—was it only three days?—Bullert ambushed me in the clubhouse of the Columbia Golf Course in Minneapolis. I liked Columbia—it was a short course with narrow fairways that favored course management over distance. After playing eighteen holes, Harry and I had stopped in the clubhouse to talk it over. The waitress had just served our drinks when Bullert appeared, behaving as if meeting us like that had been as lucky as picking the Gopher 5. All of my internal alarm systems flared at once. It wasn’t that I had any fear of Bullert, whom I hadn’t seen since that frigid night in Lakeville. It was that he was wearing a suit, a tie, and black wingtips. Clearly he hadn’t come to Columbia for a good walk spoiled, as Twain might have put it.

  After taking a seat, Bullert said, “McKenzie, I was just thinking about you.”

  “Is that right?”

  “How’s the shoulder?”

  I flexed it to show that my broken collarbone had healed nicely. “Good as new,” I said.

  “The concussion—no lingering symptoms, I hope.”

  “Nothing for a couple of months now, thanks for asking,” I said. “Why are you asking?”

  “I heard you got banged up a while back. Something about a museum heist.” He was staring at Harry now, looking for assistance. The FBI agent’s expression suggested that he was uncomfortable about giving it, although it occurred to me that Bullert would not have known I was going to be at the golf course if Harry hadn’t told him. I took a sip of my beverage and waited for the shoe to drop. It didn’t take long.

  “Busy these days?” Bullert asked.

  “I manage to keep occupied,” I said.

  “Doing favors for friends, I hear.”

  “McKenzie’s a born kibitzer,” Harry said.

  Bullert pointed at my drink. “Buy you another?”

  I rested the palm of my hand on top of the glass. “No, I’m good.”

  Bullert nodded.

  Harry nodded.

  I nodded, too, but then I hate to be left out.

  “What?” I asked. “What do you want, Chad?”

  “How come you never gave me a nickname like Harry?”

  “I did. I called you Alec because you look like the actor Alec Baldwin, but I haven’t seen you for five years so it didn’t stick.”

  Bullert turned to Harry. “Do I look like Alec Baldwin?”

  “No,” Harry said.

  “What do you guys want?” I asked.

  Harry looked away as if he were too embarrassed to answer. Bullert wasn’t so self-conscious. “I need a favor,” he said.

  “What kind of favor?”

  “Will you help?”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “It’s for your country.”

  Uh-oh, my inner voice said. For Bullert to play that card so early in the conversation …

  “A wise man once said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” I told him.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You wouldn’t be shamelessly appealing to my love of country unless something went splat and now you need assistance cleaning up the mess. Am I right?”

  Bullert gave Harry a sideways glance. Again he seemed to want help, and again Harry looked like he wished he were somewhere else.

  “Have you ever heard of Operation Fast and Furious?” Bullert asked.

  “Is that the title of the new Vin Diesel movie?”

  “We’re serious, McKenzie.”

  “Yes, I know about Fast and Furious. It was in all the papers.”

  “What do you know?”

  “It was the name of a sting gone bad. A few years ago, the ATF—you guys—and some federal prosecutors supplied gun dealers with seventeen hundred weapons, the plan being that you would track the weapons and then arrest the dealers and their customers when they illegally resold them to the Mexican drug cartels. Only you screwed up—you lost track of the guns. Now they’re popping up at crime scenes all along the border. There’s evidence that they might even have been used to kill our own guys. Congress found out, hearings were held, disgruntled ATF agents and other whistle-blowers testified, high-ranking officials lost their jobs, the administration was embarrassed—just another sunny day in our nation’s capital.”

  “We’ve recovered about half the guns one way or the other,” Bullert said. “Still ca
n’t account for the other half, though.”

  “Butterfingers.”

  “A couple days ago, we got a lead.”

  “What lead?”

  “I need to tell you something, but it must be held in strictest confidence.”

  I didn’t respond. Again Bullert sought help from Harry. “McKenzie can keep a secret,” the FBI agent said.

  Bullert rubbed his face and then set his hands palms down on the table in front of him. He stared at the table, studying it carefully as if he wanted to commit it to memory.

  “Some of the guns have shown up along the Canadian border,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Northern Minnesota.”

  “Ahh, c’mon…”

  “We apprehended a man armed with an AK-47 that we sold in Arizona. He was attempting to rob the box office of a music festival near Grand Rapids; the Itasca County Sheriff’s Department arrested him. There were five people involved. Four of them got away clean. Skarda—his car broke down, an old Saturn, blew a timing belt during the getaway. A patrol car rolled up; the deputy didn’t even know about the robbery. He saw the AK on the seat and said, ‘Hey.’”

  “Top-flight police work all around,” Harry said.

  “The suspect’s name was David Skarda,” Bullert said. “We think he’s a member of a crew called the Iron Range Bandits.”

  “The what?”

  “That’s what the Duluth News Tribune named them. They appeared about a year ago—robbed a couple of grocery stores, a bar known to cash payroll checks, never making much more than ten thousand dollars and usually less. So far they haven’t hurt anyone that we know of. Sooner or later that’s going to change, though.”

  “Yeah, it will,” I said. Their fault, the victim’s fault, nobody’s fault—if they kept thieving, sooner or later someone would get shot. It was as inevitable as the rising of the sun.

  “Skarda had no previous record, so we thought it would be easy to flip him, but he won’t be flipped,” Harry said. “Won’t tell us anything. He’s facing a four-year jolt and seems content to do it all.”