The Last Kind Word Read online

  “Which means he knows nothing about prison,” I said. “Which means he’s probably not a career criminal.”

  “Or it could be he doesn’t want to rat out his family,” Bullert said. “That’s what the Itasca sheriff thinks. He wants to look into it. We’re holding him back. We’re holding everyone back—the BCA, too.”

  “Why?”

  “The guns, McKenzie. We need to get those damn guns off the border.”

  “Just because Skarda is stand-up doesn’t mean the rest of his people are. You lean on them, someone will talk.”

  “What if they don’t? What if the gunrunners learn that we’re looking into it and get spooked?”

  “What if, what if—what do you want me to do about it?”

  “We’ve arranged for Skarda to escape custody,” Harry said.

  “We want you to go with him,” Bullert said. “Infiltrate the crew.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just like they do on TV.”

  “We’re not asking you to stop the gunrunning,” Harry said. “We’re not asking you to arrest anyone. All we want is a name.”

  “And a location,” Bullert said.

  “But we’ll settle for a name. Find out who supplied the AK to Skarda, and we’ll take it from there.”

  “Why me?” I asked. “I don’t have any undercover experience. You have agents who are trained for this sort of thing, who actually like this sort of thing. Why would you—wait a minute. Wait a minute! Why are we even having this conversation? I’m not a cop.”

  “You used to be,” Bullert said. “A good one.”

  “Operative words being ‘used to be.’” The expression on their faces told me everything. “You’re working the case off the books, aren’t you? It’s a black bag job. You don’t want anyone in Justice to know about it. You’re afraid there’ll be a leak, that someone will go running off to Congress and the hearings will start up again and everyone will be embarrassed and more supervisors will get fired.”

  “That won’t happen if we recover the guns,” Bullert said.

  “If, brother. If.”

  “McKenzie, it’s not just about our reputation,” Bullert said. “Every time a crime occurs along the Mexican border, people, especially politicians, they start screaming about building electrified fences, building moats, for God’s sake. Do you want them to start talking like that up here? With Canada? Do you want to see a fence along the Rainy River, the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence Seaway?”

  “It would be one frickin’ long fence,” I said.

  “You know what I’m talking about.”

  “Yes, I do.” I turned in my chair to face Harry. “What does this have to do with you? You’re not ATF.”

  “I asked him for help,” Bullert said. “I asked Harry if he knew someone we could depend on, someone we could trust. He mentioned your name.”

  I was still looking at Harry when I said, “I’m going to have to thank him for that one of these days.”

  “I want to get the guns, too,” Harry said. “Before someone gets hurt. Do you know how many killings there have been along the Mexican border tied to ATF guns? This seems like as good a plan as any to get them back.”

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  Harry shrugged.

  “Will you do it, McKenzie?” Bullert asked. “Will you help us?”

  It took about three seconds to decide. I leaned back in the chair again and spread my hands wide, palms up.

  “Hell no,” I said.

  * * *

  ’Course, that was then. Now I was sitting on a deck in the North Woods overlooking a lake I could barely see in the dark. I felt movement behind me and turned my head in time to see the cabin door open slowly and a figure step out. White T-shirt, white shorts—even in the dark I could tell they were worn by a woman.

  “Good evening,” I said.

  There was a startled intake of breath before the figure eased cautiously toward me.

  “Mr. Dyson?” Josie asked. She kept her voice low, probably out of deference to her sleeping family, I figured, so I spoke quietly, too.

  “Just call me Dyson,” I said. “I thought we settled that.”

  “Why aren’t you in bed?”

  “I couldn’t sleep—blame it on unfamiliar surroundings. How ’bout you?”

  “I’m anxious about tomorrow.”

  “If it doesn’t feel right, Josie, just walk away.”

  “Is that your professional advice?”

  “As a matter of fact, it is.”

  “I wish it were that easy.”

  “You need to make it that easy.”

  “You don’t understand. There are bills to be paid.”

  “I figured it had to be something like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There are only three reasons people steal—to feed their family, to take a vacation in Jamaica, or to pay for a drug habit. You guys don’t look like meth heads to me, and this certainly isn’t Montego Bay. That leaves Jean Valjean and his loaf of bread.”

  She moved to the railing, stepping between the moon and me, and I became aware of the shape of her body beneath the shorts and T-shirt. It was a nice shape, a body to arouse MILF fantasies in the young men at the minimart and gas station. Being older, of course, I was immune.

  “Dyson, if you don’t mind my asking, how did you become a criminal? I only ask because you seem so comfortable in the role.”

  “Me?” I flashed on Harry and Bullert. “You could say I fell in with the wrong crowd.”

  “Now I’m the wrong crowd.” Josie’s voice reminded me of a tenor saxophone. It was quiet and calm and totally without self-pity. “I’m the people my parents warned me about when I was growing up. I didn’t mean to become a criminal, you know.”

  “No one ever does. It just kind of sneaks up on you.”

  “Everything went from bad to worse so quickly. First, the mines closed—I suppose we all saw that coming, but we were still unprepared for the consequences. Babbitt, the City of Babbitt, was hit hard. It has a high school built for two thousand students and an enrollment of a hundred and sixty. Last time I looked, a four-bedroom house was selling for forty thousand dollars and no takers. A couple of months ago the city’s only grocery and drug stores burned down—maybe they’ll be rebuilt, I don’t know. In the meantime, people have to drive twenty miles to Krueger or Ely just to get a gallon of milk.

  “Then the paper mill in Krueger closed, and no one saw that coming. Two hundred and forty employees out of work, and that’s not counting the loggers and truckers and all the others that depended on it. The mill was profitable, too; it was making money producing cardboard boxes for Kellogg, Budweiser, FedEx. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy for reasons that had nothing to do with us, though, and they just boarded it up. We were all hoping the company would sell the mill; we were told that was the plan. Learned that was a lie when the company decided to turn off the heat last January to save a few dollars—turn off the heat in the dead of a Minnesota winter. No matter how hard they tried to drain and winterize, there were so many feet of piping and odd angles—water pipes burst, equipment was destroyed, infrastructure damaged. The mill was built thirty years ago. Today, the place looks like ancient ruins. No one is going to buy it now—reopen it.

  “All this on top of the housing crisis. Unemployment in Krueger is over twenty percent. It’s about sixteen percent across the Range. One in six people is living below the poverty level. The government says it’s a recession. Sure looks like a depression to me. My business—did David tell you I was a real estate agent, that I specialized in selling lake homes? My business went away, too.

  “We’re all supposed to keep a positive attitude, though. We’re all supposed to carry on. That’s what they tell us. Carry on. How? With what? There aren’t any jobs, Dyson, minimum wage or otherwise, and there aren’t going to be any. That’s why the Range is losing population and the Cities are growing at double digits, because that’s where a
ll the jobs are. You either leave the only home you’ve ever known, where your parents lived and your grandparents and great-grandparents lived, or…”

  “Or you steal,” I said. “You don’t need to justify yourself to me, Josie.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  “My experience, the reason most people are honest, seem to be honest, is because they’ve never had a reason—or at least the opportunity—to be anything else.”

  “You’re saying we’re all thieves at heart?”

  “Not at all. Some people are painfully honest. That lovely little girl asleep in there—I bet she’s been against what you’re doing from the very start.”

  “Jillian doesn’t understand the real world.”

  “From the bruise on her chin I’d say she’s learning fast.”

  “Roy. I suppose it’s been tougher on him than the rest of us.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He was in the army.”

  “I gathered that.”

  “You did?”

  “He’s always standing at parade rest.”

  “You don’t miss much, do you, Dyson? After he retired from the army, they gave him a management position at the paper mill. They hired him to systematically lay off the workforce so they wouldn’t get their hands dirty. He hated doing it, just hated it, but he was used to following orders. He became terribly depressed. It didn’t help that since he was the man handing out the pink slips, people held him personally responsible for what was happening. He was the face of the company; people didn’t know whom else to blame. When he finished the job, the company fired him, too—fired him in an e-mail. This is a man who’s known structure his entire life. Now he’s adrift.”

  “Isn’t that just too damn bad for Roy?”

  “You’re not a particularly compassionate character, are you, Dyson?”

  “Compassion has its downside. For example, it makes you perfectly willing to forgive Roy for abusing his wife.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant—it’s hard sometimes knowing what to do.”

  “Think so? If Jill were my cousin, I’d know what to do. I’d beat the sonuvabitch to death for hitting her, and I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass what drove him to it. But as you suggest, I’m not particularly virtuous.”

  “You’re a violent man.”

  “On the contrary. There are few people as laid-back as I am. I just happen to live in a world where violence is always an option, sometimes the only option. You live in that world now, too, whether you care to admit it or not. You’re carrying guns into the grocery store tomorrow, aren’t you? Tell me, JoEllen, if it all goes bad, if someone gets between you and the door, will you shoot him? Will you take his life just so you can pay your bills? Will you become a killer?”

  “Would you?”

  “I don’t have to make that decision. I’m not the one going into the grocery store, you are.”

  Josie stared into the darkness for a long time without speaking. The moon continued its slow arch across the sky. There were crickets and frogs and the rustling of leaves in the wind, and when she shifted her weight I heard the moan of wooden planks beneath her feet. Finally she turned and moved toward the door of the cabin.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Sweet dreams.” I didn’t mean anything by it, yet the words made her pause just the same.

  “This is only temporary,” Josie said. “Just until things get better.”

  I didn’t know if she was speaking to me or to herself. A moment later she disappeared inside the cabin.

  * * *

  I slept surprisingly well. When I woke, the cabin was filled with activity. Someone said, “Where the fuck is Dyson?” Skarda and the old man stepped out onto the deck. “There you are,” Skarda said. I was sitting in a lounge chair; the blanket I had retrieved after Josie went to bed was wrapped around me.

  The old man shook his head like he was embarrassed for me. “You afraid we were gonna jump you in your sleep?” he asked.

  I pulled the blanket away with one hand, giving him a good look at the Glock that I held in the other. “The thought never occurred to me,” I said.

  I made my way into the cabin. Roy and Jimmy were talking in hushed tones inside one of the bedrooms. Josie was in the kitchen. She was wearing boots, baggy coveralls, and a sweatshirt; her auburn hair was tucked beneath a baseball cap. She said “Good morning” in a quiet voice and offered coffee when I approached. I took a sip. It was strong enough to bring a dinosaur to its knees.

  “Mmmm,” I hummed.

  “Most people don’t like my coffee,” Josie said.

  “Wimps,” I said. “Tell me, what are you made up for?”

  “I don’t want witnesses to know I’m a woman.”

  “Sweetie, I could tell you’re a woman from a thousand yards, and it wouldn’t matter how you’re dressed.”

  She smiled slightly at the remark and nodded, also slightly, as if she appreciated the compliment but thought it was in questionable taste.

  I sat at the kitchen table. It wobbled again, and I automatically looked down to see which of its flimsy legs was the culprit. Jill was already sitting there and staring wistfully out the window. There was a mug of coffee in front of her along with an untouched plate of eggs, bacon, and hash browns.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Morning,” she replied in a soft, middle-C voice.

  I gestured at her food. “Not hungry?”

  Jill smiled weakly and shook her head in response, and I had to fight the urge to cup her smooth, cool face in my hands, kiss her forehead, and promise her only laughter and love. I was a lifelong bachelor—not necessarily by choice—and the truth of it is, no matter how much we claim that we prize our independence above all else, bachelors tend to fall in love quite easily. I hadn’t heard this beautiful, unhappy young woman speak more than a half dozen words, yet I was prepared to do just about anything to protect her. I suspect Nina would have understood. She had a sense of me that I didn’t comprehend myself. She knew, for example, that I was going to help Harry and Bullert even while I was telling her that it was never going to happen. Maybe that’s why she had yet to give me a definitive answer even though I had proposed to her three times over the past three years. She knew something I didn’t.

  “What do you think?” Jimmy asked. He wasn’t speaking to me, yet I turned in my chair to examine him just the same. He was wearing a nylon jacket with an elastic waistband; the jacket zipped to a couple of inches below his throat. There was a discernible bulge above his left hip.

  “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” I said.

  “You can see it?”

  “Unzip your jacket, let it hang loose. Let your arms hang at your sides.” He did. The bulge disappeared. “Do you have anything a little more appropriate for the weather? A light windbreaker?” He shook his head. I stepped next to him and pulled the hem of the jacket away to reveal a 9 mm Browning stuck in his belt. “Are you left-handed?” I asked.

  “No, right-handed.”

  “As a general rule, you don’t want to cross-draw unless you’re sitting down. In any case, you’ll want to practice, especially if you’re all thumbs.”

  Jimmy reached across his body and pulled the Browning. Both the 45⁄8 inch barrel and front sight caught on his jeans.

  “That happens with big automatics like this,” I said. “Listen, do you have a smaller gun? A .32 caliber snub-nose with a concealed hammer is my choice. It’s less likely to catch on your clothes.”

  “I have a .38 S&W, but I don’t know,” Jimmy said. “It’s smaller, and it only has five shots. The Browning has ten plus one more in the chamber.”

  “You point a gun at someone, it’s going to look as big as a howitzer no matter what size it is. My opinion, a wheel gun is more reliable, less likely to jam, okay? It’s not going to eject your empties all over the place, either, in case you left your print on a shell casing.”

  “But five
shots…”

  “Kid, if you can’t seal the deal with five, an extra six isn’t going to help. Trust me on this.”

  “What do you know about combat?” I glanced over Jimmy’s shoulder to see Roy standing in the doorway that led to the bedrooms. He was carrying an AK-47 assault rifle in the port position.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Where did you get that?”

  I reached for the rifle, but Roy turned his shoulder away like a child protecting a toy from his older brother.

  “Don’t touch it,” he said.

  “C’mon,” I said.

  Roy stepped away, showing me his back. “It’s none of your business where I got it,” he said. “What are you even asking for?”

  Back off, back off, back off, my inner voice chanted.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” I said aloud. “Relax, man. I’m just curious. You don’t often see this kind of ordnance.”

  “You come in here, pushing people around, and now you want to know where we get our guns—”

  Skarda and the old man walked into the cabin. They must have heard the exchange on the deck. Skarda asked, “What’s going on?”

  Harry and Bullert wanted me to ask questions and get answers. At the moment, I couldn’t think of anything more suspicious or foolhardy. It was like when you’re doing time—ask for nothing, take nothing, offer nothing, see nothing, know nothing, never show interest in the activities of others, never take sides. Sooner or later the other inmates will realize that you want nothing from them. That’s when they start talking to you. I needed to change the topic of conversation in a hurry.

  “You’re a real desperado, aren’t you, Roy?” I said. “Ex-army puke, you think you know my business? Tell me something, Roy, what are you going to do if it rains?”

  The question caught him by surprise—it kind of caught me by surprise, too. He hemmed and hawed and said, “It’s not going to rain.”

  “Oh, you can predict the weather coming off of Lake Superior?”

  “I’m just saying…”

  “I’m just saying, I know my business and you don’t. You’re an amateur, Roy, and this gung ho we got the barn, we got the costumes, we got frickin’ AKs, let’s put on a frickin’ show bullshit is going to get someone killed. Roy.” I spun around, went back into the kitchen, scooped up my mug, and gave Josie my best Oliver Twist impersonation. “Please, may I have some more?”