The Last Kind Word (7 page)

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 can'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.”

“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.”