Last Words

by Michael Koryta

  “Have to keep you in town, Mark Novak,” Ridley whispered. “Can’t let you get back on a plane. Can’t have that.” His hands were moving faster and faster, and he closed his eyes. He could feel sweat on his forehead, dripping down his cheeks, but his breathing was steady. Ascender hitch, taut-line hitch, clove, Munter. A Prusik with two wraps, then one with three. He began to work backward now, the sweat flowing freely—too much wood in the woodstove; it had to be sixty-five degrees in the house, too warm, Ridley liked it cool, cooler, cold. His hands moved even faster, always you could be faster, reverse order on the hitches, three-wrap, two-wrap, done, on to the Munter, done, then the clove, the taut-line, the ascender, done!

  His breathing hadn’t changed. His heart rate hadn’t changed. If the temperature had been right, he wouldn’t even be sweating. He’d worked fast and he’d worked hard but his hands were steady and smooth and his adrenaline had never spiked.

  Control.

  It was a good feeling. One that didn’t come easily. One that had to be earned; one that could be lost.

  It wouldn’t be lost again. Never again.

  You lost control.

  No. No, he hadn’t, and he wouldn’t. Novak had lost control, and that was why he’d left the house. He wasn’t as strong as Ridley had hoped. Not as composed. But it was hard for Ridley to see those things, because Ridley couldn’t relate to fear; he was a man who toyed with panic, teased panic, tormented panic. He didn’t lose to it.

  You did. You do.

  Damn it, no. He opened his eyes, dropped the rope, and rushed back out onto the porch, welcoming the cold air. The wind pushed right into his face.

  Don’t lose Novak.

  He wouldn’t lose him. Novak was here because he’d already taken the bait. He wanted Ridley to believe that he was merely nibbling. Bullshit. You didn’t fly from Florida to Garrison for a nibble.

  Things were in motion, and Ridley was in control. He let himself feel some satisfaction with that as he packed his bag. It was a small, battered backpack that contained carabiners, two helmets with headlamps, a flashlight, protein bars and almonds, a first-aid kit, and two Benchmade pocketknives. Assisted-opening, one-handed operation, the spring assist making it nearly a legal switchblade. Actually, switchblades were legal again in Indiana. The legislature had taken the time to consider that law and pass it. There was something about this that entertained Ridley to no end. Elected officials often did.

  Mr. Barnes, something you need to understand—the people of this county have elected me to preserve law and order and punish all those who do not follow the law. I intend to do the job that I promised to.

  Ridley’s smile was wider now, memories flooding back, and he knew that it was time to get underground, and fast. It was earlier than he’d intended to go, but Novak’s visit had him excited—not nervous, just enthused—and he wanted to be in motion, wanted to be alone in the cool dark where his mind could clear and his thoughts crystallize. There was much to think about, and Ridley always thought better when he was alone in the dark.

  He changed out of his jeans and into heavy canvas pants, slipped knee pads on, then added a few loose layers of shirts and grabbed a backpack. When he left the house, he simply crossed the road on foot and started across the fields. There were three accessible caves within walking distance from his house, the reason he made his home there. Drive ten miles and there were five more. Burn the whole truck tank of petrol and he could reach fifty, maybe sixty. Hell, he had no true idea, didn’t keep count. Most cavers did, loved to talk about it, got a hard-on boasting about how many caves pocketed this part of the world, but they were missing the point.

  There was only one.

  Ridley had known that for years now. Most people counted entrances as separate caves because they reached walls and they said, Here’s the end of it. It was a poor understanding of both caves and walls. There were ways through walls, and once you were past them, were you really in a new place? No. You were in a different room of the same house.

  The snow had stopped but the wind was still blowing as he walked across the field, his lug-soled boots crunching on frozen shafts of broken wheat. Ahead of him the land fell gently to the left and at the base was a small brook. Dry in the summer months, it was flowing now, or at least it was flowing just below the skim of ice. Along its banks, slabs of limestone showed, and then, just far enough away that all you could see of Ridley’s house was one edge of the roof, a small hole yawned in the rock. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people would walk past it and dismiss it the way they would a storm drain. To them, it was just a place where the inconsequential was swept away from the world that mattered.

  Oh, what sorry lives most people lived.

  Ridley dropped to his knees and slipped off the backpack. He removed the helmet from it, this one outfitted with a new headlamp, slid the helmet on, and fastened the chinstrap. Then, without bothering to turn on the light, he put his head into the hole in the rocks. His shoulders stuck immediately. He made one quick squirm, a side-to-side shimmy, and then he was through. If he could clear his shoulders, he would always be fine in a passage, because Ridley took care to keep himself in shape. It occurred to him that Novak was built for caving, with a clear V taper to his torso that would allow his shoulders to tell the tale of the tunnels just as Ridley’s did. Very fit but not overly tall. Probably a shade over six feet, which was still a few inches taller than Ridley. The tall men Ridley had seen in caves tended to be uncomfortable men. Novak’s musculature was right, though, lean and ropy, his physical strength evident but not overdeveloped bulk. Too much bulk turned a belly crawl into a challenge. Yes, Novak would do just fine underground if he would only show the initiative to go there. Perhaps some encouragement was needed.

  Although the entrance Ridley had taken looked tight from the surface, it opened up into a chamber the size of a bus, walled in by cool damp stone. Once he’d cleared his feet and was completely underground, he pivoted and reached back, grabbed his bag, and pulled it in with him. Then, for the first time, he turned on the light. The world was lit in all directions, and he frowned and clicked the lamp again, dimming it to a tolerable level. There was no sign that any creature had been here since his last visit. Once, he’d encountered a coyote who’d taken the place as a den. That had been an adventure, and one that ended badly for the coyote. Ridley’s hand drifted toward his knife as he remembered.

  The large room faded to an angled shelf of rock about twenty feet from him, and below the shelf was a shadowed passage. He braced himself on his forearms, so the elbow and knee pads would take the brunt of the bruising, and crawled. Soon he had to drop all the way down to his belly and wriggle forward again. If he’d attempted to lift his head to see what was coming, he would have cracked it against the stone ceiling, and on either side of him, the walls were close enough to squeeze the shoulders. A classic panic passage for rookies, but a short test, thirty feet. The passage bent to the right and led down and then the cave opened again, this room larger than the last, stone formations showing, including a wall so pocked that it looked as if it had been riddled by cannon fire.

  Though he’d hardly worked, he was surprised to feel a bead of sweat on his forehead. When he lifted his gloved hand to wipe it away, he froze.

  His hand was shaking.

  He looked at it with disgust, as if the appendage didn’t belong to him, then wiped the sweat away and laid his fingers against his throat. Even through the gloves he could feel that his pulse was too fast. This angered him. There was no excuse for these reactions. He should be in control. He always was.

  Novak. He was the reason for the trouble, the reason Ridley didn’t have the control he should have. Ridley turned off the headlamp, plunging himself into a world of blackness, and waited for the silent dark to soothe him.

  It always did.

  4

  There were four hotels in Garrison—two were locally owned, shotgun-style buildings with about a dozen units that looked like they were competing f
or the next remake of Psycho, and two were chain hotels on the outskirts of town where things had grown up a bit and turned into a sort of minor interstate exit. There were a few chain restaurants near the chain hotels, and a couple of gas stations. Mark chose the only hotel that didn’t have rooms opening directly to the outdoors. He’d never liked those. When you thought of crime scene tape over a hotel-room door, the image that sprang to mind was inevitably of a door that opened to the outside.

  The clerk, a pretty brunette, smiled when Mark asked if there were rooms available.

  “A few. How many nights?”

  Mark hesitated. “One. I’ll just stay the night.”

  Once inside the room, he cranked up the heat by ten degrees, dropped his suitcase, and set Ridley’s case file on the little desk by the window. He’d asked for a smoking room, and it stank like one. He always hated that. He’d never been able to get used to the smell. The taste he’d acquired with time. Some people lit candles for the dead, but that showed more than Mark liked to reveal. So he smoked Lauren’s cigarettes, filling his lungs daily with the thing he’d once feared would kill her.

  He slid the ashtray over beside the case file, took out an American Spirit, and lit it. He smoked while he watched the wind push the snow around the pool cover, and when the cigarette was done and his mouth was full of the taste, he reached for the phone, ready to call Jeff and confront him. Jeff would have an answer, of course, a bit of sage wisdom, but Jeff should have realized that there were some buttons you didn’t push, no matter how good your intentions.

  He had his cell phone in hand when the hotel-room phone rang, and for a moment he was confused and almost answered the cell. Then he picked up the room line, expecting the front-desk clerk because nobody else knew he was here, and a female voice said, “Who in the hell are you, and what do you want out of this?”

  After a beat, he said: “My name is Markus Novak. Who in the hell are you?”

  “What are you doing asking about my baby?”

  The mother. Shit. Should have gone to her first, Mark thought. Not to the police, not to Ridley. Damn it, you knew better.

  “I was going to call you, Mrs. Martin. You were next on my list. I was—”

  “I was next on your list? You think that’s proper?”

  My baby. Mark had a flash of memory: Lauren’s father down on his knees on the afternoon of the funeral, robbed of his ability even to stand.

  Sarah Martin’s mother said, “What, you have no answer for that?”

  Mark blinked, refocused. “I’d like to explain my role.”

  “You don’t have a role. But I’d like to see you.”

  “Tell me where to meet you, then. I can head out right—”

  “I’m in the lobby of your hotel. And I won’t be leaving until I see you.”

  “Be right down,” Mark said, but the line was dead.

  She was supposed to look weary. Beaten. He’d met a lot of her kind over the years, enough that he’d begun to believe he could spot them in crowds. Grief took its toll, but grief without answers? That was acid. That ate you slowly but relentlessly.

  Sarah Martin’s mother didn’t fit the profile, though. She was lithe and blond and, right now, equipped with a hunter’s stare. She radiated energy, the focus of a master at work on a task, and that was worse, because Mark was the task.

  She had her hand extended as he crossed the lobby toward her, which seemed an odd formality, not in keeping with her anger on the phone, but when he reached out to shake it, her fingers moved quickly from his palm and gripped his wrist instead. He looked down, surprised by the strength of her grasp, and when she spoke, her words were hissed.

  “Next on your list? You really said that to me? Come into this town asking around about Sarah, and I’m next on your list?”

  “I gather the sheriff called you,” Mark said. She moved her fingers higher on his wrist, and his blood pulsed against them. He glanced down again, struggling for words. “I wish I’d been able to introduce myself first. That would have helped. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not a police officer, correct? So who are you? Who sent you here?”

  She had the interest of the desk clerk now, and someone else poked a head out of an office. Sarah’s mother, still holding on to his wrist, her eyes scorching, said, “What, would you like to be somewhere else? Don’t want to be embarrassed here, with an audience? You’d rather sneak around the town?”

  “Let’s walk and talk, Mrs. Martin. Please.”

  “We can stay right here.”

  “We can, but we won’t.” Mark went to the doors, and when they slid open, he looked back at her, waiting. He was struck by how unbothered she looked there in the middle of the lobby with everyone staring at her.

  Used to that now, he realized. It’s been a long time, and in a town like this, so small? She knows her role now. She’s the dead girl’s mother. Stares don’t bother her. Not anymore. They’re just part of the landscape.

  He turned from her and walked through the doors and knew without looking back that she would follow. She was, after all, there for him.

  It was getting on toward dark and the wind was blowing harder, and in his hurry, Mark had left even the blazer upstairs. He’d have pneumonia by the time he boarded the plane for Florida. He didn’t know where he was going; he just wanted out of the hotel. There was a steak house across the parking lot, the only target in sight, so he angled toward it. It was some sort of Western-themed thing with wagon wheels on the sign, the type of place that disgusted people who were actually from the West because it reminded them of the moron tourists. Or the tourons, as Mark’s uncles had called them, usually when aggravated by the driving of some fucking flatlander who was uneasy on the mountain roads.

  “Don’t you run away from me,” Sarah Martin’s mother called, hurrying in pursuit.

  He turned back to her.

  “I’m not running. I’d like to sit down and talk. I always intended to.”

  “You always intended to. Well, that’s sweet of you to say.”

  “I’m not going to cause you any trouble. I’m not going to be in this town for one damn minute longer than I can help it. I’m doing what I was told to by my boss, but the truth is, I’m biding my time up here because my boss is worried about me. You want to know why?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Because he thinks I’m doing a poor job of coping with my wife’s unsolved murder.”

  Several seconds of silence passed. The wind was howling in, and it was hard not to turn away from it, but Mark stayed in place, facing the wind and Mrs. Martin. Her hunter’s eyes had softened. Almost too much. They were harder to face now than the wind. He was so much better with anger than grief.

  “Would you be willing to at least hear from Sarah Martin’s mother? While you’re busy talking to other people, perhaps you should pause to hear from Diane Martin. Are you willing to do that?”

  “I never wanted to ignore—”

  “It’s your choice. I just need to know if you are willing.”

  Silence again. He tried to avoid her stare but couldn’t.

  “Buy me a beer?” she said. It was a strange question, like she was asking for a date, but he nodded.

  “Buy you plenty of them.”

  They were nearly alone at the restaurant bar, drinking a local beer called Upland that was actually damn good, when Mark finished explaining Innocence Incorporated and why he’d come to Garrison. Diane Martin didn’t speak at all, just sipped her beer and watched him. He found himself avoiding her gaze, the reverse of his typical habit. He favored direct eye contact at all times because he’d learned that it often told you more about someone than words did, but her eyes unsettled him. She was so balanced, so composed, as if she understood him well from his one disclosure.

  Maybe his biggest concern was that she did.

  “I can’t tell you with certainty that we won’t take this case,” he said, “but I can tell you that it would be a first if we did. The wh
ole point of the organization is death-row defense.”

  “So why are you here? You said your boss—”

  “I’m in exile,” Mark said, and gave a weary smile. “And maybe I’m fired. It hasn’t been decided yet. My boss wanted me out of the way of the board of directors. He’s fighting for me, and he shouldn’t be.”

  “What’s your great transgression?”

  He wasn’t going to tell her that. He hadn’t told anyone that, had admitted the truth to only London, who was now busy trying to convince everyone that it was a bullshit story concocted by a desperate inmate seeking attention.

  “I can’t disclose that,” he said, but her damn eyes were fixed on his and he couldn’t look away from them. They were magnetic, but not in an attractive sense. Just a powerful one.

  “Yes, you can. If you would like to tell me, you should tell me. Would you like to?”

  Her voice was almost intimate. He tried to separate himself from her gaze by turning back to his beer, but she said it again: “Would you like to, Mark?”

  She hadn’t used his first name before. He looked back up, back into that stare, and said, “I had a snitch in Coleman prison down in Florida. He told me that he’d heard a rumor that someone in there had killed Lauren. And so I offered him ten thousand dollars and free legal assistance for his appeal if he…if he confirmed the rumor.”

  “And how was he going to do that?”

  “By any means necessary,” Mark said, and his voice was steady. “And if it was confirmed, he had another hundred grand coming his way, though even he didn’t know that, because we didn’t get far enough along.”

  “What was the other hundred grand for?”

  “Killing him.” He had never told anyone this, not even Jeff. All that was understood of his negotiations in Coleman were that they’d been conducted in pursuit of information.