Last Words

by Michael Koryta

  Mark closed the file and dropped it back into the bag and turned off the bedside light, which did little to darken the hospital room, then closed his eyes and sought sleep. It was a fruitless search. He was exhausted physically, but mentally he was alert. Not just alert. Afraid. Mark was no stranger to horrors, but this one was unique. To say This is what happened and find neither trust nor support was a terrifying thing. How was it happening? Three men should be in prison for what they’d done to him, but the police weren’t even looking.

  You’re going to need a witness, Jeff had said.

  There had been three witnesses to his abduction. None of them were likely to corroborate Mark’s version of the events.

  But who were they? Where had they come from?

  He turned the light back on, found the phone, and called Jeff.

  It was an hour before he got through to him, fresh off the plane in Texas.

  “I want Ridley’s phone records,” Mark said. “Whoever came for me, they were sent by Ridley. There’s no other option. They came on fast too. He made a call, and there will be a record of it. The records can’t lie.”

  The videotapes did, a voice in his head whispered. The voice had become familiar in the hours since Jeff had left, and its tone had shifted from warning to mocking. The people lie, and the videos lie, and you tell the truth, Mark? My, my. That’ll be a tough sell.

  Almost on cue, Jeff said, “That’ll be a tough subpoena to get, considering there’s no legal case in progress and the only person who has grounds for charges here is Ridley, and against you.”

  “I didn’t suggest a subpoena.”

  Silence.

  “Jeff, I’ve worked with you for years. I’m well aware of what can be gotten, and how. You can get them, and we both know it.”

  “And we both know that it’s illegal.”

  “We’re talking about saving my job here.”

  “And risking mine.”

  Mark lowered his voice. “This is all I have, Jeff. It’s not just a job, not just a paycheck. You know that.”

  “That’s the same thing you told me the last time you jeopardized it. I listened then. I’m supposed to again?”

  “Last time I made a mistake. This time I was forced into one. There isn’t a chance we’re going to take this case; it doesn’t even meet the rules of the damned bylaws, we couldn’t take it if we wanted to. Yet you sent me up here, and now everything I have left in my life is at risk, and you won’t run a fucking phone record for me?”

  Jeff didn’t answer. Mark let the silence roll for a few seconds, and when he finally spoke, he had better control. “I know I’ve got no right to ask this of you. I know I keep pushing you for help, and your face told me what your words didn’t when you were up here—you’re starting to wonder about my story, aren’t you? To wonder about me. If I can be trusted.”

  “I trust you,” Jeff said in the way a man might say I love you to his ex-wife on the day they signed the divorce papers.

  “I need you to understand this from my point of view. After listening to you and hearing what work you’ve done to verify my story and what you’ve found, I’m beginning to have trouble trusting myself. Think about that for a minute.” Mark took a deep breath—which hurt; everything hurt, and he was still in bed—and said, “The only thing I can say is that Ridley is engineering all of this somehow. But he didn’t know I was headed to his house until I showed up. No one was following me. They came at me after I came at him. So if Ridley didn’t make any calls, Jeff? If his phone lines were silent between the time I left his house and the time I was stopped on the road? Then I need to go home. Without a job, because I won’t deserve one. I’ll deserve a room with padded walls.”

  Still Jeff didn’t speak.

  “You’re the one who told me I’m going to need to prove my story to keep my head above water,” Mark said. “It starts with those phone records. If you don’t want to do it yourself, I understand. Give me the right contact, and I’ll do it. You shouldn’t be involved anyhow.”

  “Bullshit I shouldn’t. It’s my fault you’re up there. You shouldn’t have been there to begin with. You know that and you always did. I had an idea that it was what you needed. It was the wrong idea.”

  “You wanted me up here because of the date,” Mark said. “You wanted to push my buttons, rattle me.”

  “Yes. I thought—I hoped—that if you spent even a little time looking at an unsolved case that bore any similarity to Lauren’s, it might…give you a little perspective. Remind you that you’re not alone in the world. That others have suffered the same losses. It was a terrible idea.”

  Two days ago, Mark had been enraged by the move. Now he couldn’t summon any emotion over it, let alone anger.

  “If you feel any responsibility for this, then do this one thing,” he said. “Get those records. If Ridley didn’t make any calls, then it means…”

  “I’ll do it,” Jeff said. “But Markus? You’re going to need to file this favor with all of the other things you can’t remember.”

  “That’ll be easy enough.”

  It took him less than an hour. Technology might have done a lot of good for the world, but it had done nothing good for personal privacy. If you floated around the investigative and intelligence professions for long enough, you began to understand just how laughable the illusion of privacy was; if a pro, or even a dedicated amateur, wanted someone’s information, he could find it, and fast.

  Jeff’s phone-records contact was a retired FBI agent who’d specialized in computer intelligence and who now lived in Georgia and had an ax to grind with the government and a hard-core pill habit to support. His information came at a price, but it came fast, and it was reliable.

  “Ridley was on the phone a total of four times to a total of three people in the two days you were in town,” Jeff said. “One was a dentist, one was a bakery, and two calls were with a guy named Evan Borders.”

  “Evan Borders. Ridley called that guy?”

  “You know the name?”

  “He was the other suspect in Sarah Martin’s murder. He was her boyfriend, the one who took her into the cave.”

  “Evan Borders called Ridley shortly before noon, at home,” Jeff said. “Ridley called him back shortly after one.”

  Mark let out a breath that came more from his soul than his lungs. “That’s right after I left. They bookended me with phone calls, basically. Ridley picked up the phone just after I left.”

  “Seems like a strange choice. Two lead suspects trading calls?”

  “Sure does. But it’s real.” That word had taken on new meaning in the past day. “Ridley engineered all of this. He wanted me down in that cave. He asked me to go, and when I didn’t, he put me there. I don’t understand how he’s got the influence that he does, but I’ll figure it out. I’ll get him.”

  “Step lightly with that boy.”

  He asked Jeff for all the call times and numbers—Bishop was the dentist, and the bakery was Haringa’s—and he wrote them down, thanked Jeff, and then hung up. There was only one light on in the hospital room, and he lay there in the dimness and stared at those names.

  Evan Borders. The kid who’d brought Sarah Martin down to Trapdoor was in communication with her suspected killer a decade later.

  Evan was going to require a visit, Mark decided. No phone call there, no discussion with the sheriff beforehand. Mark wanted to see Evan’s face.

  More important, he wanted to watch Evan see his face.

  24

  They released him the next day, after Dr. Desare had reviewed his test results and proclaimed him maybe not the luckiest son of a bitch in history, but on the short list.

  “Go back home, and get some rest,” he’d instructed. “Your body took a beating. Don’t underestimate that. Some rest in the warm sun will be just right.”

  It sounded just right, but it wasn’t an option. Mark had four days before his professional fate was decided for him, which meant three days to get some evid
ence for his side of the argument.

  All of that evidence was in Garrison.

  He arranged for a rental car to be dropped off at the hotel. This one was a Ford Edge. Charming names Ford was coming up with these days—Escape and Edge. They might be great marketing hooks, but Mark wouldn’t have minded seeing a Chevy at this point. He eased behind the wheel like an elderly man; each movement required planning and brought pain. He thought he’d known soreness before in life, but it had just been redefined. As he drove out of the parking lot, he felt alone in a way that surprised and chilled him. More alone than even the worst days after Lauren’s killing. Then, he’d had the support of those around him because they believed him. It had seemed a small thing then, to be believed.

  Such a small thing.

  You’re going to need a witness, Jeff, his closest friend, had said, unwilling to look him in the eye.

  To fill the silence of the car on the highway, he streamed music through the car’s Bluetooth system. It was music he’d never allowed anyone except Lauren to hear him listening to. The songs had traveled with him from Montana, over time changing from one format to another and then another, the sound fuzzed with white noise by now. The original had been a cassette recorded by his mother at a powwow they’d attended one summer. It was drum and chant music, and the performances had been the one element of the weekend powerful enough to distract Mark from his shame even though his mother was recording it for use in her con. When Mark stole the tape, he’d been trying only to remove a bullet from her arsenal. He’d fallen in love with the sound, though. The power of the drums, the haunting cries in a tongue he could not understand but somehow felt he knew. The music was everything his mother was not: Authentic. And brave.

  His uncle Ronny had caught him playing the tape once and viewed him grimly. Mark thought he might catch hell for stealing it, because his mother had searched frantically for weeks after discovering it was gone. Instead, Ronny had said only Don’t mess with that shit, Mark. You don’t know what it is.

  Maybe he didn’t. He knew what he felt when he listened to it, though. Stilled and angry, calm and fearless, all at once. There was a hypnotic blend of fatalism and perseverance to the music, a sense of an understood mission.

  He listened while he drove south, listened until the drums began to enter his blood like a pulse. By the time he reached Garrison, the pain and fatigue had retreated from the front of his mind, and his hands were steady on the wheel.

  The downtown square snuck up on him in the way it can only in a small town—you ran right into the heart of the place without encountering any arteries along the way. The stretch of town that had been built up, where the hotels and chain restaurants were, was farther south, edging toward the interstate that was still miles away, trying to snuggle up as close as possible to something that connected the town to the rest of the world but not quite making it. Mark parked on the square, where he had his pick of empty spaces, their meters standing like hopeful ushers at a play that had overextended its run, the staff now outnumbering the audience. With piles of shoveled snow climbing the meter poles and not enough foot traffic on the sidewalk to even create slush, the only word for the town was forlorn.

  As soon as he stepped out of the car, the wind caught him, and while he’d shrugged it off on his first visit, he couldn’t afford to now, not in his present condition.

  Coffee seemed like the best substitute for sleep, and there was an old-fashioned diner on the square with a few booths on one wall and a long lunch counter. When Mark pulled open the door, a bell jingled, and ten faces pivoted in unison to look at him. Seven customers—all older men—and three employees. Mark walked up to the counter and asked for the largest coffee to go that they had. The old men were watching him with undisguised interest the way you could only when you belonged and the object of your stare did not.

  “Where’s the best place to pick up a warm jacket around here?” he asked the girl behind the counter.

  “Easton’s Mercantile,” she said. “Three blocks south, can’t miss it. Big old stone building. Used to be the biggest store in town. Now they sell hunting gear and work boots, things like that. They’ll fix you up.”

  One of the men, a guy with a gray goatee, slipped a five-dollar bill out of his shirt pocket and slid it across the counter.

  “Take his coffee out of this, Donna.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” Mark said.

  “I’ll even buy you a cheeseburger,” the man answered, “if you don’t mind telling us why in the hell you felt the need to tell that tale about Diane Martin.”

  The remark seemed to add silence to the diner, but the truth was nobody had been talking anyhow. They were all just watching Mark.

  “My picture made the paper, I take it,” he said.

  “Oh, sure did. Takes an unusual man to tell a story like that.”

  “Wasn’t a story, old-timer. People in this town have lied to me and then about me. I’m back to set the record straight.”

  Mark met all their eyes, moving through the diner one unfriendly face at a time. “You all seem like the types who do a solid job of spreading the word in this town. Why don’t you spread this one, far and wide: whoever put me in that cave made one hell of a mistake in letting me come back to the surface.”

  Easton’s Mercantile—or Merchantile, according to the ancient spelling that was carved into the limestone building—had morphed into a work-wear and sporting-goods store, with racks of shotguns and shelves filled with shells. Mark’s eyes lingered on the oiled black-pump shotguns, remembering the three that had been leveled at him in the snow.

  At the moment, Mark was wearing a pair of running shoes that he’d left in the hotel room before it all began, and he picked up a pair of waterproof steel-toe Wolverine boots to replace them. The weight of them felt good, and uncomfortably familiar. It had been many years since he’d worn real boots, but for many years before that, that had been all he’d worn. From the clearance clothing rack, he chose a pair of wool base layers and a couple of heavy canvas shirts. Then he moved to the jackets. The gray, hooded Carhartt was there, a twin of Ridley’s and a cousin of the one Mark’s mother had given him that Christmas. Rugged and durable, kiddo. Just like you. He grabbed it.

  On his way to the cash register, he walked past a cubby filled with knit caps and ski masks. He pulled one of the masks out and looked at it, remembering the three of them advancing toward him through the snow. Then he added it to the pile.

  Mark traded the running shoes for the boots before he even left the store, then slipped the jacket on and stepped outside, feeling warm for the first time in days and also feeling as if he blended in better, which wasn’t a positive, because he did not want to be a part of this place. No choice about that, though. Not until he had some answers. He glanced back into the window of Easton’s Mercantile and saw that rack of Mossberg pump guns, sleek and black and all too familiar.

  No, he was not quite done in Garrison.

  25

  There’d been a poker game in a Montana town called Silver Gate on a blizzard-blasted week when Mark was fourteen. His uncles had brought him along with them to a bar and old boardinghouse called the Range Rider where they entertained the crowd by walking in their cowboy boots across the massive log beams that spanned the ceiling, usually for dollar bets, sometimes just for the hell of it. A slip from those timbers would have meant a broken back, but they’d never fallen.

  The poker game that night was supposed to be good fun, but there was an out-of-towner and obvious cheat working the cards, a man who treated warnings with a wink. He’d given a false name, gotten up to go to the men’s room, and never returned, hustling out in the middle of the night on a snowmobile, which was a problem for him because there wasn’t far to go in Silver Gate on a night like that. “He got while the getting was not good,” Larry had said ruefully, and then he and Ronny had passed a bottle of bourbon back and forth in the silent mood that their nephew knew better than to test, and eventuall
y Ronny had said, “So we don’t know who he is, but we know people who know him. He mentioned a name or two, if not his own.”

  When Larry had nodded, it was almost with sadness. “They’ll bring him to the surface,” he said. “It’s the only way.”

  It had been far from the only way. But it hadn’t been ineffective. They’d crossed paths with three men and broken nine fingers before they got the name they wanted. They’d gotten it, though.

  “It’s a matter of physics,” Ronny said as they made their way to the stranger’s cabin, fourteen-year-old Mark at the wheel of the old Ford Sport Custom pickup, using the granny gear to claw through the snow while his uncles took turns on a flask. “You apply enough pressure, Mark, and eventually things start to leak. Ask any man who ever worked a pipeline. This world? It’s run by pressure.”

  The pressure was on Mark now, and he had a limited window to adjust it. There was a proper way to work a case and there was a desperate way, and the former was no longer an option in Garrison. You fell back on more basic instincts when you had to, but Mark didn’t feel so bad about that. In their own ways, his uncles had been fine detectives. If you judged the results instead of the process, they’d been damn good.