Rise the Dark

by Michael Koryta

  Webb regarded him with eyes so expressionless they seemed opaque. He was six four and weighed 230 pounds, and when he accepted the handshake, John felt a sick chill at the power in his grip.

  “I guess you’re not the celebrating sort,” he said, because Garland still hadn’t uttered a word. “Do you have everything you need? There’s a release-assistance program that will—”

  “I have everything I need.”

  “All right. I’m sure it will be a relief to walk out of here.”

  “Just back to business,” Garland Webb said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s time for me to get back to business. No more diversions.”

  “Right,” John said, though he had no idea what Webb meant, and he was uncomfortable with what he might mean.

  Webb fixed the flat-eyed stare on him and said, “I have a purpose, understand? This detour was unfortunate, but it did not remove my purpose.”

  “Right,” John repeated. “I’m just supposed to let you know that if you need assistance finding a job or locating a—”

  “I’m going back to the same job,” Webb said.

  John fell silent. He’d spent several months on this case and he knew damn well that Garland Webb had been unemployed at the time of his arrest.

  “Where will you be working?” he asked, and Garland Webb smiled. It was little more than a twitch of the lip, but it was more emotion than he’d displayed when the judge had announced the verdict in his favor.

  “I’ve got opportunities,” he said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  “Great,” John said, and suddenly he was eager to get out of the room and away from this man. “Stay out of trouble, Garland.”

  “You too, John.”

  John Graham left before Garland did, although he’d initially intended to stay with him through the process all the way up to the point of escorting him out of the prison. That no longer felt right. In fact, winning the freedom of Garland Webb suddenly didn’t feel like much of a victory at all.

  On the day Webb collected his belongings and walked to a bus station, before he left, he bribed a guard to send a message to another inmate at Coleman. The message got through, and the inmate requested a phone call. Seven miles off the southernmost shore of the United States, Markus Novak’s cell rang.

  They’d been having a good day of it, but in the afternoon the fishing had slowed; the Gulf of Mexico began churning with high swells, and Jeff London turned a shade of green that matched the water.

  “Bad sandwich,” he said, and Mark smiled and nodded.

  “Bad sandwich, eh?”

  “I don’t get seasick.”

  “Of course not.”

  When Jeff put his head in his hands, Mark laughed and set his rod down and moved to the bow, where he stood and stared at the horizon line, the endless expanse of water broken only by whitecapped waves. All of his memories of the sea were good, because all of them involved Lauren. Sometimes, though, when the light and the wind were right, the sea reminded him of other endless places. Expansive plains of the West; windblown wheat instead of water; storm-blasted buttes.

  Not so many of those memories were good.

  He’d been watching the water for a while when he heard the ring, a soft chime, and the charter captain, who was lounging with his feet up and a cigar in his mouth, said, “That’s yours, bud.”

  Mark found the phone in his jacket pocket, and he remained relaxed, warm and comfortable and with his mind on this boat and this day, until he saw the caller ID: COLEMAN CORRECTIONAL.

  For an instant he just stared, but then he realized he was about to lose the call to voice mail, so he hit Accept and put the phone to his ear.

  He knew the voice on the other end. It was a man he’d spoken to many times, a snitch who’d contacted Mark for legal help, which Mark provided in exchange for a tip on who killed his wife. The police didn’t believe the story; the snitch held to it.

  “He sent me a note, Novak. For you. For both of us. Here’s what it says: ‘Please tell Mr. Novak that his efforts were a disappointment, and every threat was only so much wasted breath. I’d hoped for more. Let him know that I’ll think of him outside this prison just as I thought of him inside it, and, more important, that I’ll think of her. The way she felt at the end. I’ll treasure that moment. It’s a shame he wasn’t there for it. She was so beautiful at the end.’”

  The man on the phone had once beaten someone to death with an aluminum baseball bat, but his voice wavered as he read the last words. When he was done, he waited, and Mark didn’t speak. The silence built as the boat rose and fell on the waves, and finally the other man said, “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Yes,” Mark said. “I want to know. It is important that I know.” His voice was hollow, and Jeff London lifted his head with a concerned expression. “Is that all he had to say?”

  “That’s all. He’s made some threats to me, you know that, but ain’t shit happened, so maybe he’s all talk. Maybe about…about this too, you know? Just one of them that likes to claim shit to make themselves feel hard. I’ve known them before.”

  “You told me you didn’t think he was that kind,” Mark said. “You said you knew better. You said he was telling the truth.”

  A pause; then: “I remember what I said.”

  “Anything changed your opinion?”

  “No.”

  “All right. Thanks for the call. I’ll send money to your commissary account.”

  “Don’t need to, not for this. I just thought…well, you needed to hear it.”

  “I’ll send money,” Mark repeated, and then he hung up. Jeff was staring at him, and the charter captain was making a show of working with his tackle, his back to them.

  “That was about Webb?” Jeff said.

  Mark nodded. He found the horizon line again but couldn’t focus on it.

  “He’s taunting me. He killed her, he knows that I know it, and he’s a free man. He wanted to let me know that he’ll be thinking of me, and her. From outside of a cell now.”

  “It’s a dumb play. He’ll go back to prison.”

  “Yeah?” Mark turned to him. “Where is he?”

  “Don’t let this take you back to the dark side, brother. You’ve got to build a case, and you’ve got to—”

  “Someone has to settle the score for her.”

  Jeff’s face darkened. “There are lots of tombstones standing over men who made proclamations like that.”

  “I don’t want a tombstone. When I’m gone, you take the ashes wherever you’d like. Just make sure there’s a strong wind blowing. I want to have a chance to travel.”

  “That’s a bad joke.”

  “It’s not a joke at all,” Mark said. “I hope you remember the request should the need ever arise.” He looked at the charter captain. “You mind bringing us in a couple hours early?”

  The captain looked from Mark to Jeff and shook his head when no objection was raised. “It’s your nickel, bud.”

  “Thanks,” Mark said. “We had a good run this morning. Sorry to cut it short. That’s just how it goes sometimes.”

  Jeff’s voice was soft and sad when he said, “He won’t be in Cassadaga, Markus. You know that. He won’t go back there.”

  “He could.”

  Jeff shook his head. “You’re just feeding the darkness if you do that. Think about Lauren. What she believed, what she worked for! What she would want.”

  “You’re asking me to consider what she would have wanted in her life. She’s dead, Jeff. Who’s to say what she wants now? In those last seconds of her life, maybe she formed some different opinions.”

  3

  The sun had barely been up when Jay left on the first call-out, but it had set and risen again by the time he made it home and found a stranger at his kitchen table.

  Jay was so exhausted, so bone-tired, and the man was so relaxed, sitting with one leg crossed over the other and a polite smile, that Jay felt no threat. Just
surprise, and only a modicum of that. He was confused by the stranger’s presence but unbothered by it because of the way he sat so calmly, with a cup of coffee, still steaming, close at hand. It was one of Jay’s mugs, and his perception was that his wife must have brewed the coffee. Everything that Jay didn’t understand about his visitor, Sabrina must know.

  “How’s it going?” Jay said to the stranger as he shed his jacket and set to work unlacing his boots.

  “Long day?” the stranger asked, genial and compassionate. He was a lean man with a narrow, pale face and long hair tied back in a tight topknot against his skull.

  “A day so long it started yesterday,” Jay said, liking the stranger well enough. He walked past him, out of the kitchen and into the living room, and called for his wife.

  “Sabrina isn’t home,” the stranger said. He took a drink of the coffee. He didn’t bother turning to face Jay.

  “Pardon?” Jay’s next thought was that the man must be a neighbor unknown to him, because Sabrina hadn’t gone far—her car was in the garage. Sabrina was the more outgoing of the two of them, and she tended to the neighbors with an interest Jay had never been able to muster. His initial concern in Red Lodge had been getting to know the power grid, not the neighbors.

  “She’s not in the house, is what I mean,” the stranger said.

  Jay was standing in the living room, looking back at the man in the kitchen. The stranger set the coffee down, lifted a cell phone that was resting on the table, and beckoned to Jay.

  “Come here. I’ll show you.”

  Jay walked up beside him obediently. He wasn’t sure if the man had a message on the phone or if he intended to call Sabrina, wasn’t sure of anything but that the situation, however odd, was absent of menace.

  Then he saw the phone’s display.

  At first he thought the image on the screen was a still photo. For a few frozen, shocked seconds, he was convinced of it. Then his wife moved, and shackles rattled across her body, and he understood that it was a video.

  “She’s unhurt, as you see,” the stranger said in an unfazed voice. “A bit groggy now, but physically unharmed. She’ll remain in that condition as long as you desire. Everything in Sabrina’s future belongs to your choices, Mr. Baldwin.”

  On the screen, Sabrina shifted again. She was wearing a pale blue nightgown that Jay had given her two Christmases ago and there was a handcuff on her wrist that was fastened to long links of a chain that trailed offscreen. Jay was numbly aware of the floor beneath her—unvarnished boards, clean and showing no blood. He was looking for blood already. As Jay stood in his kitchen and watched, Sabrina glanced down at her wrist and cocked her head from side to side, as if she didn’t understand the meaning of the handcuff and was trying to make sense of it.

  Jay started to shout something then. A question, a threat. Maybe just a scream. He didn’t know, exactly, because when he turned from the phone’s display and gave the stranger in his house his full attention for the first time, he saw that the man now had a short-barreled revolver in his right hand that was pointing at Jay’s belly. The genial expression was gone, and his eyes were empty.

  “Her future belongs to your choices,” he repeated.

  Jay tried to focus on the man in front of him, on the tangible threat, but his mind was still on that image of Sabrina. He stood and trembled in silence, like a frightened dog.

  “Let’s not waste time,” the stranger said. “You have many questions, I know. You’ll have answers soon. But I can’t give them here. We’ll need to relocate. You’ll drive. It’s not so far. We can talk on the way.”

  “Why?” Jay said. Just one word, but one that carried the weight of all his terror.

  “You’ve been selected, Mr. Baldwin. Consider it an honor. You’re about to be part of something historic.”

  The stranger held the gun close to Jay’s skull as Jay put his boots back on. While his head was bowed, Jay let his eyes drift to the stranger’s feet, and he saw something there that bothered him.

  He was wearing what looked like everyday construction boots, built for hard work, but they had unusually thick rubber soles, and none of the eyes or grommets were metal. Everything was leather or rubber. It was the kind of boot you wore when you worked around high-voltage equipment and knew that any trace of metal could kill you.

  4

  On the day he visited Cassadaga to see the place where his wife had died, Mark began by taking the same run she had made on the last morning of her life.

  Lauren’s route through St. Petersburg’s bay front took him down Fifth Avenue and past Straub Park, facing Tampa Bay. There he angled left and ran alongside the seawall as it curved toward the bridge between Old Northeast and Snell Isle. At the bridge he stopped running and then walked back, letting his breathing settle. Once, during an early run here, he’d seen a shadow in the water and loudly announced the presence of a shark. It was actually a dolphin. Lauren, born and bred on the Gulf Coast, a scuba diver from the age most kids learn to ride bikes, laughed so hard that she couldn’t breathe. Mark thought of that moment often—Lauren in running shorts and tank top, soaked with sweat, looking fit and impossibly young, doubled over and gasping with laughter she didn’t have the air for, her ponytail bobbing as if to count off the wheezes of her silent laughs.

  “I know you’re from the mountains,” she’d said when she could finally speak, “but I have never heard anyone yell ‘Shark!’ like that in my life. Outside of the movie Jaws, that is. It tells me things about you, babe—you see Flipper and you scream ‘Shark!’ That tells me things.”

  He told her that he hadn’t screamed anything, he’d just announced what he thought he’d seen. Announced it a little loudly, maybe, for clarity’s sake. That only made her laugh harder. She’d ended up on her butt on the sidewalk, arms wrapped around her knees and tears in her eyes, fighting for air.

  Following today’s run he stopped for a cup of coffee at Kahwa, the little coffee shop on his building’s ground floor, then went upstairs, entered his condo, and walked out onto the deck. There he sipped the coffee, shook a single cigarette loose from a pack of American Spirits, and lit it. This was the last part of the routine, and the one he liked least. He had hated his wife’s cigarette habit. It was the only consistent fight they ever had—he told her it was selfish to those who loved her because it could take her from them young.

  Funny, the things you could be so strident about. So convicted of.

  When she died and left a pack behind, he couldn’t bring himself to throw them out. He smoked them instead, like a Catholic lighting candles for the dead. Then he bought another pack, continuing the one-a-day ritual. There in the morning on the deck, in the smell of sweat and cigarettes, he could close his eyes and, for an instant, feel as if she were at his side.

  Today he stubbed out the cigarette early and headed for the shower. He had a drive to make, and he’d been waiting too long on it already.

  Lauren’s car had been returned to Mark nine weeks after she was buried. The title was in both of their names, so he was the rightful owner and the police couldn’t claim it was a crime scene any longer. No evidence was in the car.

  Their condo building in St. Petersburg had been designed to feel spacious despite the constraints of reality, and the garage featured an admirable attempt to fit two cars into a single parking space. Hydraulic lifts hoisted one vehicle in the air so another could be parked below it. A seamless system—provided that you and your spouse worked in strict military shifts or were indifferent to which car you drove. Lauren was not indifferent. She loved the Infiniti, its look, speed, and handling. It was her car. Mark’s old Jeep—filled with empty coffee cups and notepads and the gym clothes he inevitably forgot to bring up and put in the laundry—was not an acceptable substitute. When she wanted to go somewhere, she was going to go in her own car.

  He parked on the street. Problem solved.

  Neither of them ever used the lift, but when the police returned the car to Mark, he put
it up there. Lauren’s pearl-white Infiniti coupe had been sitting on the top of the lift, untouched, for nearly two years when he turned the key that operated the hydraulics. The system hummed and groaned and then lowered the car slowly, like pallbearers easing a casket into the ground. The tires were low, and the battery was dead. He used a portable generator to air up the tires, pulled his Jeep in the garage long enough to jump the battery, and then got behind the wheel, closed the door, and waited for the profound wash of memories.

  He wanted to be able to smell her, feel her, taste her. He had a million memories of the car, and Lauren was in all of them, and he felt as if the vehicle should have held on to some of her. Instead, all he smelled was warm dust and all he felt was heat blasting from the air vents. It had been a warm day when she’d died but a cold one when he’d driven the car back onto the lift.

  After he had listened to the engine purr for a few seconds, he backed out of the garage and drove toward Cassadaga.

  Mark had never known anyone who was more emphatically opposed to capital punishment than his wife. For many years, as they lived and worked together, Mark had shared her beliefs. He preached them, and he practiced them. When Lauren was killed, he continued to do so—publicly.

  He wasn’t sure exactly when he parted with them in his soul.

  Maybe her funeral. Maybe when he saw the crime scene photographs. Maybe the very moment the sheriff’s deputy arrived to tell him the news.

  It was hard to be sure of a thing like that.

  The thing he was sure of now? The game was over. It had ended with Garland Webb’s parting words. And it was time to be honest—he’d never really believed in it like Lauren did. He’d wanted to, and maybe even convinced himself that he did, because it was the ideology of the woman he loved. He often assured her of his understanding of the world: No man should kill another, no matter the circumstances, no matter the sins. He’d meant it then, and he thought that was important—he’d meant the words when he’d said them.