The Last Kind Word

by David Housewright

  She did, too, or rather Jenness Crawford did. Nina remained out of sight. It occurred to me that it was no coincidence that the morning after the TV program’s camera crew arrived at Rickie’s, Erica flew off to New Orleans.

  The moment Nina left, Finnegan said, “I don’t know about ghosts, but clearly she—”

  I raised my index finger in warning and cleared my throat. Finnegan glanced at Harry, who was shaking his head slowly from side to side, an expression of dire warning on his face.

  “Yes, well, a very nice club,” Finnegan said. “I hear the music is sensational.”

  “So is the food,” Harry said.

  Finnegan took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He didn’t smile. I doubted he had much of a sense of humor—he had the look of a man who decided long ago life was a very serious proposition. He began speaking in that earnest, sincere way career politicians have.

  “McKenzie,” he said. “It’s just McKenzie, correct? Not Mr. McKenzie?”

  “McKenzie will do.”

  “McKenzie, normally I would attempt to appeal to your altruistic nature. I would tell you about all the people who will suffer if we don’t get those guns off the border, the men and women—and children—who will be hurt or killed. I would tell you how the damage done to the Justice Department’s reputation would make it more difficult for us to do our work, how it would compromise our ability to secure our borders and protect our citizens. However, I’m informed that Special Agents Bullert and Wilson have already addressed that argument.”

  Everyone nodded in agreement.

  “Next, I would make threats. I would refer to that rather lengthy document we’ve compiled on you and your many, should I say, indecorous actions?”

  Oh, let’s, my inner voice said. Indecorous—my, my, my.

  “I have been assured, however, that you are not a man who is easily intimidated,” Finnegan said. “I am also aware that you and your investment counselor—H. B. Sutton, I believe is her name—have grown the reward you accepted to nearly five million, so a bribe is certainly out of the question.”

  “Sounds like an impasse to me,” I said.

  “On the other hand, perhaps you might be enticed by the age-old system of barter. That is your preferred method of exchange, is it not—favor for favor?”

  “What do you have to trade?”

  Finnegan took a business card from his pocket and slid the card, faceup, across the table to me. The top listed his name, title, and assorted means of contact under the crest of the U.S. Department of Justice. I turned it over and found the word “allegation” written there.

  I repeated it out loud, and Finnegan grinned. “I love that word,” he said. “What was it that the Reverend Jesse Jackson once said? ‘I not only deny the allegation, I deny the alligator.’”

  “What does this mean exactly?” I asked.

  “Call my office day or night, use the code word, and the next voice you hear will be mine.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s a get-out-of-jail-free card,” Harry said.

  “Let’s face it,” Bullert said, “the way you live your life, sooner or later you’re going to need it.”

  “Your buddy Governor Barrett is not running for reelection,” Harry reminded me.

  “So?” I said.

  “So now we’re your friends in high places,” Finnegan said. “And a man like you can never have too many friends.”

  * * *

  “I made myself clear to Finnegan,” I told Bullert over the cell phone. “I’m in until the bullets start flying. I’m in as long as no one gets hurt. If these guys shoot someone…”

  “Let’s hope for an uneventful criminal enterprise, then,” he said.

  “Christ.”

  “In the meantime, we’ll check out this Roy Cepek. Could be he got the guns through a military connection, an army buddy turned merc, maybe.”

  I ended the call, erased Bullert’s number from the log just in case, deactivated the phone, and returned it to my pocket. Shortly after, my hands filled with cardboard coffee cups, I opened the café door with my shoulder and stepped into the parking lot. The Corolla was still there; the elderly man still inside, although Roy Clark had been swapped for Loretta Lynn—I guessed this was what amounted to Golden Oldies in Silver Bay. I returned to the Jeep Cherokee and handed Skarda his coffee through the open passenger window.

  “You were gone so long,” he said. “I was starting to get worried.”

  “I took a minute to use the john,” I said. I circled the SUV and entered through the driver’s door. “Anything interesting happening?”

  “Just the armored car.”

  “What armored car?”

  Skarda handed me the binoculars, and I studied the blue vehicle, the name Mesabi Security printed on its side. It was a decidedly old armored truck with streaks of rust along the wheel wells and rocker panels. The driver sat in the cab, the window rolled down, his elbow propped on the door frame. A second guard exited the supermarket carrying a nylon bag. He set it on the ground behind the truck where the driver couldn’t possibly have seen him, opened the rear compartment, tossed the bag inside, and then climbed in after it.

  “Very, very sloppy,” I said.

  “Hmm?”

  “The armored car guards. I could take those clowns with a slingshot. Okay, look—you had better contact Josie and have her call off the job.”

  “I can’t. I don’t have a cell phone. What happened to the one we bought yesterday?”

  “I tossed it. Look, we have to head them off somehow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s no money to steal. The armored car guys just drove off with it.”

  “No…”

  “What do you think they were here for? To buy Milky Ways and Slushies?”

  “No…”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “Look.”

  Skarda pointed. I followed his finger to a car that pulled to a stop directly in front of the grocery store. Jill was driving. Jimmy got out of the car. His jacket was hanging open as he nonchalantly walked into the store, pausing for a moment while a woman pushed a loaded shopping cart past him. Exactly seven minutes later a second vehicle approached from the opposite direction. The old man was driving. Roy stepped out holding his AK-47 in the port position again and scanned the parking lot like a hunter searching for game. Josie—the way she was dressed she looked to me like a woman who was trying hard not to look like a woman, not unlike the feminists who marched for the Equal Rights Amendment when I was a kid. She was carrying a shotgun when she emerged from the passenger side. Together, she and Roy entered the supermarket.

  The sky suddenly seemed to grow dark and ominous to me, even though it remained bright blue with puffy white clouds to everyone else. I rested my head against the top of the steering wheel.

  “Well, this is an unfortunate turn of events,” I said.

  “If everything is going according to plan, Jimmy has his gun on the store manager and is forcing him to open the safe.”

  “Which is empty, now.”

  “Roy is guarding the door while Josie moves from cash register to cash register, forcing the cashiers to empty their drawers into a grocery bag.”

  I rotated in my seat and gazed out the window toward the Silver Bay Police Department. I saw no movement, but that didn’t mean anything. More likely the department’s patrol cars had all received the 911 by now and were converging on this very spot with the greatest possible dispatch. I started the Cherokee just in case.

  Seconds seemed like minutes, and minutes—it felt like I was sitting through Avatar again. I listened intently, for what I wasn’t sure. Terrified screams, I suppose. Gunfire.

  “Here they come.”

  Skarda was pointing again. Jimmy was first out the door, carrying a white tote bag by the handle with one hand and his clunky automatic with the other. He was followed closely by Josie. She was clutching a plain brown grocery bag to her chest as if it
contained baby formula. Roy came out of the supermarket a moment later, backside first, training his weapon on the entrance as if he were expecting a swift counterattack. Jimmy was in Jill’s car and the car was motoring halfway out of the parking lot before Josie reached hers. She shouted something as she climbed in, and Roy turned and jogged after her. He jumped into the car, and the old man stomped on the gas, spinning his tires like a teenager trying to impress his rivals.

  That’s when the Silver Bay PD arrived.

  The patrol car came slowly up Shopping Center Road without siren or lights.

  I saw it first in my sideview mirror and again when I twisted in my seat to look at it through the rear window. It was dark blue and scary as hell. At the same time, I saw the elderly man backing his red Toyota away from the café and steering it toward the entrance to the parking lot. At his current speed, I estimated that he would reach the entrance just before the cop car did.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  I cranked the wheel of the Cherokee and hit the accelerator. The coffee cups spilled out of the cup holders and fell to the floor of the passenger side, the tops popped off, and coffee splattered Skarda’s feet and ankles.

  “What are you doing?” he shouted.

  I ignored the question and sidled up next to the Toyota just as it entered Shopping Center Road in front of the cop, its sideview mirrors nearly touching the Cherokee’s driver’s-side door. I leaned hard on my horn. The elderly man looked at me, panic etched across his face—and did exactly what I wanted him to do. To avoid a collision, he spun his steering wheel violently to the left away from me, stomped on the accelerator, and promptly crashed into the Silver Bay Police Department patrol car. There was no squealing of tires, no blaring of horns, just a satisfying crunch as the Toyota’s fiberglass composite front end folded around the cop’s high-grade steel push bumper.

  I drove straight ahead, crossing Shopping Center Road, shooting down the alley between the public library and the police department, hanging a hard right on Davis Drive and then another on Outer Drive. I followed it at high speed past Blazers Northshore Auto, Silver Bay Municipal Liquor, and the City Arena to U.S. Service Highway 11. We were not followed. It wasn’t until we were a good five miles out of town that it occurred to me that the Silver Bay cop might not have received a call about the supermarket robbery at all; he didn’t have his lightbar and siren working. He might simply have been patrolling in the wrong place at the wrong time. Skarda, however, didn’t see it that way. He was full of praise about how my superior driving skills once again not only made good our escape, they also delivered his family from sure arrest.

  “You’d make a great Iron Range Bandit,” he said.

  I started laughing out loud, but, of course, Skarda didn’t get the joke.

  * * *

  It took several hours to return to Lake Carl, mostly because of the roundabout way I took to get there. The Iron Range Bandits were gathered on the deck when we arrived. None of them looked pleased. They were drinking beer from a cooler set beneath the picnic table; the empties suggested they had been drinking a lot. There were five stacks of U.S. currency on the table along with the white tote bag and paper grocery bag, both emblazoned with the name of the Silver Bay grocery store. A single rock had been placed on top of each stack to keep the bills from blowing away in the light breeze. Neither of the bags moved despite the wind, and I decided there must be something inside weighing them down.

  “Where have you been?” Josie wanted to know the moment Skarda and I started up the steps that led to the deck.

  “Silver Bay,” Skarda said. “We were watching.”

  “I told you to stay here.”

  “You’re lucky we didn’t. The cops came just as you were leaving the parking lot. If it wasn’t for Dyson, they would have caught you.”

  There was a murmur of voices. Josie turned to me. “Is that true?” she asked.

  “More or less,” I said.

  “Did any of you know that Silver Bay had a police force?” Skarda asked. “Did you know that the police station was five hundred yards away from the shopping mall? You could see it from the parking lot.”

  “I only know that we took $2,347,” Roy said. “A lousy $2,347. That’s $469 each.”

  “And they say crime doesn’t pay,” I said.

  “I need more than that,” Jimmy said. “I have a townhouse to pay for. I’m getting married.”

  “No one gives a shit about your problems,” Roy said. His face was flushed with anger and alcohol.

  “Shut up, Roy,” Josie said.

  “You shut up. This is your fault. You’re the one who picked the supermarket. $469. We can’t live on that.”

  “None of us can,” Jimmy added.

  “What are we going to do?” the old man asked. He had been standing at the railing and now moved to a frayed lawn chair at the head of the picnic table. He lowered himself into it the way the elderly sit when they’re afraid something might break. He sure got old in a hurry, I thought.

  “Ask your daughter,” Roy said.

  “Josie,” the old man said. “Josie, what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” Josie said. She turned her back to the people on the deck, leaned against the railing, and stared out at the lake.

  “I knew I should have kept the marijuana farm,” Jimmy said. “Out in the forest, on public land, no one around to bother you. I would have had a huge crop by now.”

  “You would have been in prison by now,” Roy said. “You rode around in an old Cadillac so everyone would think you were a player.”

  “I told you, that was all about marketing.”

  “No one in this family is going to deal drugs,” Josie said.

  “This is better?” Jimmy asked.

  “It would have been okay if you had gotten there half an hour earlier,” Skarda said.

  “What are you talking about?” Jimmy asked.

  I went to the cooler, lifted the lid, retrieved a can of beer, and closed it while Skarda answered.

  “An armored truck picked up all the money just before you arrived. We were going to warn you, but it was too late,” he said.

  “Is that true?” Roy wanted to know.

  “You didn’t do your homework,” I said. I reached for the two bags and looked inside. They both contained personal checks made out to the grocery store as well as some receipts.

  How are these people not in jail? my inner voice asked. They’re not even smart enough to destroy incriminating evidence.

  “Maybe it’s a sign,” Jill said. “Maybe it’s someone telling us we should quit. We should stop doing this.”

  Roy cursed and raised his hand to hit her. Jill made no attempt to escape. Instead, she cringed, raised one shoulder and ducked her head behind it as if she knew exactly where the blow would fall, and screwed her eyes tight in anticipation. Rushmore McKenzie wanted to step in to protect the girl. Nick Dyson did nothing. Stay in character, stay in character, my inner voice chanted. Fortunately, the blow didn’t fall. Roy simply cursed again and turned away. I opened the beer and took a long sip.

  “What we should have done,” Skarda said, “was rob the armored truck. Dyson said the guards were sloppy. He said we could have taken it with a slingshot.”

  “That’s not what I said, not exactly anyway,” I told him.

  Josie turned to face me. “How much money does an armored car carry?” she asked.

  “Depends on the customers,” I said. “Sometimes millions, sometimes only a few hundred thousand dollars.”

  “A few hundred thousand,” Jimmy said. “That would be more than enough.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “You guys can’t even stick up a supermarket properly.”

  “You can teach us,” Josie said.

  “Me? I’m just passing through, remember? I’m going to Canada.”

  “With only four hundred and sixty-nine dollars?” Jimmy asked.

  “Josie insisted we give you a share, I don’t know why,�
�� Roy said. “Jimmy’s right, though. How far do you think you’ll get on four hundred and sixty-nine dollars?”

  “I’ll get more,” I said.

  “How?” Josie asked. “With what? A stolen car? A deputy’s gun?”

  “It’s a start.”

  “You’re on the run, remember? Every cop in the state is looking for you.”

  “Dyson, you said it would be easy,” Skarda told me.

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. “Listen to me. Forget what I said about the local cops before. You hit an armored truck—that’s a federal beef. The FBI investigates whenever federally insured money is stolen, and they never stop looking for you. Never. They’re worse than the frickin’ Mafia. When they catch you—there’s no parole system for federal prisoners, no time off for good behavior. They’ll convict your ass for aggravated bank robbery with a deadly weapon—which is how they look at armored truck heists, like they were bank robberies. You could draw a sentence all the way up to twenty years, and you’ll serve every single day.”

  “You said—”

  “I didn’t say, Dave. You weren’t listening. That’s the problem, you guys don’t listen. Jimmy didn’t listen about the automatic. Roy doesn’t listen to anything. You think you’re hardened criminals. You’re not. We’re talking about real cops and robbers now, and people can get killed.”

  “You can teach us,” Josie repeated.

  “C’mon.”

  “What about it, tough guy?” Roy said. “You’re supposed to be this criminal mastermind. What about it? Are you chicken?”

  “You’re damn right I am.”

  “Dyson,” Jimmy said. “You told us about the FBI and all that. What’s the upside? There’s always an upside, isn’t there?”

  “You mean besides the money? The FBI has never solved more than thirty or forty percent of the armored truck robberies committed in any given year, so the odds are slightly in your favor. Unlike with a bank, there’s little chance that the money will be marked. Also, you get to hit the truck at a time and place of your own choosing. If you work it right, you can do it where there are no witnesses. Or at least fewer witnesses than in a bank—no tellers, cashiers, customers, no security cameras. The problem is, it’s an armored truck, emphasis on armored. The only way to get into the rear compartment where they keep the money is with a carefully guarded key, which requires an inside man that we don’t have, or with explosives. Have you ever seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where they accidentally blow up the train? You want to avoid that, which means the best way to do it is when the guards are outside the truck. Except these guys are macho men. They’re like Roy here; they all think they’re tougher than Israeli commandos. You can’t expect them to give up the money without a tussle.”