The Last Kind Word

by David Housewright

  “A man and a woman spending time together in a car outside of a bar—no one’s ever seen that before.”

  “They know me here.” That caught my attention. “They’ll think I’m spending time with you.”

  “Perish the thought.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I gestured casually at the shack across the county blacktop. “Do you know who works here?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  “It’s a small town.”

  “Not that small.”

  “Sweetie, my high school graduating class was bigger than this.”

  “That doesn’t mean we know everybody, and don’t call me sweetie. Besides, the man who works there, he might not even be from Krueger. People don’t necessarily live near their work up here. Distance doesn’t mean the same to us that it does to people in the Cities.”

  “Distance, though, that’s why this place exists. I’m guessing Mesabi Security has a lot of clients up here. Instead of commuting all the way from Duluth, especially when the weather’s iffy, they roll some of their armored trucks out of this terminal. Judging by the number of cars in the lot, I’m guessing three.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “Time will tell. Do you have a map?”

  “Glove compartment.”

  I opened it, found a three-year-old Explore Minnesota Official State Highway Map, and handed it to Josie.

  “Tell me your cell phone has a camera.”

  She did. I asked her to show me how it worked. Afterward I told her to drive the car to the shack, get out, and ask the attendant for directions.

  “Directions where?”

  “Josie, I don’t care. I just want you to distract him for a few minutes.”

  “Why?”

  “So I won’t be seen while I take photos of the padlock.”

  “Why do you want to do that?”

  “God, you’re worse than your brother.”

  “What a terrible thing to say.”

  “Do me a favor. Before you walk into the shack, undo a couple of buttons on your sweater.”

  “I most certainly will not.”

  “Just a thought.”

  I slipped out of the Taurus and walked casually down the county road. Josie drove her car out of the roadhouse parking lot to the nearest intersection, flipped a U-turn, and came back, pulling up in front of the shack. As soon as she disappeared inside, I jogged across the blacktop and followed the short driveway to the gate. The padlock was made by Abus, a company I had never heard of. I took photos of each side, plus the top and the bottom. Less than a minute later, I was back on the blacktop and walking away from the terminal. Six minutes after that, the Taurus pulled up, and I jumped into the passenger seat.

  “What took you so long?” I asked.

  “The attendant wanted to chitchat.”

  I glanced at Josie’s chest. She had undone the top three buttons of her sweater.

  “I don’t blame him,” I said.

  Josie knew exactly what I was talking about. She tried to rebutton her sweater with one hand while driving with the other. The car swerved over the centerline.

  “Want me to do that?” I asked.

  “I hate you, Dyson. Honest to God I do.”

  SEVEN

  Grand Rapids was a real city with a population of about eleven thousand built on the Mississippi River where it was still narrow enough that you could pass a football from one side to the other. That put it in the heart of Minnesota’s northern resort and recreation area, making it a prime retail center. The stores there sold everything I needed, including an Abus Solid Steel Chrome Plated 83/80 RK padlock. It had taken me about five minutes using Josie’s office computer to identify it from the photographs and another three to locate the nearest store that sold it.

  Josie was skeptical when I announced we were taking a road trip. “G. R. is in Itasca County,” she reminded me.

  “Yes.”

  “Itasca County Sheriff’s Department—you escaped from them the day before yesterday.”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you worried that they’re looking for you, that they might find you?”

  “Nah.”

  Famous last words.

  It took us nearly ninety minutes to get there with Josie driving. Along the way I kept fiddling with the buttons, searching the available radio stations for something worth listening to.

  “What are you looking for?” Josie asked.

  “Jazz.”

  Josie slapped my hand and punched the button for KGPZ, the FM station out of Coleraine. The announcer referred to it as a “real country” station and proceeded to play Taylor Swift.

  “Where I come from, the person driving the car gets to pick the radio station,” she said.

  “Country-western, though?”

  “It’s the voice of the people.”

  “It’s pop music. It stopped being the voice of the people when Johnny Cash died.”

  “Take that back.” Josie’s jaw was set, and her hands clenched the steering wheel with anger.

  Is she really going to fight over this? my inner voice asked.

  “I mean it,” she added.

  Yes, she is.

  “I apologize,” I said.

  Josie knew I was less than sincere, yet she said, “That’s better,” just the same.

  “You’re nuts,” I told her. “You know that, right?”

  “Do you want to drive, Dyson?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “Well, you can’t.”

  I only knew Grand Rapids well enough to drive through it, so it took a while before we found the locksmith that stocked the Abus padlock. I matched it against the photos I took on Josie’s cell phone and paid the man in cash. He asked if I needed a receipt. When I answered no, he put the bills in his pocket instead of the cash register and thanked me for my business. I found myself nodding as I left the store. Even when I wasn’t pretending to be a hardened criminal, I appreciated any effort that kept taxable income out of the hands of the government.

  Afterward, we headed for an electronics megastore off of Highway 169 where a fetching young lass with eyes that matched the color of her shirt gave me a quick tutorial on the pros and cons of a variety of GPS transmitters. We settled on a passive GPS logger that recorded locations, speed, and time and, when plugged into a computer’s USB port, displayed the data it collected on an interface powered by Google Maps.

  “It has a motion sensor,” the tech told me with a pretty smile. “When the vehicle isn’t moving, the device will go into sleep mode to conserve battery power.”

  I bought three, plus magnetic boxes to put them in.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” Josie told me when we entered the checkout line.

  “Now what did I do?”

  “Flirting with that salesgirl. She’s young enough to be your daughter.”

  “She wasn’t a salesgirl. She was a trained tech assistant—it said so on her name tag.”

  “I was standing right there, too. Who knows what she thought.”

  “Probably that we had a boring sex life that could only be improved by her technical expertise.”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  Not me, I told myself, Dyson. Dyson was disgusting, and he was kind of enjoying it. After I paid for the electronic devices, I made sure I was walking behind Josie as we left the store.

  “My, my, my,” I chanted.

  “Stop it.”

  “It must be jelly cuz jam don’t shake like that.”

  Josie turned sideways to glare at me as she passed through the automatic doors. “Now you’re just being obnoxious,” she said—and walked directly into the arms of Deputy Ken Olson of the Itasca County Sheriff’s Department, hitting him hard enough that they both nearly fell over.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

  “Don’t worry a
bout it.”

  It was then that Josie noticed the uniform, noticed the badge. She took a step backward. Her voice became thick with anxiety. “My mistake,” she said.

  Deputy Olson smiled his pearly whites at her. He looked over her shoulder at me. His eyes grew wide, the smile disappeared, and he rested his hand on his Glock—apparently he had replaced the one I had stolen. Josie saw the movement and her expression displayed her panic. Like her brother’s, her face didn’t hide anything.

  “No harm done,” I said.

  I moved closer to the deputy. I was counting on the fact that Bullert had briefed him after the escape and had even told Olson’s boss that Olson had been in on it from the beginning so he wouldn’t be disciplined for his incompetence.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it, Deputy?” I added.

  Olson read my eyes. He removed his hand from the butt of the Glock and visibly relaxed.

  “It is, sir,” he said. “Anyone who wonders why we suffer through Minnesota winters should come up here on a day like this. Are you sure you’re okay, miss?”

  Josie nodded a little too vehemently.

  “Are you from around here?” the deputy asked.

  “No,” I said. “Just visiting friends. I should be back in the Cities in a couple of days.”

  “Enjoy your stay.”

  The deputy offered his hand, and I shook it.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  A moment later, Josie and I were crossing the parking lot, my hand gripping her elbow. We walked to her Ford Taurus as casually as I could make her.

  “What just happened?” she wanted to know.

  Instead of answering, I directed her to the passenger side, took her keys, unlocked the door, and eased her inside.

  “I’ll drive,” I said.

  She didn’t object.

  A few minutes later we were heading out of town.

  “He recognized you,” Josie said. “I saw it. He even reached for his gun.”

  “He thought he recognized me. When I came up and started chatting with him like we were old friends he realized, no, I couldn’t possibly be the same guy. If I were the same guy, I’d be running or shooting it out. I wouldn’t be asking him how he was doing.”

  “You were so calm. You just—you just talked to him. How could you do that?”

  Because you’re not actually wanted, my inner voice said. You had nothing to be afraid of. You can’t tell her that, though.

  “We all have a fight-or-flight response mechanism built into our DNA,” I said. “It’s an instinct that’s left over from when our ancestors slept in trees. Animals have it, too. The trick is knowing when to suppress it, knowing when being smart is preferable to doing battle or running like hell.”

  She stared at me for a few beats after that and then asked the question I knew was coming. “Why are you doing this? You’re so intelligent, you’re so—you could be doing anything you want.”

  “I am doing what I want. Few people enjoy their work as much as I enjoy mine.”

  “You don’t have to steal.”

  “Neither do you.”

  Josie shifted in her seat and gazed out the passenger window. She didn’t speak until I started fiddling with the radio stations again. “Just pick one,” she said.

  She was angry, only I don’t think she was angry with me.

  * * *

  The sun was still high in the sky by the time we returned to Krueger. I drove Josie’s Taurus past the Mesabi Security terminal again. It was the same as it had been hours earlier: eight vehicles parked inside the enclosure, no armored trucks to be seen.

  “What should we do?” Josie asked.

  “I don’t think the attendant would fall for the same trick twice no matter how many buttons you open.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  I glanced at my watch. “Let’s come back in an hour.”

  We did, this time stopping in Buckman’s lot. Two of the armored trucks were now parked within the enclosure, and most of the other vehicles were gone, leaving just a single car and two pickups. It was after 8:00 P.M., but thanks to daylight savings time, dusk was still a long way off.

  “Go inside the bar,” I said. “I’ll meet you there in a minute.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We can’t afford to wait. The third truck could arrive at any moment and we’ll lose our chance.”

  Josie kept staring at me.

  “Go inside the bar,” I repeated slowly.

  Josie gave it a beat and then scampered out of the Taurus. When she disappeared into Buckman’s I left the car and walked swiftly across the county blacktop to the terminal’s driveway and down the driveway to the gate. I was carrying my Abus padlock. It was unlocked. When I reached the gate, I slipped Mesabi Security’s padlock off of the chain and replaced it with my own. Careful not to accidentally close the shackle on Mesabi’s padlock, I returned to Josie’s Ford Taurus and set it gently on the driver’s-side floor. The entire process took less than ninety seconds, and as far as I could tell, no one saw me, yet I was sweating profusely. A moment later, I entered the roadhouse.

  * * *

  It was a polite bar despite the smell of stale beer rising from the warped wooden floor—the kind of place where a restless woman could come in alone, survey what was available, maybe even sample the merchandise, and leave without necessarily being tackled in the parking lot or followed home.

  I found Josie sitting at a small table just inside the doorway with a man who seemed to be in his midtwenties. It was hard to tell because he was hunched over his beer and the bar’s lights had been dialed down to give patrons a sense of privacy. I let my fingers brush Josie’s shoulder as I walked past just to let her know I was there. She surprised me by reaching back and giving my hand a squeeze without once taking her eyes off the young man.

  “How’s your mother?” she asked him. She asked the question softly with a concern in her voice that told me she had a natural and genuine sympathy for anyone who was in trouble.

  I made my way to the end of the bar and found a stool. The Twins were on the coast playing the Angels, and the pregame show was on the flat-screen TV.

  “What can I gitcha?” the bartender asked.

  He didn’t pour Summit Ale, so I ordered a Sam Adams that he served in the bottle.

  “You come in with Josie?” he asked.

  “I did.”

  “Love that girl. Always cheerful, always cheers the place up. She knows, no one else seems to know but she does, acting all miserable all the time, it ain’t gonna make the world a better place, is it?”

  I couldn’t argue with that, I told him.

  “How’s business?” I asked, just to be polite. I didn’t expect much of an answer. The bartender gave me one anyway.

  “If it improved one hundred percent it would still be lousy,” he said. “Since the big shock, since the mill closed, it’s been deader than—I got my customers, my regulars, the truckers and loggers and guys from the mill, they still come in, but all they order is beer now.” He gestured at the bottle in front of me. “They buy a beer and nurse it all night long; taking no pleasure in drinking it, neither. The only reason they come in at all is because they can’t stand being cooped up in their homes no more, you know?”

  It was terrible, according to the bartender. Tough times all through the region. An economy in free fall. Everywhere you looked, men and women out of work through no fault of their own. Corporations, some of them founded when his father was a boy, were folding like carnival tents. Banks failed. Retailers from national chains to the ma-and-pa shop on the corner were locking their doors and throwing away the key. Yet even though it was happening to everyone, he said it was hard not to take it personally. Especially in small towns like Krueger and Babbitt that had been built around one company or one industry, towns whose very existence had been decided on the whim of overpaid, overpampered executives who had never even seen the place.

  That was only part of it, the bartend
er said. Because of the lack of jobs, people were abandoning the area’s small towns and cities. Which reduced their tax base. Which lowered their general funds. Which caused them to slash the services they could afford to provide the citizens who remained. Which encouraged more people to leave. Which lowered tax collections even more. Which put entire communities at risk.

  “A city like Krueger,” said the bartender, “we’re one disaster away from bankruptcy, and not a big disaster, neither. A roof collapses on the municipal building, a sewer pump burns out, a water main breaks—that’s all it’d take.”

  Listening to him and watching the men and women who sat in twos and threes at the tables and in the booths, I felt the despair of the unemployed. I began to wish that the bar would suddenly disappear along with all the other buildings in Krueger, and the people, too. I wished that none of the Scandinavians, Slavs, and Italians who had initially settled the region had come there and that it would all revert back to the wilderness from which it sprang. I wished we all could start over again knowing what we know now, hating fewer people and admiring others not so much. I wished …

  I glanced Josie’s way just in time to see her open her bag, pull out her wallet, peel off several of the bills she had helped steal in Silver Bay, and press them into the young man’s hand. He didn’t want to take them, yet she insisted. The gesture reminded me of a poem I was taught way back in St. Mark’s Elementary School, something by Robert Browning.

  ’Twas a thief said the last kind word to Christ:

  Christ took the kindness and forgave the theft.

  In that moment I felt the acid taste of guilt crawl up from my stomach into my throat; guilt because I didn’t have the same needs that these people had, the same concerns; guilt because I was a millionaire who had done precious little to earn my money. The reason I couldn’t be corrupted like Josie and the Bandits, the biggest reason anyway, was that I didn’t need the dough. Assistant U.S. Attorney James R. Finnegan had been right about my finances. Yet if I had been wallowing in debt, if my child needed medical care, if my home was about to be foreclosed on, if my wife was threatening to leave me, I might have thought differently.

  No, no, no, don’t go there, my inner voice told me. These guys are criminals, and the why isn’t important. Think about their victims. Think about how terrified they must have been to have guns pointed at them—an AK-47, for Christ’s sake. The Bandits hadn’t physically harmed anyone, yet that would change if they kept on—think about that. Coming around to Josie’s way of thinking would be a very dangerous thing indeed. Stockholm syndrome, I think they call it.