Michael Koryta - Last Words

There was a piece of plastic in the shadows on the floor. He slid forward and then lowered himself until he was resting on his hands and knees and could see the plastic squarely centered in the light.

It was about the size of a poker chip and bore the logo of the Saba National Marine Park. A diving permit.

Mark reached for it and managed to stop himself when his fingers were about an inch away. He closed his eyes again and breathed a few times and then he rose without allowing himself a look back and went outside in the hard white glare of the day and called the sheriff’s office and asked for Dan Blankenship.

It took the sheriff just over fifteen minutes to arrive and when he did, he was alone. He was in uniform with the badge gleaming high on his chest and even had the brown trooper hat. Very Wild West.

“Let me guess,” he said. “The door was standing open when you found it.”

“You’re good at this,” Mark said.

Blankenship spit into the snow, trying to hold his trademark sour expression with Mark, but he was struggling. Something about the place excited him, and that was interesting, because the only importance Mark could attach to it was that this was where he’d been beaten, drugged, and interrogated — all crimes that Blankenship claimed he didn’t believe had occurred.

“You’ve got unique law enforcement in this county,” Mark said.

“How’s that?” Blankenship answered.

“Fieldwork tends to be handled by deputies. But I get the elected official himself, and I get him solo.”

“You didn’t call 911, Novak, you called me direct. I always answer direct phone calls. Part of my duty to the taxpayers.”

“That must be it,” Mark said. “In Florida, we don’t pay state income tax. I’ve always suspected policing was a lot more hands-on in places where you did.”

Blankenship almost smiled at that. He walked through the snow and up to the ramp and put one gloved hand on the railing.

“You said you had evidence, not just a story. Is that inside?”

“Yes, sir. You’ll find a plastic dive permit on the ground in there that was previously in my pocket.”

“The kind of thing you could have just dropped on the ground before you called me, in other words.”

“Exactly that kind of thing. Only I didn’t. And the dive permit doesn’t belong to me. It belonged to my wife.”

Blankenship turned away from the trailer and his expression softened.

“You carried it with you?”

“Every day, Sheriff. Every single day.”

They looked at each other in silence and then Blankenship said, “Anything else?”

“Bloodstains on the carpet. They’ll belong to me. Maybe not all of them, it looks like the sort of place that has seen some blood before, but I can point you to some of them.”

“Stand where you are for a bit, all right?”

“Sure.”

Blankenship went up the ramp, walking carefully, and then withdrew a small tactical flashlight and used it to illuminate the interior of the trailer. He didn’t cross the threshold, but he didn’t need to in order to see the living room.

“I didn’t touch the dive permit,” Mark said. “Sure wanted to, but I left it.”

“You think it’s worth bagging and tagging?”

“I doubt it, but that’s why I didn’t touch it. Two of them wore gloves, but maybe they took them off at some point. Test it, but I’d like it back when you’re done. Please.”

The sheriff turned the light off and walked back down the ramp to join him.

“So this is where they brought you, eh? Three masked men. An abandoned trailer. And you just happened to come across it?”

“The search was a little harder than that.”

“Yeah? How’d you get here?”

“I was hypnotized. By a woman named Julianne Grossman.”

Blankenship was one of those rare older men who could still intimidate with sheer size, and he knew how to draw it up. His body seemed to inflate.

“There are some lines you don’t cross,” he said, each word deep and dark.

“I’m not trying to cross any, damn it. I came back here to find out who had fucked with me, and why. She’s the woman who impersonated Diane Martin. Only it’s a little more complex than that. If you know anything about her, maybe you understand what I mean.”

He had Blankenship’s full interest now.

“You know Julianne personally, or you just know of her?” Mark asked.

Blankenship didn’t answer right away.

“What I was told,” Mark said, “was that she worked with Diane Martin after her husband died. That’s all I know. If she lied to me, then set me straight, please. Because I’ve got my own issues with Julianne.”

The sheriff turned the flashlight over in his hands and hesitated as if he was trying to make up his mind on something. Finally he said, “What do you know about this place, Novak?”

“I know that I can see the cave from here, and that’s where I ended up. I know that the Leonard brothers live at that farm way out across.”

“The Leonards have gone to ground, by the way. Haven’t been seen in a few days. You know anything about that?”

“I stopped by to talk with Lou.”

“That would have done it. They’ll be MIA for another week or two and then I’ll see them again.” Blankenship pointed at the trailer. “But this place? What do you know about it?”

“I’ve got a feeling it will help prove my story.”

“You’re telling me the truth?”

“Damn it, Sheriff, I don’t know another way to say it.”

Blankenship shook his head. “You weren’t kidding when you said you didn’t care, were you? You came back here for your own skin. You got no interest in Sarah.”

“I wasn’t kidding when I said it, but I’m starting to care.” You see, I saw her down there, Mark thought. And she’s waiting, Sheriff. She’s waiting, and she doesn’t understand why it’s taking so long. But what he said was “What’s so important about the trailer?”

“It’s where Evan Borders lived as a child. This collapsing shit pile was home when his daddy wasn’t in prison. Family land, going back more than a century. Carson — that’s his father — ended up selling it off to pay for his lawyers and his habits. Didn’t get much for his money. Tried to bargain his way out of prison in a different fashion and got a hit put on his head for that effort. All that remains of Carson’s legacy in Garrison County is his son. And, I suppose, his teeth. The boys in Detroit were kind enough to mail those back.”

“Would Evan have owned the cave?” Mark said. “If his father hadn’t gotten into the legal troubles, would the cave have been theirs?”

“Yes. If it had opened up a little earlier, a little later, however you care to look at it. Family land, like I said. But instead, it was going to be Sarah’s family land. I always wondered about that. Seems irrelevant to some, I suppose, but I wondered.”

“You were right to,” Mark said. He remembered a rancher outside Billings who sold a few hundred acres of generations-old family cattle land that turned out to have vast oil deposits. He’d put the barrel of a twelve-gauge in his mouth six months after news of the discovery broke. He hadn’t ever disputed that the transaction was fair and honest. The point was only that it had been made.

“I can tell you some things about Ridley,” Mark said. “They’ve got nothing to do with what happened to me here, but I think you should hear them.”

“We’ll talk in my office,” the sheriff said, and then he walked away from Mark and back up to the road. He had his radio to his lips by the time he reached his car.

The sapphire sky was cleansed of color by storm clouds just before dusk and then the sun went down somewhere behind them and full dark settled and Ridley knew that it was time.