Michael Koryta - Last Words

The clerk, a pretty brunette, smiled when Mark asked if there were rooms available.

“A few. How many nights?”

Mark hesitated. “One. I’ll just stay the night.”

Once inside the room, he cranked up the heat by ten degrees, dropped his suitcase, and set Ridley’s case file on the little desk by the window. He’d asked for a smoking room, and it stank like one. He always hated that. He’d never been able to get used to the smell. The taste he’d acquired with time. Some people lit candles for the dead, but that showed more than Mark liked to reveal. So he smoked Lauren’s cigarettes, filling his lungs daily with the thing he’d once feared would kill her.

He slid the ashtray over beside the case file, took out an American Spirit, and lit it. He smoked while he watched the wind push the snow around the pool cover, and when the cigarette was done and his mouth was full of the taste, he reached for the phone, ready to call Jeff and confront him. Jeff would have an answer, of course, a bit of sage wisdom, but Jeff should have realized that there were some buttons you didn’t push, no matter how good your intentions.

He had his cell phone in hand when the hotel-room phone rang, and for a moment he was confused and almost answered the cell. Then he picked up the room line, expecting the front-desk clerk because nobody else knew he was here, and a female voice said, “Who in the hell are you, and what do you want out of this?”

After a beat, he said: “My name is Markus Novak. Who in the hell are you? ”

“What are you doing asking about my baby?”

The mother. Shit. Should have gone to her first, Mark thought. Not to the police, not to Ridley. Damn it, you knew better.

“I was going to call you, Mrs. Martin. You were next on my list. I was—”

“I was next on your list? You think that’s proper?”

My baby. Mark had a flash of memory: Lauren’s father down on his knees on the afternoon of the funeral, robbed of his ability even to stand.

Sarah Martin’s mother said, “What, you have no answer for that?”

Mark blinked, refocused. “I’d like to explain my role.”

“You don’t have a role. But I’d like to see you.”

“Tell me where to meet you, then. I can head out right—”

“I’m in the lobby of your hotel. And I won’t be leaving until I see you.”

“Be right down,” Mark said, but the line was dead.

She was supposed to look weary. Beaten. He’d met a lot of her kind over the years, enough that he’d begun to believe he could spot them in crowds. Grief took its toll, but grief without answers? That was acid. That ate you slowly but relentlessly.

Sarah Martin’s mother didn’t fit the profile, though. She was lithe and blond and, right now, equipped with a hunter’s stare. She radiated energy, the focus of a master at work on a task, and that was worse, because Mark was the task.

She had her hand extended as he crossed the lobby toward her, which seemed an odd formality, not in keeping with her anger on the phone, but when he reached out to shake it, her fingers moved quickly from his palm and gripped his wrist instead. He looked down, surprised by the strength of her grasp, and when she spoke, her words were hissed.

“ Next on your list? You really said that to me? Come into this town asking around about Sarah, and I’m next on your list? ”

“I gather the sheriff called you,” Mark said. She moved her fingers higher on his wrist, and his blood pulsed against them. He glanced down again, struggling for words. “I wish I’d been able to introduce myself first. That would have helped. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not a police officer, correct? So who are you? Who sent you here?”

She had the interest of the desk clerk now, and someone else poked a head out of an office. Sarah’s mother, still holding on to his wrist, her eyes scorching, said, “What, would you like to be somewhere else? Don’t want to be embarrassed here, with an audience? You’d rather sneak around the town?”

“Let’s walk and talk, Mrs. Martin. Please.”

“We can stay right here.”

“We can, but we won’t.” Mark went to the doors, and when they slid open, he looked back at her, waiting. He was struck by how unbothered she looked there in the middle of the lobby with everyone staring at her.

Used to that now, he realized. It’s been a long time, and in a town like this, so small? She knows her role now. She’s the dead girl’s mother. Stares don’t bother her. Not anymore. They’re just part of the landscape.

He turned from her and walked through the doors and knew without looking back that she would follow. She was, after all, there for him.

It was getting on toward dark and the wind was blowing harder, and in his hurry, Mark had left even the blazer upstairs. He’d have pneumonia by the time he boarded the plane for Florida. He didn’t know where he was going; he just wanted out of the hotel. There was a steak house across the parking lot, the only target in sight, so he angled toward it. It was some sort of Western-themed thing with wagon wheels on the sign, the type of place that disgusted people who were actually from the West because it reminded them of the moron tourists. Or the tourons, as Mark’s uncles had called them, usually when aggravated by the driving of some fucking flatlander who was uneasy on the mountain roads.

“Don’t you run away from me,” Sarah Martin’s mother called, hurrying in pursuit.

He turned back to her.

“I’m not running. I’d like to sit down and talk. I always intended to.”

“You always intended to. Well, that’s sweet of you to say.”

“I’m not going to cause you any trouble. I’m not going to be in this town for one damn minute longer than I can help it. I’m doing what I was told to by my boss, but the truth is, I’m biding my time up here because my boss is worried about me. You want to know why?”

“Not particularly.”

“Because he thinks I’m doing a poor job of coping with my wife’s unsolved murder.”

Several seconds of silence passed. The wind was howling in, and it was hard not to turn away from it, but Mark stayed in place, facing the wind and Mrs. Martin. Her hunter’s eyes had softened. Almost too much. They were harder to face now than the wind. He was so much better with anger than grief.

“Would you be willing to at least hear from Sarah Martin’s mother? While you’re busy talking to other people, perhaps you should pause to hear from Diane Martin. Are you willing to do that?”

“I never wanted to ignore—”

“It’s your choice. I just need to know if you are willing.”

Silence again. He tried to avoid her stare but couldn’t.

“Buy me a beer?” she said. It was a strange question, like she was asking for a date, but he nodded.

“Buy you plenty of them.”

They were nearly alone at the restaurant bar, drinking a local beer called Upland that was actually damn good, when Mark finished explaining Innocence Incorporated and why he’d come to Garrison. Diane Martin didn’t speak at all, just sipped her beer and watched him. He found himself avoiding her gaze, the reverse of his typical habit. He favored direct eye contact at all times because he’d learned that it often told you more about someone than words did, but her eyes unsettled him. She was so balanced, so composed, as if she understood him well from his one disclosure.

Maybe his biggest concern was that she did.

“I can’t tell you with certainty that we won’t take this case,” he said, “but I can tell you that it would be a first if we did. The whole point of the organization is death-row defense.”