The Last Kind Word (Mac McKenzie #10)

“Where the hell have you been?” he wanted to know.

He was speaking to Josie, not me. She attempted to explain, but the old man stopped her when she got to the part where I spent the night at her place.

“He did what?” he said.

“Dad, nothing happened.”

I reached for one of the old man’s beers. He slapped at my hand and I pulled it back.

“You spent the night with my daughter?” Technically, it was a question, yet the old man made it sound like a damning accusation.

“Nothing happened,” Josie repeated. “After he put me to bed—”

“He put you to bed?”

“He slept on the sofa in my living room.”

“And you let him? You let him?”

Josie’s face expressed a silent apology to me. I smiled it away. Parents, more often than not, must take responsibility for their children, must take much of the credit or blame for the way they turn out. Children, on the other hand, cannot be held accountable for their parents. After all, they have no choice in the matter.

“I had thought about ravishing her defenseless body,” I said, “but I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

The old man’s eyes narrowed. “Are you making fun of me?” he asked.

“Yes, I am. Listen, Dad—has your daughter ever done anything that made you ashamed of her?”

“No.” He didn’t even pause to think about it.

“Well, then.” I reached for a beer. This time he let me take it. I popped it open and took a sip. “Moving on.”

“I can’t stay here,” Josie said. “I have work, such as it is. Do you need me for anything, Dyson?”

“Not until tonight.”

That caught the old man’s attention. His eyes swept from his daughter to me and back again.

“The dark side of midnight,” Josie said.

“Exactly so,” I said.

She was gone a moment later. I sat at the table across from the old man. I asked one question—“How’s it going?” His answer was surprisingly long and illuminating. I suspect the beer had something to do with it. Up until that moment I had dismissed him as being little more than an aging hippie. Still, we are all rarely just one thing, and Josie’s father was also a weathered, callused, tired old man, the kind that had worked hard his entire life with every expectation of having something to show for it at the end. Only the paper mill he had given his life to closed, taking the hard-earned pension he had been promised with it—the owners had looted the fund to pay for their own salaries and bonuses. When he heard the news, the old man’s best friend of nearly sixty years put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

“He thought his life was all behind him,” the old man said. “Couldn’t see no way of going forward. Didn’t have much of a family, no one to help him out, no Iron Range Bandits. It broke my heart what he did, yet I’ve thought about doing it once or twice myself.”

“Except you have a family that cares about you.”

He nodded and drank more beer. His eyes glazed over, and for a moment I thought he might start weeping.

“I shoulda done better,” he said. “Taken care of my family. I shoulda done better. They shouldn’t be worrying about me now, taking care of me. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.”

“Sure it is,” I said. The reason I had quit the St. Paul cops to take the reward on the embezzler was to give my father a rich and carefree retirement. Unfortunately, he died six months later.

“Would they be doin’ what they’re doin’ if not for me?” the old man asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Dyson, you gotta do me a favor.”

“If I can.”

“Will you promise?”

“If I can.”

“Take care of my JoEllen. David, too. All of ’em. Take care of all of ’em. Don’t let nothing bad happen. Promise?”

“I promise.”

I meant it when I said it. I just didn’t know how I was going to manage to keep Josie and the Bandits from harm and still do the job I had been sent there to do.

Dave Skarda emerged from the cabin. He stood in the center of the deck wearing nothing but a thin pair of shorts that were far too tight for him. Back when I played ball, my friends and I would have called them “crowd pleasers.”

“What’s all the noise?” he asked.

“He walks, he talks, he wiggles his belly like a reptile,” the old man said. “It’s about time you got up.”

“Why? Is there somewhere I need to be?” Skarda moved to the picnic table, picked up the old man’s beer can, and took a chug. He returned the can and sat down. “Another day in paradise.”

“Get dressed,” I said. “We need to sneak over to your place.”

“What for?”

“So I can steal some of your clothes and other supplies.”

“Buy your own shit. You’ve got more money than I do.”

“I spent most of the money from the Silver Bay job,” I said. I explained what I spent it on and why.

“That worked?” Skarda asked. “Just switching locks?”