Read Page 16

“Well, duh,” Skarda said.

“Everybody happy?” I asked. “How ’bout you, Dad?”Advertisement

The old man smiled at me. He was a happy drunk. I liked that.

“Like I said, we don’t mean any disrespect,” Josie told me.

“Please, don’t apologize,” I said. “This is the only smart thing I’ve seen you people do since I’ve been here.”

“It’s just that David escaping the way he did, escaping with you so soon after he was caught by the police, and both of you showing up here, it’s such a coincidence.”

“You have every reason to be cautious, although I doubt the cops would go to such extremes just to catch the Iron Range Bandits.”

“You think you’re something special, don’t you?” Roy rose to his feet, although with his height it was more of an unfolding. He stood in the center of the living room, the legs straight without locking his knees, his feet about ten inches apart, his hands locked behind his back and centered on the belt. “If you’re such a master criminal, how come you got caught?”

“I trusted a man who I thought was my friend. We all make mistakes.” I was staring at Skarda when I spoke, and I saw his Adam’s apple bob. I thought I also heard him gulp, but that was probably just my imagination.

“I’m not impressed,” Roy said.

“I’m going to lose a lot of sleep over that.”

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“I’m impressed,” Jimmy said.

“This coming from a kid who wanted to start a marijuana farm in the Superior National Forest,” Roy said.

“Claire liked the idea.”

“Claire?” said Skarda. “Claire hasn’t got the brains God gave an aardvark.”

Jimmy turned and looked me in the eye as if he expected me to defend Claire, whoever she was. Like I’m an authority on the intelligence of aardvarks.

“I had a spot all picked out,” Jimmy said. “Deep in the forest where no one would have stumbled over it. I had processing equipment, packaging—in three to five months I would have been ready for distribution.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“No one in this family is going into the drug business,” Josie said.

“That happened,” Jimmy said as he gestured toward his cousin.

“We’re consumers, not dealers,” said the old man.

Jimmy shook his head the way I expected Willis Carrier might have when his family pooh-poohed air-conditioning. He produced a laptop and plugged it into a phone jack. A few minutes later he had his browser up. He googled Nick Dyson and files appeared. The files were genuine. There really was a career criminal named Nicholas Dyson who specialized in robbing banks, jacking armored cars, and burgling the occasional jewelry store. We picked him because his physical description resembled mine—all we did was swap out his photo wherever we found it. The most recent file was from the Web site of the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper. It had booking photos of Skarda and me. In mine I had a scraggly beard and long hair that didn’t appear fake at all.

“You get a haircut and shave after you were caught?” Jimmy asked.

“Wanted to make sure I looked like a sober, law-abiding citizen if my case came to trial,” I said. “I was even going to wear a sweater like the one that guy wore in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” Roy said from the living room.

He was being deliberately provocative, trying to goad me into a fight. Rushmore McKenzie would have ignored him, but then he had a job to do, and it didn’t include beating up middle-aged punks with chips on their shoulders. Nick Dyson, on the other hand, had a reputation to uphold. He was a bad man, and if these people were going to do what he needed them to do, he might have to prove it.

“Roy,” I said, “do you really want me to go over there and fuck you up in front of your pretty wife? I know you’ll slap her around later to prove you’re a man, but she’ll see it and she’ll remember. So will everyone else.”

To show I meant business I stood up, took the Glock from where I had holstered it between my belt and the small of my back, and stepped away from the table. Jimmy went to his sister and pulled her out of the line of fire. The old man dodged out of the way as well. Skarda sat in his chair and watched. Roy eyed me cautiously yet did not move. It occurred to me that I might have played my hand too hard, forcing Roy to go all in even though neither he nor I wanted to. Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed. Josie stepped directly between us, slowly looking first at Roy, then at me, then Roy, and finally back to me again.

“I’m grateful for what you did for my brother,” she said. “But gratitude has an expiration date. Like a sack of donuts, after a while it just goes stale. You know?”

“I’ll be out of your hair by this time tomorrow,” I said. pqdm.com