No, he was not quite done in Garrison.
25
There’d been a poker game in a Montana town called Silver Gate on a blizzard-blasted week when Mark was fourteen. His uncles had brought him along with them to a bar and old boardinghouse called the Range Rider where they entertained the crowd by walking in their cowboy boots across the massive log beams that spanned the ceiling, usually for dollar bets, sometimes just for the hell of it. A slip from those timbers would have meant a broken back, but they’d never fallen.
The poker game that night was supposed to be good fun, but there was an out-of-towner and obvious cheat working the cards, a man who treated warnings with a wink. He’d given a false name, gotten up to go to the men’s room, and never returned, hustling out in the middle of the night on a snowmobile, which was a problem for him because there wasn’t far to go in Silver Gate on a night like that. “He got while the getting was not good,” Larry had said ruefully, and then he and Ronny had passed a bottle of bourbon back and forth in the silent mood that their nephew knew better than to test, and eventually Ronny had said, “So we don’t know who he is, but we know people who know him. He mentioned a name or two, if not his own.”
When Larry had nodded, it was almost with sadness. “They’ll bring him to the surface,” he said. “It’s the only way.”
It had been far from the only way. But it hadn’t been ineffective. They’d crossed paths with three men and broken nine fingers before they got the name they wanted. They’d gotten it, though.
“It’s a matter of physics,” Ronny said as they made their way to the stranger’s cabin, fourteen-year-old Mark at the wheel of the old Ford Sport Custom pickup, using the granny gear to claw through the snow while his uncles took turns on a flask. “You apply enough pressure, Mark, and eventually things start to leak. Ask any man who ever worked a pipeline. This world? It’s run by pressure.”
The pressure was on Mark now, and he had a limited window to adjust it. There was a proper way to work a case and there was a desperate way, and the former was no longer an option in Garrison. You fell back on more basic instincts when you had to, but Mark didn’t feel so bad about that. In their own ways, his uncles had been fine detectives. If you judged the results instead of the process, they’d been damn good.
The rental house that Evan Borders currently called home was probably close to a hundred years old, with a deteriorating stone foundation, vinyl siding that bubbled in most places and curled apart at the corners, and an aluminum porch roof that had pulled loose from one support and hung at a precarious angle, dumping melting snow onto the steps below. Three plastic bins lined the base of the porch, each one overflowing with Busch cans floating in the snowmelt. There was a vehicle parked in the weeds beside the house, an old Jeep with oversize tires and a roof rack of lights. A shame. Mark had been hoping for a white Silverado or a panel van.
Mark pulled his car in across the street and sat with the engine running, looking the place over and hearing echoes of the various warnings. Let’s get to it, Mark’s mind said, but his body didn’t agree. Mark didn’t often have a pronounced size advantage, but he generally had a strength advantage, and ever since he was a child, he’d had one of the greatest advantages you could carry into a fight: he didn’t mind getting hit. You learned a lot about fighting when you didn’t disappear after the first punch, and in the circle of towns that Mark had passed through, there’d been a lot of first punches. That came with the constant string of new neighborhoods, new schools, new shames.
All of these things were supposed to be gone from him, of course. They had been, for a while. A few good years. But now he sat outside of the house of a man who possibly had held a knife on him, and then a needle, and what he wanted wasn’t the sight of that man in handcuffs or a jail cell. What he wanted was blood. What he needed was the truth.
Whether Borders was the guilty man or not, there was a chance that Mark’s walking onto his front porch was going to start a war. And today, when Mark could exhaust himself just by walking up a flight of stairs, that would end badly for him.
Still, some part of him wanted it.
The frame of the storm door was bent, keeping it from closing, so he pulled that open, blocked it with his heel, and pounded hard on the main door. A police knock, the kind that suggested you had a short window of time to open it yourself or it would be opened for you. Evan Borders had probably heard that kind before.
The door opened fast, and Mark’s focus from the start was on the other man’s eyes, because he knew they would tell him more than anything. Mark wasn’t sure he’d be able to recognize anyone from that snowy road, not with the way they’d been dressed and had their faces covered, but he was damn sure anyone who had been there would recognize him.
Evan Borders took the detective work out of the equation fast. He said, “Hey, hey, the man himself. Novak, right?”
“I’m a familiar face to you?”
“Familiar face to anybody who reads the paper. You’re one famous fella around here.”
Mark looked into those eyes, trying to place them. Blue, and that seemed to fit, but he couldn’t be sure. His size eliminated him from two of the three possibilities — if he’d been there, he’d been the man who waited in the middle of the road, the one who hadn’t worn gloves. Mark looked at his hands, wondering if he’d have better luck recognizing something there. Again, it was impossible to tell. Evan was wearing an old T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, exposing tattoos on both biceps, a snake surrounded by flames on the right arm, a crucifix on the left. Perhaps that was an attempt at irony.
“Figured you’d drop by,” Borders said.
“Why’s that?”
“Because you weren’t shy about throwing my fucking name around town, and even around the newspapers.” His eyes were flint. “But then, after somebody decided to chill you out, I wasn’t sure if you’d hit town again. After a thing like that, some men would head south.”
“I’m not one of those men.”
“Too tough, eh?”
“Or too stupid.”
Borders smiled a mean smile and said, “That one would get my vote.”
“I understand you and Ridley did some chatting the same day I took a beating.”
“No shit?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Yeah? So what of it, boy?”
Boy. It echoed in Mark’s mind, familiar for reasons unknown. A simple word, but still, something about it taunted.
“Well?” Evan said.
“Mind telling me why?” Mark said. “Man’s believed to have killed your girlfriend ten years ago, but you call him up at home same day I arrive asking questions? Seems odd.”
“Those feel like police questions. You ain’t police.”
“If you don’t answer me, the police’ll be asking the same questions eventually. I’ll see to it. You could save yourself the hassle.”
Evan Borders smiled. “Appreciate you thinking of me that way, though I understand that the police have questions for you. Me? I’ve got nothing to hide, and I’m telling no lies, not like you. So you ask me an honest question, you get an honest answer in response. I called Ridley Barnes to offer my services. You might recall that it was snowing that day? Maybe you don’t; you got an unusual memory, is what I hear.”
“I remember the snow.”
“Well, that’s progress. During the winters, I plow snow. I was plowing all day; you can ask my cousins and our clients if you don’t believe that. Plenty of witnesses on my side. Doesn’t sound like you’re too familiar with witnesses. I asked Ridley if he needed help ’cause I was out near his place, and turned out he didn’t. He called me back and told me that. Now, I’ll go ahead and answer your next question, which is whether I can prove this. Unlike you — notice how many differences there are between you and me and the stories we tell? — I sure can. I was working with two other people, and I got a client list a mile long that the police can check if they want to. You don’t get that list, because I’m already being more generous than I need to be. Point is? I know what I was doing that day. What you were doing crawling into that cave? Boy, I got no idea on that front. Nobody in town seems to.”