Homefront

by Chuck Logan

  No response.

  “Debbie said she talked to a guy who talked to a guy at ATF,” Cantrell said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “’Bout the Prairie Island thing.”

  This time J. T. looked up. “Yeah?”

  “Said they found lots of this residue, like clay silicates or something. Wasn’t the usual shit they find when you blow off a lot of plastique…”

  “And?”

  “Just a stupid wild-ass guess, but the guy thought maybe those terrorists got short weight on their explosives. Somebody sold them a bunch of play dough mixed in with the Semtex. Guy said that’s why the shock wave didn’t stove in that cooling pool.”

  “Bingo.” J. T. pointed his pipe at a red Trans Am that wheeled into the lot and parked six stalls away. The shaggy driver bounded out of the car in a silky blue wind suit and hefted his gym bag, looking like a young buffalo wearing lifter’s gloves.

  “Rodney all right,” Cantrell said, sitting up. “What’s his last name again?”

  “Rodney Jarue,” J. T. said. “Let’s give him a few minutes to settle in.”

  They entered the club lobby and were immediately challenged by the lean, tanned redhead wearing horn-rims behind the reception counter. “Excuse me, but are you members?”

  She kept her smile in place, but furrowed her brow ever so slightly. A big black guy traveling with a stringy well-preserved Elvis clone didn’t fit her normal Saturday-morning walk-in client pattern.

  “I’ll make this easy,” J. T. said amiably, opening his coat so she could see the gold detective shield on his belt. He left out the part about taking the badge off a decorations wall mount in his den.

  “You guys are cops,” she said, biting the inside of her cheek, lowering her voice, casting her eyes around like she was relieved they were alone in the lobby.

  “Hey”—Cantrell scowled indignantly—“it’s just a job. Take it easy.”

  Still wary but a bit more agreeable, she asked, “Is something wrong, Officer?”

  “Nah,” Cantrell said, coming closer, leaning over the counter, staring at her blouse, which was very tight and had this string tie dealy that accentuated her bodice. “Say, I used to play racquetball here…”

  “Things have changed. The new manager tore out two of the courts, put in a nursery,” the woman said. Then her eyes clicked on J. T.

  “Look. We just want to talk to one of your members, kinda quiet like.” He dropped his voice a register, oozing sympathy. “You know, don’t want to bother him at work…in front of people…”

  Her eyes darted back and forth between them.

  Cantrell said, “Just be a few minutes.” They were already heading for the stairs in the right corner of the lobby. “Weights still upstairs?” Cantrell called to her as they started up the stairs.

  “What’s she doing?” J. T. asked.

  “Not sure. Possibly debating whether to reach for the phone.”

  They jogged up the stairs, peered through the glass door to the right, where an aerobics class was in progress on a highly polished gym floor. To their left a long room with two rows of cardio machines stretched the length of the building, facing three wall-mounted TVs. Halfway down the machine room the club opened into another area with lots of stainless steel showing, half fixed weight stations, the other half free weights. Floor-to-ceiling mirrors lined one wall. They headed into the weight room.

  “There he is, on the bench press,” J. T. said.

  “Perfect,” Cantrell said.

  Maybe a dozen people were scattered among the shiny equipment, four guys, the rest women.

  “I love it,” Cantrell said, “the way they flex and sneak looks at themselves.”

  Rodney had removed his jacket and lay on his back on the bench wearing a loose armless T-shirt with an “A.S.I.A. Security” logo on the chest. He was adjusting his grip on a bar that rested in the lift rack over his head. Two forty-five-pound plates were on each end of the bar, held in place by steel squeeze clips. He was just finishing up a few deep clarifying breaths, getting ready to lift the bar off the rack, when he looked up.

  “Oh, bullshit,” Rodney said as his eyes scanned J. T. and then came to settle on Cantrell.

  “Rodney? What’s this?” Cantrell said, bending down and pinching Rodney’s right biceps, where a band of subtle scarring and healing skin circled his arm. “Didn’t you used to have this barbed-wire tattoo?” He glanced over at J. T. “You know what? I think our boy is cleaning up his act.”

  “I don’t have to say shit to you,” Rodney said. “You ain’t on the job anymore. I know my rights.” He focused his eyes upward, then powered the bar off the rack and slowly lifted it. Locked his elbows. Exhaled.

  Cantrell shrugged, then reached over, deftly pressed the handles of the squeeze clamp, slid it off the bar. J. T. immediately did the same with the one on his side.

  “Hey, don’t fuck around,” Rodney said.

  Cantrell then reached over, grabbed a thirty-five-pound plate off a peg on a nearby machine, held it up. J. T. nodded, found a similar weight on his side. They quickly slapped the weights on either end of the bar behind the twin forty-fives.

  Rodney grunted, his arms trembling slightly as he started to lower the bar back toward the rack. J. T. moved behind the bench and put his fingers lightly on the bar, nudged it away from the rack.

  “Jesus,” Rodney muttered. Arms wobbling slightly, his elbows caving in, he shoved the bar back up to full extension.

  “Sheryl Mott. Used to hang around with OMG, tell us about her,” Cantrell said.

  Rodney grimaced. Dots of sweat squirted up across his broad forehead. Strips of muscle jumped under the flushed skin of his shoulders. “Fuck you,” he hissed between clenched teeth.

  “Again,” Cantrell said. He quickly plucked two more thirty-fives from nearby pegs, raised his leg, straddled Rodney’s torso, and slapped the weights on the bar, one side, then the other. J. T. maintained the subtle stand-off pressure on the bar. Cantrell looked down at Rodney, who was now making this deep grinding tectonic noise in his chest. “Sheryl Mott,” he repeated.

  “Guys,” Rodney gasped. “You ain’t been around. I am trying to go straight. Talk to Lymon at Wash Co. for Christ’s sake…” His bulging brown eyes blinked away the gush of sweat, darted at the nervous gallery starting to assemble around them. Then he whispered, “C’mon, cut me some slack. I’m trying to get a job here, personal trainer…” His arms were shaking now, deep tremors running down into his pecs.

  “C’mon, Rodney,” Cantrell said impatiently. He was mashing the handles of the squeeze clip in one hand, reached up with other, selected the Pall Mall from behind his ear, and put it in is lips.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” an indignant female voice said. Cantrell turned his head, saw a perfectly coiffed woman, maybe forty-five, cute little halter, Spandex shorts, bare midriff clean and smooth like it’d been run off a lathe. She glared at him through a sheet of meticulously applied makeup.

  Cantrell took a Zippo from his pocket, popped it, lit the Pall Mall.

  “Eekkk,” squeaked the woman, backpedaling like a mouse in Cinderella.

  Cantrell turned back to Rodney, blew a stream of smoke in his face. “We’re waiting.”

  “OMG’s bad folks, too bad for me,” Rodney panted. The pressure had traveled down his arms into his chest, up his red corded throat into his bulging eyes. Sweat streamed down his swollen arms as they struggled to hold off the inexorable weight pressing down.

  Frustrated, Cantrell was now mashing the squeeze clip in his right hand. Inspired, he twisted, pressed the handles together, opening the spring circle, and thrust the clip into Rodney’s writhing crotch, probing the cod of bunched blue material for something to clamp down on.

  “Okay, okay,” Rodney moaned. “What I hear…she’s the perfect chick. She loves to fuck and cook. Fuck bikers…and…cook…meth. Learned her business in some big lab in Washington state. All I know, honest.”

  “See,”
J. T. said, releasing the pressure on the bar. “That was easy.”

  “Spot, SPOT!” Rodney hollered in a desperate hoarse voice as the bar shivered, descending on his spasming arms.

  Shouldering through the gaggle of wide-eyed people rushing to Rodney’s aid, Cantrell said, “Not to worry, it’s the new Afghan extreme lifting—”

  “The near-death school,” J. T. said.

  Cantrell pointed out an alternate route of egress through the gym. Trailing a contrail of his cigarette smoke amid the aghast aerobics class, they beat it down another flight of stairs and out an exit door on the first level, next to the pool.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  An hour after he returned from his face-off with Gator Bodine, Griffin heard tires crunch through the windowpane in the puddles of his driveway. He walked out on his deck and saw the green Toyota Tundra pull up. Hello? Broker got out from the passenger side wearing cross trainers and an old blue sweat suit under his jacket. Nina lowered the driver’s-side window and leaned out. Kit waved from the backseat.

  “Hey, Harry? You ever been to Dawn’s Salon on Main Street?” Nina said.

  Broker held up his hands in mock despair. “I was getting used to her hair longer. Now she’s gonna cut it all off.”

  Harry walked up to the truck and studied Nina’s face. “Going to the beauty parlor, huh?”

  “Me too,” Kit said.

  Nina nodded. “It’s time. Her cowlicks have turned into a briar patch the last two months.”

  There was an ease in the talk Griffin hadn’t seen with these people since they appeared at the rental house in January. Nina said good-bye, put the truck in gear, and steered the Toyota back down the drive. Griffin walked Broker under the deck, into the lower level of his house. “When did she come out of it?” he asked.

  “Yesterday, boom, just like that.”

  “So?”

  “If she stays steady, we’ll probably be heading back to the Cities in a week,” Broker said. “No sense hanging around. Kit needs to get back with her friends and activities.”

  Their different styles collided awkwardly in the silent interval. Griffin was grinning, waiting for Broker to say more. But he’d known Broker for thirty years and had learned that the man kept his emotions carefully embedded between his mind and his muscles. More like the steady instincts of an elusive wild animal.

  Broker had assessed a problem, laid out a plan, and soldiered through. His expression was not so much relief as a confirmation of the correctness of his decision.

  “So,” Griffin said, “you ready to grab something heavy and pick it up?”

  Broker looked at his old friend, unshaved, fairly vibrating with the caffeine shakes. Probably had one of his bad nights. But he did grin, this fond, indulgent exasperation. His thick eyebrows beetled as his eyes scanned the room where they stood. The walls were a gallery that marked the stations of Griffin’s errant life. Griffin had spiraled out of the Army and become an underground cartoonist. After he sobered up, he briefly became a newspaper artist.

  Several of his old drawings had been enlarged and framed: a gaunt haunted depiction of Christ could have been a comical self-portrait. The Cartoon Christ trudged under his crown of thorns and a huge picket sign that bore the caption: “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30 Who Hasn’t Been Crucified.”

  Another, a favorite of the old East Metro Drug Task Force, showed two hippie dopers looking up from lighting their weed as a ten-foot-tall tit smashed through the door. One of them said, “Cool it, man, it’s a bust.”

  A talented, conflicted man who had loved and hated their war, Griffin had always rebelled against his true nature. Broker wasn’t fooled; he had seen Griffin in the field.

  He’d assessed instantly what Griffin spent his life denying.

  Harry Griffin was a natural killer. Broker had always approached this perception with caution. Acknowledging the fact that looking too closely at Griffin was like peering into a mirror…

  He shook his head and turned his attention to Griffin’s latest Peter Pan fixation. The barbell on the floor, a leg press, an overhead draw-down lift, triceps pulls, a set of fly cables, and the crunch chair.

  After Korean karate, yoga, and Transcendental Meditation, Griffin, looking sixty dead in the eye, had discovered high-intensity weight lifting.

  So Broker tossed off his coat and actually laughed. “Christ, remember the time you tried to teach me to stand on my head?”

  Griffin snorted and pointed to the barbell on the floor. It was fitted with two forty-fives and a twenty-five on each end. “Classic deads,” he said. “You first.”

  Broker rotated his shoulders, loosened up, took the lift straps off the floor, inserted his wrists, looped the straps around the bar, snugged them up, and stooped.

  “Remember, keep your shoulder blades tight and your butt back. Push down with your feet,” Griffin said.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Broker took a breath, held it, and lifted the bar slowly. Ten-second count going up and then back down. By his third slow repetition, Broker was sweating and panting for breath.

  “One more,” Griffin admonished with glee as he slapped half a ton of iron on the leg press, getting the next station in the torture ready.

  Less than half an hour later they were through the five stations. Broker was covered with sweat and out of breath. Griffin, barely breathing hard, the eternal contradiction, lit a Lucky Strike. “Half an hour a week, it’s the cat’s ass, huh?” Griffin winked.

  Shaky on his feet, Broker followed Griffin upstairs, where they poured coffee and took their cups out on the deck. The morning was mild, with a tickle of greening in the air.

  Broker sipped his coffee, squinted out over the lake. “Think it’s finally going to be spring?”

  Griffin shook his head. “Looked at the Weather Channel this morning. We might have another clipper on the way. Big rumpus kicking around in Manitoba.” He shrugged. “But you could be on your way south before it hits.”

  “Maybe,” Broker said.

  “You pulled it off.”

  “She pulled it off. I just held her coat,” Broker said.

  Griffin decided it was time to pop the big question. “So now what? She going back into that good old spooky shit?”

  Broker studied Griffin’s face as he said that, always the lilt of the road not taken in his voice. “It’s all changed, Griffin; you wouldn’t recognize special ops anymore. The people are different, the gear, the thinking. Hell, they even have a different map of the world.”

  “Yeah,” Griffin said wistfully, slouching back, drawing his neck into his shoulders as a gust of cool breeze blew over them. “I saw that snappy consultant guy, Barnett, give his briefing on C-SPAN. There’s the globally connected core. In the middle you got Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia; all the ragheads in the nonintegrated gap.”

  “Face it, man. We’re dinosaurs,” Broker said.

  Griffin held up his cup in a toast. “To the old neighborhood, where we grew up,” he said as they clicked rims. “Northern Quang Tri Province.” He settled back. “Guess the only thing I got to look forward to now is whether I’m going to wind up a geezer, a codger, or a coot.”

  “Buck up. We got in our licks.”

  “Yep. Killed our Communists.” Griffin grinned. “And George W’s and Dick Cheney’s too.” He studied the bottom of his coffee cup for a moment, then looked up frankly. “You never really told me. One month Nina’s an MP captain in Bosnia; the next she’s mobbed up with Delta Force. How’d that go down?”

  Broker listened to the wind toy in the trees like a palpable sigh of desire. Decided he owed Griffin that much. “She embodies a concept,” he said finally.

  “Say again?”

  “She took a course on tactical decision-making at Bragg before she deployed to Bosnia. The Boyd thing. The OODA Loop.”

  Griffin nodded. “I read the book. Not sure you can teach that. You got it or you don’t.”

  “Well, she aced out all the guys in the course. On
e of them was a Delta colonel who was into thinking outside the box—” Broker’s voice stuck briefly. “Holly, Colonel Holland Wood,” he said.

  “There was a Delta colonel with you at Prairie Island,” Griffin said directly.

  “The same.” He paused, closed his eyes briefly, and continued. “Any rate. He ran into her in Bosnia, remembered her, and invited her in for an interview. I only know snatches. After 9/11 she disappeared into the black side. Thing that still pisses me off is, she took Kit with her last time out. Used our kid to set up her cover in that North Dakota thing.”

  “Kit,” Griffin said simply. “You want her to turn out like you, or Nina? She’s headed in that direction, you know. Unless you guys change.”

  Broker listened to the soft breeze rise and fall, drawing silky through the pines.

  “Think about it all the time,” he said.

  Griffin backed off. Figured it was as close as Broker would get to answering the question about what Nina would do next.

  Broker’s prediction turned out to be inaccurate. When Nina and Kit left Dawn’s Salon, Nina’s reddish amber hair was cleaned up but styled longer than it had been since her undergraduate days. Kit sported a matching cut; the snarl of her cowlick bangs resolved under Mom’s watchful eye. Nina tossed her new do and looked up and down Main Street.

  “We’re going out tonight, so let’s splurge a little, maybe get new outfits,” she said. Her eyes prowled the storefronts. Stopped on a funky hand-painted sign across the street, next to the redbrick courthouse: “Big Lake Threads.” “There,” she said. She took Kit’s hand, and they started across the street.

  The door jingled when they entered, and Nina scanned a display of hats, gloves, and scarfs that tended more toward fashion than the practical; accessories for women who didn’t worry about getting cold. So it was a boutique that catered to the high-end summer crowd. Probably kept open as a labor of love through the winter. The lady sitting behind the counter looked up, smiled, then went back to reading her book. The store was empty except for one other shopper, a slim, striking woman with long black hair who stood among the racks, holding a blouse at arm’s length, staring at it with a tangible longing.