by Chuck Logan
“Go on, Magic, pig out.”
The cat ran and hid under the desk. Be patient. She’d be back. He stripped off his jacket, retrieved the fax sheets, put them on his desk, and circled Broker’s name and Visa number. Then he tucked them into the manila folder with the warrants and put the file in his desk drawer.
Had to calm down.
So he resorted to ritual. He poured the dregs from the Mister Coffee into a cup, selected a yellow number-two pencil off his desk blotter, and walked to the alcove off the office. It had originally been a bathroom. Gator had removed the door and put in a cot along the wall. Just the toilet and the cot.
His thinking place.
He sat on the floor next to the commode and snapped the pencil in half. Then, slowly, he peeled away the wood pulp with his thumbnail and eased out two lengths of graphite. Wrapped the ends in toilet paper.
He fingered a Camel from his chest pocket, then carefully inserted the pencil lead pieces into the wall outlet and crossed them. When they sparked and the paper ignited, he bent, placing the cigarette to the flame, puffing, until he had a light. Then he sat back and savored the cigarette. Smoke had never tasted so good. Or old reheated coffee. He could almost hear the night murmurs of the joint.
By the time he finished the cigarette, the kitty had edged out from under the desk and dipped her whiskers in the milk.
See. Like a sign.
Gator refilled the cat’s bowl, brought the milk carton back into the house, and put it in the refrigerator. Then he took a hot shower, changed into fresh clothes, and heated a fast Hungry Man dinner in the microwave. After he bolted the food, he paced.
Calm down, wait for Sheryl to call.
He glanced out the window, across the yard at the lights in his shop, the spotlight illuminating the tractor in the front. Lot of hard work went into putting that operation together-even if it was a front for something more ambitious.
You gotta keep your eye on the overall plan. Go off half cocked, and you’re just like those institutionalized fools on a revolving door. Wait for Sheryl to call. The way it worked, that meant another drive to the phone booth; this time the one in town, outside Perry’s grocery.
They communicated strictly by pay phones. She’d call at six. He had some time, so he made a cup of instant coffee and slit the cellophane on a fresh pack of Camels. When the coffee was ready, he sat down at the kitchen table and worked on a difficult corner of the puzzle.
He was good at waiting.
Three end-to-end Camels later, he pulled on his coat, went out, got back in his truck, and drove back toward town. At 5:55 P.M. he was standing in the booth at Perry’s IGA on Main Street. He always called her from the Amoco; she always called back at this phone at the grocery store.
The phone rang. Gator snatched it off the hook.
“You called,” Sheryl said.
“I got something big for you,” Gator said.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“No, I mean I found something big-time serious. It could affect everything. But I need help figuring it out.”
“So, tell me.”
“Uh-uh, too complicated. You gotta see it. Can you be here tonight?”
“Aw, bullshit,” Sheryl said.
Gator heard the stretch in her voice. Reluctant. After the strain they’d been through two weeks ago. “C’mon, Sherylll-”
“Okay, but tonight’s out. I was at work all day. I’ll leave in the morning.” She sounded final.
“See you then,” he said and hung up. Back in the truck, driving, thinking; there were words for this expansive feeling. Found money. Luck. Fucking destiny. Whatever.
Nothing to do now but wait for her.
So go home, kick back. Which is what he did. He debated whether to bring the cat into the house. Nah, let her get used to the shop. So he went into the house, tossed a bag of popcorn into the microwave, and set the timer. As the corn started to crack, he went into the living room, thumbed the TV remote, and slipped a Sopranos DVD into the machine. While the teaser to the show ran on the screen, he retrieved his popcorn, dumped it in a bowl, and opened a cold can of Mountain Dew. He came back into the room, sat down in the recliner. Put up his feet.
First, the edgy theme music. Tony lighting his big cigar, working down the toll road out of New York City, heading for Jersey. The second season, still had the World Trade Center towers in the New York skyline.
Pleased with himself, he addressed the image on the televison. “Thing is, Tony, you were born with a silver coke spoon in your mouth ’cause your dad was a made guy. Me, I’m a self-made man.”
Gator settled back and grinned.
It could work. If the right pieces fell in place. Yes it could. Special Agent Broker. Uh-huh. Man, I got a feeling you’re gonna make a big difference in my life.
When the phone rang, he dived for it, thinking it was Sheryl, breaking the rules, changing her mind, coming up tonight.
“Gator, it’s Cassie…”
Oh shit.
“You said you were going to bring me something.”
Chapter Twelve
Nina, holding it together, coached Kit through supper. When Broker came back into the house, she was ushering Kit from the kitchen, heading for the stairs, getting ready for bed. For once, Broker was almost thankful for clinical depression; Nina struggled with the most fundamental tasks, like sleep. Getting dressed. Exhausted, focused inward, she missed nuance, mood.
Once she would have spotted the change in the way he moved and nailed him the moment he came through the door. What’s up, Broker? You’re all jagged.
Kit’s fast eyes picked up on his edge but channeled it into an extension of her current personal drama. “Ditech?” she asked.
“I’m still looking, honey,” Broker said.
“We had a talk,” Nina said, her voice thready, as if unraveling with the effort. Then she signaled Kit with a raise of her eyebrows.
Kit balked, pursing her lips, then recited, “If Teddy Klumpe bothers me again, I should use my words and get help from a teacher. No hitting.”
“And?” Nina prompted.
“-and tomorrow after school I have to vacuum all the rugs in the house.”
“Good,” Broker said. “We’ll go over it again in the morning. Now, it’s time for bed.”
Kit huffed, folded her arms across her chest, and marched off toward the stairs. He turned to Nina, lowered his voice. “Maybe you should bunk with her tonight, until I find the kitty.”
“There’s wolves in the woods,” Kit called out. “They’ll eat her.”
“The wolves don’t come down this far,” Broker said, and immediately regretted it.
“That’s a lie, Dad; you showed me the tracks.”
“I’ll go out with a bowl of food and shake it. I’ll find her. And the elusive rabbit.”
“I heard that,” Kit sang out, a room away. “She ain’t an eloosof rabbit. She’s a toy. She’s not real, Dad.”
“Sorry,” Broker said. The kid had eyes like a hawk, ears like a bat. “Mom’s gonna sleep with you.”
Kit did not respond. Dejected, she trudged up the stairs. Nina shrugged, turned, and followed Kit.
First Broker scouted every room on the ground floor, looking for a sign that someone had been in the house. The new Dell computer was undisturbed on the small porch off the kitchen. Living room TV and DVD player still in place. Griffin’s old stereo system was still stacked on a wall shelf.
It was a revealing walk-through. He had not, until this crisis, really appreciated how stark their living space was. Three stacks of boxes lined a living room wall where they’d been placed in January, when they moved in. The living room was strewn with the weights Nina used to rehab her shoulder. Triage dictated Broker’s housekeeping efforts. Kit was not a TV kid, so, except for Nina’s weights, not much went on in the living room. Broker concentrated on the kitchen, the only room in the house that needed to function every day.
His personal pile of boxes fill
ed a corner by the desk. Books mostly, mementos, a few old piles of dusty paperwork stuffed among novels he hadn’t read in years. A yearbook from Grand Marais High, circa 1970, poked from the top box. Boxes that had followed him, from closet to closet, for decades. Except now they were in plain view.
He raised the desk blotter. Bill statements verifying the automatic withdrawals on the Hong Kong Visa. A few letters. Nothing seemed disturbed. Then he spotted the letter from John E. at Washington County, the note and remainder of a pay voucher. Shook his head. Once he’d never have kept anything around that hinted at his past in law enforcement. He reached out his left hand and raised the letter, let it drop, feeling the lingering ache as he extended his fingers. The ragged scar was still slick red where he’d taken a.38 slug through the fleshy pad of his left palm. Last July, disarming a crazy woman in Stillwater. On the Saint Vigilante Thing.
The day after he got shot, he’d followed Nina into the North Dakota Thing.
The North Dakota Thing had played out on a real bad day at the Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant.
Now here they were in Glacier Falls, eight months later, still trying to fit the pieces back together.
Broker turned away from the gloom that linked these thoughts. Continued his inspection.
If someone had come to rob, they were out of luck. He kept very little cash on hand. Used plastic for their groceries and expenses. The question of rent hadn’t really come up with his friend Griffin. Griffin took care of the utilities. They’d settle up later.
Think. Sometimes Kit played with the kitten outside and put food in a bowl on the back porch. Maybe that’s how…
Immediately he walked through the kitchen and opened the patio door. And there, just outside the door, he saw the orange pellets of Kitty Chow sprinkled on the snow. Back inside, he stared at the phone on the kitchen wall, an old rotary Bakelite model that Kit regarded with awe. A cordless set was plugged into the wall on the counter near the stove.
Call the sheriff ’s office and say what? Speculate that Klumpe knifed his tire and tried to poison a dog Broker didn’t own? How would that sound to a rural sheriff? Like some wimpy overreaction.
He turned away from the phone and walked into the living room. This was the kind of community where a certain amount of solving one’s own problems was the norm.
Which brought him in front of a red-and-black-patterned Hmong quilt hung on a portion of the wall. Nina had picked up the quilt in a Hanoi street market, back in ’96. Broker tacked the hems to dowels top and bottom and rigged a cord-and-pulley system so the quilt could be raised.
The purpose was functional, not decorative. He raised it now, tied it off on the hook on the wall, and stared at two stout oak cabinet doors three feet long. Griffin had crafted this locker with stout hasps that Broker kept fastened with a thick Yale lock. He carried the key to the lock on a leather thong around his neck.
The lock and hasps were untouched.
But he withdrew the key and opened the lock, slipped it from the hasps, and opened the sturdy doors. A faint scent of solvent and gun oil seeped from the cabinet.
The interior was taller than the dimensions of the doors suggested and held a built-in gun rack and some shelves, two drawers across the bottom. The rack held a.12-gauge pump shotgun, the heavy-barreled.257 Roberts that Broker favored for whitetail hunting, and an AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle. A green canvas case lay on a shelf and contained Nina’s Colt model 1911.45-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Four cleaning kits, one for each weapon, were stacked on the shelves. The drawers held empty magazines for the assault rifle, clips for the pistol, and several boxes of ammunition.
His hand briefly touched the black plastic stock of the assault rifle. He selected the shotgun and a box of.00 buck. Then he closed the cabinet, replaced the lock, snapped it shut. Lowered the hanging. Then he set the shotgun against the wall and paused at the foot of the stairs, listening to Nina’s voice, reading to Kit.
The bunny would turn up. Always did. Christ, man, settle down. The bowl could have been on the back deck, and the tire could be a slow leak. A defect. The antifreeze in the bowl was real enough. A thrown elbow. Petty payback for his morning. Okay. He could play that game if it came to that.
But he had to find the cat. Kit was right; there were things in the woods that would scarf her up.
So he climbed the stairs, entered the bedroom, and kissed his daughter good night, Nina on the cheek. He reassured Kit that cats always land on their feet. It really wasn’t that cold. The kitty would come home to eat. And Old Bun would turn up, like she always did.
After he had helped deliver the necessary cliches, he left them curled up with an American Girl Doll book. He came back down the stairs, put a bowl of cat food on the back deck, rattled it a few times, went inside. As he retrieved the shotgun, he stopped and solidly faced the fact he hadn’t kissed his wife on the lips for months. Nor had she offered those lips to be kissed.
Broker pulled on his boots, coat, a felt hat, and gloves. He stepped into the garage and pushed four shells into the shotgun, racked the slide, and set the safe. His gut told him that the door didn’t open by itself. The snow had stopped. Four fresh inches made a clean slate of the back deck. Switching on his flashlight, he walked out into the yard. Looking up, he saw that the lights in Kit’s bedroom had been turned off. A fitful northwest wind grumbled across the lake. Iron waves muttered on the shore.
Okay. So walk the property. Shotgun slung over his shoulder, flashlight in one hand, he shook the stainless-steel bowl of cat food. The rattle disappeared on divots of wind. As did his voice, mouthing words he never thought he’d ever be saying:
“Here, kitty, kitty…”
Chapter Thirteen
Gator went and got what he needed and then found himself making the drive across the Barrens for the fifth time that day. Getting dark now, night creeping down like a black garage door.
He felt lucky; if he’d lived a different kind of life, he might say blessed. This Broker guy, the cop, had fallen into his hand like a gift, he thought as he watched the familiar jack pine and muskeg filling in with ink. He could afford to be magnanimous with Jimmy and Cassie. And besides, giving Cassie her piece of cheese to nibble on would bolster her incentive to keep Jimmy on task. He was shaky, but he’d hang in. Just had to keep them focused on the money…
Coming up on the crossroads. Hmmmm?
What’s that? Alert behind the wheel, squinting in the twilight. Headlights knifed about a mile through the gloom. On the right side off the road…looked like they were over near the old Tindall place.
Gator shut off his headlights and turned off on Z going west, in the direction of the lights. There was just enough reflection off the snow to drive by. Soon he determined that the lights had indeed turned in at the Tindall place. About three hundred yards from the house, he pulled to the shoulder and turned off the engine. Several flashlights dipped and swung, outlining the windows of the old house.
Gator slouched back behind the wheel, reached for his smokes; decided to wait and watch. File it away for future reference.
There were five deserted farmhouses on Z alone. Another dozen sprinkled through the Barrens. Several times a week he would do a drive-by. Sometimes kids from town partied in the houses. And sometimes outsiders slipped in for less convivial reasons. Gator made a point to run them off. He kept the Barrens free of intruders. It was his buffer zone.
Sometimes outsiders coming in could be tough-guy wannabes, so Gator took more than a flashlight along on these nocturnal forays. Technically, as a felon, he had lost his right to own firearms. But Keith had sat down with Gator’s parole officer and the game warden and worked out an accommodation. As long as Gator continued to sniff out meth operations in the remote north end of the county, where Keith didn’t have the manpower to patrol, he could carry a gun north of Z to hunt in the big woods.
Tonight, he’d left his pistol back at the shop. Hell, being in such a good mood, Gator didn’t feel like stompin
g in and wrecking somebody’s party.
He started the truck, made a U-turn, headed back to 12. Half an hour later he was coming down Lakeside Road on the west side of the lake, thinking as he drove how he could spin this playground tiff with Teddy into something useful. Seeing’s how Keith had already been on the scene…
He was good at plans. Hell, he figured out most movie plots in the first half hour.
Plus he could give Jimmy some responsibility. Jack him up.
Jimmy Klumpe. Gator shook his head, leaned back in his seat, and ran through Jimmy’s story. Like the regulars at Skeet’s Bar observed after a few beers: Jimmy Klumpe had won the Moose Lottery.
Jimmy’s money dilemma started when his mom and dad were driving home from the little casino near Thief River Falls, three years ago January. Icy roads and a ground fog were a contributing factor, Keith Nygard wrote in his report. They rounded a turn, possibly too fast. Old Tom was known to have a heavy foot and also was an authority on everything, including how fast to drive on slick back roads. What it turned out he wasn’t so smart about was the bull moose that trotted right through a barbed-wire fence and into the path of his old Bonneville. They died instantly, Ed Durning, the medical examiner, said. In an explosion of air bags, trailing barbed wire, entrails, and moose shit, Keith Nygard said. Took two hours with the jaws of life for the Fire and Rescue boys from Thief River Falls to free the antlers that had pinned the bodies in the front seat.
Jimmy, an only child, turned out to be the beneficiary on their life insurance policies, and found himself in possession of a million bucks. Up till then, Jimmy’s life had been all downhill since he was homecoming king to Cassie’s queen senior year. He always drank a little too much and stayed tangled in family apron strings, marking time as a driver at his dad’s garbage company. Now he had inherited his dad’s house on the lake and Klumpe Sanitation, which consisted of three trucks, a garage, the dump, and the county contract.
