by Chuck Logan
“You got something you want to say, say it.”
Trying to keep the mellow mood going, he shook his head. “It can wait.”
She studied him for a moment. “You’re thinking, When is she going to call the doctor at Bragg, huh.”
“I guess,” Broker said. There it is.
“Pretty soon,” she said with a sliver of the old steel in her voice. “And then we’ll have a long-overdue talk. You and me.” She grimaced ever so slightly, looked away, and picked up the cigarette, started out of reflex to put it in her lips.
Broker felt the tiny slippage in the air, the day starting to slide.
But then she snapped her wrist and darted the cigarette across the table into the glowing coals in the stove. “You know,” she said, giving him that sidelong glance, “I wouldn’t blush if you wanted to fool around again tonight. Unless Griffin snapped your dick string lifting those weights this morning…”
Chapter Forty
Because Gator generally didn’t trust excitement, he compensated for his giddy Saturday and weird brush with Griffin by working all day on the Moline. Important to keep the shop running normally. Never tell when Mitch Schiebel, his parole officer, might stop by for a spot-check and cup of coffee. By sunset he’d finished replacing the clutch and flywheel.
He put away his tools and washed up. Sheryl had not left a message. And he was all right with that. She wouldn’t talk to the gang until tomorrow morning. Why waste a drive to Perry’s pay phone just to be anxious together?
Just after he turned the display light on his show tractor the phone rang. It was Cassie.
“Gator, you think you could drop by again?”
“Uh-uh, I’m through making house calls,” he said in an idle voice as he watched the black kitty jump up on the office desk and stretch.
“C’mon, just one more time, honest,” she said.
Gator reached out his hand and stroked the cat’s glossy fur, feinted with his finger, sending the cat back on its haunches, paws up; then he darted in the finger, tickled it on the chest. “You want something, you’re going to have to come get it,” he said into the phone.
“I thought you didn’t want me to come out there?”
Gator lifted the cat and let it pour from his hand, this smooth effortless motion. “Maybe I changed my mind,” he said.
“I gotta think about that,” Cassie said.
“You do that,” Gator said. Then he ended the call. For a moment he had a fleeting sensation of what it might feel like to get everything you want.
He pushed up off his chair and, feeling more balanced after a day spent with his tools, took some coffee, put on his coat, went out through the paint room door, and walked through the old machines in back of the shop. Looking at the sky filling in with dark clouds, he made a mental note to check the Weather Channel; see exactly what was behind the front taking shape to the northwest.
As the light left the sky, an afterglow seemed to cling to the snow cover on the fields in back of the shop. The snow cover had melted then frozen again, forming a tough crust. Faintly, then louder, he heard a swelling chorus of howls. The pack was active. Wolves could run across the crusted snow in which the deer foundered. Made them easy targets.
From the accelerating howls, he assumed they had located such a deer; a straggler, injured or just weak.
People in town had come to associate him with the wolves, because he lived alone out here. Even attributing to him some of the animals’ wildness.
He did see one comparison.
The meth they cooked would prowl along the margins of the population, selecting out the dumb, the naive, the weak. Like the wolves, it would devour the strays who, ensnared in their addiction, could no longer run.
Fact was, he would be providing a social service. In producing the drug, he would be culling out the weak and infirm. By killing them, he was improving the quality of the herd.
The wind gusted, and he turned up his collar and sipped the coffee. Hearing the howls and thinking of Sheryl negotiating with a killer brought to mind his own kills.
In addition to the tractors, his dad had left a locker containing a rifle, a shotgun, and three pistols. After his folks “died,” he greased the weapons up with Cosmoline and wrapped them in oilcloth; a souvenir German Luger, two small.22-caliber pistols, a.12-gauge shotgun, and a 30–06 deer gun. Took them into the tractor grave yard and hid them in the chassis of an ancient Deere. They stayed there for years. As a kid he favored the Luger, but as it turned out, when he returned to the farm, the Ruger.22 proved more useful.
Homicide 101 on Cell Block D over bootleg cigarettes and contraband potato hooch. A.22 works just fine, but you gotta put the sucker right up against the poor fuck’s head you’re gonna kill. Or better, stick it in his ear and burn the body. That way, nobody’s gonna know the body has a bullet in it ’cause the round won’t exit the skull.
Like a TV show beamed in from a satellite on the dark side of the moon. Stuck way off the menu past the music channels, the auctions and the religious nuts. Always ran in the back of his mind. Way back.
He could watch it if he chose.
Not his mom and dad. That was more like fate. Predetermined-he had just provided an extra nudge. Like the wolves again, cleaning some slime out of the gene pool.
The rule certainly applied to his cousins, who were filthy people. Untidy in their morals and their housekeeping. Preying on their own kids. Fucking scum.
The day Marci Sweitz got poisoned, he saw a way to solve his biggest problem, them snooping around his shop. Not that much different from taking out the trash for Jimmy to pick up. Clean up the neighborhood. Shot them fast coming into the stinking house. Herded them into the bathroom to control them and popped them all carefully in the throat. Multiple times with the Ruger.22. Soft tissue bleeder wounds, taking care to avoid the bones. Soft-tissue wounds would burn away in the fire. Billie, Vern, Doug, and Sandy last of all. Disgusting little tramp kid poisoner, down on her knees, slobbering in the spoiled food and dog crap. Begging, had this baby pacifier in her mouth; all that Ecstasy and meth had given her fits of jaw-clenching and teeth-grinding and had probably ruined her oral sex career.
“Calm down, Gator, please. Let me do you. You know how good I am.”
She was actually frantically grabbing at his belt when he put the barrel to her throat.
Swallow this, bitch.
Then he opened the propane coupling on the hot water heater in the disgusting basement, turned on the hot water full blast in the kitchen and the bathroom. Half an hour later, standing on his porch, he watched the sky light up over the tree line.
The world could only improve when you stuffed all that walking garbage in a plastic bag.
The howls rose in their usual spooky intensity, toying with the short hairs on his neck. At this point the wolf logic hit the unresolved contradiction of his life. His contribution to upping the mental hygiene had amounted to killing off Bodines, his own family.
That left Cassie. And him.
Got him thinking how there’s wolves and there’s wolves, like the alpha wolves who cull the pack.
He had watched Broker chopping wood in back of his house that first day. But he’d only seen him up close once. Fast but close, going past him on the ski trail. But he got a good look at the man’s severe agate eyes under those shaggy eyebrows. Thinking back on it now, Broker looked sort of like a wolf.
To hear Sheryl tell it, this Shank fella was a real pro. Looks like they were going to find out.
Gator looked up at the dark wall of nimbostratus clouds coming in low-snow clouds. He shook off the chill, dumped his coffee, walked to the house, went inside, and shut the door tightly against the baying of the hunting pack. Dumb, thinking like this.
He jumped when the wall phone rang in the kitchen. Approached it tentatively. Picked it up and heard Barnie Sheffeld’s gritty voice. Barnie had the antique Case on display at his implement showroom in Bemidji.
“Thought you might
want to know,” Barney said. “Got a buyer for that Case. When it’s all wrapped up, you be looking at eighteen thousand, how’s that.”
“Hey, Barnie, that’s great,” Gator said, grinning.
After a few more pleasantries they ended the call, and Gator paced the cramped kitchen. It was like a sign.
Like-after all the planning and hard work, he and Sheryl were going to succeed. He was dreaming barefoot, sand between his toes. Boat engines would be cleaner than country tractors. Surf and sun. No more skinning his knuckles in a freezing junkyard, looking for parts. He’d take his time. Put together his own boat. An island runner. Things to learn, navigation, charts…
Never seen the ocean. Just Lake Superior.
Damn. He cocked his head and imagined a gruff shadowy gremlin god for grease monkeys and dope-dealing jailbirds who rewarded hard work.
Imagined this crafty demon looking up from counting his money. Imagined him smiling.
Chapter Thirty-one
Sheryl spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon smoking, watching daytime TV. And watching the phone. She imagined Gator pacing in his shop, watching his phone. No sense talking about what they didn’t know. Especially since it would involve signaling on his pager with a phony number, which would send him on a half-hour drive to the pay phone at the grocery store. So she didn’t make the call. Finally, at one-thirty in the afternoon, her phone rang.
“Country Buffet, in Woodbury, that mall off Valley Creek Road and 494, you know it?” said a calm voice without introduction. She knew the restaurant…
…and the voice.
“It’s a dump,” she said.
“Correct, dress according. Wear a Vikings sweatshirt. Say in an hour. Two-thirty.”
Jesus. It was moving fast. “I’ll be there.” The call ended. Sheryl was impressed. That was fast. Which meant Werky’s “investigator,” Simon Hanky, was on the job. Simon wound up going by his first initial. There was a word in poetry, onimana something. Like when a words sound like the thing it describes. That was him to a T.
Drop the Y.S. Hanky. Then drop the Y.
Shank did some time for manslaughter after Werky pleaded him down from second degree for killing his ex-wife’s boyfriend. In the joint, Danny’s organization was impressed by his icy focus and recruited him after he decimated a bunch of Mexicans in the showers.
He had matured in prison and never killed in hot blood again. Now he only operated with methodical planning. Some people were into beginnings, and some people like to stretch out the middle. Shank was an expert on endings.
He killed people.
This corkscrew sensation squirmed through Sheryl’s chest. Old tapes. She had been around a lot of dangerous men in her life, and most of them had made her nervous, mainly because they were unpredictable and had poor impulse control. Shank had zero impulses, barely a pulse.
Wow.
Shit, man, something must have clicked for them to trot out the Shank.
At two-thirty sharp, Sheryl, face washed clean of makeup, hair gathered in a ponytail, stood at the checkin line at the Country Buffet chewing Juicy Fruit. She wore a pair of faded Levi’s, a brand-new, itchy purple Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt, scuffed tennies, and a cheap Wal-Mart wind jacket. Some Spanish was being spoken in the line, several gangs of Mexican laborers coming in for all-you-can-eat-a grotesque gallery of obese flesh fighting a losing battle against gravity. On top of which, excessive meat was apparently difficult to wash; the place smelled like an elephant house. Should hose them down, she was thinking when she heard the familiar voice behind her, in a loud whisper: “Hey, Sheryl Mott, long time no see.”
She turned and saw Shank, icy smooth, standing behind her. Sinewy, six feet tall; he had white-blond polar bear hair and eyebrows and startlingly pale blue eyes. They’d been an item briefly, when she returned from Seattle, just before she quit cooking for Danny’s crew and took up her waitress career.
The smooth pigment of his face avoided the sun and reminded her of the texture of mushrooms under cellophane in the produce section. He wore busted-out denim work duds and beat-up steel-toed boots to fit in with the crowd. Looked skinnier than the last time she saw him.
“Shank. You lose some weight?”
He heaved his shoulders, said, “I feel like a real heel-I shoulda called. You see, right after the last time we were together I tested HIV-positive…”
Sheryl clasped his horn-hard hand, noting the manicured nails set like jewels among the callus. “You’re shitting me, right?”
“Yeah,” he grinned. “It’s the South Beach diet.”
She cast her eyes around, sniffed. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
“Let’s say I’m comfortable around real fat people. They eat like gamblers play slot machines. Totally oblivious to what’s around them.”
Sheryl gave him an appreciative nod. She liked what she saw so far. They were treating her decent for a change.
Shank paid admission, and they followed a tired-looking waitress who seated them at a booth, brought them glasses for their beverages, and said in a tone both cryptic and bored, “You can start now.”
“You hungry?” Shank asked after the waitress left them alone.
Sheryl rolled her eyes in mild revulsion at the shuffling feeding frenzy and shook her head. “Coffee black,” she said.
Shank got them two cups of coffee, resumed his seat across the table, and spread his hands in a respectful preamble. “First, Werky says Danny says hello.”
“Yeah, okay.” Sheryl took a deep breath, let it out.
“And he says to treat you right. You’re the birthday girl. ’Cause, guess what-so far your end checks out. There was a dude name Broker who hung out on the fringe of things. Seems he was more into running guns around than dope. Though there is a story about him bringing in a semi flatbed from North Dakota; piled with hay bales on the outside, bales of weed on the inside. He fixed things, had a bunch of tools in a truck and some landscape equipment. You been out to Danny’s place in Lakeland?”
“Yeah, before the feds took it away for taxes.”
“So, remember the backyard, all the terracing, rocks and shit?”
“Overlooking the river?”
“Yeah, well, Danny told Werky this fuck, Broker, did all that. And one of the guys recalled he put in Jojo’s sound system in Bayport.”
“Bingo,” Sheryl said.
“Meets our probable-cause threshold,” he said. “I don’t suppose you have a picture?”
“’Fraid not.” Sheryl thinking, Christ, I just became an accessory to murder one.
“No problem.” He leaned forward, agreeable. “So what’s it take to locate this ratfuck? You know where he is, correct?”
“Uh-huh. Him, his wife, his kid.”
“And to give them up you want…?”
“Let’s just say, down the line, I got this little project you guys might be interested in…”
“Uh-huh. You know, your name came up a couple weeks ago. Billy Palmer saw you in Arelia’s on University. Said you were talking around selling some shit?”
Sheryl sniffed, looked away, “Billy wasn’t interested, treated me like some meth whore.”
“So, what? You sold to another culture, huh? Mexicans probably, the brothers aren’t really into meth…”
“Do I have to answer that?”
“Nah, it’s cool,” Shank said.
“Heck, you know me.” She wiggled her hips in a taut rumba. “Wanna rattle my pots and pans.”
“I thought you gave it up.”
Sheryl leaned across the table. “Look, the reason I been laying off the scene is there’s too many meth suicide bombers out there burning down houses and littering the countryside with toxic waste. Agreed?”
Shank folded his arms across his chest, listened.
Sheryl carefully arranged her coffee cup, a spoon, and the napkin on the table. Tidying up before she began to speak. Then she said, “I’m not asking for anything for this n
arc. He’s a gift, understand?”
“Uh-huh. Right. Continue,” Shank said.
Sheryl’s face clouded with concentration. “Let’s just say I’ve spent the last year assembling state-of-the-art gear, the perfect partner, the perfect location, and the perfect operation.”
“Perfect,” Shank said judiciously, giving her his best North Pole stare.
“Absolutely fucking perfect,” Sheryl insisted, meeting the stare.
“Okay, go on…”
“Thank you. My problem is logistics and distribution. I need someone who can provide precursor and chemicals in large volume and deliver it in a discreet and timely fashion. If I can get that-with my setup-I can cook twenty pounds a heat-”
Shank made a face. “Twenty pounds, bullshit.”
Sheryl’s eyes didn’t waver. “Twenty pounds. No mess. Pfizer couldn’t do it cleaner. That’s twenty pounds of ninety-nine-percent-pure crystal four times a month for two months.”
Shank rubbed his chin, squinted at her. “How’re you going to have all that smelly chemical crap coming and going without drawing attention?”
“We’re way out in the sticks, right? So we have a huge tank of anhydrous parked in a barn, and”-Sheryl paused for effect-“we got the local garbageman.”
“Huh?”
“Here’s how it could work. Somebody with the resources-maybe you guys-phonies up the supplies to look like trash and trucks it to the local garbage dump, after hours. We can work out some bullshit contract to make it look cool. Our guy loads it in his truck and delivers it when he runs his normal route. We cook, then the garbageman disposes of the waste back in the woods, then brings the product back to the dump. You pick up when you deliver the next load of supplies.” Sheryl savored the way Shank’s cool eyes appreciated her, like he’d just spotted a plump seal on an ice flow.
“No shit,” he said, steepling his fingers, sounding impressed. “A super lab.”
