by Chuck Logan
Mouse shook his head. “Fuck that!”
“So that’s it. Stonewall until I get back in town,” John said. They all stood up.
Mouse said, “We’ll keep it low profile, talk to the congregation. .”
“All six of them,” Lymon quipped.
Broker nodded. “I’ll touch base later this morning after I call on Harry.”
Lymon stepped closer. “You know, you might need backup going out to Harry’s. I could. .”
“Take off,” John said sharply to Lymon as he took the young detective by the arm and walked him to the door. Then he turned to Mouse. “When it gets right down to it, Broker is going to need a hand with Harry.”
Mouse shook his head. “Sure, but I’ll do it under protest. I don’t go for strong-arming him into the hospital.”
“See what it’s like here?” John said to Broker. “I got a mutiny.”
“So hang me,” Mouse said. “Harry breaks the law, I’ll put him down. But all Harry did was mouth off to Lymon. I ain’t defending it, what he said, but all he did was say some words.” Mouse paused and said to Broker, “What you and him have in the past is your business.” Mouse turned and left the room.
“I’m going to be real popular around here,” Broker said. “And what’s Lymon’s story? The dude is barely housebroken.”
“It’s a brave new world, buddy. Lymon is pretty typical of the new breed. Smarter than most. He went straight from high school in the suburbs to college to patrol in Park Rapids. You remember in St. Paul, the first thing they had us do at rookie school?”
Broker shrugged. “Sober up?”
“You know what they do now? They put gloves on them and stick them in the ring. Most of these kids have never been hit in their life. Then they take them to the morgue to see their first dead body.”
“Fuck me dead,” Broker said. When he and John went through rookie school, 90 percent of their class was ex-marine and army grunts back from a shooting war.
“And you gotta watch what you say these days. There’s age discrimination, there’s sexual discrimination. .” John wagged an admonishing finger and raised his eyebrows for emphasis. “There’s racial discrimination. And there’s a need to be generally sensitive. For instance, Lymon is pretty serious about his family and going to church.”
“Gosh,” Broker said.
“That’s better. Now, here’s my cell; I’ll be monitoring it full-time in Seattle.” John handed Broker two cards. “Give your cell on the second one.” Broker scribbled the number and handed the card back. Then John asked, “Who are you going to approach at the archdiocese about Moros?”
“I thought Jack Malloy,” Broker said.
“He’d be my choice,” John said.
“I’ll call him right now,” Broker said and reached across the desk, picked up John’s receiver and dialed information, got the number for Holy Redeemer in St. Paul, called it, and asked for Jack Malloy. He told the secretary it was urgent. The voice on the line said that Father Malloy was not available this morning. Broker covered the receiver with his hand and said, “Playing golf.” He requested a sit-down with Malloy as soon as possible. He used the word urgent again and left his name and cell number.
When he hung up, John said, “Make nice to Mouse; he’ll come around and fill you in.”
“Yeah, right,” Broker said. “Sounds like Lymon was part of the scene that got Harry in trouble.”
“Harry comes into the unit stinking of booze, and somehow Lymon picked up the Mr. Coffee before he did, so Harry yells, ‘Who gave this nigger cuts to the front of the line?’ Bigger than shit in front of half the squad.”
Broker shook his head. “Vintage Harry.”
John pointed a no-nonsense finger. “I’m thinking when Harry sees I sent you after him, he’s going to blow his top. Everything’s going to come out. You push him hard on the Saint. But then he goes inside, in-patient, four weeks at the CD ward at St. Joseph’s. No treatment, no badge, no gun. You got it?”
“I got it,” Broker said.
“I mean, you get Mouse to help you, and you walk him into the hospital to the admitting desk, and you don’t leave till he has a little white plastic patient ID strapped on his wrist. And be careful; I don’t think Harry’s a threat to the public safety in general. .”
“Just to me,” Broker said.
“Well, yeah.”
Chapter Seven
Broker had never been to Harry’s home, but he knew roughly where it was and he had Mouse’s instructions. It was the only house on a small unnamed lake in the middle of eighty acres of fallow farmland off the Manning Trail north of town. To get there, he drove past other parcels Harry had sold off and which now sprouted new homes in developments named Oak Grove Marsh or Pine Cone Ridge.
Wearing Diane’s death date engraved in 7s on his arm, Harry hit Las Vegas, Atlantic City, the bigger casinos in the Midwest-he gamed across the board: blackjack, poker, slots.
And since her death he just couldn’t seem to lose no matter how hard he tried. Ten, twelve years ago he’d started investing his winnings in farmland outside Stillwater just ahead of the housing boom.
Getting closer, Broker mulled over the standard lecture about the foolishness of gambling and how it usually ended with stating the exception that proves the rule: Of course, some people do win.
Harry didn’t have to be a cop. He certainly didn’t need the pension. Broker figured he liked to pack a gun and have the authority to pull people over and stick a badge in their face. Possibly he kept the job just to spite John Eisenhower, who had tried various ways to get him to move on.
Broker consulted the directions, pulled off Manning, and drove down a gravel road hemmed by red oaks and overgrown fields. The dull space inside where he carried Diane Cantrell’s death began to ache. So what was it going to be? Manhandle a blubbering drunk to Detox?
Or High Noon?
Maybe it was being back in touch with the pent-up momentum from all the years of wary hostility, worrying about Harry. Maybe it was just being back in harness. Whatever it was, Broker was leaning forward, working an edge.
He came to a plain mailbox with the name Cantrell handwritten on it in slanted block letters. He turned down the gravel drive that snaked off into the woods.
Halfway down the drive he hit the brakes and pulled sharply to the side of the road going into a turn.
Twenty yards ahead, in the belly of the turn, a silver Acura TL type S skewed at an angle, the left front fender punched in against the trunk of an oak tree. Broker glanced at the sheet Mouse had given him. The make, model, and the license matched. Harry’s personal car. The passenger-side door was sprung open. Broker stopped his truck, got out, and approached cautiously, circled, saw that the driver’s-side door was dented, striated with impact, and jammed. The air bag had deployed.
He checked the road, the surrounding brush. No sign of Harry.
He leaned into the interior through the open passenger side and saw a few dribbles of what looked like dried blood on the driver’s seat and smeared on the air bag.
Dried. It would be hours old.
He then studied the crash site and saw how the locked wheels had carved deep trenches in the gravel when Harry lost control overdriving the turn.
Broker looked back in the car. Like a drunken red flag, the keys were still in the ignition. On a hunch, he reached in and twisted them, to engage the electrical system. The digital clock on the dashboard blinked on and off, repeating the same number over and over: 6:42. Then the clock flickered, went dim, and then opaque.
He left the keys in the car and carefully inspected the road leading away from it. Squatting, moving slowly on his haunches, he searched for a blood trail.
A careful minute later he found a small ant war seething over a pizza crust. He returned to the car, leaned inside, and carefully inspected the smear on the air bag.
It had a dried anchovy stuck in it.
Okay. The carnage appeared more involved with cuisine than b
loodshed. He got back in the truck and drove toward the house, parked, and got out.
Harry lived in a modest, comfortable rambler with stout vertical cedar planks for siding and a broad wraparound cedar deck. The door to the three-stall garage was open. A fishing boat sat on a trailer in one stall; the other two parking spaces were empty. Broker walked up and looked in the boat. It looked as if it had never been used.
He left the garage, went up the steps onto the deck to the door, which was also open. He peered in through the screen. Quiet. Empty. He rang the bell. Then rapped on the doorjamb.
“Yo? Anybody home?”
Getting no answer, he walked around the house on the deck. A good-size lawn in need of cutting inclined down to the lakeshore. There was a small dock with a rowboat tied off on a piling; a picnic table and a Weber grill sat on a patio. Several bullet-scarred cast-iron targets in the shape of pigs lay on the picnic table. Another was propped up on a stand. Broker estimated it was fifty yards from the picnic table to the house; extreme pistol range for anyone except an expert.
He turned toward the house and looked into the windows. In the living room, he saw a flat white Broadway Pizza box lying on the carpet next to the couch. A sliding patio door led from the living room to the deck. Like the front door, it was open. This time Broker slid back the screen and stepped in.
“Hey? Anybody home?”
He walked a quick circuit of the house and found clothes hung on doorknobs and strewn in the hallway. He stepped over a pile of damp towels and entered the bathroom. Little wads of crumbled toilet paper littered the sink, dotted with blood. A wisp of bloody fingerprint marked the mirror glass of the cabinet door. A disposable Bic razor lay in the bottom of the sink.
The garbage can overflowed in the kitchen; dirty dishes piled the sink. The refrigerator contained nine bottles of Pabst, a piece of cheese green with mold, and three slices of pepperoni pizza on a plate.
Harry’s contradictory patterns were evident in the littered house; underneath the surface debris the fundamentals-the carpets, counters, bathroom tile-were scrupulously clean.
The bedroom had rumpled sheets, an overflowing ashtray, an empty Scotch bottle. . His eyes stopped at the framed wedding picture on the bureau. Diane. Harry. And Broker. Another woman whose name he did not remember. The maid of honor.
He turned away from the bedroom and went down the stairwell to the basement, which looked like the nuts-and-bolts aisle in Home Depot. Shelves went from floor to ceiling and were thick with a variety of cardboard and plastic containers. Except these boxes weren’t for nuts and bolts; they held primers, powder, bullets, casings, and reloading dies. There had to be thousands of rounds of ammo here, in every conceivable caliber.
In the old days in St. Paul, Harry was famous for experimenting with pistol loads and trying them out on stray dogs.
A broad workbench spanned the area, with four reloading presses bolted to it. Two gun safes sat along the wall next to the shelves. Perhaps as a clue to Harry’s current state of mind, the heavy doors on both safes were ajar.
Broker did not profess to know a whole lot about firearms. But he knew there were reloaders and there were serious shooters, and then there were wildcatters like Harry. And he knew that the small orange press on the right side of the bench was for sizing lead bullets and that the RCBS reloader next to it was for precision loading. These devices identified Harry as ultra-hard-core.
Broker walked up and perused the stacked boxes of reloading dies on the shelves. His eyes stopped on a box that read 338/378 K T. He vaguely understood this was a maverick caliber that was not commercially produced.
Curious, he went to the gun safes and looked in the first one. It contained all shotguns. He went to the second and saw a dozen rifles in the rack. His eyes immediately sought out the longest one; sleek and black with a distinctive muzzle brake perforating the end of the barrel.
This had to be the.338. Harry would have painstakingly assembled this rifle himself.
One look at the target knobs on top of the big Leupold field scope, and he was sure. The range finder was dotted in increments of 100 yards out to 1,200.
Broker lifted the big rifle and ran his palm along the custom fiberglass stock. He saw the Can Jar trigger with the two-ounce let-off and the bulky safety switch from a 1917 Enfield, the highly modified Enfield action.
This was Harry’s idea of a good time. Go out on a calm day and punch holes in a pie plate at 1,000 yards. He’d always filled the sniper slot in the SWAT team. That’s what the Marine Corps had trained him to be. And that’s how he’d spent his time in the war.
Broker eased the rifle back in the safe and pushed both the doors until they clicked shut.
He went back up the stairs and returned to the living room, stooped, and inspected the pizza box. A yellow VISA receipt lay among a debris of chewed crusts. He recognized Harry’s scrawled signature. It was dated 18:04 yesterday afternoon. Three empty bottles of Pabst were strewn at the foot of the couch along with a TV remote.
If the clock in the Acura had indeed jammed upon impact, that gave Harry thirty-eight minutes to make it from Broadway Pizza in downtown Stillwater to his driveway. Entertaining Lymon Greene’s suspicions for a moment, Broker speculated that Harry could have driven to St. Martin’s on the way home, parked his car, climbed into some kind of disguise, gone into the church, shot the priest, got back in the car, continued on home eating his pizza with one hand, steering with the other-and put his car into a tree. It was theoretically possible.
Darin Kagin’s silent chattering face flickered on CNN at the edge of his vision. The TV had been left on, the sound muted. Broker reached over and tapped the remote button. The TV zapped off with an electronic sizzle.
He looked around one more time. No Harry.
He picked up Harry’s phone and dialed Anne Mortenson’s number from Mouse’s instruction sheet. No answer. Then he tried the public library number and was transferred to the reference desk.
“Anne Mortenson?”
“Yes?”
“This is Phil Broker with the Washington County Sheriff’s Department. I’m looking for Harry Cantrell. Can you help me?”
There was silence on the line for a beat, two. “Yes, he called this morning and asked to borrow my car.” Her voice was level and direct.
“And?”
“Pardon me?” Anne said.
“Did he borrow your car?” Broker said.
“Yes. His broke down. So I drove over and picked him up. He dropped me off at home; it’s only a few blocks to work.”
“Did you happen to see his car?”
“Ah, no. He met me at the end of his drive by the mailbox.” For the first time there was a slight waver in her steady voice. Concern, like a dropped stitch. “Is this official or personal?”
“Welll. .” Broker drew the word out.
Anne’s voice regained its strength. “It’s official, I imagine. Harry is under a cloud. It’s about his drinking.”
“Okay, you’re right. I need to find him.”
Anne cleared her throat. “When he’s been drinking, I usually don’t encourage that behavior in any way. But on Wednesday mornings Harry visits his mother in the Linden Hills nursing home. I made an exception for that.”
Broker hid his dismay. Initially, she had sounded smarter than that. “Linden Hills near downtown, on Green Street.”
“That’s it. He brings her flowers. She doesn’t recognize him anymore, but she recognizes roses. That’s Alzheimer’s for you. He left here over an hour ago. If you hurry, you might be able to catch him.”
Broker pulled a pen from his chest pocket, poised to write on Mouse’s instruction sheet. “I need a description of your car.”
“Yes, it’s a new Subaru Forester, red, mono color, no cladding. The S model.” Anne gave him the plate number. As he wrote it down, she thought out loud, “Do you think maybe I made a mistake?”
Broker didn’t want to give her a straight answer. “The sooner I find h
im, the better,” he said. Then, after a quick thank you, he hung up and dashed for his truck.
Leaning forward in his seat, he pushed the Ranger over the speed limit, ran stop signs, and passed on the shoulder. Broker came into town hot and swung into the nursing home lot. He scanned the aisles of cars. No red Forester. He went inside, stopped at the reception desk, and inquired.
A nurse walked him down a hall into a private room. An elderly woman sat up behind a tray that was positioned across the bed. She was very involved in staring at a bouquet of roses.
“Every Wednesday morning Harry brings her flowers,” the nurse said.
“How long ago did he leave?” Broker asked.
The nurse led Broker back into the hall and chatted with another nurse. She turned to Broker. “He was in and out, just making a delivery. So it was quite a while ago.”
Back in the parking lot, Broker raised his eyes to the canopy of elms and cottonwoods where millions of leaves hung absolutely still, pressing down. His body suddenly crossed a threshold, and his sweat came all at once. Mopping his wrist across his brow, he stared across the hills, at the gingerbread facades on the houses, the quaint steeples, the river, the bridge.
Missed him.
Chapter Eight
Broker hated offices, so he moved fast through Washington County Investigations-a grid of gray cubicles with six-foot privacy walls that housed General Investigations, Fraud, and Narcotics. Art Katzer’s empty office and a receptionist’s desk were located at the head of the room. Interrogation rooms lined one wall; more cubicles made up the other.
He was looking for Mouse.
Several cops stirred around desks in white shirts and ties. They wore round leather backings with five-pointed county stars on their belts, along with holstered.40-caliber pistols. They were mostly older, mostly developing bellies. This being the far reaches of the Twin Cities’ eastern suburbs, they were all white.
