Vapor Trail pb-4

by Chuck Logan

  “Sheriff says you got priors. You’re over the line. That’s a commit to prison.”

  “Fuckin’ guidelines,” Ray said.

  “Yeah, but maybe we can get them to go for a departure from the guidelines.”

  “The sheriff didn’t say maybe. He said be quiet about the woman in the Saints jacket going in the church, and he’d get me a deal.”

  “What I want to know is, could it have been a guy dressed like a woman?” Broker said.

  “She looked like Robin Williams,” Tardee said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah, remember that movie Mrs. Doubtfire, where he dressed up in that padded costume and the wigs and shit? That’s exactly what she looked like. A fucking shim.”

  “Shim?”

  “A she and a him. An in-between.”

  “How tall?”

  “Too tall. About five eleven, but walking funny, like a kid in high heels. Like she was in built-up shoes. And, ah, she had a big ass.”

  “How so?”

  “Too big. I’m good on asses, but I’m better on pussy. See, I got hit in the war, and they put this steel plate in my head.” Ray thumped his skull. “Ever since, I got no sense of smell whatever; I can eat anything.” Ray grinned broadly and let his tongue loll inside his smile.

  “I’m impressed. So was there anything about her big ass that was distinctive?”

  Ray grinned. “Yeah, it was too big for the rest of her. And she didn’t move like someone who had a big ass. She moved like someone who had a pillow stuffed in the seat of her drawers.”

  “So it could have been a guy dressed up like a girl?”

  “Could of been, but probably not, unless you really want it to be,” Tardee said carefully.

  Broker let it go; he was getting personal again, trying to make it be Harry. He thanked Tardee and left the broken porch. As he walked toward the car, he heard Tardee whistling behind him. He was a good whistler. The Fat Tuesday lilt of “When the Saints Go Marching In” was unmistakable.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Easing from North End gravel onto city pavement, Broker remembered the book of matches he’d taken from Harry. He fished the square of cardboard from his chest pocket and rotated it in his fingers like prayer beads.

  He was starting to formulate a plan.

  He flipped open his cell phone, thumbed out Mouse’s card, and punched in his number. Mouse answered on the third ring.

  “So what are you doing?” Broker asked.

  “Driving back from federal court in St. Paul. They recessed on me. How’d it go with Harry?”

  “Not so hot; Ole’s was a setup,” Broker said. “He talked me into dropping by his place on the way so he could pack a bag. And he. . slipped out on me.”

  “Slipped out on you,” Mouse repeated carefully.

  “Where can we meet away from the shop?” Broker said.

  “Is this, like, getting real fucked up?” Mouse said.

  “Where, Mouse? I want to talk.”

  “Okay, since you’re supposed to have all kinds of bread stashed away, you can buy me a drink at Club Terra in fifteen minutes.”

  “See you there.”

  Club Terra would not have been Broker’s first choice. It was a supper club with a log cabin exterior across Highway 36 from the Washington County Government Center, so it did a brisk business with county workers. But he needed Mouse to level with him on Harry. So he drove to the restaurant, went in, and got a table just as the place was filling up with the late-lunch crowd. Mouse came in a few minutes later.

  The weather was getting to Mouse. After being in court he’d exchanged his suit jacket, shirt, and tie for a baggy cotton polo shirt that covered his pager and holster. The shirt stuck to his ample belly in dark patches of sweat.

  “Some weather, hey; and, ah, you look like shit,” Mouse said.

  “Christ, Mouse; half the county is here. I wanted to get away,” Broker said, suddenly self-conscious.

  “Stay cool. You wanted to get down and dirty, right? This is the place.”

  A waitress appeared. They refused menus. Neither of them had an appetite in the heat. Broker ordered ice tea. Mouse ordered iced coffee.

  “Harry says he’ll help,” Broker said.

  “Really?” Mouse said as he took a toothpick out of his chest pocket, put it in his mouth. “So where’s my cuffs?”

  Broker reached back under his shirt, took the handcuffs off his belt, and slid them across the table.

  Mouse inspected them and said, “There’s pieces of woody shit ground in the grooves here.”

  Broker didn’t answer, so Mouse ran his practiced eyes over Broker and stopped on the raw red marks on his left wrist. Then Mouse said, “You know, you’re, ah, wearing your hair shorter than you used to.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, it makes it easier to see things on your scalp, like, for instance, the black-and-blue goose egg behind your right ear.”

  “Shit.” Broker pursed his lips.

  Mouse raised his iced coffee, sipped, put it down, and said, “You gonna tell me, or do I have to torture it out of you?”

  “I turned my back on him,” Broker said.

  Mouse shut his eyes, grimaced, crossed his arms over his wide stomach, then raised his right hand and propped it under his heavy chin. “My fault. I shoulda come with you.”

  “No you shouldn’t have. It’s personal; this part at least.” Broker pointed behind his right ear.

  “You saying there’s more?” Mouse squinted and leaned across the table.

  Broker nodded. “Harry and I have this heavy private agenda we have to work through, right? But apart from that he wants to stay in touch. I think he feels left out.”

  Mouse shook his head, but he couldn’t entirely hide the admiration in his voice. “Fucking Eisenhower. When Harry’s drunk, he blames you for his wife’s death. Some people think he’s basically sworn to kill you; so John puts you next to him ’cause he thinks there’s some weird chemistry between you two that’s going to make him spill his guts.”

  “Kind of scary, huh? A man with a deviant mind like that being the sheriff in the fastest-growing county in the state,” Broker said.

  “So, did Harry tell you anything good?”

  “He told me that if the Saint isn’t”-Broker hooked the first two fingers of both hands and struck quote marks in the air- “doing God’s work, he might help with the catching part.”

  “Like he really knows something.”

  “There it is,” Broker said. “Of course he’d been drinking.”

  “Of course,” Mouse said as he rolled a toothpick across his mouth, fiddled with his napkin, and tapped his fingertips on the tabletop.

  An ex-cigarette smoker, Broker recognized the symptoms of the craving. In fact, he was starting to feel the nervous hankering toying powerfully with his insides. He made a mental note to buy some cigars, sort of as a tobacco methadone fix against the heroin lure of cigarettes.

  “He said that, huh?” Mouse said. Then he inclined his head and directed his eyes across the room. Broker followed the direction of Mouse’s gaze, through the crowd. Three people were moving from the reservations desk behind a waitress, going toward a table. Two men and a woman.

  Perhaps in thrall to status, they wore suits in spite of the heat-a blazer and skirt for the woman. They were too young and fit-looking to be normal county apparatchiks.

  “Look like lawyers,” Broker said.

  “Uh-huh. County attorneys, actually,” Mouse said.

  Upon closer inspection, Broker saw that the two men were not remarkable. The woman, however, put out serious candle power. Black-framed glasses magnified a friction in her eyes that could ignite fires. She had very short razor-cut black hair and a sinewy athleticism. The calf muscles in her tanned legs clenched at every step.

  “Stillwater girl,” Mouse said.

  “Say again?”

  “My dad used to say you can always tell a Stillwater girl by her legs. From going up a
ll the stairs on the hills.”

  There was only one female assistant prosecutor with a reputation for that kind of physical intensity. “Is that Gloria Russell?” Broker asked.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “And?”

  “And, well, you know-the Saint case was this real nightmare; it went through the county like an emotional plague. People quit; people went on medication; some people had affairs. Old Gloria hit for the cycle; she turned in her resignation, only they threw it back at her. She went on medication, and she had an affair.”

  “She did, huh?”

  “Oh yeah. A real double-scream-back-crawler. You know, Harry never once denied he was the Saint. He’d sort of smile and he’d say, ‘Well, somebody has to carry out the garbage.’ But the one thing he’d always deny was. .” Mouse inclined his head at the assistant prosecutor.

  “You mean. .” Broker said, craning his neck now to get a better look at her.

  “Big time,” Mouse said as he curled his left index finger into the hollow of his left thumb to make a circle. Then he inserted his right index finger into the socket and pumped it.

  Broker raised his hand and flipped it over, palm up. “So connect some dots for me,” he said.

  Mouse twisted his lips in a sour expression. “Hey, I gotta work here in this glass house. John E. brought you in to throw the stones.”

  “Mouse, there’s a dead priest with a Saint’s medal in his mouth.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Mouse made placating gestures with his palms. “So what do you want?”

  “You going to help me with Harry, Mouse? You were playing hard to get this morning.”

  “That’s before you got hit in the head and maybe handcuffed. Harry’s a great guy when he’s sober, and I love him. But he can be dangerous when he’s drinking. I mean”-Mouse carefully looked Broker in the eye-“he could kill somebody, right?”

  Broker nodded. “Yep. If he’s drunk and you get in the way of the wrong mood swing- Harry could kill you.”

  Mouse leaned forward and squinted. “Cut the shit, Broker; it’s the Mouse you’re talking to. .”

  “Okay, Harry could put one right here.” Broker tapped his forehead.

  Mouse nodded. “So you want us to put a Bolo on him for whatever it is he did to you, which you ain’t saying? Drag his ass in?”

  Broker caught a whiff of cigarette smoke gliding from the bar and all these vampire air sacs in his lungs sat upright in their coffins. “Nothing so obvious,” he said. “Picture somebody chasing him down the street and he’s blacked-out drunk. He took one of his favorite toys when he left his house-the one with the target knobs on the scope that’s registered out to twelve hundred yards. He could climb up in a building, and it could bounce strange.”

  “I hear you,” Mouse said.

  “Or less dramatic, he could seriously disappear, and we need him. So we use him and then we trap him.”

  “And drag him off to the hospital in a net like a wild animal.” Mouse grinned.

  “Exactly,” Broker said. “Remember what you said about checking every casino in a one-hundred-mile radius?”

  “That was a joke,” Mouse said, a little alarmed.

  “No joke. Can you do that? Quietly, like, don’t let your buddy Benish know. Fax Harry’s picture around to the security officers. I mean, we’re talking about a high roller who’s drunk, who looks like a skinny Johnny Cash, who has three red sevens tattooed on his right forearm. How hard is that?”

  Mouse nodded. “Maybe I can do that. I know a retired state patrol copper who runs security in the Grand Casino up in Hinckley. Maybe he can flog the network.”

  “We might get lucky. If I was Harry crashing and burning on my last hurrah, I’d hang in the casinos where it’s dark and cool and anonymous,” Broker said as he stared across the room at Gloria Russell in profile. She leaned forward, chatting intently with her colleagues. Her teeth flashed in a smile like crisp punctuation. She looked incredibly healthy and vital, as though she breathed better air, took better vitamins.

  “Okay, I’ll get on the casinos.” Mouse took a last swig at his coffee and set the glass down. “When do you talk to the archdiocese?”

  “Meet my guy in the morning,” Broker said.

  Mouse nodded. “When you get back, we’ll sit down and run everything we’ve got on Moros. You, me, and Lymon.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Maybe everybody was invisible down deep.

  Or were they just hiding what they were thinking?

  All the people she passed during the day. People she knew, went on break with. Even the man she’d let into her body. She couldn’t really see the pictures moving in their minds just behind their eyes.

  Windows to the soul?

  Hardly. More like the two-way mirror in the hard interrogation room. You could see out at them, but they couldn’t see in. They looked at you and saw their own reflection.

  But they knew you were there, watching.

  So more like-windows to the game.

  Angel was through with games.

  She was playing for keeps.

  And right now she was daydreaming in the heat. Driving from Herberger’s Department Store up on 36, she passed a digital sign on a bank marquee. The time, then: 102 degrees.

  The heat made her light-headed.

  Floaty.

  So get serious.

  Specifically, this afternoon she would be playing for keeps with Aubrey Jackson Scott. Aubrey was a freelance photographer. He lived in a river cottage on the St. Croix north of Stillwater. He was divorced. He drove a 1995 Accord. He had no police record. Just the one complaint.

  A neighbor couple had griped that Aubrey invited their eight-year-old daughter into his house to give her a new bathing suit. They suspected, but could not confirm, that Aubrey had taken photos of her when she put the new suit on.

  A Washington County deputy had talked to the parents. He’d signed off when he learned that the child refused to give back the suit. County, understaffed, had let it slide.

  The back-and-forth facts didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Aubrey’s name was number two on the list.

  Angel parked her car, gathered her shopping bag, and went into her apartment. Just as with Moros, she took time to prepare herself mentally. She sat down in her living room and stared at the face in the picture framed on the bookcase across the room.

  You told me I had to be strong.

  Then, methodically, she laid out her gear: the latex gloves, the medallion, and the wig. She kept two pistols in her desk drawer. She loved the.38. Its heft and bulk. But it was a revolver, and when she’d used it the first time she was damn near as scared as that creep Dolman when she heard it go off. She’d turned the volume on his sound system way up, and still she worried people would hear.

  So this time around she’d decided to do a little research on-line that took all of ten minutes.

  She typed HANDGUN and HOMEMADE SILENCER into Google.com and got hundreds of sites.

  The book she bought with her sister’s VISA card cost fourteen bucks and was titled Homemade Silencers Made Easy. Used automobile oil filters were the favorite home item recommended by the right-wing crazy who wrote this slim volume. But Angel couldn’t see lugging around a dirty, oily hunk of metal in her purse.

  Uh-uh. Angel preferred something clean.

  Like a twenty-four-ounce plastic Mountain Dew pop bottle. No complicated threading device. Just a big plug of duct tape attaching the bottle to the barrel housing of a.22-caliber Ruger Mark II target pistol.

  She bought the Ruger at a chain-store gun department using her sister’s driver’s license-same height, around the same weight, same eye color. And she’d worn her sister’s wig for the first time outside of the apartment.

  In her sister’s glasses, and the wig, the resemblance was uncanny, although her sister’s face in the license photo was much thinner than her own. So the salesman had perused the license, taken her sister’s name and social security number, and
submitted them to a computer background check.

  Two weeks later Angel was the owner of a new pistol, which-according to the author of Homemade Silencers Made Easy-was a perfect fit for the clumsy but effective pop bottle taped to its barrel housing.

  And, as the visit with Father Moros demonstrated, the silencer system worked just fine. The main thing was she had to get in close.

  Angel slipped out of her working clothes and her underwear. She removed the new bathing suit from the shopping bag, held it up in front of her, and pitched a sidelong glance into her full-length mirror.

  Close would not be a problem.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Broker drove around the back of the LEC, parked in the underground garage, and took an elevator up to the sheriff’s offices. Going into Investigations, he checked Lymon’s cube. Empty. He ignored the sullen nongreetings from the other cops, continued down the row of cubicles. “Narcotics,” he sang out.

  “We got a hell of a going-out-of-business-sale on Ecstasy right now,” a young voice replied.

  “Where are you?”

  “Other side of the cubes.”

  A young investigator stood in the aisle. He was dressed in filthy blue work trousers, a soiled T-shirt, steel-toed shoes. A pair of bulbous ear protectors was slung around his neck.

  “What are you supposed to be besides bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?” Broker said.

  The young cop shrugged. “Working a UC gig; right now I’m a tree trimmer. Got a chain saw and everything.”

  “You are. .?” Broker said.

  “Pete Cody. Narcotics.” Cody did not offer to shake hands. “But I heard about you. You’re the loneliest guy in the world, right?”

  Broker was not amused. “How’d a shrimp like you manage to grow up instead of being beaten to death on the playground?”

  Cody smiled. “Musta been all that mediation counseling, I guess.”

  Broker said, “You know anything about a guy named Ray Tardee?”

  Cody shrugged. “Sure, one of our perennials.”

  “Who’s prosecuting?”

  “Russell.”

  “Thanks.”