The Breaker

by Nick Petrie

  Peter had lost his cowboy hat at the loading dock. Behind them, finally, rose a distant duet of sirens.

  “Come on.” Peter turned toward the market. “We need to talk to that guy in the suit. This wasn’t some random stickup. You don’t steal a phone with an AK-74.”

  “You don’t want to go back there,” Lewis said. “All those cameras, remember?”

  The cameras. The police.

  Peter sighed.

  June was going to be pissed.

  5

  Three blocks from the market and just moments after the staccato rattle of an automatic weapon, nobody on the street seemed to have noticed. They jogged back toward the coffee shop where they’d left June.

  Two blocks out, lunchtime walkers were still rooted to their shadows like startled sheep, uncertain of what they’d heard or what to do next. One block out, they met the first frantic people running in the opposite direction. By the time they made it to the coffee shop, they saw shoppers shoving their way out of the market.

  June was gone. Peter’s blue sweatshirt lay abandoned on their table. Peter pulled his phone from his pocket and texted her. All okay here. Where are you?

  No answer.

  “You know where she is,” Lewis said.

  Peter felt the answer like a pit in his stomach. June was a journalist to her bones, hardwired to get after it. Which would put her inside the market, chasing the story.

  The pit in Peter’s stomach got deeper. How long had she waited before going after them? If she’d been hurt or killed by the gunman’s stray rounds, Peter would never have forgiven himself. He’d hunt that fucker to the ends of the earth.

  The pair of sirens sang louder.

  Peter pulled the hoodie over his gray T-shirt as he slipped into the coffee shop, where he took a mesh-backed trucker’s cap off the display shelf, dropped a twenty in front of the clerk, and left without his change. Lewis was already on the move. Peter caught up and together they ran around the east end of the market building, past the outdoor tiki bar, and toward the delivery area.

  Five minutes after the gunman had opened fire, Peter stepped over the crushed cowboy straw and looked across the low metal fence, afraid of what he might see on the other side. The parking lot was emptying out. Dazed bystanders hugged themselves and each other. June stood beside them with her phone out, asking questions and taking pictures.

  With the sight of her, Peter felt his heart begin to beat again.

  She hadn’t been a straight newspaper reporter for years, but he could see her as she might have been at twenty-one, fresh out of J-school, lit up by the action and the hunt for the truth of what had happened.

  Peter raised a hand and called out. “June.”

  She turned and saw him. A wave of relief washed across her face. “You’re okay? Lewis is okay?” Peter nodded. She glared at him. “You are such an asshole.”

  “Better than the alternative,” he said. The schoolkids were clumped together by the bus under the fierce gaze of their teachers. They looked scared but unharmed. “Did anyone get hurt?”

  “Nobody that I’ve seen,” she said. “What happened?”

  Peter told her about the gunman taking the phone, then preparing to execute the victim. “Did you see a guy in a cream-colored suit? Shaved head, scared as hell?”

  June cocked her head and pushed her mouth sideways and squinted into space. Peter knew this meant she was running her mental fingers through the giant filing cabinet of her brain. “Yeah. He climbed the picnic table to get over the fence. But he had his phone in his hand.” The squint got sharper as she focused inward. “Actually, he looked familiar.” June met a lot of people in the course of her work. A keen memory for faces was a crucial tool in her kit.

  The sirens blatted, getting close. Peter was running out of time. He didn’t want to be inside their perimeter when they finally arrived. But he should have heard a lot more than two cars. “Where the hell are the cops?”

  She made a face. “Chasing phantoms. I texted Zedler and he said some dickhead called in a half-dozen bomb threats all over town.” Dean Zedler was a coworker at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, another investigative reporter she’d worked with in Chicago, years ago.

  Over her shoulder, Peter saw two cruisers come to a stop on Water Street, lights flashing, sirens now mercifully silent. The patrolmen climbed out, thick in their body armor, hands on their holstered weapons, heads turning like gun turrets. In their hats and sunglasses, they didn’t look that different from the gunman.

  Peter said, “Tell them they’re looking for a guy with a big beard and a red cap and jacket riding a crazy-fast electric bike, headed south on Broadway. He’s probably in Ohio by now.”

  She shooed him away with the back of her hand. “Get the fuck out of here before some rookie recognizes you from a wanted poster.”

  Peter blew her a kiss and turned to go.

  Behind a shipping container, Lewis stood amidst scattered brass, staring at the Isuzu box truck. The front was stitched with a row of bullet holes. “Cuttin’ it close.”

  “We got lucky,” Peter said. Past the truck was a clear line of fire to the parking lot and a busy street and a cluster of office buildings a block away. He thought of how the gunman had stood with his AK on full automatic, glasses askew, firing indiscriminately. He wondered how many other people weren’t so lucky.

  “Found something.” Lewis held up his open pocketknife. A pair of razor shades hung balanced on the blade.

  “You don’t want to leave those for the police?”

  The tilted smile. “They never caught me with all those years of trying. Figure we got as good a chance as anyone.” He raised a shoulder in an elegant shrug. “We find anything useful, we mail ’em to June at the paper. She’ll get ’em to the cops.”

  Peter looked at him. “You’re going to dust for prints?”

  Years back, for professional reasons, Lewis had taken a couple of criminology classes at the community college. He had once been a very successful armed robber.

  The tilted smile got wider. He offered Peter the knife handle. “That ain’t half of it. Take a look.”

  Peter raised the glasses closer and saw a green light above the right lens. Then he noticed nearly invisible buttons in the plastic of the temple. And a pin-sized dot in the center of the bridge.

  He looked at Lewis. “Camera glasses?”

  “I figure that green light means they’re still recording. I’m guessing they’re wireless, streaming to the guy’s phone or laptop, anything with enough memory to hold all that video. Prob’ly got some nice footage of your face, too.”

  Peter hit the button with a fingernail and the green light turned off.

  The cops would be turning over every rock in six counties to find the gunman. When they did, they’d get his electronics, too.

  If Peter wanted to stay free, he’d better find the guy first.

  6

  In the nine months since he’d come back from Iceland with his face on a wanted poster, Peter had tried to keep his head down. He’d stayed out of bars and bad neighborhoods and other places where trouble might find him.

  The problem was that Peter liked trouble. In a way, he needed it.

  On nights when he couldn’t sleep, when the werewolf began to howl inside the cage of his mind, he’d lace up his old combat boots and go for a long run through the city. Sometimes he’d push himself hard along the lakeshore and let the cool breeze blow through him. Sometimes that was enough.

  Other times, he ran the darker ways, putting himself in the path of predators. Occasionally, he got lucky. Once he’d found three young men wrestling an overserved young woman into a car. It wasn’t exactly a fair fight, but Peter had held himself in check. No permanent damage. That wasn’t the point. The point was to be useful.

  And to let the werewolf out of its cage, if only for a fe
w minutes.

  * * *

  —

  As Peter pulled the flatbed Toyota into the driveway, his phone lit up with a call. “Hi, Franny. What’s up?”

  Fran Anderson was a rail-thin ninety-seven-year-old widow who lived across the street. As far as Peter could tell, she spent her days on her screened porch or at her front window, talking back to the radio as she glared at the drivers of passing cars, smoked Marlboro Lights, and made a list of chores for Peter. She had an avocado-green wall-mounted phone with a forty-foot cord for the handset so she could call from anywhere in the house.

  “You’re home early, kiddo.” Part concern, part accusation. Fran had a clear position on lazy people. “Did you get that replacement burner for my stove?” She’d slammed a cast-iron frying pan onto her stove in frustration after the Cubs fell out of the pennant race.

  “Special order,” Peter said. “It should come next week.” Like almost everything else in her house, the stove was older than Peter’s dad. “Everything else okay?”

  “Still vertical,” she said. “Are you going to rake my leaves? And maybe clean my gutters?”

  “I hope so,” Peter said. “I might have to take a trip, and I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. I’ll let you know.”

  The previous January, after Peter and June had moved in, he noticed that his neighbor’s walk went unshoveled after a snow, so he took care of it. Several snows later, she beckoned him to her front door, where she waited with a box of Thin Mints in one hand and an envelope in the other.

  The cookies had been expired for three years and the box was cold to the touch. Inside the envelope was her name, phone number, and the key to her house.

  “If my porch light is still on at seven in the morning, you better come look for me.” She tapped the frosty box with a bony finger. “You play your cards right, kiddo, you’ll get another box. I got a freezer full of ’em.”

  “Ma’am, you don’t even know me,” Peter had said. “You sure you want to give me a key?”

  “You have a good face,” she’d said.

  Now he stood in his kitchen in the fading afternoon light, checking the contents of the backpack he’d put together nine months ago, in case he had to run. That old tension inside him like a spring wound too tight, the need to take action.

  He wanted to be somewhere else when the U.S. Marshals found him. He wasn’t going to let June get charged with aiding and abetting or harboring a fugitive.

  The charge would be righteous, too. Because for Peter, June was his safe harbor from the storms of the world. Wherever she lived, that was home. He just had to hope he could find his way back to her. And that he’d still be welcome when he got there.

  He had to admit, he’d grown attached to the house. It was one of Lewis’s rentals, a basic 1950s colonial that backed onto the Milwaukee River Greenway, a half-wild tree-filled steep-walled ravine with the river running through the bottom, eighty feet below. The Greenway had miles of trails and linked a half-dozen parks. Peter could step out his back door and walk for hours on narrow, winding trails and see very few people. The street was only one block long, but part of a larger quirky network of streets aligned to the contours of the ravine. There was a giant old elm in the front yard. Lewis and Dinah and their boys, Charlie and Miles, lived three doors down.

  When Peter moved in, he and Lewis had replaced the walls in the back half of the house with floor-to-ceiling windows on both floors that looked out on the ravine. In the spring and summer, with the sun filtered green through windblown leaves, it had felt like a treehouse. In the fall, with the maples and oaks and birches changing colors, it was like living inside a painting.

  He’d been looking forward to seeing the leaves drop entirely, when the bare trees would stand like sculptures along the steep slopes of the ravine. He’d wanted to see the winter’s first frost on the branches, the first fallen snow on the bones of the land.

  The illusion of living outside had helped the static fade, at least most of the time. He felt like he was making progress. He and June had shared a bed consistently for the first time since they’d met. They’d shared a life.

  June had landed a journalism fellowship at Marquette University so she could work on her book about the Washington insider who had almost started a war. The fellowship came with a desk at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where she’d found the lively camaraderie that she’d been missing since she joined the virtual newsroom of Public Investigations.

  Peter spent his days working with Lewis, first renovating the rental, then expanding Dinah’s kitchen down the block, then beginning the rescue of a severely neglected bungalow in Washington Heights. Peter always finished the day tired, hungry, and dirty, feeling like he’d done something useful. He’d found a weekly veterans’ group. He’d gotten back to yoga and meditation, which his shrink recommended to help the post-traumatic stress. The war still lived inside him, as it always would, but the static had softened and the tightness behind his eyes had begun to ease.

  Now that life was over.

  Peter had done the right thing, he knew that. He couldn’t watch a man carry a rifle into a crowded building and do nothing. He had plenty of regrets, but going into that market wasn’t one of them.

  And none of those kids had died.

  Peter would count that as a win.

  7

  The side door banged open and June walked her bike into the kitchen, her work bag slung over one shoulder and her face flushed pink from the ride. She often said that one of the best things about living in Milwaukee was the fact that everything was within bicycle distance.

  She hung her helmet on the handlebars and bent to remove the Velcro band that kept her pant leg out of the bike chain, all while keeping her eyes locked on Peter at the table, his open go-bag in front of him.

  It was an oversized daypack that carried a change of clothes, a fresh burner phone, a multi-tool, a liter of water and a handful of granola bars, a backpacker’s hammock and rain fly, a decent first aid kit, twenty thousand dollars in small bills, and three sets of false documents that included driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and credit cards. It also held a Vietnam-era Colt Commander that Lewis had given him. It wasn’t a great weapon by modern standards, but Peter only kept it to calm his nerves. If push came to shove, he told himself he’d go to jail rather than hurt another policeman.

  The documents were easier to obtain than he’d thought they would be. Lewis had kept in touch with his contacts from his former life, including a friend at the DMV and a printer in Wauwatosa who was a genius with Photoshop. Lewis didn’t mind helping. Sometimes he missed the old days, too.

  “That’s it?” Her face was expressionless, her green eyes cool. “You’re leaving?”

  “Just for a few days,” Peter said. “Until we’re sure they haven’t run that market security video through facial recognition.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Better you don’t know,” he said. “I don’t want you to get in trouble. I won’t go far.”

  June dropped her bag on the side table with a thump, then combed her fingers through her red pixie cut, smoothing out her helmet hair.

  “I spent the whole afternoon chasing down the Public Market story.” Her voice sounded casual, but Peter knew better. “It’s a big deal because of the location, but otherwise, there’s not much to it. Aside from some flying glass in an office on Michigan Street, nobody got hurt. It’s really just attempted robbery and discharge of a weapon. The shooter vanished without a trace. The victim’s gone, and he even got his phone back. The market cameras aren’t exactly cutting-edge. The police don’t know a damn thing. Plus some lunatic carved up two guys with a machete on Hampton and Teutonia this afternoon. So unless something new happens to make the Public Market a priority again, this story will be gone in a couple of days.”

  She looked him right in the face. “Or is there some
thing else you’re planning to do?”

  She knew him so well.

  “Lewis found a pair of sunglasses,” Peter said. “The gunman’s. They’re video glasses, and they were recording the whole time, streaming to his phone or laptop.”

  He’d researched the glasses on the way home and learned that they connected to a device via Wi-Fi, but thankfully had no GPS. Lewis had already dusted them and found no fingerprints. Now they sat on the kitchen counter beside a jar of loose change.

  “And what,” June said. “You’re leaving here and going after him? That’s not your damn job. Turn those glasses over to the cops. Fucking stand down, Marine.” June’s vocabulary would make a drill sergeant blush. “You stopped a massacre, you don’t need to be the police, too.”

  “That sunglasses footage has my face in it. It won’t be crappy public security footage, either. If they catch him, they’ll be able to catch me, too. Then they’ll start looking at Lewis.”

  Except for his time in the army, Lewis had been a career criminal from the age of thirteen until he and Peter had come into a financial windfall several years before. Lewis had washed the money through various investments, but anyone looking closely could find hints of his past. Peter was afraid that his carefully rebuilt life, which now included Dinah and the boys, might not withstand prolonged scrutiny.

  “Then throw the damn glasses away. Or better yet, put them somewhere safe in case you need to hand them over later. This is not your fight, okay? Your current mission is your own damn life.”

  “If I get caught,” he said, “you’ll get charged, too. I’m not letting my bad decision to go to Iceland ruin your career, ruin your life.”

  She put her hands on her hips. Freckles flared bright on her face. For a slim woman, she took up a lot of space in the room.

  “You dumb fuck,” she said. “Don’t you know a goddamn thing about women? I’m not mad about your decision to go to Iceland. In retrospect, it was the right thing to do. I’m not even mad about you ending up on the FBI’s Wanted list. I’m mad—no, I’m royally pissed—that you lied to me about going. Because I was scared to death, okay? Scared not knowing where you were, or what was happening, or whether you were okay. And I don’t ever want to not know again.”