by Chuck Logan
They let it cook between them for a few seconds and then Wales resumed: “Downs says some people back in your state think you’re one of the bad guys. Eight years back you dropped out of police work, showed up in Vietnam. The story goes you dug up a shitload of lost gold bullion. To hear Downs’ version, you’re a cross between a mercenary and a pirate.” He paused. “You want some water or something? You don’t look so hot.”
Broker held up his hand. “Infection.”
“Uh-huh. So—are you some kind of freelance pirate, or what?”
Broker defaulted to his basic operating persona. He maintained strict eye contact and kept his voice flat and steady. “Wales, I own this little resort up on Lake Superior. We got pretty good walleye and lake trout fishing if you’re ever up that way.”
“Yep. Downs told us. He also told us you’re married to Nina Pryce, a gal in the Army who’s stirred up enough controversy that Downs says she got her name in Newsweek a couple times. Saturday, I got Nina Pryce showing up in my county. Sunday, I got you.”
Broker watched Wales furrow his forehead, the sheriff thinking he might try to stare Broker down. Wales decided not to and nodded. “Okay?” He opened his large hands in a reasonable gesture. Broker noticed he wore a copper bracelet around his right wrist. “I’ll make this simple. The federal undercover population of my county has just shot up considerably in the last two days. All I want to know is—are you part of the problem or part of the solution?”
Broker was exhausted from the drive, his hand hurt, his head hurt. All the unflappable reflexes he’d cultivated over the years failed him utterly. He was an angry dad whose kid had been deserted. Fuck a bunch of feds. “Goddamn bitch,” he muttered. “All I know is, I came to get my kid,” Broker said hotly.
Wales sensed a chink in Broker’s surface and his demeanor toughened perceptibly. “You and your wife are broke up, right?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Well, just what is it that your wife does in the Army?”
“Last I heard she was in Italy.” Broker hoped that was general enough. Goddamn you, Nina, I’m going to wring your neck.
Wales squinted at Broker. “She’s a long way from Italy now.”
“Guess so. We’ve been out of touch.”
Wales leaned back and steepled his fingers. He stared briefly at a county road map that hung on the wall. “How do I say this?”
“Try straight ahead.”
“Straight ahead it is. Nina showed up with this Jane lady and they put considerable effort into looking, ah, like they were involved together.”
“Say again?” Broker came forward slightly in his chair.
“Traveling as, ah, a quarreling couple,” Wales said.
Broker stared at him.
“Actually, we don’t have a whole lot of experience with this sort of thing out here…” Wales talking slower now, deadpan, drawing it out and studying Broker’s feverish face for a reaction.
“C’mon, Wales. You don’t strike me as a guy who talks sideways,” Broker said.
“Alternative lifestyles. I believe that’s what you call it in Minnesota, ain’t it?”
“Wales?”
“Out here I guess we’re less kindly disposed toward…alternative lifestyles, but naturally we’re working on it,” Wales said.
“What exactly is it you want to tell me?”
“This Jane lady Nina’s traveling with works real hard at looking sexy in a strident way that excludes men. She comes across queer.”
“Ah,” Broker said as a jagged fever spike flared up through the roof of his mouth and jabbed into his brain.
Wales continued his careful scrutiny. “Gotta give them an A for effort. You worked UC, you know how hard it is to put an agent into a small community. I didn’t buy it at first look, but there’s some who did. Like maybe their intended target. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s just bored and this gambit amuses him.”
“You might as well tell me the whole story,” Broker said in his best neutral voice.
“Sure, I can do that. Yesterday around noon this soap opera rolls into town. We get a call, two women having a domestic in the parking lot of a virtually closed local bar. They got a little kid with them. So our deputy goes and cools them out. Various accusations pass back and forth. My cop separates them. Gets them to agree on a plan to diffuse the conflict. The plan is to locate you to come get your kid. Jane gives my guy a contact person to find you. Jane takes your kid and checks into the motel. Then Nina…”
Wales paused, massaged his right wrist where he wore the copper band. “Arthritis. Copper’s s’posed to help. Anyway, when Nina doesn’t show up at the motel, Jane calls my deputy as per the arrangement. He calls the contact person who turns out to be the sheriff in Cook County, Minnesota. Now, we get to wondering—why is a county sheriff involved?
“Then Sheriff Jeffords calls me and asks me, as a favor, to make extra sure nothing happens to your kid on account of you and him are buddies. Meanwhile, your Nina runs off with the bar owner. Seems they saw they had something in common from the git. To wit: a drinking problem.”
“Aw god.” Broker sagged forward, elbow on knee, face in his hand. “Go on,” he said. The fever had now divided into a lot of little spikes that started to seethe behind his eyes like flames, or maybe snakes. He struggled to keep a straight face.
Very casual, very sly, Wales hit Broker with his crack shot. “By the way. Nina and Jane rolled into town in this broken-down Volvo.”
“Volvo,” Broker said in a strangled voice.
Wales grinned. “That’s how my guy read it. He said that underneath their bullshit, these two chicks had the look of folks who might arrive by Humvee, or in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, or by fuckin’ parachute…”
Broker held up his hands. “I give up. You’re right. The people she hangs with would turn Volvos away from her funeral.”
“And those people would be…”
“Nina never brought her work home.” Broker clicked his teeth together. “The fact is, she ain’t brought herself home, either, the last couple years.”
“You ever heard of the Purple Platoon?” Wales asked.
Broker shook his head. “Where’d that come from?”
“Your friend Downs, he’s got a photographic memory, I guess. From an article he read. What about the term D-girls?”
Broker stared at him. “Got me.”
“C’mon, Broker,” Wales said softly. “Try D for Delta.”
Broker slumped his shoulders. “Wales, man, I don’t know. I just come here to get my kid clear of whatever’s going on.”
Wales leaned across his desk and said, “Maybe.”
They stared at each other.
Slowly, employing a reasonable tone of voice, Wales said, “Look. The guy she took off with is named Ace Shuster. He did a bit for manslaughter ten years ago. Everybody, including me, believes it was self-defense and the jury stuck it to him. A case of personal and local politics. He drinks too much and considers himself a ladies’ man. And his dad had a moment of notoriety a couple years back as the biggest whiskey smuggler in North Dakota. But the way they do it, they haven’t been breaking any state laws. The dad split for Florida and left Ace behind to sell the family bar. And probably, from time to time, Ace ships a little booze north, like a thousand other saloons between here and Washington State. But his heart ain’t really in it, because the truth is, Ace ain’t such a bad guy. We also believe, but cannot as yet prove, that the little asshole who runs Ace’s bar, Gordy Riker, is moving methamphetamine precursor, and anything else that pays the freight, down from Canada…”
Wales’ voice was picking up momentum. “I talked to people in Bismarck who never bullshit me. There is no state operation aimed at Ace Shuster currently in the works.”
Broker stared at Wales’ face. It was a rugged, compassionate face, like the perfect uncle or the perfect sergeant. Wales narrowed his eyes. “Let me tell you how it is. I got three full-time deputies for this who
le county. There’s one state highway patrol copper…”
Broker interrupted. “I saw a bunch of brand-new Border Patrol Tahoes parked at the motel on the way in.”
“Right. After 9/11 they started sending guys from Texas through here on thirty-day rotations. We got three official border crossings in the county. They close between ten at night and six in the morning. The BP sits at the customs stations each night just in case Al Qaeda comes trotting down the road in platoon strength chanting the Koran.”
“I wish I could help you, Wales,” Broker said.
“Lemme put it to you this way, Broker. You remember Gordon Kahl?”
Broker nodded. “Tax resister, Posse Comitatus type. There was a shoot-out here in North Dakota, early eighties. They got him later someplace down south.”
“Arkansas. But the scene here is what I’m getting at. Feds came strutting into Medina and brushed the local cops aside. Dumb shits. Set up an ambush on the road. Two federal marshals were killed and Kahl got away. Lot of people think that wouldn’t have happened if they let the local sheriff handle it.”
Wales smiled tightly and paused to let his words sink in before he resumed talking. “I got two hundred miles of wide-open border, and, like I said, three official crossings under the watchful eye of the U.S. Border Patrol.” He stood up, planted his wide knuckles on his desk, and enunciated very clearly: “And I got twenty-three prairie roads cutting through the fields that people been using for a hundred years. Some of them are graded and can handle a semitrailer.”
He paused and took a breath. Then he said, “So I only got one question: WHAT THE FUCK IS ARMY SPECIAL OPS DOING IN MY COUNTY!”
Chapter Twelve
Broker left the sheriff’s office pissed, but also experiencing fits of wonder and disbelief at what Nina and her crew were up to. He got back in the Explorer, continued down Highway 5, and found the city park sign and an arrow pointing north. Two blocks later he passed the elementary school.
Like Jane said, it was hard to miss.
Broker stared up at a perfectly restored Spartan missile at the edge of the park grounds. Looming fifty-five feet tall, the antiballistic missile was painted white with accurate black tail and fin markings and a vertical stack of uppercase letters spelling US ARMY.
He left the Explorer on the street and walked up to the missile and read the plaque at the granite base, which announced that the missile was given to the people of Langdon and Cavalier County during deployment of the Safeguard Anti-Ballistic Missile Facility.
Only then, looking at this memorial, did it finally dawn on Broker that he was in the heart of the old ICBM, ABM belt. He remembered back to the 1970s and ’80s, all the talk about the good life in Minnesota until some party pooper pointed out that the state was right in the path of the prevailing winds from the missile fields in North Dakota. In other words, if the worst happened, North Dakota would take the first hit, but Minnesota would catch all the fallout.
Nina had picked an interesting locale.
He crossed the park grounds and entered a low building that abutted the fenced-in swimming pool. He told the employee behind the counter he was here to get his kid and went out onto the pool area.
Summer squeals and splashes greeted him, kids in water wings throwing balls, riding on Styrofoam snakes. Parents sat along the poolside, a few dangling their legs, more of them at tables under umbrellas.
Broker spotted her in the pool putting serious moves on the water. Even in his wounded hand he felt the instant ache of absence, four months’ separation. Kit Broker, seven years old, in an apricot Speedo swimsuit, goggles, hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, was busting her butt, doing a fairly decent crawl, cranking out laps all alone in the right-hand lane.
A watchful presence who had to be Jane paced her up and down the pool. Broker recognized her voice from the telephone as he walked up:
“Long and strong, Kit. Long and strong. Short and fast won’t do it. Let’s try for twenty strokes on this next lap.”
She wore a plain black tank suit over a sleek coat of fast-twitch muscle. Dark short hair, the sides showing a flash of scalp, a touch of style to go with hoops of metal pierced into the edges of her ears. All together it added a glint of pagan wildness to her tired brown eyes. Not flashy and not subtle. And Broker disagreed with Wales. Jane didn’t look especially sexy or dikey. She looked exhausted. And, sure, she was sharp—as in sharpened to too fine a point. And just plain dangerous, the way someone strung out on speed is unpredictable.
As Broker came up to the edge of the pool he scanned the crowd of parents and watchers and settled on the older guy with sandblasted ash hair. He had the deep face and arm tan of a man who works outside. His muscular legs were pale in comparison. The leisurely wide shorts and oversized orange and red Hawaiian shirt didn’t go with the face, whose pale blue eyes, relentlessly tracking the scene, had forgotten how to relax over twenty years ago.
The moment Broker started toward Kit, Hawaiian Shirt uncoiled out of his chair with slow intensity. His large blunt hands, attached to thick-veined forearms, moved to a hover near his waist, eyes scanning.
Then the eye contact, the recognition, the easing back.
Okay. So Sheriff Wales did have excellent instincts.
Kit was swimming with the sharks.
“Dad-deee…”
Kit shot up, gleaming, out of the water, hoisted herself out of the pool, and ran to him, a blur of freckles and red hair. She jumped into his arms. Broker grimaced and grinned at the same time, hugging the happy squirm of his daughter as he got covered in wet kisses and chlorine. Taller by a good inch since he’d last seen her, Kit was starting to show some of the lean lioness density she inherited from her mother. Broker got thoroughly wet in the process and grimaced when her knee banged his injured hand.
“Kit, hey, look at you.”
She had her mother’s eyes and color. She’d acquired her mom’s scary habit of totally focusing her attention. The habit of picking up small details she got from both of them. “What happened to your hand?” she asked.
“Oh, I hurt it working.”
“Can I see it?”
“Okay. But later. So where’s Mommy?” Broker asked, managing to keep his voice cordial.
Kit knit her brows—the brooding expression came from her dad. “Mom’s at work,” she said. Then she brightened. “I helped. We were in a play.”
“You were, huh? So who’s watching you?” He hefted her in his arms, settling her weight on his hip. She laid her cheek along his neck and nestled in, molding into his hollows. She raised her eyes and said:
“Auntie Jane and Uncle Hollywood.”
“Uncle Hollywood?” Broker nodded, turned, and stared at the gaudy Hawaiian Shirt. “And this must be Auntie Jane.” Broker turned to face the woman in the black swimsuit.
She extended her hand. “Jane Singer. How you doing?” Her grip was a little too firm. An edge of challenge in her eyes was ambiguous and sexually nonspecific. Like a dare to guess where she was really coming from. She’s young, overtrained, and very very tired, Broker thought.
Kit interrupted their mutual inspection, squirming from his embrace.
“Daddy, can I show you something?” She scrambled from his arms, looked to Jane for a second, and then crouched in racing-dive position at the end of the pool.
“Swimmers, take your mark. Get set. Go!” Jane said.
Kit sprang forward into the air, swept up her arms for more loft, clasped them over her head, and cleanly cut the water with nary a splash.
“All right!” Broker said, impressed.
“She has talent,” Jane said simply.
Broker briefly watched his daughter go down the pool. She was a strong swimmer. She was also the only kid in the pool not playing. And that was probably as much his fault as Nina’s—poor kid, condemned to a life sentence with Broker’s and Nina’s genes. He turned and stared at Jane.
She met his eyes in a level gaze and said, “How’s your hand doin
g? We heard you got dinged yesterday.”
Broker decided not to ask her how she got her information.
“You gonna tell me what’s happening here?” he asked.
“Sure. Let’s put Little Bit in the shower back at the motel and talk.”
Broker waved to Kit. When she scrambled out of the pool he bundled her in the towel that Jane held out. Four months ago when he’d done this he’d thought of her as a baby. Something different now. It had to do with the way she used her eyes, how she held herself. She’d changed into a miniature woman. When Broker started to lead his daughter to his truck, Jane gently intervened. “We have a system. Follow us to the motel.”
Broker decided not to fight the system just this once. He followed Jane to the famous red Volvo, pointed to his Ford. She nodded, got in with Kit, and drove away. A dusty gray Chevy truck pulled in behind her. The Old Man And The Sea was at the wheel. Broker came last.
They parked at the motel, went up a flight of stairs to the room.
“Go take a shower and wash your hair. And use the conditioner—you gotta get the chlorine out or it’ll turn your hair green,” Jane told Kit.
“Okay.” Kit gave Broker a hug and raced into the bathroom. A moment later the water started running.
“She seems to be holding up pretty well,” Broker said.
“She’s very on-task and mature for her age. Plus, she understands what her mom does for a living,” Jane said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“At the very end in Vietnam, you were in MACV-SOG with Nina’s dad. Everyone was leaving, but the two of you went back in to bring out your Vietnamese agents…”
“I knew Ray Pryce,” Broker said simply.
Jane studied his face and said, “Only one of you came back out. For most of Nina’s childhood, her dad was deployed in forward areas. Nina was raised by her mom back in the States.”
“So?”
“So, the shoe’s on the other foot and you don’t like it. You should be big enough to handle Nina’s success…”