by Chuck Logan
Yeager leaned back and rubbed his chin with the knuckles of his right hand. “Something to be said for rushing in. I watched that Columbine thing live on TV. Those Colorado boys sure didn’t do any rushing in on that one.” He cut Broker with a frank look. “Just my opinion—but my gut read was if there would have been more dead cops, there would have been less dead kids.” After making his point, Yeager swung his eyes back on the road. Then he said, “Your wife and her army pals are old-style, when it comes to rushing in…”
Broker didn’t take the bait and so Yeager drove in silence. They passed two deserted farmhouses in as many miles, the driveways filled up with weeds, the white paint on the wood siding peeled back to gray pith. Stark as rib cages left to molder in the wheat.
“Looks like the real estate market is kinda depressed,” Broker said.
Yeager shrugged. “Some of it’s consolidation. Big ones eat the little ones. Cheaper to just plant around the abandoned houses than tear them down. But some of it’s just changing times. That last house, they still farm but they moved into town. When I grew up we had animals, an orchard, a big truck garden—enough stuff to keep a family busy. And a cushion to fall back on during a bad year.” Yeager twisted his lips in a cynical smile. “In addition to durum, we used to grow more of a certain kind of kid out here. Yeah, well—couple years ago they closed down the Future Farmers of America program at the high school.”
Yeager slowed as they came up to a long capsule-shaped white tanker on a wheeled gurney parked next to the road. He pointed to the hose coming off a coupling. “This is a dumb shit, leaving his hoses on the tank.”
“I don’t follow,” Broker said.
“You’re out of touch, Broker. These white tankers you see all over. It’s anhydrous. Liquid fertilizer. There can be enough ammonia left in the hoses to cook a batch of meth. A gallon of anhydrous is worth less than half a buck to a fertilizer dealer. But it converts to two ounces of meth, worth a thousand bucks on the street in Grand Forks, Fargo…Minneapolis.”
They lost the asphalt and were driving on gravel now.
Yeager jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Those deserted houses we went by? Perfect sites for Beavis and Butt Head meth labs. Little assholes come up from Fargo, Bismarck. Road-trip around, assembling their cook kit, then come up here for the free anhydrous sitting all over the place. Then they find a deserted house to cook in.”
Broker nodded. “It’s just starting to hit Minnesota. Since they regulated the ephedrine, it’s harder to cook it down from commercial cold medications, like Sudafed. Can only buy two packs a pop.”
“Yeah,” Yeager said. “They have to cover a lot of territory to come up with quantity. Mostly it’s kids making it for their personal use. The real problem is the border.”
Broker saw a cluster of buildings. A flutter that could be flags.
“Maida,” Yeager said. “Port of entry.” He turned left on a less maintained gravel road. They bumped along in silence for a couple miles and then Yeager turned right into a rutted path. Just two tire tracks running off into the green, empty, treeless horizon. But they were well-worn tracks, no grass growing in them. Yeager drove slower now, the weeds swishing up to the windows of the cruiser. Finally he stopped the car. “Let’s get out, stretch our legs.”
They walked down the path. Yeager pointed to the ground that was damp enough to clearly show fresh tire treads. “Mulberry Crossing. Active.” They continued walking. A hundred yards further and the path turned and paralleled a slight road embankment. A yellow sign was set in the ground next to the tire tracks that climbed the embankment. It said: ILLEGAL BORDER CROSSING.
“See how easy it is,” Yeager said.
Broker nodded. “This is Canada.”
“Yep. And in good weather this prairie road will support a tractor-trailer. Pick a no-moon night. Turn off your lights. From here to the road we came up on,” Yeager pointed back toward his cruiser. “Maybe twenty seconds and you’re across. Like we were talking before, less and less people living out here now. And them that do, hell, they all shop in Canada, because the dollar buys more. They see somebody coming through here at night, it could be their neighbor buying fertilizer at a forty-percent savings. Just come across, go east, in an hour you’re on the interstate.
“So,” Yeager went on, “ephedrine is still easy to get in bulk in Canada. Say, a case of seventy-five thousand pills might go for eighteen thousand bucks. Makes about eight pounds of meth that wholesales for around forty-eight thou. Figure a hundred cases of pills in a trailer. Adds up to serious money.”
Broker squinted back toward the customs station. “What about the border patrol?”
Yeager smiled. “They say they got sensors, but I don’t hear any alarms going off, do you? They started sending more bodies up after 9/11. Guys mostly with names like Martinez, from Texas. Right after they started showing up, that first October, it was about thirty-eight degrees out and I noticed them all out in front of the Motor Inn plugging in the tank heater on their shiny new Tahoes. So I go over and ask, ‘What’s up?’ ‘Getting cold,’ they said.” Yeager shook his head. “They come and go in thirty-day rotations, like R&R. Hell, I understand they need a break, they got some hairy duty down south. But the point is, they don’t stay long enough to know the ground. And they don’t patrol, anyway. They sit on the official crossings.”
Broker shifted from foot to foot. Thought of starting another cigar to keep his hands occupied. Clearly Yeager was laying foundation, leading up to something. Gamely, Broker tried to hold up his end of the conversation. “They just watch the crossings?”
“Yeah. Used to be, when the customs shut down the border and went home from ten P.M. to six A.M. they’d put orange plastic cones across the road. Of course, after 9/11 they geared up for heavy-duty action and built these little steel gates. Border patrol, they watch the gate. And, sure, there’s a few aircraft overhead from time to time.”
Broker decided to start that cigar. Yeager popped his Zippo, giving him a light.
“So,” Yeager said.
“So,” Broker said.
“Point is, the border patrol’s number-one priority up here ain’t to stop our meth problem. Not now. Like, say, take our friendly smuggler who usually drives a load of ephedrine pills, or kitchen cabinets, or flush toilets.”
“Toilets?”
“Yeah, we had a run on full-capacity flush toilets a while back. You know, we got all these environmentally correct toilets now that use less water—you gotta flush two, three times. They were bringing truckloads of the big five-gallon jobs down, some of them right through where we’re standing. Any rate, point is, one night our driver hauls a different cargo. Maybe he don’t even know what’s in his trailer.”
Yeager squinted down the rutted track back toward his cruiser. “Like, say, a full load of Stinger missiles. Or those Russian SA-18s. That’d play some hell with the air traffic pattern.”
“So you guys been brainstorming scenarios, huh?” Broker said.
“You bet. Your wife’s caper has a terrorism angle all over it. And we wouldn’t have had a clue if she wouldn’t have used your kid as a prop. I don’t know if that was brilliant or just plain cold—but once your sheriff buddy called and asked us to get tight on the kid, we got onto you, and then we started getting pieces of the whole picture.”
“Look, Yeager. Nina and her crew are cowboying, way out ahead of something. I got a feeling the big-footed feds will roll into your shop any day with the official word.”
“I don’t think you’re hearing me, Broker. What good is some fancy helicopter full of commandos gonna do? Hell, they don’t know what it’s like out here on these prairie roads at night. Me and the boys grew up here. We can keep track of Ace and Gordy. It ain’t like they’re going to do anything with Nina along. Or didn’t she think it through that far?”
Broker thought about it. Yeager was right. But so was Holly. Once the words nuclear device were put into the mix there was no telling how even st
eady-looking dudes like Yeager would bounce.
“Yeager, I just came up here to get my kid.” Broker didn’t sound convinced and Yeager sure wasn’t.
Sensing that Broker was weakening, Yeager remained patient. “Okay, come on. Back in the car. We got one more stop.”
They got in the cruiser and backed out of the trail and drove the roads on the American side. For Broker the empty monotony of these fields now took on a sinister sweep. There was just no way to stop a simple suitcase coming across.
After a mostly silent ten-minute ride, Yeager wheeled his cruiser into a weed-thick driveway and drove up to yet another deserted farmhouse. A windmill tower stood beside the house with just the gears up top, no blades. A collapsing barn leaned off to the side, and a rundown Quonset hut out back. This house had a narrow front and a high-pitched roof, its two upstairs windows empty of glass and the front door, torn away, looked like gaping eyes and a mouth.
Yeager leaned back in his seat and lit another Marlboro.
“This is where Ace Shuster lived when he was a kid.” He pointed south. “Our house was about two miles that way, and it’s in worse shape than this place.”
“What are we doing?” Broker asked.
“Figured I’d bring you up to speed on Ace, since he’s become the object of all this intense interest.”
Broker had to grin at Yeager’s style—laid back but relentless.
“What? You got something better to do?” Yeager grinned back.
“So you’re going to take your time, give me the county tour. Spend half the day out in the tullies and maybe my cell phone will ring and I’ll have to go somewhere and you’ll just have to take me there.”
“Hey, Broker, you got a suspicious mind. You should be a cop.”
“I already met Ace.”
“What’d you think?”
Broker thought about it. “At first he seemed like this aging hell raiser, and then…”
“Yeah?”
“His eyes. His eyes were…sad.”
Yeager nodded. “The whole family is just a little bit”—Yeager gently waffled his hand—“off center. His sister, Dorsey, was the one who showed it most. And then, I guess, the kid brother, Dale. The dad, Gene, he was crazy but disciplined. Always cooking these wild schemes to get rich, but always worked like hell. Now, Gene’s dad, Asa—he had the outlaw gene. A regular bomb thrower, back in the days of the Nonpartisan League…”
The term bomb thrower got Broker’s attention. He’d been sitting back, hands crossed in his lap. He came forward, opened his arms, draped one back on the rear seat. Put the other hand on the dash. More attentive now, he said, “Sounds like some family.”
“Yeah. I think their mom, Sarah, she just checked out and went on automatic pilot. Like one of those women you read about back in the old days: too much work, too much prairie. The wind gets to some people. The winters…” Yeager chewed at the inside of his cheek, looked off across the fields. “Ace, he was the oldest kid. Thing I respect about Ace is the way he fights to keep that outlaw gene at bay. Gets up every morning and has to choose twenty-four hours of not breaking the law. That’s a tough one. Another thing, he pretty much looks after everybody.”
“You saying Ace has real psychological hang-ups?”
Yeager shrugged. “Hard to tell with German farm stock. Everybody keeps it in. Then they get behind with the bank, have a couple bad years, and we get a call from an anxious wife with supper cold on the table. Sometimes find the guy’s body out in the corner of a field with his shotgun next to him. Ace? He ain’t exactly your Prozac kind of guy, so he maintains with alcohol.”
The question was on his face so Broker went ahead and said it: “Not the bomb-throwing type?”
“Ace? Is that what they think?”
Broker decided to take the chance that Yeager was waiting for. “Okay, here we go…”
Now Yeager was sitting forward. “Yeah?”
“They got a picture of Ace standing near McVeigh at Waco.”
Yeager rolled his eyes. “They’re basing this whole circus on a fucking picture?”
“I didn’t say that. But they have a picture.”
“Hey, man, these people gotta do their homework,” Yeager said, getting more animated. “Remember I mentioned his sister, Dorsey? Well, she was wild as hell in high school and then did one of those come-to-Jesus flip turns. She started chasing religious cults. Word got back she was hanging out in this wacko compound in Texas. Turned out to be Koresh’s operation. So Ace went down there, just about the time the ATF did their famous ninja walk in their pretty little black suits.”
Broker braced himself. “So?”
“Once Ace got down there, he found out that Dorsey had been there but split a month before. Ace eventually found her in Seattle, working in a Starbucks coffee bar. Married some guy and is still there, as far as I know. A happy ending.” Yeager squinted at Broker. “If I was you, I’d put a little more faith in what people say over coffee at Gracie’s diner and less in the people who breeze around in black helicopters.”
“Okay, maybe he doesn’t want to blow up federal buildings—could he be the kind of guy who would run anything across the border for money?”
Yeager kind of sidled closer, on the scent. “Anything? Like something real dangerous?”
“C’mon, Yeager…”
Yeager wagged his finger in Broker’s face. “No. Ace wouldn’t do that. But that little creep Gordy Riker would. In a fucking heartbeat.”
“Why you so sure Ace wouldn’t?”
“ ’Cause I’ve known him all my life. Look, we played Legion ball together. Jesus, could he hit. He was eighteen and people were saying he was another Maris. He had a shot at the majors, hurt his knee in a tryout camp, and never went back. Just bad luck. That’s the story of Ace’s life. Nothing ever worked out right for him.” Yeager shook his head.
“He killed a guy in a bar fight.”
“More bad luck. Goddamn loudmouth Bobby Pease down in Starkweather. Came at Ace with a beer bottle, and Bobby musta been loosey goosey flatfooted when Ace hit him. Broke his neck. Ace did eleven months on the state farm for involuntary manslaughter.”
“What about Dale, the equipment dealer?”
Yeager shook his head. “Jeez, I don’t know. Parts to that guy are missing. Like, the key to the ignition. Guy is gonna live and die in his folks’ basement. He’s gonna follow them to Florida.”
“And Gordy?”
“Cunning little fucker. And greedy. I been trying to catch him running meth precursor for over a year. He has grandiose dreams of being a big dope dealer.”
“Violent?”
Yeager grinned and eyed Broker. “You tell me. Story going round is he knocked you on your ass.” He paused, still grinning, then said, “That’s how we know you’re in on this thing. We figure it was for show. No way in hell a guy like you’s going to let a Gordy Riker put you on the ground, shot hand or not.”
As Broker was composing his comeback, the car radio squawked: “Two-forty, where are you?”
Yeager keyed his mike. “Six north.”
“Your ten-seventeen just showed up at the SO.”
“Ten-four.”
Yeager quickly wrote his cell phone number on the back of a card and handed it to Broker. Then he put the cruiser in reverse and backed out of the driveway. “We’ll have to finish saving the world later,” he said. “My wife just dropped my son off at the office. I gotta coach T-ball.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Ace came down the stairs two at a time; edgy, snapping his fingers, shaking it out. Gordy assessed him. Uh-huh. So much for mellow. Ace’s serotonin was definitely headed south. It was not a coffee day.
He tossed the cup of coffee he’d prepared and set a bottle of Wild Turkey on the bar with a glass. As Ace sat down and poured his breakfast, Gordy pointed to the Grand Forks Herald.
“Inside section. They’re scaling back the search for Ginny Weller,” he said.
“Ginny was yo
ur basic land shark, but she didn’t deserve this,” Ace said, taking a drink. He produced a Camel from his chest pocket in a snappy display of dexterity, lit it, and inhaled. He pushed the newspaper aside, blew out the smoke, and looked around. “Okay, where’d she go?”
“Out front. On her cell,” Gordy said.
Ace took his glass to the window and saw her pacing on the trap rock with her head cocked over in the New American Silhouette: neck straining to cup a cell phone. Ace thought how a whole lot of orthopedic surgeons were going to make out in twenty, thirty years, when all the crook-necked cell-phone casualties came walking into their offices bent over funny.
He took a long, slow swallow and felt the whiskey burn down his throat and rush out to the tiny capillaries in his fingers and toes. He watched the humid prairie breeze catch the summer dress and wash it up around her thighs and hips. A ripple of maroon and green. Alive against her body like a flutter of moths. Or a flag, maybe. A flag just for a woman. It wasn’t that she had smallish hips, just tidy and tight, like everything else about her—efficient, traveling light, no padding. And her shoulders were broad.
Those legs and that back. I bet she swam butterfly in school, he thought.
Probably had her kid by C-section, with those hips.
If so, there’d be a halfmoon scar under her belly button.
Just over her bush.
So am I gonna get to see that scar, or what?
Gordy came up beside him. “One way or another she’s going to fuck us up.”
Ace kept his eyes on her and thought, Aw shit, Gordy is probably right. So much for believing life could move like a soft, easy dance. Course, she was far from soft and easy. He was tired of slow dancing. It was time to make a call. “Don’t doubt it for a second,” he said. “Like you said, she don’t add up.” He cuffed Gordy on the shoulder. “She’ll be gone before dark.”
“ ’Bout time.”
“Yeah. Now, look, something’s going on. I don’t know what you all were doing downstairs but I just saw her husband meeting with Jimmy Yeager across the road.” He reached out, clamped his hand on Gordy’s shoulder, and pulled him in closer. “Tonight, you work your jigsaw extra special to see if you got a tail. I’ll do the same. If we got company we’ll run ’em through an old-fashioned snipe hunt.” Ace winked. “Let’s have some fun out on the gravel.”