Vapor Trail

by Chuck Logan

  A. J. made a reasonable gesture with his hands. “I didn’t invent Madison Avenue, Angela. So maybe I’m a little ahead of the curve, playing with the edges of child erotica. But ads have been published in the New York Times Magazine and in Vanity Fair that are a mere inch away from that.”

  “Looks more like about six inches to me,” she said in a flat, deadly voice.

  He misunderstood her comment because he grinned and said, “It’ll be mainstream someday, so I’m getting ready.”

  “He’s just a kid, for Christ sake,” Angel protested.

  “Really. Did you know how old the shepherd boy was who posed for Michelangelo’s David? No? How about fourteen.”

  “So this isn’t pornographic? This is art?” Angel felt the trigger along the pad of her index finger, the trigger guard eased against her knuckle.

  “I don’t see any sex act, do you? And the statutes are very specific on that. ‘Clear and convincing’ is the rule. ‘Explicit’ is the governing term,” A. J. said.

  Angel rolled back to the computer, reached out with her left hand, and selected another frame.

  “Why are you wearing gloves?” he said in a challenging tone, and now the first thin quiver of alarm sounded in his voice.

  “So my hands don’t get dirty, asshole. Now tell me about the artistic content of this one.” She clicked twice, and the boy was back except now he was unmistakably limbering up to masturbate for the camera.

  “Get the hell out of here,” A. J. said. In fast jerky steps he crossed in front of her, closed out the computer file, and turned off the printer.

  “Right after you,” Angel said as she came off the chair and started to swing the gun up out of the bag. For a second the Ruger snagged in the material.

  A. J.’s trained eye took it all in immediately. He bolted across the room, through the patio door onto the deck. By the time Angel had the pistol free, he was tearing down the steps. As she came out on the deck, his bare feet failed him on the sharp gravel at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Ow, shit,” he yelped, grabbing one of his feet, hopping absurdly.

  She was on him and walked behind his weird jumping, waiting until he made it off the gravel and fell on the grass. “C’mon, A. J.; you just can’t take a joke,” she said.

  “What, what?” he said, pushing himself up, attempting to run. She tripped him, and he fell heavily and rolled over. That’s when she decided to go for the belly shot.

  Squeeze, don’t jerk, the trigger.

  The muffled clap sounded like applause as she fired point-blank from a distance of five feet and hit him low in the abdomen.

  “My God,” he gasped and pawed in disbelief at his belly.

  Angel hovered over him, the pistol and its bulbous silencer in plain view. “Hold that thought. Now you get to find out. Is God or isn’t God?”

  He tried scuttling away, this painful, ungainly motion on his back. For a few seconds, he was aided slightly by the incline of his property, but after ten yards or so, Angel tired of the routine and swung the pistol on target.

  Clap-clap-clap.

  The small rounds tracked up his chest, and the last one apparently missed. Coming closer, she saw that her last shot hadn’t missed. It hit him in the mouth, broke some teeth, and exited his cheek. He was still wet-gargling air when she stuffed the medallion in his wrecked mouth. She returned to the house, collected the printouts, came back out, and pasted one of the pictures over his bloody face.

  She put the others in her beach bag. She made sure she had one that was daubed with his blood.

  Then she placed the silencer against the soggy print of the boy stripper that was stuck to A. J.’s twitching face and squeezed again.

  Clap.

  She watched the physical systems shut down, muscle spasms, breathing; a few last convulsions and then stillness.

  As she got ready to go, she remembered the lie she’d told him. About the cancer. In fact it was contagious. It’s just that the doctors looked for the causes in all the wrong places. Angel knew where the disease came from. It accumulated inside some men’s hearts, and, after a certain amount of time, it drained down and was absorbed into their sperm.

  Angel absolutely believed that the cancer that killed her twin sister had been cultured in their daddy’s body, that he had transmitted it into her sister’s twelve- and thirteen- and fourteen- and fifteen-year-old uterus, where it rooted and matured into the malignant ovarian tumor that had eventually eaten her up inside and destroyed her body.

  Her life had been destroyed much, much earlier on.

  So, before turning toward the house, she shot A. J. Scott one last time in the balls just for spite.

  Chapter Twenty

  Broker drove back to Milt’s with one eye fixed on the rearview mirror. Distracted, he didn’t appreciate the blazing western sky, where it looked like North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska had caught fire along with Colorado and Arizona. He turned off Highway 95 and braked his way down Milt’s winding gravel drive, quadrant-tracking the dusk that filtered in through the trees. There were a thousand places up in this darkening bluff where . . .

  He spotted the maroon Lexus 300 with smoke-tinted windows tucked in the oaks at the bottom of the drive about twenty yards from the house. Nobody said Harry had to be driving Broker’s truck. So Broker pulled over, killed the engine, grabbed the Ithaca .12-gauge and approached the house at port arms with his right thumb on the safety.

  All he needed was Harry staggering around, drunk and armed.

  He felt the low, slanting sun come through an opening in the trees and hit his back. He saw his shadow stretch out, preceding him on the gravel drive. Stepping carefully on paving stones so he didn’t make a sound, he came in close to the house and lost his shadow in the larger shadow of the overhanging eaves. He flattened himself against the side wall. Ever so slowly, he edged his head around a corner just enough to get a view of . . .

  Janey Hensen.

  Chagrined, he clicked the gun on safe. She sat on the top step of the stairs leading up to the deck, looking trim in a white halter, denim shorts, and tanned skin. She wore no makeup and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. A fine layer of sweat shimmered on her tan as if she’d just been misted with a spray bottle. She was reading a book.

  “Janey? What the hell?” He stepped around the corner holding the shotgun awkwardly at the vertical in his right hand like a high school boy carrying a bouquet.

  Janey was unfazed. Always dry on the uptake, she batted her eyes and said, “Jeez, Broker, I figured you missed the old days but not this much.” She stood up and brushed off the back of her shorts. Maybe it was the sunset hamming it up like a Rodgers and Hammerstein background out of South Pacific. Maybe it was the businesslike way she dusted off her bum—but it struck Broker that Janey still bore a resemblance to midwestern ensign Nellie Forbush as played by Mitzi Gaynor.

  He hefted the shotgun self-consciously. “Just putting it in the house; just be a sec. Ah, what’s this?” As he went up the stairs he changed the subject by flicking his finger at the book she was reading: Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe.

  “Our own Michael Osterholm,” Janey said.

  Osterholm had been the Minnesota state epidemiologist. “Yeah, I know,” Broker called over his shoulder as he slipped into the kitchen through the patio door. He quickly racked the side, emptying the shotgun. He stuffed the shells behind a bag of corn chips on a counter, stashed the gun in the broom closet, and came back out. “I read it.”

  “After the anthrax scare?” Janey said.

  “No, when it first came out.” He smiled tightly. “Nina brought it home from ‘work.’”

  “And how is Xena the Warrior Princess?” Janey said.

  “That’s fair. She called you the Stepford Wife,” Broker said. Nina and Janey met two years ago at J. T. Merryweather’s retirement party. They chatted, ostensibly discussing the movie American Beauty. The way Broker remembe
red it, their words rattled back and forth like long elegant needles, probing for vital spots.

  “Really? And we only met once. Do you think she got it right—me sitting in my Martha Stewart kitchen, tapping the mute button when the school shootings and Zoloft commercials come on CNBC in between stock quotes?” She inclined her head and said, “I heard you two separated.”

  Broker stared at her as if to say, What are you doing here?

  She shrugged. “Drew took Laurie to T-ball, so I went out to the lake to work on my tan. I was in the neighborhood, so . . .”

  “How are you doing, Janey?” Broker said.

  “I’m morbid.” She hunched her shoulders, let them drop, and then held up the book. “He suggests in here that a guy could walk into a big shopping mall with smallpox cultures in an aerosol doodad, set it up in an air-circulation duct, turn it on, and kill over one hundred thousand people.” She raised her eyebrows. “You think that’s possible?”

  “I don’t think Osterholm is into writing books for the money,” Broker said.

  Janey tossed the book on the patio table, spun, walked to the rail, leaned into it with both hands, arched her back, and kicked up one sandaled foot. “This is nice here,” she said.

  “Yeah. I’m watching it for the summer. The owner’s a friend of mine. He’s in Europe.”

  “Milton Dane, the attorney.”

  Broker didn’t ask how she knew; he just smiled.

  Janey turned, smoothed a hand along the side of her hair, and said, “You’re too skinny. There’s hungry, and then there’s starvation.”

  “Pot calling the kettle.” Broker caught himself getting involved in the motion of her upper arms as she raised her hands and fussed with the binder in her ponytail.

  “And the short hair, it throws me,” Janey said.

  “You didn’t used to smile so much,” Broker said.

  “It’s the influence of the postindustrial service economy. We’re surrounded by people whose jobs are being nice to people. It makes us smile more. When people worked in steel mills, they didn’t say things like ‘have a nice day.’ “

  Too many words.

  She’d always surrounded herself with too many words, sharp words projecting like porcupine quills. “So you said you wanted to talk,” Broker said.

  Janey slouched against the rail, her eyes rolled up, and she said, “You never were one to dance a girl. No flirty chitchat to get things rolling.”

  “Rolling,” Broker repeated, knitting his eyebrows.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Sure, small talk.”

  Janey smiled. “Never your thing. I understand completely. You were always into” —Janey creased her forehead and searched for the right phrase— “the eloquent silence of the hunter. It must be hard on you now, living ordinary life.”

  “It’s hotter than shit. It’s been a rough day. I’m getting a beer. You want one?” Broker said, heading for the kitchen.

  “Sure.”

  He returned with two Heinekens. The cold green bottles immediately beaded in the heat. Janey took hers, sat in a deck chair, and inspected the drip of condensation that dribbled down the side. Very deliberately, she dug through the damp label with her thumbnail and flicked the ribbon of label away.

  Then Janey dropped it on him: Boom. “Did you ever wonder why I married Drew?” she said.

  Broker stared, momentarily unfocused, his mind paddling to stay afloat in the heat. “I was curious,” he said slowly.

  “He was the opposite of you. After you, I designed this man rating system—one to ten; solitary hunter to social gatherer.”

  “What’s in between?”

  “Most guys. No, that’s not true. I never had a representative sample. I was up to my neck in law enforcers. Cops and prosecutors. Men with authority hang-ups.”

  Broker drew his right hand between them in a slow, level motion and said, “Drew is steady. A safe bet for the long haul.” From memory, Broker re-created Drew’s angular unlined face, his mild blue eyes.

  Janey smiled tightly. “Make that was. Past tense.” She raised her chin, which began to quiver slightly. “After what happened on nine-eleven, I heard people were supposed to take inventory, reaffirm their relationships, draw closer together. Well, Drew missed that particular point entirely, because he’s seeing another woman, and he’s not even being discreet about it.” Then Janey began to spill big hot tears all over her white halter.

  So he brought her a towel to wipe her cheeks. Then he brought her a glass of ice water and cleared the decks to hear about the other woman.

  And he could empathize, to a point. He had visited the subject of the other man. The younger other man. So he assumed that Janey’s other woman would be younger and bursting with wonderful unlived-in smells and secret places. She would be unwrinkled from lack of child rearing. She would have pert Cosmo snow cone breasts.

  “She’s this . . . cow,” Janey seethed. “You know, with the big bovine brown eyes.”

  Okay, so not Cosmo. Playboy maybe. He listened patiently.

  “Goddamn men and their midlife crises.” Suddenly, she seized his left forearm, pulled him toward her, and looked directly into his eyes. “You could talk to him.”

  He retrieved his arm. “Janey, I’m a little busy right now.”

  Without missing a sniffle, she pointed to his left wrist, where he wore a bracelet of dark purple blood bruises from Mouse’s handcuff. “You should put some ice on that,” she said.

  She got up, folded her arms across her chest, and paced.

  “Twelve years of married life, for Christ sake. I thought maybe you could knock some sense into him? He always respected you.” She gulped several rapid breaths, then sipped some water to steady herself.

  Broker protested, “Drew never respected me. He thought I was . . . crude; a door ripper, lacking subtlety.”

  “Well, just what are my daughter and I supposed to do? It’s not fair.”

  “I’m sorry.” Broker’s voice backed up to try again. He tried again, and all he could come up with was the same. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all you can say is—you’re sorry?” She tossed a hand in disgust, then swiped the tears away with the back of her hand and set her jaw. “Fuck a bunch of crying. I should never have quit working,” she said in a dead-serious voice. They did not make eye contact as she stalked off the deck and down the stairs.

  Broker watched Janey stride toward her car and get in. She started the Lexus and lurched backing up, bumped a pile of firewood, and put a twelve-hundred-dollar scratch in her rear bumper. Finally, in a grind of gravel, she was gone up the drive.

  Broker drank his beer and opened another; then he put some ice cubes in a dishrag and placed it against the bump on his head. Holding the ice with one hand, he washed down three 200-mg Ibuprofen. Then he lit a cigar.

  He logged onto the laptop and checked his e-mail. NO NEW MESSAGES ON SERVER.

  One-thirty in the morning the cell phone rang. Broker fumbled it to his ear and heard a disembodied voice caterwaul from way down in a whiskey wind tunnel: “I came to believe I was powerless over alcohol . . .”

  “Goddammit, Harry,” Broker shouted.

  . . . . . . . . . .

  Click.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Scricchhhhh. . . .

  The rasping sound brought Broker stark upright. Skimming like a water bug, he’d barely made a dent in sleep.

  Scricchhhhhhhh. . . .

  He eased up on the bed, holding the shotgun that was slick with his sweat, looking around. Another night without the A/C, thinking he could hear better with the windows open.

  Scricchhhhhhhh. . . .

  It wasn’t quite fingernails screeching on a blackboard. But it was close. He oriented quickly on the sound of cat claws raking across a screen door.

  Ambush wanted to go out.

  When Milt got involved with Hank Sommer’s widow, he also inherited Hank’s cat, Ambush, who was now Broker’s responsibility
for the summer. The cat was getting old, plump, fussy. She communicated her desire to go outside by pawing at the patio screen door, and now she had managed to get one of her claws tangled in the ripped wire mesh.

  “Okay, just a minute,” Broker mumbled as he rolled from the sheets and padded barefoot across the kitchen to the door that led onto the deck. He freed the stuck gray paw from the abraded screen and slid the patio screen open. Ambush strolled across the deck and disappeared down the stairs.

  He looked past the deck. The river had acquired a muddy Nile-brown complexion under an overcast gray sky. He stood there naked for a while and let the malarial dawn drip over him.

  The thought formed that the Saint was out there, waking up in this very same heat. And Harry, the midnight crooner. Unless, of course, they were, as a third of the cops in the county believed, the same person.

  Onward.

  Sweat trickled from his scalp, streaked down his check, dripped from his chin, and splashed on the oak floor. Running in this heat would be an exercise in hydraulics. He’d have to grow gills. It would be absolute madness. Sort of like the general atmosphere in Investigations at Washington County.

  Harry could be out there, could have put him to bed. Could be waiting to get him up in the morning. He considered lugging the Ithaca along on the run. Screw it. Broker sat down and pulled on his Nikes.

  Five minutes later, he couldn’t tell where the air stopped and his sweat started. By the time he’d made it up the hill, he was back remembering his Camus from a literature class at the University of Minnesota—The Stranger, Meursault, on the torrid Algerian beach absurdly killing a man purely because of the heat. Broker completely understood the condition as he jogged into entry-level heat exhaustion. He crossed the road to catch some patches of darker humidity disguised as shade. He took a long look down the road at the steamy licorice waves rising off the black asphalt. He made his first really smart decision in the last couple of days.

  He turned around and walked back down the driveway, skipped the plunge in the river, which was probably the temperature of warm spit, and went straight for a cold shower and a hot shave.