Vapor Trail
Page 27
GUN.
Really diving now, off the ground, stretching because the pistol was coming up in line with Janey’s face. He batted Janey aside with his right hand while his left hand whipped out and grabbed the muzzle.
KABOOM—OHSHITFUCK!
He felt the bullet punch through his palm.
The noise, pain, and shock welded a frozen white circle, and he was suspended for a fraction of a second as he hurtled toward the floor and crashed chest and elbow into the rim of the claw-footed bathtub.
And that hurt more than the goddamn bullet.
Jarred, he flipped down and hit the floor hard.
In that tiny beat he saw Janey—a Janey he had never seen before—pounce over him and close with the shooter. Broker, dazed, coming up off the floor, Laurie screaming, Drew crawling, his chin coated with blood.
And Broker looked up and saw something else he had never seen before as Janey went in snarling and clawed her fingers into the other woman’s eyes.
The woman staggered back, her eyes now a torn red mask. Janey went after the faltering pistol. Seized it in her hand. As Broker struggled up from the floor, he had one of his basic rules reaffirmed, the one about never having a loaded revolver in the house. No safety mechanism. The ultimate in point-and-shoot.
Without the slightest hesitation, she thrust the pistol into Annie Mortenson’s face and pulled the trigger once, twice, and would have kept yanking it if Broker hadn’t come up fast and torn the weapon from her grip.
Laurie screamed louder and clapped her hands to her ears.
Broker’s own ears were ringing, plugged, stinging from the shots.
Laurie’s screams brought Janey to her senses. She saw the gouts of flesh and splinters of scalp that spattered the wall, the floor, her daughter.
Instantly, she wrapped Laurie in her arms and then whisked a towel from a rack and began cleaning Laurie’s face.
“Get her out of here,” Broker said. Then seeing the slumped woman’s face, knowing it was futile, he knelt, put down the pistol, and put his fingers to her throat. He waited several beats and felt no pulse.
Janey stepped over Annie’s body, plucking red matter from Laurie’s hair with her fingers and flicking it away. Immediately, she started to kneel to Drew. Broker grabbed her arm and shoved her toward the studio doorway and the porch beyond.
“Take her out there. Leave this to me,” Broker said. Then he turned and saw air bubbles suck red suds in Drew’s back. Bright red blood.
Sucking chest wound. Exit wound.
He squatted, turned Drew’s shoulder, and saw a similar but smaller pumping action in his chest.
Through and through. Okay. Seal a sucking chest.
He walked, not real steady but fast, toward the kitchenette, tossing the contents of a cupboard until he found a roll of Saran wrap, a spool of duct tape. Ignoring Drew’s groans he forced him to a sitting position, wound the Saran around his chest, flung his arms out of the way, and then reinforced the impermeable barrier with the tape.
Drew’s breathing improved enough for him to try to talk.
“Shut up, save your strength,” Broker said as he reached for the phone on the drawing table. It had just occurred to him that the people down on the street had probably not called the cops.
Broker called 911, identified himself, gave the address, told the call taker he had a man down with a sucking chest and a woman dead on the scene. Broker described the first aid he’d given and said the wounded man was breathing and able to talk.
Then Drew started to topple over, so Broker put down the phone and hunkered with Drew and straightened him up again.
Drew wheezed, “Say . . .”
“What?”
“Sane . . .”
“Drew, be quiet.”
“Saint. Her. Crazy. Said she killed . . . some woman. Take the blame. She had one of those medals.” Drew rallied and forced out a whole sentence, “Broker, she said she killed that guy . . .”
Broker was too focused on the immediate demands of the situation to process what Drew was saying. He told Drew to be quiet.
“No, listen; she . . .” Then he pitched back against the bookcase and gasped, completely exhausted.
“You rest. Help’s on the way,” Broker said. He propped him upright with a chair so the internal bleeding wouldn’t collapse the lung, wedged him so he wouldn’t fall. Then he went to check on Janey and Laurie.
Janey had scrubbed the blood from Laurie’s face and hair and had swaddled her in the towel. He bent to them, inspecting them for shock. That’s when he saw the medallion around Laurie’s neck. That meant something, but at the moment Broker wasn’t entirely sure what. They were okay. Drew was okay too, if the medics stepped on it.
He put his hand on the porch railing to steady himself, beginning to feel real fuzzy around the edges. Getting old, you pussy, letting a little paper cut kick your ass. He studied the ragged hole through the meat of his left palm. Painfully, he moved his fingers. The machinery that operated the bones and tendons was still intact.
Another scar, he thought vaguely.
Equally vaguely, he now recognized the dead woman in the bathroom as Annie Mortenson. The librarian. Harry’s ex-girlfriend. He began to feel dizzy. He began to shake.
Funny, out in the winter snow, shock could be a sheet of fire. Now, in this heat, it wrapped him in cold shivers.
Down below he saw people come up the street and gather in a semicircle around the stairway. Several had bottles in their hands; probably they’d just left bar stools. In the distance, bracketed by the first thunderclap of this July, he heard the wolf pack sirens.
Goddamn, he was tired of sirens.
Something soft and cool grazed his face, and at first he thought it was Janey. But then he realized he was feeling the first temperate breeze in weeks. And the sky was darkening, thickening up with real thunderheads.
Broker slouched against the rail and looked for the ambulance. As he waited, he watched one of the oldest scenes in the world: a woman rocking a terrified child in her arms and saying over and over, “It’s all right. It’s all right. Mommy’s here.”
Mommy.
He was looking at Janey and Laurie. He was seeing Nina and Kit. He turned and faced north and west, the direction bad weather came down from North Dakota—where Nina had ditched their kid.
Then he heard the darkness grumble, and down the river valley he saw white veins bulge in a bundle of black clouds. Ten seconds later, he heard the crash of the thunder overhead. When the ambulance screeched to a halt on the street, the big, fat, cool raindrops had already started to scatter down and sizzle on the baked concrete.
Okay. North Dakota. Gotta get organized.
Blood dripping from his wounded hand, Broker started down the stairs. A paramedic ran up, yelling, “Where’s the sucking chest?”
“Inside, keep going,” Broker said. He took two more steps and ran into a Stillwater cop whom he recognized but whose name he couldn’t place just now.
“Whoa, hey Broker, you better sit down, man,” the copper said.
“Outa the way, gotta go. Airport,” Broker insisted. He shook his head to clear his vision because the raindrops splashing on his face were making his thoughts all runny . . .
“Sit him down; he’s in shock.”
Many hands were on him now, gentle but firm, pushing him down to a sitting position on the stairs. Someone mashed a compress into his palm. Raindrops and blood mingled in the white gauze.
“Airport, goddammit. Gotta get . . .”
“No problem,” said a female paramedic in a soothing voice as she worked on his hand.
Broker gathered himself and surged up against the cops and medics.
They were too many. Too strong.
They didn’t understand.
I gotta get to my kid.
Acknowledgments
Sheriff Jim Frank, Washington County.
Sergeant Neil Nelson, St. Paul Police Homicide Unit.
Deputy Sh
eriff Investigator Michael Lindholm, Washington County.
Supervisor Troy E. Ruby, Communications Center, Washington County.
Sue Giles, 911 Public Safety Dispatcher, Communications Center, Washington County.
(Rev.) John M. Malone, Pastor of the Church of the Assumption, St. Paul.
John X. Paquette, former Special Agent, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
Judy Schiks, Family Court Services, Washington County.
Mark Ponsolle, Assistant County Attorney, Ramsey County.
Tracy Braun, Assistant County Attorney, Ramsey County.
Richard Buchman, Assistant County Attorney, Ramsey County.
Amy Becker, St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Keith Mortenson, Chief Investigator, Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Diane Olivieri, Fitness Director, River Valley Health Club, Stillwater, Minnesota.
Chris Lentz, Loome Theological Booksellers, Stillwater, Minnesota.
FarWorks Inc. and Creators Syndicate, for granting permission to describe and quote one of Gary Larson’s Far Side greeting cards.
Kim Yeager, Bill Tilton, and Don Schoff.
About The Author
CHUCK LOGAN is the author of Hunter’s Moon and of the Phil Broker novels The Big Law, The Price of Blood, Absolute Zero, and Vapor Trail. The HarperCollins e-book edition of Absolute Zero contains “Survive Absolute Zero: The U.S. Army Guide.” Chuck Logan lives in Stillwater, Minnesota, with his wife and daughter.
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Also by Chuck Logan
Absolute Zero
Hunter’s Moon
The Price of Blood
The Big Law
Credits
Jacket designed by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
VAPOR TRAIL. Copyright © 2003 by Chuck Logan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
“Phil Broker: Old-Fashioned Hero Whose Time Has Come.” Copyright © 2002 by Chuck Logan.
EPub Edition © MARCH 2003 ISBN: 9780061827334
Print edition first published in 2003 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
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