by Chuck Logan
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 remembered 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 knoc
k 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 Nilebrown 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.
And he skipped making coffee; easier to grab some on the way into town. He did pay attention to the note he'd left under a magnet on the refrigerator, next to a snapshot of his daughter, Kit. FEED CAT!
He dumped about a pound of dry Chef's Blend into a large stainless steel mixing bowl and remembered to check to make sure the toilet seat was up so Ambush could get to water. Then he pulled on a pair of loose khaki's, a light cotton polo shirt, and loafers. He debated about the shotgun and decided to put it back in the trunk. Loaded. Okay. He had the ten o'clock meeting with Jack Malloy, pastor at Redeemer in St. Paul.
Heading south down 95, he hit an open stretch, so he put the souped-up Crown Vic cop package to the test, easing off the gas just shy of one hundred miles per hour. Going fast didn't change the fact that the morning air was turning to sticky gray vapor right before his eyes.
It was a little over half-an-hour drive time to St. Paul, so he figured he had time to stop by the Washington County government center for an unscheduled office call on Gloria Russell, ostensibly to get the deal machinery going for Ray Tardee.
In reality he wanted to get a close-up look and see if the HarryGloria-Lymon gossip really had legs.
He parked on the government side of the county offices, went in, and took an elevator to the attorneys' offices on the third floor. He showed his ID to the secretary and asked the location of Ms. Russell's office.
No, he didn't have an appointment.
Broker found the office and rapped on the doorjamb.
"Yes?" Gloria Russell spoke without looking up from the paperwork on her blotter. She sat behind her desk in a gray sleeveless blouse that complemented her short black hair. There was enough definition in the muscles of her upper arms so that a discreet puddle of purple vein rested in the hollow of her elbows and disappeared up either biceps. Her office space was Doric, basic, unadorned; just shelves of a law books and law degree on the wall.
"I'm Broker," he said. "I called you yesterday about Ray Tardee."
Gloria's tanned face came up like a bronze figurehead. Broker saw heat and danger but not a lot of warmth; Joan Crawford from 1940s noir. Not a bad face if it learned how to relax.
Lavender triangles of fatigue stamped the smooth tan below her lower eyelids. The eyelids quivered slightly. A faint stripe on the third finger of her left hand had almost completely faded into her tan. She took her heavy framed, black, plastic glasses from the desktop and put them on like a mask.
"Oh yeah, Broker. You're Special Projects on the dead priest," Gloria said. "John Eisenhower brought you in to spy while he's out of town."
"Nice meeting you, too," Broker said, giving her his best empty grin.
"I checked around. The book on you is BCA left you out in the cold five years too long. A lot of people think you migrated to the other side."
"Yeah, well; I just did a fast migrate back. Can we talk, or do I go down the hall and talk to Jerry?" Jerry Hassler was the county prosecutor.
"And you know Jerry going way back to when he worked in St. Paul, I know. You know everybody. The Old Boys' Club. That's why the sheriff sailed you in here on a sky hook." Gloria exhaled. "Fine. Come in, sit down, get comfy, and stay for about thirty seconds."
Broker entered her office and sat at the stiff-backed chair in front of her desk. A stand-alone picture frame on the corner of the desk faced the visitor's chair and held an enlarged block of type:
NO PERSON IN THE UNITED STATES SHALL, ON THE BASIS OF SEX . . .BE SUBJECTED TO DISCRIMINATION UNDER ANY EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM OR ACTIV
ITY RECEIVING FEDERAL FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE.
Broker thought about it and decided to jazz her a little, to see where it went. He pointed to the frame. "So are you really the dark side of Title IX? Funny, you don't look like that kind of feminist . . ."