Homefront pb-6

by Chuck Logan

  “How’d it go?” she asked, casually shaking out the snare of her curiosity.

  Susan knew a little about the Brokers, the new folks in town and therefore a focus of gossip. She knew Broker and Harry had been in Vietnam together for a long time. She knew Broker had been a cop. But she knew virtually nothing about the mysterious “Mrs. Broker.” Now, like all the women at the school, she was anxious to hear more.

  Griffin shrugged. “We’ll get it fixed. Keith’s doing his peacemaker number, filling in the background on Jimmy. Why he’s a hair-trigger mess. Took Broker out and showed him the Bodine house, explained about Cassie and the Sweitz kid. The fire. The pollution mess. The skeleton house.”

  “Did Keith tell him Gator Bodine burned the place? With the town’s blessing?” Susan asked.

  “C’mon, that’s hearsay. Nobody knows for sure; all the flammable crap they had in there, anything could have set it off,” Griffin said, mouthing the official line.

  Susan wrinkled her nose. “Right,” she said. “Ruled an accident. No real autopsy. Not what Jeff Tindall said…”

  Jeff owned the hardware store and was a volunteer fireman.

  Susan continued. “Jeff says the people in that house got real confused because they crammed themselves into this tiny, centrally located bathroom. Stoutest room in the house. Good plan for a tornado. Not so good for an exploding meth lab. Jeff found them stuck together”-she wrinkled her pert nose-“layered, kinda like lasagna.”

  Griffin made an effort to ward her off with his eyes, like he always did, for starters.

  “Everyone believes it was Gator, avenging that little girl. He always hated his cousins, going way back. Maybe he saw it as sticking up for his wronged sister, like he always does-”

  “Small-town gossip,” Griffin said.

  Susan didn’t even pause. “He went over there, saw what happened, called Keith to get the children out and went back that night and killed his own kin,” she said, moving in close. “You know that, like Keith knows it. Everybody knows they have a deal. Since Marci Sweitz died, Keith keeps Gator out there, stalking down anybody cooking that stuff. In return he lets a felon have guns and hunt in the woods. You know that just like you know a lot of things about your pal Broker and his wife-don’tcha.”

  She eased up and nuzzled his throat, following the angle of his chin with lips and tongue, bit his earlobe, and then moved on to his mouth.

  Harry pulled back. “C’mon. I been sitting in the Jeep chain-smoking and pounding down coffee for two hours. I gotta brush my teeth-”

  “Or,” she whispered, pressing against him and tilting her face up, bold, “you could dip your face in something sweet…”

  For Susan, sex was merely prelude to the talk that followed. Griffin had come to think of these long talks as the job interview for the open position of long-haul partner and standin father figure to Susan’s daughter. Trust was an important part of the negotiation.

  And trust was achieved through the sharing of personal information.

  Griffin sat naked on the rug in front of the hearth. Susan reclined in front of him, firelight tracing the curve of her hips and good legs. Legs crossed, he worked with a needle, thread, and some stuffing from an old life jacket. Squinting, he methodically ran the needle in and out, repairing the blue-and-white bunny. Good with his hands. At fifty-eight, he could lay stone all day, come home, go belly to belly with a woman twenty years younger, and still thread a needle.

  “You know,” she said in a dreamy voice, “you and Broker are kinda the same size from a distance. Anybody ever have trouble telling you apart in the dark?”

  Griffin ignored her. He recalled a TAC sergeant in Ranger school who used to call them “Heckel and Jeckle,” but damned if he was going to tell her.

  “So you gonna tell me what you’re doing?” she asked with one of his Luckies hanging from the corner of her mouth.

  “Nope.” It amazed Griffin, how she could stretch out naked on the rug and smoke just one cigarette. He fluffed the toy, inspected the restored proportions, and decided Kit would never know her bunny had been disemboweled by a ski pole. He set the bunny aside.

  “Code of the West? Post-Vietnam Lost Boys Sacred Oath?” Susan arched an eyebrow. “Just what is your pact with Phil Broker?” She leaned forward and trailed her fingers over the thick blight of withered scar tissue that wrapped the muscle above his left knee. “Does it have something to do with this?”

  He removed her hand, reached over, plucked the smoke from her lips, and took a drag. Gave it back. “What’s the point?” he asked.

  Susan studied the burning cigarette between her fingers, looked up. “Maybe I can help.”

  Griffin grumbled but did not break eye contact. Encouraged, Susan continued. “I’ve been watching Kit Broker at school. She plays alone. She’s way too self-contained for an eight-year-old. She’s learned how to distance. Knows how to deflect any questions about her family, her past. It’s like she’s being…coached. That’s masking behavior…stuff you might see in kids with abuse at home, or criminal activity.”

  Griffin uncrossed his legs, recrossed them, reached for his own cigarette, lit it. Stared at her.

  “What’s Kit got at home?” Susan asked. “What’s the big deal? You tell people he works on your crew, but he really doesn’t. He hardly ever shows up. You’re providing sanctuary. Why?”

  Griffin stared at the fire and thought about it. After Nina had her head-on collision with depression, Broker had called in some chits. He’d just been up for deer hunting and knew the house on the lake was unoccupied for the winter. It was the perfect remote retreat for Nina to tough it out…

  He engaged the concern in Susan’s eyes. True. They had not considered Kit as a factor. Figured she’d go along as obedient baggage. Now Susan was raising flags. He turned from the fire and faced her.

  “You’re asking a lot,” he said.

  Susan shrugged her bare shoulders. “What I see is the kid. Especially after she punched out Teddy Klumpe. She’s way too tough for eight. That could come from carrying too much weight. Like she’s wearing armor. Somebody should say something to the parents. Is trying to stop a kid from getting damaged asking a lot?”

  “Broker and his buddies do have a code,” Griffin said. “The main part of it has to do with loyalty.”

  “Okay,” Susan said. “That’s for them, cops. Ex-cops. Whatever. Not you. Or is this because you were Army buddies back in the day?”

  “Jesus, you don’t give up,” Griffin said.

  Susan grinned and poked his flat stomach with her finger. “Nope.” She scooted closer, rested her elbows on his knees. “C’mon. Who are they?”

  “I thought you were concerned with Kit.”

  “Sure, and I’m thinking, my Amy’s the same age. We could get them together for a play date, for starters. That way I could meet her mom, get it going back and forth,” Susan said.

  “They didn’t come up here for play dates and coffee with the moms. Pretty much the opposite,” Griffin said. His voice sharpened and Susan saw the fast warning shadow pocket his face.

  Sensing she’d hit a boundary, she sat back, folded her arms across her modest breasts, and gave back a little challenging edge of her own. “You’re overdramatizing, as usual.”

  “Listen, Susan; they’re not going to be here long enough for Kit to get damaged,” Griffin said.

  “You sure about that? He’s your friend. You should help him.”

  True. Which got Griffin thinking…

  Susan waited patiently. She’d been North Woods raised on the big lake and was a seasoned angler. She knew when she felt a nibble, knew the proper time to play out a little more line.

  Except Griffin was now thinking about the other thing; how no way Jimmy could come into the place on skis. So somebody else could be in this. Somebody who played real rough. Finally he said, “Look, it’s complicated…”

  Susan took a last drag on her one cigarette, twisted, and flipped it into the fireplace.
When she turned back, she took her time, letting the firelight play over the very serviceable curves of the only intelligent eligible woman in Glacier Falls who would take a chance on a silvertip loner like Harry Griffin.

  Griffin started over, speaking carefully. “It’s like this with Broker and his wife. You know how when there’s a crisis-say a building catches fire-everybody runs. Except there’s two people who go back into the fire to take care of the casualties…”

  Susan sat up straight. She had never felt his eyes range in on her quite this way, like hard iron sights. She nodded her head slightly.

  “Well,” Griffin continued, “it’s good we have people like that around when all hell breaks loose. But maybe it’s not such a good idea if they get married to each other and have a kid.”

  Deliberately, Griffin stood up and stared at her, to let it sink in. She knew him as an intense guy; and now she’d hit a new wall in him. Macho guy loyalty. Whatever. She sobered a bit, seeing the warning frown in his eyes. Shucks, so much for afterglow. And he was standing in a certain way, this quiet power stancing, cautioning her away from the subject. Then he turned and walked from the main room toward the bathroom. A moment later, Susan heard the shower start to run.

  Susan hugged herself in front of the fire. She looked down and saw a faint tickle of goose bumps rise on her forearms. It was the first time he’d revealed a part of himself that actually worried her.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The alarm went off, and Sheryl Mott got up in her efficiency apartment on Lincoln Avenue in St. Paul. Five-fuckin’-thirty in the morning. Still dark out-and this is after doing a six-hundred-mile round trip yesterday, missing work…she gingerly touched the rash on her cheeks from Gator’s Brillo-pad four-o’clock shadow.

  Mission Impossible theme music was playing in her head. Your assignment, if you choose to accept it…

  Her assignment today was Dickie Werk, Werky for short.

  Richard M. Werk maintained an office in the Ramsey Building, a liver-colored brownstone near Mears Park in downtown St. Paul. He employed a secretary, two legal clerks, and an “investigator.” Simon Hanky, the investigator, was a vetted OMG soldier whose main job was to keep an eye on Werky and clean up messes. Sheryl had some history with Hanky, and he was one scary fella.

  Werky rented space to three young, eager, world-saver attorneys who rallied to the defense of disadvantaged inner-city youth who had difficulty finding gainful employment in a tough economy…and were forced to support themselves by robbing and selling dope. And stabbing and shooting people.

  Sheryl rolled her eyes, shook her head, planted her feet on the chilly hardwood floor, and pushed up off the bed.

  Werky was the kind of overly self-dramatizing guy who never outgrew snarfing his first line of cocaine in law school, blowing his brains out listening to Warren Zevon’s Lawyers Guns and Money at max volume. He ate too much, sweated too much, talked too much and had this absolute, and potentially fatal, fascination with rubbing up against hard-core criminals.

  She had heard him blab at a party once; comparing himself to Robert Duvall playing Tom Hagen in The Godfather. How he only had one client. Wink, wink.

  But pulsing in all that corpulent narcissism was a brilliant legal mind totally devoted to getting Danny T.’s convictions overturned. So the gang indulged Werky’s affectations. So far.

  Sheryl sighed and headed for the bathroom. A few minutes later she was worried she had a mild kidney infection. Goddamn Gator wouldn’t use condoms. Made her stand around after so he could see his jizz…

  Back on task. Werky.

  How to proceed. After Seattle had exploded in her face, Sheryl didn’t indulge nobody anymore.

  She didn’t trust Werky’s office help or his do-good office mates.

  She didn’t trust the office phones.

  Neither did Werky. He handled his One Client’s real business affairs exclusively by cell phone in his car. Had a whole stash of cells. Use them one time and toss them. So she’d have to catch him in his car.

  She took a shower, washed and blow-dried her hair, put on minimal makeup, a long denim skirt, a mock turtleneck, and a long leather coat that reached down past the tops of her tall leather boots.

  No sense in giving Werky ideas by showing skin.

  She tucked Gator’s stolen paperwork into her purse, went down to the street, and started the Pontiac. Then she stopped at the Grand and Dale drugstore, bought a pack of Merit filters. Two blocks down, she picked up a tall cardboard cup of Starbucks with a couple shots of espresso. Then she joined the steel-and-glass bumper-to-bumper escalator of commuters going down Grand Hill into St. Paul. She inched through the business district and turned into the parking garage next to the Ramsey Building. Drove to the contract parking level in the basement. Some things don’t change. Werky still had a parking stall with his name on it.

  The stall was empty.

  She parked one floor up in hourly, took the stairs down, and walked a figure eight in the crowd of sleepy-eyed nine-to-fivers getting out of their cars and marching into the skyways. She kept a sharp watch on the parking stall.

  Two Merits later: bingo. The shiny black Escalade wheeled in on a plush squeal of Michelin radials. Sheryl took a deep breath. The OMG gang had matured around dope from street thugs into serious big-time crooks. Trick was to be nimble, like a fly zipping through a sticky spiderweb. Get in and out fast. And not get wrapped up and eaten. She walked up to the tinted driver’s-side window and tapped.

  The window zipped down an inch. An eye appeared in a thick puddle of a glasses lens.

  “Yeah?” said the eye.

  She watched the eye cross-reference a databank of faces, names, levels of trust and threat, and quickly reach a decision:

  “How you doin’, Sheryl?”

  “Hiya, Werky.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Need you to look at something.”

  The eye fluttered, amused. “Like your tattoo? You still got it?”

  Mastering an impulse to puke all over his fancy wax job, Sheryl said, “You gonna make me stand out here in the cold?”

  The door locks snapped open. Sheryl walked around the front of the SUV, opened the passenger-side door, and slid into the deep leather bucket seat.

  Same old Werky, piled up like Jabba the Hutt’s pinstriped baby brother. He licked his gummy lips and said, “You’re looking well, Sheryl. Threadbare but righteous. Sorta like the Little Match Girl.”

  Sheryl resolved to keep her cool. She had once known a Las Vegas hooker who swore that men were all just physical extensions of their dicks. Werky fit the pattern; short, sixty pounds overweight, and lopsided with a head too small for the rest of him.

  She removed the sheaf of papers Gator had lifted from Broker’s house from her purse and handed them to him.

  Seeing the documents, Werky’s demeanor changed. Focusing fast, he flipped through the pages, his voice concentrating in a meditative “Hmmm.” Sheryl sipped the remains of her coffee and waited. Another, longer “Hmmmm” followed by an impressed: “No shit.” Now Werky had tilted his thick glasses down his nose, looking over them as he scanned the warrant, the memo, the Visa statement, and the Washington County pay voucher. “The missing puzzle piece. Perhaps,” he said slowly. When he looked up at her, his eyes darted fast and alert. “Where’d you get this?”

  Sheryl gave him a brief, ambiguous smile.

  “So,” he said.

  “So?” she said.

  “You want something,” Werky said, waffling the papers in his hand. “In exchange.”

  Sheryl pursed her lips and said, “Consider it a gift. For now, just make Danny aware of what’s in those papers. I know it nags him, the way Jojo checked out. You can talk to Danny, right? So no one’s listening in.”

  “I can do that.” Werky cocked his head.

  “Just tell him I said hello. And, ah, maybe, after you make that call, we could talk again,” Sheryl said.

  “I see,” Werky said slowl
y, watching her as he heaved in his seat, reached in the back, and pushed open a square leather briefcase the size of a small Duluth pack, started to insert the papers. “May I?”

  Sheryl shrugged, “Sure, they’re yours.”

  “Good,” Werky said. He tucked the papers out of sight and removed a yellow legal pad, picked up a pen from the dash, and handed pen and pad to her. “Give me a number where you can be reached day or night.”

  Sheryl jotted down her cell, handed back the pen and pad, and started to open the door.

  Werky laid his porcine hand on her arm, friendly. “Nice seeing you again, Sheryl,” he said, no games, level and businesslike.

  “Yeah, me too,” she said.

  Werky maintained the pressure on her arm. “Welcome back,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Sheryl said, trying to maintain her unassuming expression and stuff her building anticipation. Shit, they might actually go for this.

  Werky released her arm; she opened the door and got out. As she closed it, she saw him reaching for the car phone. She headed for the stairs. Three minutes later she was strapped into her seat belt and pulling the Pontiac out of the parking garage.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Nina lay in bed watching the stucco ceiling slowly emerge from darkness; a hieroglyphic of veined cracks and blots of water that had taken months to master and finally read:

  “Crazy,” Nina whispered to the half-light in the shuttered bedroom.

  Just a word, two syllables, two sounds. That is, until it finally wears you down like a sweaty high school boyfriend who just won’t stop insisting: “If you really love me, you’ll…”

  At some point you give in.

  She had not made love to her husband in over a year. Crazy was the Thing that shared her bed, and now she knew it more intimately than Broker’s body. Its smell, its familiar stir, the urgent touch of the incessant demands it made in the night.

  The last word she said at night. The first word she said every morning.

  But this morning something was different, as, beyond the ajar bedroom door, the sounds and smells of morning filled the house and meandered up the stairs. She heard Broker enter Kit’s room, pull the window blinds. Heard him say in an upbeat voice, “Not a cloud in the sky. It’s gonna be sunny today.” Then to Kit, “C’mon, get up. Feet on the deck.”