Homefront pb-6

by Chuck Logan

  “Gas money. Get some McDonald’s. A malt.”

  “Ah, thanks,” Terry mumbled, staring at the bill.

  Gator took Terry by the arm and walked him to the swaybacked porch. “One last thing.”

  “Sure, anything,” Terry said, antsy, seeing his car just thirty feet away.

  “Say, ‘Who was that masked man,’” Gator said,

  “What?” Terry’s voice cracked wide open with fear, sensing some freaky trick coming just as he was about to get free.

  “C’mon. It’s just words. Say it.”

  Terry swallowed, took a breath, and said, apprehensively, “Who was that masked man.”

  Gator smiled. “Good. Now get the fuck out of here.” He shoved him hard and sent him sprawling off the porch into the snow. “Run, you little shit. Run for your life,” he taunted as he put the light on him.

  Terry scuttled on all fours, gamboling through the snow. Got to his feet, surged for the car, hurled open the door, and jumped behind the wheel.

  Gator watched the kid fishtail the Nova, hell-bent with a twenty in his hot hand, heading for the nearest dealer who’d sell him a chunk of ice. But probably not in Glacier County. The kid would get high and embellish the story. Tell ’em to keep clear of those spooky woods where nobody lived but crazy cousin-killer Gator Bodine. And the wolves.

  And that’s just how Gator wanted it.

  He went back in the house, shone the light at the cook ingredients strewn on the floor. Leave it. Give Keith the names. Plan it so they’re sitting in his office, talking, when Broker goes down.

  That’d work.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Griffin studied the squat gray building just fifty yards away, checked the road, then, seeing no headlights, left cover and jogged leisurely toward the shop. He had no preconceived plan; it all depended on what he found. Freeform. The thing would dictate its own course.

  He went right to the front door, twisted the knob, and went in; knelt, unlaced his boots, stepped out of them, and did a fast walk-through in his socks. The square cement-block building was divided roughly into three rooms. In front, the office took up a partitioned corner and contained a desk and shelves with this open alcove at one end with a bunk and an exposed toilet.

  The office door opened into a machine shop area with a steel lathe, milling machine, metal saw, grinders, and a drill press.

  The second room was the garage. A disassembled rust orange tractor was raised up on blocks and bottle jacks. A tall tool caddy on casters was positioned next to the tractor; lots of drawers, with a workbench on top. Looking around, he saw a wire-feed Mig welder, welding tanks, an air compressor, and a big Onan diesel generator. Gaskets hung on the wall next to a Halon fire extinguisher. Lots of wood blocks, a few jack stands. What you’d expect to find in a mechanic’s shop.

  Griffin briefly inspected the partitioned storeroom between the garage and the paint room. It contained a paint gun, two protective suits with breather masks connected to filter packs, and buckets of paint. Last, he walked through the paint room. The walls and floor and ceiling were rainbow-mottled with spray from the paint gun, as was the sink and a long worktable with a wide elaborate fume hood that he assumed led up to the blower exhaust fan on the roof.

  He walked up to a small color snapshot taped over the workbench: palm trees, a sand beach, sea blue water, and surf that looked like ocean. He shrugged and walked back through the shop into the office, taking his time now. He noticed two things. There was a pile of rags under the desk and two bowls; one with a residue of milk, the other with cat chow.

  And on the desk, a blue-green pamphlet caught his eye, lying on top of a pile of tractor magazines. Tropics View under a red logo. He opened it and thumbed through. It was a brochure for a puddle-jumper airline that catered to Belize, on the east coast of Mexico.

  He put down the brochure. Nothing in the shop struck him out of the ordinary; the paint room could be dual use. Okay. Teedo said that he’d seen Gator moving boxes and drums with his Bobcat, to the barn.

  Griffin put his boots back on and walked to the barn.

  The hayloft was vacant, so Griffin went to the lower level and pulled open the tall, stout sliding doors. The basement floor was walled in two broad stalls; the one on the right was obviously used as a parking garage for Gator’s truck and was empty except for a battery charger and plastic gallons of wiper fluid and antifreeze.

  The other stall looked more promising. He searched inside the door jam, found an electrical box, and flipped the switch. A chain of four overhead bulbs came on, illuminating a long interior space. A working tractor with a snow bucket and the Bobcat were parked alongside a huge white oblong tank on wheels. “Anhydrous” printed in blue on the side. Stacks of yellow bags; rock salt. A bank of chest-high feed bins made of heavy three-quarter-inch ply lined the entire length of the partition to the right.

  The long basement abutted cattle pens and a lean-to that was open to the fenced pasture. He saw half a dozen heavy green plastic fifty-five-gallon drums arranged in the corner of one of the pens. Inspecting the drums, he found them empty and clean-smelling, like they’d been scrubbed with disinfectant.

  Griffin was running out of places for Gator to hide things. Briefly he considered digging through the tangled tractor graveyard in back of the shop. Then his eyes settled on the row of plywood bins. He walked over and lifted one of the lids. Immediately he stepped back, making a face at the stench. It was heaped with blackened smutty feed corn, garnished with a jumbo decomposing rat sprawled next to green poison pellets. He went down the line, opening the lids. Five in all; another corn, a barley, two oats, all of them years gone to mildew and rot. A remnant of the hobby farm that had been here.

  Griffin thought about it.

  The rest of the place was so shipshape. Why would he have these bins full of rotten feed? Decided to give the bins a closer look. He rapped his knuckle on the side panel; a solid thump. Moved his hand down a foot. This time when he struck the wood with his fist, he got a hollow-sounding bounce.

  Well, well.

  After fiddling with the plywood, he determined that the bins had been constructed with lift-out front panels; the wood screws that appeared to pin them in place had been trimmed back, didn’t go through. Cosmetic.

  Grunting with the effort, he forced the tightly fit panel up and revealed a compartment beneath the false feed tray. It contained a tall cardboard box. He removed the box, opened the flaps. Three round-bottomed glass flasks and a long twin-tubed glass apparatus were carefully packed in wadded newspaper. Tubing, stoppers, and clamps were tucked in crevices between the flasks.

  Gator’s little home chemistry set. Okay.

  Griffin stood up and looked down the row of bins. He didn’t have time to open all five bins. After carefully repacking the box, he put it back in the compartment and forced the panel in place. Then he went to the last bin and swiftly wedged open the front panel. This compartment contained a stash of over-the-counter chemicals, just like he’d read about in his Internet search. Stacked gallon cans of camping fuel, toluene, and paint thinner. A tightly packed box of lithium batteries, cans of Red Devil lye drain opener. A row of red Iso Heet plastic bottles. And a bottle of ether.

  Talk about fire in the hole.

  Griffin surveyed the basement. Now the yellow bags of rock salt piled along the wall behind the anhydrous tank didn’t look so innocent.

  Looking up at the series of overhead lightbulbs, he suddenly smiled. The old cartoonist in him suddenly frolicked in the image. Pop! Caption of the old lightbulb coming on in a thought bubble. It looked to Griffin like Gator’s tidy work ethic had broken down here in the old barn. Because all the volatile chemicals hidden in the bins posed one serious fire hazard. Yes, they did. So.

  Maybe just skip a step, leave Keith out of it. Besides, Keith probably wouldn’t really appreciate the concept of Gator’s karma working itself out, so to speak. It had the added elegance of poetic justice. Seeing’s how Gator made his Robin H
ood reputation blowing up a meth lab.

  Well, turnabout is fair play, motherfucker.

  Griffin vaulted up on the bin and unscrewed the lightbulb over the last bin, tossing it in his palms, hot potato, until it cooled; then he inspected it. Like he thought, a lightweight commercial bulb. He screwed it back in, jumped down, and hurried to the door and switched off the light. He needed a rough-service bulb with a more durable filament.

  Then he slipped out the door and checked the road for headlights. Seeing none, he walked back into the pines and melted into the murky forest. Touchy going in the shadowy trees, jogging his way back along his tracks; but he immensely enjoyed every step of the trek back to his Jeep. Doubly enjoyed it because he knew he was coming back.

  When it was really dark.

  An hour and forty-five minutes later, Griffin was back home in his own modest garage workshop, taking three items from a bag he’d just purchased at Tindall’s hardware in town; a package of heavy-duty lightbulbs, a sixty-milliliter vet’s syringe, and a can of starter fluid.

  Griffin opened the bulbs, selected one, placed the metal-threaded nob in his bench vise, and carefully tightened the jaws until the nob was secure. Then he took an electric hand drill, inserted a one-eighth-inch bit, and bored a hole in the metal thread. He repeated the procedure with a second bulb. Two should be enough.

  Then he looked around for something to carry the fluid in, that would be easily accessible to the long syringe needle. He settled on a soup-bowl-sized Tupperware container filled with woodscrews, dumped out the screws, poured in the fluid, and secured the lid with duct tape.

  He tucked the bulbs, syringe, and fluid in his backpack. Then he went into the house, found his small head-mounted flashlight, and replaced the batteries. Going back outside, he paused to look at the patchy clouds drifting past the constellations. The fattening half-moon. Fifty percent illumination. What the hell, now he’d be able to see in the woods.

  Thirty minutes later, the only thing moving on the back roads, Griffin arrived back at the logging road off Z, parked the Jeep, and set off trotting back along his fresh tracks.

  Like he thought. Didn’t need the light. The snow glimmered with faint moonlight, enough to see his tracks. As he moved, he thought about how this escapade had started because Kit Broker got in a fight at school. Messages were sent back and forth by the belligerent families. Now Griffin was adding his own anonymous little communique, and he was going to use a trick that Ray Pryce, the grandfather Kit had never known, taught him in Vietnam. The dormant artist in him loved the family symmetry.

  Breathy with sweat, staying on his earlier tracks, Griffin approached the farm and stalked back along the pine windbreak. Gator’s truck was parked in front of the barn, the chassis an oily yellow in the sodium vapor light on the barn. The farmhouse was blacked out except for the flicker of a TV in two of the first-floor windows.

  Part of the fun, going in while Gator was there, awake.

  Griffin crossed to the side of the barn, away from the yard light, and entered from the rear through the open shed and pens. Once inside, he pulled on the small headlamp and climbed onto the farthest bin from the front door. He took off his pack, and removed the bulbs, syringe, and plastic container of fluid. Then he reached up and unscrewed the lightbulb from the fixture, put it in the pack, and replaced it with one of the drilled bulbs. Snapped on the headlamp. Gingerly, working by the narrow light, he rotated the bulb just until the thread caught, leaving the hole exposed.

  Now for the hard part. He untaped his container and drew a syringe full of fluid. The trick was to insert the needle in the hole and squeeze the fluid into the bottom of the bulb without disturbing the filament, then very carefully screw the bulb back into the socket so the liquid didn’t slosh around, disabling the circuit.

  Which he accomplished, holding his breath, with steady fingers. Then he repeated the operation, replacing and loading the next bulb. When he’d stowed his gear back and put the replaced bulbs in the pack, he switched off the headlamp and hopped to the concrete floor. He judged the danger close distance to the front door and the light switch. Should be enough cushion.

  The next time that light was turned on, the bulbs would explode and spew liquid fire down on the plywood bins, hopefully igniting all the volatile crap in the area. He wanted to give Gator a scare and hopefully burn his stash, not kill the guy.

  Satisfied, Griffin exited the rear of the barn and ran back to the pines. Twenty minutes into the woods, he slowed his pace and allowed himself a cupped cigarette.

  Not quite like night work in the old days. In Vietnam, he would have waited until the lights were off in the house, crept in, and cut Gator’s throat.

  But close enough to elevate the pulse.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Saturday night. Nina wore a new green peasant blouse with flared sleeves. Kit had a smaller version of the same garment in burgundy. Broker cleaned up as best he could, left his work coat on the hook and dug a decent leather jacket from the closet, ran a comb through the shaggy hair curling over his collar.

  Then he took the newly coiffed girls out on the town. Such as it was. The Angler’s Inn was the only good restaurant that stayed open during the winter. It was located off the frontage road, near Glacier Lodge. The dining room was closed, but the bar side was open and served an abbreviated menu.

  They entered the old eatery tentatively, like a family venturing into church after a long absence. Only two people sat at the bar; half the booths were filled. The TV was off. A ceiling of antique stippled tin stretched down the long room, etched gray with generations of nicotine, grease, and wood smoke from the open-hearth fireplace. Kit walked solemnly, hugging her bunny, inspecting the gallery of photos and taxidermy on the walls-musky, walleye, a wolf. A moose head projected over the bar like an incoming antlered spaceship.

  Like a shrine to the departed twenthieth century, an old Wurlitzer jukebox pulsed and bubbled red and green in the back of the room. Kit had never seen one before, so Nina led her to the music box with a handful of quarters. Broker sat in a booth watching as Nina helped Kit load up songs. The waitress brought water and menus.

  At a moment like this, he could be as sentimental as the next guy. He allowed himself a vacation from suspicion about the future; enjoying looking at his wife standing next to his daughter. Nina in the new green flowing blouse, one hand planted on her hip, filling out a pair of Levi’s 501s like a north-country roadhouse dream.

  The women returned, and they ordered food as the songs came on. Some Gary Puckett. Jay and the Americans. Deliberate flourishes echoing back to their tornadic courtship.

  “Come a little bit closer”…like that.

  Midway through grilled walleye and moose burgers, he put the idea in play with a casual remark: “You know, I could call Dooley, have him get a housekeeper in to clean up the Stillwater place.”

  Nina looked up from her plate, blew a strand of hair away from her eyes, nodded, and said, “Give me another couple days to be sure. But I’m for that.”

  Seeing her mom and dad grinning at each other, Kit bounced in her seat. “You mean?”

  “That’s right, Little Bit,” Nina said. “We’re going home.”

  As they gabbed about Kit’s friends on North Third Street, and swimming and piano, Broker rode the happy thermals. Nina mentioned that she and Kit had bumped into Teddy Klumpe and his mother when they were shopping.

  “How’d that go?” Broker asked, momentarily snapping out of his glide.

  “It was icky,” Kit said. “Mom was so nice to her.”

  Nina shrugged. “She’s one uptight lady, so yeah, I made nice. Bought the kid a T-shirt to replace the one that got bloodied up-”

  “When he started a fight, and I got suspended. It was very icky, Dad,” Kit said emphatically.

  Broker grinned as Nina and Kit went back and forth on the etiquette of the meeting. The waitress cleared their plates, and Broker asked for the dessert menu.

  Nina was try
ing to explain to an eight-year-old the difference between necessary and unnecessary conflict. Kit scowled, furrowing her brow, looked to her dad for assistance.

  Broker made a stab. “Remember our little talk about laws of human nature?”

  Kit swelled her eyes. “Are we gonna throw more rocks in the air? Oh, boy.”

  Nina masked her laugh with her hand.

  “Well,” Broker said, “another basic law is there’s two kinds of people-”

  “Yeah,” Kit said, “there’s girls and there’s fat creepy boys like Teddy-”

  “Close. More like there’s people who like themselves and people who don’t like themselves. I don’t think Teddy likes who he is. See, it’s important to know the difference. Because the people who aren’t comfortable in their skins make you miserable.”

  By way of response, Kit held up her bunny, holding its stubby arms over its ears. Broker turned to Nina and asked, “Whatta you think?”

  “I think I’ll have the German chocolate cake and ice cream,” Nina said, suppressing a snicker.

  “I give.” Broker tossed up his arms. The waitress returned and he ordered German chocolate layer cake and ice cream all around.

  A little later, as they drove back to the small house on the lake, he found himself sneaking looks at Nina and pondering his glib, simple cliche: What goes up must come down.

  Broker built a fire in the Franklin stove, and they played two rounds of Sequence, a board game Kit liked, on the kitchen table. Kit won the first game.

  “Don’t pull your punches,” Broker hectored Nina as he reshuffled the cards and they sorted the plastic chips.

  “Hey, I didn’t,” Nina said, a little testy.

  “Mom doesn’t like to lose,” Kit said.

  Kit won the second game and yawned. Haircuts, shopping, dinner, talk of going home, dessert, and the fire had worn her out. They put her to bed and returned to the kitchen and the embers of the fire. Sat across the table from each other.

  Nina took out a cigarette and instead of lighting it manipulated it in the fingers of her right hand, like a prop in a dexterity exercise. Finally she set the cigarette vertical on the table, balanced on its filter. Then she poked her finger and knocked it over. Looked up at him.