by Chuck Logan
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 trying 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.
“You got something you want to say, say it.”
Trying to keep the mellow mood going, he shook his head. “It can wait.”
She studied him for a moment. “You’re thinking, When is she going to call the doctor at Bragg, huh.”
“I guess,” Broker said. There it is.
“Pretty soon,” she said with a sliver of the old steel in her voice. “And then we’ll have a long-overdue talk. You and me.” She grimaced ever so slightly, looked away, and picked up the cigarette, started out of reflex to put it in her lips.
Broker felt the tiny slippage in the air, the day starting to slide.
But then she snapped her wrist and darted the cigarette across the table into the glowing coals in the stove. “You know,” she said, giving him that sidelong glance, “I wouldn’t blush if you wanted to fool around again tonight. Unless Griffin snapped your dick string lifting those weights this morning…”
Chapter Forty
Because Gator generally didn’t trust excitement, he compensated for his giddy Saturday and weird brush with Griffin by working all day on the Moline. Important to keep the shop running normally. Never tell when Mitch Schiebel, his parole officer, might stop by for a spot-check and cup of coffee. By sunset he’d finished replacing the clutch and flywheel.
He put away his tools and washed up. Sheryl had not left a message. And he was all right with that. She wouldn’t talk to the gang until tomorrow morning. Why waste a drive to Perry’s pay phone just to be anxious together?
Just after he turned the display light on his show tractor the phone rang. It was Cassie.
“Gator, you think you could drop by again?”
“Uh-uh, I’m through making house calls,” he said in an idle voice as he watched the black kitty jump up on the office desk and stretch.
“C’mon, just one more time, honest,” she said.
Gator reached out his hand and stroked the cat’s glossy fur, feinted with his finger, sending the cat back on its haunches, paws up; then he darted in the finger, tickled it on the chest. “You want something, you’re going to have to come get it,” he said into the phone.
“I thought you didn’t want me to come out there?”
Gator lifted the cat and let it pour from his hand, this smooth effortless motion. “Maybe I changed my mind,” he said.
“I gotta think about that,” Cassie said.
“You do that,” Gator said. Then he ended the
call. For a moment he had a fleeting sensation of what it might feel like to get everything you want.
He pushed up off his chair and, feeling more balanced after a day spent with his tools, took some coffee, put on his coat, went out through the paint room door, and walked through the old machines in back of the shop. Looking at the sky filling in with dark clouds, he made a mental note to check the Weather Channel; see exactly what was behind the front taking shape to the northwest.
As the light left the sky, an afterglow seemed to cling to the snow cover on the fields in back of the shop. The snow cover had melted then frozen again, forming a tough crust. Faintly, then louder, he heard a swelling chorus of howls. The pack was active. Wolves could run across the crusted snow in which the deer foundered. Made them easy targets.
From the accelerating howls, he assumed they had located such a deer; a straggler, injured or just weak.
People in town had come to associate him with the wolves, because he lived alone out here. Even attributing to him some of the animals’ wildness.
He did see one comparison.
The meth they cooked would prowl along the margins of the population, selecting out the dumb, the naive, the weak. Like the wolves, it would devour the strays who, ensnared in their addiction, could no longer run.
Fact was, he would be providing a social service. In producing the drug, he would be culling out the weak and infirm. By killing them, he was improving the quality of the herd.
The wind gusted, and he turned up his collar and sipped the coffee. Hearing the howls and thinking of Sheryl negotiating with a killer brought to mind his own kills.
In addition to the tractors, his dad had left a locker containing a rifle, a shotgun, and three pistols. After his folks “died,” he greased the weapons up with Cosmoline and wrapped them in oilcloth; a souvenir German Luger, two small.22-caliber pistols, a.12-gauge shotgun, and a 30–06 deer gun. Took them into the tractor grave yard and hid them in the chassis of an ancient Deere. They stayed there for years. As a kid he favored the Luger, but as it turned out, when he returned to the farm, the Ruger.22 proved more useful.
Homicide 101 on Cell Block D over bootleg cigarettes and contraband potato hooch. A.22 works just fine, but you gotta put the sucker right up against the poor fuck’s head you’re gonna kill. Or better, stick it in his ear and burn the body. That way, nobody’s gonna know the body has a bullet in it ’cause the round won’t exit the skull.
Like a TV show beamed in from a satellite on the dark side of the moon. Stuck way off the menu past the music channels, the auctions and the religious nuts. Always ran in the back of his mind. Way back.
He could watch it if he chose.
Not his mom and dad. That was more like fate. Predetermined-he had just provided an extra nudge. Like the wolves again, cleaning some slime out of the gene pool.
The rule certainly applied to his cousins, who were filthy people. Untidy in their morals and their housekeeping. Preying on their own kids. Fucking scum.
The day Marci Sweitz got poisoned, he saw a way to solve his biggest problem, them snooping around his shop. Not that much different from taking out the trash for Jimmy to pick up. Clean up the neighborhood. Shot them fast coming into the stinking house. Herded them into the bathroom to control them and popped them all carefully in the throat. Multiple times with the Ruger.22. Soft tissue bleeder wounds, taking care to avoid the bones. Soft-tissue wounds would burn away in the fire. Billie, Vern, Doug, and Sandy last of all. Disgusting little tramp kid poisoner, down on her knees, slobbering in the spoiled food and dog crap. Begging, had this baby pacifier in her mouth; all that Ecstasy and meth had given her fits of jaw-clenching and teeth-grinding and had probably ruined her oral sex career.
“Calm down, Gator, please. Let me do you. You know how good I am.”
She was actually frantically grabbing at his belt when he put the barrel to her throat.
Swallow this, bitch.
Then he opened the propane coupling on the hot water heater in the disgusting basement, turned on the hot water full blast in the kitchen and the bathroom. Half an hour later, standing on his porch, he watched the sky light up over the tree line.
The world could only improve when you stuffed all that walking garbage in a plastic bag.
The howls rose in their usual spooky intensity, toying with the short hairs on his neck. At this point the wolf logic hit the unresolved contradiction of his life. His contribution to upping the mental hygiene had amounted to killing off Bodines, his own family.
That left Cassie. And him.
Got him thinking how there’s wolves and there’s wolves, like the alpha wolves who cull the pack.
He had watched Broker chopping wood in back of his house that first day. But he’d only seen him up close once. Fast but close, going past him on the ski trail. But he got a good look at the man’s severe agate eyes under those shaggy eyebrows. Thinking back on it now, Broker looked sort of like a wolf.
To hear Sheryl tell it, this Shank fella was a real pro. Looks like they were going to find out.
Gator looked up at the dark wall of nimbostratus clouds coming in low-snow clouds. He shook off the chill, dumped his coffee, walked to the house, went inside, and shut the door tightly against the baying of the hunting pack. Dumb, thinking like this.
He jumped when the wall phone rang in the kitchen. Approached it tentatively. Picked it up and heard Barnie Sheffeld’s gritty voice. Barnie had the antique Case on display at his implement showroom in Bemidji.
“Thought you might want to know,” Barney said. “Got a buyer for that Case. When it’s all wrapped up, you be looking at eighteen thousand, how’s that.”
“Hey, Barnie, that’s great,” Gator said, grinning.
After a few more pleasantries they ended the call, and Gator paced the cramped kitchen. It was like a sign.
Like-after all the planning and hard work, he and Sheryl were going to succeed. He was dreaming barefoot, sand between his toes. Boat engines would be cleaner than country tractors. Surf and sun. No more skinning his knuckles in a freezing junkyard, looking for parts. He’d take his time. Put together his own boat. An island runner. Things to learn, navigation, charts…
Never seen the ocean. Just Lake Superior.
Damn. He cocked his head and imagined a gruff shadowy gremlin god for grease monkeys and dope-dealing jailbirds who rewarded hard work.
Imagined this crafty demon looking up from counting his money. Imagined him smiling.
Chapter Forty-one
At 8:03 on a sunny but brisk cloudless Monday morning Shank wheeled the gray Nissan Maxima to the curb in front of Grand and Dale Drugs, where Sheryl was standing in dress jeans, boots with two-inch heels, a slightly clingy blouse, and her good leather car coat. No hat, no gloves, no scarf. As she got in the passenger side, she missed the way he appraised her choice of clothing, like it might be a problem.
“Hey,” she said, upbeat, scanning the leather interior. “Nice wheels.”
Pulling smoothly into traffic, Shank pointed to an envelope on the dash. “Check it out,” he said.
Sheryl picked it up, an old Fotomat envelope with a blurred date entered in ballpoint, “7/23/92.” She opened the flap and pulled out a stack of four-by-six colored photographs. An almost starry moistness came to her eyes when she saw the top one; the old gang in better times, more hair showing, bare-chested, tank tops, tattoos taking the summer sun…maybe two dozen guys and their old ladies, clustered around a tall ponytailed already gray eminence. Danny Turrie, hands on hips in the middle, anchoring the crowd. They were arranged linking arms in a cluster. This smoky pile of dirt in the foreground. And there she was right in front, ten years younger, nut brown in cutoffs and a bikini top. Blissed-out grin on her face…musta been tripping…
“Jesus, this was-” She thought back.
“Uh-huh. Back in the day. The pig roast, on the bluff out at Danny’s Lakeland place. Before my time,” Shank said.
“Where’d you g
et these?”
“Spent all day yesterday tracking them down. Joey Chatters took them.”
“I know Joey,” Sheryl said.
“He ain’t doing so good, type-two diabetes,” Shank said.
“Jeez, next to Danny, that’s-”
“Yep. Jojo, holding a bottle of Bacardi. Check out the dude in front, with the shovel. Take your time.”
Sheryl sorted through the pictures. They diagrammed a process; the crowd watching the lean guy with the shovel, shirt off, glistening with sweat, tiger muscled. No tattoos. He was digging into the smoky coals, opening a hole in the pit, unearthing a long greasy bundle. He had shaggy dark hair, prominent cheekbones, and these heavy eyebrows that grew almost together in a line across his forehead.
“I sorta remember him, we called him…” Sheryl bit her lip, concentrating.
“Eyebrows, you called him Eyebrows back then,” Shank said.
“Yeah,” Sheryl said. “Eyebrows. He roasted the pig. Wasn’t patched, sort of a-”
“Handyman, helped Danny out. Made himself useful,” Shank said. He had turned off Dale onto westbound I-94, accelerated into the rush-hour traffic. “Remember, Saturday, I asked you if you had a picture?”
“No shit; that’s Broker.” She looked up, her face conjuring with the information. “I never…I mean, Gator, he found the guy. I never put eyes on-”
“Up north,” Shank said.
“Yeah,” Sheryl said.
“I spent all Sunday talking to three people in those pictures, they all remember clearly the guy’s name was Phil Broker.”
“You been busy,” Sheryl said.
Shank shrugged. “You got a job, sometimes you have to actually do it, huh. Ain’t done yet. I need one more ID.”
Sheryl thought about that as Shank expertly threaded the car through lanes of traffic on the 280 curve near the University of Minnesota; the IDS tower up ahead, Minneapolis skyline catching the morning sun.
Seeing the question taking shape on her face, Shank gave her a sidelong glance and asked, “How do you usually drive to Glacier Falls?”