Vapor Trail (24 page)

Broker and Janey
sat on the deck sipping coffee and watching the clouds roll in. A grumble in the distance prompted Janey to turn her head. “Was that thunder?” she said.

“I think it was,” Broker said. He could feel a cool shadow insinuate into the air, compressing the humidity like a spring.

Their eyes met, and they laughed, just as they’d laughed last night when they couldn’t get past mild petting. Janey had slept in the guest room.

After a few beats, Janey said, “Well, look at us; so much for weak moments.”

Broker shrugged and said, “Maybe weak moments are like straight-leg jeans; you gotta be young to be comfortable in them. We’re pretty much padded with baggage, you and me.” He briefly revisited his “weak moment” last year with Jolene Sommer, which had been pretty awful.

“I guess Drew doesn’t let it bother him,” Janey said.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Broker said.

“Maybe it’s his men’s group . . . we go to this Unitarian church
sometimes, and they have . . . don’t laugh,” Janey said, seeing the smile curl at the corner of his lips.

Broker held up his hands in a surrendering gesture. “Hey, I can dig it. I was in this big men’s group once. Cut my hair short, wore green all the time, ate shitty food, and slept in the woods. No drumming, though, and no campfires.”

“Very funny. What I mean is, Drew and these guys get very involved in discussing their evaporating testosterone or something . . . their vigor. I think getting older scares him.”

A long muted crackle snaked across the sky. If his daughter were here, Broker would tell her that, far away, a thunder lizard was uncoiling his spiked ozone tail.

“I don’t know. Sometimes a marriage comes down to basic triage. When things get ugly and bloody, you have to figure where you’re headed—to emergency or the morgue,” Broker said.

“Now there’s a quaint—” Janey stopped in midsentence as two phones rang at the same time in the kitchen: the house phone and her cell phone on the table. “That’s . . . weird,” she said.

They got up and went to their respective phones.

Broker picked up and heard the familiar voice start in, “It’s Jeff; first of all, everything’s all right so don’t worry, you hear me?”

The caller was Tom Jeffords, the Cook County sheriff. His neighbor on Lake Superior’s north shore.

“What the hell? Is it the folks?” Broker said, bracing himself.

“No, it’s Kit,” Jeff said.

Instant Tilt-a-Whirl in his chest. “Kit?”

“She’s all right. She’s fine. It’s just that she turned up in a motel room in Langdon, North Dakota, with a baby-sitter who had instructions to call me today.”

Broker sat down as the edges of his vision came tunneling in. “Where the hell is her mother?” His voice shook between incredulity and real anger.

“Nina left her with this baby-sitter yesterday. Just the instructions to call. No other message,” Jeff said. “I called the Cavalier County Sheriff’s Department, and they’ve got deputies on it up the wazoo. Nothing to worry about. She’s fine, so stay cool.”

“Where the hell is Langdon?” Broker said, trying to stay cool.

“Up in the northeast corner in the middle of nowhere. Grand Forks is the nearest air link. Take these numbers.”

Broker wrote down the numbers for the Cavalier County Sheriff’s Department. And the Best Western where Kit was found. He listened while Jeff counseled him not to bother his parents until he had Kit in hand. Jeff said call anytime; he was there night or day. They said good-bye.

He immediately started to punch in the motel number when Janey appeared in front of him. She pressed her phone to her chest, and her face was cold with restrained fury. “That was Laurie, calling me on Drew’s cell phone. He left her stranded in the bathroom, and he’s got some woman there.”

Broker held up his hand. “Wait a minute,” he said. He had to think. Better to make his calls from the county office. He had to return Mouse’s car, anyway. No sense troubling Janey with this new information. “Go down to the car. I’ll be right there,” he said.

Broker went fast through the bathroom and the bedroom; threw his toilet articles and a change of clothes in a duffel bag, locked the house, and jogged to the car.

Driving between eighty and ninety, he barely heard Janey’s screed against Drew as he tried to stay focused. When they hit the north end of town, he was reassuring himself that Jeff was a strictly no-bullshit cop.
If he said Kit was all right, she was all right.

Okay. So what . . . ?

Then he stopped and double-parked in front of Drew’s building, where a small crowd of people stood on the street nervously
pointing up the steps toward Drew’s studio. Janey stepped out of the car, spoke briefly to someone in that crowd, and immediately sprinted up the steps.

Broker jumped from the car and raced after her.

“ . . . gunshot up there . . . ,” someone yelled as he rushed past.

Now what?
Taking the steps three at a time. Going in cold, nothing in his hand. Nothing. Just going in.

Now screams.

The kid. Laurie in there screaming.

He was in and . . .

Drew, naked with a towel trailing off his butt, leaking bubbles of blood from his chest and his lips. He left a slick red smear on the hardwood floor as he crawled sidestroke toward the bathroom. Broker dropped to one knee, to check Drew, and Janey shot past him into the bathroom.

“LET HER GO!”

Broker leaped over Drew, threw his shoulder against the door, and shoved it against the recoil of struggling bodies on the other side. He set his stance and forced his way in. Inside the small room, Janey grappled with a woman who had just taken her hands off Laurie. Laurie was screaming and crouched waist-deep in a bathtub full of water as she swung her tiny bandaged fists.

Broker had seen this woman before.

Lunging, he thought with his hands. The woman was reaching down to the wet floor . . .

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.