Most of the wood was split and stacked when Earl stepped onto the deck outside Hank’s room and waved at Jolene.
“He smells like a Porta Potty at the state fair. I’ll feed him and wipe his nose but I’m not changing diapers, uh-uh,” Earl said.
Jolene removed her gloves. “I’ll be back in a minute.” Broker nodded and resumed work. She followed Earl inside and the first thing she reacted to was the blaring volume on the television. Immediately she searched for the remote. “Very funny,” she said when she found it where Earl had comically inserted it in Hank’s limp hand. She picked it up, clicked off the set, and said, “You know how much he hates the Fox News Channel.” She eyeballed Earl to see which face she was dealing with.
“C’mon, he isn’t there. Allen says if you keep up that kind of talk you’re going to have a problem with acceptance,” Earl said.
Okay. It was his mean face. “I already have a problem with you,” Jolene said flatly.
Earl moved on an oblique angle to her defiance and threw a menacing arm in the cat’s direction. “You should do something about that goddamn cat.” Ambush was now up, back arched at Earl’s loud voice. “If it was up to me, I’d nail that damn cat to a tree.”
* * *
The idea of Earl harming Ambush filled Hank with a normal anxiety that he found comforting compared to the bizarre terror he inhabited. Run, kitty, he thought. Get away from him.
Which Ambush did. She jumped lightly to the floor and sped from the room.
“I’d watch running my mouth about nailing things to trees,” Jolene said under her breath.
“You know what they say?” Earl grinned. “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.”
“I’d watch my mouth if I were you,” Jolene repeated, louder.
“Or what?”
“You said you were going to talk to Stovall,” Jolene strained the words through set teeth.
“I did talk to him. He wouldn’t talk back.”
“So you got mad.”
“Jolene, whatever I did I did for you. We’re in it together. You told me all about his cutting hangups because he talked about them in AA. How the cops had to come unnail him from the bathroom door in the basement. Same wrist. I used the scar for a guide.”
“You didn’t have to waste the guy, goddammit.”
“Me? He fucking froze to death. It wasn’t suppose to get that cold.”
“It was dumb and wrong and unnecessary,” Jolene said. “Milt will be into the trust in a month. .”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Earl countered. “Hank’s got an ex-wife in Michigan and one in St. Paul. They could tie it up.”
“We’re just lucky no cops have been going around interviewing all Stovall’s clients,” Jolene said.
“Hey”-Earl stabbed with his finger- “if I ever have to do any explaining, I’ll explain the part about you feeding me his cutting habits first. Maybe we don’t make it anymore, honey, but we’re still linked at the hips-just like NoDak.”
North Dakota. As always, Jolene recoiled from the memory of the ice age cold and that cowboy clerk’s scuffed boot soles doing their backward flip. So she changed the subject. She took out a fresh diaper, a baby wipe, and talcum powder. She said, “How could you grow up and never change a diaper?”
Earl made a face. “That isn’t a baby’s butt; that’s a rude old guy’s.”
Efficiently, Jolene peeled away Hank’s gown, removed the diaper and, as she carried it to the diaper caddy, she wrinkled her nose. “Something’s different,” she said, weighing the sodden weight in her hand.
“Yeah, him out there, he’s different,” Earl said, jerking a thumb toward the muffled sound of splitting oak.
“He’s handy,” Jolene said. She dropped the diaper into the can and let the top fall. Then she swabbed Hank with a wipe and dusted him with talc. Then she scooted an arm under the small of his back and levered him up to slide the new diaper under him.
“The Yellow Pages are full of guys who are handy,” Earl said.
“I kind of like this one,” Jolene said, pulling Hank’s gown into place.
Hank watched Jolene smile sweetly, undeterred by Earl’s glower. Something was going on. Maybe some of the things he’d been trying to teach her the last year had taken root.
“Hey, look,” Earl said, “you’re almost a rich widow. You have this big house and you’re surrounded by these guys who want to get into your pants. Allen for sure, maybe Milt, now this Broker guy. .”
“Yeah, so, tell me something I don’t already know,” Jolene said.
“How about you need some protection. And guidance.”
“Earl, what I’m trying to tell you is I don’t need your kind of protection.”
“Hey, wait a minute here, you called me up. You were all freaked out till I showed up,” Earl protested.
Jolene smoothed wrinkles out of Hank’s sheets. “True. I was. But now I’m better. And I don’t need your protection,” she repeated firmly. “That’s why I have a lawyer.”
Her last remark clearly alarmed Earl. “Hey, Jolene, word of advice. You try going from Wal-Mart to Nordstrom too fast, you’re going to get the bends.”
“Oh yeah? How’m I doing?” Jolene asked, sticking out her chin.
Now Earl threw his change-up and became genial. “Jolene, honey,” he said, coming forward, arms wide as if to embrace her, “who’s always been there for you?”
She moved in swiftly and poked a stiff finger into his sternum. “Right. And I appreciate it.” Another poke. “And I’ll make sure you’re taken care of,” she said.
“Taken care of?” Earl slapped her hand away, his expression curdled. “That sounds on the minimal side.”
“Not at all. I kept track and wrote it all down in a notebook, the amounts you spent putting me through treatment and what you gave me the last few weeks. We’ll come up with a figure we agree on. See?” And she let him have another sharp poke.
“Ow.” The annoyance on Earl’s face quick-fused to anger. He reached out and grabbed her hand below the wrist before she could poke him again. His knuckles blanched white and purple as he powerfully wrenched her toward him.
“You’re hurting me,” Jolene said between clenched teeth.
They glared at each other, Jolene up on her tiptoes, yanking her hand to free her trapped wrist.
Earl pointed out the window with his other hand, in the direction of the woodpile. “Cut the shit, Jolene. Now you get rid of him or I will. And if I do, it won’t be pretty.” He released her hand.
Jolene stepped back and triumphantly massaged the bruising already evident on her wrist. “You know what? I think you better watch yourself around this guy.”
An awkward amount of time passed. Too long for a simple bed check. Broker had finished the wood and now waited, sitting on the chopping block with the maul across his knees. When Jolene left she’d been breezy and confident. When she finally stepped back out onto the deck and approached him she had washed her face and put on lipstick. And her posture and gait were guarded. She held her right arm tucked close, protectively.
“I think you better go,” she said. Her eyes did not quite rise to his. “It’s got a little tense around here.”
“Uh-huh.” Broker got to his feet.
“I don’t know exactly how to put this.” She glanced back at the house. “I’m afraid you could get hurt.”
Broker ignored her last remark and tugged at the cuff of her right sleeve and saw the bracelet of blood bruising on her wrist.
“That’s going to show,” he said.
“I’ll wear long sleeves.”
“I owe your husband a big favor, more than chopping wood can repay,” Broker said slowly.
Jolene shook her head. “Earl’s my problem. And I have to learn how to handle him.”
He could still walk away. But maybe this was his entry into the curious dynamics of this house. So he said it and went over the line. “How about I just teach him some manners.”
After another of their loud silences, he reached in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and removed a card on which was printed:
Broker Fixes Things
Carpentry, Electric, Plumbing
Landscaping
The card was history-an artifact of his undercover persona. He was following his reflexes but he was working in midair, without a badge, without authorization.
But it felt good.
He took a pen from his jacket pocket, crossed out the old Stillwater address, and wrote down J.T.’s phone number and handed her the card. “I’ll be at that number for the next two days. You think about it.”
Jolene looked at the card, then at him. “You sure?”
Broker nodded. “Like I say, you think it over. Now, I’m going to put this away and leave.” He hefted the splitting maul, which weighed twenty pounds of forged steel. He carried it into the house and searched for the basement stairwell and followed a rising column of loud music and a steam of sweat, dirty laundry, and a faint under-scent of cannabis down the stairs off the kitchen.
Earl had converted the finished part of the basement into a computer crash pad. He had a futon, bench press, and weights in one corner. The rest of the space was a spaghetti junction of cables and lines connecting up two computers, two video monitors, a scanner, a TV and VCR, and a CD player set up on three tables. Piles of disks and software manuals littered the carpet.
Earl sat at his central computer nodding to the beat of ’NSYNC. Broker did not know the name of the group and vaguely understood that it was teeny-bopper music, and he wondered why a grown man was into those sounds.
Earl was selecting blocs of numbers off his screen and saving them to a file. Broker took a discreet step closer and studied the spreadsheet. Names. Addresses. Social security numbers. Sixteen-digit numbers grouped in fours. Then the heading: mother’s maiden name. And names, hundred of them.
Hmmm.
Because of the music, Earl did not hear him approach, so Broker watched for a few moments as Earl scrolled up more columns of names and numbers. And it looked to Broker’s cyber-challenged, but suspicious, eyes that Earl was in possession of a whole lot of other people’s credit cards.
Broker reached down and took an envelope with Earl’s name and a St. Paul address from a pile of bills on the desk and tucked it in his pocket. Then he leaned over and tapped off the CD.
Earl spun around, momentarily startled. Broker smiled and said, “Working hard, huh?”
Earl quickly moused an X in a box and closed the screen. “Code,” he said.
“Code, huh?”
“Yeah, I’m consulting on an encryption project for this firm in Bloomington.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Some people find programming elegant. Actually I think it’s pretty fucking tiring,” Earl said slowly, carefully watching Broker casually swing the maul in his right hand back and forth like a Stone Age intruder in Earl’s little high-tech pod.
“I wouldn’t know,” Broker said.
“Tiring and stressful,” Earl said. “Gets old pretty fast when you go through two million lines of code to find one comma out of place. I used to work for Holiday, you know, the chain of gas stations. Trouble-shooting their network.”
“Sure, Holiday,” Broker said.
“They own you twenty-four hours a day. Beep you in the middle of the night. You’re not your own person.” He positioned his feet to get up, and leaned forward and found the wedge blade of the maul jammed against his chest. “What the fuck?”
“Hey, that’s one of those new, thin-screen jobs,” Broker said, nodding at the trim-line monitor. “That must have cost a few bucks.”
Earl started to get up again and this time Broker thumped him on the chest with the maul, causing him to drop back in his chair.
“I’m done with the wood, thought you’d like to know.” Broker jabbed the maul harder.
Earl was not intimidated. He grinned and shook his head. “Take a minute to think, old man. When you came down those stairs you were looking at a bloody nose. Now you’re headed for intensive care.”
“Nah,” Broker said, “I think you’re just another of those point-and-click pussies.” Broker heaved the maul, and the cool, liquid glaze of the screen exploded in a puff of glass and sparks in Earl’s face. The maul handle clattered, overturning his keyboard.
“You, you,” sputtered Earl as he knelt and yanked the monitor cords from an outlet box.
“Sorry, must be my Luddite tendencies coming out,” Broker said.
Earl was puffed with fury but his shirt and eyebrows and hair and lap were dusted with sticky pieces of broken glass. His hands, which had balled into fists, now opened to wipe the debris away from his face and eyes.
“Don’t touch her again,” Broker said, then he whipped out his wallet, fingered out the hundreds that Earl had given him up north, and flung them in Earl’s face.
Then he turned, walked up the stairs, out of the house, and got into the Jeep. He waited for a minute, watching the door to see if Earl would come out. It occurred to him that he probably needed a weapon if he was going to play these kinds of games again. But Earl didn’t show. So he scribbled Earl’s license plate on a scrap of paper, shifted into reverse, backed up, put it in first, and drove away.
Broker was smiling, enjoying the memory of the shocked look on Earl’s face when his computer monitor turned to glitter dust. For the second day in a row he had come to Hank Sommer’s house for the last time. He had a feeling he’d be back.
On his way to J.T.’s, Broker detoured through Timberry’s main commercial drag and spent half an hour purchasing some items in a CompUSA.