It was turning into the kind of hot July day when you want to stay inside, draw the blinds, and turn up the A/C. Broker lit another of the cigarettes from Nina’s pack. As he smoked, he continued to hold the pack in his hand, like it was a link to her. He felt the remaining cigarettes in it, resisting the urge to actually count them. About half left. In the back of his mind a scared little kid made up a game.
As long as I have her cigarettes, she’ll be all right.
As they drove in Wales’ truck, Broker wondered if these cops had been waiting for this ever since they swore an oath and strapped on a gun-a killing in their town. Now it was on them; three people shot dead in less than an hour. One of them by their hand.
Barry Sauer was in the hospital ER getting his face stitched. The Border Patrol was in charge of the site where Joe Reed had been stopped. Kruse was searching the Shuster home. Druer, the part-time deputy, was now helping Fire and Rescue organize a search party to comb through the fields and ditches along Joe Reed’s escape route. Looking for Nina and Dale. They were covering all the bases.
Norm Wales drove up in front of the Missile Park and parked next to the county car. Deputy Vinson ushered them into the bar with a stern proprietary admonition: “Now, nobody touch nothin’.”
The older men glared at him. He glared back. “I mean it, I been keeping this site clean.”
Ace and Jane lay about three feet apart. Ace was facedown, curled slightly, compact, his arms tucked under his chest. Two red rosettes had spread no more than three inches wide in the back of his T-shirt, between his shoulder blades. Jane’s position was more dynamic-pitched on her right side, her right arm outstretched. A 9-mm Beretta lay on the pine floorboards about six inches from her spread fingers. He couldn’t see Ace’s eyes, but he could see Jane’s. They were open but had become things, mere organic matter, no longer human. Hardly any blood was evident on her broad forehead, but her chest was still soggy with it. A wet copper stench hung in the musty room.
“There’s five ejected cartridge casings by the rear doorway,” Vinson said.
Broker took a deep breath, let it out. You can get used to being around the dead but you never get used to the questions they pose.
“Broker, you been around some shootings?” Norm Wales said.
“A few,” Broker said.
“What do you see?” Wales said.
Broker studied the way Jane was sprawled. She had been trying to fight, had been chopped down in the act of trying to aim her weapon. He looked at the doorway at the other end of the room, where the empty brass lay. He said, “Not much bleeding. They died fast. That guy Joe could shoot.”
“Yeah,” Yeager said. “He hit Barry twice in the Kevlar at a dead run over broken ground-from more’n twenty-five yards on the first one.”
“I’m assuming Jane was no slouch with a handgun. But she took two in a two-inch group in the chest. Pretty fancy shooting under a lot of pressure for a blown-up Indian from Turtle Mountain,” Wales said.
“Nina told me to watch out for him,” Broker said. “Said he looked trained.”
“Trained,” Wales repeated. Like it was an especially potent word.
“She meant it as a backhanded compliment, as in trained like an operator. Like her. A peer. Maybe she was right,” Broker said. “Maybe she found exactly what she was looking for.”
Wales took a step closer and stared hard at Broker. “She’s your wife. Where you at with this thing?”
Broker had to explain something. They’d all been watching closely as he cycled, by turns intense and cool, burning an icy hole in the day. “It’s like this-Nina and I have had a few moments like this, and we made a pact that if the shit hits the fan-like now-we focus on working the problem until we know something for sure.”
“For sure,” Wales repeated.
“Yeah. Like until there’s a body.” They continued to stare at him. So he said, “Bottom line? Let’s say Dale Shuster is a bad guy. If she’s still breathing and he’s dumb enough to take her along, he better watch out.”
Wales nodded, he turned to Yeager. “Nuff said. Okay. What about Ace? Taking two in the back?”
“Don’t figure,” Yeager said. “Ace never ran from anything in his life.”
Wales shook his head. “ ’Cept maybe success.” He turned to Vinson. “You’re doing it right. Keep everybody out till the state crime guys get here.” Broker and Yeager followed him outside. He stood in silence for a few moments on the porch, staring at the equipment shed across the road. “Shuster and Sons,” he said under his breath. “I’m going to have to call Gene Shuster, tell him about his boys. Question is, tell him what, exactly?” He collected himself and faced the other men. “Okay. We plan along two tracks. Until someone convinces me otherwise I’m treating Dale’s nine-one-one call like what it appears. A murder-kidnap. So I got search parties started to go over every inch of ground on Joe’s route.” He looked directly at Broker. “You understand.”
Broker nodded. “If they’re dead, he had to dump the bodies.”
“At the same time we’ll give your misdirection theory some play. We’ll dig up a photo of Dale, put out an all-points, and fax out the picture of Nina off her military ID.”
Wales turned to Broker. “Okay, you come up with any bright ideas, you let me know. I’ll let Jimmy spend some time with you. There’s a couple carloads of people on their way from Bismarck and other counties, so it’s not like I’ll be hurting for help. All I ask is you two stay out of their way.”
“You going to tell the state guys who Jane was?” Broker said.
Wales folded his arms across his chest. “Not right off. “ ’Cause all I got is hearsay, right? Nobody’s going to confirm her, or Nina. And there’s this-we haven’t had a shooting in this county for a long time. This here’s news. There’ll be reporters coming. Loose talk about Army Delta and black helicopters could get real nuts real fast. Get way out of hand.” Then he squinted at Yeager. “Jimmy, now you’ve got a taste for this weird shit, how you going to go back to writing speeding tickets and counseling domestics?”
Yeager shifted from foot to foot. “Norm, what about a shooting board? Do I turn in my sidearm and go off the clock?”
“And reduce my full-time staff by thirty percent? Anyway-you fire that Colt on your hip?”
“Nope.”
“Then turn in the rifle. We’ll start the paperwork. Everything going on, it’ll probably be a week before we have a sit-down.” He pointed his finger. “Don’t do anything to antagonize the state guys.”
Broker and Yeager nodded.
Wales started for his car. “I’ll be at the SO, coordinating,” he said, cranking some irony and awe into the remark.
As soon as Wales pulled away, Broker reached for his cell and called Holly.
They agreed to meet in the parking lot of Shuster and Sons Equipment, across from the bar. Holly drove up in his undercover rig, the dust-blasted gray Chevy truck with the Arizona plates. With his pale eyes and shaggy hair he projected an aura of a spooky wind blowing off the Superstition Mountains. He wore faded jeans, cracked dirt-whitened leather boots, and a colorless T-shirt frayed from too much sweat and too many washings that bore a small line of type over the heart: John McCain for President.
“Holly, you remember Yeager. He dropped the guy they think killed Jane.” Holly and Yeager shook hands.
Holly studied the deputy. “We met out on the highway last night.”
“Sorta. You arrived in the helicopter,” Yeager said. He nodded across the road. “State crime agency is on the way to process the scene. You want to identify her?”
Holly shook his head and gazed across the road to where Vinson was stringing yellow crime scene tape. “I go in there, the forensic investigators’ll want to know who I am, and I can’t tell them.” He paused, then said softly, “SOP. If it was me in there, Jane would say the same.” He cleared his throat and planted his hands on his hips. “So I got one down and one missing.” He swung his pale blue eyes on the deputy, waited a couple of heartbeats. “So…with us here-are there any rules?”
“Whatever you cook up, I go along. How’s that for rules?” Yeager said.
“And if I don’t like it?” Holly asked.
“Then I take you in for questioning.”
“Well, then I guess I agree.” He turned to Broker. “Whatta you think?”
“I think Dale and Reed were your smugglers. I don’t know if Ace was involved. Somehow Nina and Jane bumped into them this morning and they panicked. If we find Dale, we might find what you came looking for,” Broker said.
“Great,” Holly said. “My crew is gone, my assets are gone. Any minute now, my chopper will be gone, too. I spent all morning getting chewed out on the telephone for running a cowboy operation. Now I’ve got casualties. And this ain’t exactly my turf. So where do we start?”
“Right here.” Broker pointed to the equipment shed, then turned to Yeager. “I saw something yesterday I want to show you. C’mon, it’s out in the back.”
Holly and Yeager followed Broker around the large shed. The weeds were chest high and still wet in the shadow of the building, and the dew drenched their trouser legs and footwear. They picked through a rusty junkyard: cast-off machinery parts, orange and flaking with rust, weeds growing in and around them. They came to a disturbed area, the dirt churned up and gouged by huge tire treads. The weeds in the dirt were dwarfs compared to the other weeds. Recent growth.
“He had a big loader in here,” Yeager said.
Broker pointed to a slick of yellow metal among the churned dirt. “I’d stepped out the back door and just looked around, and I caught this flash of yellow. See that? I was wondering why he’d bury something like that.”
Yeager stooped, scooped dirt away, and uncovered the top of a thick slab of yellow iron about two feet long and six inches deep. He moved closer, going down on his knees, and started to paw away the sand and dirt. “We need something to dig with.”
Immediately they spread out and started searching around the large pole barn and its outbuildings. Yeager went to a nearby utility shed, kicked in the door, and returned with two dusty old shovels. He gave one to Broker and they began to clear away the soil.
After a few shovelfuls Yeager was panting and sweating profusely. He staggered and leaned on his shovel. “Don’t know what’s wrong.”
Holly took his shovel, drove it into the dirt. “Delayed stress,” he said quietly. “You ever kill a man before?”
Yeager shook his head, mopped sweat from his face.
“Kind of weight you pick up and never put down. Takes some getting used to. Hello…” His shovel twanged on hollow metal.
They looked at each other. “That ain’t right,” Yeager said. “It’s a fucking counterweight, it’s solid iron.”
They went back to work and got it exposed. The weight was squared off on top and a slightly wider trapezoid on the bottom. Three large bolt holes were drilled into it, and an oblong opening through the side and out the top, like a handhold.
“What kind of weight?” Holly asked.
“Counterweight for a Deere loader. A 644C. Common enough machine around here,” Yeager said.
Broker curled his hand around the opening in the top and yanked. It heaved slightly. “Jesus, what’s it weigh?”
“Yeager squinted. “Something’s wrong. You shouldn’t be able to move that thing. Sucker should weigh over four hundred pounds.”
“Why bury it? It’s not like they wear out, like tires,” Holly said. Real curious now, his shaggy white eyebrows drew closer together, his forehead wrinkled. Broker cleared away more dirt, tossed the shovel aside. With Holly, he squatted, grabbed handholds, and together they upended the weight.
“No shit, lookit that,” Holly said.
The three of them explored the cast-iron slab with their fingers. More than a third of its volume had been cleanly machined to create a cylindrical cavity, open on one end.
“A hollow counterweight?” Broker said as he and Holly turned to Yeager.
“See here,” Yeager said. He pointed to one end of the cavity, where the edge of the weight had been thinned down to less than a quarter-inch. It had cracked and shattered. “If it was bolted on the machine, with another weight in back of it, you could never see it was drilled out. But they screwed up milling out that thin edge to the hole and it cracked. Woulda gave it away, so he tossed it.”
“Dale Shuster is sounding more and more like a tricky guy,” Broker said. “What do you suppose he had in mind to put inside this thing?”
Yeager squatted, ran his thick fingers over the steel. “I seen a lot of smuggling tricks-false bottoms in gas tanks, compartments in trucks. But this is way too much work to get on and off a machine unless it was for something real special.” He looked at Holly. “Would what you’re looking for fit in here?”
Holly shook his head, tapped his teeth together. “Not sure.”
“Still, it’d be one hell of a chore to get the weight on and off. You’d need a hoist, air wrenches for the bolts. And only one fella around here has the gear to do millwork like this,” Yeager said. He looked at Broker, then at Holly. “Eddie Solce. He’s done a lot of repair work for the Shusters, going way back.”
On the ride out, Yeager explained how Eddie Solce lived south of town. He’d failed farming and had sold off half his land and had the rest in the Crop Rotation Program. He’s always been the local guy to repair farm equipment in his metal shop. “And he’s only got one hand. Lost his left hand in a corn picker, ’bout twenty years ago. Got him one of those old-fashioned Trautman farm hooks-just this clamp, but he can practically pick his nose with it.”
Yeager wheeled into a long driveway leading up to a white foursquare farmhouse in need of a paint job. Pointing toward a green F-150, he said, “He’s home, there’s his truck. Another thing, Solce always liked Ace. He was a little disappointed Ace didn’t marry his oldest daughter, Sally. They dated pretty heavy during high school.”
At the front door, Eddie Solce came out to meet them in blue jeans and a Chambray work shirt. Lean and rawboned, he’d shriveled into one mean nest of wrinkles after sixty and now it was impossible to tell his age. But he still looked strong, especially his right hand-as if the loss of his left hand had pumped twice the strength into the right. Broker thought he looked garrulous and he was.
“I already heard. Goddamn shame. Ace got himself shot by that goddamn Joe Reed. And some woman, too. Ace always did follow his pecker into trouble. Damn Joe anyway. Dale should’a never taken that buck on.” Eddie paused, squinted, nodded toward Broker and Holly. “Who the hell are these two? Ain’t from around here, that’s for sure.”
Yeager took Eddie by the shoulder, walked him off a few paces. “You don’t want to know who these boys are, believe me.”
Eddie flexed his jaw and sucked in his cheek on one side as he snatched a look over Yeager’s shoulder. “That one dusty white-haired fucker-he looks like he came outta a goddamn movie.”
“Eddie.” Yeager said it like an admonition, like a command to come back to his senses and get serious.
“Yeah, Jimmy,” he said, more collected.
“C’mon, let’s take a walk.”
“Am I in trouble?” Sober now, his voice slower. “Where we going?”
“Your shop. Something I wanted to talk to you about. We found it over at Shuster’s shed. But the thing is, it’s too big to carry around.”
Solce set his jaw in resignation when Yeager said that. Like he knew where this was heading. They started toward the barn and the pole barn alongside. Broker and Holly fell in behind, listening to the conversation.
They went into the shop, which was an orderly rectangular work space with a long metal fabrication bench in the middle. A stick welder, along with tanks of acetylene and oxygen, sat off to the side. Racks of mixed plain and diamond-plate chromed steel sheets lined the wall. Yeager walked up to a machine at the end of the shop. It stood six feet tall, had a complicated drill head and a video console on an arm off to the side.
“Bridgeport mill,” Broker said.
“Yep,” Holly said, “That’d be the thing.”
They settled back and watched.
Yeager put his hand on the mill and looked at Solce. “Well, Eddie?
“I got nothing to do with what happened at that bar. I been here all morning, ask Margo and the grandkids,” Eddie said. He began to scratch at the steel hook with his right hand.
“But you did some unusual work for Dale this summer, didn’t you?” Yeager said.
Eddie ground his teeth, tapped them together a few times. “A job’s a job.”
“But this job was pretty strange, you gotta admit…”
Eddie swallowed and said very respectfully, “Am I in trouble, Jimmy?” He scratched at his hook faster, like it really itched.
“I’m thinking no, but if you don’t tell me straight about drilling a channel in a five-hundred-pound Deere counterweight I’ll sure as hell figure out a way to put you ass deep in something,” Yeager said.
Eddie sagged and sat on his metal bench. “Wasn’t just one. Was five of the fuckers.”
Broker and Holly came forward, their eyes getting wide. “How the hell did you get five of those things in here?” Broker said.
Eddie shrugged. “Joe Reed brought ’em over on a lowboy. Had a hoist and jacks. He was good at stuff like that. We brought them in one by one on a forklift.”
“When was this?” Yeager said.
“Beginning of June. Took me two weeks to do the four on the loader. Then one of them cracked and I had to do another one.”
“Jesus Christ, Eddie,” Yeager said. “Did it occur to you to wonder what the hell Dale wanted with bored-out weights on a 644C?”
“Well, it was different. And Dale, he just said, like-‘I know this looks weird but it’s a joke I’m playing on Irv Fuller.’ See, he was getting set to sell the loader to Irv, in Minnesota.”
Broker and Holly were squinting slightly, leaning forward, listening carefully. They shot quick looks at Yeager.
“One hell of a lot of work for a practical joke,” Yeager said.
“I know, Jimmy. But those two families have a history of shorting each other way back. And there’s the stuff from high school. Remember? Irv was behind that stunt they pulled on Dale.”
Yeager narrowed his eyes, folded his arms across his chest, and said quietly, “Along with Ginny Weller.”
“They ever find her in Grand Forks?” Eddie asked.
“No,” Yeager said. He glanced at Broker and Holly.
Broker took Holly aside and explained about the burned yearbook, Nina’s license. Then he stepped forward, raised his hand to calm Eddie, who instinctively edged back. “Give us a diagram of the job, how you milled out those weights.”
Eddie’s eyes flitted to Yeager, who nodded his assent. Eddie got up from the bench, went to a counter next to the mill, and took out a pad of paper and a pen. He held the pad in place with his hook and sketched an angled channel running through two weights from the side view. He looked up. “Big enough to stick your arm in, except it don’t go through and through. The channel on the rearmost weight was open on one end and to within an eighth of an inch on the other end. That’s why one cracked, ’cause it was such a close tolerance. But the other weight, the channel was only halfway through, so when you put the weights back on the machine you can’t tell they been milled.”
“The same on both sides?” Broker asked.
“Yeah, but they wanted them angled kinda. So they run continuous together.” Eddie raised his hands and pulled them in tight to his chest in an inverted V. “Like the two channels come to a point.” He licked his lips, swallowed. “Kinda,” he said, his nerves kicking out an extra word.
Yeager clapped Eddie on the shoulder. “Take it easy, Eddie, You did good. I’ll be in touch.”
They left Eddie Solce sitting on his bench staring at the concrete floor of his workshop. On the swift walk back to Yeager’s cruiser, Holly said, “Angled channels converging, steel plug in the back, paper thin in front. What’s that sound like to you?”
“Like a funnel for a shaped explosive charge,” Broker said.
“Well, technically, more like a directional charge. Man, we gotta find that machine,” Holly said.
“I’m working on it,” Yeager said, flipping open his cell.