Broker drove back home, parked the truck, climbed up into the bed, and kicked the garbage bin off his tailgate. Standing there in the sour wind, he gauged the anger pulsing in his throat, hot in his chest.
Usually his anger was fast surface burn, like spit hissing on a griddle. This was inside, and he couldn’t get it out. It just kept circuiting on this loop. His eyes traveled back into the woods, where he’d left Kit’s toy stuck on the pole. Sagging, he got down, closed the tailgate, and straightened up the bin, positioning it where it belonged.
Should call Griffin. He knows these people.
But Griffin had a tendency to go from insult to breaking bones in seconds flat; once he got involved, it might be impossible to hold him in check. Have to think about that.
He went inside, and after confirming that Nina was sleeping upstairs, he resolved to work it off. Clean the house. Stow the clutter. Wipe down the surfaces. If not a solution, at least a distraction. First he moved all the unpacked boxes into the garage and arranged them neatly along one wall. Then he attacked the downstairs bathroom, where he got stuck for a moment staring at the cat litter box as Kit’s words from this morning washed back in a wave.
When I die, will I get to see Ditech again?
Like dying was a reasonable price to pay to be reunited with a cat? Did he think like that when he was eight? He stood, holding a scrub pad and Comet cleanser, peering at the lathered washbasin, trying to remember. The main thing he recalled was his mother yelling at him about wearing a hat and unthawing his fingers and toes after playing hockey until after dark in subfreezing weather.
He shook it off, removed the cat box, and put it in the garage. When he finished in the bathroom, he went into the living room and stacked Nina’s weights in a tidy row. Then he brought a basket of laundry from upstairs and loaded the washer.
As he stuffed in towels and washcloths, he speculated how Mrs. Helseth’s admonition to contact the sheriff would now be complicated by his ad hoc garbage dump at Klumpe’s office. Then he considered how he had not advised Nina about his engagement in low-intensity yokel warfare. How he had enlisted Kit as an accomplice in keeping mom out of the loop.
He revisited his talk with Susan Hatch, who had weighed in with more advice. Both Helseth and Hatch were suggesting he needed filling in on Cassie and Jimmy’s “local soap opera.”
That he was getting his foot into…
Twenty minutes later he left the bathroom in perfect sparkling order.
As he opened the hall closet and took out the Kenmore canister, he caught himself again and looked upstairs. Vacuuming would wake her. Take a break.
There was still coffee in the thermos on the kitchen island, so he poured some into a travel cup, put on his coat and boots, and went out on the back deck, where he sat down on the steps and lit a cigar.
Didn’t work. He found himself staring at his footprints in the snow, leading into the trees. Where he’d been out walking around last night with a loaded shotgun.
Okay. Klumpe was here. But he could have found the bunny in the truck when he knifed the tire.
If he knifed the tire.
There was even a chance Broker had not entirely closed the garage door and the cat had escaped on her own. But someone-Klumpe-had definitely removed the cat’s collar and strapped it on the toy and rammed it on the pole at the trail intersection.
Kit was still missing her cat.
With considerable effort, Broker tried to step back from the spiral of anger and evaluate motive. You humiliated Klumpe in front of his wife and kid. No need to slap the choke hold on him like that. The sheriff was getting out of his car. All you had to do was back up.
He’d always taken his ability to function under pressure for granted…
Broker sipped his coffee, puffed on the cigar, and watched the smoke dissipate in the wind. Kinda like Nina, always taking her iron will for granted.
Okay. So maybe it was time to back off. Reach out.
Broker actually grimaced at the idea of calling Griffin and asking for personal help. Help with Nina was one thing. But help for him personally…Jesus…
Up till now Griffin had provided a place to stay and the bare bones of a cover story. That done, he stayed at a respectful distance. How much did he know? Broker assumed Griffin gossiped with J. T. Merryweather and Harry Cantrell. They all used to come up here to hunt. He was one of the few “civilians” those two allowed into their confidence.
Face it. The problem with reaching out to Griffin-besides his tendency to overreact-was that he was a Vesuvius of advice waiting to erupt. He had almost thirty years saved up, twenty-five years of it stone cold sober. And Griffin tended to be blunt.
And even being longtime friends, they had some issues.
Broker finished his cigar and came back into the kitchen. He was still pondering making the call when Nina wandered in, doing her bathrobe shuffle but, Broker observed, with a little more swing than usual. She stopped, cocked her head to the side, and said, “Broker, you feeling all right? You don’t look so hot.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, backing up a step. Not used to her making and maintaining direct eye contact. Not used to seeing the hint of color in her cheeks. “Just cleaning the place up.”
She nodded, “Uh-huh. How’d it go with the principal this morning?”
“Ah, they’re moving her to a different home base, away from the kid she hit. No recess for a week. They’ll keep an eye out,” he said, thinking, first eye contact, now she’s tracking and making conversation. Christ, she is coming back. Not used to being scrutinized by her green eyes, he had to remind himself that Nina coming back was a good thing.
Then she poured a cup of coffee and took up her position at the stove, flipped on the overhead fan, and lit a cigarette. Broker was actually relieved when she pointed the TV remote like an escapist wand. The set popped on, dropping an electronic curtain over the room and hopefully cloaking his agitation.
For once he didn’t mind.
Usually the cable shows reminded him of undercover work that had taken him into endless barrooms where it was always 11:00 P.M. The time when the smart people had long departed and only the drunks remained, yelling their pet peeves at each other. Chris Matthews brayed on one stool, Bill O’Reilly on another. Sean Hannity off beating his meat in the john. CNN had less volume and droned in a thorazine monotone. PBS was different, a station that delivered its monotone with footnotes.
C-SPAN was okay, free of commercial breaks, it came at you in agonizing real time like a dogged AA group crusading to get the nation to go on the wagon of sober politics.
Broker retreated to the washer and dryer in the bathroom and reached in to haul towels from the washer, except the goddamn towels were tangled like wet pythons around the washer stalk, resisting him. Suddenly he yanked at them, jarring the machine. He stopped and stared at his hands. Close to shaking. The flash point idling hair-trigger…
Primed and ready, just a surge away.
Deep breath, center down. Slowly, he disentangled the twisted towels from the washer column. Looked up through the doorway, snuck a look at Nina, thinking how she’d always favored colors that complemented her hair and complexion; shades of green and amber. Harvest colors. Now she grabbed whatever came to hand first in the drawer or laundry basket. At this moment, under the green terry-cloth robe, she wore a gray T-shirt, a pair of red sweatpants. Purple sweat socks.
Kit was just beginning to be aware of her appearance and how to dress. She would avert her eyes from her mother’s outlandish costumes. Come to him with tops and bottoms, ask him if they matched…
Broker blinked, caught in mid-spiral; Nina was looking back at him. No, watching him.
Deliberately now, under the gaze of her increasingly alert eyes, he transferred the towels into the dryer, sorted another load into the washer, measured soap, set the control, started the water. When he went back to the kitchen, she continued to check him from the corner of her eye as she paced and chain-smoked and watched the Abrams tanks and the Bradleys rolling up the Euphrates River valley.
“So, what do you think?” she asked in a level voice, gesturing at the televised war just as some particularly sharp audio threw a rattle of shots into the kitchen. This distinctive whoosh, then an explosion.
“The AKs and RPGs sound the same,” Broker said, turning away. “I gotta go in town, pick up the flat, do some shopping before I get Kit,” he said over his shoulder, accelerating in an uninterrupted motion toward the door, stepping into his boots, grabbing his hat, gloves, carrying his coat, which he put on in the garage.
He didn’t have to check his wristwatch. He knew it was just after noon. Three hours till school let out.
As he wheeled down the driveway and onto 12, he decided he needed some drive time away from the house. He’d been living too close to her.
And her ghosts.
Janey, Holly, and Ace Shuster. The casualties from Northern Route. He repeated the names in his mind like a diagram of her condition. She blamed herself for Janey most, and then Ace. Holly had disappeared, vaporized from the face of the earth in the explosion at Prairie Island. Broker had been two hundred yards away…
He shook his head, focused on the road. Ghosts were mind games, just mental artifacts. Invisible.
Like radiation.
Broker had come to view Nina’s depression as an asylum where all the ghosts got out. Thing about ghosts. You had to keep them locked up.
Broker stabbed his right boot sole down, heavy on the gas. Maybe not the best time to call Griffin.