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 get 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?”
So it was happening fast, Sheryl thought. Important now to lean forward, into it. She answered crisply, “I take 94 to St. Cloud, then pick up 371 going north, then west on Highway 2. Gets a little tricky when we head north again past Bemidji.”
Shank focused on her. “How, tricky?”
“We’ll bypass Glacier Falls, work a jigsaw on back roads. Gator says, in the winter, the locals notice every new car. This Nissan will be like a neon sign. We gotta come in the back way, like that.”
“Gotcha.” Shank nodded and concentrated on working through a cluster of cars. When he passed then, he said, “Here’s the deal. We do a photo spread for Gator just like the cops do. If he picks Broker out, we’re in business.” He removed his right hand from the wheel and gave her a thumbs-up.
Sheryl exhaled and leaned back in the seat. “I gotta call Gator. We got this system. I page him, he goes to a pay phone, then I call from a pay phone…”
Shank said, “We’ll wait till we get free of the metro, then we’ll stop. Gotta have breakfast anyway. And keep your eye out for an outfitters. I checked the weather; you’re gonna need some boots, a sweater, gloves, stuff like that. We could hit some snow. I got stuff in the trunk but I don’t think it’ll fit you.”
“Thanks,” Sheryl said, “that’s thoughtful of you.”
Shank shrugged. “Hey, no biggie; I’ll expense it.”
They settled back for a few miles, Sheryl thinking about what he had in the trunk. Jesus. She’d see soon enough. Then Shank began to talk, casual, to pass the time.
“You know Joey, how he loves to talk? Well, he told me about that whole day of the pig roast. Broker shows up the day before. He’s got a load of firewood in his truck, has the pig on ice from a butcher shop. He digs this pit, oh, four feet deep, and starts a fire…” He turned to her. “Joey says, Danny’s coming out of the house, bringing him a beer, whatever he needs. See, Danny was always interested in learning new things. Like how to roast a pig.”
“Yeah,” Sheryl said. “Danny didn’t miss much.”
“Missed this fucker.” Shank pursed his lips. “Can you imagine those fucking narcs, sitting in a bar, yukking it up about roasting a pig. Some of those assholes have these little pig studs they wear in their ears when they hang out. I seen that once.” He shook his head, curling his upper lip in a ghastly smile, showing an elongated canine. Turned to her.
“Joey said when you roast a pig, you wrap it in burlap, then truss it up with barbed wire. Wet down the burlap, that seals in the flavor or something. Put it in the coals, put more coals on top. Put in a piece of corrugated tin to hold the heat, then fill the pit with dirt, let it cook for ten, twelve hours…”
Sheryl nodded her head along with his conversation, careful not to bring up the lab plan. Don’t rush it. Let it develop. Be attentive, a good listener.
“Yeah, well,” Shank said. “We’re gonna have our own pig roast.”
They had rounded the Minneapolis metro and were coming up on west 94; the roadside clutter starting to fade, the land unrolling brown and tired. Snow dusting the ditches and fields.
Sheryl removed her cell from her purse. “Should make my call,” she said.
“Go ahead. We’ll grab a Perkins in half an hour. Grease down. They’ll have a pay phone.”
Half an hour later, Gator stood stamping his boots in the phone booth outside Perry’s Grocery, watching the Monday-morning shoppers wheel their carts into the parking lot. The wind had picked up ice-pick sharp, chipping flecks of stinging snow off the looming iceberg clouds.
The excitement was heavy and compact in his chest, purring like a motor. When the phone rang, he took a moment to compose his voice. “Yes?”
“Hi, hon, thought I’d give you a heads-up. Shank and I are on the road. We should roll into the farm about one this afternoon. We’re driving a gray Nissan Maxima.”
Listening to her saying this in a normal voice, like it was routine, riding up north with a killer. “That car’s gonna stick out like a sore thumb up here,” Gator said in a calm controlled voice. Behind his voice the motor in his chest was smoking. Holy shit! It’s on, it’s happening.
“We’ll come in careful on County Z.”
“Grab some local stations on the AM, we got some weather.”
“Maybe you should get the garage door open,” Sheryl said.
“Will do. Ah, anything else?” He wondered if Shank was monitoring her conversation, standing there.
“Let’s just not get ahead of ourselves. Take it one step at a time, okay?”
“I hear you. I’ll get ready.”
Sheryl hung up the pay phone in the lobby of a Country Kitchen and waited while Shank paid for breakfast at the cashier’s counter. When they got back in the car and pulled back on the road, Shank just asked, “Everything all right?”
Sheryl nodded. “Told him we’d be in around one in the afternoon. He said to check the local stations when we get up north. Could be a storm coming down.”
“Good idea.” Then, after a pause, “Not to pry, but what’s he like, Gator? I asked around, and he kept a low profile in the joint. Just a few pickups in the visitors’ room to keep our guys off his back.”
Sheryl thought about it. “He’s a real hard worker, crackerjack mechanic.” Thought some more. “A compulsive planner.”
“A mechanic would be, they know how things fit together,” Shank said.
They settled in for the long middle of the drive. Sheryl thumbed through the photos again, mentioned how times had changed. People weren’t hanging it out on the street in leathers, tooling around on fat boys, like they used to.
Traveling north on 371, coming up on Little Falls, they started talking about The Sopranos on HBO.
“I don’t buy the bit about a boss going to a shrink,” Shank said. “That’s contrived. I think they do that to suck in a wider audience. None of them ever known a gangster, but lots of them go to shrinks.”
“You got a point,” Sheryl said. After a moment, she wondered out loud, “How do you think it’s going to end?”
“The way I see it, there’s two possibilities; you got a war brewing with Johnny Sack in New York, then you got the family angle cooking underneath.”
“Yeah, Carmela and her thing with Furio. That ain’t over. He’ll be back, Furio will,” Sheryl said seriously.
“True. Furio is a stand-up guy,” Shank said.
“So Furio returns and has a showdown with Tony over Carmela,” Sheryl said.
Shank smiled and wagged his finger at her. “No offense, but you’re thinking like a woman. Making it all romantic-”
“Hey,” Sheryl countered. “TV shows are like everything else. They’re a business, and I bet most of the viewers are women.”
“Granted, they could pussy out and do it that way,” Shank said. “But I think, ah, what would be more true to life is Tony gets caught making this big choice between his family and the mob.”
“How do you mean?” Sheryl said.
“Well, what’s he going to do if push comes to shove? Sacrifice his family to save his business? Al Pacino would do that, right. He had Fredo killed in Godfather II. But Tony goes to a shrink, right? He’s got guilt and panic attacks. No, I think the way to end it is, he has to turn into the thing he hates to save the thing he loves.”
Sheryl considered it, cocking her head.
Shank continued. “So Tony makes a deal with the feds, rats out all his buddies, and goes into Witness Protection. There he is, living in a crummy track house in Utah, driving a garbage truck. Carmela is shopping at Wal-Mart. The End.”
“Jesus, that’s grim,” Sheryl said.
“Yeah. I kinda like it,” Shank said.
Sheryl took out her Merits and her lighter. “You mind?” she asked.
Shank shrugged, hit the window controls, zipped the front seat windows down an inch, and turned up the heater.
Sheryl lit the cigarette and blew a stream of smoke into the icy draft. After a minute or so she turned and caught Shank watching her.
“What?” she asked.
He shrugged affably, turned back to watching the road. “Shouldn’t smoke those things,” he said. “They’re bad for your health.”