Broker stared at the telephone on the bedside table and tried to change the subject, which was difficult when you’re having a conversation with yourself.
Kit stood up in her crib, through the connecting doorway, hands on the rail, doing chubby knee bends. She watched him, smelling like cow pie. Big X-ray eyes. With her ears like radar dishes and a fresh new mind that absorbed everything.
Like him thinking-the first time he saw Caren she was standing in a Macalester College gym with a dozen other neighborhood women. Broker, the bad street cop, was there to teach a class in self-defense. To his hot young eyes she’d looked good enough to be in Hollywood. But she didn’t go to Hollywood. She stayed in Minnesota and kept marrying cops.
Broker rubbed his eyes. Zombie Daddy. He went to Kit, who had begun to cry, placed her on the changing table and changed a three-wipe pooper, dusted on powder, strapped on a dry Huggies and snapped her back into her sleeper.
Then he walked with his baby on his shoulder.
Thinking.
Caren. Coming here. Today. Into his new world of diapers, cleaning, cooking and folding baby clothes. Not to mention…
Nina, who watched him from a framed photo on the bedside table with her smiling Pict princess smile and her freckles like Scotch-Irish war paint under a fur cap. Camouflage fatigues, a flak vest and a pistol belt strapped around her waist. Black camouflage oak leaves fastened on her collar.
Major Mom.
Broker grimaced and said to his wife’s picture, “I said I’d give her a good listen. Okay?”
Then.
Keith, you idiot. Domestic assault. There’s that new law.
They’ll take your gun away, son-they’ll put you out to pasture answering phones and force you out of the job.
Serves you right for being smart enough, or dumb enough, to steal my wife.
Ex-wife, Broker reminded himself.
Sonofabitch hit her, she said.
Some buttons still lit up.
It took him half an hour to get Kit back to sleep. Then he pulled on his Sorel boots and a jacket and stepped out on the front deck. Unseen, Superior heaved and splashed behind a curtain of fog. Lots of things were up and moving out there in the fog. Like Caren. And if she was coming, Keith wouldn’t be far behind.