Communication with Victor Konic ended. They wound more tape around his eyes, but sloppy, so he could see. And bound his ankles. Then they threw him in what felt like a van. They drove. After an hour, they stopped. Hands grabbed under his armpits. Took his feet. And heaved.
The rain had stopped. But it was wet sand where he fell.
A beach, because he could hear the deep, regular emptying and filling of surf. Smell the salt. The damp soil seeped into his bones. He ached. Old wounds, old injuries; the doors to all his compartments came unlocked. His living and his dead promenaded in the dark.
The tape cut his wrists and ankles as he slowly, methodically, warred against his bonds. Sometime during the night, animals, dogs he hoped, sniffed near in tall grass. His movements scared them away.
All night he listened to the pounding of surf. There was a fullness to it, a long roll. More resonant than the crash of freshwater on granite.
It did not rain.
Drenched with sweat and dew, it took him until dawn to work through the tape on his ankles. Finally, he freed his legs and stood up. A breath of light nudged the darkness.
Like black fog, it drifted out to sea, toward the west.
Sand dunes, tall wind-bent grass. Ancient rounds of rusted barbed wire. And a vast horizon. Superior made the same picture for the eye. But Broker smelled the sweep of Asia out there.
Kit would still be sleeping in Minnesota. He hoped Nina was well. And that Ida Rain was still with us. He wondered if his daughter, if all the sons and daughters, would ever know about Uncle Keith.
Going deep.
Broker started to walk off the beach, out of the Shadow of Death. Into the thin sunlight. Stumbling, hooded with the tape, hands still tightly bound behind his back, he tried to get his bearings. Grids of soggy green fields stretched inland.
There was a road. And an old house. Once elegant, now its shutters were rotted, the tiles falling from the roof, walls bleached of color by the salt air.
As he approached the dwelling, El Nino marshaled the clouds. His shadow gradually faded on the gummy road, then vanished. A Mexican woman with four kids stood in the yard, behind a rickety fence rigged from wire and driftwood.
She looked hopefully at the sky, debating whether to hang her basket of laundry on the clothesline. The tall Anglo walking toward her gate looked desperate, but it didn’t seem to bother her.
Broker stopped at the edge of the fence.
“I need to use a telephone,” he called from his mask of tape.
She gathered the children to her, glanced around awkwardly. Alone out here. No car in the drive.
“Telephone,” he repeated.
She shook her head.
“Nine-one-one,” he said.
“Que?”
A lost pilgrim from the Boreal Forest, he struggled at Spanish. “Nuevo-uno-uno?”
“Que?”
The sky grumbled. She looked up with a resigned expression, and it began to rain.