Chuck Logan - After the Rain

Then, about eight years ago, Nina Pryce had launched a genteel bayonet charge into his life. She had an agenda. She had a skull and crossbones tattooed on her shoulder. She had a map to buried gold in her hip pocket.

Broker followed her to Vietnam, where they found several tons of Imperial gold ingots on a beach on the South China Sea.

They came home quietly rich, pregnant, and eventually married. More than two tons of the gold found its way into a bank account in Hong Kong. Broker lived on credit cards linked to that account.

Five years ago he’d helped the FBI penetrate the Russian Mafia. An informal arrangement evolved. The Feds let him keep his loot as a kind of open-ended retainer.

Broker and Nina’s marriage, conceived in high adventure, could not survive ordinary life. After Kit was born, Nina nursed her for six months, woke up one morning, saw the dishes in the kitchen sink, experienced a panic attack, and hurried back into the Army.

Some cops in Minnesota, who were not exactly fans of Phil Broker, saw a measure of poetic justice in the complications of his marriage.

Karma coming back to him, stuff like that.

So.

For a number of reasons, all of them having to do with airport security, Broker had decided not to fly into Grand Forks. And though he still had a deputy badge and ID, a routine phone check with the Washington County Sheriff’s office would elicit the friendly reminder that he should have turned the badge in yesterday. These minor details would complicate flying commercial with the.45-caliber automatic, the two magazines, and the box of ammunition he had tucked under the front seat.

The circumstances he was driving into struck him as very odd. Broker was familiar with Nina Pryce’s flaws. But those flaws ran to vainglory, arrogance, and compulsive overachievement. Quitting on any task or abandoning her people were taboos in her strict warrior code. He could not imagine Nina abandoning her daughter as long as there was still breath in her body…Broker knit his bushy eyebrows and smiled an unhappy intuitive smile…But she was capable of using their daughter in some cockeyed special-ops ploy, if the stakes were high enough.

Goddamn sonofabitch!

But even angry, wounded, and full of painkillers, Broker remained focused. He took several deep breaths and let his eyes travel over the empty landscape.

He was driving through some of the least populated territory in the United States. So what was a Delta Force operator doing in Langdon, North Dakota?…His eyes drifted north, past the wheatfields to his right. For the second time he flashed his unhappy grin as a line from The Magnificent Seven time-traveled into his mind. He heard the sound track, saw Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen banter back and forth about something they had going…

“… in this little town below …

“…the longest undefended international border in the world.”

So. When it came down to it, he wasn’t in a mood to rely on other people to protect his daughter.

Twenty minutes later, two blue water towers, some grain elevators and a micro dish antenna rose out of the fields and he drove into Langdon, North Dakota. It was one-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, no sun, gray clouds like an overcoat over ninety-seven humid degrees. The air was heavy and sweaty, hovering over a million acres of ripening wheat.

The first thing he saw was the four new white Tahoes with Border Patrol markings parked at the motel. Okay…

The county building was low red brick on his right. A leafy main street nestled in shadow on his left. Keep going? Find the pool? Or talk to the cops?

Kit was waiting in the park two blocks away. Broker doubted that Jane was alone. Assuming Jane and company were Nina’s comrades, Broker figured his daughter was at this moment the most well-defended child in North Dakota. She could last another half-hour.

Broker reverted to one of his basic commonsense rules, which in this case was the Waco Rule of Thumb. The WRT posited that in 99.9 percent of all cases the locals knew the ground far better than the federal interlopers, were less arrogant, and would return straight talk in kind.

So he ignored mysterious Jane’s admonition to check in with her first. He drove around the county offices until he spotted a small sign on a rear entrance by the parking lot: SHERIFF’S OFFICE. He parked, checked the note he’d scribbled to himself again. Sheriff Norman Wales. Then he went in through the door.

Something had to be up. Why else would the sheriff be in his office on a muggy Sunday afternoon?

Broker gave his name and came under the intense scrutiny of a very curious dispatcher the moment he was buzzed in through the security door. She directed him through the radio room and pointed to two men, one in uniform, who appeared in a doorway. Then she immediately reached for a phone.

“We’ll walk you down to Norm’s office. Jim Yeager,” said the husky one in jeans and a T-shirt, extending a hard farmer’s mitt. “This is Barry Sauer, state highway patrol,” he said.

Broker shook their hands in turn. Sauer was obviously working today. He wore a dark brown shirt and tan trousers and had a full service belt strapped around his waist. He had the creased and spit-shined military bearing that the people who bossed state cops liked to see in their troops. Yeager and Sauer kept glancing at Broker’s bandaged left hand. But there was more to their curiosity.

They came in to look me over. Word’s out.

They were old-fashioned cops, like Broker’s dad had been. Two of the biggest, strongest guys in town. But they had quick eyes and were light on their feet and Broker decided that strong did not imply dumb with this bunch.

Stay alert.

Sheriff Norm Wales, like his deputy, Yeager, came in special today. He wore jeans and a golf shirt and stood waiting in his office doorway. He waved the two cops off and they retreated back down the hall. “That where you got shot?” he asked, pointing to Broker’s hand. The remark got Broker’s attention. Wales was letting him know he was up to speed. He had a soft, reserved voice, sad, blue basset-hound eyes, sandy brown hair, and thirteen-inch wrists.

“How’d you know?” Broker asked back as they shook hands.

“I had this little sheriff’s convention to get the book on you. When I heard you were coming I talked to Jeffords in Cook County again. He handed me off to Eisenhower in Washington County, who says, by the way, you forgot to turn in one of his shields.” Wales paused and cleared his throat. “In case you were thinking of flying any false flags. We seem to have a rash of that going on last couple days.”

Broker shifted from foot to foot. This prairie cop had done his homework.

Wales indicated a chair in front of his desk. “Go on, sit.” He closed his office door, went around behind his desk, sat down, and said, “Your daughter is just fine. She’s up at the municipal pool, swimming laps. We’ve had people watching her ever since this started. But the fact is, looks like she’s running in some pretty heavy company.” Wales gave Broker a very direct look. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“I just got here,” Broker said, as he dropped into the chair.

“Your kid got very strangely abandoned in my town and suddenly I got sheriffs coming out of my ears. Gets a guy to thinking. So I took a flyer, had the county attorney call somebody he knows who works in the Minnesota AG’s office,” Wales said.

“Who?” Uh-oh.

“Tim Downs. My guy met him at a seminar at the University of Minnesota. I believe you’re acquainted.”

Shit. “Sure. Downs and I worked in St. Paul together some years back. We were never what you’d call close.”