Chuck Logan - After the Rain

“He killed a guy in a bar fight.”

“More bad luck. Goddamn loudmouth Bobby Pease down in Starkweather. Came at Ace with a beer bottle, and Bobby musta been loosey goosey flatfooted when Ace hit him. Broke his neck. Ace did eleven months on the state farm for involuntary manslaughter.”

“What about Dale, the equipment dealer?”

Yeager shook his head. “Jeez, I don’t know. Parts to that guy are missing. Like, the key to the ignition. Guy is gonna live and die in his folks’ basement. He’s gonna follow them to Florida.”

“And Gordy?”

“Cunning little fucker. And greedy. I been trying to catch him running meth precursor for over a year. He has grandiose dreams of being a big dope dealer.”

“Violent?”

Yeager grinned and eyed Broker. “You tell me. Story going round is he knocked you on your ass.” He paused, still grinning, then said, “That’s how we know you’re in on this thing. We figure it was for show. No way in hell a guy like you’s going to let a Gordy Riker put you on the ground, shot hand or not.”

As Broker was composing his comeback, the car radio squawked: “Two-forty, where are you?”

Yeager keyed his mike. “Six north.”

“Your ten-seventeen just showed up at the SO.”

“Ten-four.”

Yeager quickly wrote his cell phone number on the back of a card and handed it to Broker. Then he put the cruiser in reverse and backed out of the driveway. “We’ll have to finish saving the world later,” he said. “My wife just dropped my son off at the office. I gotta coach T-ball.”

Ace came down the stairs two at a time; edgy, snapping his fingers, shaking it out. Gordy assessed him. Uh-huh. So much for mellow. Ace’s serotonin was definitely headed south. It was not a coffee day.

He tossed the cup of coffee he’d prepared and set a bottle of Wild Turkey on the bar with a glass. As Ace sat down and poured his breakfast, Gordy pointed to the Grand Forks Herald.

“Inside section. They’re scaling back the search for Ginny Weller,” he said.

“Ginny was your basic land shark, but she didn’t deserve this,” Ace said, taking a drink. He produced a Camel from his chest pocket in a snappy display of dexterity, lit it, and inhaled. He pushed the newspaper aside, blew out the smoke, and looked around. “Okay, where’d she go?”

“Out front. On her cell,” Gordy said.

Ace took his glass to the window and saw her pacing on the trap rock with her head cocked over in the New American Silhouette: neck straining to cup a cell phone. Ace thought how a whole lot of orthopedic surgeons were going to make out in twenty, thirty years, when all the crook-necked cell-phone casualties came walking into their offices bent over funny.

He took a long, slow swallow and felt the whiskey burn down his throat and rush out to the tiny capillaries in his fingers and toes. He watched the humid prairie breeze catch the summer dress and wash it up around her thighs and hips. A ripple of maroon and green. Alive against her body like a flutter of moths. Or a flag, maybe. A flag just for a woman. It wasn’t that she had smallish hips, just tidy and tight, like everything else about her-efficient, traveling light, no padding. And her shoulders were broad.

Those legs and that back. I bet she swam butterfly in school, he thought.

Probably had her kid by C-section, with those hips.

If so, there’d be a halfmoon scar under her belly button.

Just over her bush.

So am I gonna get to see that scar, or what?

Gordy came up beside him. “One way or another she’s going to fuck us up.”

Ace kept his eyes on her and thought, Aw shit, Gordy is probably right. So much for believing life could move like a soft, easy dance. Course, she was far from soft and easy. He was tired of slow dancing. It was time to make a call. “Don’t doubt it for a second,” he said. “Like you said, she don’t add up.” He cuffed Gordy on the shoulder. “She’ll be gone before dark.”

“ ’Bout time.”

“Yeah. Now, look, something’s going on. I don’t know what you all were doing downstairs but I just saw her husband meeting with Jimmy Yeager across the road.” He reached out, clamped his hand on Gordy’s shoulder, and pulled him in closer. “Tonight, you work your jigsaw extra special to see if you got a tail. I’ll do the same. If we got company we’ll run ’em through an old-fashioned snipe hunt.” Ace winked. “Let’s have some fun out on the gravel.”

“Awright, boss- awright !” Gordy smiled.

Finally.

“It’s me, I want to talk,” Nina said.

“So talk,” Broker said. He had been pacing in the motel room, watching the Weather Channel, mulling over his drive with Yeager and his missing pistol. Hearing her voice, he admitted to himself he had been waiting for the cell to ring, and now it had.

“Face-to-face,” she said.

“You had lunch?”

“No.”

“There’s a restaurant a block from the motel. Gracie’s. It’s right on the highway.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Did Kit get off home?”

“Lyle Torgeson and Doc Harris flew in and picked her up this morning. She’ll be with my folks later today. You should give her a call.”

“Not a good idea right now.”

“Right, I forgot. Mission over men.”

His remark killed conversation for several seconds. He imagined her mind maneuvering in the silence.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said finally in her clipped, hard voice.

Broker found himself sitting up, leaning forward, hovering over the tiny phone. “You need a ride?” But the connection had ended.

Broker heaved up off the bed, stripped off his clothes, peeled the bandage from his hand, walked into the bathroom, and ran the shower to revive himself after the long, hot ride along the border. All the shower did was concentrate the humidity into liquid jets. He stood under the needles of water, eyes shut. Then he held his injured hand up to the shower and let the spray irrigate the ragged flesh.

Jane’s salve worked. The swelling and redness were going down.

He got stuck, went blank, and then realized he was staring at a Barbie Doll, naked flesh-colored plastic, awkward jointed hips and arms, sitting on the soap tray like a crumb left behind by his daughter, part of a trail leading into the forest of his marriage. He picked up the toy and observed that Kit had cut the doll’s red hair short.

So it looked like Nina, or perhaps Jane. He put the doll with his toilet articles so he wouldn’t forget it.

One towel. Two. Trying to get dry. Then, gingerly, he tested the smaller, but still red, fan of infection radiating from the wound. Still tender. He applied the Bag Balm and taped on a clean dressing. As he took two of the Vicodin, it occurred to him that ten years earlier he’d have ignored the wound; it wouldn’t have slowed him down. He felt every one of his forty-eight years as a specific weight dragging on his body.

He shook his head and swore softly as he pulled on a pair of jeans, cross trainers, a T-shirt. The idea of finally sitting down with Nina brought on a snap of resentment-at finding himself caught up in another of her projects.

They had not planned on getting married. But, then, they had not planned on getting pregnant. Maybe she thought, given her chosen line of work, it would be the only shot she’d have at a child. Maybe he thought that having a kid would nudge her out of the Army. No, not maybe.

She thought he wanted her to get pregnant, his assigned role in the male plot to boot her out of the service.

No, Nina, I just think Mama, Papa, and baby belong under one roof.