Chuck Logan - Homefront

“I just got here.”

“Yeah? Talk to Harry Griffin about that.”

Broker raised his eyebrows. “You know Harry?”

Susan rolled her eyes. “Gets so a single woman will do just about anything up here for some decent conversation. Yes, I know Detroit Harry.” She lowered her eyes and raised them in a certain way.

The bold remark, along with her knowing and saying Griffin’s street name, created instant intimacy. Broker looked her up and down and couldn’t help grinning, “And?”

“Harry’s been up here ten years, and people say he doesn’t fit either.”

Now it was Broker who narrowed his eyes.

Susan shrugged, “Look, you’re up north. The men up here are prone to drinking too much and fighting.” She smiled painfully. “I know you didn’t ask, but here’s my two cents anyway-you and Harry are getting too old to fight. You just don’t know it yet.” Susan blew on her bare hands and plunged them into her coat pockets. “Tell Harry to be careful. You too.”

Susan Hatch walked back toward the school’s front door and left Broker standing by the Dumpster, inhaling the greasy odor wafting out from the lunch-room grill through the exhaust fan.

The smell reminded him he had one more stop to make.

Klumpe Sanitation housed its trucks and maintained an office in a big Morton building behind a cyclone fence on a lot a mile west of town. The gate was open. Driving up, Broker saw no trucks, no lights in the office windows that straddled one corner of the garage. No sign of anyone, in fact.

Slightly disappointed that he didn’t have an audience, he pulled into the parking apron, then backed up until his tailgate was almost flush with the office door. He got out, climbed into the truck bed, lifted the heavy bin, and upended it, dumping the trash dead center on the welcome mat.

At 11:00 A.M. Gator paced on the front porch in his Carhartt parka, hunched against the drizzly mist, sipping a fresh cup of coffee. He was a few drags into a new Camel when he saw the gray Pontiac GT’s low beams poke through the gloom, sweep across the Fordster on display next to his sign, and swerve into the drive.

Sheryl.

Just like she was supposed to, she drove the car into the open sliding door on the lower level of the barn, so it was out of sight. The locals, stir-crazy with cabin fever, noticed a new car in the neighborhood. Would drive clear into town and tell everybody at Lyme’s Cafe, “Hey, I seen this strange Pontiac going out Twelve, near the big woods…”

Sheryl came out and struggled, hauling the wide wooden door shut. She turned toward the house.

Sheryl Marie Mott.

They had met in the visitors’ room at Stillwater. He’d agreed to make a pickup for Danny T.’s organization, to pay his tax to stay in population. So they put her on his list. She walked up to the table in the visitors’ room like some improved hippie dream in a beige pantsuit. Leaned over the table and planted this open-mouth kissed on him, expertly ramming a tiny balloon full of cocaine down his throat with her tongue. Then she patted his cheek and whispered, “Hey, you’re kinda cute; now swallow, don’t spit.”

One look, and he knew he had to see her again. Kinda cracked her up when he asked for her phone number, like it was a blind date.

Gator had read this story in the joint, and he figured her secret was like in the story; some Dorian Gray deal with the devil that enabled her to keep all the debauchery of her life compacted inside so she looked so damn good on the outside. Couldn’t even begin to guess her age. Older than him.

Sheryl had deep indigo eyes, flared cheeks, and long black hair down past her shoulders; the kind of dusky looker who coulda played a blue-eyed Indian princess in 1950s Hollywood, alongside Sal Mineo.

An East Side St. Paul street kid, somewhere around seventeen years old she’d discovered she liked really bad white guys who rode fat-boy Harleys even more than real bad black guys.

Biker chick. Rode with the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang, the OMG.

Central to the hard-core OMG ethos was the injunction, You must know the difference between good and evil and choose the evil. She traded in her patched jeans and tie-dye for greasy leather and denim. She’d done it in the dirt, pulling the shaggy biker trains at bonfires in the woods with the predatory relish of an MBA trying to make the cut on Donald Trump’s Apprentice . In two years flat she went from anybody’s groupie to briefly becoming a fixture on the back of Danny Turrie’s chopper.

Always thinking. Mind-Fuck Mott. The story was, she’d moved Danny out of weed, and almost convinced him to sidestep the urban crack drama with its well-armed gangbangers. Got him into the suburbs, into coke. Then Danny shot those two North Side jigs and went away forever. Gang bangs were one thing; gangbangers and real bullets were another.

Sheryl split the cities, moved to Seattle during the great meth awakening, and shacked up with a guy who owned a perfume company. She took some chemistry course at a community college, learned her way around chemicals, dabbled in designer drugs, learned to cook meth, and socked her money into a lot on the beach in Belize.

Then her Seattle boyfriend had a weak moment and couldn’t resist buying List I chemicals in bulk from a firm going out of business. Except the firm was a DEA cover operation, and Sheryl beat the battering ram coming through the door by half an hour. With just the money in her purse and a credit card, she took a cab to the airport and arrived back in Minnesota with thirty-four bucks.

When Gator met Sheryl she was marginally connected, but out of the loop. Burned, paranoid; she cooked a few batches of meth for the OMG, didn’t like the flaky level of the operation, and wound up muling dope into Stillwater Prison to help make her car payments.

Gator heard the stories about her in the joint. When he got out, living in a halfway house, taking a tractor mechanics course at Dunwoody Institute that he could have taught better than the pencil-neck instructor, he asked her out for coffee.

He had this idea, see, that he’d been refining for a year behind bars…

Waiting tables, barely paying the freight on her apartment and the GT, Sheryl was ready. They started out in a Starbucks and conducted the second round in her bed, where his performance had lagged considerably.

This was before she understood Gator never really could get it going in a bed.

Gator grinned. Sheryl in high-heeled boots taking little bird steps through a foot of soggy snow. The biker-girl duds were long gone. Now she was more into business casual-designer jeans, the Donna Karan sweater picked up at Goodwill, the fancy hip-length leather car coat, a joke in this weather.

“What the hell is this?” she protested, kicking the snow off her footwear, coming up the steps. “It’s the end of March.”

“Your memory is impaired by global warming. This is old Minnesota normal. How you doing, Sheryl?”

She walked up to him, shrugged her shoulders, and went up on tiptoe. “Here I am. What’s so urgent?”

He shied away from her upturned face. “Not yet.”

She furrowed her brow, studied him. “Aw shit, aren’t we done with that routine yet?”

“Let’s go inside,” Gator said firmly.

Sheryl followed him, shaking her head. “I forgot, isolated up here you didn’t get the word how when the apes climbed down from the trees they invented these things called beds…”

Gator ignored her, knowing how much she really dug the weirdness of it. He walked through the kitchen, down the hall into the bathroom, and turned on the shower.

“Aw, jeez, what you got better be good.” She grimaced. “I was up at six, been on the road for almost five hours driving straight drinking coffee. Man, first thing, I gotta pee.” She wiggled out of her coat, unzipped the boots and kicked them off, and headed for the bathroom. When she returned, she drew herself up, knit her brows, and pointed a finger. “No gas, understood.”