Chuck Logan - Homefront

He turned around and headed back for the main road. “Getting late, let’s get you home.”

Broker and Griffin stood in the driveway and watched Nygard’s taillights fade off around a turn in the road.

“Story from hell, huh,” Griffin said. “So what do you wanna do?”

Broker heaved his shoulders. “Guy’s got enough problems. Hell, I’ll let it go if he will.” The fact was, Broker felt a tremendous sense of relief. The stops on Nygard’s night tour had moved him off his tight loop of anger. Gave him some perspective.

“Okay, but you may have to toss Klumpe a softball, some little gesture. You handle that? I can talk to him,” Griffin said.

“Whatever. Let me know.” Broker cuffed Griffin on the shoulder. “Say. Maybe I’ll drop by the lodge and help out tomorrow. Nina’s feeling better, and I’m the one who’s starting to go nuts. I need to get out of the house, man. Work up a sweat. Shoot the shit.”

“Cabin fever, I can dig it,” Harry said.

“Yeah, whatever,” Broker said.

“Great, see you in the morning,” Griffin said. Despite Broker’s swing into elevated banter, he watched him closely in the harsh yard light. “Now go home to your crazy but very sexy wife,” he said, waving good night, walking to his Jeep.

Harry Griffin drove toward his house nearer to town, on the south end of the lake, something Broker said sticking in his mind. He just couldn’t see Jimmy coming in stealthy through the woods on skis. Jimmy was strictly a tub-of-guts, snowmobile kind of guy.

Have to think about that. Then he turned his attention to Broker. Edgy, sure, but above all, a measured control freak. Throwing that choke hold on Jimmy in a schoolyard in front of the sheriff? That was looking like a loose cannon. Very un-Broker-like.

Harry knew that Broker believed in walling off his ghosts and personal monsters in a system of compartments. Well, it looked like the locks on his control method were starting to go.

In Harry’s estimation, Broker had been running damn near thirty years of rope. And now he had reached the end of his tether. In fact, Broker’s life had come to resemble a proof of the old Chinese adage: be careful what you wish for. You might get it. He had wanted to reunite his splintered family ever since Nina returned to active duty after Kit was born. Now he had. And look what it was doing to him.

The quiet snow-cloaked woods slid by, his asylum and buffer to a world spinning out of control. Being in proximity to Broker the last three months had started to pry at Harry’s own system of controls. The life choices he’d made.

He had walked away from the madness. Broker and Nina were still out there trying to fix it.

And Broker had that judgmental cop streak; never actually came out and said it, but sometimes Griffin got the feeling Broker thought he had turned tail and run.

Griffin swung into his driveway, drove past the pole barn that housed a rock splitter and the long attached shed with bins for fieldstone and masonry sand. Coming up on the house, he smiled and shook his head when he saw Susan Hatch’s tan Honda CRV parked at his back door.

Susan, his on-again, off-again girlfriend. Broker said she’d taken him aside at school this morning. Damn. The woman was more curious than a cat. Her ex-husband had taken their daughter to visit his parents in Bemidji, where he now lived. Susan had the night off.

He went inside, removed his boots and parka on the mud porch, and entered the main living area; one long vaulted room with a kitchen at one end and a massive stone fireplace at the other. A stairway led to another level below, built into the bluff overlooking the lake.

Susan rose from a chair by the hearth to greet him. She’d built up the fire, burned some incense, and made herself comfortable, stripping out of her school clothes and pulling on the shiny threadbare black silk kimono he’d picked up in Bangkok a long time ago. He could almost feel her earnest energy throb across the room; big brown eyes wide open, ears alert for new information.

Susan glided through the firelight playing off the pine paneling with a swish of silk on bare skin. Her eyes and the way she moved always said it the same way: Old wolf like you is never gonna get another chance like this…

She capitalized on her lean, angular physicality, a type Griffin had always found irresistible; what she lacked in padding she made up for in extra-fast-fire nerve clusters packed close to the surface. She had discovered that Harry Griffin, tight-lipped, rugged to a fault in all the other areas of his life, had a pillow-talk Achilles’ heel.

“How’d it go?” she asked, casually shaking out the snare of her curiosity.

Susan knew a little about the Brokers, the new folks in town and therefore a focus of gossip. She knew Broker and Harry had been in Vietnam together for a long time. She knew Broker had been a cop. But she knew virtually nothing about the mysterious “Mrs. Broker.” Now, like all the women at the school, she was anxious to hear more.

Griffin shrugged. “We’ll get it fixed. Keith’s doing his peacemaker number, filling in the background on Jimmy. Why he’s a hair-trigger mess. Took Broker out and showed him the Bodine house, explained about Cassie and the Sweitz kid. The fire. The pollution mess. The skeleton house.”

“Did Keith tell him Gator Bodine burned the place? With the town’s blessing?” Susan asked.

“C’mon, that’s hearsay. Nobody knows for sure; all the flammable crap they had in there, anything could have set it off,” Griffin said, mouthing the official line.

Susan wrinkled her nose. “Right,” she said. “Ruled an accident. No real autopsy. Not what Jeff Tindall said…”

Jeff owned the hardware store and was a volunteer fireman.

Susan continued. “Jeff says the people in that house got real confused because they crammed themselves into this tiny, centrally located bathroom. Stoutest room in the house. Good plan for a tornado. Not so good for an exploding meth lab. Jeff found them stuck together”-she wrinkled her pert nose-“layered, kinda like lasagna.”

Griffin made an effort to ward her off with his eyes, like he always did, for starters.

“Everyone believes it was Gator, avenging that little girl. He always hated his cousins, going way back. Maybe he saw it as sticking up for his wronged sister, like he always does-”

“Small-town gossip,” Griffin said.

Susan didn’t even pause. “He went over there, saw what happened, called Keith to get the children out and went back that night and killed his own kin,” she said, moving in close. “You know that, like Keith knows it. Everybody knows they have a deal. Since Marci Sweitz died, Keith keeps Gator out there, stalking down anybody cooking that stuff. In return he lets a felon have guns and hunt in the woods. You know that just like you know a lot of things about your pal Broker and his wife-don’tcha.”

She eased up and nuzzled his throat, following the angle of his chin with lips and tongue, bit his earlobe, and then moved on to his mouth.

Harry pulled back. “C’mon. I been sitting in the Jeep chain-smoking and pounding down coffee for two hours. I gotta brush my teeth-”

“Or,” she whispered, pressing against him and tilting her face up, bold, “you could dip your face in something sweet…”

For Susan, sex was merely prelude to the talk that followed. Griffin had come to think of these long talks as the job interview for the open position of long-haul partner and stand-in father figure to Susan’s daughter. Trust was an important part of the negotiation.

And trust was achieved through the sharing of personal information.

Griffin sat naked on the rug in front of the hearth. Susan reclined in front of him, firelight tracing the curve of her hips and good legs. Legs crossed, he worked with a needle, thread, and some stuffing from an old life jacket. Squinting, he methodically ran the needle in and out, repairing the blue-and-white bunny. Good with his hands. At fifty-eight, he could lay stone all day, come home, go belly to belly with a woman twenty years younger, and still thread a needle.