Chuck Logan - Homefront

After Teedo left, Griffin sat for several minutes studying the number on the slip of paper. Okay. This was something Keith should know about. He went out, got in his Jeep, drove into town, and pulled into a diagonal parking slot in front of the old two-story redbrick county courthouse. The snow on the barrel of the Civil War four-pounder cannon on the lawn had melted during the warm day. Since sunset, the temperature drop had formed a long fringe of icicles.

Griffin stared at the icicles, organizing his thoughts. The sheriff ’s office occupied one side of the lower floor. He could see Howie Anderson, Keith’s chief-and only-deputy during the winter, standing in the well-lighted window, leaning over, talking to Ginny Borck sitting at the dispatcher’s desk.

He knew they had a new computer and radio setup purchased with Homeland Security money; primarily to monitor Border Patrol and Highway Patrol advisories. Be easy to run a license plate check.

Then he considered Teedo’s cryptic snapshot of Keith being Gator Bodine’s high school pal, how they’d teamed up, since the Marci Sweitz episode, to rid the county of meth. Remembered Susan’s remark about the cursory medical examiner’s report after the trash house fire. Accidental death. No arson investigation. The cursory autopsies.

Griffin looked up and down the empty street; not much going on except the slush starting to set up and freeze. Everything seemingly hunky-dory-except that, just below the surface, the pollution cooking under Jimmy Klumpe’s property on Little Glacier might leak over into the big lake.

And kill the summer trade that supported the town.

Could that kind of hovering phantom cause a solid family man like Keith Nygard-wife, three kids, second-term sheriff, deacon in his dad’s Lutheran church-go into the drug business as a hedge against the future?

Nah-he could see Keith getting blindsided, but the guy was just too rock-ribbed Lutheran to go over the line. It was time to slow down and think this through. All he had was Teedo’s hearsay story and a number scrawled on a lottery ticket. Walk in there with a bunch of bar talk, and he’d sound like an excited citizen who’d been watching too many detective shows.

He needed a little more specific information before he approached Keith. One thing he could do was reach out to J. T. Merryweather, see if he’d run a check on the license number. His mind made up, Griffin backed out of the parking space in front of the courthouse and drove slowly out of town, slowing as he went past the lighted windows of Lyme’s Cafe.

A few minutes later Griffin stood in his kitchen, phone in hand, tracing a number in his phone book with his finger. Teedo’s slip of paper lay on the open page. Without hesitation he tapped in J. T. Merryweather’s number, down on his ostrich farm in Lake Elmo.

Denise Merryweather answered the phone, her voice tightening when she placed Griffin in the part of her husband’s life that involved Phil Broker. “Is it important?” Her tone was cool. “We’re eating supper.”

“It’s important.”

A moment later, J. T., St. Paul PD captain of homicide when he retired, came on the connection. “Griffin. What’s up? This about Broker and Nina? How’s she doing?”

“Actually, Nina’s coming out of it. Broker? He’s stressed to the max, but he won’t admit it.”

“Figures,” J. T. said.

Griffin picked up the piece of paper with the number on it and said, “J. T., I need a favor…”

Sheryl spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon smoking, watching daytime TV. And watching the phone. She imagined Gator pacing in his shop, watching his phone. No sense talking about what they didn’t know. Especially since it would involve signaling on his pager with a phony number, which would send him on a half-hour drive to the pay phone at the grocery store. So she didn’t make the call. Finally, at one-thirty in the afternoon, her phone rang.

“Country Buffet, in Woodbury, that mall off Valley Creek Road and 494, you know it?” said a calm voice without introduction. She knew the restaurant…

…and the voice.

“It’s a dump,” she said.

“Correct, dress according. Wear a Vikings sweatshirt. Say in an hour. Two-thirty.”

Jesus. It was moving fast. “I’ll be there.” The call ended. Sheryl was impressed. That was fast. Which meant Werky’s “investigator,” Simon Hanky, was on the job. Simon wound up going by his first initial. There was a word in poetry, onimana something. Like when a words sound like the thing it describes. That was him to a T.

Drop the Y.S. Hanky. Then drop the Y.

Shank did some time for manslaughter after Werky pleaded him down from second degree for killing his ex-wife’s boyfriend. In the joint, Danny’s organization was impressed by his icy focus and recruited him after he decimated a bunch of Mexicans in the showers.

He had matured in prison and never killed in hot blood again. Now he only operated with methodical planning. Some people were into beginnings, and some people like to stretch out the middle. Shank was an expert on endings.

He killed people.

This corkscrew sensation squirmed through Sheryl’s chest. Old tapes. She had been around a lot of dangerous men in her life, and most of them had made her nervous, mainly because they were unpredictable and had poor impulse control. Shank had zero impulses, barely a pulse.

Wow.

Shit, man, something must have clicked for them to trot out the Shank.

At two-thirty sharp, Sheryl, face washed clean of makeup, hair gathered in a ponytail, stood at the check-in line at the Country Buffet chewing Juicy Fruit. She wore a pair of faded Levi’s, a brand-new, itchy purple Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt, scuffed tennies, and a cheap Wal-Mart wind jacket. Some Spanish was being spoken in the line, several gangs of Mexican laborers coming in for all-you-can-eat-a grotesque gallery of obese flesh fighting a losing battle against gravity. On top of which, excessive meat was apparently difficult to wash; the place smelled like an elephant house. Should hose them down, she was thinking when she heard the familiar voice behind her, in a loud whisper: “Hey, Sheryl Mott, long time no see.”

She turned and saw Shank, icy smooth, standing behind her. Sinewy, six feet tall; he had white-blond polar bear hair and eyebrows and startlingly pale blue eyes. They’d been an item briefly, when she returned from Seattle, just before she quit cooking for Danny’s crew and took up her waitress career.

The smooth pigment of his face avoided the sun and reminded her of the texture of mushrooms under cellophane in the produce section. He wore busted-out denim work duds and beat-up steel-toed boots to fit in with the crowd. Looked skinnier than the last time she saw him.

“Shank. You lose some weight?”

He heaved his shoulders, said, “I feel like a real heel-I shoulda called. You see, right after the last time we were together I tested HIV-positive…”

Sheryl clasped his horn-hard hand, noting the manicured nails set like jewels among the callus. “You’re shitting me, right?”

“Yeah,” he grinned. “It’s the South Beach diet.”

She cast her eyes around, sniffed. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”

“Let’s say I’m comfortable around real fat people. They eat like gamblers play slot machines. Totally oblivious to what’s around them.”

Sheryl gave him an appreciative nod. She liked what she saw so far. They were treating her decent for a change.

Shank paid admission, and they followed a tired-looking waitress who seated them at a booth, brought them glasses for their beverages, and said in a tone both cryptic and bored, “You can start now.”