Chuck Logan - Homefront

“My pleasure,” Gator said in an icy fuck-you tone.

As Griffin turned to leave, he paused, raised his finger and pointed. “And, Gator?”

“Now what?”

Griffin smiled. “You got egg on your chin.”

Driving home from his weekly sit-down breakfast, Gator briefly entertained the notion of shutting Griffin off like an antique tractor. Then he calmed down and went over the story about Griffin beating up that bunch of drunks in Skeet’s with a pool cue. But that was three, four years ago. And he only heard it, he didn’t see it. So he decided the intelligent thing to do was let Griffin have his little senior moment, raffling wolf tickets, showing solidarity with his friend. Maybe drop a hint to Keith that Griffin was getting cranky with him. Off-his-meds kind of thing.

Had more important business to think about.

Griffin drove back to his cabin fast, drifting the Jeep around the turns with an almost adolescent glee. The whole aggravated knot of insult and age and punk-ass youth and past and present unraveled when you yanked one cord:

Okay. Now it’s personal. And he started it.

Don’t go off completely half-cocked. Wait for J. T.’s call.

And Teedo had given him directions how to come in on Gator’s place through the woods.

So go take a look for himself.

The notion toyed with him with a palpable prod of danger. Felt like this sleeping figure was waking up in his chest, unfolding its limbs, putting him on like a suit of clothes. Susan Hatch would counsel he was too old…

“No, I ain’t,” Harry Griffin said aloud. Hell, he’d always been at his best alone, on his own. Mindful that Broker was coming over in an hour, he decided to keep this one to himself. And if it turned out that Teedo’s story was true, he could tell Broker about it later.

Run away, my ass.

J. T. Merryweather woke up before the alarm on Saturday morning, and as his feet searched for his slippers on the chilly floor, his first thought was about Phil Broker.

Griffin didn’t specify in so many words, but J. T. was thinking this had to do with Broker being up north.

Moving quiet, so he didn’t wake his wife and daughter, he selected clothes from the closet and dresser in the dark. Then he padded downstairs, plugged in the coffee, and showered in the first-floor half bath.

After he dressed and breakfasted on a quick bowl of cereal, he retrieved Griffin’s license number request and made some phone calls, taking notes. Not entirely satisfied with what they told him on the phone, he decided to take it a step further.

J. T. stepped out on his front porch and studied the hazy dawn that cloaked his fields, the paddocks, and the fences in mist. He’d made it up to homicide captain in St. Paul before he took the early retirement and put his savings into 160 acres in Lake Elmo and tried raising ostriches.

The specialty meat was slow to catch on in a fast-food culture, so now he was trimmed down to breeding stock and covering his bets with beef. Never regretted farming. Not one bit. He started his town car, a Crown Vic he got at a police auction-interceptor package, good Eagle tires-and headed out his driveway into the fog.

His weather-wary eyes scanned the muddy fields to either side of the road; first the early rain, then the frost, now clogged with wet snow. Like his own land. How soggy would the spring be, how soon could he get in with a tractor?

He drove south and west on back roads until he hit State 95, which he took until it T-boned into 61. He turned south, and soon he was driving across the bridge over Mississippi at Hastings. He continued through town and turned left on Highway 361, following the red-and-blue toucan on the sign for the Treasure Island Casino that pointed the way with lifted wing.

J. T. thinking. Broker had been one of the least likely cops he’d ever partnered with. Harry Cantrell was the other. Now he was on his way to find Cantrell. Saturday morning was Cantrell’s Treasure Island day.

He made the last turn and headed down the road toward the casino. Off to the right he saw the twin gray domes of the Excel Prairie Island nuclear reactors hover in the steam clouds over the scratchy bare trees. The sight of those reactors reminded him that he and most of the people in the state owed Broker a debt of thanks.

Last July there had been an explosion at the plant.

A construction accident, they said.

Nine people had died. Dozens were injured. The official story descended from Washington and walled off the incident like a solid steel trap; no way in or out. So far the press was unable to dent the official story that a fuel tanker had ruptured, flooding a ditch with gasoline, that a spark ignited a truck full of oxygen and acetylene. The explosion had rocked the plant and cracked the spent-fuel pool. But no significant radiation had been released, the governor had insisted. The state quietly provided doses of potassium iodide for thousands of citizens in a ten-mile radius as a precaution against possible low levels of radiation poisoning. Now a lot of people who’d taken the iodide were looking at their kids closely every morning at the breakfast table.

Broker had been in the blast area when the explosion occurred, with a Delta colonel. They had diverted an explosive device away, from the cooling pool. It had been a near thing. Broker survived. The colonel did not. Nina had been thirty miles away fighting for her life against George Khari, who’d infiltrated the explosives into the plant.

Khari had links to Al Qaeda. Nina killed him, tearing her right shoulder to shreds in the fight.

J. T. took his pipe from the pocket of his Carhartt jacket and nibbled at the stem. You think you know a guy, how much he can take-all his life Broker had loved the shadows. Saw Gary Cooper in High Noon when he was a kid, took his cues, and never looked back. Married a woman who was his fierce mirror image.

J. T. shook his head.

After Prairie Island, Broker and Nina shrugged it off. Just another op. But people who knew them, people like J. T., observed that they were different.

They should have seen God in the inferno of that day.

Just too damn dumb and proud and stubborn-both of them-to admit the damage they’d taken below the waterline. It hit Nina first.

J. T.’s eyes drifted to the northern sky, socked in with brooding gray clouds. They were up north now, hiding out in a backwoods retreat. Healing up, playing house, pretending they were all right…

Griffin was looking out for them. J. T. shook his head again. Jesus, Griffin, the reformed angel of death, playing nanny, hovering over them. Except something had happened, and now Griffin needed a favor.

So, to do this right he’d take another old partner along on this day’s work.

J. T. shook his head one last time.

Cantrell. Cleaned up now, after Broker hauled him kicking and screaming into treatment. He’d retired from Washington County after he sobered up. A pure, unreconstructed redneck son of a bitch. Cantrell didn’t answer his phone. Made himself hard to find. You had to track him down and get him face-to-face.

So here was J. T. driving to a fucking casino, which he considered a monument to stupidity, on a dreary late March morning.

He parked in the mostly vacant lot and went into the pink pleasure palace. As a favor to his wife he was trying to give up smoking his pipe, and now the cloud of cigarette smoke fluttered against his nose like the smudged wings of tiny tempting devils.

Seniors mostly. Old guys with wars on their hats. One of them shuffled by, with a silhouette of a World War II destroyer on his baseball cap; dragging his oxygen tank, transparent tubes running to his nose.