Chuck Logan - Vapor Trail

Getting closer, Broker mulled over the standard lecture about the foolishness of gambling and how it usually ended with stating the exception that proves the rule: Of course, some people do win.

Harry didn’t have to be a cop. He certainly didn’t need the pension. Broker figured he liked to pack a gun and have the authority to pull people over and stick a badge in their face. Possibly he kept the job just to spite John Eisenhower, who had tried various ways to get him to move on.

Broker consulted the directions, pulled off Manning, and drove down a gravel road hemmed by red oaks and overgrown fields. The dull space inside where he carried Diane Cantrell’s death began to ache. So what was it going to be? Manhandle a blubbering drunk to Detox?

Or High Noon?

Maybe it was being back in touch with the pent-up momentum from all the years of wary hostility, worrying about Harry. Maybe it was just being back in harness. Whatever it was, Broker was leaning forward, working an edge.

He came to a plain mailbox with the name Cantrell handwritten on it in slanted block letters. He turned down the gravel drive that snaked off into the woods.

Halfway down the drive he hit the brakes and pulled sharply to the side of the road going into a turn.

Twenty yards ahead, in the belly of the turn, a silver Acura TL type S skewed at an angle, the left front fender punched in against the trunk of an oak tree. Broker glanced at the sheet Mouse had given him. The make, model, and the license matched. Harry’s personal car. The passenger-side door was sprung open. Broker stopped his truck, got out, and approached cautiously, circled, saw that the driver’s-side door was dented, striated with impact, and jammed. The air bag had deployed.

He checked the road, the surrounding brush. No sign of Harry.

He leaned into the interior through the open passenger side and saw a few dribbles of what looked like dried blood on the driver’s seat and smeared on the air bag.

Dried. It would be hours old.

He then studied the crash site and saw how the locked wheels had carved deep trenches in the gravel when Harry lost control overdriving the turn.

Broker looked back in the car. Like a drunken red flag, the keys were still in the ignition. On a hunch, he reached in and twisted them, to engage the electrical system. The digital clock on the dashboard blinked on and off, repeating the same number over and over: 6:42. Then the clock flickered, went dim, and then opaque.

He left the keys in the car and carefully inspected the road leading away from it. Squatting, moving slowly on his haunches, he searched for a blood trail.

A careful minute later he found a small ant war seething over a pizza crust. He returned to the car, leaned inside, and carefully inspected the smear on the air bag.

It had a dried anchovy stuck in it.

Okay. The carnage appeared more involved with cuisine than bloodshed. He got back in the truck and drove toward the house, parked, and got out.

Harry lived in a modest, comfortable rambler with stout vertical cedar planks for siding and a broad wraparound cedar deck. The door to the three-stall garage was open. A fishing boat sat on a trailer in one stall; the other two parking spaces were empty. Broker walked up and looked in the boat. It looked as if it had never been used.

He left the garage, went up the steps onto the deck to the door, which was also open. He peered in through the screen. Quiet. Empty. He rang the bell. Then rapped on the doorjamb.

“Yo? Anybody home?”

Getting no answer, he walked around the house on the deck. A good-size lawn in need of cutting inclined down to the lakeshore. There was a small dock with a rowboat tied off on a piling; a picnic table and a Weber grill sat on a patio. Several bullet-scarred cast-iron targets in the shape of pigs lay on the picnic table. Another was propped up on a stand. Broker estimated it was fifty yards from the picnic table to the house; extreme pistol range for anyone except an expert.

He turned toward the house and looked into the windows. In the living room, he saw a flat white Broadway Pizza box lying on the carpet next to the couch. A sliding patio door led from the living room to the deck. Like the front door, it was open. This time Broker slid back the screen and stepped in.

“Hey? Anybody home?”

He walked a quick circuit of the house and found clothes hung on doorknobs and strewn in the hallway. He stepped over a pile of damp towels and entered the bathroom. Little wads of crumbled toilet paper littered the sink, dotted with blood. A wisp of bloody fingerprint marked the mirror glass of the cabinet door. A disposable Bic razor lay in the bottom of the sink.

The garbage can overflowed in the kitchen; dirty dishes piled the sink. The refrigerator contained nine bottles of Pabst, a piece of cheese green with mold, and three slices of pepperoni pizza on a plate.

Harry’s contradictory patterns were evident in the littered house; underneath the surface debris the fundamentals-the carpets, counters, bathroom tile-were scrupulously clean.

The bedroom had rumpled sheets, an overflowing ashtray, an empty Scotch bottle. . His eyes stopped at the framed wedding picture on the bureau. Diane. Harry. And Broker. Another woman whose name he did not remember. The maid of honor.

He turned away from the bedroom and went down the stairwell to the basement, which looked like the nuts-and-bolts aisle in Home Depot. Shelves went from floor to ceiling and were thick with a variety of cardboard and plastic containers. Except these boxes weren’t for nuts and bolts; they held primers, powder, bullets, casings, and reloading dies. There had to be thousands of rounds of ammo here, in every conceivable caliber.

In the old days in St. Paul, Harry was famous for experimenting with pistol loads and trying them out on stray dogs.

A broad workbench spanned the area, with four reloading presses bolted to it. Two gun safes sat along the wall next to the shelves. Perhaps as a clue to Harry’s current state of mind, the heavy doors on both safes were ajar.

Broker did not profess to know a whole lot about firearms. But he knew there were reloaders and there were serious shooters, and then there were wildcatters like Harry. And he knew that the small orange press on the right side of the bench was for sizing lead bullets and that the RCBS reloader next to it was for precision loading. These devices identified Harry as ultra-hard-core.

Broker walked up and perused the stacked boxes of reloading dies on the shelves. His eyes stopped on a box that read 338/378 K T. He vaguely understood this was a maverick caliber that was not commercially produced.

Curious, he went to the gun safes and looked in the first one. It contained all shotguns. He went to the second and saw a dozen rifles in the rack. His eyes immediately sought out the longest one; sleek and black with a distinctive muzzle brake perforating the end of the barrel.

This had to be the.338. Harry would have painstakingly assembled this rifle himself.

One look at the target knobs on top of the big Leupold field scope, and he was sure. The range finder was dotted in increments of 100 yards out to 1,200.

Broker lifted the big rifle and ran his palm along the custom fiberglass stock. He saw the Can Jar trigger with the two-ounce let-off and the bulky safety switch from a 1917 Enfield, the highly modified Enfield action.

This was Harry’s idea of a good time. Go out on a calm day and punch holes in a pie plate at 1,000 yards. He’d always filled the sniper slot in the SWAT team. That’s what the Marine Corps had trained him to be. And that’s how he’d spent his time in the war.

Broker eased the rifle back in the safe and pushed both the doors until they clicked shut.