Chuck Logan - Vapor Trail

“Slipped out on you,” Mouse repeated carefully.

“Where can we meet away from the shop?” Broker said.

“Is this, like, getting real fucked up?” Mouse said.

“Where, Mouse? I want to talk.”

“Okay, since you’re supposed to have all kinds of bread stashed away, you can buy me a drink at Club Terra in fifteen minutes.”

“See you there.”

Club Terra would not have been Broker’s first choice. It was a supper club with a log cabin exterior across Highway 36 from the Washington County Government Center, so it did a brisk business with county workers. But he needed Mouse to level with him on Harry. So he drove to the restaurant, went in, and got a table just as the place was filling up with the late-lunch crowd. Mouse came in a few minutes later.

The weather was getting to Mouse. After being in court he’d exchanged his suit jacket, shirt, and tie for a baggy cotton polo shirt that covered his pager and holster. The shirt stuck to his ample belly in dark patches of sweat.

“Some weather, hey; and, ah, you look like shit,” Mouse said.

“Christ, Mouse; half the county is here. I wanted to get away,” Broker said, suddenly self-conscious.

“Stay cool. You wanted to get down and dirty, right? This is the place.”

A waitress appeared. They refused menus. Neither of them had an appetite in the heat. Broker ordered ice tea. Mouse ordered iced coffee.

“Harry says he’ll help,” Broker said.

“Really?” Mouse said as he took a toothpick out of his chest pocket, put it in his mouth. “So where’s my cuffs?”

Broker reached back under his shirt, took the handcuffs off his belt, and slid them across the table.

Mouse inspected them and said, “There’s pieces of woody shit ground in the grooves here.”

Broker didn’t answer, so Mouse ran his practiced eyes over Broker and stopped on the raw red marks on his left wrist. Then Mouse said, “You know, you’re, ah, wearing your hair shorter than you used to.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, it makes it easier to see things on your scalp, like, for instance, the black-and-blue goose egg behind your right ear.”

“Shit.” Broker pursed his lips.

Mouse raised his iced coffee, sipped, put it down, and said, “You gonna tell me, or do I have to torture it out of you?”

“I turned my back on him,” Broker said.

Mouse shut his eyes, grimaced, crossed his arms over his wide stomach, then raised his right hand and propped it under his heavy chin. “My fault. I shoulda come with you.”

“No you shouldn’t have. It’s personal; this part at least.” Broker pointed behind his right ear.

“You saying there’s more?” Mouse squinted and leaned across the table.

Broker nodded. “Harry and I have this heavy private agenda we have to work through, right? But apart from that he wants to stay in touch. I think he feels left out.”

Mouse shook his head, but he couldn’t entirely hide the admiration in his voice. “Fucking Eisenhower. When Harry’s drunk, he blames you for his wife’s death. Some people think he’s basically sworn to kill you; so John puts you next to him ’cause he thinks there’s some weird chemistry between you two that’s going to make him spill his guts.”

“Kind of scary, huh? A man with a deviant mind like that being the sheriff in the fastest-growing county in the state,” Broker said.

“So, did Harry tell you anything good?”

“He told me that if the Saint isn’t”-Broker hooked the first two fingers of both hands and struck quote marks in the air- “doing God’s work, he might help with the catching part.”

“Like he really knows something.”

“There it is,” Broker said. “Of course he’d been drinking.”

“Of course,” Mouse said as he rolled a toothpick across his mouth, fiddled with his napkin, and tapped his fingertips on the tabletop.

An ex-cigarette smoker, Broker recognized the symptoms of the craving. In fact, he was starting to feel the nervous hankering toying powerfully with his insides. He made a mental note to buy some cigars, sort of as a tobacco methadone fix against the heroin lure of cigarettes.

“He said that, huh?” Mouse said. Then he inclined his head and directed his eyes across the room. Broker followed the direction of Mouse’s gaze, through the crowd. Three people were moving from the reservations desk behind a waitress, going toward a table. Two men and a woman.

Perhaps in thrall to status, they wore suits in spite of the heat-a blazer and skirt for the woman. They were too young and fit-looking to be normal county apparatchiks.

“Look like lawyers,” Broker said.

“Uh-huh. County attorneys, actually,” Mouse said.

Upon closer inspection, Broker saw that the two men were not remarkable. The woman, however, put out serious candle power. Black-framed glasses magnified a friction in her eyes that could ignite fires. She had very short razor-cut black hair and a sinewy athleticism. The calf muscles in her tanned legs clenched at every step.

“Stillwater girl,” Mouse said.

“Say again?”

“My dad used to say you can always tell a Stillwater girl by her legs. From going up all the stairs on the hills.”

There was only one female assistant prosecutor with a reputation for that kind of physical intensity. “Is that Gloria Russell?” Broker asked.

“Oh yeah.”

“And?”

“And, well, you know-the Saint case was this real nightmare; it went through the county like an emotional plague. People quit; people went on medication; some people had affairs. Old Gloria hit for the cycle; she turned in her resignation, only they threw it back at her. She went on medication, and she had an affair.”

“She did, huh?”

“Oh yeah. A real double-scream-back-crawler. You know, Harry never once denied he was the Saint. He’d sort of smile and he’d say, ‘Well, somebody has to carry out the garbage.’ But the one thing he’d always deny was. .” Mouse inclined his head at the assistant prosecutor.

“You mean. .” Broker said, craning his neck now to get a better look at her.

“Big time,” Mouse said as he curled his left index finger into the hollow of his left thumb to make a circle. Then he inserted his right index finger into the socket and pumped it.

Broker raised his hand and flipped it over, palm up. “So connect some dots for me,” he said.

Mouse twisted his lips in a sour expression. “Hey, I gotta work here in this glass house. John E. brought you in to throw the stones.”

“Mouse, there’s a dead priest with a Saint’s medal in his mouth.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Mouse made placating gestures with his palms. “So what do you want?”

“You going to help me with Harry, Mouse? You were playing hard to get this morning.”

“That’s before you got hit in the head and maybe handcuffed. Harry’s a great guy when he’s sober, and I love him. But he can be dangerous when he’s drinking. I mean”-Mouse carefully looked Broker in the eye-“he could kill somebody, right?”

Broker nodded. “Yep. If he’s drunk and you get in the way of the wrong mood swing- Harry could kill you.”

Mouse leaned forward and squinted. “Cut the shit, Broker; it’s the Mouse you’re talking to. .”

“Okay, Harry could put one right here.” Broker tapped his forehead.

Mouse nodded. “So you want us to put a Bolo on him for whatever it is he did to you, which you ain’t saying? Drag his ass in?”

Broker caught a whiff of cigarette smoke gliding from the bar and all these vampire air sacs in his lungs sat upright in their coffins. “Nothing so obvious,” he said. “Picture somebody chasing him down the street and he’s blacked-out drunk. He took one of his favorite toys when he left his house-the one with the target knobs on the scope that’s registered out to twelve hundred yards. He could climb up in a building, and it could bounce strange.”