Chuck Logan - Vapor Trail

“I hear you,” Mouse said.

“Or less dramatic, he could seriously disappear, and we need him. So we use him and then we trap him.”

“And drag him off to the hospital in a net like a wild animal.” Mouse grinned.

“Exactly,” Broker said. “Remember what you said about checking every casino in a one-hundred-mile radius?”

“That was a joke,” Mouse said, a little alarmed.

“No joke. Can you do that? Quietly, like, don’t let your buddy Benish know. Fax Harry’s picture around to the security officers. I mean, we’re talking about a high roller who’s drunk, who looks like a skinny Johnny Cash, who has three red sevens tattooed on his right forearm. How hard is that?”

Mouse nodded. “Maybe I can do that. I know a retired state patrol copper who runs security in the Grand Casino up in Hinckley. Maybe he can flog the network.”

“We might get lucky. If I was Harry crashing and burning on my last hurrah, I’d hang in the casinos where it’s dark and cool and anonymous,” Broker said as he stared across the room at Gloria Russell in profile. She leaned forward, chatting intently with her colleagues. Her teeth flashed in a smile like crisp punctuation. She looked incredibly healthy and vital, as though she breathed better air, took better vitamins.

“Okay, I’ll get on the casinos.” Mouse took a last swig at his coffee and set the glass down. “When do you talk to the archdiocese?”

“Meet my guy in the morning,” Broker said.

Mouse nodded. “When you get back, we’ll sit down and run everything we’ve got on Moros. You, me, and Lymon.”

Maybe everybody was invisible down deep.

Or were they just hiding what they were thinking?

All the people she passed during the day. People she knew, went on break with. Even the man she’d let into her body. She couldn’t really see the pictures moving in their minds just behind their eyes.

Windows to the soul?

Hardly. More like the two-way mirror in the hard interrogation room. You could see out at them, but they couldn’t see in. They looked at you and saw their own reflection.

But they knew you were there, watching.

So more like-windows to the game.

Angel was through with games.

She was playing for keeps.

And right now she was daydreaming in the heat. Driving from Herberger’s Department Store up on 36, she passed a digital sign on a bank marquee. The time, then: 102 degrees.

The heat made her light-headed.

Floaty.

So get serious.

Specifically, this afternoon she would be playing for keeps with Aubrey Jackson Scott. Aubrey was a freelance photographer. He lived in a river cottage on the St. Croix north of Stillwater. He was divorced. He drove a 1995 Accord. He had no police record. Just the one complaint.

A neighbor couple had griped that Aubrey invited their eight-year-old daughter into his house to give her a new bathing suit. They suspected, but could not confirm, that Aubrey had taken photos of her when she put the new suit on.

A Washington County deputy had talked to the parents. He’d signed off when he learned that the child refused to give back the suit. County, understaffed, had let it slide.

The back-and-forth facts didn’t really matter. What mattered was that Aubrey’s name was number two on the list.

Angel parked her car, gathered her shopping bag, and went into her apartment. Just as with Moros, she took time to prepare herself mentally. She sat down in her living room and stared at the face in the picture framed on the bookcase across the room.

You told me I had to be strong.

Then, methodically, she laid out her gear: the latex gloves, the medallion, and the wig. She kept two pistols in her desk drawer. She loved the.38. Its heft and bulk. But it was a revolver, and when she’d used it the first time she was damn near as scared as that creep Dolman when she heard it go off. She’d turned the volume on his sound system way up, and still she worried people would hear.

So this time around she’d decided to do a little research on-line that took all of ten minutes.

She typed HANDGUN and HOMEMADE SILENCER into Google.com and got hundreds of sites.

The book she bought with her sister’s VISA card cost fourteen bucks and was titled Homemade Silencers Made Easy. Used automobile oil filters were the favorite home item recommended by the right-wing crazy who wrote this slim volume. But Angel couldn’t see lugging around a dirty, oily hunk of metal in her purse.

Uh-uh. Angel preferred something clean.

Like a twenty-four-ounce plastic Mountain Dew pop bottle. No complicated threading device. Just a big plug of duct tape attaching the bottle to the barrel housing of a.22-caliber Ruger Mark II target pistol.

She bought the Ruger at a chain-store gun department using her sister’s driver’s license-same height, around the same weight, same eye color. And she’d worn her sister’s wig for the first time outside of the apartment.

In her sister’s glasses, and the wig, the resemblance was uncanny, although her sister’s face in the license photo was much thinner than her own. So the salesman had perused the license, taken her sister’s name and social security number, and submitted them to a computer background check.

Two weeks later Angel was the owner of a new pistol, which-according to the author of Homemade Silencers Made Easy -was a perfect fit for the clumsy but effective pop bottle taped to its barrel housing.

And, as the visit with Father Moros demonstrated, the silencer system worked just fine. The main thing was she had to get in close.

Angel slipped out of her working clothes and her underwear. She removed the new bathing suit from the shopping bag, held it up in front of her, and pitched a sidelong glance into her full-length mirror.

Close would not be a problem.

Broker drove around the back of the LEC, parked in the underground garage, and took an elevator up to the sheriff’s offices. Going into Investigations, he checked Lymon’s cube. Empty. He ignored the sullen nongreetings from the other cops, continued down the row of cubicles. “Narcotics,” he sang out.

“We got a hell of a going-out-of-business-sale on Ecstasy right now,” a young voice replied.

“Where are you?”

“Other side of the cubes.”

A young investigator stood in the aisle. He was dressed in filthy blue work trousers, a soiled T-shirt, steel-toed shoes. A pair of bulbous ear protectors was slung around his neck.

“What are you supposed to be besides bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?” Broker said.

The young cop shrugged. “Working a UC gig; right now I’m a tree trimmer. Got a chain saw and everything.”

“You are. .?” Broker said.

“Pete Cody. Narcotics.” Cody did not offer to shake hands. “But I heard about you. You’re the loneliest guy in the world, right?”

Broker was not amused. “How’d a shrimp like you manage to grow up instead of being beaten to death on the playground?”

Cody smiled. “Musta been all that mediation counseling, I guess.”

Broker said, “You know anything about a guy named Ray Tardee?”

Cody shrugged. “Sure, one of our perennials.”

“Who’s prosecuting?”

“Russell.”

“Thanks.”

Broker went to an empty cube, sat down at the desk, got out the county phone directory, called the county attorney’s office, and asked for Gloria Russell.

“Miz Russell took the rest of the day off,” the receptionist said.

“Tell her Phil Broker, Special Projects on Moros, called. We need to talk ASAP about one of her cases, Ray Tardee.” Broker gave his cell phone number.