Chuck Logan - Vapor Trail

A. J.’s trained eye took it all in immediately. He bolted across the room, through the patio door onto the deck. By the time Angel had the pistol free, he was tearing down the steps. As she came out on the deck, his bare feet failed him on the sharp gravel at the bottom of the stairs.

“Ow, shit,” he yelped, grabbing one of his feet, hopping absurdly.

She was on him and walked behind his weird jumping, waiting until he made it off the gravel and fell on the grass. “C’mon, A. J.; you just can’t take a joke,” she said.

“What, what?” he said, pushing himself up, attempting to run. She tripped him, and he fell heavily and rolled over. That’s when she decided to go for the belly shot.

Squeeze, don’t jerk, the trigger.

The muffled clap sounded like applause as she fired point-blank from a distance of five feet and hit him low in the abdomen.

“My God,” he gasped and pawed in disbelief at his belly.

Angel hovered over him, the pistol and its bulbous silencer in plain view. “Hold that thought. Now you get to find out. Is God or isn’t God?”

He tried scuttling away, this painful, ungainly motion on his back. For a few seconds, he was aided slightly by the incline of his property, but after ten yards or so, Angel tired of the routine and swung the pistol on target.

Clap-clap-clap.

The small rounds tracked up his chest, and the last one apparently missed. Coming closer, she saw that her last shot hadn’t missed. It hit him in the mouth, broke some teeth, and exited his cheek. He was still wet-gargling air when she stuffed the medallion in his wrecked mouth. She returned to the house, collected the printouts, came back out, and pasted one of the pictures over his bloody face.

She put the others in her beach bag. She made sure she had one that was daubed with his blood.

Then she placed the silencer against the soggy print of the boy stripper that was stuck to A. J.’s twitching face and squeezed again.

Clap .

She watched the physical systems shut down, muscle spasms, breathing; a few last convulsions and then stillness.

As she got ready to go, she remembered the lie she’d told him. About the cancer. In fact it was contagious. It’s just that the doctors looked for the causes in all the wrong places. Angel knew where the disease came from. It accumulated inside some men’s hearts, and, after a certain amount of time, it drained down and was absorbed into their sperm.

Angel absolutely believed that the cancer that killed her twin sister had been cultured in their daddy’s body, that he had transmitted it into her sister’s twelve- and thirteen- and fourteen- and fifteen-year-old uterus, where it rooted and matured into the malignant ovarian tumor that had eventually eaten her up inside and destroyed her body.

Her life had been destroyed much, much earlier on.

So, before turning toward the house, she shot A. J. Scott one last time in the balls just for spite.

Broker drove back to Milt’s with one eye fixed on the rearview mirror. Distracted, he didn’t appreciate the blazing western sky, where it looked like North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska had caught fire along with Colorado and Arizona. He turned off Highway 95 and braked his way down Milt’s winding gravel drive, quadrant-tracking the dusk that filtered in through the trees. There were a thousand places up in this darkening bluff where. .

He spotted the maroon Lexus 300 with smoke-tinted windows tucked in the oaks at the bottom of the drive about twenty yards from the house. Nobody said Harry had to be driving Broker’s truck. So Broker pulled over, killed the engine, grabbed the Ithaca.12-gauge and approached the house at port arms with his right thumb on the safety.

All he needed was Harry staggering around, drunk and armed.

He felt the low, slanting sun come through an opening in the trees and hit his back. He saw his shadow stretch out, preceding him on the gravel drive. Stepping carefully on paving stones so he didn’t make a sound, he came in close to the house and lost his shadow in the larger shadow of the overhanging eaves. He flattened himself against the side wall. Ever so slowly, he edged his head around a corner just enough to get a view of. .

Janey Hensen.

Chagrined, he clicked the gun on safe. She sat on the top step of the stairs leading up to the deck, looking trim in a white halter, denim shorts, and tanned skin. She wore no makeup and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. A fine layer of sweat shimmered on her tan as if she’d just been misted with a spray bottle. She was reading a book.

“Janey? What the hell?” He stepped around the corner holding the shotgun awkwardly at the vertical in his right hand like a high school boy carrying a bouquet.

Janey was unfazed. Always dry on the uptake, she batted her eyes and said, “Jeez, Broker, I figured you missed the old days but not this much.” She stood up and brushed off the back of her shorts. Maybe it was the sunset hamming it up like a Rodgers and Hammerstein background out of South Pacific . Maybe it was the businesslike way she dusted off her bum-but it struck Broker that Janey still bore a resemblance to midwestern ensign Nellie Forbush as played by Mitzi Gaynor.

He hefted the shotgun self-consciously. “Just putting it in the house; just be a sec. Ah, what’s this?” As he went up the stairs he changed the subject by flicking his finger at the book she was reading: Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe.

“Our own Michael Osterholm,” Janey said.

Osterholm had been the Minnesota state epidemiologist. “Yeah, I know,” Broker called over his shoulder as he slipped into the kitchen through the patio door. He quickly racked the side, emptying the shotgun. He stuffed the shells behind a bag of corn chips on a counter, stashed the gun in the broom closet, and came back out. “I read it.”

“After the anthrax scare?” Janey said.

“No, when it first came out.” He smiled tightly. “Nina brought it home from ‘work.’”

“And how is Xena the Warrior Princess?” Janey said.

“That’s fair. She called you the Stepford Wife,” Broker said. Nina and Janey met two years ago at J. T. Merryweather’s retirement party. They chatted, ostensibly discussing the movie American Beauty . The way Broker remembered it, their words rattled back and forth like long elegant needles, probing for vital spots.

“Really? And we only met once. Do you think she got it right-me sitting in my Martha Stewart kitchen, tapping the mute button when the school shootings and Zoloft commercials come on CNBC in between stock quotes?” She inclined her head and said, “I heard you two separated.”

Broker stared at her as if to say, What are you doing here?

She shrugged. “Drew took Laurie to T-ball, so I went out to the lake to work on my tan. I was in the neighborhood, so. .”

“How are you doing, Janey?” Broker said.

“I’m morbid.” She hunched her shoulders, let them drop, and then held up the book. “He suggests in here that a guy could walk into a big shopping mall with smallpox cultures in an aerosol doodad, set it up in an air-circulation duct, turn it on, and kill over one hundred thousand people.” She raised her eyebrows. “You think that’s possible?”

“I don’t think Osterholm is into writing books for the money,” Broker said.

Janey tossed the book on the patio table, spun, walked to the rail, leaned into it with both hands, arched her back, and kicked up one sandaled foot. “This is nice here,” she said.

“Yeah. I’m watching it for the summer. The owner’s a friend of mine. He’s in Europe.”