Chuck Logan - Vapor Trail

“Milton Dane, the attorney.”

Broker didn’t ask how she knew; he just smiled.

Janey turned, smoothed a hand along the side of her hair, and said, “You’re too skinny. There’s hungry, and then there’s starvation.”

“Pot calling the kettle.” Broker caught himself getting involved in the motion of her upper arms as she raised her hands and fussed with the binder in her ponytail.

“And the short hair, it throws me,” Janey said.

“You didn’t used to smile so much,” Broker said.

“It’s the influence of the postindustrial service economy. We’re surrounded by people whose jobs are being nice to people. It makes us smile more. When people worked in steel mills, they didn’t say things like ‘have a nice day.’ “

Too many words.

She’d always surrounded herself with too many words, sharp words projecting like porcupine quills. “So you said you wanted to talk,” Broker said.

Janey slouched against the rail, her eyes rolled up, and she said, “You never were one to dance a girl. No flirty chitchat to get things rolling.”

“Rolling,” Broker repeated, knitting his eyebrows.

“You know what I mean.”

“Sure, small talk.”

Janey smiled. “Never your thing. I understand completely. You were always into” — Janey creased her forehead and searched for the right phrase- “the eloquent silence of the hunter. It must be hard on you now, living ordinary life.”

“It’s hotter than shit. It’s been a rough day. I’m getting a beer. You want one?” Broker said, heading for the kitchen.

“Sure.”

He returned with two Heinekens. The cold green bottles immediately beaded in the heat. Janey took hers, sat in a deck chair, and inspected the drip of condensation that dribbled down the side. Very deliberately, she dug through the damp label with her thumbnail and flicked the ribbon of label away.

Then Janey dropped it on him: Boom. “Did you ever wonder why I married Drew?” she said.

Broker stared, momentarily unfocused, his mind paddling to stay afloat in the heat. “I was curious,” he said slowly.

“He was the opposite of you. After you, I designed this man rating system-one to ten; solitary hunter to social gatherer.”

“What’s in between?”

“Most guys. No, that’s not true. I never had a representative sample. I was up to my neck in law enforcers. Cops and prosecutors. Men with authority hang-ups.”

Broker drew his right hand between them in a slow, level motion and said, “Drew is steady. A safe bet for the long haul.” From memory, Broker re-created Drew’s angular unlined face, his mild blue eyes.

Janey smiled tightly. “Make that was . Past tense.” She raised her chin, which began to quiver slightly. “After what happened on nine-eleven, I heard people were supposed to take inventory, reaffirm their relationships, draw closer together. Well, Drew missed that particular point entirely, because he’s seeing another woman, and he’s not even being discreet about it.” Then Janey began to spill big hot tears all over her white halter.

So he brought her a towel to wipe her cheeks. Then he brought her a glass of ice water and cleared the decks to hear about the other woman.

And he could empathize, to a point. He had visited the subject of the other man. The younger other man. So he assumed that Janey’s other woman would be younger and bursting with wonderful unlived-in smells and secret places. She would be unwrinkled from lack of child rearing. She would have pert Cosmo snow cone breasts.

“She’s this. . cow ,” Janey seethed. “You know, with the big bovine brown eyes.”

Okay, so not Cosmo. Playboy maybe. He listened patiently.

“Goddamn men and their midlife crises.” Suddenly, she seized his left forearm, pulled him toward her, and looked directly into his eyes. “You could talk to him.”

He retrieved his arm. “Janey, I’m a little busy right now.”

Without missing a sniffle, she pointed to his left wrist, where he wore a bracelet of dark purple blood bruises from Mouse’s handcuff. “You should put some ice on that,” she said.

She got up, folded her arms across her chest, and paced.

“Twelve years of married life, for Christ sake. I thought maybe you could knock some sense into him? He always respected you.” She gulped several rapid breaths, then sipped some water to steady herself.

Broker protested, “Drew never respected me. He thought I was. . crude; a door ripper, lacking subtlety.”

“Well, just what are my daughter and I supposed to do? It’s not fair.”

“I’m sorry.” Broker’s voice backed up to try again. He tried again, and all he could come up with was the same. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s all you can say is-you’re sorry ?” She tossed a hand in disgust, then swiped the tears away with the back of her hand and set her jaw. “Fuck a bunch of crying. I should never have quit working,” she said in a dead-serious voice. They did not make eye contact as she stalked off the deck and down the stairs.

Broker watched Janey stride toward her car and get in. She started the Lexus and lurched backing up, bumped a pile of firewood, and put a twelve-hundred-dollar scratch in her rear bumper. Finally, in a grind of gravel, she was gone up the drive.

Broker drank his beer and opened another; then he put some ice cubes in a dishrag and placed it against the bump on his head. Holding the ice with one hand, he washed down three 200-mg Ibuprofen. Then he lit a cigar.

He logged onto the laptop and checked his e-mail. NO NEW MESSAGES ON SERVER.

One-thirty in the morning the cell phone rang. Broker fumbled it to his ear and heard a disembodied voice caterwaul from way down in a whiskey wind tunnel: “I came to believe I was powerless over alcohol. .”

“Goddammit, Harry,” Broker shouted.

Click.

Scricchhhhh. .

The rasping sound brought Broker stark upright. Skimming like a water bug, he’d barely made a dent in sleep.

Scricchhhhhhhh. .

He eased up on the bed, holding the shotgun that was slick with his sweat, looking around. Another night without the A/C, thinking he could hear better with the windows open.

Scricchhhhhhhh. .

It wasn’t quite fingernails screeching on a blackboard. But it was close. He oriented quickly on the sound of cat claws raking across a screen door.

Ambush wanted to go out.

When Milt got involved with Hank Sommer’s widow, he also inherited Hank’s cat, Ambush, who was now Broker’s responsibility for the summer. The cat was getting old, plump, fussy. She communicated her desire to go outside by pawing at the patio screen door, and now she had managed to get one of her claws tangled in the ripped wire mesh.

“Okay, just a minute,” Broker mumbled as he rolled from the sheets and padded barefoot across the kitchen to the door that led onto the deck. He freed the stuck gray paw from the abraded screen and slid the patio screen open. Ambush strolled across the deck and disappeared down the stairs.

He looked past the deck. The river had acquired a muddy Nile-brown complexion under an overcast gray sky. He stood there naked for a while and let the malarial dawn drip over him.

The thought formed that the Saint was out there, waking up in this very same heat. And Harry, the midnight crooner. Unless, of course, they were, as a third of the cops in the county believed, the same person.

Onward.

Sweat trickled from his scalp, streaked down his check, dripped from his chin, and splashed on the oak floor. Running in this heat would be an exercise in hydraulics. He’d have to grow gills. It would be absolute madness. Sort of like the general atmosphere in Investigations at Washington County.