Chuck Logan - Vapor Trail

He immediately started to punch in the motel number when Janey appeared in front of him. She pressed her phone to her chest, and her face was cold with restrained fury. “That was Laurie, calling me on Drew’s cell phone. He left her stranded in the bathroom, and he’s got some woman there.”

Broker held up his hand. “Wait a minute,” he said. He had to think. Better to make his calls from the county office. He had to return Mouse’s car, anyway. No sense troubling Janey with this new information. “Go down to the car. I’ll be right there,” he said.

Broker went fast through the bathroom and the bedroom; threw his toilet articles and a change of clothes in a duffel bag, locked the house, and jogged to the car.

Driving between eighty and ninety, he barely heard Janey’s screed against Drew as he tried to stay focused. When they hit the north end of town, he was reassuring himself that Jeff was a strictly no-bullshit cop. If he said Kit was all right, she was all right.

Okay. So what. .?

Then he stopped and double-parked in front of Drew’s building, where a small crowd of people stood on the street nervously pointing up the steps toward Drew’s studio. Janey stepped out of the car, spoke briefly to someone in that crowd, and immediately sprinted up the steps.

Broker jumped from the car and raced after her.

“. . gunshot up there. .,” someone yelled as he rushed past.

Now what? Taking the steps three at a time. Going in cold, nothing in his hand. Nothing. Just going in.

Now screams.

The kid. Laurie in there screaming.

He was in and. .

Drew, naked with a towel trailing off his butt, leaking bubbles of blood from his chest and his lips. He left a slick red smear on the hardwood floor as he crawled sidestroke toward the bathroom. Broker dropped to one knee, to check Drew, and Janey shot past him into the bathroom.

“LET HER GO!”

Broker leaped over Drew, threw his shoulder against the door, and shoved it against the recoil of struggling bodies on the other side. He set his stance and forced his way in. Inside the small room, Janey grappled with a woman who had just taken her hands off Laurie. Laurie was screaming and crouched waist-deep in a bathtub full of water as she swung her tiny bandaged fists.

Broker had seen this woman before.

Lunging, he thought with his hands. The woman was reaching down to the wet floor. .

GUN.

Really diving now, off the ground, stretching because the pistol was coming up in line with Janey’s face. He batted Janey aside with his right hand while his left hand whipped out and grabbed the muzzle.

KABOOM- OHSHITFUCK!

He felt the bullet punch through his palm.

The noise, pain, and shock welded a frozen white circle, and he was suspended for a fraction of a second as he hurtled toward the floor and crashed chest and elbow into the rim of the claw-footed bathtub.

And that hurt more than the goddamn bullet.

Jarred, he flipped down and hit the floor hard.

In that tiny beat he saw Janey-a Janey he had never seen before-pounce over him and close with the shooter. Broker, dazed, coming up off the floor, Laurie screaming, Drew crawling, his chin coated with blood.

And Broker looked up and saw something else he had never seen before as Janey went in snarling and clawed her fingers into the other woman’s eyes.

The woman staggered back, her eyes now a torn red mask. Janey went after the faltering pistol. Seized it in her hand. As Broker struggled up from the floor, he had one of his basic rules reaffirmed, the one about never having a loaded revolver in the house. No safety mechanism. The ultimate in point-and-shoot.

Without the slightest hesitation, she thrust the pistol into Annie Mortenson’s face and pulled the trigger once, twice, and would have kept yanking it if Broker hadn’t come up fast and torn the weapon from her grip.

Laurie screamed louder and clapped her hands to her ears.

Broker’s own ears were ringing, plugged, stinging from the shots.

Laurie’s screams brought Janey to her senses. She saw the gouts of flesh and splinters of scalp that spattered the wall, the floor, her daughter.

Instantly, she wrapped Laurie in her arms and then whisked a towel from a rack and began cleaning Laurie’s face.

“Get her out of here,” Broker said. Then seeing the slumped woman’s face, knowing it was futile, he knelt, put down the pistol, and put his fingers to her throat. He waited several beats and felt no pulse.

Janey stepped over Annie’s body, plucking red matter from Laurie’s hair with her fingers and flicking it away. Immediately, she started to kneel to Drew. Broker grabbed her arm and shoved her toward the studio doorway and the porch beyond.

“Take her out there. Leave this to me,” Broker said. Then he turned and saw air bubbles suck red suds in Drew’s back. Bright red blood.

Sucking chest wound. Exit wound.

He squatted, turned Drew’s shoulder, and saw a similar but smaller pumping action in his chest.

Through and through. Okay. Seal a sucking chest.

He walked, not real steady but fast, toward the kitchenette, tossing the contents of a cupboard until he found a roll of Saran wrap, a spool of duct tape. Ignoring Drew’s groans he forced him to a sitting position, wound the Saran around his chest, flung his arms out of the way, and then reinforced the impermeable barrier with the tape.

Drew’s breathing improved enough for him to try to talk.

“Shut up, save your strength,” Broker said as he reached for the phone on the drawing table. It had just occurred to him that the people down on the street had probably not called the cops.

Broker called 911, identified himself, gave the address, told the call taker he had a man down with a sucking chest and a woman dead on the scene. Broker described the first aid he’d given and said the wounded man was breathing and able to talk.

Then Drew started to topple over, so Broker put down the phone and hunkered with Drew and straightened him up again.

Drew wheezed, “Say. .”

“What?”

“Sane. .”

“Drew, be quiet.”

“Saint. Her. Crazy. Said she killed. . some woman. Take the blame. She had one of those medals.” Drew rallied and forced out a whole sentence, “Broker, she said she killed that guy. .”

Broker was too focused on the immediate demands of the situation to process what Drew was saying. He told Drew to be quiet.

“No, listen; she. .” Then he pitched back against the bookcase and gasped, completely exhausted.

“You rest. Help’s on the way,” Broker said. He propped him upright with a chair so the internal bleeding wouldn’t collapse the lung, wedged him so he wouldn’t fall. Then he went to check on Janey and Laurie.

Janey had scrubbed the blood from Laurie’s face and hair and had swaddled her in the towel. He bent to them, inspecting them for shock. That’s when he saw the medallion around Laurie’s neck. That meant something, but at the moment Broker wasn’t entirely sure what. They were okay. Drew was okay too, if the medics stepped on it.

He put his hand on the porch railing to steady himself, beginning to feel real fuzzy around the edges. Getting old, you pussy, letting a little paper cut kick your ass. He studied the ragged hole through the meat of his left palm. Painfully, he moved his fingers. The machinery that operated the bones and tendons was still intact.

Another scar, he thought vaguely.

Equally vaguely, he now recognized the dead woman in the bathroom as Annie Mortenson. The librarian. Harry’s ex-girlfriend. He began to feel dizzy. He began to shake.

Funny, out in the winter snow, shock could be a sheet of fire. Now, in this heat, it wrapped him in cold shivers.