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  CHUCK LOGAN

  HOMEFRONT

  For Jean and Sofie

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  Broker was looking at women’s long underwear in the J. P. Asch…

  CHAPTER ONE

  The new kid was a snotty showoff, and it was really starting to bug…

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Broker leaned down, the material of his tan work jacket tight…

  CHAPTER THREE

  The driver’s-side door on the Ford tore open too fast, springing on…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After Keith Nygard finished up his lecture, Jimmy got back in his…

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Okay, Cassie; calm down,” Gator Bodine said as he patiently listened…

  CHAPTER SIX

  They came through the door and immediately smelled the cigarette…

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Gator closed the door to his shop and stood for a few moments…

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ten minutes into the trail Broker caught a blur of movement up…

  CHAPTER NINE

  Gator put a few hundred yards of twisting trail between him and the…

  CHAPTER TEN

  After stowing the skis in the garage, Broker told Kit to shovel off…

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When he arrived back at his truck, Gator stowed his skis in the back…

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Nina, holding it together, coached Kit through supper. When Broker…

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Gator went and got what he needed and then found himself making…

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Broker started in the garage. No tiny paw prints led from the garage…

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Four-thirty in the morning. Broker and Kit were sound asleep, Kit…

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Broker awoke, alert and rested after seven hours on the couch. He…

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  At 11:00 A.M. Gator paced on the front porch in his Carhartt parka…

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Broker drove back home, parked the truck, climbed up into the bed…

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Gator was jangled on too much morning coffee, and now rubber-kneed…

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  When Broker picked Kit up at school, their conversation consisted of…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The first time Broker laid eyes on Harry Griffin was thirty-two…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Smell it?” Nygard asked.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Harry Griffin drove toward his house nearer to town, on the south…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The alarm went off, and Sheryl Mott got up in her efficiency apartment…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Nina lay in bed watching the stucco ceiling slowly emerge from…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Harry Griffin woke up feeling the warm impression Susan had left in…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Broker dropped Kit off at school, drove back through town, and…

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was game time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Broker sat in his truck in front of the school, showing no expression…

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Griffin wheeled into the parking lot of Skeet’s Bar and parked his…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Sheryl spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon smoking…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  After supper, Kit sat at the desk on the insulated office porch, practicing…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Harry Griffin passed a fitful night that was not altogether unpleasant.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  J. T. Merryweather woke up before the alarm on Saturday morning…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  An hour after he returned from his face-off with Gator Bodine, Griffin…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Nina and Kit returned to Griffin’s house with their new hairdos and…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Driving back from the pay phone at Perry’s, bouncing in his seat.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Griffin studied the squat gray building just fifty yards away, checked…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Saturday night. Nina wore a new green peasant blouse with flared…

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Because Gator generally didn’t trust excitement, he compensated for…

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  At 8:03 on a sunny but brisk cloudless Monday morning Shank…

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Monday morning was another first. Nina drove Kit to school. Not…

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Quarter to one, Gator pacing on the farmhouse porch, peering into…

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Sheryl Mott sat in the idling Nissan and watched Gator and Shank march…

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Five minutes into her run, Nina was having doubts about being out…

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Shank hunkered in the thick spruce maybe sixty yards from the garage…

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  “We’ll use the Jeep, Griffin needs the truck,” Broker said, guiding…

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Kit Broker stood shaking at the edge of the woods, looking back…

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  After Shank called, Sheryl put the car in gear and crept down the…

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Keith Nygard sat at his desk in the sheriff ’s office in the corner off…

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Broker braked the Jeep halfway up the drive in a four-wheel drift,…

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Sweat was dripping down Gator’s freshly shaved jaw. It was all coming…

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Police tape clamored yellow in the fifty-mile wind. An ambulance…

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Gator wheeled into his driveway, saw the Nissan sitting in plain view…

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Knowing the road, doing a hundred over the Barrens’ flat, Nygard…

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  “What’s Mom doing now?” Kit asked.…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY CHUCK LOGAN

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  Prologue

  DECEMBER 17, STILLWATER, MINNESOTA

  Broker was looking at women’s long underwear in the J. P. Asch Outfitters store in downtown Stillwater when he got the call.

  Outside, at the curb, a seven-foot spruce was encased in plastic netting in the bed of his Toyota Tundra. Last night Nina and their daughter, Kit, had raided the local Target store for a cart full of lights to string on the house and the tree. The boxes of decorations had been dusted off, opened, and laid out in the living room. It was going to be the first real Christmas together in four years that didn’t involve Nina or Nina and Kit flying in from Europe.

  He was debating which color lightweight Capilene to buy; the Red Chili Heather or the Purple Sage Heather. Either color would complement Nina’s ruddy freckled complexion, her green eyes and amber-red hair. She had been making steady progress with the rehabilitation on her shoulder, and he had purchased new cross-country ski gear for the family. Nina thought her shoulder might be good enough to lightly hit the trails up north by the middle of January. His eyes drifted out the window at the black iron girders of the old railroad lift bridge that spanned the St. Croix River. The top of the structure feathered off in the haze of an unseasonably warm drizzle.

&nbs
p; Hopefully the snow would hold up north, he was thinking.

  Then the phone rang. He flipped it open and hit answer.

  “Mr. Broker. This is Brenda from the office at Stonebridge Elementary. Your daughter has been waiting for someone to pick her up for over forty minutes…”

  Huh? “I’m on my way. Be right there.”

  What the hell? Rain, shine, or snow, Nina walked Kit to school and then ran five miles every morning. Every afternoon she trekked the six blocks to the school and walked Kit back home. Hadn’t missed a day since they’d enrolled her in September.

  Broker jumped in his truck, fought his way through the congested downtown traffic, drove past the festive streetlights hung with wreaths and Christmas decorations, half heard the carols piped from the busy storefronts. He drove up the North Hill, and when he wheeled into the deserted parking circle in front of the one-story school building, Kit was waiting at the front door with a teacher’s aide.

  “Hey. Where’s Mom?” she asked, as she hopped in the backseat of the extended cab. Tallish, broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, and cougar-cub lean at eight years old, she’d learned to be a stickler about punctuality. From her mother. She also had Nina’s hair, freckles, and deep green eyes.

  “Let’s go find out,” Broker said as he drove home faster than usual. He’d purchased the house on North Third as an investment; a large white duplex on the bluff overlooking the river. His address of record remained the Broker’s Beach Resort in Devil’s Rock, north of Grand Marais, on the Lake Superior shore. The needs of his reconstituted family had obliged him to migrate from the remote north woods. Nina insisted on dance lessons, piano, and most of all, access to a fifty-meter pool; her daughter would be a competitive swimmer.

  Like her mom.

  Broker pulled up the long driveway and parked his truck in back of a rusted Honda Civic. A square, powerfully built man with a graying ponytail and a Pistol Pete mustache squatted behind the car, replacing the license tabs. As Broker and Kit got out of the truck, Kit called to the guy, “Dooley, you seen Mom?”

  Dooley stood up and shook his head. Kit jogged toward the back door. Following her, Broker yelled over his shoulder to Dooley, “Could you take the tree outa the truck, strip the plastic sleeve, and lean it against the garage?”

  Dooley nodded and headed for the truck. He was a steady excon who’d helped Broker out of a few jams back when Broker was in law enforcement. Broker gave him an efficiency apartment in exchange for yard work, maintenance, and general watchdog duties. He was a good man to have around, except for his tendency to talk up born-again Christianity to Kit…

  “Daaaddddd!!!”

  Galvanized by Kit’s shrill yell, Broker sprinted over to the door. “What?”

  Kit stood in the open door, glowering, clamping her nostrils together with a thumb and index finger. She pointed with her other hand into the all-season porch. Broker went in and immediately saw and smelled a thick stratum of cigarette smoke hanging in the air.

  Broker had been off tobacco for three months. Nina had agreed never to indulge her cigarettes inside the house, a rule she hadn’t violated since they took up residence in late August, when she cleared the base hospital at Fort Bragg. He followed the smoke to where it was thickest, through the open door into the kitchen.

  Major Nina Pryce, U.S. Army, nominally “retired” and on extended sick leave from government service, sat at the table, still in the sweat suit and New Balance shoes she wore on her morning run. She leaned forward, elbow braced like someone arm-wrestling an invisible opponent. An inch of ash dangled from the end of the American Spirit jammed in the corner of her mouth. A breakfast bowl on the table held four or five butts mashed into the Total cereal and milk. Another cigarette butt floated in a coffee cup.

  And then he saw it, in her right hand.

  Broker reacted instantly. He gently shoved Kit back into the porch, closed the door in one swift movement, and lunged into the room. Nina, staring straight ahead, seemingly unaware of his presence, was raising and lowering her right arm, in the manner prescribed to strengthen the damaged muscles. But instead of the two-pound weight she always used, this afternoon she was raising and lowering her .45-caliber Colt semiautomatic—in which he saw no vacant cavity in the handgrip.

  Jesus! The pistol had a magazine in it.

  Immediately Broker snatched the weapon from her hand and dropped out the magazine, which smacked down on the polished maple tabletop like an exclamation point. For a fraction of a second he stared at the top stumpy bullet spring loaded in the magazine like a fat round tombstone. Then he racked the slide. No round in the chamber. Locked, not loaded. He exhaled audibly, only then realizing he’d been holding his breath.

  “For the weight,” she said in a thick, labored voice.

  Broker reached for the breakaway hideout holster on the table and was about to slide the pistol into it when he saw the unfolded note tucked inside:

  “Went out for coffee with Janey. Be back soon.” A sensual openmouthed lipstick blot marked the note by way of signature.

  Broker took a step back and placed the pistol on the counter next to the stove. Deep breath in. Shaky coming out.

  She drilled him with a look that spiraled with palpable self-loathing and hair-trigger rage. With difficulty, he held her fierce gaze as he mentally tracked back five months to that North Dakota morning.

  She’d left the note for Broker on the table in their room at the Langdon Motor Inn next to her holstered pistol. She’d decided not to take the gun when she went out with her partner, Janey Singer, for coffee. Then they’d taken a detour to the Missile Park Bar. Northern Route, their undercover mission to Langdon, North Dakota, had apparently been based on faulty intelligence. They had selected the wrong smuggler. Nina felt an obligation to say good-bye to her target in the misguided sting, Ace Shuster.

  Broker gauged the turmoil in Nina’s eyes, glanced at the note on the table, and instinctively understood the source of her despair. She’d torn her shoulder to shreds fighting for her life. But that wasn’t it. That was later. No, it was leaving her weapon behind that morning.

  She had become imprisoned in three seconds of her life…

  Because Nina was not your ordinary ex-Army Stillwater housewife getting ready to trim the tree.

  She was a “D-Girl,” attached to the Army’s elite Delta Force. She was also one of the few women to qualify for the Army Marksmanship Unit. Under extreme real-world pressure, she had reliably demonstrated the ability to get off an accurate shot with a handgun in under three seconds up to fifty yards.

  It was all there in her eyes.

  A split second before everyone else, Nina saw it was a trap. She saw Joe Reed appear through the back door of the bar with his big Browning automatic coming up in a two-handed grip. She yelled a warning, her hand flashing in a lightning reflex for the small of her back.

  I can beat you…

  But she came up empty. She’d left the pistol back at the motel on the table next to her sleeping husband. All she could do was watch.

  “Janey!”

  “I’m here, girl,” Janey yelled back, swinging around, yanking her Baretta, turning…

  Too late. Reed shot her twice in the chest at a distance of ten feet. Lieutenant Janey Singer went down, and Reed came on another two steps and put the last one in her head.

  Then Reed swung the gun, and Ace Shuster took the bullets meant for her. That’s when Ace’s crazy brother Dale stepped in front of Reed and stabbed her with the syringe of ketamine. The last thing she saw, as the paralyzing anesthetic dragged her into the black, was the contempt in Joe’s cold eyes. And blood. Ace’s blood on her chest.

  Her eyes rolled up. Dread was mocked by the sinking euphoria in her veins. The thought that she’d never see her daughter again.

  The pain, loss, and guilt had taken a freaky rebound; twisted around and got caught in her head. She’d let her buddies down. Worst thing in the world for a soldier like Nina Pryce.

  No way s
he could have known…

  Didn’t matter. She was stuck on those three seconds. If she hadn’t left her weapon behind, Operation Northern Route would have ended in that barroom. Janey would be alive, and Ace and Holly—Colonel Holland Wood. There would have been no attack on the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant.

  He’d never seen her like this. Ever. Sure, he knew there was a downside to her job. He’d spent his time in special ops in the old days. He knew that killing people—or losing people—leaves a harsh sudden vacuum in the world. And sometimes this could rush into it. But you never thought about it, and you never voiced it. Now. Jesus. He was numb, blindsided, like he’d lost his place. His voice shook, searching for reference.

  “Nina, hey kiddo…”

  “Fuck you, Broker. Leave me alone.”

  He studied the conflicted stranger who now occupied his wife’s body. Her taut face had lost its tone and aged ten years since breakfast, now just a clay mask of melancholy and fatigue. He could smell the rank sweat. More than fear; hopelessness, dread. Most of all he saw her shattered eyes, green splinters of pain jammed inward.

  She took the cigarette from her lips and dunked it in the coffee cup, in the process scattering ash across the black type that spelled ARMY on the front of her sweat suit. Then she got up from the table, walked past him, went through the living room and up the stairs. As the bedroom door slammed shut upstairs, Kit cautiously stepped through the kitchen door and dropped her backpack on the floor.