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  ( Phil Broker - 6 )

  Chuck Logan

  Chuck Logan

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  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.

  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 she 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.

  “What’s wrong with Mom?”

  “She’s just tired, honey; her arm is hurting her.”

  Kit arched up on tiptoe, absorbing the tuning-fork tension still vibrating in the smoky air. She arched up more when she spied the pistol on the counter and the loaded magazine on the table. She measured the distance between the forced calm of her dad’s words and the hard, controlled look in his eyes, the way his body had changed. Then she regarded him with a wary cynicism no eight-year-old should have. She knew what it meant when her mom or dad adopted this physical tone. Stuff happened fast. Bad stuff. They sent her to stay with Grandpa and Grandma.

  Seeing her rising alarm, Broker put his hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right…”

  Kit shook off his arm and fought a rush of tears, forced them back down, and shouted at him. “You said it was going to be normal. It was going to be Christmas. You lied. People are gonna die and go to hell!”

  She ran from the kitchen. Broker let her go as reflex kicked in. Deal with it. He snapped the trigger lock back on the.45, removed the key, and jammed it in his pocket. Up the stairs, past the two tightly shut bedroom doors, into the den closet, back down again with the other guns in the house. Out the back door. He was loading the guns in the heavy diamond-plate toolbox in the back of his truck-to which he had the only key-when he saw Dooley come out of his apartment doorway.

  Seeing the guns going in the lockbox, Dooley walked over, leaned against his rusty Civic, checked Broker with his quiet brown yardbird eyes, and asked, “This something I should know about?”

  “Nah. Housecleaning,” Broker said evenly as he snapped the lock on the toolbox. Too calm. Hurricane-eye calm. Standing dead still, his insides struggled for balance. A palpable sensation churned in his chest that his life had uprooted and was starting to rotate around him.

  “Uh-huh,” Dooley said.

  Still smarting from Kit’s outburst, Broker stared at his tenant, standing there next to the Civic with the weathered Bush/Cheney sticker on the rear bumper. Dooley, a felon, couldn’t vote, but he flew the sticker to keep bleak faith with the Christian Man in the White House.

  “One thing,” Broker said. “Go easy on the religion stuff with Kit, okay? You got her spooked about people dying and going to hell.”

  Dooley shrugged. “We were raking leaves last month. She’s a smart kid, she asks questions.”

  “Whatever,” Broker said. “Look, Dooley, do me a favor.”

  “Sure, what?”

  Broker pulled two twenties from his jeans. “Go up to Len’s and get me some cigars, those Backwoods Sweets.”

  “Light brown pack. Uh-huh. How many?” Dooley looked at Broker and then at the Toyota, as if to say, You forget how to drive, or what?

  “All they got.”

  Back inside, he scanned the kitchen calender scrawled with holiday commitments. He picked up the phone and canceled their dinner plans with his ex-partner, J. T. Merryweather, and his wife. He ordered pizza and paced the backyard, smoking one of the cigars Dooley had fetched for him. He checked on Nina, sleeping upstairs. More pacing and smoking, aware that Kit was watching him from the back porch. When the pizza arrived, he set Kit up in front of the VCR. In the middle of her second Harry Potter, she fell asleep. He carried her upstairs and put her to bed.

  Not wanting to disturb his wife’s sleep, he spent the night on the floor at the foot of the bed, awake half the time, listening to her troubled breathing.

  The next morning Nina was still in bed. Broker sat down with his daughter at the kitchen table. One of Kit’s favorite expressions, which she’d learned from her parents, was, “Say what you mean.” Broker was direct.

  “This is just between us. Mom might be a little sick, she might need a lot of rest,” Broker said.

  Kit stared at him; the sickest she had ever been was a couple colds and an ear infection.

  “We might have to make some changes,” Broker said. “If anybody asks, just say Mom isn’t feeling well. Understand?”

  Kit nodded obediently. She had spent the last two years living on the fringe of the special operations community in Italy. Usually it was the dads who went away; the moms and kids did not talk about it to outsiders.

  Christmas came and went, a wreckage of canceled play dates and parties. No one visited. The kids down the street Kit played with were not invited into the house. The new skis leaned in a corner, barely unwrapped. Without water, decorated halfheartedly by Broker and Kit, the magnificent tree dropped needles and shriveled to brown tinder. Nina stopped running in the morning, quit her exercises. She ate and talked little. Mainly she slept.

  Broker hovered. He monitored the pills in the bathroom cabinet and the knives in the kitchen. Finally, Nina surfaced through the oceans of exhaustion long enough to tug his arm and say, “We gotta talk.”

  They sat down on a chilly gray overcast afternoon bundled in fleece and parkas at the pi
cnic table in the backyard, overlooking the color-drained St. Croix River valley. Kit stood motionless, hugging herself on the back porch. Watching them through the windows.

  They made up their minds in less time than it takes to play a game of checkers. Broker did most of the talking. Nina, in the grip of the thing that had captured her, refused to speak its name.

  “You trust me on this?” Broker asked. She nodded and continued to nod as he frankly ticked off the signs. They both had been brushing up on the relevant chapters in the DSM-IV. She had lost interest or pleasure in nearly all activities. He saw insomnia, decreased energy, and fatigue, along with a diminished ability to think or concentrate, irritability, and guilty preoccupations with past failings. And she’d basically ignored her daughter and her husband. He finished up by saying, “We gotta get you away from-”

  She nodded again and said, “People.”

  “What about the doc at Bragg you check in with?” he asked.

  Nina shook her head vehemently. “Not a word about…this thing. He knows how serious the shoulder is. Time’s not a factor. I’m not exactly under discipline anymore, am I? I’m technically a ‘contractor.’” She managed a bitter twitch of a smile.

  “Okay, so we agree,” he said.

  “We agree. No doctors, no drugs, no hospital,” Nina said flatly. “If anything goes on the record, I’ll never work on the teams again. I’ll do this on my own.”

  Broker understood. He had once dated an FBI shrink, a profiler. She had diagnosed him as a fugitive from modern psychology whose emotional development had been arrested when he read Treasure Island at age eleven. But he recalled her observation that an otherwise healthy person could tough their way through severe depression, given enough time and seclusion.

  “We should send Kit to stay with your folks. It’ll be hard on her to lose dance class, swimming. At least with them she can keep up with piano,” Nina said, grimacing.

  “No.” Broker was adamant. “She’ll handle it. We’ll all three go away. Up north. Someplace safe where no one knows us. It’s better if we work through it together.”