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  He had to believe that.

  Half an hour later he came up on the crossroads and took the turn on Z, turned off his lights again, and coasted up to the empty farmhouse. This time he got out and walked close enough to hear rap music banging on the faint breeze. Lights swirling in the windows. Must have a battery CD player. Little rave going in there; good, keep it up. He turned and walked back to his truck. One of these days, he’d be back.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Broker started in the garage. No tiny paw prints led from the garage back door; a dusting of new snow where Kit had shoveled was unmarked. Then he got lucky. Kit had not been super-conscientious about her cleaning along the edge of the deck. He set down the bowl of cat food and studied the pattern of imprints filled in with fresh snow, spaced like footsteps next to the rail.

  Way to go, Kit. Okay.

  Broker exhaled, went down a level.

  Someone had been here, had slipped over the rail.

  It took a few minutes peering over the flashlight, but Broker saw enough to get a gut check on how the night visitor had entered and exited the yard. Came in serpentine, stepping in existing tracks. No new cleat marks, only the pattern of Kit’s Sorels and Broker’s Eccos along with the prints of their ski boots. But even filling in with fresh snow, Broker could see that those prints were mashed out where the intruder had stepped, widened.

  Like the newer tracks off the deck.

  Uh-huh. So you tied cloth on your boots to mask your tracks.

  It took another ten minutes to follow the tracks through the edge of the woods. They led to the connecting path to the state ski trail. Where they vanished.

  More stooping, more studying impressions in the snow. The path appeared undisturbed since their afternoon ski run. Just the wide-angled splay of Kit’s skis next to Broker’s parallel tracks.

  But the parallel tracks were cleaner, the snow firmed by pressure.

  Broker thought back to all the skiers on the trail this afternoon. Okay, so you’re smart. You came in on skis, stayed in the tracks I made earlier today. Stepped out of the bindings, slipped some kind of wrap on his boots. Went in, came out, took off the wrap, and stepped back into the skis. Turned the skis around without disturbing the tracks. Not some casual vandal. You put effort and planning into this.

  He straightened up, turned off the flashlight, and shook out his senses. He smelled the faint camphor of pine and frozen resin. Felt the invisible wall of cold up close. Almost silent now. Just the wind shifting through the pine needles; here and there dry dead branches rattled. Hazy moonlight sifted down through the tall old red and white pines and traced northern European shadows on the snow, bent and twisted together like stained-glass patterns. Could see where the Gothic cathedrals got their start, in among trees like this.

  The trail beckoned, a curving band of open white.

  At home in the woods, aren’t you. Confident.

  Broker had made a life of high-wire work, shifting his balancing act between caution and impulse. Going with his gut. With mood. At the moment he was still mainly curious; so he walked slowly up the trail.

  Each step brought him closer to a bad feeling, so he instinctively tempered his curiosity with caution. Somebody this tricky could still be out here. He slipped off the trail into the trees. Focused now, ignoring the raw cold.

  Took three slow, silent steps, stopped, and listened. Then repeated the pattern. An Australian sergeant had taught the still-hunting routine to Broker and Griffin at the MACV-SOG Recondo school in Da Nang. “Takes forever,” a young Broker had protested.

  The Aussie had cut them with the bemused utter contempt he reserved for regular American troops. “The object, mate, is to get to the other side of the fuckin’ woods alive.”

  Broker had come home alive and trusted the method. It took him ten minutes to cover the two hundred yards to the end of Griffin’s land. He came to the yellow No Hunting sign posted on the property line where the connecting trail T-boned into the broader ski trail.

  He stopped dead still, his alertness total and jagged, like a snapped tuning fork. Faint but definite, he heard a tinkle on the wind. Broker stood unmoving. There it was again.

  He experienced a flush of almost preadolescent excitement. He could picture the smile on Kit’s face. When Daddy found the kitty.

  Okay. Don’t blow it. Gotta spot her.

  Slowly, straining his eyes in the haze of moonlight, he scrutinized the surrounding trees, stopping at the center of the T formed by the trail intersection.

  This slender vertical shadow.

  Out of place. Stark against the snow. A dark lump at the top.

  Now impulse rushed to the surface, but he reined in the dark intuition that propelled him forward. It was Broker’s nature to go quiet now, to keep his anger cold and controlled, to save it up. He stepped from the cover of the trees.

  So this is how it is.

  He removed his glove and reached out his right hand. Old Bun leaking stuffing. Impaled on one of Kit’s ski poles, the handle driven deep into the snow.

  Tenderly he patted the stuffed animal, then froze again when the movement caused Ditech’s collar, carefully buckled around the bunny’s neck, to jingle.

  His experience dictated that he back off a space, take inventory. He was a little awed at the bile that rose in his throat. He’d stalked and collared men for the state of Minnesota. And he’d killed enemy soldiers in combat—that was a certain type of work.

  He’d descended to the bottom of the adrenaline fear tank and made all the stations coming up. Never felt quite like this…

  Klumpe. Coming at my kid.

  So this was hatred. Nothing clean about it. Just visceral dirty rage. A hunk of rotten meat stuck in his throat.

  At my kid.

  Training and experience fell away. Fucker had been in the house, had taken Kit’s stuffed animal from her bed. He backtracked through the day. When we were on the ski trail. Could have been in the house when Nina was asleep. When I left the cat in the garage. He could have been there, hiding. Snatched her, went over the deck rail…

  Ambush alert now, he half crouched, shotgun at port arms, and listened carefully.

  Slowly he rotated his head and scanned the surrounding darkness. Listened again. Nothing but the soft wind rubbing the dry branches together, the heave and murmur of the pines. After another ten minutes of listening, he decided he was out here all alone. He removed a tinfoil pouch of cigars from his pocket, selected one of the rough wraps, took out his lighter, and lit the cigar. Then he squatted, Vietnamese peasant fashion, by the side of the trail, smoked, and thought about it as it began to snow again.

  Jimmy Klumpe’s face, this morning in the cab of the garbage truck, on the sidewalk in front of the school yesterday morning—his nutty wife yelling from the truck. Striking back against him and Kit. Had to be.

  Broker shifted his weight, drew on the cigar, and studied the pole stuck carefully in the snow. At the exact intersection of two trails.

  Like a signal. A warning. Back off.

  Because my kid hit their kid…

  He flicked the coal from the cigar, shredded the rolled leaves, and tossed them aside. The snow sailed down like forgetfulness, blurring the edges of the tracks in the woods, filling them in. He took one more look at the vertical ski pole. Leave it undisturbed for now. Make sure Kit didn’t come here. He turned and started back to the house. Had to think this through. Maybe call Griffin. Bring him out to see this.

  But not tonight.

  Broker came around the garage and saw Nina sitting on the back steps before she saw him. He quickly rerouted around the garage, went in the front door, entered the kitchen, went into the living room, and tucked the shotgun in the couch cushions, out of sight. Then he retraced his steps back around the garage and approached her. It was a giant step, her coming outside at night. She was layered in fleece, boots, and a parka. Smoking. Holding a cup of coffee. She had removed the tangled braids from her hair.

  “I saw y
our light in the woods. Any luck?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “If the cat isn’t back by morning, then it doesn’t look good.” He nodded up toward the bedroom. “How’s she doing?”

  “Whatever else we did, we didn’t make a neurotic kid. Nothing gets between her and her sleep.” Nina shifted, making room for him on the deck cushion she was sitting on. He sat next to her. She produced a steaming thermal cup from her lap and passed it.

  The fresh hot coffee would keep him up. He only took a sip. He needed to sleep. See it fresh in the morning. He handed the cup back. Instinctively, they scooted closer together to keep warm. They watched the snow stream down. Every dizzy snowflake could have been a thought unsaid between them, building into a slow storm of unspoken words. She took out her American Spirits, cupped her hand, and thumbed her lighter. She inhaled, exhaled. He put his arm around her.

  The snow came faster, no longer serene. Like confusion.

  Finally Broker asked, “Where is it?”

  Nina looked up to him with calm eyes. “In the woods. It stays mainly in the woods now.”

  They’d evolved a code to simplify the overwrought discussion; back in December, they’d talked it to death, and all the talk had just worn them out. So they settled on it. The depression. Winston Churchill’s black dog.

  Progress. Two months ago, when he’d asked where it was, she’d answer, walking on live grenades, “In the house.”

  He tightened his arm around her shoulders, and stared into the woods where’d he’d just been. Once she’d had strong shoulders and they would be strong again. But right now they didn’t need the extra weight.

  Broker pulled his eyes away from everything that could be pacing back and forth in the woods tonight and said, “C’mon, let’s go inside.”

  She cocked her head, and he saw a flicker of her old smile; tough, smart, wry. “Nah, I’ll sit awhile, finish my smoke.”

  His forehead bunched in concern, but also a ray of hope. “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure. Take off.”

  He rose to his feet. “You’ll stay right here on the porch, right?”

  Nina shrugged, then turned back to her meditation on the woods. Going into the kitchen and shutting the door behind him, Broker glanced back, at her hunched hooded figure sitting alone on the deck.

  First time in three months she’d stayed outside the house alone at night.

  Nina Pryce tried to stare down the snow. It kept coming at her eyes, like pinwheeling hooks of panic. Pulling at her. Only a fragile connection with the solidity of the deck under her butt kept her from launching weightless into the swirling night.

  One step removed from the snare of deep space…

  She dragged on the Spirit, exhaled, and wished she’d taken a bullet on her last assignment, with Delta Team Northern Route. She’d come back from a bullet before. Instead she’d dropped her guard for a moment and had lost two buddies, the use of her right arm…

  And her mind.

  Now, after eight months of unrestricted sick leave, she faced the dark woods without illusions.

  When she was a little girl, she had sat on her grandfather’s lap and listened while he tried to explain living through the Great Depression. How he had once stood in an unemployment line in Chicago, rubbing his last two dirty copper pennies together in his pocket.

  I hear you, Grandpa.

  All the energy she could muster came from the friction of rubbing her last two pennies together. Broker and Kit. Last two pennies.

  Nina suffered alone, without God. She’d operated in some of the great shitholes of the world and came away an unambiguous Hobbesian; man was a devious tool-making animal who was kept in line mainly through fear of his own violent death.

  She had been part of a thin green line that made that fear palpable to Iraqis, Serbs, Filipino guerrillas, and Al Qaeda operatives.

  Even in the depths of clinical depression, her mind was practical. It was all about energy. As a serious athlete in her youth, she understood that competition was psychologically anchored, mind over matter. Her body had been the testing ground in which she learned to function through pain. In the Army she’d upped the ante and performed through fear and even dread. When it got rough, she’d always relied on an unmovable part of herself to brace on. She had always taken her mind for granted. She’d absolutely believed that her willpower would still be kicking an hour after she was dead.

  But then, a week before last Christmas, the source of her will, her mind itself, had failed. At the first sign of panic, she reached down deep to brace and fight back. To her immense surprise, the solid baseline gave way, and she catapulted off into an internal void. With nowhere to plant the fulcrum of her will, there was no way to direct her energy. She lost gravity. She lost up and down.

  Worst time of her life.

  Worse than the confused sandstorm fight in the dunes during Desert Storm, when she became the first woman in the history of the U.S. Army to be awarded the Combat Infantry Badge. Worse even than the death struggle with George Khari last July, when she wrecked her shoulder.

  Finally, she was feeling a little traction. Maybe it was finally getting out of her own head long enough to see Broker struggling alone, nursing her, trying to take care of Kit. Something.

  She’d earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and three Purple Hearts. And on this chilly evening she was making the scariest night jump of her life by merely sitting alone and facing the dark.

  She puffed on the cigarette. The soldier’s friend. As long as you had a smoke, you were never alone. Civilians pulled mere smoke into their lungs. Soldiers sucked in their fear. She clutched her cigarette, managed a tiny grin at how she’d wound up more of a fraidy-cat than she’d been as a five-year-old sitting on her grandpa’s knee.

  Christ. At five, I wasn’t afraid of the dark.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Four-thirty in the morning. Broker and Kit were sound asleep, Kit in her bed, Broker curled on the living room couch. The TV was silent. Nina had tightly shut the kitchen door and now sat, elbow on the kitchen table, arm wrestling with a fifteen-pound barbell. By the light of the solitary lamp next to the indestructible snake plant, she studied the weight in her right hand, removed the cigarette from her lips, put it in the ashtray on the table. Took a deep breath. Then, methodically, she raised the compact hunk of iron. At between fifteen and twenty degrees of arc, she made a face. Not quite pain, more frustration.

  Son of a bitch.

  The warning light popped on the fifth repetition. A huge drag of fatigue. Then she raised the weight over her head, and the shoulder failed between 80 and 120 degrees; the classic painful arc.

  She pictured the architecture of her rotator cuff; in her case, a train wreck where the coracoacromial ligament mashed into the acromion. The wear and tear of the life she’d lived had reduced the cushioning bursa to a blown-out tire. Useless.

  What the doctors called a type 2 impingement; irreversibly damaged tissue.

  She’d faked it for years out of denial, ignoring pain. She eeked out a few more years with concealed cortisone injections, gobbling anti-inflammatory drugs. On leave, when Kit was born, she’d slipped into a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota, for outpatient orthoscopic decompression surgery to trim back the ligament and bone. The tattoo on her shoulder concealed the scars, like it hid the cortisone needle marks. Didn’t even tell Broker. That bought a few more years.

  To prepare for her last Army PT test, she’d gone out on the street to score Oxycontin to blur the pain…

  Christ. If it binds like this at fifteen, how’ll I ever get to twenty-five…

  Head snapping around, alert.

  Something…

  A tremble at the corner of her eye. And a low moaning sound that she couldn’t place. Then, looking out the windows, she saw a faint wrinkle tug at the darkness. She dropped the weight, got to her feet, and switched off the single light. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the ragged black fr
inge of tree line across the lake sharpened and—moved? No. The motion was above the trees, in the sky.

  Squinting, she made out the tall pliant silver-green towers, an electric Stonehenge swaying in a tapestry of constellations.

  She was drawn to the eerie light. Anything that pushed back the darkness.

  She pulled on her jacket, opened the patio door, and stepped out on the back deck. The sheer visual power of the northern lights commanded her to tilt up her head, and she almost forgot herself as the icy wind sucked the heat from her lungs in a frosty plume.

  So cold she could feel the water snap. Little arrowheads of windowpane stuck in the crannies of the granite boulders along the shore.

  Then the wind, honed on a million pine needles, ripped open an acoustic tunnel in the night, and straight down that tunnel raced the baying of the wolves who owned that creepy forest up north. Eyes pinned on the sky, ears ringing with the howls, she had an impression of an utterly hostile beauty.

  In which she had no permanent place.

  Time and isolation for a cure. Up in Glacier County. Right as usual, Broker, honey.

  Wolves. The sky dripping icy midnight fire. The thrill of atavistic fear and dumb wonder almost spooked her out of the heavy inertia.

  She shivered.

  Christ, she wondered as she hugged herself. Which was colder, the thing that wouldn’t stop turning in her mind, or the frigid wind? But even the pull of the dancing sky lights and the howling wolves could not slow her own personal flickering images…

  …the pictures that played over and over in her head.

  So she darted back into the kitchen and turned on all the lights. Then the TV. Poured a cup of coffee and lit another Spirit.

  Broker had called it exactly. She was stuck in those three seconds, eight months ago. What Broker did not comprehend was that she was doing it to herself.

  Northern Route had been a pure seat-of-the-pants operation. A batch of misfits willing to go off the reservation. They’d exceeded their orders on an unsanctioned high-stakes gamble to stop what they thought was a tactical nuke coming into the country. Intel suggested that Al Qaeda was using an American smuggling operation to bring it in across the North Dakota border.