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  “Got a flat, some kind of puncture,” Broker said.

  The old guy jerked his pipe at a Dodge Ram dually up on the rack. “Can’t get to it till afternoon.” Then he jabbed the pipe at the wall. “Set it down there.”

  Broker left the tire and followed the guy into the small office, where the guy scrawled something unreadable on a numbered tagged, handed it to Broker.

  The guy studied him. “You’re the new guy out at the Hamre place Harry Griffin bought and fixed up.”

  “Yeah,” Broker said.

  “Uh-huh, that’s Harry’s truck I got up on the lift. Tell him I’m still waiting on the part,” the old guy said, continuing his inspection. “Be ready this afternoon.”

  Coming up on the school, Broker turned and eyed Kit in the back seat. “So you just sit up straight and say ‘Yes ma’am’ and we’ll get through this…okay?”

  She stared straight ahead as they pulled into the school parking lot. Like an echo of yesterday morning, the playground was filled with kids who, undeterred by the gloomy sky, romped in the snow.

  Broker half expected the garbage truck to be parked at the curb. Klumpe in the office, waiting for him. Be cool. Save it up. Don’t give him the satisfaction.

  No garbage truck and no brown Ford F-150. Okay. Doing his best to look humble, Broker ushered Kit into the school. They went in the office and sat in two of the three chairs that faced the receptionist’s counter.

  They were five minutes early for the meeting. No sign of the other family. The receptionist nodded, noting their arrival, got up from her chair, knocked on the principal’s office, stuck in her head, said something, then returned to her chair.

  Broker watched Kit, who had fixed her eyes on the second hand sweeping around the clock on the wall. When the minute hand nudged onto the 12, Mrs. Helseth emerged from her office and summoned them with an open hand, not unkindly: “Mr. Broker, Kit.”

  They entered the office and took the chairs in front of the desk. Kit sat up straight and stared at the principal. Broker was satisfied that her face was alert and not defiant.

  The principal stood behind her desk for twenty seconds, silently observing. Then she said, “Kit, have you had time to think about what happened yesterday?”

  “Yes, ma’am. If I get picked on again, I should use words. And, ah, no hitting.”

  “Good. And that’s not a bad idea even if you don’t get picked on.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Kit said.

  “Fine. Now we’re going to make two changes, one temporary, one permanent. For the rest of the week you’ll be staying in during recess. And you’ll be moved to a new home base so you and Teddy are in different classes.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s all, Kit. You can go into the office, and Ms. Hatch will help you get settled in. Your dad and I are going to talk a little more.”

  Kit looked at Broker, who nodded. She stood up, shouldered her book bag. Helseth walked her into the office, conferred with the receptionist briefly, then came back in and closed the door. This time she sat down in the chair next to Broker, the one Kit had been in.

  “We’ll forgo the usual mediation process in this case, after the scene between Jimmy Klumpe and yourself,” she said, staring down at the floor. “Frankly, I don’t think it would make any progress. We’ll take some extra precautions to minimize flash points between Teddy and Kit.” She inhaled and said, “It’s probably better to find an informal way to smooth things down outside the school. Between the families.” She raised her eyes and looked directly at Broker to see if he got the point.

  “I’m not sure…”

  “Keith, Sheriff Nygard, he’s good at this sort of thing. Maybe you should talk to him.”

  “Mrs. Helseth, I’m missing some information here. What’s so special about this case?” Broker said directly.

  “Talk to Keith. That’s my best advice.”

  “Okay, I’ll sure think about it.” Then Broker thanked Trudi Helseth, shook her hand, and left the office. In the hall he encountered Susan Hatch standing by the front door. She was wearing her coat.

  “Kit’s settled in to her new home base. I’ll keep an eye on her,” Susan said.

  “Thanks,” Broker said. She didn’t leave, just stood waiting, so he held the door open for her. They stepped out into the cold. She turned up her collar, cocked her head to the side, and asked, “How did the readmission conference go?”

  “Not what I expected. Is this what you call a special-needs situation?”

  Susan pursed her lips. “Let’s walk.”

  They walked around the side of the building down the shoveled walk and stopped by the Dumpsters, big brown bins with the white cursive type; “Klumpe Sanitation” coming at Broker like another poke in the eye. An aroma of fried food drifted from the school cafeteria and hovered over the more gamy smell above the bins.

  Susan turned, squinted seriously, and said, “I saw you and Jimmy Klumpe yesterday, out front.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t know who you are or where you’ve been, but I’d be real careful rubbing up against our local soap opera if I were you. I’d watch out for Jimmy Klumpe—he’s capable of doing something really dumb.”

  “He already has,” Broker said softly.

  “There you are. You’re in Minnesota Appalachia, Mr. Broker; these people are into clan feuds like the Hatfields and McCoys, except here it’s Bodines and Klumpes. You can go from two kids in a fistfight to the emergency room real fast. And this town hasn’t got an emergency room.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “People talk. They decided you’re a question mark. Like, nobody has seen your wife. Kit is an island. People say you don’t fit.”

  “I just got here.”

  “Yeah? Talk to Harry Griffin about that.”

  Broker raised his eyebrows. “You know Harry?”

  Susan rolled her eyes. “Gets so a single woman will do just about anything up here for some decent conversation. Yes, I know Detroit Harry.” She lowered her eyes and raised them in a certain way.

  The bold remark, along with her knowing and saying Griffin’s street name, created instant intimacy. Broker looked her up and down and couldn’t help grinning, “And?”

  “Harry’s been up here ten years, and people say he doesn’t fit either.”

  Now it was Broker who narrowed his eyes.

  Susan shrugged, “Look, you’re up north. The men up here are prone to drinking too much and fighting.” She smiled painfully. “I know you didn’t ask, but here’s my two cents anyway—you and Harry are getting too old to fight. You just don’t know it yet.” Susan blew on her bare hands and plunged them into her coat pockets. “Tell Harry to be careful. You too.”

  Susan Hatch walked back toward the school’s front door and left Broker standing by the Dumpster, inhaling the greasy odor wafting out from the lunch-room grill through the exhaust fan.

  The smell reminded him he had one more stop to make.

  Klumpe Sanitation housed its trucks and maintained an office in a big Morton building behind a cyclone fence on a lot a mile west of town. The gate was open. Driving up, Broker saw no trucks, no lights in the office windows that straddled one corner of the garage. No sign of anyone, in fact.

  Slightly disappointed that he didn’t have an audience, he pulled into the parking apron, then backed up until his tailgate was almost flush with the office door. He got out, climbed into the truck bed, lifted the heavy bin, and upended it, dumping the trash dead center on the welcome mat.

  Chapter Seventeen

  At 11:00 A.M. Gator paced on the front porch in his Carhartt parka, hunched against the drizzly mist, sipping a fresh cup of coffee. He was a few drags into a new Camel when he saw the gray Pontiac GT’s low beams poke through the gloom, sweep across the Fordster on display next to his sign, and swerve into the drive.

  Sheryl.

  Just like she was supposed to, she drove the car into the open sliding door
on the lower level of the barn, so it was out of sight. The locals, stir-crazy with cabin fever, noticed a new car in the neighborhood. Would drive clear into town and tell everybody at Lyme’s Café, “Hey, I seen this strange Pontiac going out Twelve, near the big woods…”

  Sheryl came out and struggled, hauling the wide wooden door shut. She turned toward the house.

  Sheryl Marie Mott.

  They had met in the visitors’ room at Stillwater. He’d agreed to make a pickup for Danny T.’s organization, to pay his tax to stay in population. So they put her on his list. She walked up to the table in the visitors’ room like some improved hippie dream in a beige pantsuit. Leaned over the table and planted this open-mouth kissed on him, expertly ramming a tiny balloon full of cocaine down his throat with her tongue. Then she patted his cheek and whispered, “Hey, you’re kinda cute; now swallow, don’t spit.”

  One look, and he knew he had to see her again. Kinda cracked her up when he asked for her phone number, like it was a blind date.

  Gator had read this story in the joint, and he figured her secret was like in the story; some Dorian Gray deal with the devil that enabled her to keep all the debauchery of her life compacted inside so she looked so damn good on the outside. Couldn’t even begin to guess her age. Older than him.

  Sheryl had deep indigo eyes, flared cheeks, and long black hair down past her shoulders; the kind of dusky looker who coulda played a blue-eyed Indian princess in 1950s Hollywood, alongside Sal Mineo.

  An East Side St. Paul street kid, somewhere around seventeen years old she’d discovered she liked really bad white guys who rode fat-boy Harleys even more than real bad black guys.

  Biker chick. Rode with the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang, the OMG.

  Central to the hard-core OMG ethos was the injunction, You must know the difference between good and evil and choose the evil. She traded in her patched jeans and tie-dye for greasy leather and denim. She’d done it in the dirt, pulling the shaggy biker trains at bonfires in the woods with the predatory relish of an MBA trying to make the cut on Donald Trump’s Apprentice. In two years flat she went from anybody’s groupie to briefly becoming a fixture on the back of Danny Turrie’s chopper.

  Always thinking. Mind-Fuck Mott. The story was, she’d moved Danny out of weed, and almost convinced him to sidestep the urban crack drama with its well-armed gangbangers. Got him into the suburbs, into coke. Then Danny shot those two North Side jigs and went away forever. Gang bangs were one thing; gangbangers and real bullets were another.

  Sheryl split the cities, moved to Seattle during the great meth awakening, and shacked up with a guy who owned a perfume company. She took some chemistry course at a community college, learned her way around chemicals, dabbled in designer drugs, learned to cook meth, and socked her money into a lot on the beach in Belize.

  Then her Seattle boyfriend had a weak moment and couldn’t resist buying List I chemicals in bulk from a firm going out of business. Except the firm was a DEA cover operation, and Sheryl beat the battering ram coming through the door by half an hour. With just the money in her purse and a credit card, she took a cab to the airport and arrived back in Minnesota with thirty-four bucks.

  When Gator met Sheryl she was marginally connected, but out of the loop. Burned, paranoid; she cooked a few batches of meth for the OMG, didn’t like the flaky level of the operation, and wound up muling dope into Stillwater Prison to help make her car payments.

  Gator heard the stories about her in the joint. When he got out, living in a halfway house, taking a tractor mechanics course at Dunwoody Institute that he could have taught better than the pencil-neck instructor, he asked her out for coffee.

  He had this idea, see, that he’d been refining for a year behind bars…

  Waiting tables, barely paying the freight on her apartment and the GT, Sheryl was ready. They started out in a Starbucks and conducted the second round in her bed, where his performance had lagged considerably.

  This was before she understood Gator never really could get it going in a bed.

  Gator grinned. Sheryl in high-heeled boots taking little bird steps through a foot of soggy snow. The biker-girl duds were long gone. Now she was more into business casual—designer jeans, the Donna Karan sweater picked up at Goodwill, the fancy hip-length leather car coat, a joke in this weather.

  “What the hell is this?” she protested, kicking the snow off her footwear, coming up the steps. “It’s the end of March.”

  “Your memory is impaired by global warming. This is old Minnesota normal. How you doing, Sheryl?”

  She walked up to him, shrugged her shoulders, and went up on tiptoe. “Here I am. What’s so urgent?”

  He shied away from her upturned face. “Not yet.”

  She furrowed her brow, studied him. “Aw shit, aren’t we done with that routine yet?”

  “Let’s go inside,” Gator said firmly.

  Sheryl followed him, shaking her head. “I forgot, isolated up here you didn’t get the word how when the apes climbed down from the trees they invented these things called beds…”

  Gator ignored her, knowing how much she really dug the weirdness of it. He walked through the kitchen, down the hall into the bathroom, and turned on the shower.

  “Aw, jeez, what you got better be good.” She grimaced. “I was up at six, been on the road for almost five hours driving straight drinking coffee. Man, first thing, I gotta pee.” She wiggled out of her coat, unzipped the boots and kicked them off, and headed for the bathroom. When she returned, she drew herself up, knit her brows, and pointed a finger. “No gas, understood.”

  Gator nodded. “Agreed. No gas.”

  “Good. I can do weird. I draw the line at fucking crazy.”

  “C’mon, humor me,” Gator chided, his voice wide, stuck in his throat. Maneuvering her back into the bathroom.

  “Been missing it, huh?” She slithered out of the sweater, elbows out, hands back in that contortionist trick chicks do, unclipping her bra. Then she peeled off the jeans and panties. “I don’t suppose you got a shower cap?”

  Gator didn’t hear. He was staring at her. Sheryl and her tattoo. Not like the twisty flowery bullshit the girls these days get, curled around their waists and back. Uh-uh. This was from the old days when tats were the exclusive domain of crooks and GIs. This pair of red Harley wings spread out two inches below her navel. Hip to hip. Framed just so in her bikini bottom tan marks. Gator didn’t trust his voice. He pointed at the shower.

  “Okay, okay.” She reached her hand past the curtain and tested the water, adjusted the handle, and stepped into the tub.

  Gator let it build for about a minute, then threw back the curtain. She stood face to the nozzle, drawing her hands through the dark glistening stream of hair. He reached out and clamped his hand on her wrist, pulled her.

  “Hey.” She stumbled over the side of the tub, banging her shin. She collided into him, slick, shadowed, her ribs tiger-streaked with tan fading from the beach in Belize. He spun her and forced her forward over the sink, his left hand straight-arming her, pressing on her neck. His right hand fumbled with the buttons of his jeans.

  She always resisted, at first; like now, rearing at his rough grip on her neck, swinging her head around, dark eyes flashing, the long wet hair swinging round like black whips. “Christ’s sake, Gator; can’t we work this out a little?”

  “Shut up, face forward. Stand.”

  Pouting, she turned back to the sink and muttered, “Too damn old to get fucked flatfooted…” Then she broke out of her brooding stance, hips warming up in a slow canter. “…then again, maybe I’m not…”

  “Shush,” he said hoarsely.

  “There…you…go…”

  He finally got his angles working and hit the rhythm. Unsteady on his feet now, jeans around his knees, he leaned forward, forcing her head down with both hands so all he saw in the mirror was the top of her dark hair and the water beaded up glistening on her back, jiggling where her smooth ass…

>   Oh, yeah.

  Shower running, little chain hanging down from the lightbulb got to dancing as she grabbed the sides of the sink with both hands to brace against the thrust of his hips.

  “Ain’t you slippery.” He groaned.

  He watched the muscles in her arms and back tense, corded, popping sweat; her voice a throaty chant: “One a…these days…gonna…tear…this sink clear outa THE WALL!!!”

  When her cherries lined up, she just paid and paid—ca-ching-ca-ching—the coin coming in a hard hot rush handled endlessly, loaded by the sackful…

  Gator just holding on now; ears plugged with blood, other parts of him getting away, runny with his sweat, her sweat. Panting, staggering back, he watched the cannibal gene seep down the inner curve of her thigh. Only way it worked for him. Worked really good. Here in this damn moldy room with the floor joists rotting out under the crummy linoleum. Sheryl, thinking he had potential, patiently went along. All year they’d been starting like this, here in the bathroom.

  Breathing not quite returned to normal, Sheryl rolled to the side and sat heavily on the toilet seat; hair tangled, arms down straight between her knees like a spent runner.

  “So much for foreplay,” she said, getting her breath.

  Gator grinned, wiping off, doing up his jeans.

  The real sex happened out in the shop, where everything was clean and in its place.

  Where they talked about the plan. And where he would reveal his find.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Broker drove back home, parked the truck, climbed up into the bed, and kicked the garbage bin off his tailgate. Standing there in the sour wind, he gauged the anger pulsing in his throat, hot in his chest.

  Usually his anger was fast surface burn, like spit hissing on a griddle. This was inside, and he couldn’t get it out. It just kept circuiting on this loop. His eyes traveled back into the woods, where he’d left Kit’s toy stuck on the pole. Sagging, he got down, closed the tailgate, and straightened up the bin, positioning it where it belonged.