Homefront Read online

  “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 picnic 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.”

  Too weary to argue, she nodded; then she got up and went into the porch and tried to talk to Kit. Broker watched Nina through the windows, saw her struggle in silent pantomime, head downcast; saw Kit embrace her mother, face upturned, nodding encouragement. Christ. It was almost like they were switching roles.

  He took a deep breath, still having difficulty seeing Nina as…fragile. But she was right. She had to beat this thing with a minimum of interference.

  Still…

  He’d been around cops for over twenty years and watched as some of them peeled off and started to descend into themselves, drifting down this dark internal staircase. Usually it was the dead little kids—butchered, starved, abused—they encountered on the job that put them over the line. The main cop taboo was to show weakness, so they medicated with alcohol and hung tough till the pension kicked in. But once in a while a guy would find the dead kid he was trying to forget waiting in the basement at the bottom of those dark stairs, and he’d eat h
is gun.

  Broker resolved to position himself on those stairs for her. Whatever it took.

  On this one, he had to reach way back, to someone he’d known before he entered police work, or the odd string of adventures that followed his early retirement from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension eight years ago. After he got involved with Nina Pryce.

  He flipped open his cell and called Harry Griffin, his old Vietnam buddy. He’d hunted with Griffin just last November…

  Way up in Glacier County.

  Chapter One

  It was another March surprise. Yesterday the kids were playing in long sleeves and tennis shoes. Then the storm moved in last night, riding on serious cold that knocked everyone’s weather clock for a loop. Now there was a foot of fresh snow on the ground. The air temperature stuck on 18 degrees Fahrenheit, but the windchill shivered it down to 11. School policy put the kids out in the snow if the thermometer topped zero. Ten-thirty in the morning at Glacier Elementary. Recess.

  The new kid was a snotty showoff, and it was really starting to bug Teddy Klumpe. Especially the way a lot of third-graders had gathered on the playground to watch her.

  Just like yesterday, when she was doing skips on the monkey bars. Not just swinging, flying almost. And everyone big-eyed, checking her out, like wow. See that? Three-bar skip. Except today it so was so cold—ha—that her gloves slipped on the icy bars and she dropped off, the heels of her boots skidded in the snow, and she fell on her skinny rear end. But then she got up and studied the stretch of steel bars over her head; studied them so hard these wrinkles scrunched up her forehead. Slowly, as her breath jetted in crisp white clouds, she removed her gloves.

  Boy, was that dumb. It was just too cold…

  But it didn’t stop her. She mounted the wooden platform and carefully placed her gloves on the snowy planks. She blew a couple times on her bare hands, took a stance, gauged the distance, bent her knees, swung her arms back, and sprung. Parka, snow pants, bulky boots. Didn’t matter. Smoothly, she caught the third bar out.

  Yuk. The thought of his bare skin touching that frozen steel made him wince. Along with the fact he was too heavy to propel himself hand over hand. But when she dropped back to the ground. Then he’d show her. Skinny, red-haired, freckle-faced little bitch.

  The Klumpe kid was almost nine. Naturally powerful for his age, he packed an extra ten pounds of junk-food blubber in a sumo-like tire around his gut and his wide PlayStation 2 butt. Biggest kid in the third grade. Most feared kid. Knew the most swear words. King of the playground.

  Screw her.

  Teddy scouted the immediate area.

  Mrs. Etherby, the nearest recess monitor, was watching the kids sliding down the hill on plastic sleds. The other monitor was on the far side of the playground, where some fourth-graders were building a snow fort.

  Ten of Teddy’s classmates were standing over by the slide next to the monkey bars, making a winter rainbow of fleece red caps and blue and yellow Land’s End parkas against the oatmeal sky. All of them curiously watching Teddy and the new kid. They should be watching him take his snowboard down the hill. And repairing the bump jump when he smashed it apart. Instead, they were watching to see what he would do.

  The new kid swung from the last bar, landed lightly on her feet on the far wooden platform, and blew on her chapped hands. Teddy eyed the gloves she’d left on the opposite end. As she leaped up and grabbed the bars for the return trip, Teddy walked over casually, snatched up her gloves, and stuffed them in his jacket pocket.

  “Hey!” the kid yelled, swinging hand over hand.

  Teddy ignored her and kept walking, around the back of a small equipment shed near the tire swings.

  “Hey,” she said again, dropping to the snow and trotting after him. “Those are my gloves.” Her breath made an energetic white puff in the air. Two brooding vertical creases started between her eyebrows and shot up her broad forehead.

  Teddy angled his face away from her but let his eyes roll to the edge of his sockets. Kinda like his dad did when he was getting ready to get really mad. He took a few more steps, drawing her farther behind the shed, out of sight from eyes on the playground. Then he spun.

  “Liar,” he said.

  She balled her cold hands at her sides and narrowed her green eyes. The creases deeper now, pulling her face tight. “Thief,” she said in a trembling voice.

  Teddy saw the tension rattle on her face, turning it red. He heard the tremor in her voice. Little bitch is scared. Encouraged, he surged forward and pushed her chest hard with both hands. She went down on her butt in the snow. Then he yanked her gloves from his pocket and tossed them up on the roof of the shed, where they stayed put in a foot of snow.

  “Yuk,” Teddy wiped his own gloves on the front of his jacket. “Now I got girl cooties all over me.”

  She was starting to get up, working to hold back tears.

  “Now you’re gonna cry. More girl cooties,” Teddy said with a grin.

  “No, I ain’t,” she said in a trembling voice as she drew hard, pulling the tears back inside her eyes. She pushed up off the snow.

  “Crybaby girl cooties,” Teddy taunted, and he rammed her with his shoulder and hip. Ha. Hockey check. She went down again.

  “Leave me alone,” she said in the shaky voice. “I mean it, that’s two.” This time she was up faster, bouncing kinda…

  Two? Teddy laughed and shoved her again. “Loser,” he taunted. It was one of his dad’s favorite words. Then he blinked, surprised because this time she surged against him, kinda strong for a girl, and kept her footing. Doing this dance thing on the balls of her feet.

  “That’s three,” she said, still moving away from him but her small fists swinging up; tight, compact miniature hammers. Red with cold.

  “Oh, yeah?” Teddy sneered, opening his arms, palms out, elbows cocked to shove her again. As he charged forward, he realized she wasn’t moving away anymore.

  Thirty yards away, Mrs. Etherby started when she read trouble in the blur of red and green jackets that lurched around the side of the shed. Uh-huh. Definitely trouble. She’d need some help. The big kid in the green was Teddy Klumpe. She whipped off her glove better to thumb the transmit button on her playground walkie-talkie.

  Then she hesitated and lost her breath…

  Jesus. The smaller kid—the new girl, hat knocked off, red ponytail streaming—planted her feet and whipped her whole upper body around behind a rigid right-hand punch that landed smack on Teddy’s onrushing nose.

  Fat droplets of bright poppy red blood splashed the snow. More red dribbled down Teddy’s chin as he dropped back on his rear end. Aghast, he began to sob.

  Running forward, breathless, Etherby got her call off to the office receptionist:

  “Madge, you’re not gonna believe this.”

  Chapter Two

  When Broker leaned down, the material of his tan work jacket tightened across his shoulders, stretching the pyramid logo and the type, “Griffin’s Stoneworks,” on his back. The jacket Griffin had loaned him was a touch small. He wrestled a heavy oak round up on the chopping block next to the woodshed in back of the garage and grinned; never thought he’d be chopping firewood at the end of March again. He’d been splitting oak since they’d moved into Harry Griffin’s lake rental. The hardwood didn’t grow up here, pretty much it petered out in the middle of the state. Griffin imported the oak by the truckload to heat sand and water so he could mix mortar for winter work on his stone crew.

  If anybody asked, Griffin would say the new guy in town was working on his crew. Mostly Broker stayed home and split wood for exercise. Stayed close to Nina. Going on three months.

  But the geographic cure was working. She was slowly climbing out of the black pit. So he picked up the twenty-pound monster maul, hefted it, getting his stance, swung it up using his legs, hips, and shoulders to transfer the weight in a powerful arc over his head. Then he brought it down. The wood parted with a clean snap that echoed into
the surrounding trees, out across Glacier Lake.

  He put down the maul and yanked another hunk of oak from the pile next to the chopping block. Seventy degrees yesterday down in the cities. Fifty-five degrees up here. Then in midmorning the temperature nosedived, and he noticed the nuthatches and chickadees mob the bird feeder in a feeding frenzy…

  Sensing the onrushing storm.

  Now, a day later, Broker picked up the maul and raised his eyes to the clouds still coming in rolling gray ranks from the northwest. The clipper had roused out of the Yukon, roared across Canada, and dumped fourteen inches of snow on Glacier County just after lunch yesterday. Almost as if the Canadians were sending a cold wish of censure across the border.

  On the day Dubya rolled the tanks into Iraq.

  As he bent to lift the heavy round, he heard a low, shivering moan. He paused and listened carefully. Okay. Got it. Wolves. An acoustic bounce, rippling in their baying on the wind from the big woods up north. He was sizing up the knot in the wood on the block when Nina came out on the back deck and held out the cordless phone. “Can you take this?” she said.

  He looked at his wife, leaned the splitting maul next to the chopping block, removed his gloves, and walked to the porch steps, raising his thick eyebrows and heaving his shoulders in a questioning gesture. Then she grimaced and darted her eyes north, sensing more than hearing the wild sigh on the wind. She narrowed her eyes. “Is that…?”

  “Yeah. The pack up in the big woods, sounds like they’re active in daylight. It’s the new snow freezing last night. Crust on top makes it hard for the deer to run,” Broker said, matter-of-factly.

  “Cool. Now we have wolves day and night,” she said, staring into the distance, listening to the faint rise and fall of the eerie baying. Then she recovered and thrust the phone at him. “Something happened at school.” Still no help, doing a quick handoff.