After the Rain Page 8

  No sun since Friday. Saturday it had started to rain in Minnesota. Saturday…He blinked sweat, refocused. Saturday, which was yesterday…

  Not now. Think of something else. He’d had heavy rain as he drove across Minnesota. It tapered off just past Grand Forks. He’d switched off the metronome slap of the wipers and opened the windows. Now he was sweating from more than the muggy air.

  Infection had set in in his left hand where the slug from the .38 had bit a chunk of meat from the heel of his palm. So Broker had been shot with an old-fashioned low-velocity full-metal-jacketed round. Through and through. Which was apt, because he tended to be an old-fashioned wood-and-steel kind of guy.

  Another scar.

  The bullet had missed the bones and ligaments and the big nerve. So the hand still worked. The wound had been treated at Lake View Emergency in Stillwater. Last night the bandage was crisp gauze and white adhesive. Now it was turning a wrinkled funky gray, coming loose, with a ragged cockade of stiff brown blood the size of a silver dollar in his palm. It throbbed like hell.

  Broker had been doing a favor for a friend.

  The friend was a sheriff. As it turned out, he knew too many sheriffs. And now he was on his way to meet another one.

  Back in Minnesota, he’d agreed to a temporary stint as a special deputy to the Washington County Sheriff. The favor had resulted in a struggle for a gun and him getting shot. Yesterday, just before noon.

  An hour before getting shot, at ten A.M. yesterday morning, Phil Broker had been sitting on the deck of Milt Dane’s river place sipping coffee. He had been house-sitting for Milt. Getting away to think. Rain clouds were rolling in to break a record heat wave.

  That’s when another sheriff called. This one was his neighbor, Tom Jeffords, up in Cook County, where Broker owned a small resort on the North Shore of Lake Superior.

  Jeff had been called by the Cavalier County Sheriff’s office, in Langdon, North Dakota. It seems that Karson Pryce Broker, Broker’s seven-year-old daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in four months, had popped up in a motel room in Langdon.

  Minus her mother.

  A woman named Jane had complained to the cops that Nina Pryce had abandoned the child. Then, before he could contact this Jane person, some real life had intervened and Broker got shot. So he called Jane from an emergency room. Vague on details, Jane said she’d stay with Kit until Broker showed up to claim her.

  Immediately, the red flags started popping up.

  Jane’s voice came across with a relentless high-voltage undercurrent, the kind of energy that thrived on fatigue and crisis. A voice with a trained meter and cadence that she couldn’t quite disguise.

  The last address Broker had for his estranged wife, Major Nina Pryce, U.S. Army—who had informal custody of their daughter—was in Lucca, Italy.

  Goddamn sonofabitch Nina! What could be so damn important that she dangled Kit out there like a loose end? It was time to confront the thing straight on.

  He hooked his injured hand in the wheel and used his good right hand to pry open his cell phone and thumb in the cell number for this Jane person.

  “This is Jane,” answered the efficient voice.

  “This is Broker. I have a fire mission. Can you copy. Over.”

  Silence on the connection. Then she said, “Very funny.”

  “Tell me one thing. Are you guys wearing uniforms?”

  Broker listened to Jane’s second loud silence. Then he said, “My guess is you’re not wearing uniforms. So who are you, Jane?”

  “I’m a friend of Nina’s.”

  “Uh-huh. So where’s Nina?”

  “Concerning that, ah, it’s better if you should talk to me first.”

  “Not the cops who came looking for me?”

  “I think it’d be best to talk to me first.” She was letting him fill in the blanks.

  “Where’s Kit?” Broker could guess. The connection was good. He heard kids laughing and the sound of bodies splashing in water.

  “She’s in the community pool here in town. You want to talk to her?”

  “Sure.”

  Broker counted to ten and then his daughter’s strong direct voice came on the connection. “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hiya, hon, whatcha doing?”

  “Auntie Jane is teaching me to dive.”

  “Great. How’s your mom?”

  “Ah…” There was a pause, in which Broker imagined Jane giving his daughter stage directions. “Ah, Mom’s working.”

  “Great, hon, I’ll be there in about an hour.”

  “Bye.”

  Jane came back on. “She’s good. We just got here, so we’ll hang for a while. She’s looking forward to seeing you. The pool’s in the park two blocks north of the highway. You can’t miss it.”

  “So, Jane. What’s up?”

  “See you soon, Broker. And like I said, come here first.”

  Like he’d just received an order.

  Right. Pissed, Broker immediately punched in the number for the Cavalier County Sheriff’s office, got dispatch, and left a message that he’d be there within the hour. The dispatcher informed him that Sheriff Norman Wales would be in his office and was looking forward to meeting him.

  Hmmmmmmm.

  A lazy herd of buffalo grazed behind an insubstantial barbed-wire fence. An unmarked but heavily fenced and abandoned-looking concrete structure bristled with antennae. The vast green rug of wheat. The endless clouds. Broker slumped behind the wheel.

  So this was what his rodeo marriage came down to.

  In the past, he and Nina had tried to work things out in a friendly manner. No lawyers involved. Ever since Kit had been born her father lived in Minnesota and her mother deployed all over the world. For the first four and a half years of her life she had stayed mostly with her dad.

  About the time Kit started kindergarten, the battle lines were drawn. Nina wanting Broker to migrate to Europe and play “officer’s spouse” to her career. Broker wanting the family under one roof in the States, which would require Nina to give up the Army.

  Standoff.

  In the interim, Kit wound up traveling back and forth.

  That arrangement was about to end.

  Broker had been around. He was a trained, competent man who could be utterly unsentimental in action. But all his experience failed when he pictured his marriage reduced to pieces of human machinery that had stopped working.

  They didn’t pack instructions on how to take a marriage apart.

  His saliva dried up, his tear ducts started, and the muscles curled inward in his belly. Painful work, breaking a marriage apart and packing it into two separate boxes. Tearing a seven-year-old in half…

  He pretty much knew what ripping a marriage in half sounded like. It sounded like Kit crying.

  But goddammit, it was lawyer time. His kid wasn’t going to be raised by strangers in Army day care all over Europe anymore.

  Or mysteriously pop up in North Dakota motel rooms.

  It was time for Nina to choose. She could be a mother or she could persist in her Joan of Arc soldier fantasy.

  She couldn’t do both.

  But…

  All the little hairs on the back of his neck had stayed at full alert since Jeff called. Because Nina wasn’t just your ordinary insanely driven, ambitious soldier gal clawing for recognition…

  His cell phone rang. Thinking it was Jane again, he fumbled at it one-handed and barked, “Now what?”

  “Phillip?”

  He sagged and caught his breath. Only his mother called him that. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Do you know more yet? About Kit?”

  “I just talked to her. She sounded fine. I’m almost there. I guess Nina got called away quick…”

  “It’s not her fault. She really can’t help it.” Irene Broker said. “Nina’s a triple fire sign and—”

  “Yeah, Mom. You already told me.” Mom had a Merlinesque faith in astrology and believed that Nina was in thrall to her heroic stars.


  “Her basic energy comes from Sun in Aries. Her inner feelings come from Moon in Sagittarius. And her behavior is anchored in Mars in Leo.”

  Aries, Mars. He didn’t need a starbook to plot that trajectory. Plus she had the Scots bloodline. Well, fuck Nina and the meteor she rode in on. He pictured her going naked into battle, like her ancestors, with her pubes dipped in blue woad.

  “C’mon, Mom, give me a break,” he said. Sun in Aries. Right. He looked up to where the sun should be and saw only gray woolly clouds.

  “Well, are you going to drive Kit back? Because if you’re not for some reason,” she said presciently, knowing her son and the kind of work he still sometimes performed, “your dad is talking to Doc Harris about flying in and picking her up.”

  “That’d be good to follow up, Mom.”

  “I thought so. Now, just don’t get ahead of yourself. And give her a chance to explain. You know, practice your listening.”

  “I will.”

  “Good. Well, keep us posted.”

  “Right, Mom.”

  “And, Phillip, remember to listen.” Said it like she used to say “Make your bed. Wear a hat. Don’t talk back to your father”—the tone of her voice reducing him to about twelve years old.

  “Goodbye, Mom.”

  Broker ended the call and stared at the moody cloud cover. Calm down. Think. Listen. Okay.

  Nina was not dishonest. She just omitted virtually everything about her last assignment to a classified military unit popularly known as the Delta Force. But ever since 9/11, communication with Nina had been increasingly spotty.

  Broker was not dishonest either. But he also left a lot of things out. When people met Broker casually, he’d angle around direct answers. A sketch emerged of him suggesting a background involving a successful landscaping business in the St. Croix Valley to the east of the Twin Cities. Then he’d drop a few hints how he’d got out of landscaping and put his money in a little resort up on Lake Superior before the real estate up there went through the roof. This was the truth, up to a point; but the landscaping gig was a cover. In fact, Broker had left the St. Paul cops and joined the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension fifteen years ago. Then he proceeded to clock the longest run of deep undercover work in the history of Minnesota law enforcement.

  Then, about eight years ago, Nina Pryce had launched a genteel bayonet charge into his life. She had an agenda. She had a skull and crossbones tattooed on her shoulder. She had a map to buried gold in her hip pocket.

  Broker followed her to Vietnam, where they found several tons of Imperial gold ingots on a beach on the South China Sea.

  They came home quietly rich, pregnant, and eventually married. More than two tons of the gold found its way into a bank account in Hong Kong. Broker lived on credit cards linked to that account.

  Five years ago he’d helped the FBI penetrate the Russian Mafia. An informal arrangement evolved. The Feds let him keep his loot as a kind of open-ended retainer.

  Broker and Nina’s marriage, conceived in high adventure, could not survive ordinary life. After Kit was born, Nina nursed her for six months, woke up one morning, saw the dishes in the kitchen sink, experienced a panic attack, and hurried back into the Army.

  Some cops in Minnesota, who were not exactly fans of Phil Broker, saw a measure of poetic justice in the complications of his marriage.

  Karma coming back to him, stuff like that.

  So.

  For a number of reasons, all of them having to do with airport security, Broker had decided not to fly into Grand Forks. And though he still had a deputy badge and ID, a routine phone check with the Washington County Sheriff’s office would elicit the friendly reminder that he should have turned the badge in yesterday. These minor details would complicate flying commercial with the .45-caliber automatic, the two magazines, and the box of ammunition he had tucked under the front seat.

  The circumstances he was driving into struck him as very odd. Broker was familiar with Nina Pryce’s flaws. But those flaws ran to vainglory, arrogance, and compulsive overachievement. Quitting on any task or abandoning her people were taboos in her strict warrior code. He could not imagine Nina abandoning her daughter as long as there was still breath in her body…Broker knit his bushy eyebrows and smiled an unhappy intuitive smile…But she was capable of using their daughter in some cockeyed special-ops ploy, if the stakes were high enough.

  Goddamn sonofabitch!

  But even angry, wounded, and full of painkillers, Broker remained focused. He took several deep breaths and let his eyes travel over the empty landscape.

  He was driving through some of the least populated territory in the United States. So what was a Delta Force operator doing in Langdon, North Dakota?…His eyes drifted north, past the wheatfields to his right. For the second time he flashed his unhappy grin as a line from The Magnificent Seven time-traveled into his mind. He heard the sound track, saw Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen banter back and forth about something they had going…

  “…in this little town below…

  “…the longest undefended international border in the world.”

  So. When it came down to it, he wasn’t in a mood to rely on other people to protect his daughter.

  Twenty minutes later, two blue water towers, some grain elevators and a micro dish antenna rose out of the fields and he drove into Langdon, North Dakota. It was one-thirty on a Sunday afternoon, no sun, gray clouds like an overcoat over ninety-seven humid degrees. The air was heavy and sweaty, hovering over a million acres of ripening wheat.

  The first thing he saw was the four new white Tahoes with Border Patrol markings parked at the motel. Okay…

  The county building was low red brick on his right. A leafy main street nestled in shadow on his left. Keep going? Find the pool? Or talk to the cops?

  Kit was waiting in the park two blocks away. Broker doubted that Jane was alone. Assuming Jane and company were Nina’s comrades, Broker figured his daughter was at this moment the most well-defended child in North Dakota. She could last another half-hour.

  Broker reverted to one of his basic commonsense rules, which in this case was the Waco Rule of Thumb. The WRT posited that in 99.9 percent of all cases the locals knew the ground far better than the federal interlopers, were less arrogant, and would return straight talk in kind.

  So he ignored mysterious Jane’s admonition to check in with her first. He drove around the county offices until he spotted a small sign on a rear entrance by the parking lot: SHERIFF’S OFFICE. He parked, checked the note he’d scribbled to himself again. Sheriff Norman Wales. Then he went in through the door.

  Something had to be up. Why else would the sheriff be in his office on a muggy Sunday afternoon?

  Chapter Eleven

  Broker gave his name and came under the intense scrutiny of a very curious dispatcher the moment he was buzzed in through the security door. She directed him through the radio room and pointed to two men, one in uniform, who appeared in a doorway. Then she immediately reached for a phone.

  “We’ll walk you down to Norm’s office. Jim Yeager,” said the husky one in jeans and a T-shirt, extending a hard farmer’s mitt. “This is Barry Sauer, state highway patrol,” he said.

  Broker shook their hands in turn. Sauer was obviously working today. He wore a dark brown shirt and tan trousers and had a full service belt strapped around his waist. He had the creased and spit-shined military bearing that the people who bossed state cops liked to see in their troops. Yeager and Sauer kept glancing at Broker’s bandaged left hand. But there was more to their curiosity.

  They came in to look me over. Word’s out.

  They were old-fashioned cops, like Broker’s dad had been. Two of the biggest, strongest guys in town. But they had quick eyes and were light on their feet and Broker decided that strong did not imply dumb with this bunch.

  Stay alert.

  Sheriff Norm Wales, like his deputy, Yeager, came in special today. He wore jeans and a golf shirt
and stood waiting in his office doorway. He waved the two cops off and they retreated back down the hall. “That where you got shot?” he asked, pointing to Broker’s hand. The remark got Broker’s attention. Wales was letting him know he was up to speed. He had a soft, reserved voice, sad, blue basset-hound eyes, sandy brown hair, and thirteen-inch wrists.

  “How’d you know?” Broker asked back as they shook hands.

  “I had this little sheriff’s convention to get the book on you. When I heard you were coming I talked to Jeffords in Cook County again. He handed me off to Eisenhower in Washington County, who says, by the way, you forgot to turn in one of his shields.” Wales paused and cleared his throat. “In case you were thinking of flying any false flags. We seem to have a rash of that going on last couple days.”

  Broker shifted from foot to foot. This prairie cop had done his homework.

  Wales indicated a chair in front of his desk. “Go on, sit.” He closed his office door, went around behind his desk, sat down, and said, “Your daughter is just fine. She’s up at the municipal pool, swimming laps. We’ve had people watching her ever since this started. But the fact is, looks like she’s running in some pretty heavy company.” Wales gave Broker a very direct look. “Wouldn’t you say?”

  “I just got here,” Broker said, as he dropped into the chair.

  “Your kid got very strangely abandoned in my town and suddenly I got sheriffs coming out of my ears. Gets a guy to thinking. So I took a flyer, had the county attorney call somebody he knows who works in the Minnesota AG’s office,” Wales said.

  “Who?” Uh-oh.

  “Tim Downs. My guy met him at a seminar at the University of Minnesota. I believe you’re acquainted.”

  Shit. “Sure. Downs and I worked in St. Paul together some years back. We were never what you’d call close.”

  Wales tugged an earlobe. “Right. Downs had a knack for Internal Affairs and you had a knack for undercover. Not exactly compatible assignments. And, well, Downs did go to law school…”