A few minutes later he was huddled in the front seat, coaxing the heater to warm faster. Catching his breath.
Checked his watch. Just past 2 A.M. What time did it get light?
He forced himself to drink a cup of coffee from the thermos. Had to calm down before he got back on the road.
Chill out. Formed the phrase in his mind. Curious usage under these circumstances, freezing.
Okay. Very carefully he turned around, fearing unseen ditches in the snow and drove back toward Highway 61.
When he got to the intersection, he stopped. Slammed by waves of impulse. Broker to the left. Freedom to the right.
Discipline. Think of everything he’d achieved. Can’t take the chance of blowing it. Stick to the plan.
But he knew that, in the house where Broker lived, a computer was turned on, the website the hick ex-cop had concocted. Up there, glowing in the dark.
Mocking him. And causing problems. They’d probably move him from Santa Cruz because of it. Stick him in some trailer court in Idaho.
Reached under the seat, checked the cold shape of the pistol. What if he wasn’t there. Nah, he’d be there, with the brat.
The big-eyed brat who haunted his dreams.
It was wrong. Stupid. But Danny knew he was going to do it anyway. Because of who he was now. Because he was through taking shit off people. His foot released the brake, stabbed at the gas and turned left.
64
Broker had stayed up late, had consumed too much coffee.
He watched for trucks. He had even crept through the woods, up to the cabin next door and peeked in the window. David and Denise were fused together on a foldout couch, a carnal pretzel illuminated by the glimmering TV screen. Stacks of video cassettes piled the coffee table.
Chastised, cursing himself for a paranoid, he came home and headed for bed. Caffeine limbo waited, a dehydrated shadow of sleep. At 2:30 A.M., his kidneys prodded him and he got up and padded to the bathroom. On the way back to bed he saw the bright display of the video monitor suspended in the dark, Tom James’s face under the garish orange type.
He and Ida Rain had missed each other. She’d communic-ated remotely, leaving a message on his voice mail. She thought the website, while novel, was desperate-if
No reaction from the FBI.
Wouldn’t be, either. He was out of moves. It was over.
Out the windows, fog slowly crept into the chinks and crannies. Broker never sighed.
He sighed.
Too much thinking. What he needed was sleep. He went into Kit’s room and checked on her in the soft spill of the night-light. She lay as if flung headlong, limbs willy-nilly, in a clutter of stuffed animals. Her head was thrown back in a nest of sweaty curls, one arm twisted out and ended in an upturned hand. The tiny fingers continued to reach. A miniature detail from Michelangelo.
The mystery of Peace made simple, in the undisturbed sleep of a healthy child. Everywhere, always, the same. Softly, he touched her chest, sensitive to the tiny rise and fall, felt her warm forehead, said one of his wordless daddy prayers.
Back in the covers he drifted in shallow tangles. Fatigue marched over him, an ant army of tiny distractions. The fog turned to rain, which lulled him. But then the rain turned hard, a sleet downpour. Eventually he sagged in a hammock of consciousness, just below the surface of sleep. A muffled drawn-out crash shot him bolt upright. Up, looking out the windows. A whole row of pines had keeled over against the roof, their branches weighted down with ice.
Ice storm. Like they were getting up in Canada. Nothing for it tonight. Back in bed, his last snatches of wakefulness recorded the ominous scrape of ice-burdened branches against the roof and eaves. The steady thud of icy rain. The crash of trees falling in the woods.
His muscles snapped to while his mind was still blind with sleep. A tinny musical reveille insinuated through the groan of the wind and ice-tormented trees-Cucaracha Dog.
Kit’s cry, simultaneous to the calliope weirdness of the toy. Then-the scramble of feet in his house.
Broker sprang off the bed in a gymnastic movement at combat speed. The twelve-gauge came off the floor and THE BIG LAW/373
swung comfortably into his hands before his eyes opened.
Lizard brain pushed the mammal brain, then cerebral cortex, the civilizing membrane, but way out front and absolutely ready to kill-was the new daddy brain. And the daddy brain propelled Broker through the dark. Seeking the threat in a cold rage, thumbing off the safety on the shotgun, heading for his daughter’s cries, filtering out the sound of the toy.
Someone in the house. Stepped on the toy?
How? Figure it out later.
Without thought of caution or strategy, he went immediately to the crib and scooped up the bawling child. He backed from her room-Kit in one arm, the weapon ready in the other-to his room, and as he dropped her in a plastic hamper in his closet and closed the door and heaved the dresser in front of it, he realized-
No yard light.
No night-lights.
No light over the stove.
Just ice glowing in the luminous mist. He proceeded to search his house. Room by room, corner by corner, closet by closet. Finally he backtracked, pausing in Kit’s room.
Found the musical toy at the foot of her bed. She could have tossed it out, that could have set it off.
But he didn’t believe that. He heard somebody. He crept out on the back porch on planking slick with ice. Ice was everywhere. Trees dipped in it. Every branch and pine needle was sheathed. His driveway was a transparent sheet.
Then he saw the power line and the phone line, sagging to the ground under the heavy whiskers of ice. An ice-stricken pine had toppled with them, the snowy crown punched in a basement window.
Immediately, he went inside, down the basement stairs. Found tiny pools of dirty melt on the steps. Led to the broken window. That’s how they got in.
Back up, outside. An engine growled up on the highway.
But, before dawn it was routine, even in this weather-truck-ers ferrying supplies to the casino at Grand Portage.
He squinted at the fog. Went in, picked up his phone.
Dead.
No cell phone. Just as well, Jeff would have his hands full on a night like this.
One last check to make. Forgive me, Kit. He slithered through the woods again. And-the Audi was gone from the blacked-out cabin. Deserted.
Okay, David. We’re going to have a talk.
Whatever happened, it was over, and now he felt dumb waving around a loaded gun.
The barrel of the Remington arced down from alert, his thumb clicked the safety back on. He went back in, the shotgun in the crook of his arm, got a flashlight and liberated Kit from the closet.
