Saturn long enough to make sure of the plates. The Saturn ran Devil’s Rock’s one stoplight, accelerated, and disappeared along the waterfront.
“Glove compartment. Cell phone. Gimme,” said Broker.
Nina opened the phone and Broker took it in his good hand. He punched in the number with his thumb.
“Devil’s Rock Public Safety.”
“Give me Tom Jeffords. It’s Phil Broker.”
“Hey, Broker, Merryweather told Tom some guy ate your thumb. That true?”
“Yeah, yeah, Tom there?”
“I’ll patch you through.”
“Chief Jeffords.”
“Tom, it’s Broker.”
“No shit, we heard-”
“Later. Look, I just drove into town and I got some citizen in a green Saturn, plates lima lima gulf six two niner, been on my ass since I left Stillwater. I’m heading for Dad’s place. Can you have somebody check him out and call me?”
“You think somebody wants your other thumb?”
“You tell me. I’m off the clock.”
Broker handed the phone back to Nina. “Could be Earl has a friend looking for some payback,” he said.
Nina shook her head. “Guy followed me from New Orleans. Same flight.”
“We’ll see.”
“Yes we will.”
North of town Broker turned off on a gravel road and stopped in front of a billboard that advertised the Broker’s Beach Resort. A dusty CLOSED sign now bannered it. Broker got out and lowered a chain that closed off the access road. As he returned to his truck, he noticed the green car pulled onto the shoulder, about two hundred yards up the road.
It was getting harder now to dismiss Nina as a paranoid; even more difficult to banish the ten-ton shadow beginning to lurk just below his thoughts. We’ll see, he soundlessly challenged the blip of green up the highway.
Nina’s view in the passenger seat was blocked by brush and Broker said nothing to disturb her. Assuming he was in someone’s binoculars, he took his time. He mused at the cascading irony coming off Jimmy Tuna’s cryptic note. He had learned the basic premise of undercover life from Nguyen Van Trin during the one, and only, and unusually, candid private conversation he’d ever had with the man.
He got back in and drove down toward the shore. They broke through the pines and he mused how other people said their childhood environs looked smaller when they revisited them as adults.
No way Lake Superior was ever going to shrink.
The Brokers owned two thousand feet of wild lake frontage, arced in a cove and spectacularly fanged with granite. Tall old red and white pines, which had been preserved from the clear-cut at the end of the last century, cloaked the cabins from the highway. Broker’s personal cabin, sometimes rented as overflow, clung to a rock promontory to the side of the resort behind a privacy screen of gnarled white birch, balsam, alder, and mountain ash.
What he really wanted to do was pull the Jeep into the drive, walk down to the beach, strip off his clothes, and dive off his favorite rock into the icy clean water. Then fire up the sauna and do it again. He turned off the key and sagged over the steering wheel.
“Still magic,” said Nina.
“Yeah,” he nodded.
“Oh oh,” said Nina. “Something new.”
A seriously large, hundred-fifty-pound silver, black, and tan shepherd bounded from the brush and planted his square paws on the side of the Jeep. His nails drew screeches on the paint and a tongue the size of a size sixteen red lumberjack sock hung between his big pointy teeth. “Hey, get down, Tank,” Broker yelled as he got out and tussled with the dog. Nina cautiously got from the passenger side and kept the briefcase that contained her map tight against her side.
“Is he…safe?”
“Hell no,” said Broker, shaking the ruff of fur around the dog’s neck. “He was too aggressive for St. Paul K- nine so I brought him up here. Mike and Irene squared him away, didn’t they, Tank.” Tank cocked his huge head and his yellow eyes tracked Nina’s every move.
Nina squinted at the dog and then at Broker’s eyebrows. “There’s a family resemblance. And like…human intelligence behind those eyes.”
“Yeah, retarded human intelligence,” said Broker, cuffing the dog playfully. “Come on, let’s go see the folks.”
Halfway down a trail paved with split granite Tank stood alert, growled deep in his chest, and swung his head toward the road. Broker gripped his choke chain and brought him to heel.
“Do we have company?” Nina asked.
“Maybe,” said Broker and they kept walking down into a natural amphitheater cragged with immense bedrock terraces, some the size of three-story buildings. As a boy, Broker thought it looked like a huge, wrinkled pile of gray elephants.
Then he hit the eyesore on the mild late afternoon; the shells of twelve spacious cabins were tucked into the shelves of stone. The oldest ones marked the summers of Broker’s college years. He and his dad built one a year from the thick stone foundations to the cedar shake shingles that had plated the roofs. Dawn to dusk, six days a week. The main house was marked by an OFFICE sign and sat back from the cabins in a sheltered cranny. In a small bedroom on the second floor his mother still kept his high school and University of Minnesota-Duluth hockey varsity letters tacked to the wall-one of her few touches of conventionality.
When Broker got to the first grade he discovered that other kids went to church on Sunday. He learned he had been raised by North Shore pagans, small p.
His dad kept faith with the primacy of earth, sky, water, and fire. His hands had hauled on the rosary of artisan labor every day of his life as he connected heavy beads of wood, steel, and stone with bullets of sweat. He had rejected the concept of babying teenagers. He believed in preparation. Broker grew up hard.
The odd thing was that his rough, tough dad was a dutiful teddy bear who had read to him the off-the-shelf stories about mice and cuddly rabbits and all of Dr. Seuss.
Quiet, slender Irene sat her baby boy down on the wrinkled elephants during fierce dawns and sunsets, or pulled him through the deep snow in a sled under Orion and the Borealis.
Only half in jest, she told him of the race of Nordic gods who had battled the ice monsters and created the first man from an ash and an alder tree. Their names were still preserved in the days of the week. Tuesday for Odin’s son Tyr, Wednesday for Woton, which was another name for Odin himself, Thursday for Thor and Friday for Freya, the goddess of love.
Hail was the foam dropping from the jaws of the Valkyries’ horses and the Northern Lights were the flash of their armor as they rode across the sky.
And, of course, she told him about the tree the Christians stole for Christmas.
Broker clicked his teeth. Now the cabins, with makeshift plywood roofing, looked like a refugee village. Some of the sheets had pulled free of their nails, testifying to the cruel whimsy of the lake winds. Weeds already had taken sturdy root and choked the caved-in construction where plumbing had been halted. The downhill end of the foundation for the new lodge had washed out, one-ton granite blocks strewn like a child’s wooden playthings. At the edge of the grounds a wheel-barrow was embedded in a shower of cement like a grave marker, one rusty handle twisted to the sky. A winding split-granite staircase was locked stillborn in the spill.
Now Mike was under a doctor’s orders not to lift anything heavier than a ballpeen hammer.
Irene Broker sat on the deck of the old central lodge arranging Devil’s Paintbrush in a vase. When she saw them coming she stood up, lean in faded Levi’s and a pigment-smeared blue smock. Her long hippie hair was still crow-dark in her sixties and her eyes, like her son’s, were quiet, watchful green, the color of an approaching winter storm. A painting easel was set up behind her. So she was still painting loons for the tourist trade, a hobby that
