Vapor Trail

came in close to the house and lost his shadow in the larger shadow of the overhanging eaves. He flattened himself against the side wall. Ever so slowly, he edged his head around a corner just enough to get a view of. .

Janey Hensen.

Chagrined, he clicked the gun on safe. She sat on the top step of the stairs leading up to the deck, looking trim in a white halter, denim shorts, and tanned skin. She wore no makeup and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. A fine layer of sweat shimmered on her tan as if she’d just been misted with a spray bottle. She was reading a book.

“Janey? What the hell?” He stepped around the corner holding the shotgun awkwardly at the vertical in his right hand like a high school boy carrying a bouquet.

Janey was unfazed. Always dry on the uptake, she batted her eyes and said, “Jeez, Broker, I figured you missed the old days but not this much.” She stood up and brushed off the back of her shorts. Maybe it was the sunset hamming it up like a Rodgers and Hammerstein background out of South Pacific. Maybe it was the businesslike way she dusted off her bum-but it struck Broker that Janey still bore a resemblance to midwestern ensign Nellie Forbush as played by Mitzi Gaynor.

He hefted the shotgun self-consciously. “Just putting it in the house; just be a sec. Ah, what’s this?” As he went up the stairs he changed the subject by flicking his finger at the book she was reading: Living Terrors: What America Needs to Know to Survive the Coming Bioterrorist Catastrophe.

“Our own Michael Osterholm,” Janey said.

Osterholm had been the Minnesota state epidemiologist. “Yeah, I know,” Broker called over his shoulder as he slipped into the kitchen through the patio door. He quickly racked the side, emptying the shotgun. He stuffed the shells behind a bag of corn chips on a counter, stashed the gun in the broom closet, and came back out. “I read it.”

“After the anthrax scare?” Janey said.

“No, when it first came out.” He smiled tightly. “Nina brought it home from ‘work.’”

“And how is Xena the Warrior Princess?” Janey said.

“That’s fair. She called you the Stepford Wife,” Broker said. Nina and Janey met two years ago at J. T. Merryweather’s retirement party. They chatted, ostensibly discussing the movie American Beauty. The way Broker remembered it, their words rattled back and forth like long elegant needles, probing for vital spots.

“Really? And we only met once. Do you think she got it right-me sitting in my Martha Stewart kitchen, tapping the mute button when the school shootings and Zoloft commercials come on CNBC in between stock quotes?” She inclined her head and said, “I heard you two separated.”

Broker stared at her as if to say, What are you doing here?

She shrugged. “Drew took Laurie to T-ball, so I went out to the lake to work on my tan. I was in the neighborhood, so. .”

“How are you doing, Janey?” Broker said.

“I’m morbid.” She hunched her shoulders, let them drop, and then held up the book. “He suggests in here that a guy could walk into a big shopping mall with smallpox cultures in an aerosol doodad, set it up in an air- circulation duct, turn it on, and kill over one hundred thousand people.” She raised her eyebrows. “You think that’s possible?”

“I don’t think Osterholm is into writing books for the money,” Broker said.

Janey tossed the book on the patio table, spun, walked to the rail, leaned into it with both hands, arched her back, and kicked up one sandaled foot. “This is nice here,” she said.

“Yeah. I’m watching it for the summer. The owner’s a friend of mine. He’s in Europe.”

“Milton Dane, the attorney.”

Broker didn’t ask how she knew; he just smiled.

Janey turned, smoothed a hand along the side of her hair, and said, “You’re too skinny. There’s hungry, and then there’s starvation.”

“Pot calling the kettle.” Broker caught himself getting involved in the motion of her upper arms as she raised her hands and fussed with the binder in her ponytail.

“And the short hair, it throws me,” Janey said.

“You didn’t used to smile so much,” Broker said.

“It’s the influence of the postindustrial service economy. We’re surrounded by people whose jobs are being nice to people. It makes us smile more. When people worked in steel mills, they didn’t say things like ‘have a nice day.’ “

Too many words.

She’d always surrounded herself with too many words, sharp words projecting like porcupine quills. “So you said you wanted to talk,” Broker said.

Janey slouched against the rail, her eyes rolled up, and she said, “You never were one to dance a girl. No flirty chitchat to get things rolling.”

“Rolling,” Broker repeated, knitting his eyebrows.

“You know what I mean.”

“Sure, small talk.”

Janey smiled. “Never your thing. I understand completely. You were always into” — Janey creased her forehead and searched for the right phrase- “the eloquent silence of the hunter. It must be hard on you now, living ordinary life.”

“It’s hotter than shit. It’s been a rough day. I’m getting a beer. You want one?” Broker said, heading for the kitchen.

“Sure.”

He returned with two Heinekens. The cold green bottles immediately beaded in the heat. Janey took hers, sat in a deck chair, and inspected the drip of condensation that dribbled down the side. Very deliberately, she dug through the damp label with her thumbnail and flicked the ribbon of label away.

Then Janey dropped it on him: Boom. “Did you ever wonder why I married Drew?” she said.

Broker stared, momentarily unfocused, his mind paddling to stay afloat in the heat. “I was curious,” he said slowly.

“He was the opposite of you. After you, I designed this man rating system-one to ten; solitary hunter to social gatherer.”

“What’s in between?”

“Most guys. No, that’s not true. I never had a representative sample. I was up to my neck in law enforcers. Cops and prosecutors. Men with authority hang-ups.”

Broker drew his right hand between them in a slow, level motion and said, “Drew is steady. A safe bet for the long haul.” From memory, Broker re-created Drew’s angular unlined face, his mild blue eyes.

Janey smiled tightly. “Make that was. Past tense.” She raised her chin, which began to quiver slightly. “After what happened on nine-eleven, I heard people were supposed to take inventory, reaffirm their relationships, draw closer together. Well, Drew missed that particular point entirely, because he’s seeing another woman, and he’s not even being discreet about it.” Then Janey began to spill big hot tears all over her white halter.

So he brought her a towel to wipe her cheeks. Then he brought her a glass of ice water and cleared the decks to hear about the other woman.

And he could empathize, to a point. He had visited the subject of the other man. The younger other man. So he assumed that Janey’s other woman would be younger and bursting with wonderful unlived-in smells and secret places. She would be unwrinkled from lack of child rearing. She would have pert Cosmo snow cone breasts.

“She’s this. . cow,” Janey seethed. “You know, with the big bovine brown eyes.”

Okay, so not Cosmo. Playboy maybe. He listened patiently.

“Goddamn men and their midlife crises.” Suddenly, she seized his left forearm, pulled him toward her, and looked directly into his eyes. “You could talk to him.”