Vapor Trail

“I guess Drew doesn’t let it bother him,” Janey said.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Broker said.

“Maybe it’s his men’s group. . we go to this Unitarian church sometimes, and they have. . don’t laugh,” Janey said, seeing the smile curl at the corner of his lips.

Broker held up his hands in a surrendering gesture. “Hey, I can dig it. I was in this big men’s group once. Cut my hair short, wore green all the time, ate shitty food, and slept in the woods. No drumming, though, and no campfires.”

“Very funny. What I mean is, Drew and these guys get very involved in discussing their evaporating testosterone or something. . their vigor. I think getting older scares him.”

A long muted crackle snaked across the sky. If his daughter were here, Broker would tell her that, far away, a thunder lizard was uncoiling his spiked ozone tail.

“I don’t know. Sometimes a marriage comes down to basic triage. When things get ugly and bloody, you have to figure where you’re headed-to emergency or the morgue,” Broker said.

“Now there’s a quaint-” Janey stopped in midsentence as two phones rang at the same time in the kitchen: the house phone and her cell phone on the table. “That’s. . weird,” she said.

They got up and went to their respective phones.

Broker picked up and heard the familiar voice start in, “It’s Jeff; first of all, everything’s all right so don’t worry, you hear me?”

The caller was Tom Jeffords, the Cook County sheriff. His neighbor on Lake Superior’s north shore.

“What the hell? Is it the folks?” Broker said, bracing himself.

“No, it’s Kit,” Jeff said.

Instant Tilt-a-Whirl in his chest. “Kit?”

“She’s all right. She’s fine. It’s just that she turned up in a motel room in Langdon, North Dakota, with a baby-sitter who had instructions to call me today.”

Broker sat down as the edges of his vision came tunneling in. “Where the hell is her mother?” His voice shook between incredulity and real anger.

“Nina left her with this baby-sitter yesterday. Just the instructions to call. No other message,” Jeff said. “I called the Cavalier County Sheriff’s Department, and they’ve got deputies on it up the wazoo. Nothing to worry about. She’s fine, so stay cool.”

“Where the hell is Langdon?” Broker said, trying to stay cool.

“Up in the northeast corner in the middle of nowhere. Grand Forks is the nearest air link. Take these numbers.”

Broker wrote down the numbers for the Cavalier County Sheriff’s Department. And the Best Western where Kit was found. He listened while Jeff counseled him not to bother his parents until he had Kit in hand. Jeff said call anytime; he was there night or day. They said good-bye.

He immediately started to punch in the motel number when Janey appeared in front of him. She pressed her phone to her chest, and her face was cold with restrained fury. “That was Laurie, calling me on Drew’s cell phone. He left her stranded in the bathroom, and he’s got some woman there.”

Broker held up his hand. “Wait a minute,” he said. He had to think. Better to make his calls from the county office. He had to return Mouse’s car, anyway. No sense troubling Janey with this new information. “Go down to the car. I’ll be right there,” he said.

Broker went fast through the bathroom and the bedroom; threw his toilet articles and a change of clothes in a duffel bag, locked the house, and jogged to the car.

Driving between eighty and ninety, he barely heard Janey’s screed against Drew as he tried to stay focused. When they hit the north end of town, he was reassuring himself that Jeff was a strictly no-bullshit cop. If he said Kit was all right, she was all right.

Okay. So what. .?

Then he stopped and double-parked in front of Drew’s building, where a small crowd of people stood on the street nervously pointing up the steps toward Drew’s studio. Janey stepped out of the car, spoke briefly to someone in that crowd, and immediately sprinted up the steps.

Broker jumped from the car and raced after her.

“. . gunshot up there. .,” someone yelled as he rushed past.

Now what? Taking the steps three at a time. Going in cold, nothing in his hand. Nothing. Just going in.

Now screams.

The kid. Laurie in there screaming.

He was in and. .

Drew, naked with a towel trailing off his butt, leaking bubbles of blood from his chest and his lips. He left a slick red smear on the hardwood floor as he crawled sidestroke toward the bathroom. Broker dropped to one knee, to check Drew, and Janey shot past him into the bathroom.

“LET HER GO!”

Broker leaped over Drew, threw his shoulder against the door, and shoved it against the recoil of struggling bodies on the other side. He set his stance and forced his way in. Inside the small room, Janey grappled with a woman who had just taken her hands off Laurie. Laurie was screaming and crouched waist-deep in a bathtub full of water as she swung her tiny bandaged fists.

Broker had seen this woman before.

Lunging, he thought with his hands. The woman was reaching down to the wet floor. .

GUN.

Really diving now, off the ground, stretching because the pistol was coming up in line with Janey’s face. He batted Janey aside with his right hand while his left hand whipped out and grabbed the muzzle.

KABOOM-OHSHITFUCK!

He felt the bullet punch through his palm.

The noise, pain, and shock welded a frozen white circle, and he was suspended for a fraction of a second as he hurtled toward the floor and crashed chest and elbow into the rim of the claw-footed bathtub.

And that hurt more than the goddamn bullet.

Jarred, he flipped down and hit the floor hard.

In that tiny beat he saw Janey-a Janey he had never seen before-pounce over him and close with the shooter. Broker, dazed, coming up off the floor, Laurie screaming, Drew crawling, his chin coated with blood.

And Broker looked up and saw something else he had never seen before as Janey went in snarling and clawed her fingers into the other woman’s eyes.

The woman staggered back, her eyes now a torn red mask. Janey went after the faltering pistol. Seized it in her hand. As Broker struggled up from the floor, he had one of his basic rules reaffirmed, the one about never having a loaded revolver in the house. No safety mechanism. The ultimate in point-and-shoot.

Without the slightest hesitation, she thrust the pistol into Annie Mortenson’s face and pulled the trigger once, twice, and would have kept yanking it if Broker hadn’t come up fast and torn the weapon from her grip.

Laurie screamed louder and clapped her hands to her ears.

Broker’s own ears were ringing, plugged, stinging from the shots.

Laurie’s screams brought Janey to her senses. She saw the gouts of flesh and splinters of scalp that spattered the wall, the floor, her daughter.

Instantly, she wrapped Laurie in her arms and then whisked a towel from a rack and began cleaning Laurie’s face.

“Get her out of here,” Broker said. Then seeing the slumped woman’s face, knowing it was futile, he knelt, put down the pistol, and put his fingers to her throat. He waited several beats and felt no pulse.

Janey stepped over Annie’s body, plucking red matter from Laurie’s hair with her fingers and flicking it away. Immediately, she started to kneel to Drew. Broker grabbed her arm and shoved her toward the studio doorway and the porch beyond.

“Take her out there. Leave this to me,” Broker said. Then he turned and saw air bubbles suck red suds in Drew’s back. Bright red blood.

Sucking chest wound. Exit wound.