to the chill breath of the first frost. Gunmetal on oatmeal on concrete. And no blue. No sun. Far to the north he saw a curtain of rain, a shudder that could be lightning. But far away. Well into Manitoba.
No sun since Friday. Saturday it had started to rain in Minnesota. Saturday…He blinked sweat, refocused. Saturday, which was yesterday…
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.
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.
