After the Rain

like to have all that vitality under his control.

“Dale? That’s your name?” she said in a measured, no nonsense voice that gave away the lie of her act, the way it presumed to arrange life in straight lines, like she knew all the rules. He nodded his head, his smile oblivious to the warning in her tone.

“Dale, that crack was pretty obnoxious.”

He shrugged. “Just want you to know I’ll never lie to you.” He stared at her hard, marking her with his eyes.

“I guess we just ran out of things to talk about. So why don’t you move it on down the line.”

Dale wiggled his fingers. “Bye.” He walked past her and went up the stairs. As he went up, Gordy came down the stairs, smiled tightly, and went into the office.

Nina lowered her eyes and stared at the twist of smoke coming off her cigarette. Jesus, what’s cooking with these guys? Joe Reed was scary and Dale was creepy. Gordy was barely under control. And Ace-he was rowing across an ocean of booze, striving to maintain an even strain between mania and depression.

Dale walked into the apartment and said, “I seen your new girl.”

“Nina?”

“Uh-huh. Her husband came by the shed this morning pretending to look at my old Deere. You fuck her yet?”

“Nah, it ain’t like that. She’s going through a bad time breaking up. We’re just sort of fellow travelers.” The husband, he thought, moving toward the front window.

“Losing your touch?” Dale said.

Ace stopped and regarded his brother with gentle eyes. He had never allowed himself to be angry with Dale, regardless of what he said. “What’s on your mind, Dale?”

“Gordy come and talked to me about her.”

“Yeah?”

“He’s nervous, thinks she’s here to snoop.”

“What do you think?’

“I think Gordy has reason to be nervous. More than you. That’s what I think.”

Ace clapped his brother on the shoulder. “So he’s got a reason to be nervous, huh?”

“Yep. Joe says Gordy’s running too much dope; Pseudoephedrine in bulk down from Winnepeg, some coke, and that hydroponic grass they got. Joe says he’s attracting sharks.” Dale pointed down the stairway. “Maybe federal sharks.”

“A fed, huh? I ain’t so sure. She just don’t strike me as a cop.”

“Has she been asking around, kinda snooping after something?”

“Mainly she’s been pissed from the minute she walked through that door. At her husband mostly, but I get the feeling she’s pissed at the world in general.”

“Still, you gotta be careful, brother. You gotta do something about Gordy.”

“Christ, Dale, Gordy does all the work around here, he keeps the books. How am I going to replace him?”

Dale shrugged. “Hell, I can keep books, you know that.”

Ace shook his head. “Nah, I don’t want you mixed up in this. You sell off the last of the junk across the road, padlock the door, and go to Florida.”

“I wanna help. What if I could get him to quit running dope. How about that?” Dale said. “You always looked out for me, except when you were in jail that time. Just fair I do something to help.”

Another sore point. Ace’s easy smile masked a swell of remorse. Would it have made a difference if he’d been around during the end of Dale’s senior year, when he turned funny, inward, a little weird? Probably not.

“Sure. Talk to Gordy if you think it’ll help. But don’t take any shit. If he gets antsy, you tell me.” Ace continued to the front window, eased the curtain aside with his finger.

Dale smiled. “I’ll give him a talking-to he won’t forget.”

“You do that,” Ace said, facing away, looking out the window. Hello. What’s this? Across the road he saw Broker walking next to Deputy Jimmy Yeager. Broker got in a green Explorer that was parked in front of the Shuster shed. Yeager got in his cruiser on the road. Then Broker followed Yeager east toward town.

What do you suppose they’re up to?

Dale nodded and left him, went down the stairs, ignored Nina, who was still sitting at Ace’s table, smoking, drinking coffee, and reading the Grand Forks Herald. He walked up to the office door.

“Guess Joe’s pissed at me, huh?” Gordy said, looking up from the desk.

Dale said, “I can fill you in on where he’s coming from-say, later tonight. You got anything going on?”

“Maybe.”

“Mind if I come along?”

Gordy shot a wary look at Nina in the other room, took a pen from his chest pocket, and wrote “9 P.M… here” on a notepad. Then he tore the paper in half, then in quarters, and tossed it in the trash can behind the bar.

Dale nodded and started for the door. As he left the bar he sang out, “Be seeing you, Nina…”

Chapter Twenty

“She calls herself Nina Pryce. Red hair, mid-thirties, and she’s competent. I don’t think she’s a cop. More like government. Maybe military.”

“How can you tell?” the Mole said into the telephone receiver.

“The way she watches things, the way she moves. Trust me on this. And then there’s her alleged husband…”

“Forget the husband, there are already too many distractions.”

“I’m just saying-”

“No, stay on plan, you understand?”

“Okay. But this is taking a funny bounce, the way she’s coming on to Ace, pretending to have drinking problem, marriage problems. Point is, they are definitely here.”

As the Mole listened, his eyes traveled across the deserted truck stop and fixed on the word CLOSED written in soap on the empty diner windows. Closed. Out of business. The end. Now they would be out of business if he didn’t act.

“We’ll see how it goes tonight,” the Mole said.

“You’re taking a big risk, cousin.”

“We’re after a big jackpot. You just get our friend out of there.”

“It won’t be easy. We’ve created some kind of monster. He’s getting harder to control. We might have to put him down and let it all go.”

“No. We’re almost there. Stick to the plan. We’ll get rid of him when it’s all over,” the Mole said. The calmness of his voice was at odds with the violence with which he slammed the phone down on the hook. Immediately he regretted the show of anger. The man he’d been talking to was family, a distant cousin who handled the Canadian end of the smuggling network. Now his cousin was having doubts, and the moment he decided the plan was losing its wheels, he would likely disappear back to Canada.

Shit. The Mole clenched his fists. He’d been too long out of play. His method of recruiting the American had been flawed, and now it had backfired.

Damn, it had all been so perfect.

At first, he had just agreed to smuggle Rashid’s shipment and had brought in his cousin for extra security. They’d met with Rashid to finalize the deal and lingered over coffee. Rashid revealed the depth of his background check. He knew that twenty years earlier the Mole had trained with the group that went on to hit the Marine