A screened window over the bed was partly open, letting in patches of light and shadow. She heard the thrum of tires, road sounds. Traffic passing.
She tried to look around the compartment. She could see where a sink, counter, and partitions had been removed. It had been stripped and now just contained a TV bolted to a shelf over the bed, a VCR stacked on top. A small chemical toilet sat next to the curtain. Then her eyes stopped on the video camera set on a tripod in the corner with a cable looped around it. The cable ended in some kind of remote device.
The vehicle went over a bump. The video camera jiggled, came to life. The cheap tripod legs rattled on the floor, taking baby robot steps. Toward the bed. And her intuition made a few fast leaps.
Nina understood that the camera was for her.
No preparation for this. But she found it familiar. Down deep, she had been braced for something like this all her life. Every woman carried the nightmare in her blood salts: you wake up bound, powerless in the hands of a disturbed, angry man. Usually it happens to other people and you read about it in the newspaper. You see it on TV.
Not this time.
Furious, she reared against the restraints, and succeeded only in bruising her wrists. She collapsed back on the bed.
As best she was able to determine her clothing had not been torn, didn’t seem to have been removed. The smear of blood on her chest was dry and flaking around the edges, still damp in the center. Some time had passed.
The only pain she felt was in her right hand, and she carefully-selectively-worked back. Dale Shuster had stepped on her hand when she went after Jane’s pistol.
She had hardened herself to accept rape as part of capture, like a beating. In theory. But this was more. She was lashed down to something in motion. She swallowed and tried to get her breathing under control.
She was caught up in the mechanics of the thing she had been looking for. Taken. For a reason.
Not by Wahhabi fanatics out of the Afghan camps. But by Dale Shuster. And Gordy’s “funny fucking Indian,” Pinto Joe.
Then the road noise lessened and she could feel the vehicle slowing, the tires hitting gravel. Turning. The sunlight coming in through the window dappled down to shade.
Motion ceased. The sound of traffic had disappeared. She could almost hear the heat buzzing on the green griddle of fields. Bird-song. The idling motor vibrated under her, a warm steel kitten. She heard a body moving beyond the curtain. Voices.
“Goddammit, Dale, not now!” An impatient voice she could not place.
“Take it easy, we got lots of time,” Dale said. Then a hand swept the material aside and Dale entered the compartment. His bulk made the space where she was smaller, stole the light. He held a twenty-ounce plastic bottle of Coke in one hand and the remnants of a doughnut in the other. Nina could see grains of sugar on his thick lips, see his tongue dart out and lick them off.
He smiled. “How about I show you a movie?”
Chapter Thirty-six
Broker stood next to the ambulance, listening to the radio traffic wind down. The fields were quiet again, the sirens stilled. Joe Reed had resisted arrest and had been killed in a shootout on the border. He watched the EMT’s face go from mortal anxiety to relief as she talked on the radio. They assured her the state cop was all right.
“Her husband,” Vinson told Broker.
A second deputy arrived at the Missile Park in a Toyota Tundra. He’d obviously been summoned in a hurry because he wore a uniform shirt tucked into his jeans. He huddled briefly with the regular deputy and the EMTs. Then he introduced himself to Broker as Marly Druer, part-time help called in special for today.
Druer was brief: “Sheriff says you were a cop so there’s no need to baby around with you. There was a nine-one-one call from Dale Shuster, he said Joe Reed shot the two in there. Then it gets confusing. Maybe Dale was taken hostage. They been going over the tape and it sounds like Dale said another woman was involved. That could be your wife. So, first off, where was your wife this morning?”
“She left a note at the motel that she was going out for coffee with Jane.” Almost ashamed, Broker added, “I was asleep.” He pointed to the bar’s desolate brick facade. “I think Jane’s in there.”
“It’s Jane,” said Vinson. “I met her when they came to town.”
“Neither of them were in Joe’s van when they caught up with him,” Druer said. “Could be your wife is missing in this. So the sheriff wants to talk to you. Leave your truck here. You can ride with me.”
A few moments later, Broker realized he had thought
“Okay,” he said finally. He took a drag of the cigarette as he armored himself with control. The shock whirled his guts to the brink of nausea, edged back. “But I need a minute to call my folks in Minnesota. I sent my kid back there and she’s expecting her mother to call her this morning.”
“Ah, jeez. Yeah, sure,” Druer said.
Broker walked off a few paces and took out his cell phone, pulled the card with Holly’s number from his wallet. Punched it in and hit send.
“Colonel Woods.”
“Holly?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“Broker.”
“C’mon, I don’t need any more shit. I’m up to my ass in alligators here…”
“You sure are. Jane’s dead and Nina is missing. It ain’t over, Holly.”
“Goddamn…How?”
“Shootout in that bar. Ace Shuster is dead. This Indian dude who worked for his brother is the prime suspect. It’s possible he took Nina and Ace’s brother with him when he made a run for it. They mouse-trapped him, killed him in a gunfight trying to run the border. And Nina and the brother are nowhere in sight. Listen. The local cops are all over me. I’d stay out of sight if I were you. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
“Broker.”
“Yeah, Holly.”
“She’s as tough as they come. If there’s any…”
Broker ended the call, cutting Holly off. He didn’t need coaching about what was going on. He put his cell away, got in Druer’s truck, and worked hard at resisting gravity. Let it float. He stared straight ahead, tried to slip the first wave of shock as if it were a punch.
But the jolt was maybe just what he needed to knock him a little off kilter. To see this morning’s events and everything that had happened from a slightly skewed angle. So he stared right into it. All of it. He stared and he stared.
And sonofabitch! There it was.
They parked in back of the county building and went to the sheriff’s office, buzzed in through dispatch, and waited. A few minutes later, Sheriff Wales came in, flushed. Dark patches of sweat staining the underarms of his uniform. From the knees down he was damp and smeared with crushed, tiny yellow flowers that smelled faintly like last night’s canola fields.
He motioned Broker through the corridors to his office, where they faced off. “You gonna help me on this, Broker?” Wales said. “Now that we got dead people lying all around.”
“You know about the fiasco last night?”
Wales nodded. “It’s all over town. But I can’t figure why they’d go after Ace.”
“Five days ago Nina’s bunch cracked an Al Qaeda finance officer in Detroit. He gave up a smuggling operation. He suggested they were bringing a nuclear device in through your county and, that they were dealing
