So this was hatred. Nothing clean about it. Just visceral dirty rage. A hunk of rotten meat stuck in his throat.
Training and experience fell away. Fucker had been in the house, had taken Kit’s stuffed animal from her bed. He backtracked through the day.
Ambush alert now, he half crouched, shotgun at port arms, and listened carefully.
Slowly he rotated his head and scanned the surrounding darkness. Listened again. Nothing but the soft wind rubbing the dry branches together, the heave and murmur of the pines. After another ten minutes of listening, he decided he was out here all alone. He removed a tinfoil pouch of cigars from his pocket, selected one of the rough wraps, took out his lighter, and lit the cigar. Then he squatted, Vietnamese peasant fashion, by the side of the trail, smoked, and thought about it as it began to snow again.
Jimmy Klumpe’s face, this morning in the cab of the garbage truck, on the sidewalk in front of the school yesterday morning-his nutty wife yelling from the truck. Striking back against him and Kit. Had to be.
Broker shifted his weight, drew on the cigar, and studied the pole stuck carefully in the snow. At the exact intersection of two trails.
Like a signal. A warning. Back off.
He flicked the coal from the cigar, shredded the rolled leaves, and tossed them aside. The snow sailed down like forgetfulness, blurring the edges of the tracks in the woods, filling them in. He took one more look at the vertical ski pole. Leave it undisturbed for now. Make sure Kit didn’t come here. He turned and started back to the house. Had to think this through. Maybe call Griffin. Bring him out to see this.
But not tonight.
Broker came around the garage and saw Nina sitting on the back steps before she saw him. He quickly rerouted around the garage, went in the front door, entered the kitchen, went into the living room, and tucked the shotgun in the couch cushions, out of sight. Then he retraced his steps back around the garage and approached her. It was a giant step, her coming outside at night. She was layered in fleece, boots, and a parka. Smoking. Holding a cup of coffee. She had removed the tangled braids from her hair.
“I saw your light in the woods. Any luck?” she asked.
He shook his head. “If the cat isn’t back by morning, then it doesn’t look good.” He nodded up toward the bedroom. “How’s she doing?”
“Whatever else we did, we didn’t make a neurotic kid. Nothing gets between her and her sleep.” Nina shifted, making room for him on the deck cushion she was sitting on. He sat next to her. She produced a steaming thermal cup from her lap and passed it.
The fresh hot coffee would keep him up. He only took a sip. He needed to sleep. See it fresh in the morning. He handed the cup back. Instinctively, they scooted closer together to keep warm. They watched the snow stream down. Every dizzy snowflake could have been a thought unsaid between them, building into a slow storm of unspoken words. She took out her American Spirits, cupped her hand, and thumbed her lighter. She inhaled, exhaled. He put his arm around her.
The snow came faster, no longer serene. Like confusion.
Finally Broker asked, “Where is it?”
Nina looked up to him with calm eyes. “In the woods. It stays mainly in the woods now.”
They’d evolved a code to simplify the overwrought discussion; back in December, they’d talked it to death, and all the talk had just worn them out. So they settled on
Progress. Two months ago, when he’d asked where
He tightened his arm around her shoulders, and stared into the woods where’d he’d just been. Once she’d had strong shoulders and they would be strong again. But right now they didn’t need the extra weight.
Broker pulled his eyes away from everything that could be pacing back and forth in the woods tonight and said, “C’mon, let’s go inside.”
She cocked her head, and he saw a flicker of her old smile; tough, smart, wry. “Nah, I’ll sit awhile, finish my smoke.”
His forehead bunched in concern, but also a ray of hope. “You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Take off.”
He rose to his feet. “You’ll stay right here on the porch, right?”
Nina shrugged, then turned back to her meditation on the woods. Going into the kitchen and shutting the door behind him, Broker glanced back, at her hunched hooded figure sitting alone on the deck.
First time in three months she’d stayed outside the house alone at night.
Nina Pryce tried to stare down the snow. It kept coming at her eyes, like pinwheeling hooks of panic. Pulling at her. Only a fragile connection with the solidity of the deck under her butt kept her from launching weightless into the swirling night.
One step removed from the snare of deep space…
She dragged on the Spirit, exhaled, and wished she’d taken a bullet on her last assignment, with Delta Team Northern Route. She’d come back from a bullet before. Instead she’d dropped her guard for a moment and had lost two buddies, the use of her right arm…
And her mind.
Now, after eight months of unrestricted sick leave, she faced the dark woods without illusions.
When she was a little girl, she had sat on her grandfather’s lap and listened while he tried to explain living through the Great Depression. How he had once stood in an unemployment line in Chicago, rubbing his last two dirty copper pennies together in his pocket.
All the energy she could muster came from the friction of rubbing her last two pennies together. Broker and Kit. Last two pennies.
Nina suffered alone, without God. She’d operated in some of the great shitholes of the world and came away an unambiguous Hobbesian; man was a devious tool-making animal who was kept in line mainly through fear of his own violent death.
She had been part of a thin green line that made that fear palpable to Iraqis, Serbs, Filipino guerrillas, and Al Qaeda operatives.
Even in the depths of clinical depression, her mind was practical. It was all about energy. As a serious athlete in her youth, she understood that competition was psychologically anchored, mind over matter. Her body had been the testing ground in which she learned to function through pain. In the Army she’d upped the ante and performed through fear and even dread. When it got rough, she’d always relied on an unmovable part of herself to brace on. She had always taken her mind for granted. She’d absolutely believed that her willpower would still be kicking an hour after she was dead.
But then, a week before last Christmas, the source of her will, her mind itself, had failed. At the first sign of panic, she reached down deep to brace and fight back. To her immense surprise, the solid baseline gave way, and she catapulted off into an internal void. With nowhere to plant the fulcrum of her will, there was no way to direct her energy. She lost gravity. She lost up and down.
Worst time of her life.
Worse than the confused sandstorm fight in the dunes during Desert Storm, when she became the first woman in the history of the U.S. Army to be awarded the Combat Infantry Badge. Worse even than the death struggle with George Khari last July, when she wrecked her shoulder.
Finally, she was feeling a little traction. Maybe it was finally getting out of her own head long enough to see Broker struggling alone, nursing her, trying to take care of Kit. Something.
She’d earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and three Purple Hearts. And on this chilly evening she was making the scariest night jump of her life by merely sitting alone and facing the dark.
