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thermals. Nina mentioned that she and Kit had bumped into Teddy Klumpe and his mother when they were shopping.

“How’d that go?” Broker asked, momentarily snapping out of his glide.

“It was icky,” Kit said. “Mom was so nice to her.”

Nina shrugged. “She’s one uptight lady, so yeah, I made nice. Bought the kid a T-shirt to replace the one that got bloodied up-”

“When he started a fight, and I got suspended. It was very icky, Dad,” Kit said emphatically.

Broker grinned as Nina and Kit went back and forth on the etiquette of the meeting. The waitress cleared their plates, and Broker asked for the dessert menu.

Nina was trying to explain to an eight-year-old the difference between necessary and unnecessary conflict. Kit scowled, furrowing her brow, looked to her dad for assistance.

Broker made a stab. “Remember our little talk about laws of human nature?”

Kit swelled her eyes. “Are we gonna throw more rocks in the air? Oh, boy.”

Nina masked her laugh with her hand.

“Well,” Broker said, “another basic law is there’s two kinds of people-”

“Yeah,” Kit said, “there’s girls and there’s fat creepy boys like Teddy-”

“Close. More like there’s people who like themselves and people who don’t like themselves. I don’t think Teddy likes who he is. See, it’s important to know the difference. Because the people who aren’t comfortable in their skins make you miserable.”

By way of response, Kit held up her bunny, holding its stubby arms over its ears. Broker turned to Nina and asked, “Whatta you think?”

“I think I’ll have the German chocolate cake and ice cream,” Nina said, suppressing a snicker.

“I give.” Broker tossed up his arms. The waitress returned and he ordered German chocolate layer cake and ice cream all around.

A little later, as they drove back to the small house on the lake, he found himself sneaking looks at Nina and pondering his glib, simple cliche: What goes up must come down.

Broker built a fire in the Franklin stove, and they played two rounds of Sequence, a board game Kit liked, on the kitchen table. Kit won the first game.

“Don’t pull your punches,” Broker hectored Nina as he reshuffled the cards and they sorted the plastic chips.

“Hey, I didn’t,” Nina said, a little testy.

“Mom doesn’t like to lose,” Kit said.

Kit won the second game and yawned. Haircuts, shopping, dinner, talk of going home, dessert, and the fire had worn her out. They put her to bed and returned to the kitchen and the embers of the fire. Sat across the table from each other.

Nina took out a cigarette and instead of lighting it manipulated it in the fingers of her right hand, like a prop in a dexterity exercise. Finally she set the cigarette vertical on the table, balanced on its filter. Then she poked her finger and knocked it over. Looked up at him.

“You got something you want to say, say it.”

Trying to keep the mellow mood going, he shook his head. “It can wait.”

She studied him for a moment. “You’re thinking, When is she going to call the doctor at Bragg, huh.”

“I guess,” Broker said. There it is.

“Pretty soon,” she said with a sliver of the old steel in her voice. “And then we’ll have a long-overdue talk. You and me.” She grimaced ever so slightly, looked away, and picked up the cigarette, started out of reflex to put it in her lips.

Broker felt the tiny slippage in the air, the day starting to slide.

But then she snapped her wrist and darted the cigarette across the table into the glowing coals in the stove. “You know,” she said, giving him that sidelong glance, “I wouldn’t blush if you wanted to fool around again tonight. Unless Griffin snapped your dick string lifting those weights this morning…”

Chapter Forty

Because Gator generally didn’t trust excitement, he compensated for his giddy Saturday and weird brush with Griffin by working all day on the Moline. Important to keep the shop running normally. Never tell when Mitch Schiebel, his parole officer, might stop by for a spot-check and cup of coffee. By sunset he’d finished replacing the clutch and flywheel.

He put away his tools and washed up. Sheryl had not left a message. And he was all right with that. She wouldn’t talk to the gang until tomorrow morning. Why waste a drive to Perry’s pay phone just to be anxious together?

Just after he turned the display light on his show tractor the phone rang. It was Cassie.

“Gator, you think you could drop by again?”

“Uh-uh, I’m through making house calls,” he said in an idle voice as he watched the black kitty jump up on the office desk and stretch.

“C’mon, just one more time, honest,” she said.

Gator reached out his hand and stroked the cat’s glossy fur, feinted with his finger, sending the cat back on its haunches, paws up; then he darted in the finger, tickled it on the chest. “You want something, you’re going to have to come get it,” he said into the phone.

“I thought you didn’t want me to come out there?”

Gator lifted the cat and let it pour from his hand, this smooth effortless motion. “Maybe I changed my mind,” he said.

“I gotta think about that,” Cassie said.

“You do that,” Gator said. Then he ended the call. For a moment he had a fleeting sensation of what it might feel like to get everything you want.

He pushed up off his chair and, feeling more balanced after a day spent with his tools, took some coffee, put on his coat, went out through the paint room door, and walked through the old machines in back of the shop. Looking at the sky filling in with dark clouds, he made a mental note to check the Weather Channel; see exactly what was behind the front taking shape to the northwest.

As the light left the sky, an afterglow seemed to cling to the snow cover on the fields in back of the shop. The snow cover had melted then frozen again, forming a tough crust. Faintly, then louder, he heard a swelling chorus of howls. The pack was active. Wolves could run across the crusted snow in which the deer foundered. Made them easy targets.

From the accelerating howls, he assumed they had located such a deer; a straggler, injured or just weak.

People in town had come to associate him with the wolves, because he lived alone out here. Even attributing to him some of the animals’ wildness.

He did see one comparison.

The meth they cooked would prowl along the margins of the population, selecting out the dumb, the naive, the weak. Like the wolves, it would devour the strays who, ensnared in their addiction, could no longer run.

Fact was, he would be providing a social service. In producing the drug, he would be culling out the weak and infirm. By killing them, he was improving the quality of the herd.

The wind gusted, and he turned up his collar and sipped the coffee. Hearing the howls and thinking of Sheryl negotiating with a killer brought to mind his own kills.

In addition to the tractors, his dad had left a locker containing a rifle, a shotgun, and three pistols. After his folks “died,” he greased the weapons up with Cosmoline and wrapped them in oilcloth; a souvenir German Luger, two small.22-caliber pistols, a.12-gauge shotgun, and a 30–06 deer gun. Took them into the tractor grave yard and hid them in the chassis of an ancient Deere. They stayed there for years. As a kid he favored the