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Luger, but as it turned out, when he returned to the farm, the Ruger.22 proved more useful.

Homicide 101 on Cell Block D over bootleg cigarettes and contraband potato hooch. A.22 works just fine, but you gotta put the sucker right up against the poor fuck’s head you’re gonna kill. Or better, stick it in his ear and burn the body. That way, nobody’s gonna know the body has a bullet in it ’cause the round won’t exit the skull.

Like a TV show beamed in from a satellite on the dark side of the moon. Stuck way off the menu past the music channels, the auctions and the religious nuts. Always ran in the back of his mind. Way back.

He could watch it if he chose.

Not his mom and dad. That was more like fate. Predetermined-he had just provided an extra nudge. Like the wolves again, cleaning some slime out of the gene pool.

The rule certainly applied to his cousins, who were filthy people. Untidy in their morals and their housekeeping. Preying on their own kids. Fucking scum.

The day Marci Sweitz got poisoned, he saw a way to solve his biggest problem, them snooping around his shop. Not that much different from taking out the trash for Jimmy to pick up. Clean up the neighborhood. Shot them fast coming into the stinking house. Herded them into the bathroom to control them and popped them all carefully in the throat. Multiple times with the Ruger.22. Soft tissue bleeder wounds, taking care to avoid the bones. Soft-tissue wounds would burn away in the fire. Billie, Vern, Doug, and Sandy last of all. Disgusting little tramp kid poisoner, down on her knees, slobbering in the spoiled food and dog crap. Begging, had this baby pacifier in her mouth; all that Ecstasy and meth had given her fits of jaw-clenching and teeth-grinding and had probably ruined her oral sex career.

“Calm down, Gator, please. Let me do you. You know how good I am.”

She was actually frantically grabbing at his belt when he put the barrel to her throat.

Swallow this, bitch.

Then he opened the propane coupling on the hot water heater in the disgusting basement, turned on the hot water full blast in the kitchen and the bathroom. Half an hour later, standing on his porch, he watched the sky light up over the tree line.

The world could only improve when you stuffed all that walking garbage in a plastic bag.

The howls rose in their usual spooky intensity, toying with the short hairs on his neck. At this point the wolf logic hit the unresolved contradiction of his life. His contribution to upping the mental hygiene had amounted to killing off Bodines, his own family.

That left Cassie. And him.

Got him thinking how there’s wolves and there’s wolves, like the alpha wolves who cull the pack.

He had watched Broker chopping wood in back of his house that first day. But he’d only seen him up close once. Fast but close, going past him on the ski trail. But he got a good look at the man’s severe agate eyes under those shaggy eyebrows. Thinking back on it now, Broker looked sort of like a wolf.

To hear Sheryl tell it, this Shank fella was a real pro. Looks like they were going to find out.

Gator looked up at the dark wall of nimbostratus clouds coming in low-snow clouds. He shook off the chill, dumped his coffee, walked to the house, went inside, and shut the door tightly against the baying of the hunting pack. Dumb, thinking like this.

He jumped when the wall phone rang in the kitchen. Approached it tentatively. Picked it up and heard Barnie Sheffeld’s gritty voice. Barnie had the antique Case on display at his implement showroom in Bemidji.

“Thought you might want to know,” Barney said. “Got a buyer for that Case. When it’s all wrapped up, you be looking at eighteen thousand, how’s that.”

“Hey, Barnie, that’s great,” Gator said, grinning.

After a few more pleasantries they ended the call, and Gator paced the cramped kitchen. It was like a sign.

Like-after all the planning and hard work, he and Sheryl were going to succeed. He was dreaming barefoot, sand between his toes. Boat engines would be cleaner than country tractors. Surf and sun. No more skinning his knuckles in a freezing junkyard, looking for parts. He’d take his time. Put together his own boat. An island runner. Things to learn, navigation, charts…

Never seen the ocean. Just Lake Superior.

Damn. He cocked his head and imagined a gruff shadowy gremlin god for grease monkeys and dope-dealing jailbirds who rewarded hard work.

Imagined this crafty demon looking up from counting his money. Imagined him smiling.

Chapter Thirty-one

Sheryl spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon smoking, watching daytime TV. And watching the phone. She imagined Gator pacing in his shop, watching his phone. No sense talking about what they didn’t know. Especially since it would involve signaling on his pager with a phony number, which would send him on a half-hour drive to the pay phone at the grocery store. So she didn’t make the call. Finally, at one-thirty in the afternoon, her phone rang.

“Country Buffet, in Woodbury, that mall off Valley Creek Road and 494, you know it?” said a calm voice without introduction. She knew the restaurant…

…and the voice.

“It’s a dump,” she said.

“Correct, dress according. Wear a Vikings sweatshirt. Say in an hour. Two-thirty.”

Jesus. It was moving fast. “I’ll be there.” The call ended. Sheryl was impressed. That was fast. Which meant Werky’s “investigator,” Simon Hanky, was on the job. Simon wound up going by his first initial. There was a word in poetry, onimana something. Like when a words sound like the thing it describes. That was him to a T.

Drop the Y.S. Hanky. Then drop the Y.

Shank did some time for manslaughter after Werky pleaded him down from second degree for killing his ex- wife’s boyfriend. In the joint, Danny’s organization was impressed by his icy focus and recruited him after he decimated a bunch of Mexicans in the showers.

He had matured in prison and never killed in hot blood again. Now he only operated with methodical planning. Some people were into beginnings, and some people like to stretch out the middle. Shank was an expert on endings.

He killed people.

This corkscrew sensation squirmed through Sheryl’s chest. Old tapes. She had been around a lot of dangerous men in her life, and most of them had made her nervous, mainly because they were unpredictable and had poor impulse control. Shank had zero impulses, barely a pulse.

Wow.

Shit, man, something must have clicked for them to trot out the Shank.

At two-thirty sharp, Sheryl, face washed clean of makeup, hair gathered in a ponytail, stood at the check-in line at the Country Buffet chewing Juicy Fruit. She wore a pair of faded Levi’s, a brand-new, itchy purple Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt, scuffed tennies, and a cheap Wal-Mart wind jacket. Some Spanish was being spoken in the line, several gangs of Mexican laborers coming in for all-you-can-eat-a grotesque gallery of obese flesh fighting a losing battle against gravity. On top of which, excessive meat was apparently difficult to wash; the place smelled like an elephant house. Should hose them down, she was thinking when she heard the familiar voice behind her, in a loud whisper: “Hey, Sheryl Mott, long time no see.”

She turned and saw Shank, icy smooth, standing behind her. Sinewy, six feet tall; he had white-blond polar bear hair and eyebrows and startlingly pale blue eyes. They’d been an item briefly, when she returned from Seattle, just before she quit cooking for Danny’s crew and took up her waitress career.

The smooth pigment of his face avoided the sun and reminded her of the texture of mushrooms under cellophane in the produce section. He wore busted-out denim work duds and beat-up steel-toed boots to fit in with