tractor?
He drove south and west on back roads until he hit State 95, which he took until it T-boned into 61. He turned south, and soon he was driving across the bridge over Mississippi at Hastings. He continued through town and turned left on Highway 361, following the red-and-blue toucan on the sign for the Treasure Island Casino that pointed the way with lifted wing.
J. T. thinking. Broker had been one of the least likely cops he’d ever partnered with. Harry Cantrell was the other. Now he was on his way to find Cantrell. Saturday morning was Cantrell’s Treasure Island day.
He made the last turn and headed down the road toward the casino. Off to the right he saw the twin gray domes of the Excel Prairie Island nuclear reactors hover in the steam clouds over the scratchy bare trees. The sight of those reactors reminded him that he and most of the people in the state owed Broker a debt of thanks.
Last July there had been an explosion at the plant.
A construction accident, they said.
Nine people had died. Dozens were injured. The official story descended from Washington and walled off the incident like a solid steel trap; no way in or out. So far the press was unable to dent the official story that a fuel tanker had ruptured, flooding a ditch with gasoline, that a spark ignited a truck full of oxygen and acetylene. The explosion had rocked the plant and cracked the spent-fuel pool. But no significant radiation had been released, the governor had insisted. The state quietly provided doses of potassium iodide for thousands of citizens in a ten-mile radius as a precaution against possible low levels of radiation poisoning. Now a lot of people who’d taken the iodide were looking at their kids closely every morning at the breakfast table.
Broker had been in the blast area when the explosion occurred, with a Delta colonel. They had diverted an explosive device away, from the cooling pool. It had been a near thing. Broker survived. The colonel did not. Nina had been thirty miles away fighting for her life against George Khari, who’d infiltrated the explosives into the plant.
Khari had links to Al Qaeda. Nina killed him, tearing her right shoulder to shreds in the fight.
J. T. took his pipe from the pocket of his Carhartt jacket and nibbled at the stem. You think you know a guy, how much he can take-all his life Broker had loved the shadows. Saw Gary Cooper in
J. T. shook his head.
After Prairie Island, Broker and Nina shrugged it off. Just another op. But people who knew them, people like J. T., observed that they were different.
They should have seen God in the inferno of that day.
Just too damn dumb and proud and stubborn-both of them-to admit the damage they’d taken below the waterline. It hit Nina first.
J. T.’s eyes drifted to the northern sky, socked in with brooding gray clouds. They were up north now, hiding out in a backwoods retreat. Healing up, playing house, pretending they were all right…
Griffin was looking out for them. J. T. shook his head again. Jesus, Griffin, the reformed angel of death, playing nanny, hovering over them. Except something had happened, and now Griffin needed a favor.
So, to do this right he’d take another old partner along on this day’s work.
J. T. shook his head one last time.
Cantrell. Cleaned up now, after Broker hauled him kicking and screaming into treatment. He’d retired from Washington County after he sobered up. A pure, unreconstructed redneck son of a bitch. Cantrell didn’t answer his phone. Made himself hard to find. You had to track him down and get him face-to-face.
So here was J. T. driving to a fucking casino, which he considered a monument to stupidity, on a dreary late March morning.
He parked in the mostly vacant lot and went into the pink pleasure palace. As a favor to his wife he was trying to give up smoking his pipe, and now the cloud of cigarette smoke fluttered against his nose like the smudged wings of tiny tempting devils.
Seniors mostly. Old guys with wars on their hats. One of them shuffled by, with a silhouette of a World War II destroyer on his baseball cap; dragging his oxygen tank, transparent tubes running to his nose.
J. T. checked the blackjack tables. Cantrell was primarily a blackjack addict. No Cantrell. Then he walked into the high stakes slots alcove. Cantrell knew you couldn’t beat the slots. But he believed you could surprise the slots. Sneak up on them at random moments.
Cantrell believed you could get lucky.
J. T. spotted him slouched in jeans, a black T-shirt, and a leather jacket on a high-backed chair like a flesh- and-blood extension grafted onto the machine. Tapping the spin button, recirculating the energy between himself and the slot.
Cantrell didn’t age. In his late fifties, Minnesota by way of New Orleans PD, his face was still Elvis smooth and ruddy, his sleek dark hair still combed in a fifties duck-ass hairdo. To J. T., who considered himself a mature black man, the rebel twinkle in Cantrell’s eyes had always raised the worst abiding ghosts of Dixie.
“You lost, J. T.?” Cantrell asked casually without moving his eyes off the rolling sevens on the machine screen. Always had great peripheral vision.
“You don’t answer your phone,” J. T. said. “We got a mandatory formation.”
Cantrell nudged the spin button again. Scattered sevens. Not lining up. “We do?”
“Griffin called me last night. He needs a favor.”
Cantrell turned in his chair and squinted through the smoke coming off the Pall Mall straight in his lips. “And?”
“I got a feeling it involves our buddy, the unsung hero.”
“Broker, really?” Cantrell removed the cigarette from his lips. “I thought he was bulletproof. So whattaya got?”
“A name. Some chick. We got to check her out.”
Cantrell shook off his casual slouch, straightened up his back. “Let’s go.”
A few minutes later they were breathing the cold fresh air in front of J. T.’s truck. Cantrell looked in the direction of the two gray nuclear reactors poking above the trees. “Fuckin’ Broker,” he said. “You know, I ran into Debbie Hall last week.”
J. T. grunted. Debbie was now a lieutenant in St. Paul homicide. Years back, when she’d been a profane fireball, she and Broker’d had this explosive street romance.
“She confessed she’d made a pass at him, couple years ago when he and Nina were separated. She put it out there, and know what he said? He said, ‘If I wanna play games, I’ll go to a fuckin’ casino.’” Cantrell shook his head.
J. T. handed Cantrell a sheet of fax paper. A one-paragraph criminal history on Sheryl Mott from the St. Paul gang task force. “Griffin had a license number. I ran a DL, talked to Tommy in the gang task force,” J. T. said.
“Known affiliation with OMG. Suspected of transporting narcotics into Stillwater Prison…no charge…” Cantrell looked up. “Not much here. You talk to Dave at Corrections about the prison stuff?”
J. T. gave him a slow smile and shook his head. “I thought maybe…Rodney.”
Cantrell shrugged. “Hell, you don’t need me to talk to a piece-of-shit snitch like Rodney.”
“Wrong. I always…sort of scared Rodney. He’s poop-hispants terrified of you.”
“Yeah.” A rakish grin spread across Cantrell’s face. “Good ol’ Rodney,” he said with slow glee.
Cantrell followed J. T. back through Hastings, then up 95 to Stillwater, where he left his Outback sedan in the Cub parking lot. He got in J. T.’s car, and they drove a few blocks and pulled into the parking lot at the River Valley Athletic Club.
“Why here?” Cantrell asked.
“His scumbag body is a temple, remember,” J. T. said. “He works out here every Saturday morning, according to Lymon at Washington County. Check this: Lymon says Rodney is trying to go straight, they got him working full- time in a health food store-”
“You can sell a lot of dope in cute little bottles in health food stores,” Cantrell said.
“Whatever. Okay. We wait. He’s still driving that red Trans-Am.”
As they waited, Cantrell watched the midmorning female traffic alight from their SUVs and saunter into the club.
