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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 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