out. I seen that once.” He shook his head, curling his upper lip in a ghastly smile, showing an elongated canine. Turned to her.
“Joey said when you roast a pig, you wrap it in burlap, then truss it up with barbed wire. Wet down the burlap, that seals in the flavor or something. Put it in the coals, put more coals on top. Put in a piece of corrugated tin to hold the heat, then fill the pit with dirt, let it cook for ten, twelve hours…”
Sheryl nodded her head along with his conversation, careful not to bring up the lab plan. Don’t rush it. Let it develop. Be attentive, a good listener.
“Yeah, well,” Shank said. “We’re gonna have our own pig roast.”
They had rounded the Minneapolis metro and were coming up on west 94; the roadside clutter starting to fade, the land unrolling brown and tired. Snow dusting the ditches and fields.
Sheryl removed her cell from her purse. “Should make my call,” she said.
“Go ahead. We’ll grab a Perkins in half an hour. Grease down. They’ll have a pay phone.”
Half an hour later, Gator stood stamping his boots in the phone booth outside Perry’s Grocery, watching the Monday-morning shoppers wheel their carts into the parking lot. The wind had picked up ice-pick sharp, chipping flecks of stinging snow off the looming iceberg clouds.
The excitement was heavy and compact in his chest, purring like a motor. When the phone rang, he took a moment to compose his voice. “Yes?”
“Hi, hon, thought I’d give you a heads-up. Shank and I are on the road. We should roll into the farm about one this afternoon. We’re driving a gray Nissan Maxima.”
Listening to her saying this in a normal voice, like it was routine, riding up north with a killer. “That car’s gonna stick out like a sore thumb up here,” Gator said in a calm controlled voice. Behind his voice the motor in his chest was smoking.
“We’ll come in careful on County Z.”
“Grab some local stations on the AM, we got some weather.”
“Maybe you should get the garage door open,” Sheryl said.
“Will do. Ah, anything else?” He wondered if Shank was monitoring her conversation, standing there.
“Let’s just not get ahead of ourselves. Take it one step at a time, okay?”
“I hear you. I’ll get ready.”
Sheryl hung up the pay phone in the lobby of a Country Kitchen and waited while Shank paid for breakfast at the cashier’s counter. When they got back in the car and pulled back on the road, Shank just asked, “Everything all right?”
Sheryl nodded. “Told him we’d be in around one in the afternoon. He said to check the local stations when we get up north. Could be a storm coming down.”
“Good idea.” Then, after a pause, “Not to pry, but what’s he like, Gator? I asked around, and he kept a low profile in the joint. Just a few pickups in the visitors’ room to keep our guys off his back.”
Sheryl thought about it. “He’s a real hard worker, crackerjack mechanic.” Thought some more. “A compulsive planner.”
“A mechanic would be, they know how things fit together,” Shank said.
They settled in for the long middle of the drive. Sheryl thumbed through the photos again, mentioned how times had changed. People weren’t hanging it out on the street in leathers, tooling around on fat boys, like they used to.
Traveling north on 371, coming up on Little Falls, they started talking about
“I don’t buy the bit about a boss going to a shrink,” Shank said. “That’s contrived. I think they do that to suck in a wider audience. None of them ever known a gangster, but lots of them go to shrinks.”
“You got a point,” Sheryl said. After a moment, she wondered out loud, “How do you think it’s going to end?”
“The way I see it, there’s two possibilities; you got a war brewing with Johnny Sack in New York, then you got the family angle cooking underneath.”
“Yeah, Carmela and her thing with Furio. That ain’t over. He’ll be back, Furio will,” Sheryl said seriously.
“True. Furio is a stand-up guy,” Shank said.
“So Furio returns and has a showdown with Tony over Carmela,” Sheryl said.
Shank smiled and wagged his finger at her. “No offense, but you’re thinking like a woman. Making it all romantic-”
“Hey,” Sheryl countered. “TV shows are like everything else. They’re a business, and I bet most of the viewers are women.”
“Granted, they could pussy out and do it that way,” Shank said. “But I think, ah, what would be more true to life is Tony gets caught making this big choice between his family and the mob.”
“How do you mean?” Sheryl said.
“Well, what’s he going to do if push comes to shove? Sacrifice his family to save his business? Al Pacino would do that, right. He had Fredo killed in
Sheryl considered it, cocking her head.
Shank continued. “So Tony makes a deal with the feds, rats out all his buddies, and goes into Witness Protection. There he is, living in a crummy track house in Utah, driving a garbage truck. Carmela is shopping at Wal-Mart. The End.”
“Jesus, that’s grim,” Sheryl said.
“Yeah. I kinda like it,” Shank said.
Sheryl took out her Merits and her lighter. “You mind?” she asked.
Shank shrugged, hit the window controls, zipped the front seat windows down an inch, and turned up the heater.
Sheryl lit the cigarette and blew a stream of smoke into the icy draft. After a minute or so she turned and caught Shank watching her.
“What?” she asked.
He shrugged affably, turned back to watching the road. “Shouldn’t smoke those things,” he said. “They’re bad for your health.”
Chapter Forty-two
Monday morning was another first. Nina drove Kit to school. Not just to drop her off, but to go in and talk to the principal about gathering Kit’s records and transferring them back to the elementary school in Stillwater. Maybe sit in on some of her classes. Today would be Kit’s last school day in Glacier Falls. Nina had set the tone at Sunday breakfast when she casually suggested that Broker should call Dooley.
He’d called Dooley and told him to get the duplex straightened up and turn up the heat; they be arriving Wednesday afternoon. That gave them Tuesday to finish packing and clean Griffin’s place. He called Griffin, explained their plans, and they agreed to have supper Tuesday night at the Anglers to settle up and say good- bye.
Now it was almost one-thirty in the afternoon, and Nina hadn’t returned yet. Broker stood in the garage studying the stack of boxes and suitcases that he, Nina, and Kit has assembled on Sunday. Seeing them, he remembered the tense days last January, the rushed packing. He raised his right hand to his throat, felt the key to the gun locker on the leather thong. The guns would be the last thing he’d load in the Tundra.
His cell rang. It was Griffin.
“You think I could get a little more work out of you, before you split?” Griffin said.
“What’s up?”
“My truck’s still in the shop. And my wood trailer’s got a broken axle. Teedo’s home with a sick kid, so I don’t have his truck. I need a couple loads of oak carted over here at the lodge. Want to get it under a tarp before this big
