Vapor Trail (7 page)

He’d been struck behind
the right ear, and the pain didn’t register until after his chest hit the decking. His breath went out in a whoosh, and he struggled to take in another breath as Harry’s knee slammed between his shoulder blades, driving him down hard.

Now he felt the pain, and he was amazed at the flimsy clichés that formed in his numb mind in the first seconds.

This is it.

This is so dumb.

Finally his mind got traction:
Fight . . .

But Harry wasn’t wobbling or slurring his words now. His trained hands efficiently removed Mouse’s cuffs and the pistol from Broker’s belt. Before Broker could react, metal circled his left wrist, and he saw Harry’s hand clamp the other bracelet to a sturdy upright strut in the deck railing. Broker tried to shake off the shock and brace to push himself up with his other hand, but Harry’s knee kept him pinned down. That’s when Harry took the badge off Broker’s belt and snaked the truck keys and the cell phone from his pocket.

The weight moved off his back, and Broker heard Harry’s shoes scrape across the deck into the house. Alone, he attempted to focus and take a breath. After he drew a few deep breaths, he raised his free right hand and felt the lump behind his right ear. His fingers came away clean. No blood. Harry had hit him with an expert stunning blow, probably with the pistol case.

It was like lying underwater in the heat; slowly, awkwardly he flailed to his knees and yanked the handcuffs against the rail. The steel rattled, but the wood did not budge.

Harry returned carrying a fifth of Johnny Walker Red Label Scotch in one hand and an ice-cold slice of last night’s pepperoni pizza in the other. He put the bottle down on the deck table and pulled a hammer from the waistband of his jeans. It wasn’t a regular carpenter’s hammer but an ugly, two-headed, short sledge. Broker recognized the type (he’d used one like it landscaping); it was heavy enough to drive pole barn spikes into railroad ties. Harry dropped the hammer on the table. Then he kicked the one remaining deck chair that had a cushion back beyond the radius of Broker’s chained reach and sat down.

He chewed some of the pizza, swallowed, and took a generous slug from the whiskey. Despite his throbbing head, Broker noticed the round white plastic thermometer hung on the wall next to the patio door. The needle was stuck at 102 degrees.
How could the guy drink the warm alcohol in this heat?
He got his answer almost immediately as he watched control suffuse back into Harry’s face and warmth trickle into his hollow eyes.

Broker didn’t know a whole lot about the pathology of alcoholism, but he suspected that Harry had progressed to a point where unintended consequences could ambush him every time he drank. Broker watched the rage and sorrow slosh back and forth in the wreckage of Harry’s eyes.

I kill you—I kill you not.

Harry studied Broker’s predicament and said, “You’re really miscast in this role, you know.”

Broker rubbed his head and said, “What did you hit me with?”

“The gun case. Didn’t hit you that hard,” Harry said.

“How miscast?” Broker said, sounding casual, but his eyes stayed fixed on that hammer.

“This dead priest isn’t your kind of thing. You’re not an investigator. You’re more the shock troop type. You go on missions after targets. That’s what John did; he sent you on a mission . . .” Harry smiled. “After me.” Harry tapped his forehead. “Old John is a pretty smart motherfucker, I’ll give him that.”

“He sent me to take you to the hospital.”

“Yeah, right.” Harry opened a palm and floated it out to broadly indicate the scene on the deck. “So why ain’t we at the hospital?”

Broker blinked several times, but nothing worked right. Harry blurred in and out; there was a white-water rush in his eardrums.

“I’ll tell you why,” Harry said, “because you and me—we got a dialogue, that’s why.”

Broker’s frustration broke through and showed when he impulsively yanked at the handcuff and only succeeded in hurting his manacled left wrist.

“You remember I asked you earlier, why didn’t you go on to become a lawyer? I mean, you’re way too smart to be a fucking cop. You never answered me,” Harry said.

Broker felt the sun beat down like a spotlight. “You know why,” he said. But his voice was hoarse, and his teeth were clamped tight.

Harry put his hand to his ear, cocked his head. “What-sa matter? Lose your voice? Louder.”

With considerable effort Broker forced himself not to say the words that were on his lips. He had been about to ask Harry what
he was going to do with him. No way he’d give the drunken bastard the satisfaction.

“Well?” Harry said.

Broker’s concentration failed, and he actually laughed because he was remembering the first line in his favorite book when he was a child: “Odysseus was never at a loss.” He’d tried to live his personal Odyssey that way. Now here he was chained and helpless, and the subject was all about loss.

He rallied and met Harry’s hot blue eyes and gave the honest answer. “I couldn’t go to law school after what happened to Diane, you know that. I had to try to . . . stop people like that.”

Harry’s face turned killing ugly as he lurched up from the chair. “Stop people?” he said incredulously. “We don’t
STOP
people. We
catch
the twisted fucks
after
they . . .” He lashed the air with clawed fingers. “I tried to
stop
somebody, and you
stopped
me.”

Harry reached over and wrapped his hand around the handle of the big hammer. He raised it slowly, and Broker could see the tendons in Harry’s arm strain with the weight. Slowly, Harry pumped the hammer in the air.

Broker had lost the fight inside where his heart broke loose in a panic gallop. He resolved to construct a box around the fear, keep it contained, keep it off his face. His mind assembled the image of his daughter’s face, and the idea was so painful that he thrust it away.

Give him nothing.

Nothing.

So Broker looked beyond Harry and pinned his eyes on the heavy foliage of two giant cottonwoods that grew along the lakeshore. He tried to locate himself in the variety of leaf and shadow, the shapes; mysteries, eternities of green . . .

“Why do you think you’re chained up there like a damn dog, huh?” Harry yelled as the hammer moved in small piston circles, gathering momentum.

Broker couldn’t keep the tree thing going. He turned back to face the hammer. “Fuck you. If you’re going to do something, do it,” he said.

Harry leaned closer. “Feel helpless, maybe? Like she did. One minute she’s safe in her kitchen, the next that sick fuck husband of hers comes through the door; the same sick fuck you and me booked into jail the night before, right? Except now he’s out, and he’s got a hammer. A hammer. You ever really think what that was like?”

Broker felt a tic of nerves pry at his face, and he wanted to tell Harry it was sadness, grief, whatever—but not fear, goddammit.

Not.

But he couldn’t control the deep soak of fear sweat that gushed from his pores. Or the rush of rapid breathing. Out of sheer animal reflex he lashed against the manacle. The indifferent steel chain rattled but held fast. Then, finally, the survivor reptile part of his brain reminded him that Harry was standing too far away to actually hit him with the hammer. Harry was carefully staying beyond Broker’s stronger reach.

“I just want you to answer me one thing,” Harry said.

Then Broker watched Harry’s clenched-teeth rage go slack. He staggered slightly and blinked several times. His nose started to bleed again. He wiped at his nose and said, “If it happened all over, would you stop me again?”

Harry straightened up and dropped the hammer to the deck. “You don’t have to answer me right now. Think about it. I thought about it a lot.” He dropped his chin to his chest, and then he rallied and his head came up and his eyes burned. He raised an accusing finger and jabbed it at Broker. “I could kill you easy.”

Breathing heavily, Harry grimaced and snapped his fingers. “Just like that. And I very well might.”

But Harry made no further move toward the hammer on the
deck. They glared at each other for several beats. Then Harry exhaled, took another pull on the bottle, and said, “Okay, listen up. John took my badge and my gun, so, just for kicks, I took your badge and your gun. Plus your keys, so I’m going to leave in your truck. You get your cell phone so we can talk. I got the number off the display.” Harry placed the cell down on the patio table well out of reach.

“Talk?” Broker almost choked on the word.

“Yeah—you and John Eisenhower’ll never catch the Saint in a million fuckin’ years.”

“Harry—I don’t know a lot about this stuff, but you could go into alcohol shock and die. You should get some help.”

“No thanks, I still ain’t got over the last time you helped me.”

Broker, who had struggled so mightily not to show fear, completely submitted to anger. Red-faced, smashing the handcuff against the unyielding redwood strut, he shouted, “Harry, you wacko, think what you’re doing!”

Harry gave a fitful misfiring laugh and said, “Save your strength and, ah, don’t go away.” He left the porch, and Broker strained to hear him moving inside the house. He heard him go down the basement stairs, then after a few minutes trudge back up and go out the front door. The door on Broker’s truck opened, then slammed shut. The front door to the house opened and closed. More sounds inside, up and down the hall.

Then Harry came back out on the deck and said, “Okay, what it is—I’m leaving the hammer so you can knock the rail apart and get out. And I saw the clipboard in the truck, with Mouse’s handwriting on it. Don’t tell Mouse what’s going on between us here, ’cause then I won’t help you.”

Broker decided to give another push. “You’re just loaded, running your mouth. You don’t know shit.”

Harry raised his hand and tapped his forehead. “Ah, psychology.
Sorry.” He held up the handcuff key. “Look—I’ll leave this in the mailbox. I’ll call you tomorrow. Meanwhile, you find out if the dead priest deserved it.”

“Deserved it?”

“Yeah, like Dolman. He deserved it.” Harry walked to the patio door, turned, and hefted the hammer. “See, if the Saint’s doing God’s work, as it were, I don’t see any reason to interfere.”

Harry extended the hammer. “This is between you and me, right?”

“You and me,” Broker said.

Harry tossed the hammer. Broker snatched it cleanly with his right hand.

Then Harry said, “Course if the priest is clean and the Saint ain’t doing God’s work, then we’ll . . . see. I ain’t really decided yet.” He reached in his front pocket, eased something out and held it in his fist, and said, “On the other hand . . .” Harry raised his closed hand palm down and opened his fingers.

The bullet clinked on the deck between Broker’s shoes. It was about the length and diameter of his ring finger. Harry turned and disappeared through the patio door.

Broker listened to Harry leave the house, get in the truck, start it, and drive away. His knuckles tightened around the slick hammer haft, dripping sweat. He drew a bead on the piece of wood that held him prisoner and swung.

It took a minute to smash the stout redwood strut from the deck rail. Broker slipped the cuff off the shattered wood, snatched up the bullet, got to his feet, went in the house and down the basement stairs.

Harry had left the second gun safe open. Broker looked in the safe to confirm what he already knew: Harry’s favorite long black rifle was missing.

Broker got out
of the cab and paid the driver. Then he took a moment to compose himself, run his hand down his sweat-soaked shirt, tuck in the anger and humiliation. He rubbed the red raw marks on his left wrist, tested the lump behind his ear for blood and found none.

He glanced around. The world looked deceptively unchanged. Except now Harry was seriously out there in it. Broker knew the stories about drunks who blacked out and continued to function like sleepwalkers for days, operating on pure reflexes.

Broker squeezed the thick .338 round in his pocket. Harry had some pretty advanced reflexes. As he walked toward the law enforcement compound, LEC, for short, he considered the unique potential for havoc in Harry, the blacked-out sniper. Well, John would be happy now that Harry was on board, as it were.

He buzzed himself through the security door with his ID card. Then he buzzed into Investigations and looked around for Mouse.

“He had to go to court,” Lymon Greene said. “What do you need?”

“A car. I had some trouble with my truck,” Broker said.

“Sure, let’s go down to the motor pool,” Lymon said. On the way out the door he stopped and took a set of keys from a cabinet and tossed them to Broker.

They walked down several staircases and some corridors and came out in an underground garage. Lymon led him to a tan unmarked Crown Victoria and said, deadpan, “Harry’s car.”

“Great,” Broker said. He immediately opened the trunk, saw the first-aid kit, some equipment related to processing traffic accidents, a Kevlar vest, and what he was looking for: the .12-gauge Ithaca pump shotgun and two boxes of .00 buckshot.

“So how’d it go with Harry?” Lymon asked.

“Harry’s just fine. Look. You got the church keys?” Lymon nodded that he did. “Okay, I want to see the church and then talk to this witness. So call him and tell him I’m coming,” Broker said.

“Sure. I was just curious. What did John mean, we don’t want to play guns with Harry . . . ?”

Broker stepped closer and placed his hand on Lymon’s shoulder. “Lymon, pal, let’s take a little history test. Who was Carlos Hathcock?”

“Don’t play games, I asked you a straight question.”

“All right. I’ll tell you. Hathcock, like Harry, was a marine sniper. Ninety-two confirmed kills in Vietnam.”

“I don’t really get around to the History Channel that much. Too many Geritol commercials.”

“Harry had forty-five kills. But then Harry was only there half as long as Hathcock,” Broker said.

The jaw muscles maneuvered around under Lymon’s smooth skin, but he decided not to say anything.

Broker said, “Okay, look—you gotta help me here. I’m real limited when it comes to small talk, paperwork, and offices. You follow me?”

A complex coolness descended on Lymon’s handsome face; part inexperience, part age, some implicit racial baggage. Broker, smarting from his encounter with Harry, didn’t give a shit.

“Okay, I get it; I’m in a movie with Tommy Lee Jones and Clint Eastwood. I’ve heard about you, you know,” Lymon said.

Broker studied the younger man. “Yeah?”

“Sure. You know how, after nine-eleven, there was all that talk on TV about the CIA not having unsavory types on their payroll who could penetrate terrorist networks. That’s kind of like you, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Yeah.” Lymon carefully twisted his lips along a fine line of irony. “You’re what they call Human Intelligence.”

Broker tapped Lymon on the chest. “Meet me at the church.”

He drove through town in Harry’s car, catching traces of Harry’s aftershave wafting off the fabric upholstery. His head throbbed, and the air-conditioning, cranked on full, hadn’t taken hold yet. The heat squatted on the day, pressing down. And pushing up. You could almost feel the humidity summoning the crabgrass and burdock up into gaps and voids. The toughest weeds had green muscle enough to crack the heavy slabs of city sidewalk.

Like murder maybe. Just waiting for the right climate to rear up and bust through. Broker pictured this big nasty weed bursting right out of Harry’s chest.

He was losing his distance. He was personalizing it.
Damn, it was hot.

After a wrong turn, Broker found the church. There was no good place to die violently, but St. Martin’s, abandoned and overgrown, would be way down on anybody’s list. The cops had kept the scene quiet. There was no stark yellow crime scene bunting to advertise what had happened here.

Just Lymon Greene, who waited at the entrance looking like a deacon in his gray suit, shined shoes, white shirt, and quiet maroon tie. He stood next to a scrawled, six-pointed pentacle graffiti vandals had sprayed in black on the flagstones in front of the door.

As Broker approached, Lymon moved to unlock the door and said, “There’s a small rectory around back where Moros lived; you want . . .”

“Wait,” Broker said and nodded toward the rundown house across a vacant lot from the church. A scruffy broad-shouldered man sat in the shade of the narrow porch. Watching.

“Is that Tardee?” Broker asked.

“That’s him; he’s waiting on you,” Lymon said.

“Okay, open it up,” Broker said. Lymon opened the heavy wooden door. Broker inspected the lock. It would fasten when he pulled the door closed. He didn’t need the keys to lock up.

“Thanks,” Broker said. “Now I want to be alone.”

Lymon began to say something like, Why the hell did you bring me out here? But he thought better of it and went toward his car. “I’ll be back at the office,” he called over his shoulder.

Broker had brought Lymon out in the heat so Tardee could see them together. It would help establish that he was a cop—because he was traveling a little light in the credentials department.
Because, you moron, you let Harry take your badge and gun.

Broker watched Lymon’s blue Crown Vic lurch away down the unpaved street. Then he turned, studied the arched stone entryway, and stepped into the church. The raw limestone, old oak, and coarse stained glass closed around him. The temperature dropped. It was cool like a mausoleum. Or a morgue.

He walked into the dank interior and found his way to the confessional. The crime techs from the BCA lab had left both doors wedged open.

First he looked into the penitent chamber and saw the kneeling rest, the shattered wooden grille through which the penitent would announce himself to the priest.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

God’s work. That’s what Harry had said.
Was the Saint doing God’s work?

If pushed on the subject, Broker considered himself a serious but skeptical pilgrim who traveled without a declared belief in God. His eyes traveled over the altar, the old-world statues and pageantry. The roots of this power went back to imperial Rome; absolutely the longest-running show in the world. It occurred to him that if he were seriously trying to find God, he sure wouldn’t start in a building some men had built.

Whatever.

He moved a few steps and looked into the priest’s side of the confessional booth. A misshapen tape outline described where Victor Moros had lain in death. The bloodstain still looked damp in the middle. That was the humidity. Neither sweat nor blood were drying as they should.

Harry was right. Broker had never acquired the investigator’s instinct to absorb telling detail from a crime scene. But even he could see the direction of bullets through the shattered wood grille, the bits scattered into the room. The killer had fired through the screen. The killer had been talking to the priest.

This was no burglary gone bad. This was personal. Or psychotic.

His eyes settled on the bloody carpet and the abstract taped image of the dead priest.
So did you deserve it?
Broker pushed sweat off his brow with the back of his hand and felt a throb of pain originate in the bump behind his ear and radiate through his head like a thought that Harry had put there.

The hell with this. Better to talk to the living.

He walked out, pulled the door shut behind him, went through a side gate in the sagging wrought-iron fence, and crossed a vacant lot snarled with weeds and wildflowers. Ray Tardee’s house was a single-story wood-frame 1890s shotgun; living room, kitchen, bedroom.

Tardee sat in a slant of shadow on his front porch sipping a can of Pig’s Eye.

He was in his midfifties, big shouldered, with not much belly. He wore a leg brace on his right foot, and even on this very hot day he wore motorcycle boots, grimy jeans, and a stained T-shirt from which the sleeves had been sliced out. His thick fingers and palms were intricately whorled in black lines, cured and callused in grease and gasoline.

Closer in, Tardee had shaggy brown hair, wispy mustache, and chin whiskers. The fading eagle, anchor, and globe of a Marine Corps tattoo graced his left forearm, and he wore a thunderbird beadwork wristband below the tattoo that suggested some Native American action in his confused bloodlines. Unmoving, he watched Broker come up his overgrown sidewalk.

“You Ray Tardee?” Broker called out.

“Sorry. I’m the fucking sphinx. I ain’t suppose to talk to nobody about nothin’,” Tardee said.

“Broker, Washington County Investigations. We just called you.”

Tardee put down his beer can and folded his arms across his chest. “The sheriff said I ain’t suppose to talk to nobody about nothin’, and that’s exactly what I’m doing,” Tardee repeated.

“Right. Sheriff Eisenhower told me; but he’s out of town, so right now you’re talking to me.”

“All right. Let’s see some picture ID.”

So Broker took out the brand-new ID that Harry had neglected to take off him. Tardee scanned it and grumbled, “Yeah, okay; I saw you at the church with that Selby Avenue Sioux.”

Tardee studied Broker to see if he picked up on the racial slur. Broker got it. Back in the old days, before gentrification, when Broker had walked a beat in St. Paul, Selby Avenue was the main drag of the black ghetto.

“You got enough skin to get on a tribal roll?” Broker asked.

Tardee squinted.

“Ojibwa?” Broker asked.

“Net Lake.”

Broker nodded. Net Lake was a poor rez, not blessed with gaming revenue. “Tough shit for you, no casino,” Broker said as he came up on the porch and sat casually on the rail. “So did you know the priest?”

Tardee shrugged. “Mexican guy. He wasn’t from around here. I saw him in the yard once, putting down sod. I told him it was the wrong time of year to lay sod, that September would be better for the roots to take.”

“You talk about anything else?”

“Yeah, he said it was hot. I agreed.”

“And that’s it?”

“Pretty much. I already been over this.” Tardee slipped his hand into his back jeans pocket and pulled out a business card. “With . . . Lie-mond Greene. Investigator.” Tardee grinned, showing decayed teeth. “Kinda makes you believe in progress, don’t it?”

“Say again?” Broker asked.

“Lymon Greene is progress, see. I asked him where he grew up. In fucking Golden Valley west of Minneapolis. He’s a new one on me. I’ve known some splivs, in the cities and in the crotch. But Lymon, he’s my first square black guy.”

“Square, huh? Not hip like you and me?”

“There it is.”

Broker endured a moment of sun-induced dementia. Suddenly,
he didn’t want to be here. “Like for instance, Lymon would never rough somebody up, you know, just because they’re a lowlife piece of shit. He probably never even says the word
shit,
huh?”

They regarded each other like natural enemies, and their eyes agreed it was too hot to pursue it. Tardee shifted his feet. “You know, the sheriff and I had this talk about this little situation I got coming up.”

Broker raised his face and took another long drink of too much sun. Working the deals was high on the list of reasons he had quit police work; herding the rats through the sewers with sticks and carrots, keeping them out of sight.

Broker blinked and shook his head again. “Yeah, that was real smart, Ray; selling a bag of grass to an undercover cop.”

Ray scratched his belly and grumbled, “Shit, man, it was self-defense; that fuckin’ undercover narc was on his knees begging. Dude was undoing my belt.”

“Sheriff says you got priors. You’re over the line. That’s a commit to prison.”

“Fuckin’ guidelines,” Ray said.

“Yeah, but maybe we can get them to go for a departure from the guidelines.”

“The sheriff didn’t say maybe. He said be quiet about the woman in the Saints jacket going in the church, and he’d get me a deal.”

“What I want to know is, could it have been a guy dressed like a woman?” Broker said.

“She looked like Robin Williams,” Tardee said.

“What?”

“Yeah, remember that movie
Mrs. Doubtfire
, where he dressed up in that padded costume and the wigs and shit? That’s exactly what she looked like. A fucking shim.”

“Shim?”

“A she and a him. An in-between.”

“How tall?”

“Too tall. About five eleven, but walking funny, like a kid in high heels. Like she was in built-up shoes. And, ah, she had a big ass.”

“How so?”

“Too big. I’m good on asses, but I’m
better
on pussy. See, I got hit in the war, and they put this steel plate in my head.” Ray thumped his skull. “Ever since, I got no sense of smell whatever; I can eat
anything
.” Ray grinned broadly and let his tongue loll inside his smile.

“I’m impressed. So was there anything about her big ass that was distinctive?”

Ray grinned. “Yeah, it was too big for the rest of her. And she didn’t move like someone who had a big ass. She moved like someone who had a pillow stuffed in the seat of her drawers.”

“So it could have been a guy dressed up like a girl?”

“Could of been, but probably not, unless you really want it to be,” Tardee said carefully.

Broker let it go; he was getting personal again, trying to make it be Harry. He thanked Tardee and left the broken porch. As he walked toward the car, he heard Tardee whistling behind him. He was a good whistler. The Fat Tuesday lilt of “When the Saints Go Marching In” was unmistakable.