Brynn watched her husband take plates from the cupboard. “Think there’s some dust on them? From the tiling?”
“I sealed it off with plastic. Took it down after I was done.”
He hesitated then rinsed them anyway.
“Can somebody take me over to Rita’s tonight?” Anna asked. “Megan’s
got to pick up her son. Just for an hour and a half or so. I promised to handle bathroom duty.”
“How’s she doing?” Brynn asked.
“Not good.” Anna and her dear friend had been diagnosed around the same time. Anna’s treatment had gone well, Rita’s had not.
“I’ll take you,” she told her mother. “Sure. What time?”
“Sevenish.” Anna turned back to the family room, the heart of Brynn’s small house on the outskirts of Humboldt. The nightly news was on. “Lookit. Another bomb. Those people.”
The phone rang. Graham answered. “Hi, Tom. How’s it going?”
Brynn set the beer down. Looked at her husband, holding the phone in his large hand. “Yeah, I saw it. Good game. You’re calling for Brynn, I’m guessing…. Hold on. She’s here.”
“The boss,” he whispered, offering the handset then turning back to dinner.
“Tom?”
The sheriff asked about Joey. She thought he was going to lecture her about skateboards too but he didn’t. He was explaining about a situation up in Lake Mondac. She listened carefully, nodding.
“Need somebody to check it out. You’re closer than anybody else, Brynn.”
“Eric?”
Graham lit a burner on the Kenmore stove. Blue sparks ascended.
“I’d rather it wasn’t him. You know how he gets.”
Graham stirred the pot. It was mostly the contents of cans but he still stirred like he was blending hand-diced ingredients. In the family room a man’s voice was replaced by Katie Couric’s. Anna announced, “That’s more like it. What the news should be about.”
Brynn debated. Then she said, “You owe me a half day, Tom. Give me the address.”
Which turned Graham’s head.
Dahl put on another deputy, Todd Jackson, who gave directions. Brynn wrote.
She hung up. “Might be a problem up at Lake Mondac.” She looked at the beer. Didn’t drink any more.
“Aw, baby,” Graham said.
“I’m sorry. I feel obligated. I left work early because of Joey.”
“But Tom didn’t say that.”
She hesitated. “No, he didn’t. The thing is I’m closest.”
“I heard you mention Eric.”
“He’s a problem. I told you about him.”
Eric Munce read
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, wore a second gun on his ankle like he was in downtown Detroit and would go prowling around for meth labs when he should have been Breathalyzing DUIs and encouraging kids to get home by 10
P.M.
From the doorway, Anna said, “Should I call Rita?”
“I guess I can take you,” Graham said.
Brynn put a stopper on her beer bottle. “Your poker game?”
Her husband paused, smiled then said, “It’ll keep. Anyway, with Joey being hurt, better to stay here, keep an eye on him.”
She said, “You guys eat. And leave the dishes. I’ll clean up when I get back. It’ll be a couple hours is all.”
“Okay,” Graham said. And everybody knew he’d clean up.
She pulled on her leather jacket, lighter weight than her Sheriff’s Department parka. “I’ll call when I get up there. Let you know when I’ll be back. Sorry about your game, Graham.”
“Bye,” he said, not looking back, as he eased the jackstraws of spaghetti into the boiling pot.
NORTH OF HUMBOLDT
Then, eight miles out of town, the storybook vanished, just like that. Pine and oak ganged beside the road, which shrank from four lanes to two. Hills sprouted and soon the landscape was nothing but forest. A few buds were out but the leaf-bearing trees were still largely gray and black. Most of the pines were richly green but some parcels were dead, killed by acid rain or maybe blight.
Brynn recognized balsam fir, juniper, yew, spruce, hickory, some gnarly black willows and central casting’s oak, maple and birch. Beneath the trees were congregations of sedge, thistle, ragweed and blackberry. Daffodils and crocuses had been tricked into awakening by the thaw that had murdered the plants in the yard of Graham’s client.
Although married to a landscaper, she hadn’t learned about local flora from her husband. That education came from her job. The rampant growth of meth labs in out-of-the-way parts of rural America meant that police officers who’d never done anything more challenging than pulling over drunk drivers now had to make drug raids out in the boondocks.
Brynn was one of the few deputies in the department who took the State Police tactical training refresher course outside of Madison every year. It included assault and arrest techniques, part of which involved learning about plants, which ones were dangerous, which were good for cover and which might actually save your life (even young hardwoods could stop bullets fired from close range).
As she drove, the Glock 9mm pistol was high on her hip, and while the Sheriff’s Department Crown Victoria cruiser had plenty of room for accessories, the configuration of bucket seat and seat belt in the Honda she was now driving kept the boxy gun’s slide bridling against her hip bone. There’d be a mark come morning. She shifted again and put on the radio. NPR, then country, then talk, then weather. She shut it off.
Oncoming trucks, oncoming pickups. But fewer and fewer of them and soon she had the road to herself. It now angled upward and she saw the evening star ahead of her. Hilltops grew craggy and bald with rock and she could see evidence of the lakes nearby: cattails, bog bean and silver and reed canary grass. A heron stood in a marsh, immobile, his beak, and gaze, aimed directly at her.
She shivered. The outside temperature was in the midfifties but the scene was bleak and chilly.
Brynn flicked on the Honda’s lights. Her cell phone rang. “Hi, Tom.”
“Thanks again for doing this, Brynn.”
“Sure.”
“Had Todd check things out.” Dahl explained that he still couldn’t get through on either of the couple’s mobiles. As far as he knew the only people at the house were the Feldmans, Steven and Emma, and a woman from Chicago Emma used to work with, who was driving up with them.
“Just the three of them?”
“That’s what I heard. Now, there’s nothing odd about Feldman. He works for the city. But the wife, Emma…get this. She’s a lawyer at a big firm in Milwaukee. Seems that she might’ve uncovered some big scam as part of a case or a deal she was working on.”
“What kind?”
“I don’t know the details. Just what a friend in Milwaukee PD tells me.”
“So she’s maybe a witness or whistle-blower or something?”
“Could be.”
“And the call, the nine-one-one call—what’d he say exactly?”
“Just ‘this.’”
She waited. “I missed it. What?”
A chuckle. “Who’s on first? I mean he said the word ‘this.’
T-H-I-S.
”
“That’s all?”
“Yep.” Dahl then told her, “But it could be a big deal, this case. Todd’s been talking to the FBI in Milwaukee.”
“The Bureau’s involved? Well. Any threats against her?”
“None they heard of. But my father always said those that threaten usually don’t do. Those that do usually don’t threaten.”
Brynn’s stomach flipped—with apprehension, sure, but also with excitement. The most serious nonvehicular crime she’d run in the past month was an emotionally disturbed teenager with a baseball bat taking out plate-glass windows in Southland Mall and terrorizing customers. It was a potential disaster but she’d defused it with a brief face-to-face, smiling at his mad eyes while her heart thudded just a few beats above normal.
“You watch yourself, Brynn. Check the place out from a distance. Don’t go stumbling in. Anything looks funny, call it in and wait.”
“Sure.” Thinking: as a last resort maybe. Brynn snapped her phone shut and set it in the cup holder.
This reminded her she was thirsty—and hungry too. But she pushed the thought aside; four of the roadside restaurants she’d passed in the last ten miles were closed. She’d check out whatever was happening at Lake Mondac, then get home to Graham’s spaghetti.
For some reason she thought of dinners with Keith. Her first husband had cooked too. In fact, he did most of the cooking in the evening, unless he was working second-shift tour.
She pushed the accelerator down a bit harder, deciding that the difference in response between the Crown Vic and the Honda was as noticeable as that between fresh Idahos and instant potato buds out of a box.
Thinking, as she had been, about food.
“
WELL, BOY, YOU
In a downstairs bedroom of the Feldman house, shades drawn, Hart was looking at the left sleeve of his brown flannel shirt, dark to start with but darker now halfway between wrist and elbow from the blood. His leather coat was on the floor. He slouched on the guest bed.
“Yep, lookit that.” Tugging his green stud earring, skinny Lewis finished making obvious, and irritating, observations and began to roll up Hart’s cuff carefully.
The men had taken off their stocking masks and gloves.
“Just be careful what you touch,” Hart said, nodding at the other man’s bare hands.
Lewis pointedly ignored the comment. “
That
was a surprise, Hart. Bitch blindsided us. Never saw
that
coming. So who the hell is she?”
“I don’t really know, Lewis,” Hart said patiently, looking at his arm as the curtain of sleeve went up. “How would I know?”
“It’ll be a piece of cake, Hart. Hardly any risk at all. The other places’ll be vacant. And only the two of them up there. No rangers in the park and no cops for miles.”
“They have weapons?”
“Are you kidding? They’re city people. She’s a lawyer, he’s a social worker.”
Hart was in his early forties. He had a lengthy face. With the mask off, his hair came well below the bottom of his ears, which were close to the side of his head. He swept the black strands back but they didn’t stay put very well. He favored hats and had a collection. Hats also took attention away from you. His skin was rough, not from youthful eruptions but simply because it was that way. Had always been.
He gazed at his forearm, purple and yellow around the black hole, from which oozed a trickle of blood. The slug had gone through muscle. An inch to the left, it would have missed completely; to the right the bullet would have shattered bone. Did that make him lucky or unlucky?
Speaking to himself as much as to Lewis, Hart said of the blood, “Not pulsing out. Means it’s not a major vein.” Then: “Can you get some alcohol, a bar of soap and cloth for a bandage?”
“I guess.”
As the man loped off slowly, Hart wondered again why on earth anybody would have a bright red-and-blue tattoo of a Celtic cross tattooed on his neck.
From the bathroom Lewis called, “No alcohol. Whisky in the bar, I saw.”
“Get vodka. Whisky smells too much. Can give you away. Don’t forget your gloves.”
Did the thin man give an exasperated sigh?
A few minutes later Lewis returned with a bottle of vodka. True, the clear liquor didn’t smell as much as the whisky but Hart could tell that Lewis had had himself a hit. He took the bottle in his gloved hands and poured the liquid on the wound. The pain was astonishing. “Well,” he gasped, slumping forward. His eyes focused on a picture on the wall. He stared at it. A jumping fish, a fly in its mouth. Who’d buy something like that?
“Phew…”
“You’re not going to faint, are you, man?” Lewis asked as if he didn’t need this inconvenience too.
“Okay, okay…” Hart’s head dropped and his vision crinkled to black but then he breathed in deeply and came back around. He rubbed the Ivory soap over the wound.
“Why’re you doing that?”
“Cauterizes it. Stops the bleeding.”
“No shit.”
Hart tested the arm. He could raise and lower it with some control and not too much pain. When he closed his fist, the grip was weak but at least it was functioning.
“Fucking bitch,” Lewis muttered.
Hart didn’t waste much anger at the moment; he was more relieved than anything. What ended up being a shot arm had almost been a shot head.
He remembered standing in the kitchen, scratching his face through the stocking, when he’d looked up to see movement in front of him. It turned out, though, to be a reflection of the young woman moving up silently from
behind,
lifting the gun.
Hart had leapt aside just as she’d fired—not even aware he’d been hit—and spun around. She’d fled out the door as he’d let go with a couple of rounds from his Glock. Lewis, who’d been standing next to him—and would have been the next to die—had spun around too, dropping a bag of snacks he’d pilfered from the refrigerator.
Then they’d heard a series of cracks from outside and Hart knew she was shooting out the tires of both the Ford and the Mercedes so they couldn’t pursue her.
“Got careless there,” Hart now said ominously.
Lewis looked at him like he was being blamed, which he was—the skinny man was supposed to be in the living room, not the kitchen, at the time. But Hart let it go.
“Think you hit her?” Lewis now asked.
“No.” Hart felt dizzy. He pressed the side of the Glock pistol against his forehead. The cold calmed him.