Now they were within hours of making it all work.
He believed Charon about the agents showing up in Langdon. And Charon wouldn’t leave until he got what he wanted. So an alternate plan was called for. Something…
The Mole squinted into the darkness. Made a decision. To keep the thing alive he’d have to take some risks. He’d have to divert them away from Charon.
He spun on his heel, walked back to the phone booth, and picked up the receiver.
Chapter Ten
Goddamn sonofabitch Nina!
The red label on the prescription bottle warned: “May cause DROWSINESS. ALCOHOL may INTENSIFY this effect. Use care when operating a car or other dangerous machinery.”
Broker took two of the white Vicodin pills, washed them down with bad roadside coffee, and stepped on the gas. If there was any dangerous machinery in the immediate area, it was him.
He was driving Milt Dane’s Ford Explorer pretty fast down a two-lane highway. A road sign flashed up, then disappeared: black rectangle framing a white silhouette of an Indian in profile with war bonnet; black number 5 centered in the white, the letter N in one corner and D in the other; WEST spelled out in the smaller panel over the sign.
He was headed west on North Dakota State Route 5, going mostly over 90 mph. Yet it seemed like he was standing still the last couple hours-ever since he pushed north of Fargo.
He’d forgotten that North Dakota was basically you and the sky.
After Fargo, the sky was no longer behind things, like the horizon. It became the main thing. It was too much. Along with too many clouds and too much flat for his north-woods instincts. The problem was-no cover. Broker was a man who understood the advantages of cover; he’d perfected an eye for the subtleties in human and geographic landscapes, for blind spots he could slip in and out of.
Looking around here, he saw no place to hide.
Talk about being too exposed. Christ. He caught himself hunching his shoulders, almost ducking behind the wheel. C’mon, un-cramp. Sit up straight, stretch.
Broker had reluctantly entered his later forties. He was tending toward lean and hungry this season, from compulsive exercise and a mild interest in Dr. Atkins’ diet. He’d cut his dark hair extra-short, almost military. He’d even trimmed some of the bushy ends off his eyebrows that grew in an almost solid monobrow. He had a fix to his gray eyes, a hollowness of cheek, and a flatness to his belly of a man who had taken vows, who was on a pilgrimage, who was in serious training.
There was some other stuff that affected his mood.
Like: a little over twenty-four hours ago he had been shot in the left hand. At the moment he was thinking, in a sweaty, feverish way, that taking a bullet was a mere nuisance, a distraction, compared to what was waiting for him down this highway. What was waiting for him was Nina Pryce. His wife.
He shook his head. People like him and Nina shouldn’t get married.
They shouldn’t be allowed to breed.
And now she’d ditched their daughter with strangers in a motel in North Dakota. Goddamn sonofabitch Nina! What are you up to?
He’d lost the sugar-beet fields when he climbed out of the Red River Valley. Now he passed through a haze of strong-smelling clover and was into serious wheat. The fields stretched out to the horizon like a deep green comforter quilted with chrome yellow patches of canola and spashes of iridescent blue flax.
There was so much sky, he thought he could see ten thousand miles, clear past summer into fall, all the way to the chill breath of the first frost. Gunmetal on oatmeal on concrete. And no blue. No sun. Far to the north he saw a curtain of rain, a shudder that could be lightning. But far away. Well into Manitoba.
No sun since Friday. Saturday it had started to rain in Minnesota. Saturday…He blinked sweat, refocused. Saturday, which was yesterday…
Not now. Think of something else. He’d had heavy rain as he drove across Minnesota. It tapered off just past Grand Forks. He’d switched off the metronome slap of the wipers and opened the windows. Now he was sweating from more than the muggy air.
Infection had set in in his left hand where the slug from the.38 had bit a chunk of meat from the heel of his palm. So Broker had been shot with an old-fashioned low-velocity full-metal-jacketed round. Through and through. Which was apt, because he tended to be an old-fashioned wood-and-steel kind of guy.
Another scar.
The bullet had missed the bones and ligaments and the big nerve. So the hand still worked. The wound had been treated at Lake View Emergency in Stillwater. Last night the bandage was crisp gauze and white adhesive. Now it was turning a wrinkled funky gray, coming loose, with a ragged cockade of stiff brown blood the size of a silver dollar in his palm. It throbbed like hell.
Broker had been doing a favor for a friend.
The friend was a sheriff. As it turned out, he knew too many sheriffs. And now he was on his way to meet another one.
Back in Minnesota, he’d agreed to a temporary stint as a special deputy to the Washington County Sheriff. The favor had resulted in a struggle for a gun and him getting shot. Yesterday, just before noon.
An hour before getting shot, at ten A.M. yesterday morning, Phil Broker had been sitting on the deck of Milt Dane’s river place sipping coffee. He had been house-sitting for Milt. Getting away to think. Rain clouds were rolling in to break a record heat wave.
That’s when another sheriff called. This one was his neighbor, Tom Jeffords, up in Cook County, where Broker owned a small resort on the North Shore of Lake Superior.
Jeff had been called by the Cavalier County Sheriff’s office, in Langdon, North Dakota. It seems that Karson Pryce Broker, Broker’s seven-year-old daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in four months, had popped up in a motel room in Langdon.
Minus her mother.
A woman named Jane had complained to the cops that Nina Pryce had abandoned the child. Then, before he could contact this Jane person, some real life had intervened and Broker got shot. So he called Jane from an emergency room. Vague on details, Jane said she’d stay with Kit until Broker showed up to claim her.
Immediately, the red flags started popping up.
Jane’s voice came across with a relentless high-voltage undercurrent, the kind of energy that thrived on fatigue and crisis. A voice with a trained meter and cadence that she couldn’t quite disguise.
The last address Broker had for his estranged wife, Major Nina Pryce, U.S. Army-who had informal custody of their daughter-was in Lucca, Italy.
Goddamn sonofabitch Nina! What could be so damn important that she dangled Kit out there like a loose end? It was time to confront the thing straight on.
He hooked his injured hand in the wheel and used his good right hand to pry open his cell phone and thumb in the cell number for this Jane person.
“This is Jane,” answered the efficient voice.
“This is Broker. I have a fire mission. Can you copy. Over.”
Silence on the connection. Then she said, “Very funny.”
“Tell me one thing. Are you guys wearing uniforms?”
Broker listened to Jane’s second loud silence. Then he said, “My guess is you’re not wearing uniforms. So who are you, Jane?”
“I’m a friend of Nina’s.”
“Uh-huh. So where’s Nina?”
“Concerning that, ah, it’s better if you should talk to me first.”
“Not the cops who came looking for me?”
“I think it’d be best to talk to me first.” She was letting him fill in the blanks.
“Where’s Kit?” Broker could guess. The connection was good. He heard kids laughing and the sound of bodies splashing in water.
“She’s in the community pool here in town. You want to talk to her?”