After the Rain (29 page)

Jimmy Yeager saw it happening. He slammed on the breaks and skidded off the road, aiming for a slight knoll in the field. He saw the van jerk to a halt. Saw Sauer block the crossing.

Three hundred yards and closing. Gotta stop now. No time. Two hundred was what he wanted but this would have to do. Timing the lurch of his vehicle so as not to lose time opening the door, he pushed the door and exited, dragging the M-14 by its skinny barrel and heavy flash suppressor.
Shit! Can’t see! Fucking fold in the land.
Immediately he hopped on the hood and then clambered onto the roof.

Now he could see. It was Joe, all right. Out of the van, running toward the State Patrol cruiser, his right arm extended.

The crack and snap of shots.

Jesus. Shaking, breathing all wrong; Yeager swung up the M-14. His old Corps dad made him learn to shoot offhand at 200 yards.

If you can’t shoot offhand you ain’t shit!

Joe running with his arm straight out, windows blowing apart in the state cruiser making it hard to see, to tell…All these shots and then Yeager squeezed off three of his own.

It wasn’t fair. They had so much. So much space, this lush yellow-and-green emptiness, the tilt-a-whirl blue sky. Joseph spun like a bad dancer, shredded. He smelled the raw sewage of the camps, saw the bloated corpses again at Sabra and Shatila. The tiny children with flies crawling on them. Cholera, typhoid, diseases that never touch these fat Americans.

Not fair.

He collapsed deeper into a million little yellow flowers. Moist like pollen, smelling like medicine, buzzing of insects. Footfalls coming from in back. Where was the Browning? But all feeling was draining from his arms. Then gone. George and Dale would have to kill the Americans. He, Joseph, was through with them.

Losing pieces of the sky and sound he thought he saw a broad white face loom over him. Lonely now. Leaving. Not sure why, he rasped his goodbye.

“
Ma’assalama…
”

Yeager stooped to hear Joe’s last words. All he got was a rattle of breath. He placed two fingers along Joe’s throat and felt for a pulse. There was none. Yeager hoisted himself up slowly. He was gasping, and starting to shake.

Joe was pitched on his side so Yeager could see his back and front were both a mess. They got him coming and going. Sauer’s .45 sure tore some holes coming out.

Sauer.

Yeager jogged the last fifteen yards to the State Patrol cruiser. Barry Sauer was sprawled forward across the front seat. His hair and grimacing teeth were covered in white powder. His arms still extended out the shattered passenger-door window. Gently, Yeager pried the .45 from the death grip of Sauer’s clamped hands. Yeager gritted his teeth, seeing the blood at Sauer’s throat, thick above his shirt collar. On his cheeks, his nose.

“Man,” Sauer gasped, “I am…sure…fucking glad…my…wife…made…me…wear…
this
.”

With his left hand, Sauer ripped at the top buttons of his uniform shirt, tearing the cloth away to show the two deep impact impressions on his Kevlar.

“You’re bleeding!” Yeager said, his voice too loud.

Sauer shook his head. “Just cuts. Glass. Whole lot of stuff flying around for a minute there.”

Yeager helped Sauer out of the car and supported him as they walked up to Joe’s body. Cars with flashing lights were converging. Norm’s Silverado. Cops from Towner.

“I yelled for him to drop it but there was no way,” Sauer said. Then more urgent. “The van?”

“I went by it. No sign of Dale. Was in a hurry. Then when I got to him he said something, couldn’t make it out. Sounded strange. Indian maybe.”

Sauer grimaced and said, “Now we got some people missing.”

Yeager nodded.

“Damn,” Sauer said. This time he pointed at his cruiser. “Old Man Kreuger probably only had one sleeper rock in his field and I had to hit it.” He shook his head, dripping blood. “Totaled another state car. That’s the second air bag I kissed in seven days.”

Yeager grinned. “Three more and they gotta make you an ace. Don’t sweat it, road dog, we’re gonna be all right.”

“How’s that?”

Yeager pointed at the cloud of dust kicked up by four new Border Parol Tahoes coming in a tight convoy. “The cavalry’s here.”

Face into the wave.

Numb, her teeth fuzzy. Hard to breathe. Nina tried to spit the taste of decay from her mouth, but she was too dry.
Memory jabbed.
Some drug he used.

Moving. Patterns of light and shadow dappled a wall of knotty pine veneer.

The morning’s shark attack all came back to her. Jane. Ace…

Not now. Focus on the present. She tried to move.

Spreadeagled on a bed.

Not good.

Resistance at her wrists and ankles. Little strength. She could move her head and she saw that her wrists were secured with double-tied bungee cords. The same for her wrists. The hooks had been crimped together tight. She strained against the cords with her wrists and legs. Some give. They were makeshift. Maybe she could defeat them. Given time, she figured, she could. But not if he kept giving her that drug.

He. Dale. The other Shuster.

Her mind churned, scurrying.
Not okay yet. Process.

Automatically, she confronted the fear. She had been trained to convert it into a manageable image. So it became a wave building in the distance. An instructor in survival training explained that extreme fear was like the ocean. Too big to get your mind around, too fast to outrun. You had to navigate it.
Great, so now I’m in the fucking Navy.
You had to turn into it, meet it head on, ride it out. If you froze up or ran away, it would roll you up and take you down.

Orient yourself. Face into the wave.

She was lashed down on a bed in the rear of a van or camper. From some calm center in her brain she recalled that Broker had in-grained in her a suspicion of vans. She twisted around to get a better look. Not the kind of bed that was built into this kind of vehicle. This was an ordinary twin bed, wooden head and footboard, sideboard, slats and springs and mattress. The interior of the vehicle had been gutted and the bed brought in. The bedroom was partitioned from the front seat by a curtain. Dale. Up there driving. Maybe that other dude, too. Just ten, twelve feet away.

A screened window over the bed was partly open, letting in patches of light and shadow. She heard the thrum of tires, road sounds. Traffic passing.

She tried to look around the compartment. She could see where a sink, counter, and partitions had been removed. It had been stripped and now just contained a TV bolted to a shelf over the bed, a VCR stacked on top. A small chemical toilet sat next to the curtain. Then her eyes stopped on the video camera set on a tripod in the corner with a cable looped around it. The cable ended in some kind of remote device.

The vehicle went over a bump. The video camera jiggled, came to life. The cheap tripod legs rattled on the floor, taking baby robot steps. Toward the bed. And her intuition made a few fast leaps.

Nina understood that the camera was for her.

No preparation for this. But she found it familiar. Down deep, she had been braced for something like this all her life. Every woman carried the nightmare in her blood salts: you wake up bound, powerless in the hands of a disturbed, angry man. Usually it happens to other people and you read about it in the newspaper. You see it on TV.

Not this time.

Furious, she reared against the restraints, and succeeded only in bruising her wrists. She collapsed back on the bed.

As best she was able to determine her clothing had not been torn, didn’t seem to have been removed. The smear of blood on her chest was dry and flaking around the edges, still damp in the center. Some time had passed.

The only pain she felt was in her right hand, and she carefully—selectively—worked back. Dale Shuster had stepped on her hand when she went after Jane’s pistol.

She had hardened herself to accept rape as part of capture, like a beating. In theory. But this was more. She was lashed down to something in motion. She swallowed and tried to get her breathing under control.

She was caught up in the mechanics of the thing she had been looking for. Taken. For a reason.

Not by Wahhabi fanatics out of the Afghan camps. But by Dale Shuster. And Gordy’s “funny fucking Indian,” Pinto Joe.

Then the road noise lessened and she could feel the vehicle slowing, the tires hitting gravel. Turning. The sunlight coming in through the window dappled down to shade.

Motion ceased. The sound of traffic had disappeared. She could almost hear the heat buzzing on the green griddle of fields. Bird-song. The idling motor vibrated under her, a warm steel kitten. She heard a body moving beyond the curtain. Voices.

“Goddammit, Dale, not now!” An impatient voice she could not place.

“Take it easy, we got lots of time,” Dale said. Then a hand swept
the material aside and Dale entered the compartment. His bulk made the space where she was smaller, stole the light. He held a twenty-ounce plastic bottle of Coke in one hand and the remnants of a doughnut in the other. Nina could see grains of sugar on his thick lips, see his tongue dart out and lick them off.

He smiled. “How about I show you a movie?”

Broker stood
next to the ambulance, listening to the radio traffic wind down. The fields were quiet again, the sirens stilled. Joe Reed had resisted arrest and had been killed in a shootout on the border. He watched the EMT’s face go from mortal anxiety to relief as she talked on the radio. They assured her the state cop was all right.

“Her husband,” Vinson told Broker.

A second deputy arrived at the Missile Park in a Toyota Tundra. He’d obviously been summoned in a hurry because he wore a uniform shirt tucked into his jeans. He huddled briefly with the regular deputy and the EMTs. Then he introduced himself to Broker as Marly Druer, part-time help called in special for today.

Druer was brief: “Sheriff says you were a cop so there’s no need to baby around with you. There was a nine-one-one call from Dale Shuster, he said Joe Reed shot the two in there. Then it gets confusing. Maybe Dale was taken hostage. They been going over the tape and it sounds like Dale said another woman was involved. That could be your wife. So, first off, where was your wife this morning?”

“She left a note at the motel that she was going out for coffee with Jane.” Almost ashamed, Broker added, “I was asleep.” He
pointed to the bar’s desolate brick facade. “I think Jane’s in there.”

“It’s Jane,” said Vinson. “I met her when they came to town.”

“Neither of them were in Joe’s van when they caught up with him,” Druer said. “Could be your wife is missing in this. So the sheriff wants to talk to you. Leave your truck here. You can ride with me.”

Okay…I’ll take missing. Better than dead.

A few moments later, Broker realized he had thought
Okay
when he’d meant to say it. Gears weren’t meshing, switches failed. What good is language at a time like this?

“Okay,” he said finally. He took a drag of the cigarette as he armored himself with control. The shock whirled his guts to the brink of nausea, edged back. “But I need a minute to call my folks in Minnesota. I sent my kid back there and she’s expecting her mother to call her this morning.”

“Ah, jeez. Yeah, sure,” Druer said.

Broker walked off a few paces and took out his cell phone, pulled the card with Holly’s number from his wallet. Punched it in and hit send.

“Colonel Woods.”

“Holly?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“Broker.”

“C’mon, I don’t need any more shit. I’m up to my ass in alligators here…”

“You sure are. Jane’s dead and Nina is missing. It ain’t over, Holly.”

“Goddamn…How?”

“Shootout in that bar. Ace Shuster is dead. This Indian dude who worked for his brother is the prime suspect. It’s possible he took Nina and Ace’s brother with him when he made a run for it. They mouse-trapped him, killed him in a gunfight trying to run the border. And Nina and the brother are nowhere in sight. Listen. The
local cops are all over me. I’d stay out of sight if I were you. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

“Broker.”

“Yeah, Holly.”

“She’s as tough as they come. If there’s any…”

Broker ended the call, cutting Holly off. He didn’t need coaching about what was going on. He put his cell away, got in Druer’s truck, and worked hard at resisting gravity. Let it float. He stared straight ahead, tried to slip the first wave of shock as if it were a punch.

Ain’t over till it’s over.

But the jolt was maybe just what he needed to knock him a little off kilter. To see this morning’s events and everything that had happened from a slightly skewed angle. So he stared right into it. All of it. He stared and he stared.

And sonofabitch! There it was.

They parked in back of the county building and went to the sheriff’s office, buzzed in through dispatch, and waited. A few minutes later, Sheriff Wales came in, flushed. Dark patches of sweat staining the underarms of his uniform. From the knees down he was damp and smeared with crushed, tiny yellow flowers that smelled faintly like last night’s canola fields.

He motioned Broker through the corridors to his office, where they faced off. “You gonna help me on this, Broker?” Wales said. “Now that we got dead people lying all around.”

“You know about the fiasco last night?”

Wales nodded. “It’s all over town. But I can’t figure why they’d go after Ace.”

“Five days ago Nina’s bunch cracked an Al Qaeda finance officer in Detroit. He gave up a smuggling operation. He suggested they were bringing a nuclear device in through your county and, that they were dealing with an American named Shuster.”

Wales took it like a body blow, narrowing his eyes, incredulous. “Ace had some kinda bomb?”

“Don’t know.”

Wales recovered quick. “Yeah, well, you seen what Ace was smuggling last night.” Then he pointed his finger at Broker. “Don’t play games. We haven’t had a murder in this town for twenty years. Now I got three people shot to death in an hour’s time. And two missing, kidnapped…”

How do you know they’re kidnapped?” Broker said.

“Dale called in to nine-one-one that—”

Broker cut in, “The Qaeda guy in Detroit said they were working with a Shuster. You got one dead Shuster and another one telling you something on a phone…”

Wales chewed at the inside of his cheek, cocked his head. “You mean…Dale…,” he said slowly.

“Yeah, Dale. What if that distress call was misdirection?” Broker ventured.

Wales headed out the door, motioning to Broker to follow. “C’mon.”

“Where we going?”

“To the Shuster house, for starters.”

Wales paused at dispatch to put instructions over the radio. “Lyle, stay at the bar and keep an eye on the ME. And when the crime lab people get in from Bismarck, thank them for assisting but make it clear we want the jurisdiction. Break. Yeager, get Barry to the hospital, then stand by at the SO.” He turned to the dispatcher. “Karen, where are we?”

“Bismarck is started. They got the crime lab on the way and two investigators.”

“Okay. Who we got up at the border?”

“The Border Patrol. Hal Cotter from Pembina, Jack Lambert from Towner, and Gerry Kruse from the state.”

“Ask real polite for the BP to secure the scene. Kruse has the most training as an investigator out of that bunch. Ask him to meet me at the Shuster house.”

“Gotcha. Anything else?”

“Tell anybody who inquires we’re gathering the facts and trying to figure out what happened. No names.”

They went out the door, got in Wales’ Silverado, and drove to the east end of town, where a row of large ranch-style homes sat off separated from the other houses by sizable landscaped yards. Wales pulled up a driveway. There was a
FOR SALE
sign. The grass needed cutting.

They studied the front door, which was pretty sturdy. Next they went around to the side. “Should really have a warrant,” Wales said.

“Right. In Minneapolis, before 9/11, Coleen Rowley tried to get a warrant on that Moussaoui guy’s computer and FBI headquarters turned her down,” Broker said.

Wales grunted, stooped, pulled a brick from the edging of the side garden, and smacked the pane of glass on the side door. “It’s called reasonable suspicion.” He started in.

“Wait a minute, you smell something?” Broker, sniffing, lifted his head.

“Yeah, around back.”

They went around to the backyard, where a fifty-five-gallon garbage drum was smoldering. Wales kicked it over. Stacks of computer printout paper and magazines spilled on the patio. Like they’d been pitched into a fire in a hurry, in thick stacks and only the edges were burned.

Druer, the part-timer, drove into the driveway. Wales asked him to poke around in the burn-barrel debris. Then he and Broker entered the empty house and did a fast walk-through, careful not to disturb anything.

“Not much here,” Broker said.

Ace’s mom and dad left over two weeks ago for down south. Dale was living here until the place sold.”

Druer stuck his head in the door. “Norm? You better get out here,” he yelled.

They hurried out the side door and around the back. Druer raced ahead and squatted on his haunches, poking a thick scorched pile of bound, laminated pages with a pen.

“Cover’s gone. But this is a high school yearbook from ten years ago,” Druer said. He tapped the pen on one of the charred pages. “And look here.”

Broker stared at a burned page. A girl’s picture was circled. Wales swept his palm over it, ignoring the sparks and ashes, bringing it up cleaner. “Look at the eyes.”

The eyes had been blacked out.

“Holy shit. It’s Ginny Weller. She went missing in Grand Forks last month. Was never found,” Wales said.

Carefully, Druer started working through the pages, flipping them one by one with the pen. They came to another circle. Another picture with the eyes blacked out. This time it was a boy. Even at ten years’ remove, Broker recognized the hairy face of Gordy Riker.

Wales bent to the radio mike clipped to his shoulder. “Karen, check around on the whereabouts of Gordy Riker. We ran into something weird at Dale’s house. Somebody’s been blacking out eyes in his high school yearbook. Like Ginny Weller’s eyes. And Riker’s. So call the other dispatchers. Get ’em on the phones. Where’s Jimmy?”

“With Sauer, at the hospital.”

“No I ain’t,” Yeager’s voice cut in on the radio. “I’m on my way to the Shuster house. I heard you on the yearbook pictures. You got Broker there?’

“Yeah, he’s here,” Wales said.

“Ask him if he’s missing a .45, and a Washington County shield. We found them in Joe’s van,” Yeager said.

Wales turned to Broker who shrugged, held up his hands. “Was lifted out of my car yesterday.”

“I also found his wife’s purse,” Yeager said.

Broker did not shrug this time. Wales touched his shoulder and said, “Just wait till he gets here.”

Then Kruse, the state cop, pulled in, and Wales asked him to search the house. Jimmy Yeager arrived a few minutes later. His cruiser was caked with mud and rattled like half the undercarriage was about to drop off.

Yeager got out of the car, immediately walked up to Broker and checked his face, his eyes. “What I got ain’t good,” he said.

“Show me,” Broker said.

Yeager held up a plastic evidence bag. Broker recognized Nina’s purse. The gray quill-patterned ostrich-hide saddlebag he’d given her for Christmas three years ago. The bag was messy red around the edges. He took a sharp breath. Messy red from coagulating blood.

Carefully, Yeager put the plastic bag down on the hood of his cruiser and worked the purse out. With a pen he nudged the wallet open, then eased out the Minnesota driver’s license.

Nina’s picture ID on the license had the eyes blacked out.