Vapor Trail (2 page)

“Wait a minute, I get it,” Angel said. She cleared her throat, composed herself, and recited from the form: “Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God.”

There was more on the form, but Angel was now preoccupied
with the Ruger Mark II .22-caliber pistol she had removed from the shopping bag. The plastic Mountain Dew bottle duct-taped over the barrel made it cumbersome.

On the other side of the screen Father Moros hung his head.
What a horrible thing. Could it be true?
But Angel’s act of contrition put him back on familiar ground. Automatically, he began to recite the prayer of absolution.

“God, Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Angel read along silently from the form as the priest droned the prayer, and then she said “Amen,” as it directed the penitent to respond. She raised the pistol slowly, bringing the bulbous makeshift silencer in line with the small rectangular screen over the kneeling rest.

“There’s one more thing,” Angel said.

“What?” Father Moros asked.

“This is your lucky day,” Angel said. “I think you’re going to see God.”

“I don’t quite understand . . . ,” Father Moros said.

The texture of light in the screen shifted slightly, and Angel placed the end of the green bottle dead center in the grille and extended her arm. “Tell me, Father Moros, why did you have to leave the parish in Albuquerque in such a hurry?”

“Wait a minute . . .” Moros tensed, combative.

“I thought you guys went in for little boys. But your thing is teenage girls, huh?” Angel said.

For a moment Moros was stunned. Where did this come from? How? Then he gritted his teeth to contain the welling anger, raised
his fists, and shouted at the screen. “Lies, all lies. Not even lies; more like stupid gossip . . .”

Angel jerked the trigger twice in rapid succession, the sound of the hammer falling on the chamber louder than the muted
clap-clap
of the muzzle.
Relax, stop shaking, see, it works—the bottle soaked up most of the blast.
Furniture crashed on the other side of the partition followed by a meaty thump on the carpet. Then nothing.

Angel picked up the two ejected shell casings off the carpet, then exited the private confession door and entered the face-to-face confession door. The priest had pitched back off his chair, knocked over a lamp, and lay on his side on the floor. Angel was not even breathing heavily. She did notice that the priest had sleek black hair that was combed back with great care. Perhaps he was vain. Whatever. Hit in the right cheek and throat, he was still breathing. She was a little disappointed that his eyes were clamped shut. One of the things she relished in the memory of Ronald Dolman’s last seconds was the fear in his eyes. Angel quickly shot him again in the temple, and he shuddered and the breathing stopped. The small entry wounds leaked threads of blood. The small .22-caliber bullet did not exit the skull. Tidy. Self-contained.

Efficiently, Angel retrieved the tiny spent cartridge casing and stripped off the wig, shoes, gloves, jacket, sweatsuit, and the bulky body stocking.

Her disguise hid skimpy shorts, a sports top, lean runner’s legs, and a flat tummy. Angel set the awkward stage shoes aside and pulled a pair of Nikes from the shopping bag, pulled them on, and laced them tight.

The shopping bag contained a backpack. Promptly, she stuffed the pack with the sunglasses, the shopping bag, the clothes,
padding, the wig, the paper bag containing the pistol and the plastic bottle silencer, which was now ragged with three holes. She removed a damp washcloth from a Ziploc bag and wiped off the cosmetics and lipstick, carefully replaced the cloth, closed the plastic bag, and dropped it in the pack.

Then, ritually, she left the signature.

Okay. Take one last quick look around. Angel cocked her head. There was this narrow stained-glass window over the askew confessor’s chair. Except it wasn’t real stained glass. It was Contact paper, like from Menard’s.

“Fake,” Angel said as she slipped on the pack.

Then she ducked from the confession booth and paused in the hallway to make sure she was alone in the church. No one in sight. Not a sound. Just a faint blur of gunpowder smeared in the air.

Like incense.

She walked under the blind plaster eyes of Jesus and Mary, went down the hallway on the left side of the altar, and exited through the back door. The walls of the church and the rectory shielded her from the street. She crossed the backyard patio and disappeared down a brushy knob and came out on a gravel road. It only took a few minutes to trot through the dusty North End streets. Soon the Nikes thudded on city pavement.

Angel opened up her stride.

A jogger gliding in Patagonia shorts and top, she slipped anonymously past the whispering sprinklers on the chemically enhanced emerald lawns with their little signs: Warning—Unsafe for Children and Pets
.
She ran past the gleaming SUVs parked in the broad driveways and the meticulously painted gingerbread trim of the old North Hill homes.

Another one down. Four to go.

Now who the hell
was calling before five in the morning?

Groggy, Broker grabbed the ringing phone beside the bed, brought it to his ear, and mumbled, “What?”

“Broker.” The brusque male voice in the phone receiver sounded like a cop’s voice. A cop who’d been up all night. A cop Broker knew.

“John? That you?” Broker said.

“Yeah. C’mon, wake up.”

Broker blinked, looked around, and tried to focus his eyes. All he saw was black, as if he were suspended in warm ink. He shook himself and sat up. When you got a call in the dark at his age, it meant:

“Somebody’s dead,” he said as the careful knitting around his heart drew tight.
Dad?

“Yeah, somebody’s dead,” John Eisenhower said. “Relax, it’s nobody we know.”

Broker sat up straighter. “So what . . . ?”

John talked over him. “Remember all those times I saved your life?”

“Bullshit, you never saved my life,” Broker protested.

“Okay, what about those times I saved your job when we were in St. Paul together?”

John had a point there; they’d come up together in the St. Paul department, and more than once he’d run interference when Broker had tangled with the bureaucrats. “Okay, okay. What’s up?” Broker yawned.

“Is your license current?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I need a big favor,” John said.

“When?”

“Starting at about daylight,” John said.

“Great.” Broker knuckled the sleep from his eyes. “You know where I’m at?”

“Guy like you comes into my county, I make it my business to know where you’re at. That’s why I’m the sheriff.”

Phil Broker was keeping to the back roads this summer. He had to figure a few things out. That said, Milton Dane’s river house was still a nice place to start the day, even after an early wake-up call from the Washington County sheriff.

Even when you’re estranged from your wife.

Even—count ’em and weep—on your forty-eighth birthday.

Broker sat up on Milt’s king-size bed, so his sweat dribbled down his bare chest and pooled in his belly button. Real smart. He had not turned on the air-conditioning, preferring to sleep with the windows open. He’d been hoping for a breeze off the river. There was no breeze. Just the ceiling fans stirring the humidity in slow circles.

Now it wasn’t even dawn yet, and the relative humidity had to be way over seventy. Yesterday the humidity had topped eighty, which was tropical.

Broker sat for a while and stared out banks of tall, east-facing windows as the darkness ebbed away, and, slowly, the St. Croix River came into focus, motionless as a painted floor. Gray mist draped the bluffs on the Wisconsin side. Still no breeze.

It would be another green furnace of a day.

It was mid-July, and Broker was in between relationships and houses. His own home was up in Devil’s Rock on Lake Superior, a twenty-minute drive from the Canadian border. But the house was haunted with too many memories of his marriage and especially of his five-year-old daughter, Kit. Her stuffed animals lay undisturbed where they’d dropped from her fingers when she’d visited him in May. At first he’d left the toys where they’d fallen because they were random reminders. Days passed and then weeks, and they started to look like tiny bodies at a crime scene. So he locked the house, traveled south to the Cities, and agreed to look after Milt’s place on the river north of Stillwater. He’d guided Milt on what had turned out to be an extreme canoe trip a year ago October. Now Milt, an attorney, had taken Jolene Sommer, a former client of his, to Italy to see Florence.

Broker had never been to Tuscany, but his estranged wife had received her mail there. Major Nina Pryce and their daughter had taken up residence in Lucca, a walled medieval town on the road less traveled between Pisa and Florence.

He didn’t know why Nina was there. She didn’t wear a uniform anymore. The nature of her work was classified. And then she and Kit had just disappeared.

Broker got up from the king-size bed and passed beneath a throng of African masks and Asian dragons that peered down from the walls and the post-and-beam ceiling. Milt had transformed the upper level of the river house into a bachelor heaven; the walls were decorated with his vacation booty. The master bedroom opened on the kitchen. The kitchen patio doors led to the broad deck.

So now, as on every recent morning, he padded into the kitchen and confronted the rectangular cyclops eye of the laptop on the table. The screen saver fluttered gently in the thin light; a winter scene to mock the current heat wave, snowflakes trickling down against a hillside of snow-frosted pine trees. He clicked onto the Internet icon, went into the message center, and selected
GET MESSAGES
.

He typed in his password:
LUDDITEONE
.

And got the prompt at the bottom of the screen:
NO NEW MESSAGES ON SERVER
.

Broker exhaled and disconnected from the Net. No communication from Nina since Kit returned to Italy in May. Not one call, e-mail, or letter. She and Kit had vanished down into a secure government rabbit hole. Broker suspected it was the culmination of a process that had started right after 9/11.

Initially, after the attack, and despite their personal issues, Nina had called regularly explaining that her duties might, and then would, make it impossible to keep Kit with her in Europe.

Fine. Broker was more than ready to take over his end of their shared child care. Then, right after Kit’s visit in May, the messages became ambiguous. Kit’s transfer to her father’s care was put off. Then communication had abruptly stopped.

Broker didn’t exactly have a lot of recourse to penetrate the silence. There was no one he could talk to about his wife’s situation. The unit that Nina had triumphantly gender-crashed herself into did not officially exist.

“Fucking Delta.” Broker swore softly.

So he drew the only conclusion he could from the silence: whatever Nina was doing at the moment, his daughter was somehow included in it.

Not knowing was worse than knowing. It has been bad enough when he admitted to Nina he had strayed with Jolene Sommer.
Nina was quick to thrust back with a confession of her own weak moment with a Ranger officer.

Make that a
young
Ranger officer. Squeaky young. Smooth young. The kind of young that didn’t have to compensate for the torn rotator cuff, the stressed knees, the back injury, and various shrapnel deposits. Carefully, Broker lined up forty-eight years of knotted scar tissue, stood up, and walked to the bathroom. Some things still worked. A kidneyful of pee crashed into the bowl. He flushed, washed his hands, and threw some water on his face. Then he turned and studied himself in the mirror on the door.

So this was forty-eight.

One hundred eighty pounds shrunk tight on a six-foot frame looked back at him. He was still holding his own against the sags of gravity; still hollow-cheeked, tucked in here, a dangle there. He had his love handles down to an inch of pinch. No second helpings. No dessert. His usually thick dark hair was cut high and tight, more than summer short; a monk’s vow of discipline. His eyebrows remained his defining feature, joining in a bushy line over his gray eyes. A pale white, raised centipede of stitched scar tissue crawled out of his hairline, angled down his forehead, and curled around his left temple. Two more puncture scars were less obvious on his left arm: one high on the biceps, the other just above the elbow. He wiggled his fingers and his toes to test the numbness. He’d been stabbed in the arm and had almost frozen to death, and he carried frostbitten nerve endings as a reminder. That was last year’s adventure; that’s when he met Milt and Jolene. Her husband, Hank, had saved his life,
and Broker had not been able to return the favor.

Continue onward.

Broker squinted out the windows at the false dawn and figured he could work a run in before John showed up. He pulled on shorts, socks, and shoes. He went into the kitchen, filled the
teakettle, set it on the stove, switched the burner to the lowest setting, and filled an electric grinder with coffee beans. Then he drank a glass of water and tied a red bandanna around his forehead for a sweat rag.

Five miles and forty minutes would bring him back to coffee water nearly at a boil. As he laced his shoes, he glanced at the Gary Larson Far Side birthday card lying on the kitchen table. It had appeared inserted inside the screen door yesterday morning. On the front there was a circus scene of a dog riding a unicycle on the high wire with a cat in its mouth and a vase balanced on its head. The dog was trying to keep a hula hoop and three juggling balls in motion.

He reread the caption:

High above the hushed crowd, Rex tried to remain focused. Still, he couldn’t shake one nagging thought: he was an old dog and this was a new trick.

The card was signed: Janey.

In a burlesque of his wife’s disappearance, he had bumped into an old girlfriend at the Cub grocery in town last week. Lean and tanned, Janey Hensen had dropped two dress sizes since the last time he’d seen her.

Working ten years deep undercover for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, Broker had acquired reflexes, like sensing when he was being watched. And that’s what had happened in the dairy aisle at the grocery store. Reaching for the nonfat vanilla yogurt he’d felt the short hairs on the back of his neck tickle up, and he turned around and locked into Janey’s green eyes.

Fancy meeting you, she’d said.

Janey always was good. She could make a cliché chime with laughter and irony and secrets.

And she had inclined her head forward so her tawny blond hair fell across her eyes in a sort of visual echo just in case he needed reminding how she used to look at him across a bedroom.

Sixteen years ago.

So this and that.

And fancy running into Phil Broker, who was separated from his wife and getting skinny as he closed in on fifty. And she saw that he saw she was getting skinny with a vengeance as she braced for forty.

It was typical of Janey to remember his birthday, and she would have followed him from the store to see where he was staying. He could almost visualize her waltzing up the stairs to Milt’s deck.

He told himself to get serious. Better that John had called than Janey.

So he walked down the stairs and out onto the driveway and into a humid morning the color and consistency of simmering tapioca. The toe of his running shoe caught in the trap rock, and he stumbled.
Getting clumsy.

Getting old.

Vaguely, he wondered what John Eisenhower had for him.

But then he rallied. As he launched into his run, he lost the clumsiness and experienced a floaty moment of weightlessness and sheer bewilderment.

You never planned on living this long, did you? So what do you do now?