Swallow this, bitch.
Then he opened the propane coupling on the hot water heater in the disgusting basement, turned on the hot water full blast in the kitchen and the bathroom. Half an hour later, standing on his porch, he watched the sky light up over the tree line.
The world could only improve when you stuffed all that walking garbage in a plastic bag.
The howls rose in their usual spooky intensity, toying with the short hairs on his neck. At this point the wolf logic hit the unresolved contradiction of his life. His contribution to upping the mental hygiene had amounted to killing off Bodines, his own family.
That left Cassie. And him.
Got him thinking how there’s wolves and there’s wolves, like the alpha wolves who cull the pack.
He had watched Broker chopping wood in back of his house that first day. But he’d only seen him up close once. Fast but close, going past him on the ski trail. But he got a good look at the man’s severe agate eyes under those shaggy eyebrows. Thinking back on it now, Broker looked sort of like a wolf.
To hear Sheryl tell it, this Shank fella was a real pro. Looks like they were going to find out.
Gator looked up at the dark wall of nimbostratus clouds coming in low-snow clouds. He shook off the chill, dumped his coffee, walked to the house, went inside, and shut the door tightly against the baying of the hunting pack. Dumb, thinking like this.
He jumped when the wall phone rang in the kitchen. Approached it tentatively. Picked it up and heard Barnie Sheffeld’s gritty voice. Barnie had the antique Case on display at his implement showroom in Bemidji.
“Thought you might want to know,” Barney said. “Got a buyer for that Case. When it’s all wrapped up, you be looking at eighteen thousand, how’s that.”
“Hey, Barnie, that’s great,” Gator said, grinning.
After a few more pleasantries they ended the call, and Gator paced the cramped kitchen. It was like a sign.
Like-after all the planning and hard work, he and Sheryl were going to succeed. He was dreaming barefoot, sand between his toes. Boat engines would be cleaner than country tractors. Surf and sun. No more skinning his knuckles in a freezing junkyard, looking for parts. He’d take his time. Put together his own boat. An island runner. Things to learn, navigation, charts…
Never seen the ocean. Just Lake Superior.
Damn. He cocked his head and imagined a gruff shadowy gremlin god for grease monkeys and dope-dealing jailbirds who rewarded hard work.
Imagined this crafty demon looking up from counting his money. Imagined him smiling.
Chapter Thirty-one
Sheryl spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon smoking, watching daytime TV. And watching the phone. She imagined Gator pacing in his shop, watching his phone. No sense talking about what they didn’t know. Especially since it would involve signaling on his pager with a phony number, which would send him on a half-hour drive to the pay phone at the grocery store. So she didn’t make the call. Finally, at one-thirty in the afternoon, her phone rang.
“Country Buffet, in Woodbury, that mall off Valley Creek Road and 494, you know it?” said a calm voice without introduction. She knew the restaurant…
…and the voice.
“It’s a dump,” she said.
“Correct, dress according. Wear a Vikings sweatshirt. Say in an hour. Two-thirty.”
Jesus. It was moving fast. “I’ll be there.” The call ended. Sheryl was impressed. That was fast. Which meant Werky’s “investigator,” Simon Hanky, was on the job. Simon wound up going by his first initial. There was a word in poetry, onimana something. Like when a words sound like the thing it describes. That was him to a T.
Drop the Y.S. Hanky. Then drop the Y.
Shank did some time for manslaughter after Werky pleaded him down from second degree for killing his ex-wife’s boyfriend. In the joint, Danny’s organization was impressed by his icy focus and recruited him after he decimated a bunch of Mexicans in the showers.
He had matured in prison and never killed in hot blood again. Now he only operated with methodical planning. Some people were into beginnings, and some people like to stretch out the middle. Shank was an expert on endings.
He killed people.
This corkscrew sensation squirmed through Sheryl’s chest. Old tapes. She had been around a lot of dangerous men in her life, and most of them had made her nervous, mainly because they were unpredictable and had poor impulse control. Shank had zero impulses, barely a pulse.
Wow.
Shit, man, something must have clicked for them to trot out the Shank.
At two-thirty sharp, Sheryl, face washed clean of makeup, hair gathered in a ponytail, stood at the check-in line at the Country Buffet chewing Juicy Fruit. She wore a pair of faded Levi’s, a brand-new, itchy purple Minnesota Vikings sweatshirt, scuffed tennies, and a cheap Wal-Mart wind jacket. Some Spanish was being spoken in the line, several gangs of Mexican laborers coming in for all-you-can-eat-a grotesque gallery of obese flesh fighting a losing battle against gravity. On top of which, excessive meat was apparently difficult to wash; the place smelled like an elephant house. Should hose them down, she was thinking when she heard the familiar voice behind her, in a loud whisper: “Hey, Sheryl Mott, long time no see.”
She turned and saw Shank, icy smooth, standing behind her. Sinewy, six feet tall; he had white-blond polar bear hair and eyebrows and startlingly pale blue eyes. They’d been an item briefly, when she returned from Seattle, just before she quit cooking for Danny’s crew and took up her waitress career.
The smooth pigment of his face avoided the sun and reminded her of the texture of mushrooms under cellophane in the produce section. He wore busted-out denim work duds and beat-up steel-toed boots to fit in with the crowd. Looked skinnier than the last time she saw him.
“Shank. You lose some weight?”
He heaved his shoulders, said, “I feel like a real heel-I shoulda called. You see, right after the last time we were together I tested HIV-positive…”
Sheryl clasped his horn-hard hand, noting the manicured nails set like jewels among the callus. “You’re shitting me, right?”
“Yeah,” he grinned. “It’s the South Beach diet.”
She cast her eyes around, sniffed. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”
“Let’s say I’m comfortable around real fat people. They eat like gamblers play slot machines. Totally oblivious to what’s around them.”
Sheryl gave him an appreciative nod. She liked what she saw so far. They were treating her decent for a change.
Shank paid admission, and they followed a tired-looking waitress who seated them at a booth, brought them glasses for their beverages, and said in a tone both cryptic and bored, “You can start now.”
“You hungry?” Shank asked after the waitress left them alone.
Sheryl rolled her eyes in mild revulsion at the shuffling feeding frenzy and shook her head. “Coffee black,” she said.
Shank got them two cups of coffee, resumed his seat across the table, and spread his hands in a respectful preamble. “First, Werky says Danny says hello.”
“Yeah, okay.” Sheryl took a deep breath, let it out.
“And he says to treat you right. You’re the birthday girl. ’Cause, guess what-so far your end checks out. There was a dude name Broker who hung out on the fringe of things. Seems he was more into running guns around than dope. Though there is a story about him bringing in a semi flatbed from North Dakota; piled with hay bales on the outside, bales of weed on the inside. He fixed things, had a bunch of tools in a truck and some landscape equipment. You been out to Danny’s place in Lakeland?”
“Yeah, before the feds took it away for taxes.”