Free After the Rain by Chuck Logan Page B

Sorcerer’s Stone to Kit. Nina got the duty and now here she was in a smuggler’sbed, listening to him putter around in his living room just beyond the closed but unlocked door. Jesus, his place was clean. Did that mean he was clean? What if he was a bareback kind of cowboy who didn’t want to use condoms?
    What was the statistical probability of contracting AIDS from unsafe sex in remotest North Dakota, anyway? Better or worse odds than being the first dummy rolling out of a Black Hawk on a hot mountain LZ in Afghanistan?
    Numbers. Odds. Probabilities…
    Nina slid between the clean sheets.
    Downstairs she heard the dolly scurry across the floor. A one-man ant colony, Gordy went back and forth, loading the crates of whiskey. The rhythm of the work, the rolling dolly wheels, the thud of the cases being hefted in place drummed like a harsh lullaby.
    Exhausted from the alcohol, Nina’s mind wandered.
    The mission.
    Her first job was to survive insertion. Boy, there’s an example of military lingo falling flat on its ass.
    Think about other things.
    Like her ex-husband…no, that wasn’t right, they were just separated. Her estranged husband. Better.
    It occurred to Nina that her asshole estranged husband would be right at home in these shadows. He’d lived this life for years on end working the margins, hiding out. A lot of people thought he’d done it too long. Not much for small talk, Broker. Not real great social skills at a cocktail party. Good with Kit, though.
    And no one was better in the fog.
    It was Broker who had taught her about compartments. The necessity to keep various parts of your life scrupulously segregated. And right now she had her daughter in one box and her husband in another. So she just cracked the door on Broker’s cubbyhole, because if she wasn’t careful all this stuff would come rushing out.
    Stuff she didn’t need right now.
    Emotional stuff.
    She realized she was holding on to her discipline like a chin-up bar. Hanging by it. White-knuckling it. Below her the rest of the night waited.
    In order to function she had to sleep.
    But sleep would leave her vulnerable.
    She had to let go and drop into the darkness.
    She had duty-trained herself to do so many things—among them, to drop into a fundamental animal sleep almost at will. She had learned how to sleep standing up, to catnap, to meditate.
    So she relaxed her grip on the strange day, finger by finger, and started to slide down into the blackness. Sinking, she caught a fleeting notion of Broker and how he’d handle the news that Kit was left hanging in some motel room in North Dakota.
    So, Broker, how many women did you sleep with in the line of duty?
    But then she had to smile. He wasn’t gonna like it the way she reeled him into this one. Uh-uh. Boy, was he gonna be pissed.
    And that’s exactly how they needed him.

Chapter Nine
    The rotary phone in the booth at Camp’s Corner still worked long after the golf course failed and the gas station and store closed. People drove out of their way to show their kids this dinosaur from the days before wireless. The county had originally asked the phone company to keep the line open so farmers working during spring planting and the fall harvest could make calls in an emergency. Which was good, because the man pacing back and forth next to the booth was facing a crisis.
    Close to midnight and the city lights of Langdon, miles to the north, pushed a dome faintly against the sky. Overhead, a sickle moon wedged between the clouds. Lots and lots of mosquitoes swarmed around.
    He was torn over the decision he had to make as he swatted at the bugs. Across the road, a spooky thread of moonlight outlined the Aztec dimensions of the Nekoma radar pyramid. He hugged himself, shivered in the muggy seventy-nine degrees, and looked up. Jeez. It was creepy out here, suspended between the ruins of the Cold War and this slender Muslim moon.
    As he paced, he put his right hand, palm open, over his heart,