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.A thrown elbow.Petty payback for his morning.Okay.He could play that game if it came to that.But he had to find the cat.Kit was right; there were things in the woods that would scarf her up.So he climbed the stairs, entered the bedroom, and kissed his daughter good night, Nina on the cheek.He reassured Kit that cats always land on their feet.It really wasn’t that cold.The kitty would come home to eat.And Old Bun would turn up, like she always did.After he had helped deliver the necessary clichés, he left them curled up with an American Girl Doll book.He came back down the stairs, put a bowl of cat food on the back deck, rattled it a few times, went inside.As he retrieved the shotgun, he stopped and solidly faced the fact he hadn’t kissed his wife on the lips for months.Nor had she offered those lips to be kissed.Broker pulled on his boots, coat, a felt hat, and gloves.He stepped into the garage and pushed four shells into the shotgun, racked the slide, and set the safe.His gut told him that the door didn’t open by itself.The snow had stopped.Four fresh inches made a clean slate of the back deck.Switching on his flashlight, he walked out into the yard.Looking up, he saw that the lights in Kit’s bedroom had been turned off.A fitful northwest wind grumbled across the lake.Iron waves muttered on the shore.Okay.So walk the property.Shotgun slung over his shoulder, flashlight in one hand, he shook the stainless-steel bowl of cat food.The rattle disappeared on divots of wind.As did his voice, mouthing words he never thought he’d ever be saying:“Here, kitty, kitty…”Chapter ThirteenGator went and got what he needed and then found himself making the drive across the Barrens for the fifth time that day.Getting dark now, night creeping down like a black garage door.He felt lucky; if he’d lived a different kind of life, he might say blessed.This Broker guy, the cop, had fallen into his hand like a gift, he thought as he watched the familiar jack pine and muskeg filling in with ink.He could afford to be magnanimous with Jimmy and Cassie.And besides, giving Cassie her piece of cheese to nibble on would bolster her incentive to keep Jimmy on task.He was shaky, but he’d hang in.Just had to keep them focused on the money…Coming up on the crossroads.Hmmmm?What’s that? Alert behind the wheel, squinting in the twilight.Headlights knifed about a mile through the gloom.On the right side off the road…looked like they were over near the old Tindall place.Gator shut off his headlights and turned off on Z going west, in the direction of the lights.There was just enough reflection off the snow to drive by.Soon he determined that the lights had indeed turned in at the Tindall place.About three hundred yards from the house, he pulled to the shoulder and turned off the engine.Several flashlights dipped and swung, outlining the windows of the old house.Gator slouched back behind the wheel, reached for his smokes; decided to wait and watch.File it away for future reference.There were five deserted farmhouses on Z alone.Another dozen sprinkled through the Barrens.Several times a week he would do a drive-by.Sometimes kids from town partied in the houses.And sometimes outsiders slipped in for less convivial reasons.Gator made a point to run them off.He kept the Barrens free of intruders.It was his buffer zone.Sometimes outsiders coming in could be tough-guy wannabes, so Gator took more than a flashlight along on these nocturnal forays.Technically, as a felon, he had lost his right to own firearms.But Keith had sat down with Gator’s parole officer and the game warden and worked out an accommodation.As long as Gator continued to sniff out meth operations in the remote north end of the county, where Keith didn’t have the manpower to patrol, he could carry a gun north of Z to hunt in the big woods.Tonight, he’d left his pistol back at the shop.Hell, being in such a good mood, Gator didn’t feel like stomping in and wrecking somebody’s party.He started the truck, made a U-turn, headed back to 12.Half an hour later he was coming down Lakeside Road on the west side of the lake, thinking as he drove how he could spin this playground tiff with Teddy into something useful.Seeing’s how Keith had already been on the scene…He was good at plans.Hell, he figured out most movie plots in the first half hour.Plus he could give Jimmy some responsibility.Jack him up.Jimmy Klumpe.Gator shook his head, leaned back in his seat, and ran through Jimmy’s story.Like the regulars at Skeet’s Bar observed after a few beers: Jimmy Klumpe had won the Moose Lottery.Jimmy’s money dilemma started when his mom and dad were driving home from the little casino near Thief River Falls, three years ago January.Icy roads and a ground fog were a contributing factor, Keith Nygard wrote in his report.They rounded a turn, possibly too fast.Old Tom was known to have a heavy foot and also was an authority on everything, including how fast to drive on slick back roads.What it turned out he wasn’t so smart about was the bull moose that trotted right through a barbed-wire fence and into the path of his old Bonneville.They died instantly, Ed Durning, the medical examiner, said.In an explosion of air bags, trailing barbed wire, entrails, and moose shit, Keith Nygard said.Took two hours with the jaws of life for the Fire and Rescue boys from Thief River Falls to free the antlers that had pinned the bodies in the front seat.Jimmy, an only child, turned out to be the beneficiary on their life insurance policies, and found himself in possession of a million bucks.Up till then, Jimmy’s life had been all downhill since he was homecoming king to Cassie’s queen senior year.He always drank a little too much and stayed tangled in family apron strings, marking time as a driver at his dad’s garbage company.Now he had inherited his dad’s house on the lake and Klumpe Sanitation, which consisted of three trucks, a garage, the dump, and the county contract.Nine years ago Cassie had married Jimmy.Which Gator thought was a dumb idea, knocked up or not.Marrying a garbage truck driver who likely as not ended Friday night facedown on Skeet’s bar.Five months later Teddy was born.Gator did admit that Cassie had cleaned up her act and was working as a receptionist at True North Realty in town.She was positioned to watch the lakefront boom start to take off.They made their fresh start about the time Gator started his bit in Stillwater.They sold their rambler in town and moved into the vacant Klumpe family house on Big Glacier.After an initial spending spree—a new bathroom, a Jeep Cherokee, a snowmobile, a sixteen-foot Lund—Cassie settled on a plan
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