They turned into Thorp’s gravel driveway and parked beside the house. Brody stepped out and his sonar spread over the property. Not only could he see Thorp riding up on a horse; he could hear the gritty clip-clop of its hoofs on gravel.
Thorp’s face was twisted into confusion. He reined the horse to stop a few yards from the stolen car. “Where did you get that thing?” He turned as the driver’s side door opened and Paige got out. The map of Thorp’s face morphed into a mix of anger and bitterness. He slid off the horse and held on to its lead, keeping his distance from both the car and Paige. He turned to Brody. “What’s she doing here?” he asked, not even trying to mask his distaste for her.
“We got into some hot water,” Brody started and stopped himself. “It’s a long story, and it’s kind of pointless to even attempt to explain.”
Paige stood in the open door of the car, remaining behind it like a shield. She looked at Thorp with newfound sympathy written on her face. “Hi, Thorp.”
He ignored her and came closer to Brody, the horse moving forward as well. “Does she know where Nectar is? Is she pulling something with you? Because she’s not trustworthy.”
“Stop,” Brody pleaded. “Relax, okay? She thinks Nectar just left town for a while to do some soul-searching.”
“You know where she is,” Thorp shouted.
At first, Brody thought he was yelling at him. But then he noticed Paige flinch. Brody stepped between them. “Come on. Relax. She’s on our side.”
Thorp sighed. “I’m going to put Maribel back in the barn.”
Watching him go, Brody could tell by the way he walked—his gait almost taking on a stomping quality—and how he shook his head as he guided the horse away that Thorp had a lot more to say.
When he was out of earshot, Paige groaned. “He hates me. He thinks Nectar gets her wanderlust from me.”
“Let’s just go inside,” Brody said, not wanting to hear any more of it.
Paige collapsed onto the living room couch and turned on the screen as if she owned the place.
Brody went into the kitchen. The table was full of electronic parts, circuit boards, spools of wire, and a soldering gun. Thorp had been an avid amateur electrician and general tinkerer in the service, but he didn’t think the pastime would’ve made it out on the other side with him. He wondered if the compulsive hobby had developed before Thorp enlisted.
He let the sonar probe around the refrigerator. Mapped on all the glass shelves were several bowls with tinfoil over them. He picked one at random and lifted the corner to see what was inside. Food, with the sonar, looked the same. A bowl of olives could just as easily be tiny robin’s eggs or what was hanging from the rearview mirror of Seb’s car. He grabbed one of the tiny round spheres out of the bowl and squeezed it gently. It was soft, wet. He gave it an inspective sniff. Olives. He ate one and then took the bowl out of the fridge and bumped the door shut with his hip. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was nearly two in the afternoon. He picked at the olives one by one.
Rubber boots stomped on the back deck, the sliding glass door opened, and Thorp entered smelling of manure and soldering.
“Trying to find a way to steal cable?” Brody nodded toward the table covered in electronics.
“Actually, I was thinking about something. Can I see that lens charger of yours?”
Brody set the bowl of olives aside. “It needs batteries. There’s no way you can do the right charge with some jerry-rigged RadioShack parts.”
“Come on.” The colorless plane of Thorp’s face folded into a grin, and he gestured invitingly by sweeping his hand toward himself. “Let me see it.”
Brody took the lens charger from his pocket and held it out. Thorp gripped it, but Brody didn’t release it until after he had said, “You break this thing, it’s your ass. You’re my friend and I love you like a brother, but if you fuck it up—I will be seriously pissed.”
“I won’t break nothing. Calm down.” Thorp went to work at the table.
Noises from a television show in the next room found their way into the kitchen. Paige.
Brody saw Thorp stiffen. Before Thorp could shoot to his feet, Brody moved forward, essentially trapping him in his chair at the table. Brody was close enough that the sonar was able to scribble in more details upon Thorp’s face. Enough to detect him mouthing the words: “Is she in there?”
Brody nodded.
Thorp put the soldering gun back in its holder before it had even begun to warm up. He gestured at the cellar door next to the refrigerator and started tromping down the creaky wooden steps. Brody followed reluctantly.
Down in the basement, Brody felt the urge to duck every few steps. Thatches of insulation hung from the open floorboards above in thick, pillowy fingers.
Thorp guided him past the laundry area, then into another room through which Thorp had to use a key.
Momentarily, Brody thought about the possibility that Nectar was in there, locked in her brother’s basement, gagged and bound to a chair. He banished the disparaging thoughts of his friend and followed him into the next room. The walls, the floor, and the ceiling were brick. As the sonar felt along the walls, he began to see the shapes of guns hanging from Peg-Board coming into focus. At the back wall, a large gun safe the size of a refrigerator. A worktable and a setup for molding metal into bullets.
The smell of gunpowder, striking his nose with the pungent ferocity of sulfur, made Brody a little uneasy. He hadn’t smelled gunpowder since the service, hadn’t held a gun since the service, hadn’t even been in the same room as a gun since the service. Minneapolis-St. Paul police had cracked down on firearms, and it seemed they were the only folks allowed to carry one. Maybe Illinois laws were different, but Thorp’s armory was in his basement behind a locked door so he guessed not. At the same time, he didn’t find the contents of the secret room much of a surprise, given how Thorp had decided to decorate his backyard.
Thorp closed the door behind them and spoke again at a normal volume. “Paige can’t hear us in here,” he reassured him as if Brody, too, had been worrying about such a thing. He stepped over to the workbench where a disassembled assault rifle was spread out in ten different pieces.
Brody remembered that sight. Drills by the ever-ticking stopwatch, taking the rifle apart, putting it back together, cleaning it, and basically treating it as an extension of the soldier’s body. Brody knew that once some lessons, sights, experiences, teachings were in a person, branded onto their minds, they never went away. They could be set aside, boxed away, but they still quietly took up space in whatever attic or basement they were stowed. Like riding a bike.
“You seriously don’t have to worry about her,” Brody said.
“How do you know? Maybe she wanted to come here so she could get information on me or find out exactly how much I get from Hark every month. Yeah? Ever consider that? If we want to find Nectar, we have to think outside the box and consider every possible lead a death trap. That’s all anyone wants anymore: money. By the end of the night, I guarantee she’ll be telling us she has Nectar strapped with a bomb somewhere and unless we pay her x amount of money—”
“Let me explain,” Brody interrupted. “She’s here right now because we stole some asshole’s car that was threatening her. It wasn’t even her idea to come with me. We just sort of paired up and headed this way.”
“Why didn’t you call and ask me? I could’ve told you she was up to no good. She’s a fucking schemer, man. You can tell just by looking at her. That ridiculous hat, the mittens. She’s trying to put shit in your head. Make you think of her as some wayward kid with an abusive boyfriend. All those charity cases have really dulled your soldier’s intuition.”
“That’s good because you know what? I’m not a soldier anymore and neither are you. You can’t go around thinking everyone’s up to no good.”
“And you can trust her? The girl with the stolen car?”
“If you saw her after that asshole talked to her the way he did, you’d know she was trustworthy. For my sake, please calm down. Leave the people reading to me, okay? I do shit like this all the time. I can tell when someone’s trying to pull a fast one.”
Thorp put his hands on his hips and sighed for what felt like a full minute, really pushing every ounce of air out of his lungs. He let his hands slap at his sides. “Okay, fine. I trust you.”
“Good. Thank you. Jesus.”
But without a moment’s peace, Thorp asked, “So, what do we know so far?”
While drawing a deep breath, Brody organized his thoughts. “Well, I think Paige has a key to Nectar’s apartment, but she wasn’t going to cough it up when we first met. Now I think she’ll be more inclined to let me have it. Of course, we should consider the fact that she may be right.”
“No,” Thorp said thoughtfully, rubbing the stubble on his chin. “I don’t think she’s out of town.”
Brody groaned. “Give it a minute, okay? She’s a searcher, apparently. You can agree with that, can’t you? You know your sister. Paige says Nectar’s always trying to find the next thing to get into, fashion or lifestyle or career or whatever. Think about it. Doesn’t this seem kind of routine?”
“She hasn’t been that way for as long as I can remember,” Thorp said.
“Before Nectar talked to you about enlisting, when was the last time you spoke with her?”
Thorp didn’t respond right away. This told Brody it hadn’t been only a couple of days or weeks. “Last summer. August, maybe. She came by to ask for some money.”
“And what do you suppose that money was for?” Brody said leadingly. He continued when Thorp didn’t pick up on the tone. “She was probably going to go out of town for a while. Give it a few days. I need to get back to Minneapolis anyway.”
“You’re going to leave?” Thorp took a step forward.
“I have to. I need to check in with my probation officer and complete my community service sometime before I die.” He winked. “Otherwise they make you work it off in the afterlife, sweeping God’s floors and doing St. Peter’s laundry.” He tried to bring some joviality into the air, but he knew it wasn’t working.
Thorp came closer, his breath rife with the last meal he’d eaten. “We have a lead now. You can get the key from Paige and check out Nectar’s apartment. This is what you do, isn’t it? The problem-solver man? The gumshoe Sherlock Holmes thing?” He gripped the lapels of Brody’s coat.
Brody put his hands on Thorp’s and gently peeled them off. Brody looked into his friend’s eyes, which to him appeared to be colorless spheres swiveling around in their sockets. But he could still clearly see the desperation in Thorp’s mug. “Do you really want me to check out your sister’s apartment?” he said with weighty reluctance, trying to make it sound like a ridiculous request.
Thorp’s face softened, a certain plunging relief coming across his forehead and laugh lines. “If you would, please, yeah. That’d be great. Even if you just find ticket stubs or something, at least then I’ll know for sure.”
“Maybe you can come with me this time?” Brody suggested. Perhaps if Thorp was there to see for himself what Brody thought he would inevitably find—the plane tickets, the reservation of a rental yurt at some Iowa commune—he’d be less prone to fly off the handle with a barrage of questions.
But the suggestion was barely past his lips before Thorp got an exaggerated look of panic on his face. Standing this close, the sonar could see Thorp’s eyes widen into saucers.
“Actually, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. I mean, I’d like to go with you and see … that you’re right, that everything’s fine—because I’m sure you’re right—but I got a lot of stuff to do around here.” He broke eye contact and stared into the middle distance. “I should stay here. Hold down the fort.” Nod. Nod. “Yeah, I think I’ll just stay here.”
“Maybe some time away from here would be just what the doctor ordered,” Brody went on, careful not to gesture at any of the guns hanging from the walls around them. “It’d be good to have two sets of eyes when we’re looking around her place. It’d get done faster.”
A strange chuckle escaped Thorp’s throat. It had a hitch in it, like the laugh itself was stumbling and fighting to retain balance in its convincingness. “No, no, that’s quite all right. I’m fine here. You go. Yeah. I’ll … I’d be better here. I won’t get in the way here.”
Brody decided it would be fruitless to press it any further. “Okay. Your call. And when I find the receipt from the airline, you’ll let me go home?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Thorp waved a hand at him. “You make it sound like I have you chained to the radiator or something. But if you find out for sure where she’s gone, I’ll be happy and leave you alone. I’ll calm down. I promise.”
“All right,” Brody said with finality. “Let’s go upstairs and see what you can do with this lens charger theory you’re cooking up and I’ll talk to Paige about that key.”
They exited the basement armory. Brody was relieved. Being around those guns and ammunition made him feel like at any moment his old drill instructor was going to burst out of the woodwork and order him to get down and give him thirty.