Broken Slate

CHAPTER 3

Chapter 3“You ever seen a live grasshopper screwing a dead one on the sidewalk?”

The portly, fourteen-year-old boy’s eyes bulged as the question caused him to choke on a swig of Wild Cherry flavored Capri Sun. “What?” he managed to gasp. His eyes glistened with moisture below his dark bangs.

Sean let the ends of his lips curl, his eyes still drawn across the clear, calm body of water that occupied Beggar’s Basin, a sprawling reservoir that sat at the bottom of a Colorado mountain range. Majestic pines crowded all but the west end of the lake, seeming to jockey for position to be admired. Other than a young couple sitting in a slow-moving canoe a few hundred yards out and a half-dozen anglers staggered across the shore, he and the boy had the tranquil area to themselves.

Sean leaned back in the lawn chair, his nearly 240-pound, thirty-nine-year-old body forcing a loud creak from its rusted metal hinges. His shadow partially shaded the boy’s smaller frame. “I said, have you ever seen a grasshopper—one that’s alive—screwing a dead grasshopper on the sidewalk? You know, riding on its back.”

The boy’s face had turned beet red, either from the coughing fit or out of embarrassment. Clad in a striped yellow and brown T-shirt and dark jogging shorts, he leaned forward in his chair and let out a clearing cough without bothering to cover his mouth.

Sean enjoyed getting an animated reaction out of Toby. Over the past year, he’d found that it was a relatively easy thing to do. The two had grown close after the death of Sean’s uncle, who’d died saving the boy’s life from a madman. Sean felt he owed it to his uncle to continue looking after Toby, when the boy’s mother would allow it, but the truth was that it wasn’t much of a burden. Sean had come to enjoy serving as a bit of a father figure, having never had any children of his own.

The boy sank back into his seat, face still red. “You’re asking me, Sean, if I’ve ever seen a grasshopper that’s alive riding on the back of one that’s dead?”

“Yeah. I think I was pretty clear.”

“I . . . I don’t know. I don’t think so. Have you?”

Sean reached to his side and pulled an old, beat-up fishing rod from the center of the forked tree branch spiked into the ground. He sat up straight and his hand fumbled for his tackle box. Toby mimicked Sean’s movements, reaching for his own tackle box. The late-morning sun forced them to squint. Sean felt its warmth along his scalp under his short, graying hair. It wasn’t easy being the owner of a struggling security company, where he was the only guard—and only employee, for that matter. The work wasn’t consistent and neither was the pay. But it did have a few perks. Being able to fish on a Thursday was one of them.

“Sure have, Toby,” he told the boy. “Lots of times. When I was a kid, I used to see them all over the place on the other side of the reservoir, by the long grass.”

“Are you talking about the bike trail? The paved one? I love that trail.” Toby’s eyes lit up. “Mom and I rode our bikes on it two months ago. I kept honking my horn because it made a cool echo sound off the rocks, but Mom told me to knock it off because it was annoying the people who were fishing. They never actually complained to her per se, but—”

“Yeah, the bike trail,” Sean interrupted, knowing that the boy’s account of the event could last the rest of the day if left to its own momentum. “In the fall, before the weather started turning cold, there’d always be a bunch of splattered grasshoppers littering the concrete. It still happens. People run over those things with their bicycles, more often than not doing it on purpose. Crunch! Flat as pancakes. Sometimes just half of their bodies, but enough to kill them either way. Even with guts hanging out of their mouths or asses, other grasshoppers will just jump right on their backs and start humping the hell out of them, or whatever they do. It’s a sad, sad thing.”

“Yuck,” Toby said, cringing with widened nostrils. “Why would grasshoppers do that?”

Sean closed one eye and examined the hook at the end of his line. He rotated it in his large fingers. “Instinct. Pure instinct.”

“Instinct?”

“It’s what they’re born to do, I guess. I’m no grasshopper zoologist, so I can’t say for sure whether it’s the scent that draws them in or what. I just know they can’t help themselves. They have no choice in the matter.”

Toby nodded his head, though Sean wasn’t sure if the boy had understood his explanation.

“Sean?”

“What?”

“I don’t think there’s such a thing as a grasshopper zoologist,” the boy said after a lengthy pause.

“I know.”

“Sean?”

“What?”

Toby pulled his own fishing pole into his hands. “Why would someone do that on purpose? Run over grasshoppers on their bikes, I mean. It doesn’t seem very nice.”

“Well, I suppose there’s something satisfying about crunching an insect like that, especially when you’re riding fast and you’ve got only one shot at it. It’s kind of like hunting. There’s some sport to it. A feeling of power.”

“Oh, I get it,” said Toby. “Kind of like dry cereal.”

Sean nodded absently. Then the boy’s words sank in. “Wait. Cereal? What in the hell are you talking about?” He let the hook swing from his hand and glanced at the boy.

Toby’s long eyelashes fluttered. A wide grin formed on his mouth when he met Sean’s questioning look. “You know, like when you’re eating cereal and a piece of it falls on the floor, and you know you should just pick it up, but you don’t pick it up because you want to see what happens when you step on it. You think to yourself, Can I turn that sucker into powder or will it break up into a few pieces?”

Sean winced and shook his head. “No. Not like that at all. That’s what you think about when you drop cereal on the floor?”

“Yes. Except for when I’m eating Lucky Charms. When a marshmallow hits the floor, I can’t bring myself to step on it. They’re soft, there aren’t that many of them in the box, and that leprechaun on TV is right when he says they’re magically delicious.”

Sean’s face further soured.

Toby continued. “Cocoa Puffs, on the other hand, may provide essential vitamins and minerals, but a good stomp will explode one of them into a kazillion pieces. Do you know what time it is?”

Sean glared at him. He’d gotten to know the boy well over the past year, but the awkwardness of his ramblings was something he had never quite gotten used to. Toby had Asperger’s syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. It supposedly contributed to the funny, irrational, and downright weird comments that sometimes fell from his mouth.

“Uh. The time, yeah . . . I’m guessing a little after ten,” said Sean, remembering what the boy had asked him. “Late for a date or something?”

A high-pitched laugh exploded out of Toby’s mouth, drawing looks from the couple across the water in the canoe. The boy hunched forward in his seat and capped his hand over his mouth for a second. “No, silly. I just can’t fish for very long this morning. Mom and Ron Oldhorse are taking me to the alpine slide over in Winter Park. I’ve never been there before and I’ve read that it’s the largest in the state. It’s over 3,000 feet long, Sean!”

Sean’s eyebrows formed sharp arches, but not in reaction to the length of the slide. “Oldhorse is going? He’s actually coming down off his mountain to sit his stiff ass on a ski lift and then slide down a hill on a plastic sled?” He shook his head. “I didn’t think that guy mounted anything that didn’t have hooves. Well, except for your mom.” When Toby gave him a confused look, he added, “Never mind. We’ll just write if off to true love.”

The boy shrugged and focused back to his fishing pole and line, examining the hook in the same fashion he had witnessed Sean doing a minute earlier.

Oldhorse was a good man and had helped bring Sean’s uncle’s killer to justice. He was also an eccentric. Of Native American heritage, he lived in a secluded cabin in the mountains and resisted modern conveniences like automobiles and even electricity. His survivalist lifestyle seemed incompatible with that of Toby’s mother, but somehow the two made their relationship work. The fact that Oldhorse was willing to accompany the family to a tourist trap in Winter Park suggested that acclimating to the twenty-first century wasn’t out of the question.

“Make sure you get some sunscreen on those pasty white legs of yours before you get on that slide,” Sean said. “Otherwise you’ll be walking around like Matt Houston tomorrow.”

“Matt Houston? Is he a friend of yours?”

“You don’t know about Matt Houston? Oh, come on,” Sean muttered, shaking his head in disappointment. “It’s a detective show. On television. From back in the eighties. Lee Horsley played Matt Houston—some rich d**k who walked around like he had a stick up his ass.”

“Ugh,” said Toby, his face wrinkling at the imagery.

“Some good plots though. Some good investigative tips.”

Toby seemed to think this over for a moment. “Sean, why were you asking me if I’d ever seen live grasshoppers screwing dead ones?” He reduced his voice to a careful whisper when pronouncing the word “screwing.”

Sean chuckled, scratching his unshaven face with the back of his hand. “Because when they’re out of the grass, and they’re mounting a dead friend, they’re distracted. Easy pickins’.”

He pulled a plastic margarine container from his tackle box and rested it on his lap. An “X” had been cut into the center of the lid. He carefully peeled back the lid and pulled from it a large, lively grasshopper. It squirmed wildly between his fingers, long antenna pointed up. Toby nearly fell out of his chair, his rod dropping to the ground as he leaped to his feet.

“Oh my gosh! What are you doing?” he breathlessly asked, taking some cautious steps backward along the gravely shore. His eyes were huge. By the time Sean answered, the boy was nearly standing in the water.

“Easy, Tobes. They make good bait. The fish like how animated they are.” Sean pierced his hook through the side of the insect’s crisp skin. The point came out the other end, along with some greenish, pus-like fluid. “Doesn’t that look tasty?”

“Oh, that’s nasty, Sean,” said the boy, his face distorting into horror. He turned his head away.

“No worse than the worms you brought.”

The distinct sound of the slam of a car door echoed its way across the water, drawing Sean’s attention. In the distance, near the dirt parking lot where Sean had left his Nova, he saw the thin figure of a man in an olive-colored, long-sleeved dress shirt and tie and matching pants standing in front of what looked like a Jeep Cherokee. He was a short man with dark hair. He placed his hand to his forehead to block the sun as he carefully panned the area. Once his gaze stopped on Sean, the man lowered his hand.

Sean stood up.

“Is that Chief Lumbergh?” asked Toby, excitement in his voice. He mimicked Sean’s narrow-eyed glare.

“Yeah.”

“Did he come to fish with us?”

“No. I don’t know why he’s here. He should be working up in Winston, like every other day.”

“Sean?”

“What?”

“Did you ever run over grasshoppers on your bike? You know, when you were a kid?”

Sean’s dry expression didn’t change as he answered. “Toby, I was the Saddam Hussein of grasshopper killers.”

Sean watched Lumbergh slowly walk toward them along the wide perimeter of the reservoir. His shoulders rode low, and even from a distance Sean could tell that his demeanor was off. It wasn’t that of the confident, spry man who had served and protected Sean’s hometown of Winston in recent years as their police chief. An unmistakable sense of humility and altruism accompanied his stride, and Sean felt that whatever exchange was about to take place would somehow mark a new chapter in the pair’s complicated history. That history included years of resentment over career-related jealousy and sacrifice, but Lumbergh wasn’t there on official business. He appeared to be there as Sean’s brother-in-law. Something was wrong.

Sean placed his pole on his chair, told Toby to stay put, and made his way toward Lumbergh. He mirrored the lawman’s pace and closing the gap between them gave the anxious thoughts bouncing off the inside his skull time to tangle. He worried that there was something wrong with his sister, Diana, or their baby, but if that were the case, Lumbergh would be a mess. It had to be something else.

Not until Lumbergh was thirty yards out did Sean think of his mother, Dolores. She had suffered a crippling stroke a couple years back and had lived with the chief and Diana ever since. Had she fallen? Had she passed on during the night? The fear of never clearing the air between them began to swirl in Sean’s gut. When he stepped on a patch of loose gravel, its crackle was deafening.

Lumbergh raised his hand in somber greeting as he drew close. The bright sun made his thinning hair nearly transparent, exposing his scalp beneath a subtle comb-over. A light breeze pressed his tie to his shirt. His Glock was visible, sticking out of a thin leather holster at his side.

“What is it, Gary?” Sean asked before Lumbergh could utter a word.

At six foot five, Sean towered over his brother-in-law, who stood at the inversed height of five foot six. Sean’s imposing shadow nearly eclipsed the chief’s entire body.

“Is it Mom?”

Lumbergh’s unfocused gaze seemed to stare right through Sean. His mouth opened, but no words came out. It was as if whatever line he’d scripted in his mind on the walk over had suddenly been deemed a poor choice of words.

“Come on, Gary.”

Lumbergh nodded his head as if to reassure himself before meeting Sean’s stare. “It’s not your mother, Sean. It’s your father. He’s dead.”