The Price of Blood (13 page)

“So,” said Nina, “Tuna never had a visitor between the time he had the fight with LaPorte and the moment he contacted me.”

Broker nodded. “Could be he had a buddy inside he confided in and might use as a mailbox. Let’s see what Ryan comes up with in federal corrections.” He stood up.

“There’s more, he gave me—” she said.

“Not now. Watch the phone. I need to take a walk.”

Storm shadows seeped up from the rock crevasses and ran inky between the smooth lakeshore cobbles. Boulders wore an ebony sheen. Broker had to force the charged air into his lungs and then wring it out.

He walked up the driveway and turned north onto Highway 61. He liked to jog along the shore road, but he usually took Tank on those runs.

Today he changed his pattern and crossed the highway and took an overgrown gravel lane inland until he came to a buckled, tar, two-lane road that ran parallel to the highway. The creepy old road had grass marching across the washouts and the rickety skeletons of wood-frame houses dotted the brush. It was a depressing place that he usually avoided.

Nineteen-eighty was stuck in his memory. Don’t try to figure it head on. Unfocus. Trick it out. Think normal thoughts. He turned right on the road and followed it north. Two hundred yards away, screened by dense poplar and birch, he heard the traffic race toward Grand Portage and the casino up there, toward the Canadian border, toward the millennium. The year 2000.

The smart thing would be to just move up here, run the lodge, live out the century in a landscape that was familiar…But his thoughts turned back to Jimmy Tuna and his fascination with funerals.

Tuna had not been a normal NCO. A lot of high-ranking officers are abetted by Machiavellian senior sergeants. Tuna was in that mold, with the appearance and the wile of a Renaissance condottieri. Why would he beg for money and fixate on his own last rites over and over with Nina? Funerals. Burial. Graves.

Another thing about Tuna. Always the joker.

He stopped in mid-thought. The unmistakable stench of decaying flesh clotted the heavy air. Fifty yards ahead, a black shiny shape spilled from the brush into the road.

He padded forward, instinctively checking the surrounding forest. Alone with the sweaty zing of cicadas, he closed the distance to the feeding frenzy of the flies.

A heavy-duty, black plastic garbage bag was dumped in the weeds. Under the fat swarming deer flies, Broker saw the boned-out ribcage of a deer and the maggots that foamed on the shreds of sun-spoiled meat. His gag reflex cocked.

Another argument for winter.

Broker stepped back and grabbed for a cigarette. Why he’d started smoking in Vietnam—it put a lid on that particular odor. He thought of Bevode Fret sitting in jail and mused that New Orleans might smell a little bit like the deer carcass, slick with gamey sweat on the edge of the Tropic of Cancer.

Then the shadow flitted in his memory and he clearly recalled the Chinook struggling up over the flare-lit tile rooftops of Hue, straining with the dangling cargo net while tracer rounds stitched the rainy night.

Broker grinned.
Jimmy, you sneaky old fucker, what are you up to
? He turned and ran back toward the cabin.

N
INA JUMPED UP FROM A BENCH ON THE BACK porch and waved him in. “He called, the ATF guy.”

Broker breathing hard, his thumb banging, “What did he say?”

“Wouldn’t talk to me, said for you to call him back.”

Broker punched in Ryan’s number. Nina plucked the cordless phone from the bedroom.

Ryan said, “Your guy’s cell mate is a lifer who’s never getting out. Name is Waldo Jenke. He’s a real yard bull. I mean big. Name he goes by in the joint is Walls. Whiskey alpha lima lima sierra.”

“What’s he in for?” But Broker was thinking. Jimmy needed someone to watch his back if Cyrus was after him.

“Creepy shit. He kidnapped children and their pets in Michigan and Illinois in the late seventies. When he was through with them he buried them together on his farm. He was back before video. He took Polaroids.”

“Any notes on him?”

“Ah, he fixated on pictures of his victims. That’s what caught him. They found a picture of a Rottweiler named Heidi in his truck during a routine traffic stop. They let him out of maximum security five years ago and put him out to pasture in Milan. The bureau hasn’t been forth-coming on the paperwork thing.”

“Keep trying. Thanks, Ryan.”

Nina came into the main room and gave Broker a thumbs-up sign. He went to the fridge, took out a bottle of Grain Belt and popped it open on the opener screwed to the counter. Grinning, he kicked open the screen door and went out through the front porch, down the stairs and the path, and out to his favorite rock. Nina followed him.

He sat down and watched the storm marshal its artillery.

“Nineteen-eighty.” Broker savored a swig of beer and poked the bottle at Nina. “In July 1980 the gold market peaked. That’s why LaPorte lost his cookies with Tuna.”

“All that gold appreciating like hell and it’s rusting at the bottom of the ocean and only Tuna knows where it went down.”

“Gold doesn’t rust,” said Broker.

“LaPorte found a helicopter wreck,” Nina speculated. “But maybe it’s the wrong wreck—”

“Could be. And if Jimmy knows where it is, he’s willing to tell us
something
. He sure isn’t making himself available to LaPorte.” Broker pulled Tuna’s crumpled note from his pocket, smoothed it out and pointed to Trin’s name.

Nina cocked her head. “Trin and my dad were friends. But I don’t see how he fits.”

“It could mean that Tuna, in prison, somehow located Trin in Vietnam after twenty years.” The idea excited Broker. “If Trin’s in our future he’d work better with somebody he knows. And the trail Tuna is setting up probably needs an investigator to follow.” Broker paused. “The thing about Jimmy Tuna, he loved pulling practical jokes. And setting booby traps. Fall asleep on ambush, Jimmy would tie your bootlaces together.”

“So it could be a trap for us, too?”

“That’s the fun, isn’t it?” said Broker with a tight smile.

“What about Trin? The phone number?” Nina asked. “You want to give it a try?”

“Let’s wait. I don’t want to bump into Trin blind after twenty years.”

“He helped save your neck in Quang Tri City. You saved his. I thought he was a buddy?”

“Nguyen Van Trin was a strange guy. He fought for the Commies and for us and was disgusted with both sides. He even designed his own flag. A white lotus in a sea of fire.” Broker shook his head. “The only person Trin is buddies with is the ghosts of his ancestors. We’ll wait.”

Their voices had dropped a register and their heads had drawn close. Nina’s eyes were slits. “Now that you’re hooked on gold fever, let me explain where my interest lies. He knows how to get LaPorte. Jimmy does.”

“Wishful thinking.”

“No. He knows. He showed me. But it was like the pension. I didn’t see it.” Her voice trailed off and her eyes conjured.

Her enthusiasm was going to be a definite obstacle. But he needed her. How much he wasn’t sure. At least to talk to this Jenke character and hopefully pick up Tuna’s trail. As an excuse to see LaPorte.

“How about we find Jimmy Tuna and ask him,” Broker said with a gentle hint of rebuff. “And let’s spend some of your money. Grab a charter to Ann Arbor and talk to Waldo Jenke. Then I’ll need a day in New Orleans to see LaPorte before Bevode Fret gets out of jail.”

“There’s fifty thousand in the bank in Ann Arbor. I’ll spend it all to clear Dad’s name and to see LaPorte stand trial.”

Broker cautioned her again. “None of this is proof. The fact LaPorte may have found gold in the ocean doesn’t connect him with the alleged robbery or your dad’s death.”

“But he was in command,” said Nina.

“True,” said Broker patiently. “But he wasn’t there. And Tuna would have to change his story and impeach his earlier testimony, which means he’s a liar. And he’s dying. LaPorte has the right to cross-examine his accuser. And there’s no court with the jurisdiction to charge LaPorte for a criminal act during an undeclared war twenty years ago in a country that doesn’t even exist anymore.”

Nina stood up and put her hands on her hips. “Wrong. When you take that oath to the U.S. Constitution, it’s forever, mister. I told you. Tuna knows a way.” She spun and tramped up the path to the cabin. A minute later she came back down the path and tossed a thick oxblood-covered text book into his lap. Broker read the cover:
UNITED STATES CODE ANNOTATED, TITLE
10,
ARMED FORCES
, 1
TO
835.

Broker clicked his teeth. The UCMJ. The Uniform Code of Military Justice. A Post-it note marked the pages. He opened to it and struggled through a paragraph underlined in yellow marker: “803. Article 3. Jurisdiction to try certain personnel: (a) Subject to section 843 of this title (article 43), a person who is in a status in which the person is subject to this chapter and who committed an offense against this chapter while formally in a status in which the person was subject to this chapter is not relieved from amenability to the jurisdiction of this chapter for that offense by reason of a termination of that person’s former status.”

“Define ‘certain personnel,’” said Broker.

“Once you’re in, and you’re an officer type and you’re eligible for a pension, you’re never really out. There’s precedent. I ran it kind of obliquely by a JAG guy I know. They reactivated a retired colonel in the seventies and tried him for misappropriating canteen funds in Vietnam in nineteen sixty-six.”

“Where’d you get this?”

“That’s my point.
I
didn’t underline that. Jimmy Tuna did. It was in the package he left the day he stood me up at prison. That note and the
Newsweek
page were folded, marking the section.”

Broker was impressed. It suggested another level to the thing.

Her eyes sharpened to pencil points. “So you’re a cop. Solve me a bank robbery.”

She was working on a full body flush of anticipation. Broker leaned away from her infectious excitement. “You got stars in your eyes. We need evidence,” he cautioned.

“Why would Jimmy give me the UCMJ unless he had evidence? But I need
you
to find
him
.”

“Before God does,” said Broker. “And we could still come up empty. And if you really want to nail LaPorte, it may not happen in the strict legal sense.”

“No. You can get the pieces any way you want, but I do it by the book. He gets tried. It gets on the record. My dad gets his name cleared.” Very serious, she planted her knuckles on her hips.

He reappraised Nina Pryce again. This time with pure intuition. She thought LaPorte’s head on a platter could pave her way back into the army. So she had a little Pluto in her, too. And stars in her eyes. Two, at least. One for each shoulder. He said, “I’m going to get some of it—”

“That’s your business.” She looked away. “I won’t help you steal. But what I don’t see, I don’t know.”

“This will go down in Vietnam. No sense letting the Communists have it.”

“It,” said Nina coolly.

He gazed across the turbulent plain of Lake Superior. There were three of them now. The third being a tangible presence that neither he nor Nina would invite out of the silence. The faint, dry rustle crept down the centuries, twisted serpentine through the bones of Cortés and Pizarro and Sir Francis Drake, and whispered in his ear.

N
INA WENT INTO THE CABIN AND CAME OUT stripped down to a pair of shorts, a running bra, and an old pair of Reeboks. She tied the red bandanna around her forehead and collected a pick and shovel and walked toward the lodge. Broker could see his dad sitting at the kitchen table, in a rectangle of yellow light that was framed in the shadow of the house under the darkening sky. Mike cupped his chin in his hands and stared out over the lake.

Broker climbed to the end of his promontory and watched while Irene and Mike showed Nina where they wanted the hole dug, in a rocky cleft overlooking the shore. Nina spread her feet and hefted the pick in her hands. Then she set to work with a slow, powerful rhythm. Fifty yards away and above her, Broker watched the flat muscles of her back and shoulders swing smoothly and oil with sweat.

She put down the pick and started with the shovel, difficult going because she lacked the proper footwear, but she didn’t flinch and soon a dark ring of sweat soaked into her shorts. Then she went back to the pick and swung it to the fitful smash of waves breaking against the tiers of stone. Last night the Big Water lay placid under a “Bali H’ai” sunset. Today whitecaps rode the north wind and it looked like
Victory at Sea
out there.

Broker was not prone to admitting it, but he added up to more than just a set of balls and fast-twitch muscles. Once, back when he still showed up for evaluations at the BCA, he’d taken a routine MMPI psychological profile. He was graded by an uptight office guy who told Broker he tested out with a deviant male identity.

Broker took the test results to a lady he was dating who did profiles for the FBI. After much teasing she interpreted the grade and, that night, staring at her bedroom ceiling, she told him that the MMPI was culture-bound and dated. “Your sensitivity range graphs out within normal parameters for a woman. Off the charts for a male. That must have freaked out the guy who graded it.”

Broker had intuition.

With his eyes he saw a young woman digging on the rocky beach; bandanna fluttering in a rising wind, she looked like a slender buccaneer. But his intuition was starting to fathom that she was a new kind of woman for a new century. And she had the spirit to march into the spooky old woods with the U.S. Code and drag LaPorte out like a gutted deer and face down the U.S. Army. She would use her dad, who was dead, and Broker, who was living right now, to do it. Goddamn. She probably
would
be the first woman to get the CIB.

He visualized the crossed bones below the skull tattoo on her glistening shoulder. She’d want to get her way. So did he…

He’d known ambitious women. But Nina was the first one who came utterly without insecurity. She didn’t crave power. She had it already, inside her. Call it charisma. Leadership. It was power. He sure felt it start to pop when their fingers touched. But she was young and she hadn’t mastered the voltage. He could wind up electrocuted if he got too close.

And gold didn’t tempt her. She demanded justice, but she also figured she was owed advancement and silver. She would trade a treasure for vindication, for LaPorte’s scalp, for reinstatement in the army, and eventually for a tiny drop of silver, fashioned in the shape of the five-pointed star that brigadier generals wear on their shoulders.

And he reflected that the search for Jimmy Tuna would be fraught with puzzles and traps and it was poetic justice that the game might end in Vietnam where the ambush was invented.

Down on the beach the hole was chest deep. Nina climbed out and lowered in the lump of tarp, and, without pausing, hurrying now, with sidelong glances at the roiling sky, she filled in the grave.

Then, as it began to sprinkle, she patted the mounded dirt and laid down the shovel and carried a towel and soap down the granite polyps to the water’s edge. She stripped off her work-fouled clothes and waded up to her thighs in the crashing surf and scrubbed as lightning scurried across the horizon. Thunder banged the bedrock and the first fat raindrops sizzled around her. It was magic light. The sun hid. Storm charge and ozone shook the air like a shaman’s rattle. Untextured by shadow, every surface—the rocks, her skin, the heaving water—shone with its own luminous electricity.

She rinsed her hard arms and reached up to embrace the furious sky and the gray wall of rain that dashed across Superior, like the hooves of running ponies, straight for her.

Broker didn’t know if Amazon hoplites really fought on the plains of Troy, and he didn’t know if America was ready for them now. He knew he wasn’t. But goddamn, man…

There it is.