The Price of Blood (25 page)

B
ROKER WOKE UP AND STRETCHED. FOR A WONDERFUL half second he drowsed with an adolescent languor until an odor smacked him that was about as far from the memory of lovemaking as you can get: Hoppe’s gun-cleaning solvent.

A shower had knocked the quaff from Nina’s hair and her face was bare of makeup. She wore baggy jeans, a pebble-gray T-shirt, and busted tennis shoes. He sat up and squinted. Probably changed to the bigger jeans because he’d said that dress was too tight at the store…

Her pant legs were drenched almost to the knees. Cockleburs stuck to them. Wet grass and bits of brush were pasted to her rubber soles. He reached for his car keys on the bedside table. Gone.

“What the hell?”

“I took the Jeep up into the hills. Ran a few rounds through the .45 to see where it shoots,” she said mildly as she held up the pistol. “A foot off to the left at eight o’clock over approximately fifty yards…”

Broker rubbed his eyes. “Let me have that cannon. Take the Beretta, it’s lighter.”

Nina hefted the Colt’s weight and said fondly, “Uh-uh, this lump of iron is the longest continuing in-service military handgun in the world for a reason.”

She sat at the table by the kitchenette surrounded by bore brushes, patches and plastic bottles, little wire brushes, cleaning rods, and a box of pistol ammunition. His Beretta lay to one side, obviously oiled. Her fingers flew, reassembling the Colt. The slide ratcheted forward with a springing snap. She fixed him with a direct, scrubbed morning stare. “Last night doesn’t mean I’m your squaw, you got that?”

“C’mon—” said Broker.

“It could complicate taking care of business, agreed?”

“Just a weak moment,” said Broker.

“A choice I made. Nothing weak about it,” she said with finality.

Broker made a face and needed to brush his teeth. Grumbling, he headed to the bathroom.

At the sink he wondered how he would get his Colt back. Should have brought the shotgun. Maybe they should stop on the road and buy one. He’d never relied on handguns, which he considered wildly inaccurate in the hands of normal people—he recalled the army pistol-shooting trophy in Nina’s apartment in Ann Arbor—unless you were an obsessive-compulsive nut who spent thousands of hours at the range. Which she could very well be.

Broker continued to grumble through a shower and a shave. When he came out, he dressed quickly. They packed their bags, clipped on their security belts, jammed guns in their waistbands, left their T-shirts untucked to cover them, and walked from the fancy room without looking back.

Broker jump-started his heart with three thimbles of espresso on the deck of the fern-elegant pastry shop next to the resort. As Nina had a vegetable omelet he watched the pewter sky heat up over the lake. With uncharacteristic ennui he wondered if he’d ever see snow again. Then they hit the road. Nobody tailed them as far as he could determine.

Nina read aloud from Tuna’s prison jacket while Broker monitored the rearview. “Graduate degree in business administration from the University of Michigan extension service. Two years of Vietnamese. Graduate courses in international investment. Tuna and I were going to school together.”

“Biding his time, getting ready for something. He always was a tricky guy but—”

“But what?”

“He always had bad luck.”

“No shit.”

In an hour they had crossed through Duluth and Superior, Wisconsin, and were speeding south on the road they’d originally taken up to Mike and Irene’s. The early morning haze burned off and humidity hugged the fields and tree lines like a lazy bejeweled python. Barefoot, early summer day, when the yellowjacket stings you in the soft flesh under your instep in the tall wet grass.

They didn’t talk much. The map lay open on Nina’s lap. Twenty years telescoped for Broker. Twenty years in which he had failed at a marriage and put a lot of guys and two or three women in jail. Not much to show. He glanced at Nina, who stared straight ahead. He wondered if some of her concentration was morning-after blues. Passion and spontaneity had overruled precaution last night.

He smiled tightly, remembering his mother’s maxim:
Our only real job here on earth is to replace ourselves
.

But the fact was, when you’re driving toward who knows what with loaded guns in your pants, you’re a long way from workaday hedges against reality like condoms and diaphragms. Seeming to sense his thoughts she turned and asked, “How are you doing, Broker?”

“We’ll do just fine,” he said.

“I think so too.” For a few moments she held his hand. Broker leaned forward and stepped on the gas.

They turned east on Highway 8 at St. Croix Falls, and then south on County 65. They consulted the map and made a turn on County F and raced down the winding tar two-lane that was hemmed in by hilly fields and a lot of swamp and small woods. They found Loki near a place called Wanderoos.

Like Ryan said. There was nothing there except a decaying A & W Root Beer stand with weeds growing in the parking lot and a two-story cinderblock building with four pickups parked behind the loading dock.

The peeling white paint on the building’s side had sprouted quaint Burma Shave whiskers and failed to blot out huge faded letters that spelled out a previous owner:
CAMP’S EXTRA MILD CHEESE
. 1926. A newer sign was bolted to a pillar on the loading dock and bore an Italian flag-colored cockade logo and the business name:
RED, WHITE, AND GREEN, INC.
Cracked cement steps rose to the dock and a sign jutted at one end. Office.

The sun was high and cropped their shadows short as they crossed the gravel lot and mounted the steps. A bell jingled as they entered.

A plaque on the desk announced
ANTHONY SPORTA, MGR.
The man behind the nameplate filled a red T-shirt and bib overalls with the swollen dignity of a Sumo wrestler. Beneath ringlets of black hair, his beady eyes peered from a face the texture of Italian sausage. The real hard kind. A twist of flypaper hung directly above his head coated with a jam of dead insects. He squinted at them. His right index finger described a dainty curlicue in the air that signaled, “Hello, come in. I know who you are.”

A muted sound of machinery carried through the walls. Lactose mist seeped in the air. Not looking real happy, Tony Sporta opened a drawer, pulled something out, and tossed it on the desk. It was a picture, twenty years old, that had been taken in a waterfront restaurant in Hue City. LaPorte, Pryce, Tuna, and Broker sat behind a forest of beer cans. An arrow drawn in marker indicated Broker’s head. Younger, but the eyebrows. Sporta’s practiced gaze settled on Broker.

“Now why does a guy who’s in shape wear his shirt out?” he said.

“Is that a bathroom?” asked Nina, pointing to an open door next to some file cabinets.

“Just stay put a second.” Sporta glowered.

Nina offered him a pained smile. “I have a female situation I have to attend to.”

Sporta grumbled, “Leave the purse.” Feigning indignance, Nina put her purse on the desk and pulled out a travel pack of super maxipads. Sporta jerked his thumb at the door and perused Broker as Nina locked the door behind her. “He says you’re a cop, but I shouldn’t let that bother me.”

“How is he?” asked Broker.

“Real fucked up. He wants you and the girl in quick, out quick, and he’s got rules.” The toilet flushed behind the bathroom door. Water pipes rattled.

“Okay,” said Broker.

“Nothin’s okay. He should see a doctor.” Sporta cleared his throat and stood up, light-footed for a big man. “He should see a priest.” The bathroom door opened and Nina came out holding up her wet hands. She was walking a little funny, but you had to have been in bed with her to tell.

“You’re out of towels,” she said.

“Sorry,” said Sporta. He turned back to Broker. “You leave your vehicle here. I drive you partway. You walk the rest.”

Broker nodded.

“You take nothing in there. No cameras, no tape recorders, no bags or purses, and
no guns
. So I gotta pat you down. Both of you. Empty your pockets. Put it on the desk.” Change and keys and spare folding cash made two little piles on Sporta’s dirty desk blotter. Then he motioned to Broker, who reluctantly lifted his arms. Sporta’s hand went right to the Beretta jammed in his waistband in the middle of his back. Broker watched Nina’s eyes, which had gone very quiet and neutral. Sporta placed the pistol on his desk.

“What’s this?” asked Sporta, patting just below Broker’s belt loops.

“Security belt.”

“What’s in it?”

Broker pulled the elastic folder out and zipped it open. “Money, ID.”

“Okay. Keep that. Lift up your pant legs so I can see your socks.” Broker did. Sporta turned to Nina. “Now you.”

His thick fingers quickly circled her waist, went lower, and hit the security belt. She pulled it out and opened it. He nodded and went through the socks routine with her. As he straightened up from inspecting her ankles he grimaced slightly. “Sorry, miss, but you got a little bulge there, front and back.”

Nina reddened and handed Sporta the maxipads. “Go ahead,” she said grimly. “You’re the one out of towels…”

Sporta delicately scratched his chin and decided to pass. He told them to retrieve their pocket items, took her purse, collected the Beretta, and put them in the desk drawer, which he then locked. “You’ll get them back.”

He bent and picked up a Coleman cooler that sat next to the desk. “You can take him some lunch. C’mon,” he said.

When Nina was sandwiched in the front seat of a huge red truck between Sporta’s girth and Broker riding shotgun, Sporta paused before he twisted the ignition. “Won’t do you any good to ask me because he didn’t tell me anything. He just gave me the picture and said bring you the minute you showed up.”

“You brought him over from Milan?” asked Broker.

“Yeah. I did do that. My mother’s his aunt. He made me promise not to even tell her he was here.”

As they drove away from the Red, White, and Green cheese factory a black Subaru station wagon overtook them and passed at high speed on the hilly, curving road. Broker felt a hitch in his stomach when he saw the tinted windows zip past. Bevode Fret had driven a green Saturn with smoked glass. Sweat trickled down the small of his back where the Beretta had been.

Sporta puffed on a Camel straight. His forearms, draped on the wheel, looked like tattooed Easter hams. “Now this place we’re going to is on a thousand acres my employers bought to go deer hunting. So they only use it in November.”

“How bad is he?” asked Nina.

Sporta shook his head. “Last week I’d get four shopping bags of food at the grocery. Now I get a bag at a time.”

They came over a hill and Broker saw the black station wagon, going slower now, keeping pace in front of them. “You recognize that car?” he asked.

“Lotta lake homes around here. There’s all kinds of cars.” Sporta shrugged. “Relax. There’s only one way in and I’ll be blocking it. I got some firepower in the back.” Sporta grinned. “Don’t tell my parole officer.”

They turned off on a gravel road and Sporta pointed to a high stand of pines and oak about a mile away. “Cabin’s up there. Swamp runs all around that hill. The water’s been high so the road don’t go through. You have to get your feet wet and walk the last three hundred yards.” He stopped the truck at a padlocked steel gate. The posts were festooned with No T
RESPASSING
and A
RMED
R
ESPONSE
signs.

When Sporta got out to unlock the gate, Broker turned to Nina. “Where’n the hell did you put the Colt?”

She batted her eyes. Sporta got back in and they drove through shadowy screens of young alders that grew dense as bamboo. Sporta said, “This is second growth. It opens up ahead. Fields we put in the land bank.” They bounced down the rutted road and the tires began to churn through mud wallows. The thick jackpine, poplar, and alders ended abruptly and the gravel road bed disappeared into a glue of trampled cattails. A leafy grove of old oak trees stood cross the swamp. Access to the other side was over a causeway of crushed rock and railroad ties. Now the roadbed was scattered and submerged. A rut of suction holes marked where someone had tramped back and forth.

Tony slumped behind the wheel. “He’s got money saved. He could’a gone to the Mayo.” They got out of the truck and Sporta pointed. A child’s blue plastic sled, with a length of yellow plastic clothesline attached, lay in the brush at the edge of the swamp. “Put the cooler in there and drag it.” Broker wondered if that’s how Sporta had ferried Jimmy Tuna across.

“The road picks up again after fifty yards, goes through a little oak woods and then there’s a field that leads up to the cabin. When you come out of that woods he might be watching you through a rifle scope so don’t move sudden.” Sporta grumbled, “If he’s awake. Sometimes he messes his pants. It ain’t pretty up there.”

Broker and Nina waited beside the cooler while Sporta took a gun case from the back of his truck, pulled out a 12-gauge pump, and loaded it. “I’ll be down a little ways back from the gate. I’ll come back in two hours and meet you here.” He climbed into his truck, leaned the shotgun out the passenger side window, and studied them. “I hope this is worth it. For him and for you.” Shaking his head, Tony Sporta backed down the road. They waited until the sound of his engine had receded in the distance.

“Turn around,” Nina said crisply, unsnapping her jeans’ button and starting the zipper.

Broker faced away with a smile, listened to a rustle of denim. A huge, snow white sanitary napkin bounced off his leg and tumbled into the water. “Christ, that looks like a diaper,” he quipped.

“Very funny,” said Nina. “You can turn around now.”

He did. With a broad grin he stared at the large pistol in her hand. “I gotta ask? Did it involve penetration?”

“No. It’s all angles and knowing how to take advantage of the terrain. Forget it. The Freudian implications will just screw up your mind.” Nina possessively jammed the Colt into her waist band and pulled down her shirt. They placed the cooler in the sled and waded into the swamp.