The Price of Blood (26 page)

Knee-deep in the gluey sediment and halfway across, they heard a sharp slapping report. They both ducked. Jumpy. And then Broker pointed to a channel of moving water and a broad pool ahead of them. A whiskery, beady-eyed knob cruised like a U-boat. “Beaver alerting,” he said.

They continued to slog. He blinked away sweat, more dripped from his fingers. The beaver had plugged him into the humid bog, sensitive to every soft buzz and chirr, to the ticking eyes of insects. He studied the shadow fan of spring ferns along the far bank, the tremble of pitcher plants that strained like flat green elephant ears from a punky log, the dry rattle of reeds. A slick orange blight of mushrooms pushed through the limp bark of a white birch and he thought: cancer.

Broker lifted one foot from the warm, soaking tickle of the mud and heard the suction pop and echo through the reeds. A brood of black ducks squirted from some bulrushes and the mama duck’s doting quacks sounded suddenly foreboding. He scanned the grove of red oaks beyond the swamp grass where the road emerged from the water. The beaver was closer to the far shore than to them.

“I think you’d better give me the pistol,” he said to Nina.

“No fucking way,” she said.

Broker clicked his teeth and wondered if someone could have gotten in ahead of them. And if so, how? They climbed back on dry land and left the sunlight. He lifted the cooler from the plastic sled and carried it in front of his chest and winced at the slosh of ice cubes on glass at his every step. Nina fell in close behind him. Halfway through the oak trees he heard the musty crunch of a boot come down on dry acorn shells.

The laconic southern voice called out, “Hi there.”

T
WO OF THEM. THEY STEPPED FROM THE COVER of the trees about sixty yards ahead, camouflaged in the shadows at the edge of the grove. Through the foliage, Broker could see an open field dance in the breeze, purple with wild alfalfa and red clover and a spray of wildflowers. The corner and the shingled roof of a cedar plank cabin at the top of the hill was just visible.

The one who had called to them resembled Danny Larkins’s description from Ann Arbor: lean, weathered, sunglasses. He stood casually in a faded blue workshirt and jeans, with his hands on his hips, next to the trunk of a thick oak tree. A pack frame leaned against the tree. A pair of binoculars dangled from a low branch.

The other one did not fit Larkins’s description as ordinary. He was skinny as the rickets and wore a gray T-shirt and a tractor cap. He covered them offhand with a Mini-14 from which curved a thirty-round magazine.

It was turning into a regular plague of rednecks.

“Stay behind me,” said Broker to Nina, who had embraced his back in feigned terror.

“I need five more yards,” she whispered and nudged him. Awkwardly, he held the cooler in his raised hands and stumbled forward.
Please, God, don’t let her try something stupid with the handgun
. In this bad light. At extreme range. In a semi-automatic rifle’s sights. Sweat electrified his eyes and the alfalfa and sweet clover beckoned, ravishing, normal, in the sun. Their hot perfume struck him dizzy. He heard the crickets, bees. They were so damn close.

“Put the cooler down to the side and stay in front of me,” she whispered in a husky high-diver’s voice.

Very slowly Broker set down the plastic box. Then he took another uncertain step forward and raised his hands.

“That’s good. Relax. We ain’t going to hurt you,” called out Sunglasses. “If you’re carrying anything under those shirts, now’d be the time to drop it. Real slow.”

Broker shook his head. Raised his hands higher. Hoping that his hands going up would distract the rifleman from the way his knees trembled in a tense crouch.

“It’s like this,” called Sunglasses. “We know he’s up there and we been waiting for you to show. We got a feeling he won’t talk to us.”

“How’d you find us?” Broker called back. He looked around, shook his head.

“We hired one of those electronic nerd guys. We tapped your telephone, you dumb shit. Then we went to the cheese factory and followed the fat man in last night. We camped out with the fuckin’ bugs so we ain’t real cordial. Now, listen up. What I got in mind is the girl stays with us and you go up and talk. You know what the general wants.”

“How’s Bevode doing?” yelled Broker. Talking to buy some time. Sporta said that Tuna had a rifle. These guys didn’t seem to know. If he could get up there…

“Cousin Bevode’s looking forward to seeing you, that’s for sure. He wanted to be here but he had to go to the dentist.”

“You! Don’t move there,” yelled the one with the rifle.

“
Nina
,” whispered Broker, sensitive to the faint rustle behind him.

“Get clear,” said Nina in a cold, determined voice.

“Honey,” yelled Tractor Hat in an amused drawl as he brought his rifle up, “put that popgun down. You can’t hit shit at this distance and I can pick your titties off.”

“Move fast,” shouted Nina and he knew she was going to do it and all he could do was follow the play. Broker dived. From the corner of his eye he caught a flash of her coming to a point, hair spilling forward, tongue stuck in the right corner of her mouth, as she took a basic bull’s-eye shooter’s stance: body turned forty-five degrees away from her target, right hand sweeping the big Colt up. Extending. Steadying.…Before he hit the dirt he cringed when he heard the two shots: a close-by whap from the Colt and the crack and simultaneous, air-tunneling shock wave of a rifle bullet…

Passing above them, snapping branches through the overhead.

Sunglasses yelped in a thoroughly amazed voice, “Holy Shit!”

Broker rolled. Processed. Tractor Hat was down. Sunglasses was backpedaling, reaching under his shirt. Broker was on his feet in a sprint. Nina swung the pistol to the second man, who was bringing out a long-barreled heavy revolver, but still moving backward, chastised now, seeking cover on the sunny side of the big oak tree, with his back to the field.

Broker covered ground. Charging a .44 Magnum as the Colt cracked bark off the oak tree. Good. Keep his head down. But Sunglasses had that big revolver leveled and was flattened in good cover and was drawing a bead on Nina, who stood in the open.

“
Run
,” screamed Broker. Ten yards out and closing. Sunglasses had to make a decision. His mournful leather-strap features shook into a wrinkled toothy grin. Keeping the tree between himself and Nina, he swung his arm, taking his time, as Broker hurtled in his sights.

Broker closed his eyes when he heard the shot. Diving in blackness, maybe toward the constellation Orion, he tackled the man. When he opened his eyes, aside from a sharp pain in his bruised right shoulder where he and the gunman had smashed into a sharp gnarl of oak root, he determined he was unhit.

Sunglasses had lost his sunglasses and now his sad brown eyes opened wide, leaving shock, going for the mystery dropoff. He twitched once on the fragrant mattress of alfalfa. A tiny storm of striped bees rose from the clover as if exiting the body and a dark stain drenched the left armpit of his blue denim Oshkosh shirt.

“Nina,” Broker yelled. Shaken. Hyperventilating. She stood calmly with the pistol dangling from her hand. “You hit?”

She shook her head and walked slowly toward the unmoving, face-down shape of the man with the rifle. The Colt slug had knocked him back and over a full turn.

Broker ran toward her, grabbed her, and checked her for wounds. She put her hand on his shoulder, briefly touched the back of his neck and then wormed from his embrace and hooked her muddy tennis shoe under the body and rolled it over. The man who inhabited the now-still flesh had worn a gray T-shirt with a Rebel battleflag across the chest. A ragged blood-ringed hole was punched two inches to the left of the crossed Stars and Bars.

Broker started to say lucky shot, but then he remembered how he’d scoffed at her trophy in Ann Arbor. He kept his mouth shut, stooped, and picked up the rifle.

They walked without speaking from the swaying shadows of the trees to the other body in the sunny field. Out of habit Broker knelt and checked for the carotid pulse. Nothing. He retrieved the Magnum and stuffed it in his belt.

They started to shiver in the bright sun, up to their knees in a gorgeous quilt of orange and Canada hawk weed, the red clover, ox-eyed daisies. Amid the wind-ruffled flowers, they swatted with exaggerated reflexes at flies that blundered into their bare arms. One fly, gross as a gumdrop, wallowed, buzzing, in a pool of blood trapped in the left corner of Sunglasses’s mouth. Their eyes met over the corpse and acknowledged that it just got big-time real.

With an exaggerated roughness to glove her bare hands, Nina rolled over the corpse and squatted gingerly, avoiding the mess in the grass. She felt for his wallet, found it, opened it, and said, “We just killed a Fret.”

Broker read the name on the Louisiana driver’s license: William Bedford Fret. It was a day of cousins. He dropped the wallet and looked up the hill. A deck extended off the side of the cabin on stilts and someone was moving up there.

“You think there’s more of them?” Nina asked as she pulled a cell phone from the back pocket of Sunglasses’s jeans. Her voice was too calm, strait-jacketed.

“I don’t know!” His fingers clenched on the rifle and his shout sounded like nerve bundles tearing.

His raw tone tripped Nina into a shudder of delayed shock. He watched her blunt the tremor of mortal fear with a spasm as old as warfare. She dropped the cell phone and kicked the body viciously. A reflex he’d seen many times in combat. “Piece of shit,” she muttered and stepped back and hugged herself, prickly with the frostbite of sudden death at high noon. “How’d you get him?” she asked quietly. “You were behind the tree.”

Broker glanced up the slope. “I didn’t.”

About a hundred and eighty yards up through the wildflowers and alfalfa, glass twinkled. He walked a few steps, unhooked the binoculars from the oak branch, and focused up the hill.

On the deck of the cabin, the vague shape materialized into a stick figure slumped in a chair. It was pitched forward, emaciated elbows planted on the railing with forearms twisted in bondage to a sniper-sling on a scoped rifle. Broker sharpened the focus on the man’s hollow face.

Jimmy Tuna was smiling.

“M
ANNLICHER-CARCANO,” RASPED JIMMY TUNA by way of greeting, thrusting the old-bolt action rifle in his wasted arms as they trudged up the steps to the porch. “Found it inside. Tony’s bosses must keep it here as a kind of joke. Same rifle Oswald got Kennedy with.” He flipped up the bolt and yanked it back and sent a twinkling yellow cartridge casing somersaulting into the sunlight. As the brass skittered on the cedar planks, he shot the bolt forward and carefully leaned the weapon against the deck railing. “Who says the Italians don’t make good stuff?” He grinned and sagged back into his chair, exhausted.

Jimmy Tuna, fifty-eight going on Lazarus, was a husk—his two hundred pounds of twenty years ago had wilted to a hundred twenty. His large nose had once trumpeted abundant appetites. Now it protruded, a bone beak stuck in carrion. The concentration required to shoot Sunglasses looked like it had gobbled up a big hunk of his remaining life.

A faded army-issue baseball cap shaded his eyes and his roadmap-veined arms poked like sticks from a sagging black T-shirt that bore the exuberant motto:
GO FOR THE GUSTO
!

“Gusto” was crusted with dried vomit. Baggy khaki trousers, also fouled, enveloped his legs. Like a tree boil, his left hip made a grotesque angle, pushed out against the pants. The toenails on his bare feet had a mucus-colored curl of accelerated growth and, piled there, in the old redwood lawn chair in the sun, his face was a chiaroscuro going to black and he smelled like the first hour of death.

He pitched back in the chair and removed his cap and his head was more skull than face: a cadaverous jack-o-lantern with eyes that burned like brown coals. Nothing was left inside the loose sack of his skin but the galloping disease.

And a secret.

Broker placed the cooler on the deck and yanked the .44 Mag from his belt and placed it on the railing along with the cell phone. Nina leaned the Mini-14 alongside. They just stared at him, panting, catching their breath, and recovering from the last ten minutes. Face to face. Finally.

Tuna grinned. “Sorry I didn’t put out party favors for old home week.” He extended a clawlike right hand. “How you doing, Phil?”

Broker took the hand. Tuna tried to generate some of his old strength and his old grin. He was drenched in sweat and his grip felt like slimy cold pasta. “Think there’s any more of them?”

Broker shook his head, “Just the two, I think.” He pointed to the portable telephone. “One of them had that.”

Tuna shook his head. “Won’t work out here. I’ve been watching them all morning, but they stayed in the trees. I couldn’t get a shot. I even thought they might be with you.”

“They’re LaPorte’s boys. They were overconfident. They told us.”

“How’d you get the other one?”

“Nina got him. She snuck a .45 past Sporta.”

Tuna nodded. “Tony’ll have to dump them in the swamp. He won’t like that, but he’s done it before. Guys he works for use this place for more than deer hunting.” He brightened. “You get ahold of Trin?”

Broker nodded. Tuna leaned back and glided behind his eyes. His vision focused and he asked, “You figure it out yet?”

Broker chewed his lip. “Cyrus found some gold next to the chopper wreck. Your note said—”

Tuna cackled and held up a shaky hand. “Be patient. Let me tell it my way.” He coughed and looked around. “Well, shit. You turned into a fuckin’ cop. Which don’t surprise me, you always had that Boy Scout look in your eyes. And you found me but this ain’t
NYPD Blue
you’re messin’ in, kid. Uh-uh.” He coughed again and glanced down into the oak grove.

Broker looked around and said, “Will the shots bring cops?”

“Hell no, way out here? And I been plunking away from this deck for a week with this old piece to kill time.” Tuna’s sunken eyes fixed in space. “Now that’s an odd phrase, don’t you think? Kill time.”

He held up a withered hand and turned his attention to Nina. “Forgetting my manners. Hello there, Miss Pryce.”

“Hello, Jimmy,” said Nina evenly. “So this is where you got to with your ‘funeral’ money.”

With difficulty he put his hand in his trouser pocket and withdrew a folded bank check. He handed it to her. “Didn’t need your money, but I had to bait the hook. Sorry about the puzzle palace you had to go through to find me. Cyrus has been on me for years. Guards. Other inmates coming at me. Thank God for conservative Republican bankers. Cyrus couldn’t get into those records.”

“How the hell did you find Trin?” asked Broker.

“That was hard. But I had a lot of time. You talked to the bank in Ann Arbor, right?”

“I did,” said Nina. “And Kevin Eichleay.”

Tuna nodded. “Kevin told the banker, said Trin looked like hell. The Commies must have worked him over good. Reeducated him. But he’s there. And he’s Trin. Was going to be my ace in the hole.” Tuna gritted his teeth at a stab of real or psychological pain. “Yours now.”

“What does he know?”

“He knows I’m his padrone. I’m a fuckin’ one-man charity. Set up his vet’s home for wayward Viet Cong. Helped him get started in the tour business. I was coming as a tourist. Now you and Nina are going in my place. I paid him to set up a tour. Hanoi to Hue. Reserved rooms both places for two weeks. Didn’t know when you’d show up. What’d he say to you?”

“He thinks you’re still in the joint.”

“I used Tony’s phone. Called him up a week ago. Told him I was detained. That I was sending you instead.”

“He wanted to know when our plane arrived, pretty straightforward stuff.”

“The revolution musta gone to hell, huh? They’re all nuts to make a buck off tourists over there now. Trin too, I guess.” He fell back heavily into the chair, spent.

“All these years. You were planning to go back for it…” said Broker.

“Yeah. I was dumb back in seventy-six. Thought I could bankroll the trip with that bank job. Not dumb anymore…aw, shit.” He feebly waved his hand. “Take a break.” He pointed to the Coleman cooler and his hollow eyes took on a keen luster of anticipation. “What’s for lunch?”

Nina took out eight cold bottles of San Miguel beer and some ham and cheese sandwiches. There was a Tupperware container in the bottom. It contained a neatly folded white cloth napkin. Tuna held out his hand, fingers fluttering in a gimme gesture. She handed over the cloth, which he unfolded with great ceremony. A plastic packet full of white powder lay in the center.

He flipped up a corner of a towel that covered a low redwood table next to his chair and revealed a syringe, a spoon, and a length of rubber tubing. Methodically he tied off his frail arm and pumped his fist. Then he pushed some of the powder into the spoon with his little finger. He thumbed a plastic lighter and cooked up. When the chemical bubbled and cooled to liquid, he inserted the syringe and drew down a shot. Then he pumped his hand again.

“Never used smack, not even in the joint. I even joined AA once. Now it’s the only medicine that works,” he said cheerfully, and his hand floated out and touched the plump vein on the hollow of Broker’s right elbow. “Man, what I wouldn’t give for that storm sewer you got in your arm.”

In the short noon shadows they watched Tuna fix. Watched him tremble and nod back in his chair until spittle dribbled from his caked lips and his eyes turned up into his head like a shark before it bites. His voice surged. “So,” he said, grinning directly into the sun. “What took you guys so long?” Then he vomited at a leisurely pace, fouling the emaciated wattles at his throat and his shirt with a mealy steam of dog food that reeked of stomach acid. His bowels released and his upper lip curled up to reveal bloody gums and long, yellowed teeth. Sightless eyes wide open, Jimmy Tuna glared at them like a raging Jolly Roger.