The Price of Blood (27 page)

“N
OW WHAT? HE’S OUT COLD. WHAT IF HE DIES ON us?” Nina muttered. Had to be ninety in the shade. Her arms still bubbled with goosebumps. One hand hugged the small grinning skull and crossbones on her shoulder.

“He’ll come around. We’re what’s keeping him alive,” said Broker. Suddenly he was very thirsty. He saw the powerline running into the cabin. “Let me get this beer out of the sun.” He went into the cool interior. The kitchen was right inside the door. He tried a light switch, saw that the electric worked and spied the icebox. He put the beer inside, found an opener in a drawer next to the sink, and opened two bottles. San Miguel. Tuna’s old favorite.

Nina entered the kitchen, paused for a moment, got her bearings and disappeared into a back room. She returned with towels and clean folded clothing. Then she filled a basin with water and went back out to the deck.

Broker followed her outside and stood in a patch of shade and sipped his beer. Nina bent over Tuna and methodically removed his fouled trousers, bundled them, and tossed them aside.

Broker averted his eyes from Tuna’s emaciation and the tumor that torqued out of his left hip. The Tuna he remembered from twenty years ago had been muscled like a Greco-Roman wrestler. “Do you have to do that right now?”

“Not the first time I’ve seen a man mess his pants,” she muttered and cast a dirtied towel aside and rinsed a fresh one. She tossed the dirty water over the patio, slapped the messy trousers in the empty basin, and handed it to Broker. “Lend a hand, this old jailbird just saved our lives.” Broker set down his beer and went for more water.

Tuna lolled in their hands as they washed his white loose flesh and then pulled on new underwear, a pair of baggy cotton trousers, and a clean T-shirt. Washing their hands in the kitchen they heard someone moving on the stairs…

Tony Sporta stuck his curly head into the kitchen. Sweat dripped from his nose. “He shit his pants again,” he said. “And there’s two dead guys in the woods.” He frowned like he wasn’t sure which of his observations vexed him most.

“Jimmy says you should put the dead guys in the swamp,” said Broker.

“Are you sure you’re a cop?”

“Way down in the swamp,” said Broker.

Sporta threw his hands in the air. He paused long enough to stick the .44 revolver in his pocket and then marched down the stairs, cursing. His voice carried all the way down the field to the trees.

Nina came out of the cabin and stood next to him. “What will Cyrus do now?”

“Keep after us until he knows where it is…” Some wooden wind chimes rattled in the breeze. Tuna’s paper lungs made a shallow rustle. Cicadas buzzed in the brush. “Should have told you before. We may have an ally inside LaPorte’s bunch. We’re supposed to think so, anyway,” he said.

“Who?”

“Someone who hates LaPorte.”

“Broker!”

Broker grinned. “His wife.”

Nina laughed sarcastically. “Wonderful. It’s Terry and the Pirates. And now we got Lola the freaking Dragon Lady.” She rolled her eyes. “All I need. Some glamorous facelift bitch who has a boat named after her.” She squinted. “You slept with her, didn’t you—”

“No I didn’t,” said Broker frankly. “She says we have…mutual interests.”

“
I’ll bet
.”

“We needed an in with them. Well, I’m in,” Broker patiently explained. “LaPorte has a roving eye for younger women for breeding purposes.” He wiped a handful of sweat from his brow. “Lola thinks she may get to Vietnam and get pushed off that boat that’s named after her and accidentally drown. So turnabout is fair play.”

Nina reached up and clipped his chin. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you go to New Orleans alone. You don’t know anything about women. I tried to tell you in Ann Arbor. They,” she paused, “we, are your weak spot.”

Broker cleared his throat. It was different, explaining this to the woman you slept with the previous night and who turned out to be, in addition to Audie fucking Murphy, Annie fucking Oakley. “She wants someone to, ah, sort of disappear her husband in the course of events. She gets to wear black for a while and haul in the family estate.”

“Someone, Broker? When did you develop this subtle speech impediment?”

“Okay. Me.”

Nina frowned. “I thought we agreed. I don’t want LaPorte
murdered
. I want him
tried
.”

Broker stood up, irritated. “Nina, goddammit! There’s no way in hell that can happen.”

“Sonofabitch, I
hate
this soap opera shit! She bought you off. That’s how you got that gold.”

“She helped me take it, that’s true—”

“
Fuck
you. You got what you want and now you’re getting cold feet.” She scowled. “I got in bed with you…”

And saved my life
. Broker tried to placate her. “We can still nail him. Not exactly the way you want, but maybe we can get him busted by the Vietnamese as a thief. You’ll have to settle for that.”

Jimmy Tuna stirred and opened one cadaverous eye. Then he smiled so slowly that his teeth appeared one by one like corroded yellow bullets in the wrinkled maw of his lips. He croaked emphatically, “Wrong.”

“T
HIRSTY,” SAID TUNA. HE FANNED HIS MOUTH. Parched. Nina darted into the cabin and returned with two open bottles of iced beer. He nodded and asked very politely, “Tony brought me some cherries last night, in a bowl in the icebox?” Nina turned promptly and returned with the large bowl of cherries. She placed them on the table next to Tuna’s chair and handed him one of the chilled bottles. She tucked the extra between his legs in the baggy folds of his trousers.

Tuna drank one beer in a long dreamy gurgle. He set the empty aside and picked up the fresh bottle. He held the ice-sweating glass to the inside of his papery left forearm and sighed. Then his other hand fumbled on the table for a pack of Pall Malls. In slow motion he lit one and inhaled. Exhaled and coughed violently.

“Shit’s probably in my lungs,” he said as heroin merriness flooded his sunken cheeks and twinkled in his cratered eyes. Seeing the corpselike figure animate with the strange current of energy and thinking about the rednecks laying stiff in the shade of an oak tree had the perverse effect of making Broker hungry. He chewed one of the ham and cheese sandwiches and washed it down with San Miguel.

Tuna began to eat the cherries, ferrying them one by one in his taloned hand, savoring them with a gluttonous sucking of lips and tongue. He spit the pits onto the deck where they collected like tiny red bodies. Ants formed industrious columns, going after the shreds of pulp.

Nina smiled tightly. “I wish there was some way we could record this.”

The stoned laughter that gushed from Tuna’s cherry-stained lips sounded like a flock of insane birds. There was some of the muscular oily humor of the old Tuna in that laugh. “How many words you think I got left? A thousand? Five hundred? I’ll do my talking to people, not a goddamned machine.”

“Okay,” said Nina, crossing her arms and waiting patiently.

Tuna cackled and his eyes and voice went into a glide. “Paget’s disease,” he whispered. “Four Purple Hearts and I walked away from each of them. Fucking Indians have casinos. Nigger kids got high-top tennis shoes, nine millimeters, and crack franchises. I got a fortune in gold and I get cancer. In prison…”

He smiled luridly. “The medical book says, get this,” he quoted: “‘The dread complication of Paget’s disease is osteosarcoma, which
fortunately
occurs in fewer than one percent of the patients.’” He sucked on his Pall Mall. “That’s quite a word—
dread
.”

He bit his cracked lips. “It’s in my rectum now. And my bladder. And my kidneys. When it gets to my lungs…hat roi.”

Hat roi was the Vietnamese phrase for “all gone.”

“Like taking a crap through a turnstile.” Tuna tried to laugh and began coughing again.

His eyes moistened. “We had some great days, Phil. Quang Tri City. That was like a chapter out of the fucking Bible. Nobody even knew. Remember?”

“Yeah, Jimmy.”

Tuna took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll give it to you straight. We left you and Trin…” He spun out the Vietnamese name and the sound twisted on the hot afternoon like a cool shadow. “Hell, we did more than that. We gave them Trin. We knew Pryce was crazy enough to go try to get him out.”

“Pryce didn’t know?” demanded Broker.

“Mama Pryce. You kidding? Him and Trin didn’t know shit.” Tuna chortled. “Trin’s gonna freak…”

Broker couldn’t imagine anything more distant from an angel than this talking corpse. But he’d just sprung Broker from Purgatory and put an avenging sword in his hand. Broker took a clean breath of fire.

Now Tuna looked Nina straight in the eye. “I killed your father. The plan was Cyrus’s. But I pulled the trigger. He was dead before we got to Hue.”

Nina stared at him, stone cold. Her voice buckled down tight. “And the pilots went along with this?”

“They were Air America, Cyrus’s cronies from Laos. Hell, by then they’d flown more dope than the Medellin cartel.”

“Go on,” said Nina. Tip of the iceberg.

“After we hit the bank I changed the plan a little,” said Tuna. He hefted the empty beer bottle and smiled helplessly. Nina averted her face. Broker went into the house and returned with two more bottles. When Tuna had taken a drink, Broker asked his main question: “Why’d you do it, Jimmy?”

Tuna squinted. “Cyrus don’t like losing. Guess I don’t either. It was plunder. We were soldiers. We wanted it, so we took it, goddammit.”

Broker shook his head slowly. So under the pomp and medals, LaPorte was just another asshole. A desire to crank the bracelets down on a retired general took precedence over dreams of gold. Automatically, he started asking questions like a cop.

“So how did you do it physically? Move all that gold out of the bank without drawing attention? There wasn’t time that night.”

Tuna cackled. “Haven’t you figured it out? Wasn’t
in
the fuckin’ bank. It was crated up on a pallet in ammo boxes in back of the bank. The Commies
didn’t even know it was there
. That’s why they didn’t raise hell about it. That was the beauty of the thing. Nobody knew it existed.”

“Ammo boxes?” Broker was stymied.

“Look,” said Tuna. “We had it disguised as a pallet of
artillery rounds
. We’d managed to get it as far as the courtyard of the bank. Then the Commies took Hue in March, remember? It just sat there for a month. All the gear the ARVNs left laying around when they split—who’d notice another pallet of ammo?”

“Where’d it come from?”

“Ask Cyrus, he got onto it. We didn’t steal it. We
found
it. Spent two years looking for that stuff. He was like a crazy man. That’s how it all started.”

Broker shook his head. “Ten tons of gold just
sat
there for over a month?”

“It ain’t
just
gold…”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see,” said Tuna. A spark of dark humor ignited in his tortured eyes.

“What about my dad, Jimmy?” Nina said in a level voice.

Tuna looked at her frankly. “You know about the original mission? How we were going in to bust Trin out of jail?”

Nina nodded.

“After Phil went in by boat, Cyrus personally changed the plan.”

“But he was down the coast off Danang,” said Broker slowly.

“He was, huh. Did you see him there?”

“I heard him on the radio…”

“He was on the radio, all right. In a light observation chopper about a mile from our boat. Cyrus could fly helicopters, you recall. He was gone from the fleet off Danang for a little over an hour, long enough to land and talk to Pryce. Then he popped back. Our guys off Danang thought he was out trying to spot refugees in the water.” Tuna cocked his head. “You remember anything about that minesweep? Like how the only Americans on it were you, me, Pryce, and the helicopter pilots? Like, no other witnesses.”

Quietly Nina said, “How’d it happen?”

“Simple. Cyrus gave Ray new orders. Made it sound like it came down from on high. First go in and sling out the pallet and bring it back to the boat,
then
pick up Phil and Trin.”

“New orders,” said Nina.

“Yeah, except we never meant to go back.” He paused, trying to wet his parched lips, staring at Nina. “Out of spit,” he said.

“What about the radio call that was in the inquest record? Someone made a net call saying my dad had changed the orders and requesting clarification,” said Nina.

“He was already dead. I made the call to shift the blame on him. It was planned that way. When we got to the bank, in the confusion, he got dumped out the door.”

“At the bank?” asked Broker, leaning forward.

“Yeah. We had two guys on the ground with a big forklift. They maneuvered the pallet in the net, scrambled up, and we boogied. Except the bird was shot up and the pilots were sweating it. Didn’t think they could fly with the weight. I made a mayday call, said we were hit and we had to set down.” Tuna smiled triumphantly. “Then it came to me. All those years I always did what Cyrus wanted. Suddenly I was in a position to do what
I
wanted. We were so damn close anyway and I had the place all picked out. Just like that.”

“The place?” asked Broker.

“Perfect place,” said Tuna, grinning. “You’ll see.”

Broker studied the relish on Tuna’s face. Going out on one last joke.

“Wasn’t hard to convince the pilots to dump the stuff. So I showed them where. There was this ravine. We dropped the sling into it, cast it off, and then we landed. We set some charges and blew this slope down over the gully.”

Nina was bursting with her question. Broker stayed her with his hand. Tuna spoke rapidly now. “It was getting light. Without the load we could fly, they thought…”

Tuna sucked at the bottle and slowly lit another Pall Mall. He blew a stream of smoke and inspected his curled fingernails. “We didn’t fly far. I saw to that.”

“You sabotaged the chopper?” asked Nina.

“Part of the plan. We were going to drop the pallet on the boat and then deep-six the chopper and the pilots and Ray’s body in the sea. So I put a whole magazine in the controls. Auto rotation time,” said Tuna, his voice softened, musing. “Funny thing about gold, Phil. It’s just a word until you actually see it, touch it. There’s nothing like it, even in the dark of the moon, in the rain…”

Nina took a sharp breath and held it.

“Let him finish,” said Broker.

“They were like kids, those other guys. They couldn’t help grabbing at some ingots and stuffing them into their flak jackets before we covered it.” Tuna cackled. “I’d tossed out the life jackets, except for one. Gold has a lot of magical properties but flotation isn’t one of them. Saved me the trouble of shooting from a tippy raft.”

Broker shook his head. “That’s why LaPorte found ingots with the chopper wreck.”

Tuna grinned. “When we went in the water I stuffed
this
in my jacket.” He reached under the towel on the crate and threw a folded, worn piece of laminated paper at Broker. A tactical map of Quang Tri Province. Grid squares. One-to-fifty-thousand scale. “So simple. A piece of paper. An X that marks the spot,” he said.

“Jimmy,” said Broker patiently. “There’s no X on this map.”

“Not yet. Saved the best for last.” He took another sip of beer. “Everyone was gone. Drowned by their gold. I sat on that raft all day memorizing that grid coordinate. I was the only person in the world who knew where it was. So I just played along with Cyrus’s cover story. Said it all went into the drink. Last person I wanted on my case was fuckin’ Cyrus.”

“Dammit, Tuna.” The fire and ice in Nina’s eyes was starting to melt. “That creep Walls gave us this note that said my dad—”

“Walls is something, isn’t he? I befriended him just by reading to him. No one bothered me in there after Walls and me were buddies.”

“Yeah, buddies are nice,” said Broker softly.

Tuna’s chest heaved and he looked away. “We saved your young ass in Quang Tri City. Maybe you belonged to us after that. Maybe you were ours to spend.” His eyelids drooped and Broker thought he might be getting ready to go. He gripped the map in both hands.

“Jimmy, for Christ sake,” said Nina.

Tuna’s eyes rolled dreamily. “I had plans, man. You know, I educated myself in prison. I figured I had time. Be more mature. No more nutty stuff like that banks mess in New York. Be easier now, going back, because we were normalizing relations…Set up the whole operation with Trin.”

“How much does Trin know about this?” Broker shook Tuna by the collar. “It’s important.”

Tuna grinned. “Remember how Trin used to know everything. Not this time, baby.” His eyes turned dreamy again. “I was going to go back to this village in Italy where my family were dirt poor peasants and live like a prince…”

Heroin tears dripped down Tuna’s sunken cheeks. For the first time he seemed to become aware of his physical condition. With a look of horror he touched his hands, his bony knees jutting through the trousers. Something snapped in his eyes. A malevolent grin twisted his festered lips. “Now to get the rest you gotta forgive me,” he croaked. “Both of you. For my act of contrition.”

“Man, I’ve done some hard shit in my life…” Nina breathed out, breathed in and said, “Fuck you, Jimmy. And damn you to Hell.”

Tuna fell back in his chair and laughed. “Didn’t hurt to try,” he said. “Aw, shit. I don’t care who gets it now, long as Cyrus doesn’t. You guys take it. Give it to the gooks. Theirs anyway…” His voice tailed off and a whitewater of foul-smelling perspiration poured from the cancer rapids. They were losing him. Helplessly, they listened to his shallow breathing. The only living thing left in his body were his eyes, two bright Christmas ornaments sinking in decayed flesh.

“Ray,” said Tuna very distinctly in a chilling voice, as if he were greeting a fourth person on the porch. “Gold,” he muttered and then he slurred a word that sounded like “disgrace.”

They stooped forward. Nina held a bottle up and dribbled beer on his caked lips. He coughed and pronounced with deliberation, “Cigarette case.” His hand fumbled toward his bloody works that lay on the towel, then suddenly dropped still. The bowl of cherries spilled over and cracked apart on the deck and the fruit bounced in a frenzy around their feet.