The Price of Blood (6 page)

Broker sat up in bed and groaned, and not because of his aching thumb. He definitely didn’t want to deal with it. He had other problems. It had levels. It involved his core beliefs. No fucking way.

Morning was a renewal of small engines. Lawnmowers and a chainsaw growled somewhere—the first green, gasoline, and grass-scented blast of summer. A rectangle of sunlight fell through the open hospital-room window and rapped him on the forehead. He opened his fogged eyes and smelled coffee. Nina held the cup to him. She had changed out of her trashy outfit and had washed her face. Now she wore faded tomboy jeans, a washed-out green cotton blouse with ruffles, and beat-up tennis shoes. A storm of tired freckles prickled her obvious hangover. He looked at her and some perverse part of his brain that lacked common sense was hearing “Green-sleeves.”

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“All right.” Broker’s wooden tongue batted furball words. He took the cup in his right hand.

“Good,” said Nina as she looked him over like a piece of busted equipment, estimating its longevity.

Then she had to be questioned by ATF while Broker debriefed with Ed Ryan. When Ed left, they cleaned and splinted and rebandaged the thumb. He received a prescription for an antibiotic the doctor affectionately called “gorrillacilian.” The doctor told him he could ease the pain by putting his hand on his head. The stitches could come out in two weeks. He should have full use of the thumb in two months. The knuckle joint and tendons were basically intact. The problem was infection.

They released Broker from the hospital at nine
A.M.
An unmarked squad car drove them to a pharmacy, where he filled his prescription, then to the sheriff’s office in the new brick county-government complex. They brought him in through the garage and up a back stairwell so that no one would see him.

W
HEN BROKER STARTED AS A ST. PAUL COP, HIS mother, Irene, had expressed disapproval that he’d misconstrued all the lore she’d fed him with her mother’s milk. “Just…contrary,” she said sadly. “You go to Vietnam when everybody else is leaving and now this.” His dad, Mike, had scratched his cheek and said, “I think she wanted you to be a college professor. Something like that.”

Broker hadn’t worn a uniform for almost twelve years. From the beginning he’d excelled at working alone. His flair for one-man undercover investigations resulted in invidious Serpico jokes and a detective’s badge and eventually a unique job offer and promotion to detective lieutenant from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

He targeted drugs and illegal weapons. A free agent, he putted through Minnesota counties in his handyman’s truck. He coordinated with sheriff’s departments, county task forces, the attorney general’s office and the feds, usually DEA and ATF.

Automatic military assault weapons were showing up on the street in Minnesota. Broker had been using Washington County, east of the Twin Cities on the Wisconsin border, as a base because Rodney lived there. On this case, he reported to the Washington County, east of the Twin Cities on the Wisconsin border, as a base because Rodney lived there. On this case, he reported to the Washington County sheriff.

As he climbed the stairs he took a deep breath. He hadn’t been in the BCA office in St. Paul for two years. He had never set foot in this county building beyond the garage, where he kept his personal vehicle. He had an unreasonable reaction to offices that bordered on claustrophobia.

It was worse now that the jargon and techniques of corporate voodoo had crept into police work. Now they had “solvability tables” to evaluate cases. His dad, who had been driven out of law enforcement by paperwork, called it flatassitis. Male Brokers were genetically resistant to it.

He averted his face from the security camera mounted in the corridor and went through the locked door into the squadroom. The tightness hairballed in his stomach. His ex, Kimberly, had wanted him to be a clotheshorse cop and play department politics. Wanted him to work in an office. Deputy chief maybe. Then run for politics.

He glanced around nervously.
Here come the Lilliputians with a million yards of thread. And the mimeo paper. Death by paper cut. Don’t bunch up, boys—they’ll get you all with one memo
.

J.T. Merryweather and Ryan were going over paperwork with a couple of Washington County detectives in a makeshift command post in a corner of the investigative unit. They’d nailed Rodney’s cohorts and the lab in Pine County at the same time that Earl and company went down. They looked like they’d slept in their shirts.

“In case you’re confused at your surroundings, this is a police station,” joked J.T. with his sharp features shuffled in a touchy mix of Caribbean and Saracen razor blades. “You notice the modular office spacers designed to promote efficiency, the tidy stacks of paperwork, the new computer system with which we try to keep cowboys in the field legal.”

Broker’s slightly feverish eyes roamed over the off-white computer plastic that packed the room. The stuff reminded him of the armor worn by the Imperial storm troopers in
Star Wars
. Now the fuckers had occupied every office in America.

He thrust his bandage, big thumbs up. “Two months medical leave. Without me out there, you guys will be breaking down the wrong doors. I can see it in the papers—Waco North.” A chorus of groans came from the tired cops.

J.T. rose to his feet and shook Nina’s hand. “Been a while, Captain Pryce.”

“Ten years, J.T., and it’s just plain Nina.”

“I was rooting for you when you were on TV. Other than having super bad timing yesterday, how’d you turn out?”

“Broker thinks I’m crazy.”

“Uh-huh. How’s that man going to know from crazy. C’mon, I’ll get your things from the property room.”

John Eisenhower appeared in the hall and motioned to Broker to join him in his office. The sheriff’s gun belt lay on a chair under a Norman Rockwell print of a Depression-era cop and a runaway kid sharing adjoining stools at a soda fountain. John had affected a folksy touch now that he was out in the eastern burbs. But Broker knew him from St. Paul, a cop right down to his depleted uranium heart. Broker sat down. This little color-coded laminated card with a fingerprint lay on the desk facing the visitor’s chair.
Test your stress level
.

They talked shop for a few minutes. Would Rodney handle in a continuing sting? Ryan wanted to use him to check out the gang-bangers over north in Minneapolis. Broker was unsympathetic to the notion. Rodney was an infant monster. He should be chained up in a damp, leaky basement in Stillwater Prison and bricked over until he resembled a cavefish. Eisenhower’s china-blue eyes circled above the fruitless conversation, watching Broker. He ended by saying, “Sorry about the thumb, but you need some time off…” He paused, eyes probing.

Broker deflected the close attention to detail in the sheriff’s eyes. It was a game they had played off and on for more than a decade of working together. Eisenhower was an excellent administrator who’d never lost the touch of a field man. And he had the confidence to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of a brilliant subordinate, which he knew Broker to be. He’d brought Broker in as a deep undercover, unknown, in the beginning, even to his own investigative unit, answerable only to himself. But he didn’t
understand
Broker.

John had done his time working undercover. A good undercover man should be able to fool the assholes, who were not thinking too clearly to begin with. But Broker could fool anybody, even very smart people. And he did it by boldly being himself, which is to say, by being blunt as a locked safe. Sometimes John thought Broker was really presenting his true undercover act when he was in an office, like now. And this disquieted John.

Not even scary J.T. Merryweather, who had partnered with Broker in St. Paul, who was as remote and hostile as a man could be, and who was the only human that Broker minimally confided in, knew the whole story behind Phil Broker.

Several years back, in St. Paul, John had asked a sharp, no-nonsense, female FBI psychologist, who had dated Broker, why she thought he was a cop and where he got his style. The woman, who profiled criminal pathology for a living, had obviously thought about this before and took her time responding.

John Eisenhower, who had graduate degrees in criminology and sociology hanging on his wall, was still disturbed and intrigued by her answer, which he remembered almost verbatim: “Broker got stung somewhere in his background and will not discuss it. Period. As to why he’s a cop—that’s easy. Phil’s a fugitive from modern psychology. He’s a romantic primitive who loves to hunt monsters. He expects them. Monsters were in the fairy tales he’d been taught as a child. Grendel in
Beowulf
was not a victim of domestic abuse or faulty nurturing. He’s a cautionary totemic being, representing evil, greed, violence, and excess. He believes in monsters because only heroes can stop them. So he can’t conceive of living without a weapon and pair of handcuffs in case he encounters one in the checkout line at the grocery.

She’d thrown in a bittersweet spark of intuition: “In a world of monsters, boys can climb the beanstalk and sail for Treasure Island and contend for the hand of a princess. And what are monsters anyway…except adults as seen through the brave eyes of a child.”

The moment passed. Eisenhower resumed his practical gaze and said: “We pulled a background check on the girl. She won a Silver Star and a Purple Heart in the Gulf. So that’s Nina Pryce.”

Broker nodded. “I was in the army with her father.”

Conversation paused a beat. The only thing Eisenhower knew about Broker’s army time was typed in impressive blank verse on his DD214. “Just bad timing, the way she turned up, huh?” he asked, but his eyes said,
Broker, you’ve been out there too long running your lone wolf number. The girl was a slip
.

He rose to his feet and clapped Broker on the shoulder. “The girl and the thumb threw a funny bounce into things. Your act is blown.”

Broker shrugged. “We’ll see.”

Eisenhower nodded. Decided not to push it. “Get lost, heal up. You going up north?”

“Yeah.”

“How’s your dad doing?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll tell BCA to send your checks to Devil’s Rock. Rodney and his crew were good for thirty machine guns statewide. A new record for you. Good job, Broker.”

Nina and J.T. were waiting in the hall outside the office. Merryweather’s droll sneer approximated a smile. “Day is getting closer. Somebody like John’s going to put you in one of these office chairs, put you back in uniform, put you through die-versity training and get you trampled by the poe-litically correct pygmy armies like the rest of us.”

“I love you too,” said Broker.

“Don’t forget to write.” J.T. blew a kiss. He shook Nina’s hand and strolled back into the office.

Without comment, Broker walked directly to the police garage. Nina quick-stepped to keep up, dragging her luggage. He pulled a tarp from his Lincoln Green ’94 Cherokee Sport. In contrast to the house on the north end, the car was scrupulously clean.

“Are you in trouble?” she asked.

Broker shrugged and grumbled, “They all think I’ve been under too long, want to bring me in. Probably figure I’m suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Starting to identify with the assholes.”

“So what do we do now?” she asked.

“We?” said Broker dubiously.

“Somebody followed me from New Orleans. Remember.”

“Okay…and what were you doing in New Orleans?” Broker recited in a tired voice, remembering the green nose of the Saturn peeking around the corner and its stealthy withdrawal, knowing full well that her personal devil, Cyrus LaPorte, lived in New Orleans.

“I guess Jimmy Tuna sent me.”

“Oh yeah?” Broker felt a sinking sensation that it wasn’t going away this time.

“We’re buds now that he’s dying of cancer.”

Broker raised an eyebrow. The Tuna he remembered had the constitution of an Italian mule.

“Bone cancer. Came on real quick. Real nasty. He, ah, sold me something, you could say.” She reached in her portfolio and withdrew a wrinkled printed page and handed it to Broker.

He unfolded a page from an April copy of
Newsweek
, a page of news briefs. Two pictures were circled in black magic marker. One showed the spare, distinguished features of Gen. Cyrus LaPorte, U.S. Army, Ret. The other was of a sleek, white, unusually outfitted ocean-going vessel. The headline said:
COLD WARRIOR MAKES AMENDS
.

Broker read the lead, “Gen. Cyrus LaPorte of Vietnam fame and scion of a wealthy New Orleans family has been playing Cousteau. His latest project has him loaning his personal oceanographic vessel, the
Lola
, to Greenpeace to conduct pollution surveys off the coast of Vietnam in the wake of stories of unrestricted oil drilling…”

“He
sold
you?” Broker narrowed his eyes as he scanned the rest of the article.

“That’s right. That page, for five grand. And this note was in the envelope he left me.” She handed Broker a folded sheet of notebook paper. It contained three stark sentences scrawled in a shaky hand: “Find Broker.” Under it. “Have Broker find Trin. All arranged.” Numbers. And one more word, underlined, like a punch in the nose: “Hue.”

Trin. Jesus Christ
. Broker staggered back a step, blinking.

“So here I am,” said Nina with a shrug. “I found you but I just lost him.”

“Tuna?”

“He skipped town on me. He’s out, early medical release because of the cancer. He disappeared with five thousand bucks of my money.”

“You got robbed by a guy dying of cancer in prison. Wonderful.”

“I wrote him a check. For his funeral expenses, I thought. He switched release dates on me. When he didn’t show up I thought he might be in New Orleans…”

He stared at her. She wasn’t dumb. Yesterday people could have been hurt, maybe killed, as a result of her cavalier walk-on appearance. No. It’s just that her wild fantasy was more important.

She went to the back of the truck and tried to open the hatchback door.

“What are you doing?” Broker demanded.

“Loading my stuff.”

“Uh-uh. Not this time. Look. My dad’s…busted up. He and Irene are in a real financial jam. I need to spend some time alone with them—”

“You’re alone with everybody always!” She stepped forward and lifted her chin aggressively. “I talked to J.T. while you were in the office. He says you’re so far out there they’re thinking of sending you to a shrink. You haven’t had a performance review in two years because you refuse to show up at your supervisor’s office. I wonder? Could it have something to do with what happened twenty years ago? That you refuse to deal with. You could be anything, but you make a career of hiding out and setting people up, gaining their trust and then busting them.”

Unconsciously, Broker patted his chest pocket for a cigarette. Nina reached in her purse and passed him the crumpled Gauloises.
Hennessy cognac and the French fags
—Broker had a precise memory of the last time he’d seen Ray Pryce take a Gauloise from the gold cigarette case that his wife, Marian, had given him. They were standing on the rolling deck of a Vietnamese minesweep that lay off the coast of Vietnam; it was April 29, 1975.

Just like Ray used to do, Broker tapped the short, fat French cigarette on his thumbnail and put it to his lips. Nina clicked the lighter and stated, “Dammit, don’t you get it. General LaPorte’s been over there posing as an environmentalist taking pictures of the bottom of the South China Sea.”

Broker inhaled the strong tobacco and tightened the bolts on his masking smile to ward off Nina’s raving attempt to raise the dead. More than that, he resented her confident quick-study routine. Her zeal. Her confidence. She was starting to have that
effect
on him. The urge to prove her wrong was almost a sneer behind his lips.