The Price of Blood (8 page)

L
IKE THE DOCTOR SAID, BROKER’S HAND DID NOT throb so badly when he put it on top of his head. It was awkward driving this way and for the moment, with Nina asleep, he didn’t feel so foolish, but the posture suggested the gesture of a slow-witted man pondering an enormous dilemma.

Which wasn’t that far off, the dilemma part. Easiest thing would be to reject her story wholesale. Just not think about it.

Drawing strength from the premise of leaving the past undisturbed, he sketched out what he would do: first off,
not get mad
at her. How was she to know he’d be working. Talk to her, humor her and then, at the right time, gently hand her off to a professional. He knew people. It would have to be a woman, but it was a stretch finding a woman therapist qualified to appreciate the lonely piece of ground that Nina had staked out for herself.

Problem being, what
she
needed for a shrink was a bare-ass Celtic warrior-priestess with her nipples dunked in blue woad.

She was like him. Therapy was for other people, people who worked in offices. Got a personal problem? Tell it to the chaplain. In other words: tough shit. His eyes darted to the rearview mirror. He had seen the Saturn yesterday. Damn if he hadn’t caught some of her contagious paranoia.

He was well beyond the city traffic now and the limboland where tract houses chewed into tree lines. He smelled fresh manure and the contours of freshly plowed fields eased his eyes. A tiny green John Deere tractor dragged a mustard sail across the horizon.

Gripping the wheel with his knees, he used his good hand to adjust the rearview mirror, glanced at Nina, and shook his head. Gingerly he poured some more coffee.

She just had to learn.

That was easy for him to say. She’d watched her mother struggle raising her and her brother, working as a legal secretary in the Detroit suburbs. Before her looks went, Marian Pryce married a lawyer in the office. A practical marriage. So her kids could live in a better neighborhood and attend college. Nina had hated the work-obsessed man, who drank too much and was never home. Her mother pretended not to notice the drinking and started to lose her grip thread by thread. Nina blamed the army lynch mob for that too.

Broker had met the guy at Nina’s graduation party and couldn’t remember his name. He’d done his family the courtesy of making full partner at the firm before he dropped dead of a massive coronary on the ninth hole of the Bloomfield Hills Country Club.

Broker had played at every kind of jive imaginable in his line of work, but underneath, he’d inherited an eccentric, but rock-solid, conservative foundation. He’d been an only kid raised strict on the hardscrabble glory of the Superior Shore.

Growing up he’d learned that some problems didn’t come with answers. No amount of talk would fix the hurt. It just hurt and you lived with the hurt and after a while it became part of you, like a line in your face. When her dad had left him hanging, at first, he refused to believe it. And finally, when there seemed to be no other explanation, he had to stick it in that black hole where there were no answers.

Being in law enforcement, he should have learned. People were capable of anything.

The main trick was not to do anything dumb to make it worse. He repeated this last thought for his own benefit because she had stirred him up. Got him thinking about that mess so long ago. So, fix her with straight talk. Finding her a shrink was just a cop-out. Just have it out with her and bang some sense into her head. He’d had that talk with her years ago when she’d run away from home. It was time for another one.

But Broker couldn’t resist reaching over and plucking the
Newsweek
page from her fingers and smoothing it between the seats and reading it again.

Sonofabitch. What if LaPorte
had
found it?

He’d inherited a granite foundation all right, but he hadn’t built anything on it. He’d backed into it like a bunker. Now here was this really big idea inviting him to come out and play.

Damn her.

Broker woke Nina in the parking lot of a roadside bar and grill outside Superior, Wisconsin, and said: “Breakfast.” Inside, he wanted a table in the rear, behind a partition if possible, where he could rest his bandaged hand on top of his head. He ordered pancakes, eggs, sausage, and a large orange juice.

Nina had a vegetarian omelet and black coffee. She ate quickly, efficiently, taking on fuel as her alert eyes scanned the eatery. When Broker had trouble getting his pancakes into bite-sized hunks with only his fork, she leaned over with her knife and fork and cut his food for him.

“Broker, I feel awful. Walking into…”

No she didn’t. In a high-stakes game, she’d go for mission over men every time. She was a Pryce. He was her expendable commodity. “Forget it. Probably would have gone down the same anyway. Guy like Earl.”

Nina sipped her coffee and her eyes tracked the other diners, came back, and rested on Broker’s face. “So what happened to Mike?”

Broker lowered his hand from his head and carefully draped it on the back of a chair. “He took a calculated risk. Then he had an accident and some real bad weather.”

He explained the fix they were in. How gradually, working summers, they’d converted their lakeshore into a cabin resort. Built eight cabins. Mike Broker had quit laying stone and went into the resort business full time at the end of the eighties. Built up a pretty good business, too. Then he got the bug and decided to upgrade everything. He figured if he could put in some improvements he could go highball on a mortgage and use the loan to build a snazzy lodge.

“Last year he got an interim construction loan from the bank. Between ice out and fishing opener he planned to reroof all the cabins and put in new plumbing, Jacuzzis, new wood stoves, some ambitious stonework for a new lodge. Once the improvements were in he’d get a better assessment for a mortgage and use the mortgage money to pay off the construction loan and complete the lodge.

“We had a mild winter so in March he hired a big crew, thinking he could gang up all the work. He was supervising a cement pour and it got away from him. He ruptured himself. And then everything went wrong. When the work crew took him to the hospital a freak straight-line storm tore in and—well, the cabins were exposed, most of the roofs were torn off, and the interiors got clobbered by water damage. The trenching for the plumbing weakened some of the foundations and they washed out.

“He was laid up in the hospital for three months with complications. The guy he hired to help Irene salvage the construction got overextended and the interim loan money ran out. The place was in shambles and Mike lost the whole season. Bills piled up and now the bank’s breathing down his neck. He started out owning a million dollars plus a slice of prime shoreline free and clear and now he could lose it all.”

“I have some money,” she said.

“Do you have a quarter of a million bucks?”

“No,” she said and lowered her eyes for a heartbeat of polite compassion. She came up iron gray and prima facie. He had given her more ammunition. He had a need. She had a plan. It could be desirable. “But I know who does. There should be enough to go around. Smart guy like you could figure out a way to get a little for your bother.”

Broker lost his appetite and tossed his napkin on his unfinished breakfast. She was right behind him, reminding him to take two more antibiotics and some Tylenol, insisting on paying the tab. As they approached the truck she asked for the keys.

“Nah,” said Broker, but then he staggered and his knees misfired and he stood fighting for balance and blinking in the warming sun.

“It’s all hitting you. You’ll put us in a ditch.” She took the keys, opened the rear hatch and arranged his bag and her suitcase and made a pillow of some blankets that were there and ordered him to take a break.

She was right. Broker crawled into the back and stretched out and she helped him get comfortable with his bad hand propped up behind his head on the blankets. Then she leaned over the seat with a road map and said, “It’s been a while.”

“Cross through Duluth, then follow North Sixty-one up the shore.” He stabbed at the map with his good hand. “If I’m not up, wake me before we get to Devil’s Rock.”

The Tylenol filed down the sharp edge of the pain and the sunlight coming through the windows, combined with the pancakes, pulled a drowsy shade down on his fatigue. His eyelids fluttered. The whir of the tires on the road lulled him. Broker was a sound sleeper and never dreamed, so the image he carried into sleep was not manufactured by his unconscious. It was his last thought before he dropped off. Ray Pryce’s square, freckled face. “Don’t sweat it, Phil; I’ll get you out, you can take that to the bank.”

Man, if ever there was a poor choice of words
.

Broker lurched awake and bumped his hand as he sat up and saw a familiar line divide sky and water and felt the brisk tonic of lake air coming through the open windows. Superior. They were past Duluth, into the Minnesota Arrowhead. But something was wrong. He immediately put his good hand to the small of his back. Uh-huh. He looked over the seat.

Nina hunched forward slightly, tense behind the wheel with her eyes riveted to the rearview mirror. The Beretta was tucked under her right thigh, the handle angled back where she could grab it easily.

“Not funny,” said Broker.

“I can shoot this thing better than you can. When’s the last time you qualified?”

That pissed him off. “
Pull over
.”

“The green Saturn, rental plates, staying way back. Been following us since we left Stillwater.”

“Ni
na
.”

Reluctantly, she jerked onto the shoulder in a hail of gravel. She got out and opened the rear hatch. Broker stood up, stretched and looked back down the two-lane highway. A truck with a boat whooshed by. A camper. No green Saturn.

He glared at her, not quite awake. With difficulty, he reholstered his pistol with one hand and got behind the wheel.

“You’re mad at me, huh?” she said.

Broker grimaced in pain when, out of habit, he put his left hand on the wheel as he shifted through the gears. “Why should I be mad at you? You sail into my life and practically get my thumb chewed off. Hell no, I’m not mad at you,” he muttered. Despite the sleep, he still nodded behind the wheel.

She folded her arms across her chest and stared out at Lake Superior. They rode in an intricate silence. He could feel her will tearing laps around him. He recalled that when she was at the University of Michigan she just missed the cut for the women’s Olympic swim team. Free style. Where she developed that great butt and the strong arms. Now he wished she had put all that energy into swimming; put it anywhere except aimed at him.

So he concentrated on the road that curled through rocky bluffs dressed with clinging white cedar and pine. Cresting a broad turn around a rock face, Broker glanced into the rearview and saw the green dot make a turn about a mile back. He stared at Nina. For the third time in ten minutes the right front tire drifted into the shoulder, and the Jeep wrenched as Broker shakily over-corrected.

“You’re a mess,” said Nina.

“I don’t bounce back quite as quick as I used to,” he admitted.

“You need a bath, a meal, and a good night’s sleep. It’ll keep till then but you have to listen to me and not cut me off like you did before.” She glanced over her shoulder. “We don’t have a whole lot of time.”

B
ROKER CONFIRMED, AS THEY DROVE INTO DEVIL’S Rock, that a green Saturn with tinted windows and rental plates was trailing them into town. He groaned to himself and remembered something that his mom, the astrology nut, always said about Saturn being the Teacher.

He turned abruptly, wheeled a fast U-turn through the parking lot of Fatty Naslund’s bank, and got behind the Saturn long enough to make sure of the plates. The Saturn ran Devil’s Rock’s one stoplight, accelerated, and disappeared along the waterfront.

“Glove compartment. Cell phone. Gimme,” said Broker.

Nina opened the phone and Broker took it in his good hand. He punched in the number with his thumb.

“Devil’s Rock Public Safety.”

“Give me Tom Jeffords. It’s Phil Broker.”

“Hey, Broker, Merryweather told Tom some guy ate your thumb. That true?”

“Yeah, yeah, Tom there?”

“I’ll patch you through.”

“Chief Jeffords.”

“Tom, it’s Broker.”

“No shit, we heard—”

“Later. Look, I just drove into town and I got some citizen in a green Saturn, plates lima lima gulf six two niner, been on my ass since I left Stillwater. I’m heading for Dad’s place. Can you have somebody check him out and call me?”

“You think somebody wants your other thumb?”

“You tell me. I’m off the clock.”

Broker handed the phone back to Nina. “Could be Earl has a friend looking for some payback,” he said.

Nina shook her head. “Guy followed me from New Orleans. Same flight.”

“We’ll see.”

“Yes we will.”

North of town Broker turned off on a gravel road and stopped in front of a billboard that advertised the Broker’s Beach Resort. A dusty
CLOSED
sign now bannered it. Broker got out and lowered a chain that closed off the access road. As he returned to his truck, he noticed the green car pulled onto the shoulder, about two hundred yards up the road.

It was getting harder now to dismiss Nina as a paranoid; even more difficult to banish the ten-ton shadow beginning to lurk just below his thoughts. We’ll see, he soundlessly challenged the blip of green up the highway.

Nina’s view in the passenger seat was blocked by brush and Broker said nothing to disturb her. Assuming he was in someone’s binoculars, he took his time. He mused at the cascading irony coming off Jimmy Tuna’s cryptic note. He had learned the basic premise of undercover life from Nguyen Van Trin during the one, and only, and unusually, candid private conversation he’d ever had with the man.
Go solitary. Even the most trusted comrade will telegraph. Trust no one
.

He got back in and drove down toward the shore. They broke through the pines and he mused how other people said their childhood environs looked smaller when they revisited them as adults.

No way Lake Superior was ever going to shrink.

The Brokers owned two thousand feet of wild lake frontage, arced in a cove and spectacularly fanged with granite. Tall old red and white pines, which had been preserved from the clear-cut at the end of the last century, cloaked the cabins from the highway. Broker’s personal cabin, sometimes rented as overflow, clung to a rock promontory to the side of the resort behind a privacy screen of gnarled white birch, balsam, alder, and mountain ash.

What he really wanted to do was pull the Jeep into the drive, walk down to the beach, strip off his clothes, and dive off his favorite rock into the icy clean water. Then fire up the sauna and do it again. He turned off the key and sagged over the steering wheel.

“Still magic,” said Nina.

“Yeah,” he nodded.

“Oh oh,” said Nina. “Something new.”

A seriously large, hundred-fifty-pound silver, black, and tan shepherd bounded from the brush and planted his square paws on the side of the Jeep. His nails drew screeches on the paint and a tongue the size of a size sixteen red lumberjack sock hung between his big pointy teeth. “Hey, get down, Tank,” Broker yelled as he got out and tussled with the dog. Nina cautiously got from the passenger side and kept the briefcase that contained her map tight against her side.

“Is he…safe?”

“Hell no,” said Broker, shaking the ruff of fur around the dog’s neck. “He was too aggressive for St. Paul K-nine so I brought him up here. Mike and Irene squared him away, didn’t they, Tank.” Tank cocked his huge head and his yellow eyes tracked Nina’s every move.

Nina squinted at the dog and then at Broker’s eyebrows. “There’s a family resemblance. And like…human intelligence behind those eyes.”

“Yeah, retarded human intelligence,” said Broker, cuffing the dog playfully. “Come on, let’s go see the folks.”

Halfway down a trail paved with split granite Tank stood alert, growled deep in his chest, and swung his head toward the road. Broker gripped his choke chain and brought him to heel.

“Do we have company?” Nina asked.

“Maybe,” said Broker and they kept walking down into a natural amphitheater cragged with immense bedrock terraces, some the size of three-story buildings. As a boy, Broker thought it looked like a huge, wrinkled pile of gray elephants.

Then he hit the eyesore on the mild late afternoon; the shells of twelve spacious cabins were tucked into the shelves of stone. The oldest ones marked the summers of Broker’s college years. He and his dad built one a year from the thick stone foundations to the cedar shake shingles that had plated the roofs. Dawn to dusk, six days a week. The main house was marked by an
OFFICE
sign and sat back from the cabins in a sheltered cranny. In a small bedroom on the second floor his mother still kept his high school and University of Minnesota-Duluth hockey varsity letters tacked to the wall—one of her few touches of conventionality.

When Broker got to the first grade he discovered that other kids went to church on Sunday. He learned he had been raised by North Shore pagans, small p.

His dad kept faith with the primacy of earth, sky, water, and fire. His hands had hauled on the rosary of artisan labor every day of his life as he connected heavy beads of wood, steel, and stone with bullets of sweat. He had rejected the concept of babying teenagers. He believed in preparation. Broker grew up hard.

The odd thing was that his rough, tough dad was a dutiful teddy bear who had read to him the off-the-shelf stories about mice and cuddly rabbits and all of Dr. Seuss.

Quiet, slender Irene sat her baby boy down on the wrinkled elephants during fierce dawns and sunsets, or pulled him through the deep snow in a sled under Orion and the Borealis.

Only half in jest, she told him of the race of Nordic gods who had battled the ice monsters and created the first man from an ash and an alder tree. Their names were still preserved in the days of the week. Tuesday for Odin’s son Tyr, Wednesday for Woton, which was another name for Odin himself, Thursday for Thor and Friday for Freya, the goddess of love.

Hail was the foam dropping from the jaws of the Valkyries’ horses and the Northern Lights were the flash of their armor as they rode across the sky.

And, of course, she told him about the tree the Christians stole for Christmas.

Broker clicked his teeth. Now the cabins, with makeshift plywood roofing, looked like a refugee village. Some of the sheets had pulled free of their nails, testifying to the cruel whimsy of the lake winds. Weeds already had taken sturdy root and choked the caved-in construction where plumbing had been halted. The downhill end of the foundation for the new lodge had washed out, one-ton granite blocks strewn like a child’s wooden playthings. At the edge of the grounds a wheel-barrow was embedded in a shower of cement like a grave marker, one rusty handle twisted to the sky. A winding split-granite staircase was locked stillborn in the spill.

Now Mike was under a doctor’s orders not to lift anything heavier than a ballpeen hammer.

Irene Broker sat on the deck of the old central lodge arranging Devil’s Paintbrush in a vase. When she saw them coming she stood up, lean in faded Levi’s and a pigment-smeared blue smock. Her long hippie hair was still crow-dark in her sixties and her eyes, like her son’s, were quiet, watchful green, the color of an approaching winter storm. A painting easel was set up behind her. So she was still painting loons for the tourist trade, a hobby that now brought in grocery money. She raised her hand to shade the sun. Broker released Tank who trotted to Irene’s side.

“Still painting loons, Irene?” sang out Broker.

She smiled wryly as they came up the steps. The smile broadened into a grin. “Hey, Nina Pryce. You’re all grown up. I saw you on TV.”

“Hi, Irene.”

“Talk to my childless son.
He
never grew up…”

Broker hugged her. “Irene believes our only purpose on earth is to replace ourselves.”

Irene grinned at Nina. “A fat little grandbaby would be nice, but for that you’d need a woman. What happened to your hand?”

“Guy bit me.”

“Don’t tell me.” Irene walked up to Nina and hugged her. “Speaking of women, you look way too fresh and on the intelligent side for Phil.”

Nina said, “That’s for sure. He’s a piece of work.”

“Yeah, yeah. Where’s the old man?” asked Broker.

Irene smiled tightly and nodded down toward the shore. “Counting rocks.”

Broker called Tank to his side and started down toward the water. Rock was what they had. Rock had been his cradle and his playpen. Like bedrock, Brokers were heavily connected by gravity to the earth. They were difficult to move and hard to the touch. This Broker learned in the silence, working beside his father.

He learned that anger and gentleness should be seldom shown so they were never squandered, so their emphasis was clear.

Now the clan was winnowed by death and geography. Now the developers and bankers laid their plans and waited for the tick of the clock.

He’d assumed the land would always be here, to come back to. He bowed his head and, with the dog at his left heel, went down the stone terraces toward his father.

Mike Broker, despite his injury, was still muscled like a troll at seventy-three. He sat on a throne of granite, facing out toward the horizon, sucking on an unlit pipe. Broker could almost see his father’s broad back smile, sensing his son’s approach. He turned slowly, a pugnosed man with a beard and thick longish unruly gray hair over a mat of bushy black eyebrows.

He’d been to Omaha Beach and Korea and had ridden with the wild biker-vets on the West Coast. Then he’d married Irene and stripped off his leathers and made his way laying stone and as a part-time high school teacher. History, civics, and hockey coach in the winter, before he went full time into the resort business. He’d served one term as the local police chief, then refused to run again because of the office work and politics. Broker’s first memory of his father was the smell of sweat. It was his favorite memory after his mother’s voice.

Broker had his mother’s eyes, her patience for fine detail, and, for better or worse, a large dose of her imagination. Misused, thus far, inside him he knew he had an unsmithed vein of German ore that was his father’s will.

When Broker was still several feet away, Mike asked casually, “What do you get when you cross a draft dodger and a crooked lawyer?”

“I give.”

“Chelsea.”

“Hi, Mike,” said Broker who had punished Bush for letting the Republican Guard get away into the Iraqi desert and put a check next to Clinton’s name.

“Hiya, kid,” said Mike, the diehard, Libertarian Perotista.

Broker sat down and pulled out his Spirits. Tank arranged his large body at Mike’s feet.

“Bad for you, the cigarettes, you know.”

“I know.”

“What happened to your hand?”

“Guy bit me.”

“What’s Nina Pryce doing with you?”

“Long story.”

Mike mulled this over and looked out over the water. “Do you ever think about death, capital D?” he asked.

After work came questions. Broker had sat on the rocks and been quizzed by his father and had been made to think. Later Broker came to understand the resemblance of this tutor-pupil relationship to the Socratic method. He was not surprised, when, in high school, he happened on the historical statue that reputed to be Socrates, and which bore a likeness to Mike Broker. Socrates was a stonemason.

“Not every day.”

“That’ll change when you turn fifty, then it’ll be every day. Now, when you turn
sixty
, you start
seeing
it, like a person, a new neighbor, say, who you pick out at a distance but you haven’t met. Then comes
seventy
and he starts getting closer and pretty soon you get to know his warts and he waves every once in a while. A nosy kind of neighbor. Before long he’s going to be over to borrow a screwdriver. I think, because this is my favorite place to sit, he’ll show up in a boat, probably with a fishing rod, in the late spring I think, just after the last ice is out.”

“You think, huh?”

“Yeah. I think he comes up and thumps on you like you’re a watermelon and then he listens to see if you’re ripe.”

“Break a knuckle on you,” said Broker. “Besides, you always said dying is one of the big whens, not an if.”

“Did I say that?”

“Yeah. One of your cautions against wishful thinking.”

Mike tapped his pipe against the stone, a sound that Broker associated with this spot and the watery heartbeat of the lake. He took a nail from his pocket and began to scrape the pipe bowl in a slow, regular motion.

“You get tired of police work yet?” he asked.

“Actually, Mike, I’m thinking of making a move.”

“Well, you gotta choose carefully. Rough economy out there. Downsizing you know.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Mike turned and faced his son. And Broker could see the complicated truss strapped under his overalls. “Phil,” he said, “I know you’ve been working with Fatty Naslund down at the bank to buy us some time, but I think we’re at the end of the rope.”

“So what are your plans?” asked Broker.

Mike averted his eyes and adopted a practical and it seemed practiced tone of uncharacteristic reasonableness. “Fatty’s lined up a developer who’ll give us a decent price for most of the place. We could pay off the bank and save one lot and build a house on it. Have a decent nest egg left over.”