The Price of Blood Part 21

Rolled on his back. Good. His left hand pawed the sheets briefly. Broker held his breath as LaPorte gurgled slightly, then stronger. C'mon, man, saw some wood.

And finally, slowly, rhythmically, Cyrus LaPorte began to snore, a deep nasal gurgle, the troughs followed by long wheezes.

Broker gave it ten more minutes. Checked his watch again. It was almost four. Be dawn soon. The storm was lessening.

Gotta do it now. He eased around the side of the bed and leaned his right arm across the sheets. How would a wife poke a sleeping man? He tried to remember. Kim had always jabbed him with her elbow. Would his fist feel like an elbow? Probably not. The angle would be wrong.

Absurdly, Broker carefully crawled into bed with Cyrus LaPorte and lay next to him. What would J.T. say? f.u.c.k that. This was one story he wasn't telling anybody.

Broker inhaled, gathered up his nerve, held it, and jammed his right elbow into LaPorte's side. LaPorte grunted but continued to snore. Broker's hand quivered, about to reach for the Colt. Then he jammed him again, harder, deciding that Lola would not have a light touch faced with this unG.o.dly racket.

LaPorte sighed, the snoring ceased, and he rearranged himself, turning toward Broker who lay wide-eyed as LaPorte threw out a sleep-heavy right arm that landed on Broker's hip. The dense shadow of the key lay on the sheet between them.

Then LaPorte snuggled toward Broker and his right arm found a comfortable perch on Broker's a.s.s.

Broker gasped. He had been holding his breath for almost a minute. Ever so slowly he eased the shears from his waistband and delicately snared the thong in the blades. Snip. He took another breath and gently reeled the leather out from between LaPorte's throat and the pillow.

Getting dizzy, he made himself breathe through his nose to calm down and closed his hand around the key. LaPorte stirred at the sound and moved closer. Like some precoital shimmy from the insect kingdom, LaPorte slowly squirmed his bony hips closer.

Broker sat up, clutching the key, and slid away from LaPorte's hand and pushed the other pillow toward the man. LaPorte grumbled and slowly folded himself around the pillow.

In the hall Broker let out a deep breath and realized he was almost giddy with laughter, this insane helium balloon filling his chest. Taking very disciplined steps, he went back down the hall into the study.

The key did not open the lock easily. It had to be inserted, turn one set of antique tumblers then inserted deeper. His hand was shaking when the lock finally popped.

A corkscrew of excitement cored him and left his toe-nails tingling. So this is why the a.s.sholes do it. Broker had never seen bars of gold before. A wet mercury gleam in a flicker of lightning. With raised Chinese characters on them. Gold. Seven ingots. Cleaned up and shiny in the dark. Heavy too. Over five pounds apiece. More where that came from...

He opened the bowling bag and removed the bundle of hotel towels. Set it aside and transferred the gold to the bag.

Just crossing a line, he told himself. Not the line.

He made himself quiet down to listen. Then he tiptoed back down the hall to make sure LaPorte was still out. Like a baby. Okay. Go back for the prize.

The thick antique gla.s.s crock was banded and studded with discolored bra.s.s ribs. And it was d.a.m.n near as heavy as three of the gold bars. He held it up and tried to decipher the contents in the weak light. Slosh. Looked like a rotten log in swamp water. Carefully he unwrapped the bundle of towels and swaddled the container. Used more towels to wedge it among the gold.

Okay. Then he took the seriously dead cat that had been wrapped in the towels and placed it in the safe. It wasn't completely black, but close enough. The first two he'd come upon were entirely wrong, a tabby and a spotted gray. Waffled with the tire tread of the vehicle that had flattened it, the cat's viscera and bones curled like Technicolor fettuccine around the squashed fur. Welcome home to New Orleans, motherf.u.c.ker.

Broker left the safe door open.

He left the key in the lock, put on his raincoat and boots, and slipped the bag over his shoulders. As he adjusted to the heft of the weight he looked up in a tremble of lightning. Royale LaPorte's cracked enigmatic smile flickered down from the painting.

Like he approved.

A flash flood of adrenaline compensated for the weight and he made it swiftly down the tree. He opened the bag, took out the gla.s.s crock, waited for a lightning-thunder stroke, and smashed the container on the cement walk by the pool.

The smell of history and pirate shanties maybe, briny and gruesome. Worse to touch it. Yuk. But Broker resolutely picked up the squishy, blackened hand and, in another crackle of lightning, saw that the fingernails had grown curled and thick as claws.

Real monsters this time.

He mounted a lawn chair and impaled the hand, wrist-down, with a sickening crunch on a lilac spear on the iron fence. Slippery d.a.m.n mess. His gloved fingers struggled with it, but when he left, the middle finger was extended skyward and the other digits were folded back.

36.

AT 7:55 A.M. BROKER LEANED IN THE SHADOW OF the gallery at the front door of the Doniat. Waiting on a cab and wondering if Cyrus LaPorte would show. Across the street, black kids in blue jumpers and slacks, white shirts and blouses, were herded by nuns toward the colonial whitewash of an Ursaline mission.

He'd treated himself to an expensive pair of sungla.s.ses and wore them now to disguise his bloodshot, sleepless eyes. The gold bars were tucked into the locked trunk of his rented car. Before dawn, he'd left the vehicle in the airport police garage at the New Orleans airport. He'd cabbed back into the city.

His sports coat was open, the stump of the Colt was loose in the holster, and his airline ticket was tucked into the waistband of his jeans. He wore the black T-shirt with the city's name spelled in dead alligators. He was drinking a Jax beer for breakfast.

The big navy-blue Seville with tinted windows came around the corner so fast and low on its suspension that it raked sparks off the bricks and almost demolished a languidly moving mule-drawn carriage full of tourists. The school kids had excellent drive-by reflexes. They scattered and ran for cover.

Broker smiled and took another sip of beer. He was enjoying himself. His thumb, still wrapped in adhesive, hardly bothered him.

The car doors sprung open. Virgil Fret, his face as chalky as uncut cocaine, hopped out of the driver's side and did a little stationary dance like he had to take a p.i.s.s. His hand hovered to his baggy shirt. Cyrus LaPorte was entombed in the back seat in burgundy upholstery like an albino in an air-conditioned cave. His color seemed off, but that could have been the tinted gla.s.s.

Broker ignored Virgil and pointed his beer bottle at LaPorte. "Get out and stand in the sun," he said in a cordial voice.

"Think you're pretty smart," said LaPorte, pushing up and out of the seat. He was ashen in the thick morning heat. Icy with control.

"Stand back from him, General," said Virgil Fret. Sniffing, hitching up his crotch, opening and closing his spare muscular fingers.

"Leave us be, Virgil," said LaPorte, exasperated.

"Tell him to get back in the car," said Broker.

"Get back in the car," ordered LaPorte. Twisting in a tight flurry of catnip reflexes, Virgil started to protest. "Now, you nitwit," growled LaPorte. The punk dropped his shoulders and got back in the car. LaPorte turned to Broker. "You have something that belongs to me."

"You got a beef? Call the cops."

"You're out of your depth, Broker."

"Don't think so. You're the one coming up empty in a hundred feet of salt water."

LaPorte executed a thin frosty smile. "It's too big for you. I know my way around over there. You don't."

"Watch me."

LaPorte squinted at him and burst into incredulous laughter. "No s.h.i.t, you waited around just to taunt me?"

Across the street the school kids milled in front of the mission, antsy in their uniforms. It was nice out, they were eager for school to end. Through the Caddy's tinted windows Virgil's fitful shadow bounced on the seat.

Broker smiled and wondered how he was doing as a pirate. "No," he said, "to caution you. You saved my life once, so I figure you deserve a warning."

"You," sputtered LaPorte, "threatening me!"

"That's right. It's you and me now. Winner take all, General, and if you go to Vietnam you'll never come back. Consider yourself warned."

Broker sat the empty beer bottle down on the curb as his cab pulled up. LaPorte couldn't stop himself from seizing at Broker's bag. Broker didn't resist. The weight told LaPorte it contained only clothing. He dropped his arms to his sides in frustration. Broker opened the cab door and tossed in his grip. He turned and smiled. "It's been fun. Anytime you need a hand, just let me know." He left LaPorte looking like he might eat the tires off that Caddy and, hopefully, furious enough to make a mistake.

They followed the cab. They followed him into the airport. LaPorte left Virgil stranded at the metal detector and came down the concourse to check the flight number.

When Broker got to the actual airplane door he flipped his badge and talked to the attendant. When he'd dropped off the rental car he'd made arrangements with the airport police. He explained that he was a Minnesota state investigator and he had to get back into the terminal without going back up the walkway. The attendant nodded and directed him to the maintenance stairway. Broker went down the stairs and rode a baggage cart back to the terminal.

He threaded through a subterranean warren of baggage conveyors and went for a phone.

He dialed Nina's in Ann Arbor. No answer. d.a.m.n. He paced in a break area and drank a cup of coffee. An airport cop met him with a concourse buggy and whisked him underground to his car.

An hour later Broker had his baggage checked and was waiting in the underground on another flight to the Twin Cities. He thought of calling Ed Ryan to keep an eye on his aborted Northeast flight into Minneapolis-St. Paul, to see if anybody interesting turned up to meet it. He decided against it. Too many people were already involved.

He had a last cigarette in New Orleans, out of sight, in a baggage handler laughing-place behind a deplaning ramp. Then he tried Nina's again. No answer. He tried J.T.'s home but got the machine. Everybody was stuck in between. Hoping that Danny Larkins was on the job, he boarded his airplane.

37.

"SHE DIDN'T CALL YOU?"

"Nah, man, nothing," said J.T. who had gone out to meet Nina's plane and checked the manifest when she wasn't on it. J.T. was working, so Broker had to keep paging him. They were having their sixth phone conversation in five hours. It was 11:45 P.M. Broker leaned, exhausted, over a telephone in the lobby of the Minneapolis Airport Holiday Inn. His arm ached from lugging the heavy bowling bag. He had taken a room when he got in, early afternoon. Nina was nowhere in sight. Had left no messages.

Broker thought about calling the Michigan State Police, but decided to wait and tried her apartment again. Nothing.

He had called the Liberty State Bank in Ann Arbor just before they closed and a tight-a.s.s banker had given him a lecture on the Right to Financial Privacy Act. Broker's name over the phone was not enough to authenticate his ident.i.ty. The banker would not confirm or deny that Nina Pryce had been in his office. He called J.T. again.

"I need a favor," said Broker.

"I thought I was already doing you a favor," said J.T. in that apprehensive voice.

"Could you get free for a day? I made three reservations for a hop to Duluth. We can rent a car and get to Devil's Rock."

"Uh-huh?"

"Leaves at five-"

"In the morning?"

"Yeah. There's a guy in county up in St. Louis, he gets out noon tomorrow, thirty-six-hour rule. I'm going to f.u.c.k him up and...well, if you aren't there I just might overdo it."

"This an open case?"

"This is personal."

"And it's got to do with Nina being missing?"

"Could be. I shouldn't have left her alone."

"You going to tell me about it?"

"Ah, there could be a problem with perjury."

Silence. "Airport Holiday Inn."

"Right."

"Fly to Duluth."

"Yeah, J.T."

"Fuuack. Gimme an hour."

At 2:15 A.M. Broker kneed J.T., who was dozing next to him, and shot out of the couch in the Holiday Inn lobby when Nina Pryce marched through the door in the company of a guy with a handlebar mustache who looked like a side of buffalo squeezed into jeans and cowboy boots. Bobbing in a porcupine quill aura of caffeine and adrenaline, hair frizzed, pupils enlarged; she crowed in hollow-cheeked triumph, "I'm in the wrong business. I should be the freakin' detective."

"Where the h.e.l.l have you been?" demanded Broker.

"Meet Danny Larkins. h.e.l.lo, J.T.," said Nina.

"Always a pleasure." J.T. yawned. Broker's hand disappeared into Larkins's giant hoof.

"Two guys," said Larkins. "They picked us up in Ann Arbor and followed us to Lansing."

"Lansing?" mumbled Broker.

"I'll explain," said Nina. She stared quizzically at Broker's lopsided posture and at the bowling bag grafted to his right hand.

"We lost them at the Lansing airport when we got on the shuttle to Detroit. I was the last guy on the plane and they did not board," said Larkins.

"You get a description?" asked Broker.

"I saw them, Broker, you can ask me," Nina interjected.

Larkins yawned. "One's tall, Caucasian, middle-aged but strong like a carpenter. Looks like a f.u.c.king hound dog. Wore sungla.s.ses. The other was ordinary white bread. They stayed in their car, a gray Nova. They must have thought they were the president with a state cruiser in front and behind."

Nina grinned. "Danny had these guys time their patrols to convoy us. It was great."

Broker handed Larkins the room key. "Go on. Get some sleep."

Larkins grinned. "Don't suppose anybody will tell me-"

"Nope," said Nina. "That wasn't our deal, Danny."