The Price of Blood Part 22

"Okay. Pay me, show me the way to the elevator."

Nina hugged the huge cop. He lolled out his tongue and panted like a h.o.r.n.y dog on a c.o.c.ktail napkin. "One last thing," he leered at Nina. "Promise me you won't abort our love child." Nina rolled her eyes and walked Larkins to the elevator, digging in her purse.

When she came back she stared at Broker and his black bag, blinked, and said, "What happened to you?"

"I got a haircut?"

She frowned. "You have a hickey on your neck."

Broker smiled tightly. "C'mon, let's find someplace to talk."

J.T. sat in the corner of an empty banquet room dubiously drinking room-service coffee. Broker slid his bag under a table and paced. The tables had been set. Lights reflected off crystal and hurt his eyes. Folded winged napkins looked like squadrons of origami warming up on aircraft carriers.

Nina marched to a window and opened it to let out Broker's cigarette smoke. The growl of jet engines entered the room on that cool, bluesy, up-all-night, morning air.

"So." She spread open a manila folder full of computer printouts on the table next to Broker. "Tuna came through the bank ten days ago. He withdrew twenty thousand and left the account open. There's another twenty thousand still in it."

"So where is he?"

"I haven't got a clue. He's been sending checks for eighteen years to an address in Italy. Paying the taxes on a farmhouse in Tuscany. The banker showed me the correspondence."

Broker shook his head. "He's too sick to travel to Italy. Where would he get a pa.s.sport?"

"That's what I thought," said Nina. "There's these canceled checks to someone named Ann Marie Sporta. They start in 1988 and stop in 1993. About fifteen thousand all together. They were stamped at a bank in Madison, Wisconsin. What do you think?"

Broker rubbed his eyes, glanced at the checks. "Don't know. What else?"

"The jackpot," said Nina "It's all in his records at the bank, canceled checks, letters, accounting forms. Since nineteen eighty-nine, when things started loosening up with Vietnam, he's been donating heavily to something called the Southeast Asian Relief."

"Define heavily?" asked Broker.

"Oh, about fifty thousand bucks-"

"To some...relief charity?" Broker shook his head.

"The SAR is just a go-between the banker found, you can't just send money to someone in Vietnam. So he used this aid organization headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. Guy named Kevin Eichleay runs it. Nam vet. Was a medic in the Air Cav. He ships over medical supplies. Runs tours of vets who rehab hamlets, hospitals, stuff like that. I called him up and said I wanted to donate some money. Then we drove like h.e.l.l to Lansing with those two guys following us."

"You should have waited for me," said Broker.

Nina arched an eyebrow and went on. "Poor Kevin," she smiled, "he's a low-key, salt-of-the-earth dude and I came cooking into his office like the Pillsbury bake-off. Larkins freaked him a bit, but he quieted down when I got my checkbook out. For five hundred bucks and a few hugs I got the whole story. Told him Tuna and my dad were in the army together. That I was going to Nam to look for my dad's remains. Man, I threw the book at him."

"What the f.u.c.k is this?" grumbled J.T. suspiciously.

Broker held up a hand. Patience.

Nina spread a sheaf of official looking Xeroxes down on the hotel table like four aces. They bore strange stamps in Vietnamese. Stars and sheaves of rice. "Approvals that Kevin negotiated on trips he made. From a local People's Committee all the way up to the Vietnamese General a.s.sembly. Get this: For the last five years Tuna has been sponsoring an old vets' home for Viet Cong amputees. Guess who runs it?"

Broker shook his head. "Oh boy," he said softly.

"You got that right," said Nina. "Nguyen Van Trin manages it. Tuna worked through the banker to bankroll Kevin to go to Nam in eighty-nine to find Trin. I showed Kevin the phone number in Hue and he confirmed it as the number Trin uses."

"Where's this home located?" asked Broker slowly.

"On the beach, in Quang Tri Province, exactly where Tuna wanted it built," said Nina mysteriously. She placed both hands on Broker's shoulders and shook him with infectious excitement. "And, Tuna bought them a serious boat to go fishing with. Kevin said it was way too much boat, big enough to run heavy cargo on the high seas. But Tuna insisted on it. That's what most of the bread went for. Permits for the boat. The Vietnamese government went through a sensitive period about people with boats."

"G.o.d, he had it all planned, for years," said Broker.

"Yep. Put everything in place and then he got cancer," said Nina.

"Trin." Broker said the name like an incantation.

"Yeah," said Nina. "How much does he know?"

"Whoa. Wait. Man, what the f.u.c.k is this?" J.T. stood up, raising his hands to dodge the high-energy splinters zipping off Broker and Nina.

"You don't want to know," said Broker.

"I want to know," said J.T.

"Okay." Broker reached down and unzipped his bowling bag. With a flourish he whipped out a glittering bar of gold and tossed it across the room.

J.T. caught it, hefted the surprising weight and groaned, "Oh oh..."

"Wow," said Nina. "You got into his safe!"

"Huh?" J.T. blinked.

"There's this guy who thinks he's a pirate and he's looking for a sunken treasure," explained Broker.

"Except it's not sunken, it's buried," added Nina. She startled. "Or is it? Where'd he find the gold?"

"By the chopper. But only seven ingots and they've had a crew over there churning up the bottom."

"I don't get it," said Nina.

Broker shrugged. "Maybe it's in two locations?"

J.T.'s eyes went first to Nina, then to Broker, and back to Nina again. "Right," he said.

"It's all dirty and we're going to bust his a.s.s," explained Broker, throwing his hands in the air.

"A pirate." J.T. glowered at the gold ingot in his hand. "A treasure." He shook his head. "In Duluth?" he asked incredulously.

"In Vietnam. If you can get a week off you can come with us," said Broker.

"f.u.c.k that. Once was enough." J.T. carefully put down the gold bar on the table and said, "You're right, I don't want to know. I'll just help you talk to that guy and quietly depart."

"Talk to what guy?" asked Nina.

"Bevode Fret," said Broker, stashing the bar back in the bag.

"Talk?"

"Yeah, the kind of talk that'll keep him in traction for a while," said Broker.

Nina said, "Not a good idea. We lost those guys in Lansing but they know where Bevode is. You go after him, they'll pick us up again."

Broker shook his head, he'd been looking forward to this. "Bevode gets his comeuppance. If somebody heavy is tailing us they'll stick out like a sore thumb in Devil's Rock."

"Along with me," said J.T. with a calm demented smile.

Nina folded her arms. "We already screwed up once. If I didn't know Danny, where would we be?"

Broker grimaced and rubbed his eyes. "If LaPorte can buy prison guards he can probably penetrate a commercial airline's scheduling computer. We aren't going to lose whoever's following us for long. And we're all going to the same place."

"We have to ditch them if we find Tuna," said Nina.

"When we find Tuna," said Broker. "It's in here." He sat down at the table and spread out the contents of Nina's folder. He pushed the Italian correspondence aside. He wondered if a man dying of cancer would try to make it to Vietnam. Tuna had prepared this for a long time.

An hour of eye-strain went by as Broker scanned through the records looking for incidental payments that could have gone for a forged pa.s.sport and ID. Nina's Reeboks squeegeed on the glossy floor, pacing behind him. J.T. snored lightly, stretched out on three chairs. Finally Broker turned to the checks issued to Ann Marie Sporta. He looked at his watch, got up, and went looking for a phone, hoping that Ed Ryan had gone to bed early the night before.

In silence, red-eyed and grumpy, they drove north from Duluth in a rental car. They stopped in Two Harbors and Broker called Fatty Naslund. He told Fatty to meet him north of town at C.R. Magney State Park, near a violent waterfall called the Devil's Kettle, where they had played as kids.

Then he called Tom Jeffords at the Devil's Rock police station and made an arrangement concerning Bevode Fret. Then he called Ed Ryan, who had been shaken out of bed by Broker's first call and was now at the ATF office and who was grumbling about Broker having used up all his chits. But he was working the computers and talking to the FBI. Broker hung up the phone and found Nina and J.T. sound asleep in the car. Broker drove to the park on stale adrenaline fumes and black Amoco station coffee.

The Kettle was reputed to be bottomless, and while he waited, Broker toyed with the concept of throwing Bevode Fret into it. Another reason to have J.T. along.

Fatty Naslund drove up cautiously in his T-Bird, avoiding mud holes. When he got out he grimaced at the mud splatters along the rocker panels.

He arched a disapproving eye at the rented car and the unmoving forms curled on the seats. "That's a black guy and a white woman?"

"They're with me," said Broker.

Fatty straightened his cuffs. Just the reflex motion. He had been working out and wore a ribbed T-shirt ordered out of a Patagonia catalogue. He was a compulsively lean, neat man who kept a rowing machine in his office at the bank so he could work up a sweat while he watched Rush Limbaugh on cable. He had been perversely nicknamed Fatty by the other kids because he was the banker's son. Now he lived in fear of excess body weight, had little calipers to pinch and measure his body fat, and went once a month to a clinic in Duluth to submerge in a tank and compute his fat-to-muscle ratio. Fatty was fastidious. He still thought copper pennies counted.

"Little unusual, isn't this?" said Fatty, striding toward the picnic table where Broker sat. He grinned his best chamber of commerce grin. His brilliant white teeth were so healthy they looked like they had definition and veins in them.

Broker unzipped the bowling bag and methodically removed the seven flat ingots of gold and stacked them in a blazing pyramid in the early morning sun. Fatty's eyes went wide then cranked down to suspicious slits.

Then Broker took out the Colt, racked the slide back, and sat it beside the metal bars.

"Holy s.h.i.t," said Fatty in feigned shock. "This is like payday in basic training. PFC Naslund reports for pay."

"How long you known me, Fatty?"

"Since kindergarten."

"You ever know me to throw you a curve on anything?"

"Where'd the gold come from, Phil?" Fatty fingered an ingot, caressing the Chinese ideograms embossed on its surface.

"From a gray area."

Fatty sat down at the table and carefully prodded the barrel of the .45 with his index finger so the muzzle pointed toward the waterfall upstream. "A gray area like New Orleans?"

"What gives you that idea?"

Fatty pointed at Broker's chest. "The T-shirt. And certain inquiries from a big property management firm down there. I faxed them Mike's loan history this week."

"You hear about the guy who killed Mike's dog?"

Fatty nodded. "All over town."

"He works for the guy who owns the property outfit in New Orleans."

Fatty stared at the gold with a pained smile. "Ah, look, Phil-"

"Don't worry. It's going to wind up perfectly legal."

"But it isn't right now, is it?"

"Remember how you always ask me about what I do? This fantasy of yours, about being involved in an undercover operation?"

"Yeeaah..."

"Well, this is going to be the biggest thing I ever tried."

"But is it legal? You know. Gavels. Juries. Cell doors clanging shut."

"Fatty, this is evidence," said Broker seriously.

"Then why is it sitting on a picnic table in Magney State Park instead of on the attorney general's desk?"

"I'm in the preliminary stage of an investigation."

"Yeaah?"

"In the meantime, I'd like you to secure these items in a safe place and tell absolutely no one."

"That's all?"

"No. Chain up the developer you sicced on my dad. One way or another this gold is going to settle that note."

"You know, Phil, there's enough weight here to take care of the loan. Maybe throw in a new Lexus," estimated Fatty. "Hmmm, and it looks real old. If it's rare it could be worth even more..." He reached out and petted a bar like it was a cat.

Broker said, "Forget the inquiry from New Orleans. It never happened."

"Is it legal?" he asked again.