The Price of Blood Part 6

Find Broker. Have Broker find Trin. All arranged. Written in a dead man's hand.

12.

BROKER CALLED HIS FOLKS AND TOLD THEM HE was coming up, and that he had Nina Pryce with him. Then he loaded a quick travel bag and slapped his cell phone into the Jeep glove compartment. As they pulled out of the drive he glowered at Nina as she warily swiveled her head, scouting the street. "You have your gun, right?" she said.

"Don't start. Not yet," said Broker.

He drove downtown to the business district, pulled in back of a row of brick storefronts and took his Thermos into a coffee shop and had it filled with strong French roast. Nina stayed at his side. Getting back into the car, she lightened up a tad. She laughed when she saw a riverboat churn through the old railroad lift bridge that crossed the St. Croix, and the tourists wandering the waterfront pavilions of an art fair and the church steeples that dotted the bluff. "Jeez, Broker, you wound up in a Grandma Moses painting. This isn't you. Uh-uh."

He wanted to strangle her. He wanted his quiet underground life back.

She poured coffee in the Thermos cup and held it for him so he could drive one-and-a-half-handed. He hot-footed it up Highway 95 through the river valley and turned east twenty minutes later, crossing the St. Croix River at Osceola, Wisconsin. Now he took less traveled State 35 up the Wisconsin side. He liked driving this particular road, finding comfort in the way the fields, forest, farms, and small towns stayed frozen in time.

He rolled down the window and felt summer heat crowd in the new foliage along the tree lines and smelled it trickle in damp waves across the new-plowed fields. He'd always had too much imagination and that complicated a cop's instinctive aversion to hot summer nights and full moons. He glanced over at Nina, who had finally yielded to fatigue and yesterday's whiskey and had fallen asleep in the warm sunlight. No, it started before he was a cop. It was his experience that murderous folly flocked in the tropical heat.

The red Georgia dirt was ninety-eight degrees in the shade on the day that Broker went to visit Nina Pryce, in July 1975, on officer's row at Fort Benning. Vietnam was finally done and the flags sagged on the lanyards across the base in the heavy doldrums of defeat.

They were bleak, the houses where the army boards its majors, especially when all the furniture has been removed and the family of a man who will not return from war stands in the empty rooms for the last time.

And the empty rooms were worse when the army moved you out with the cold, efficient energy of censure.

She was nine years old, carrot-topped, with big knees and big gray eyes and braces on her teeth. Her mother's face conveyed a look of absent practicality that wondered: How can I afford the braces now? Her brother sat outside in the car, his head buried in a comic book. Nina stood fiercely at her mother's side.

Marian Pryce was alone. No neighbors had come with ca.s.seroles and no children played in the street. The moving van sat in the driveway like the bogeyman.

The officer who faced Marian and her daughter was not a chaplain, but was instead a sa.s.sy second lieutenant from the base coordinator's office turned out in glossy leather, starched fatigues, and a laminated helmet liner. Instead of solace, he held a clipboard in his hand. He toured the quarters entering checkmarks on his clipboard, making sure Marian and her two children had not "stolen" anything from the federal government.

The investigation was over and now Ray Pryce's family was being escorted off the base and out of the army.

The little girl had stood up to the starched martinet and stated in a steady, precocious voice: "If my dad is dead in the war he should have a flag even if you can't find his body."

The second lieutenant was a real p.r.i.c.k who did not do her the courtesy of meeting her eyes. His pencil scratched on the clipboard and his voice was another cruel dismissal in official language: "Your father is not authorized a flag because his service wasn't honorable."

Perhaps Nina's personality was formed at that moment. She kicked the lieutenant in the shin, carefully hitting him above his boot leather so it'd hurt.

And 1st Lt. Phillip Broker, twenty-three years old, a lean, scorched splinter thrown off from the recent catastrophe in Southeast Asia, who was almost senseless from a week of testifying and being questioned by army lawyers, and whose angry confused attempts to defend Nina's absent father only stacked the evidence against him, Phillip Broker said good-bye to the army.

The method he chose was to take the lieutenant and throw him bodily through the front door and send him sprawling on the sidewalk. Then he stomped his Corcoran jump boot down on the clipboard and smashed it to smithereens. The lieutenant opted for a retrograde maneuver, a.s.s backward through the nearest shrubbery.

Marian Pryce, sensing that Broker was necessary to her daughter at this moment, signaled with her dry eyes and took a last cardboard box from the kitchen counter and carried it out the door. The moving van pulled away. Marian waited in her car.

Nina stood her ground, defiantly alone in the empty house. Broker, knowing nothing of children, knelt and said to her, "I want you to walk out of here like you own the place."

To underscore the point, Broker had escorted her down the rows of houses to a playground. They sat in the swings and their heels made swirls in the hot, chalky-red dust. Nina said nothing. Her large eyes roved the base, vacuuming in detail.

And then Broker had said the words that he'd come to regret: "If you ever need anything, you know, help, come find me."

She'd nodded solemnly. Down the block, her mother blew the horn. Nina's eyes were fixed in a stare across an empty parade field, on a limp American flag hanging in the dripping heat.

13.

LIKE 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-a.s.s 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 s.h.i.t. His eyes darted to the rearview mirror. He had seen the Saturn yesterday. d.a.m.n 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 ma.s.sive 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 Sh.o.r.e.

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.

Sonofab.i.t.c.h. 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.

d.a.m.n 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 part.i.tion 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 lakesh.o.r.e 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 a.s.sessment 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 sh.o.r.eline 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 compa.s.sion. 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 appet.i.te 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 sh.o.r.e." 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 b.u.mped 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 p.i.s.sed him off. "Pull over."

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

"Nina."

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. h.e.l.l 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 b.u.t.t 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."

14.

BROKER 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."