The Price of Blood pb-1 Read online

  The Price of Blood

  ( Phil Broker - 1 )

  Chuck Logan

  Chuck Logan

  The Price of Blood

  1

  Broker’s house was falling into the ravine.

  The problem was the sloping yard and the exposed limestone foundation that had pushed out in two of the corners. Spring rains had turned the mud basement into a storm sewer, and now a gravel-toothed ditch stretched from the foundation down to the ravine like an Okie’s Dust Bowl nightmare. This condition had undermined the back of the house and caused the buckled linoleum floor in the kitchen to pitch ten degrees and, back when he smoked, Broker could lay a cigarette on the table and watch it roll due east.

  When he’d moved from St. Paul he’d bought the house for the lot, which had a clear view of the St. Croix River. Property was taking off in Stillwater and someday they’d pave the street and bring in city water and sewer to the north end. Someday he’d jack up the original 1870s row house, slap in a solid foundation, tear off the screwed-up kitchen addition and put in a real kitchen that some yuppies fleeing the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metro would pay big bucks for. Then he’d sell it and invest in the resort his folks owned up north…

  But that was a retirement plan and, for now, grass went knee-high in the steep, eroded backyard and the neighborhood cats and nocturnal raccoons could prowl through it unobserved, while his crop of dandelions threatened to mutate into sunflowers. And the lilac hedges were headed for jungle and the rain had caved in the footings he’d put in to pave the dirt driveway.

  His dust-busted ’87 Ford Ranger was parked in the back and angled downhill, trusting in the emergency brake and two cobblestones jammed under the front wheels to keep it from rolling off the lot.

  On a mild spring morning in the last week of May, Broker opened his eyes, squinted, and figured that his life was headed into the ravine along with his house and truck.

  Phil Broker, long divorced and never remarried, and with little visible means of support, rose late, threw cold water on his face, brushed his teeth, and did not shave. Barefoot, he walked his slanting stairs and floors down to the kitchen and put on water for coffee. While it heated he stared at the envelope from Publisher’s Clearing House that lay on his kitchen table and declared in two-inch type: WIN TEN MILLION DOLLARS!

  As he spooned Folger’s instant into a cup and poured in boiling water he reminded the envelope that he didn’t need the whole ten million. Two hundred and fifty thousand was the figure he had to hit.

  Still barefoot and wearing only a pair of jeans, he took the coffee into the backyard and sat in a patch of thin sunlight on a distressed metal lawn chair. Through the steam curling up from his coffee cup he studied a whimsical rainbow the sun painted in the gloomy pan of oil he’d emptied from his truck the day before.

  Buck up, kid, his dad would say, you still got your health.

  Which was true. Broker looked younger than his forty-three years. He stood six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds and he figured that was just the right size for a man; being strong enough to stand your ground but still lean enough to run away. Barechested, with thick dark hair worn long and pulled back in a ponytail, he cultivated the aspect of a well-preserved biker who had almost turned to honest labor. His rugged face and neck and his arms below the biceps were T-shirt-tanned from working outside, in contrast to his torso and shoulders, which were pale, with plump blue veins marking the packed muscle. He’d spent a lot of time in the sun once and he didn’t associate tans with beaches.

  His quiet green eyes were flecked with amber and deep-set below thick, striking black eyebrows that met in a shaggy line across his unlined forehead. Young children liked his eyebrows and tugged on them, reminded of a friendly wolf toy.

  Three sips into his coffee, a car pulled into his driveway-too fast-and he heard the spitting gravel hit the peeling wood siding on his house. He sighed and added a few pennies of menace to his gaze and his eyes shaded to the color of a dirty dollar bill.

  Rodney in his Trans Am had to lean on the gas one last time to hear the engine roar before he cut the ignition. Broker shook his head that it had come to this. He listened to the car door slam. Too loud.

  “Broker? Where are you?”

  “In the back.”

  Rodney, a world-class asshole who lifted weights at a health club, swaggered around the house with his pocked skin damn near orange from a tanning booth fire. He had short, spiky blond hair and fried video-arcade blue eyes. He looked around and said, “What a fucking dump.”

  Broker had been to Rodney’s cheap condo in Woodbury. There was green fur growing in the swimming pool.

  “It’s an investment,” said Broker.

  “You insured? I could torch it for you, no extra charge.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In the trunk.”

  “Bring the car back here.”

  “First I want to see some money.”

  Broker pulled a wad of currency from his Levi’s and dropped it on the peeling lawn table that, like the chair, was stricken with white paint leprosy. Rodney reached. Broker covered the cash with his hand. His square hand looked like he’d preferred to go without gloves last winter. Rodney judiciously took a step back.

  “Bring the car around. Don’t take it out in the driveway on a public street,” said Broker.

  Rodney’s derisive laugh sounded like birds burning up in high-tension wires. Again, Broker shook his head. More and more he had to deal with assholes like Rodney who failed to grasp basic emotional math or elementary physics. It genuinely frightened Broker that Rodney worked a day job as a machinist for Northwest Airlines. More and more, he worried that guys like Rodney were out there being air controllers or running the dials at nuclear power plants.

  Rodney went back for his wheels and gunned down the drive and parked next to Broker’s truck. He got out and popped open the trunk.

  “One Power Ranger’s toy,” said Rodney, throwing back a flap of olive drab army blanket and revealing the full auto, military M16A/203. The one with the grenade launcher grafted ominously under the barrel.

  “Ammo for the launcher?” asked Broker.

  Rodney dug in the blanket and palmed three blunt 40mm high-explosive rounds. Like butter-tipped baby dinosaur teeth.

  “Just three?” Broker raised his eyebrows.

  “Three should be enough for the customer to see if the goods work. Take it or leave it. Got some other folks interested.” Rodney grinned his skin-cancer grin.

  Broker squinted, unconvinced.

  “I shit you not. These gang-bangers in north Minneapolis are up to battalion strength and put out some feelers.” Rodney’s grin broadened. “I said this magic word to them: grenade.”

  “Bullshit,” said Broker. Rodney was in the reserves and liked to make with the military terminology.

  “This deal sours, the future is over north,” said Rodney. By future, Rodney meant the many guns he intended to pilfer from Uncle Sam.

  “North Minneapolis isn’t exactly my territory,” said Broker.

  Rodney glanced at Broker’s shit-kicker truck and laughed. “Yeah, you best stick with your wood-niggers up in Stearns and Pine counties.”

  “It’s their money. I’ll call you tonight, after six. I’ll set the deal for tomorrow at twelve noon,” said Broker.

  “They coming down here?”

  “I’m not giving them a choice. Bad enough I have to drive up thirty-five east with one machine gun. I ain’t doing it with five more of them.”

  “And I get to meet them?”

  “Yeah, Rodney, you meet them and deal direct from now on. I’m not real hot on this gun stuff.”

  Rodney strutted to the lawn table, snatched up the bills
, and counted. He stopped in midcount, staring.

  “It’s all there,” said Broker.

  Rodney’s eyes jittered on two mourning doves that delicately executed a feeding ballet atop a birdfeeder set into the lip of the ravine. Unlike everything else in the overgrown, eroded yard, the feeder showed a caring hand, sanded and varnished and shaped with an elegant flair for craftsmanship. A zigzag stuck in Rodney’s eyes as he tried to extract a thought. Out of place.

  “Birds,” he said.

  “I got nothing against birds,” said Broker.

  2

  Broker ate a bowl of Special K, drank a glass of orange juice, and filled his Thermos with coffee. Then he changed into a clean black T-shirt and pulled on Wellington boots, a Levi’s jacket, and a long-billed black cap. He threw a nylon hideout holster that held a Beretta compact into his glove compartment along with a cell phone. Then he clipped on his pager.

  The sky was bright but burnished with an unseasonable chill so he grabbed a loose polo shirt to disguise the pistol if he had to strap it to the small of his back. He tucked Rodney’s rifle into the false floor of his truck bed and rearranged his tools.

  He ran an ad in the local paper for landscaping and handyman jobs. Sometimes he cut and hauled firewood. He had a talent for landscaping and kept a Bobcat on a trailer up north. One of his big limestone jobs was even photographed for the St. Paul paper.

  But…

  People still had a line on him from the old days. So he augmented his income periodically, ferrying marijuana and speed from up north down to the river valley. It was the speed that got him onto Rodney. There was this lab up in Pine County run by some skinheads who had swastikas and machine guns on the brain.

  Broker shook his head and studied his work-battered hands. A long time ago he had vowed to never get trapped working inside in an office. So now…machine guns.

  He artfully rearranged his tool trove so that anything he needed was always in a steel tangle on the bottom. But it was good camouflage. Nobody would want to get dirty nosing around in the intimidating pile. He locked the rear door to his camper and got in and slowly drove out his driveway.

  He pokeyed up the dirt streets at the city limits and climbed the North Hill until his tires picked up cement. He passed nicer homes that abutted the golf course and turned south onto North Fourth Street. He craned his neck when he passed the bed and breakfast that the movie star had just bought and was remodeling. She was nowhere in sight. Slowly, he rolled down a gauntlet of three-story woodframe homes with Rococo gingerbread trim. New tulips punched up in the flower beds. Lilac and bridal wreath were busting out. He passed the Carnegie Library, built in 1902, and the city hall and turned left on Myrtle and drove three blocks to Main Street.

  He pulled into the FINA station and gassed up. With a dry hitch in his voice he asked the clerk for six pick-five lotto tickets. The Powerball drawing tonight was for 32 million bucks. He pocketed the tickets, a couple packs of beef jerky, and hit the road.

  He drove north, up State 95, through cuts in the river bluffs and listened on A.M. radio for a weather report. The day would remain clear but with a kicker. Frost was possible tonight across the northern tier suburbs. His eyes were fixed beyond the tree lines ahead. Still cold up north.

  North was more than a direction. As life in the Cities took a definite seedy turn, he could always count on one last clean place-deep winter up along the North Shore where he’d been raised. He replayed a memory from last November, during deer season. Strapped in snowshoes, he’d plodded the frozen shore of Lake Superior on a night so cold that sap exploded in the trees. Orion glittered down and solid bedrock buoyed him from beneath the clean snow and he had felt locked in place by a harsh beauty that was older than God. He wanted to get back to that moment. Leave the city lights behind.

  He tapped in F.M. on the radio and listened to a luncheon program from the National Press Club on Public Radio: Andy Rooney reminiscing about World War Two. The Big One.

  He had never thought big enough. His ex-wife, Kimberly, had diagnosed the problem on her way out of his life and on her way to the spa to read Money magazine on the Stairmaster and to lose eight pounds, the better to run down the type-A attorney who did think big. Kim’d probably think highly of Rodney, who dreamed of being an international arms dealer. Rodney had figured out how to rip off military M16s from Fort Snelling. When Rodney talked about guns and dope in the same breath he sounded like Archimedes. Eureka. He’d found the lever that moved the modern world.

  Rodney had approached Broker at a gun show, six months ago, directed by someone with loose lips. Rodney had done his homework and had a description of Broker as a former large-quantity dealer who now had scaled down to a low-profile conduit for the “white man” dope-speed and grass-that traveled between northern Minnesota and the eastern suburbs. But the dope trade had gotten too rough and crazy. More and more he was mixed up in illegal arms.

  Broker did credit Rodney with organizational skill. He had put together a group of reservists throughout the state. Like him, they were armorers who worked in supply. Like him, they over inventoried weapons parts. Slowly they were assembling their own illegal armory out of spare parts. What Rodney needed was a man who could connect him to a market. Quietly.

  Like his ad in the Stillwater Gazette said: BROKER FIXES THINGS. One thing led to another. But Broker was a cautious man. He’d insisted on meeting Rodney’s crew, to check them out in detail.

  He turned west on Highway 97, drove through Scandia, and hooked up with Interstate 35 outside of Forest Lake. Now he was rolling north at 65 miles an hour.

  He drank some coffee and ate one of his beef jerkys and continued to think about Rodney, who had this idea about a big score at Camp Ripley when the guard went up to train for the summer. He had stoned dreams of villas on the Mediterranean, sailboats. Rodney wanted to sell tanks.

  Broker shook his head. Once he’d barreled through the Black Hills with a semi full of grass and stolen Harleys. He wondered if a Bradley armored vehicle would fit in the back of a semi.

  The people he was on his way to meet fantasized in such terms. But mostly they made do with semi-automatics: AKs, Mini 14s, and Colts. But this one guy, Tabor, the money guy, hinted that he had pieces of a.50 caliber and someday maybe he’d let Broker take a crack at getting that baby up and cooking.

  It was business. He didn’t share in the dialogue with his clients. Tabor had hired Broker to rewire his house on the side. By the time Broker was done he’d fixed the washer and the dryer and built a screened porch. All the time Tabor was making with the far-right sounds.

  Broker told him. Lookit. I used to run a little product into the Cities but I didn’t like it after the demographics started to change and cars full of heavily armed Zulus from Chicago and Detroit started appearing out of nowhere so now I do something else. I’m in it for the money-but mainly when things get busted, I fix it. And then Broker would wiggle his fierce eyebrows and give his wolf smile.

  Tabor owned a Ford dealership and a ton of land in Pine County and regularly attended church. He didn’t approve of Broker selling dope. Broker pointed out that he’d been introduced to Tabor by a bunch of neo-Nazi wackos who cooked speed in the piney woods, so lay off the pious crap. And Broker wasn’t real comfortable hanging around with Tabor’s buddies, who dressed up in soldier suits and played with guns out in the sticks. After the Oklahoma City thing he’d seen those guys on Nightline talking to Ted Koppel about the same kind of ideas about county rights that Tabor spouted. Since that federal building went up, the feds had a purple erection on. A bust had just gone down in the Cities. It was on the news. Regular alphabet soup. DEA. ATF. FBI. Minnesota BCA. Five, six counties.

  But Rodney and Tabor had agreed to a one-time gig to be connected. On a touchy deal involving military rifles Broker could expect $500 per piece. So three grand for six weapons. His toe eased off the accelerator. With a machine gun in the back maybe it was a good idea to drive the speed limit.

 
3

  He turned off at The Hinckley Exit and went down the road until he saw the cantilevers of the Grand Casino flared against the fir and spruce. The Ojibwa’s Revenge, it looked like the Flying Nun’s hat getting ready to take off. Just for lunch, he told himself as he wheeled into the lot. He walked into a campfire cloud of tobacco smoke and felt the electronic surge of the slots.

  The patrons were mostly weathered retirees; smokers with lined faces from fifties television. Like an indigenous cargo cult, they bent to the machines in disciplined ranks and made a collective wish. If they all hit the right combination, VE and VJ Day would come pouring back in a silver avalanche.

  He put a few dollars’ worth of quarters in the poker slots, cast an envious eye at the high stakes black jack tables, lost his quarters, had a hamburger and a vanilla shake, and left the casino with a sugary jingo-jango rushing in his veins.

  Back on the road he headed east into the wooded back country. Out of habit he worked a jigsaw on the gravel roads, weaving in and around some lakes. He fiddled with the radio, lost the signal from the Cities and finally turned it off and just cruised, kicking up a trail of dust. He skirted the St. Croix State Forest and came up on his destination, a small general store and tavern that Tabor owned on a crossroads. He rolled by the store, checking the cars parked outside. Tabor’s new Ford Bronco, several pickups. He turned around at a logging road and on the way back he tested the pager to make sure it was working. Then he parked in front of the tavern.

  Jules Tabor sat at the wheel of the Bronco. He motioned to Broker to pull his rig around to the back of the building. Tabor parked in front of a large pole barn. He got out, worked a combination lock, pushed open the doors, and waved Broker in.

  Tabor pulled the door closed behind Broker’s truck. Broker got out and they shook hands. Broker always noticed this archaic ritual. Most of the people he dealt with were way past guaranteeing a deal with a handshake.