The Price of Blood Read online

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.

  Tabor had a face like rare prime rib as befits a K-Mart country squire and member of the Chamber of Commerce. Broker figured that, like a lot of serious right-wingers, Tabor had solid half-truths pumping in his big fatty heart. His political allies, unfortunately, had leaked out of a Bosnian Serb circle jerk. Broker took it in stride. He’d dealt with passive-aggressive hippies and rabid pseudo-anarchists, lethal pint-sized Hmong mafia, and frothing Black nationalists. Geekers, all of them, with their IQs wired directly into their assholes, as far as Broker was concerned. So now here was potbellied Jules Tabor with a graying mass of hair and skidmarks of clandestine reverse John Brown zeal streaked in his blue eyes. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and a tie with a trout on it and his chest pocket bulged with pens clipped into a plastic holder stamped with the logo of his car dealership
.

  Tabor’s eyes swelled with gun hormones.

  “Got it right here in the back,” said Broker. He dropped his tailgate and rummaged in his tools. Tabor winced disapprovingly at the disorder. Broker opened the hinged door to his false bottom compartment and slid out the mean black rifle and handed it to Tabor, who held out his arms like a man picking up his grandson for the first time.

  “I gave him your money. It’s all yours,” said Broker.

  Tabor cradled the rifle/launcher in his arms and looked at Broker in anticipation. Broker handed over the three rounds for the launcher.

  “Those are high explosive, you can get illumination, smoke, and buckshot,” said Broker.

  “I got to try it out,” said Tabor.

  Broker rubbed his hands together and warily glanced around.

  “I mean I’ll take it back on my land. Give me an hour,” said Tabor. It was a statement not a request.

  “You, ah, know how to load it?” asked Broker.

  Tabor grinned. “Got a manual.” He wrapped his new possession in the blanket, stuffed his pockets with 40mm high-explosive rounds and left the pole barn.

  Broker closed the doors and waited a few minutes to make sure he was alone. Then he opened the door to his truck, rummaged under the seat, and pulled out a frayed copy of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. His line of work, he always did kind of identify with Alcibiades.

  There was an old easy chair in the barn and he sat there, drinking the rest of the coffee from his Thermos, reading with one ear cocked. Twenty minutes later he heard three spaced, faint crumps. Half an hour after that, tires crunched outside the building. Broker stuck his pocketbook back under his seat.

  Now for the hard part. “You want the other five and the ammo it’ll be three thousand apiece and another thousand for two hundred rounds of HE. So sixteen grand. Then you guys split my fee. At my place. Tomorrow,” said Broker.

  Tabor squinted. “I thought it was like this time, you carry.”

  Broker shook his head. “I agreed to connect you. Now he’s seen your money and you’ve seen a gun. I don’t want to carry any more money or guns on this deal.”

  Zeal departed from Tabor’s blue eyes. A shrewd car dealer took over. “I don’t know—”

  “Look, I drive up the interstate with a truck full of machine guns and grenade rounds, it’s a risk.”

  Tabor folded his big arms over his barrel chest. “I don’t like going down to the Cities—”

  “Stillwater ain’t the Cities.” Broker worried the gravel with the toe of his boot. “We got a problem. Look, there’s other people interested in this stuff.”

  “Who?”

  Broker shrugged. “I don’t know, some gangs over north in Minneapolis, so my guy says.”

  “You’d sell military weapons to the niggers?” Tabor frowned.

  “Well, naturally I don’t want to…”

  Tabor sucked on a tooth, reached in his hip pocket, and took out a pocket calendar, flipped it open, sucked his tooth again. “What time tomorrow?”

  “Around two in the afternoon.”

  “Sixteen thousand,” said Tabor.

  “In cash.”

  “Okay. And I’ll bring the two guys who want to meet your supplier. Like we talked about.”

  Broker shrugged carefully.

  “What time was that?” asked Tabor.

  “Two P.M. sharp.”

  Broker winced because Tabor, the small businessman, was actually writing it down in his calendar. Probably in detail. Five machine guns, meet Broker, 2 P.M. in Stillwater. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

  “Deal,” said Tabor, extending his large, firm hand. Feeling odd, Broker took the handshake and got back in his truck. He left Tabor standing in his pole barn rotating an empty 40mm shell casing in his large fingers with that weird light in his eyes like he was going to free the oppressed white slaves.

  Things were going so well that Broker briefly entertained the notion that he was in step with luck. He couldn’t resist stopping at the casino on the return trip. In ten minutes the dollar slots gulped down a hundred bucks of his own money in a hiccuping slur of electronic chimes. So much for luck. Grumbling, he walked to a phone and dialed.

  A very ill-humored black voice answered. “What?”

  “Rodney’s on for noon. The buyers are on for two P.M.”

  “Check. What’s with the bells. Where the fuck are you?”

  “The Grand Casino.”

  “You been out there too long, Desperado.”

  At ten in the evening, Broker sat in his living room in front of the TV and wrote down the winning Powerball numbers and methodically checked his thirty tickets.

  Thirty losers. He tore up the tickets and threw them at the TV. Then he reached for the phone and punched a 218 area code and a number north of Duluth.

  “Cheryl, it’s Broker. Let me talk to Fatty.”

  Fatty Naslund’s voice came on the line as lean and trim as cold hard cash. “Yeah, Broker, I figured you’d be calling.”

  “Where we at, Fatty?”

  “Thirty days. I can’t hang my ass out there exposed longer than that on a quarter mil note.”

  “Thanks, man, how’s my dad doing with it?”

  “Mike? You know. Stoic. Like his son.”

  4

  RODNEY HAD COME AND GONE, BUT NOT WITHOUT some difficulty. So far it was running smoothly. Broker hummed “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” an old habit from the dope deal days, as he straightened up the living room.

  Two in the afternoon. Sunlight filtered through the dusty venetian blinds on the living room windows and cut mote-filled stripes across his couch. He was proud of his couch, a garish fabric design that resembled burning tires in black, yellow, and green. He had found it on the I-94 shoulder about a mile west of the Hudson Bridge. Must have fallen off a Goodwill truck. Broker was on it, had it in the back of his truck in a minute flat.

  He had a Goodwill armchair to go with the couch and that did it for the living room unless you counted the stripped down Harley chopper frame that sat on a poncho with its steel innards neatly arranged around it and smelling faintly of gasoline. And the hunk of marble that perched on a beer case for a coffee table.

  And the whole wall of books in cheap pine shelves, used paperbacks, mostly, that he’d bought by the crate from the bookstores that lined Stillwater’s main street.

  Besides the five dully gleaming M16A2/203s lined up in a row on the couch and the ammo boxes stacked to the side, the books were the only orderly objects in the whole damn house.

  Broker smiled in anticipation. Antsy for it to get over.

  Right on time, a brown Econoline van with tinted windows and—hello—Alabama plates pulled to the curb in front of his house and Tabor stepped from the passenger side wearing powdery soft stonewashed jeans and a matching jacket, an oatmeal-colored sweatshirt, and a pair of blinding white Nike crosstrainers. Looks like a coach. Broker tested the battery in his beeper. C’mon, coach, it’s game time, baby.

  So Tabor’s buyers were out of state and they packed some muscle. The driver had arms like he juggled railroad ties and a beer-pudding belly filling up a loud red T-shirt. As they came up the steps, Broker read the slogan on the shirt spread around the silhouette of an assault rifle.

  MY WIFE YES

  MY DOG MAYBE

  MY GUN NEVER!

  The other guy, who’d been riding in the back of the van, was lean, with close-cropped silvery hair, and he wore a nylon running suit. He carried an attaché case. Yes. He was the guy to watch. He looked like he’d been seriously trained at some time in his life and had kept up the habit.

  Broker met them on the porch steps. Tabor introduced his companions. Red beer gut was Andy. Running suit was Earl. Earl took Broker’s hand and pierced him with pale blue lifer’s eyes and said “Howdy, pleased to meet you,” in a deeply sincere southern accent.

  Earl did not let go of Broker’s hand. He had vicegrips for a forearm and the more Bro
ker saw of Earl the more Tabor looked like a balloon with the air going out of it. Okay, so Earl’s the man. So he wasn’t surprised when Earl gave orders in a quiet drawl. “Andy, you go in there and take a look around.”

  Andy nodded. “Most ricky tic, Earl.”

  “Hey,” said Broker, breaking Earl’s hold with a sharp twist of his hand, “Tabor, what is this?”

  Tabor smiled. “It’s their money.”

  So. Okay. Broker wondered if they would try to take him off. In his previous dealings with handshaking Jules Tabor that eventuality had not occurred to him. But Earl was a kind of dangerous cottonmouth with a soft voice and cold swampwater in his veins. What the hell was Earl doing up here in the recently unfrozen north? Why, shopping away from the federal heat down south. Fucking machine guns. Where is my brain. Should have stayed with grass.

  Broker and Earl deciphered each other for two minutes and silently agreed; they were natural enemies. Broker’s face was relentlessly northern European, an angular German forging under the lobo eyebrows, with a touch of his mother’s stormy Norwegian melancholy informing his eyes. Earl’s face was a True Believer knot, cracked with stress, yanked way too tight. But Broker detected dangerous reserves of strength seething in Earl’s pale eyes. Like he’d grown up breathing poisonous ideas.

  Andy came back to the front door. “He’s all right, Earl, keeps a messy house but seems all right. Stuff’s in on the couch. Nobody else here.”

  “Where’s the guy?” Earl asked.

  Broker tapped the pager on his belt. “He calls in half an hour, leaves a number. If everything’s cool, he drops by, you meet. I get paid and you go off and develop a business relationship.”

  “Suppose that’s sensible,” said Earl. Everyone smiled.

  Broker let his surface relax. “You boys had me going for a while there. C’mon in and have a beer.”

  That’s when two cars rounded the corner. The first, an airport cab, pulled up right behind the van. With a soft squeal of tires, the second car, a green Saturn, pitched forward on its suspension and suspiciously backed up and disappeared around the block. Everyone halted in mid-stride on Broker’s squeaky porch steps.