The Price of Blood pb-1 Read online

  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-shir
t. 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 attache 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 Broker 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.

  He saw who was in the cab and, given a choice, at this precise moment, Broker would have preferred to see a nuclear fireball blossom on the North Hill of Stillwater, Minnesota. And he just fuckin’ knew. His life was about to spectacularly blow up right in his face.

  Again.

  5

  N ina Pryce !

  She was intense and she was not bad looking and she had been famous once for a few brief days and she was a goddamned freak who trailed a guidon of tragic purpose. And she was getting out of the airport cab.

  Broker groaned. Quicksand. Under his feet.

  A pair of seriously athletic thighs and calves hinged by perfect carved knees swung from the car door followed by a lithe young woman in an outrageous apricot miniskirt, sandals, and a flimsy tan top that had these string things holding it up. Bare shoulders and a bronze cap of short hair caught spears of sunlight.

  Her big, gray Jericho eyes were danger deep and nothing but intelligent-problem was, they fed current into a challenge to the world to knock them down. And he saw the spidery, brand-new skull and crossbones tattoo that grinned a merry fuck you on the supple, defined muscle of her left shoulder. And-aw God-she stood up with that sinewy ramrod presence that couldn’t be disguised in the trashy good-time-gal duds she wore.

  There is a quality that is scary enough in a man. Broker found it mildly terrifying in an attractive woman. The Germans, naturally, had a word for it. They called it Stramm.

  The rest of the world called it military bearing.

  She’d be about twenty-nine now. Five eight and put together, in her case, like a brick latrine. As she paid the fare and slung her bag over her shoulder and hauled out a suitcase, Tabor, Earl, and Andy put their eyes on Broker. Broker smiled. It was his innate smile and revealed his soul and the lessons of his life in a flicker through the grate of his rugged features. The smile said: Fuck me dead.

  Broker did the only thing he could do, he laughed.

  He’d always thought that she was nice to look at as long as she didn’t move. Nina in motion suggested the Waspish grace of training events that involved guns, swords, and horses. And she was moving and she glowed with an unhealthy excitement that looked to Broker like the moral pollution of some big city. Down South, judging from her surface tan and her clothing. She paused on the sidewalk and plunked down her suitcase. Twenty feet away and she radiated the energy of Excalibur plunged into the cement.

  Earl, impressed, removed his hat.

  Broker blurted, “You heard of the telephone?”

  “Aw, Broker, if I would have called you would have split on me, just like last time.” Slang didn’t ride well on her clear, chiseled diction. Broker stared: deceptive tiger-kitty freckles, ascetic slightly sunken cheeks that bespoke hours of sweat hitting varnished gym floors, gray eyes, and a straight tidy nose. Full lips, but set in a straight, austere line. Way too clean for present company.

  And he cringed further because she was trying to slip into a raunchy vernacular that didn’t fit her erect posture. Nina knew what Broker did for a living, but she got her ideas about it from books and movies.

  As if to allay his fears, she lifted a pint of whiskey from her purse, held it up like a prop, unscrewed the cap, and took a long drink. The tendons of her throat struggled with the gulp, but she got it down and her smile brightened. Maybe she figured she’d come off less obvious when drunk. The problem was, she didn’t drink. The quicksand was about to his knees.

  She came up the steps and Earl gallantly went to help her with the suitcase. And her miniskirt and sandals were a million raunchy miles off from Minnesota in May and she was a lot exhausted and she smelled of cognac and a night of insomnia and nicotine and a musk of travel that needed a wash and she was definitely in the wrong place at the wrong time and the edge in her gray eyes took in Broker and the scene he had going and it was clear she couldn’t care less.

  “You can’t be here…now,” he fumed.

  “Got no place else to go.” She shot a glance over her shoulder. “And there’s some creep following me.”

  Broker backed up a step and dry-swallowed.

  “Guess you guys scared him off.” She shrugged and started for the door. Earl and Tabor scanned the street defensively. Andy moved to block her, big hands out, warding.

  Nina cocked her head and took a stance that really annoyed Broker because, right now, he didn’t need any utter fearlessness of youth bullshit. She read the sentiment on Andy’s gross belly. “You married, Sport?”

  “Yeah, so,” said Andy.

  “If I was your wife and I caught you wearing that I’d wait till you were asleep and lump you good with a castiron frying pan.”

  Andy looked past Nina. “Earl?”

  “Who’s following you?” asked Earl.

  “This New Orleans cop,” said Nina. “Don’t worry, he’s a dirty New Orleans cop. Off the force.”

  “Why’s he after you?” asked Earl.

  “I stole something from his boss, okay? Jesus, what is this-a Boy Scout
meeting?”

  “Let her go,” said Earl. He turned and peered into Broker’s eyes. Broker’s shock was real, it couldn’t be faked. He removed his cap, scratched his sweaty hair, and glanced up and down the street, finishing with his arms out, palms up.

  They went in. Broker grimaced when Nina sang out from the living room, “Holy shit, Broker. You’re not selling grass to college kids anymore.”

  “Ah, Earl,” said Andy with a touch of gruff alarm in his voice.

  Nina had kicked off her sandals and stood barefoot on the stained hardwood floor holding one of the fierce-looking weapons up and inspecting it. There was no other way to say it, even though it was not correct in circles Nina wouldn’t be caught dead in. She didn’t hold a gun like a girl.

  Earl, Andy, and Tabor noticed this instinctively.

  “Nina, what are you doing?” demanded Broker.

  She smiled. “Haven’t handled one of these in a while.”

  “Where?” asked Earl, quietly fascinated.

  “Where what?” Nina placed the rifle back in its place on the couch.

  “Did you handle one of those?” finished Earl.

  Nina shrugged. “In the Gulf.”

  “You were in Desert Storm?” asked Earl.

  Nina drew her fingers through her sunstreaked hair and cocked her head and her hips and purred in a honkytonk drawl. “Honey, I still got sand leaking into my shorts.”

  Broker clamped his eyes shut and grimaced. When he opened them he saw Earl studying her with a queer reverence, like she was alien royalty or a deadly new virus. Earl wasn’t sure. He shrugged and looked intrigued. “It’s possible. There were women over there.” He squinted. “You look kinda familiar.”

  “You get up to Michigan much?” asked Nina.

  “I been to Flint.”

  “Ann Arbor,” said Nina. She flopped into the easy chair and picked up the pint bottle of Hennessy cognac from where she’d left it on the floor.

  Broker’s wince deepened. Her dad’s label. Nina took a pull on the bottle and narrowed her eyes.