The Price of Blood pb-1

by Chuck Logan

  “Still painting loons, Irene?” sang out Broker.

  She smiled wryly as they came up the steps. The smile broadened into a grin. “Hey, Nina Pryce. You’re all grown up. I saw you on TV.”

  “Hi, Irene.”

  “Talk to my childless son. He never grew up…”

  Broker hugged her. “Irene believes our only purpose on earth is to replace ourselves.”

  Irene grinned at Nina. “A fat little grandbaby would be nice, but for that you’d need a woman. What happened to your hand?”

  “Guy bit me.”

  “Don’t tell me.” Irene walked up to Nina and hugged her. “Speaking of women, you look way too fresh and on the intelligent side for Phil.”

  Nina said, “That’s for sure. He’s a piece of work.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Where’s the old man?” asked Broker.

  Irene smiled tightly and nodded down toward the shore. “Counting rocks.”

  Broker called Tank to his side and started down toward the water. Rock was what they had. Rock had been his cradle and his playpen. Like bedrock, Brokers were heavily connected by gravity to the earth. They were difficult to move and hard to the touch. This Broker learned in the silence, working beside his father.

  He learned that anger and gentleness should be seldom shown so they were never squandered, so their emphasis was clear.

  Now the clan was winnowed by death and geography. Now the developers and bankers laid their plans and waited for the tick of the clock.

  He’d assumed the land would always be here, to come back to. He bowed his head and, with the dog at his left heel, went down the stone terraces toward his father.

  Mike Broker, despite his injury, was still muscled like a troll at seventy-three. He sat on a throne of granite, facing out toward the horizon, sucking on an unlit pipe. Broker could almost see his father’s broad back smile, sensing his son’s approach. He turned slowly, a pugnosed man with a beard and thick longish unruly gray hair over a mat of bushy black eyebrows.

  He’d been to Omaha Beach and Korea and had ridden with the wild biker-vets on the West Coast. Then he’d married Irene and stripped off his leathers and made his way laying stone and as a part-time high school teacher. History, civics, and hockey coach in the winter, before he went full time into the resort business. He’d served one term as the local police chief, then refused to run again because of the office work and politics. Broker’s first memory of his father was the smell of sweat. It was his favorite memory after his mother’s voice.

  Broker had his mother’s eyes, her patience for fine detail, and, for better or worse, a large dose of her imagination. Misused, thus far, inside him he knew he had an unsmithed vein of German ore that was his father’s will.

  When Broker was still several feet away, Mike asked casually, “What do you get when you cross a draft dodger and a crooked lawyer?”

  “I give.”

  “Chelsea.”

  “Hi, Mike,” said Broker who had punished Bush for letting the Republican Guard get away into the Iraqi desert and put a check next to Clinton’s name.

  “Hiya, kid,” said Mike, the diehard, Libertarian Perotista.

  Broker sat down and pulled out his Spirits. Tank arranged his large body at Mike’s feet.

  “Bad for you, the cigarettes, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “Guy bit me.”

  “What’s Nina Pryce doing with you?”

  “Long story.”

  Mike mulled this over and looked out over the water. “Do you ever think about death, capital D?” he asked.

  After work came questions. Broker had sat on the rocks and been quizzed by his father and had been made to think. Later Broker came to understand the resemblance of this tutor-pupil relationship to the Socratic method. He was not surprised, when, in high school, he happened on the historical statue that reputed to be Socrates, and which bore a likeness to Mike Broker. Socrates was a stonemason.

  “Not every day.”

  “That’ll change when you turn fifty, then it’ll be every day. Now, when you turn sixty, you start seeing it, like a person, a new neighbor, say, who you pick out at a distance but you haven’t met. Then comes seventy and he starts getting closer and pretty soon you get to know his warts and he waves every once in a while. A nosy kind of neighbor. Before long he’s going to be over to borrow a screwdriver. I think, because this is my favorite place to sit, he’ll show up in a boat, probably with a fishing rod, in the late spring I think, just after the last ice is out.”

  “You think, huh?”

  “Yeah. I think he comes up and thumps on you like you’re a watermelon and then he listens to see if you’re ripe.”

  “Break a knuckle on you,” said Broker. “Besides, you always said dying is one of the big whens, not an if.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Yeah. One of your cautions against wishful thinking.”

  Mike tapped his pipe against the stone, a sound that Broker associated with this spot and the watery heartbeat of the lake. He took a nail from his pocket and began to scrape the pipe bowl in a slow, regular motion.

  “You get tired of police work yet?” he asked.

  “Actually, Mike, I’m thinking of making a move.”

  “Well, you gotta choose carefully. Rough economy out there. Downsizing you know.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Mike turned and faced his son. And Broker could see the complicated truss strapped under his overalls. “Phil,” he said, “I know you’ve been working with Fatty Naslund down at the bank to buy us some time, but I think we’re at the end of the rope.”

  “So what are your plans?” asked Broker.

  Mike averted his eyes and adopted a practical and it seemed practiced tone of uncharacteristic reasonableness. “Fatty’s lined up a developer who’ll give us a decent price for most of the place. We could pay off the bank and save one lot and build a house on it. Have a decent nest egg left over.”

  Broker gazed across the beach at a particular curved plinth of granite that leaned out toward the water like the bowsprit of a dragon ship. It was called Abner’s Rock. Abner Broker had claimed the rock as his own in 1861, before he embarked downcountry to join the First Minnesota Regiment. In 1861 the Broker clan had comprised one fifth of the population of Cook County, Minnesota.

  “And do what? Collect Social Security? Watch them build some tourist whorehouse next door? You’ll heal, you know. Maybe not like before but well enough to handle this place. We still have thirty days.”

  “Hell, Phil, we’ve run down every option short of robbing a bank…”

  Broker stared out over the water. As a boy, Irene had trained his imagination by coaxing him to read shapes in the endless play of light and shadow in the clouds, to decipher faces in the wind moving through the leaves on trees, to understand motion in the wrestle of the waves.

  Forty-three years old and hard as a rake handle left out all winter, he could just make out a galleon, packaged in cumulus, on the horizon.

  Which was probably why Nina had come for him.

  “Let’s make a fire tonight. Down where we used to,” he said.

  15

  He rejoined Irene and Nina by his cabin and called Nina aside. They walked off into the trees out of earshot and Broker told her simply: “Put it in one sentence and no bullshit.”

  She stood very erect and looked him in the eye. “Tuna strongly suggested that a case can be made against LaPorte about what happened to my dad.”

  “I need proof.”

  She glanced around. “Maybe we’ll get some tonight.”

  As they walked back to his cabin their hands grazed accidentally on purpose and Broker decided to take a calculated risk with the green Saturn. The local coppers were there as backup. He’d just lay back and let it unfold.

  He got out his keys, went up the redwood porch, which was cluttered with flowerpots, and opened the door. Nina ca
rried their bags in from the Jeep and squinted as she passed through the narrow doorway.

  Inside, light came mainly from skylights. The windows, like the doors, were built excessively narrow. The interior consisted of a long main room with a small kitchen at one end, a large wood stove, comfortable couches and chairs, and a big kitchen table. A doorway, again too narrow, opened on the left to a bedroom and off the bedroom another door opened on a sauna with its own woodstove. Another doorway beside the kitchen led to a deck that overlooked the shore.

  Irene gave the short tour. “Notice how the furniture and appliances don’t fit through the doors or windows. He built the entry and windows after he moved everything in, too small for the stuff to fit through.” She smiled. “My son the cop.”

  A wood box and chopping block sat next to the Fisher woodstove. Broker picked up a short splitting ax in his good hand and stared at the woodbox. Nina quickly stepped in, took the ax, and efficiently knocked several pieces of oak into kindling.

  “For the sauna, and the stove. It’ll be cold out tonight,” said Broker.

  “Gotcha. You take a break, I’ll get it going.” She went into the sauna with her kindling and some newspaper. A few minutes later the smell of smoke and a rusty groan of heating steel permeated the cabin.

  “The damper, you gotta-” he yelled.

  “I can do it,” she yelled back. She reappeared and inspected the kitchen cabinets, turned on the faucet, heard the well kick in, tested the gas burners on the stove, and then went outside.

  Broker sat in a chair and stared at his throbbing, bandaged left hand. Nina and Irene returned with a handful of…weeds.

  “What?” he asked.

  Irene held three big dandelions, roots and all, under the sink faucet, washing them. She laid them aside and then lifted a large stained kettle. She respected her son’s privacy and now, in among his belongings, she had the curiosity of a woman in the men’s lavatory. “When’s the last time this was clean?” she asked.

  Broker shook his head as she filled the kettle with water and threw in the dandelions and set the burner under it. Nina checked the fire in the sauna and then said she was going to look over the beach.

  “Keep the dog with you,” admonished Broker.

  The next thing he knew the phone was ringing. He had crashed again. He smelled the soupy acid simmer of the kettle, saw by the long slanting shadows that the sunlight was going. He went to the phone. Jeffords.

  “Your green Saturn is checked into the Best Western. Minneapolis Airport rental to a guy named Bevode Fret who signed in with a Louisiana license, New Orleans address. He followed you out of town and made Mike’s place. He took the room for two nights. What do you think?”

  “Tom, I got a bad feeling-” But it really was a curious feeling. A kind of litmus test.

  “What?”

  “Somebody might do a house invasion on me.”

  “Lyle Torgeson’s got patrol tonight. I’ll tell him to keep an extra sharp eye up your way. And I’ll pull a couple of the boys from Grand Marais down to lend a hand. You want state patrol?”

  “Nix on them. Keep it local. And tell Lyle I’m leaving the dog out.”

  “You really think that’s a good idea?” Nina said when Broker insisted on a sauna. Her eyes scanned the treeline.

  “Relax. Every copper in the county is watching this place and your green Saturn. Let’s see what happens.”

  “So, now I’m bait,” she said.

  “You got it. You scared?” he taunted. She reached over and squeezed his injured thumb. “Ow, damn.”

  Grumbling, he cut off the bandage and stared at the taped splint against his puffy thumb. He’d been wearing the same clothing for forty-eight hours and after one try it was clear that he couldn’t get his boots off. A nurse had helped him back into them at the hospital.

  “Hey,” he protested as she started to undress him.

  She shrugged elaborately, a casual gesture that involved a subtle flourish of her eyes and a slow pony toss of her short hair. Femininity. A weapon held in reserve. “I’ve never thought of you that way. You never let me…” She lowered her eyes for a heartbeat. Then she spoke briskly. “Besides, in the army I trained my ovaries not to advance unless they get a direct order.”

  Bullshit. She was working on him. She was a regular arsenal. If the steel trap didn’t take the hill, send in the tender trap.

  When she got to his undershorts he warded her off and stepped into the sauna chamber, pulled off his shorts, and sat with a towel around his waist. She came through the door stripped down to nothing but her pale swimsuit stripes, the small skull-and-crossbones tattoo stamped on her shoulder, and two scarlet dimples in her left hip and buttocks where she’d taken the two Iraqi Kalashnikov rounds.

  “Put on a towel,” he said, clearing his throat but looking. It had been a long time since Broker had seen a naked woman-except when he was working and they didn’t count.

  She smiled with satisfaction, seeing how Broker had to tear his eyes away. “It’s a sauna,” she said.

  “Towel.”

  Nina returned wrapped in a towel and filled a bucket. Broker tossed a couple of ladles of water on the stones on top of the stove and the first rush of steam rose. He repeated the process until the moist steam cut back and the searing dry heat came on. Trying to ignore the back-beat throbbing in his thumb, he soaped his face and picked up a razor.

  She was beside him. “Here. Lie down and put your hand up.” He let her ease him down on the bench and situate his hand. Then she took a can of lather from a shelf, the razor, and shaved him. After she rinsed off the soap, she started in with a big-toothed plastic comb, taking the tangles from his thick dark hair. In the close confines, their skin touched, slick with sweat. Little discoveries.

  “I’ll get it cut tomorrow,” he said.

  Nina shook her head. “Keep it. With short hair you almost look like a nice guy.”

  Broker studied the shiny expression on her face. The way her skin glowed against the redwood. Under her tomboy scruff she was-well, hell, he figured it was time to get out of here. He lurched upright. She raised her eyebrows.

  “I’m going to jump in the lake. It’s traditional,” he muttered.

  “Never happen.”

  He handed her a terrycloth robe, put on his own, and slipped his feet into a busted out pair of running shoes. Unsteadily, he negotiated the front porch stairs and walked down the path to his small beach. The wind had swung to the south and the clouds fluffed up in a South Pacific haze of magenta, pink, and purple. He shivered in the soft breeze. She was right. No way he was going to jump into anything. He dropped his robe and kicked off his shoes and started to wade into the chilly water. His bare feet rebelled at the stony bottom, feeling fragile and vulnerable. He backtracked, put the shoes back on and went back in. Shuddering, he ducked under the water and quenched his flaming thumb in Lake Superior.

  He surfaced and his chest heaved, sucking in huge drafts of air, and he felt better. Back on the beach, he stood for a few moments letting the warm southerly breeze chase the water droplets from his body. Then he rubbed vigorously with a scratchy towel.

  He watched enviously as Nina nimbly scaled a big hunk of Gabbro-his rock-and peered into the boulder-hemmed pool. “Can I dive here?” she asked.

  “Just don’t go too deep. It’s cold.”

  She dropped the robe and stood in the first purple flush of twilight. Broker usually referenced attractive women to the movie stars they resembled. His ex-wife Kim had reminded him of Faye Dunaway. Too late he realized she was the Faye Dunaway of Network.

  There was no precedent for Nina. She meant to set it. One of a kind, she sprang, a supple mercury-and-orchid jackknife in the magnificent light, and cleanly pierced the water with hardly a splash. Luminescent pools of bubbles marked the brisk sequence of her strokes. She swam out a hundred yards, turned, and swam back to the beach and strode from the surf. Broker took a second look. Water rolled off her skin like icy marbles. />
  He retrieved her robe from the rock and handed it to her. She dried her short hair with an end of the robe, tilting her head in a girlish pose and, at that moment, bright with cold lake water and with slippers of wet sand on her feet, she looked normal, a good-looking, very healthy young woman with her life ahead of her.

  Then she said, “C’mon, I want you to try something.”

  Tank stepped from the shadows and squired them up the path. A pitcher of liquid sat on the porch steps cooling.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Mom’s home remedy and Roto Rooter. I’ll show you.”

  She picked up the pitcher and led him inside and held up the kettle the dandelions had boiled in. Broker could see his face reflected in the gleaming bottom of the pot.

  “Huh?”

  She poured a glass of murky liquid from the pitcher and handed it to him. “Your mom showed me. If it cleans that pot just think what it’ll do for you.”

  Broker shook his head. Irene had a new hippie trick. He drained the concoction. Woody, like boiled toothpicks.

  Through a break in the trees, he marked the blue and green of a patrol car trolling along the highway. He nudged Nina and pointed. She nodded. Okay.

  Mike and Irene had potatoes in tin foil on the grill on the front porch. Slipping easily into tandem, Nina teamed with Mike. He pointed and she dragged. A heap of driftwood collected on the beach below the cabin. Then Mike threw on some venison steaks-just three. Irene, the vegetarian, sniffed her nose and tossed a salad. Talk was literally about the weather which was not idle talk next to the big water. Nina spoke little, carefully watching Broker. Tank lay at her feet on his back like a giant, hairy, dead cockroach with his legs sprawled out. Nina slowly petted him and picked wood ticks from his fur, split them on her thumbnail and tossed them into the coals. Their ears adjusted to the night sounds and the sunset flamed out and the air transformed itself into squadrons of fierce tiger mosquitoes that came straight in and stuck like darts.