The Price of Blood pb-1

by Chuck Logan

  The sun was high and cropped their shadows short as they crossed the gravel lot and mounted the steps. A bell jingled as they entered.

  A plaque on the desk announced ANTHONY SPORTA, MGR. The man behind the nameplate filled a red T-shirt and bib overalls with the swollen dignity of a Sumo wrestler. Beneath ringlets of black hair, his beady eyes peered from a face the texture of Italian sausage. The real hard kind. A twist of flypaper hung directly above his head coated with a jam of dead insects. He squinted at them. His right index finger described a dainty curlicue in the air that signaled, “Hello, come in. I know who you are.”

  A muted sound of machinery carried through the walls. Lactose mist seeped in the air. Not looking real happy, Tony Sporta opened a drawer, pulled something out, and tossed it on the desk. It was a picture, twenty years old, that had been taken in a waterfront restaurant in Hue City. LaPorte, Pryce, Tuna, and Broker sat behind a forest of beer cans. An arrow drawn in marker indicated Broker’s head. Younger, but the eyebrows. Sporta’s practiced gaze settled on Broker.

  “Now why does a guy who’s in shape wear his shirt out?” he said.

  “Is that a bathroom?” asked Nina, pointing to an open door next to some file cabinets.

  “Just stay put a second.” Sporta glowered.

  Nina offered him a pained smile. “I have a female situation I have to attend to.”

  Sporta grumbled, “Leave the purse.” Feigning indignance, Nina put her purse on the desk and pulled out a travel pack of super maxipads. Sporta jerked his thumb at the door and perused Broker as Nina locked the door behind her. “He says you’re a cop, but I shouldn’t let that bother me.”

  “How is he?” asked Broker.

  “Real fucked up. He wants you and the girl in quick, out quick, and he’s got rules.” The toilet flushed behind the bathroom door. Water pipes rattled.

  “Okay,” said Broker.

  “Nothin’s okay. He should see a doctor.” Sporta cleared his throat and stood up, light-footed for a big man. “He should see a priest.” The bathroom door opened and Nina came out holding up her wet hands. She was walking a little funny, but you had to have been in bed with her to tell.

  “You’re out of towels,” she said.

  “Sorry,” said Sporta. He turned back to Broker. “You leave your vehicle here. I drive you partway. You walk the rest.”

  Broker nodded.

  “You take nothing in there. No cameras, no tape recorders, no bags or purses, and no guns. So I gotta pat you down. Both of you. Empty your pockets. Put it on the desk.” Change and keys and spare folding cash made two little piles on Sporta’s dirty desk blotter. Then he motioned to Broker, who reluctantly lifted his arms. Sporta’s hand went right to the Beretta jammed in his waistband in the middle of his back. Broker watched Nina’s eyes, which had gone very quiet and neutral. Sporta placed the pistol on his desk.

  “What’s this?” asked Sporta, patting just below Broker’s belt loops.

  “Security belt.”

  “What’s in it?”

  Broker pulled the elastic folder out and zipped it open. “Money, ID.”

  “Okay. Keep that. Lift up your pant legs so I can see your socks.” Broker did. Sporta turned to Nina. “Now you.”

  His thick fingers quickly circled her waist, went lower, and hit the security belt. She pulled it out and opened it. He nodded and went through the socks routine with her. As he straightened up from inspecting her ankles he grimaced slightly. “Sorry, miss, but you got a little bulge there, front and back.”

  Nina reddened and handed Sporta the maxipads. “Go ahead,” she said grimly. “You’re the one out of towels…”

  Sporta delicately scratched his chin and decided to pass. He told them to retrieve their pocket items, took her purse, collected the Beretta, and put them in the desk drawer, which he then locked. “You’ll get them back.”

  He bent and picked up a Coleman cooler that sat next to the desk. “You can take him some lunch. C’mon,” he said.

  When Nina was sandwiched in the front seat of a huge red truck between Sporta’s girth and Broker riding shotgun, Sporta paused before he twisted the ignition. “Won’t do you any good to ask me because he didn’t tell me anything. He just gave me the picture and said bring you the minute you showed up.”

  “You brought him over from Milan?” asked Broker.

  “Yeah. I did do that. My mother’s his aunt. He made me promise not to even tell her he was here.”

  As they drove away from the Red, White, and Green cheese factory a black Subaru station wagon overtook them and passed at high speed on the hilly, curving road. Broker felt a hitch in his stomach when he saw the tinted windows zip past. Bevode Fret had driven a green Saturn with smoked glass. Sweat trickled down the small of his back where the Beretta had been.

  Sporta puffed on a Camel straight. His forearms, draped on the wheel, looked like tattooed Easter hams. “Now this place we’re going to is on a thousand acres my employers bought to go deer hunting. So they only use it in November.”

  “How bad is he?” asked Nina.

  Sporta shook his head. “Last week I’d get four shopping bags of food at the grocery. Now I get a bag at a time.”

  They came over a hill and Broker saw the black station wagon, going slower now, keeping pace in front of them. “You recognize that car?” he asked.

  “Lotta lake homes around here. There’s all kinds of cars.” Sporta shrugged. “Relax. There’s only one way in and I’ll be blocking it. I got some firepower in the back.” Sporta grinned. “Don’t tell my parole officer.”

  They turned off on a gravel road and Sporta pointed to a high stand of pines and oak about a mile away. “Cabin’s up there. Swamp runs all around that hill. The water’s been high so the road don’t go through. You have to get your feet wet and walk the last three hundred yards.” He stopped the truck at a padlocked steel gate. The posts were festooned with No TRESPASSING and ARMED RESPONSE signs.

  When Sporta got out to unlock the gate, Broker turned to Nina. “Where’n the hell did you put the Colt?”

  She batted her eyes. Sporta got back in and they drove through shadowy screens of young alders that grew dense as bamboo. Sporta said, “This is second growth. It opens up ahead. Fields we put in the land bank.” They bounced down the rutted road and the tires began to churn through mud wallows. The thick jackpine, poplar, and alders ended abruptly and the gravel road bed disappeared into a glue of trampled cattails. A leafy grove of old oak trees stood cross the swamp. Access to the other side was over a causeway of crushed rock and railroad ties. Now the roadbed was scattered and submerged. A rut of suction holes marked where someone had tramped back and forth.

  Tony slumped behind the wheel. “He’s got money saved. He could’a gone to the Mayo.” They got out of the truck and Sporta pointed. A child’s blue plastic sled, with a length of yellow plastic clothesline attached, lay in the brush at the edge of the swamp. “Put the cooler in there and drag it.” Broker wondered if that’s how Sporta had ferried Jimmy Tuna across.

  “The road picks up again after fifty yards, goes through a little oak woods and then there’s a field that leads up to the cabin. When you come out of that woods he might be watching you through a rifle scope so don’t move sudden.” Sporta grumbled, “If he’s awake. Sometimes he messes his pants. It ain’t pretty up there.”

  Broker and Nina waited beside the cooler while Sporta took a gun case from the back of his truck, pulled out a 12-gauge pump, and loaded it. “I’ll be down a little ways back from the gate. I’ll come back in two hours and meet you here.” He climbed into his truck, leaned the shotgun out the passenger side window, and studied them. “I hope this is worth it. For him and for you.” Shaking his head, Tony Sporta backed down the road. They waited until the sound of his engine had receded in the distance.

  “Turn around,” Nina said crisply, unsnapping her jeans’ button and starting the zipper.

  Broker faced away with a smile, listened to a rustl
e of denim. A huge, snow white sanitary napkin bounced off his leg and tumbled into the water. “Christ, that looks like a diaper,” he quipped.

  “Very funny,” said Nina. “You can turn around now.”

  He did. With a broad grin he stared at the large pistol in her hand. “I gotta ask? Did it involve penetration?”

  “No. It’s all angles and knowing how to take advantage of the terrain. Forget it. The Freudian implications will just screw up your mind.” Nina possessively jammed the Colt into her waist band and pulled down her shirt. They placed the cooler in the sled and waded into the swamp.

  Knee-deep in the gluey sediment and halfway across, they heard a sharp slapping report. They both ducked. Jumpy. And then Broker pointed to a channel of moving water and a broad pool ahead of them. A whiskery, beady-eyed knob cruised like a U-boat. “Beaver alerting,” he said.

  They continued to slog. He blinked away sweat, more dripped from his fingers. The beaver had plugged him into the humid bog, sensitive to every soft buzz and chirr, to the ticking eyes of insects. He studied the shadow fan of spring ferns along the far bank, the tremble of pitcher plants that strained like flat green elephant ears from a punky log, the dry rattle of reeds. A slick orange blight of mushrooms pushed through the limp bark of a white birch and he thought: cancer.

  Broker lifted one foot from the warm, soaking tickle of the mud and heard the suction pop and echo through the reeds. A brood of black ducks squirted from some bulrushes and the mama duck’s doting quacks sounded suddenly foreboding. He scanned the grove of red oaks beyond the swamp grass where the road emerged from the water. The beaver was closer to the far shore than to them.

  “I think you’d better give me the pistol,” he said to Nina.

  “No fucking way,” she said.

  Broker clicked his teeth and wondered if someone could have gotten in ahead of them. And if so, how? They climbed back on dry land and left the sunlight. He lifted the cooler from the plastic sled and carried it in front of his chest and winced at the slosh of ice cubes on glass at his every step. Nina fell in close behind him. Halfway through the oak trees he heard the musty crunch of a boot come down on dry acorn shells.

  The laconic southern voice called out, “Hi there.”

  47

  Two of them. they stepped from the cover of the trees about sixty yards ahead, camouflaged in the shadows at the edge of the grove. Through the foliage, Broker could see an open field dance in the breeze, purple with wild alfalfa and red clover and a spray of wildflowers. The corner and the shingled roof of a cedar plank cabin at the top of the hill was just visible.

  The one who had called to them resembled Danny Larkins’s description from Ann Arbor: lean, weathered, sunglasses. He stood casually in a faded blue workshirt and jeans, with his hands on his hips, next to the trunk of a thick oak tree. A pack frame leaned against the tree. A pair of binoculars dangled from a low branch.

  The other one did not fit Larkins’s description as ordinary. He was skinny as the rickets and wore a gray T-shirt and a tractor cap. He covered them offhand with a Mini-14 from which curved a thirty-round magazine.

  It was turning into a regular plague of rednecks.

  “Stay behind me,” said Broker to Nina, who had embraced his back in feigned terror.

  “I need five more yards,” she whispered and nudged him. Awkwardly, he held the cooler in his raised hands and stumbled forward. Please, God, don’t let her try something stupid with the handgun. In this bad light. At extreme range. In a semi-automatic rifle’s sights. Sweat electrified his eyes and the alfalfa and sweet clover beckoned, ravishing, normal, in the sun. Their hot perfume struck him dizzy. He heard the crickets, bees. They were so damn close.

  “Put the cooler down to the side and stay in front of me,” she whispered in a husky high-diver’s voice.

  Very slowly Broker set down the plastic box. Then he took another uncertain step forward and raised his hands.

  “That’s good. Relax. We ain’t going to hurt you,” called out Sunglasses. “If you’re carrying anything under those shirts, now’d be the time to drop it. Real slow.”

  Broker shook his head. Raised his hands higher. Hoping that his hands going up would distract the rifleman from the way his knees trembled in a tense crouch.

  “It’s like this,” called Sunglasses. “We know he’s up there and we been waiting for you to show. We got a feeling he won’t talk to us.”

  “How’d you find us?” Broker called back. He looked around, shook his head.

  “We hired one of those electronic nerd guys. We tapped your telephone, you dumb shit. Then we went to the cheese factory and followed the fat man in last night. We camped out with the fuckin’ bugs so we ain’t real cordial. Now, listen up. What I got in mind is the girl stays with us and you go up and talk. You know what the general wants.”

  “How’s Bevode doing?” yelled Broker. Talking to buy some time. Sporta said that Tuna had a rifle. These guys didn’t seem to know. If he could get up there…

  “Cousin Bevode’s looking forward to seeing you, that’s for sure. He wanted to be here but he had to go to the dentist.”

  “You! Don’t move there,” yelled the one with the rifle.

  “Nina,” whispered Broker, sensitive to the faint rustle behind him.

  “Get clear,” said Nina in a cold, determined voice.

  “Honey,” yelled Tractor Hat in an amused drawl as he brought his rifle up, “put that popgun down. You can’t hit shit at this distance and I can pick your titties off.”

  “Move fast,” shouted Nina and he knew she was going to do it and all he could do was follow the play. Broker dived. From the corner of his eye he caught a flash of her coming to a point, hair spilling forward, tongue stuck in the right corner of her mouth, as she took a basic bull’s-eye shooter’s stance: body turned forty-five degrees away from her target, right hand sweeping the big Colt up. Extending. Steadying.…Before he hit the dirt he cringed when he heard the two shots: a close-by whap from the Colt and the crack and simultaneous, air-tunneling shock wave of a rifle bullet…

  Passing above them, snapping branches through the overhead.

  Sunglasses yelped in a thoroughly amazed voice, “Holy Shit!”

  Broker rolled. Processed. Tractor Hat was down. Sunglasses was backpedaling, reaching under his shirt. Broker was on his feet in a sprint. Nina swung the pistol to the second man, who was bringing out a long-barreled heavy revolver, but still moving backward, chastised now, seeking cover on the sunny side of the big oak tree, with his back to the field.

  Broker covered ground. Charging a.44 Magnum as the Colt cracked bark off the oak tree. Good. Keep his head down. But Sunglasses had that big revolver leveled and was flattened in good cover and was drawing a bead on Nina, who stood in the open.

  “Run,” screamed Broker. Ten yards out and closing. Sunglasses had to make a decision. His mournful leather-strap features shook into a wrinkled toothy grin. Keeping the tree between himself and Nina, he swung his arm, taking his time, as Broker hurtled in his sights.

  Broker closed his eyes when he heard the shot. Diving in blackness, maybe toward the constellation Orion, he tackled the man. When he opened his eyes, aside from a sharp pain in his bruised right shoulder where he and the gunman had smashed into a sharp gnarl of oak root, he determined he was unhit.

  Sunglasses had lost his sunglasses and now his sad brown eyes opened wide, leaving shock, going for the mystery dropoff. He twitched once on the fragrant mattress of alfalfa. A tiny storm of striped bees rose from the clover as if exiting the body and a dark stain drenched the left armpit of his blue denim Oshkosh shirt.

  “Nina,” Broker yelled. Shaken. Hyperventilating. She stood calmly with the pistol dangling from her hand. “You hit?”

  She shook her head and walked slowly toward the unmoving, face-down shape of the man with the rifle. The Colt slug had knocked him back and over a full turn.

  Broker ran toward her, grabbed her, and checked her for wounds
. She put her hand on his shoulder, briefly touched the back of his neck and then wormed from his embrace and hooked her muddy tennis shoe under the body and rolled it over. The man who inhabited the now-still flesh had worn a gray T-shirt with a Rebel battleflag across the chest. A ragged blood-ringed hole was punched two inches to the left of the crossed Stars and Bars.

  Broker started to say lucky shot, but then he remembered how he’d scoffed at her trophy in Ann Arbor. He kept his mouth shut, stooped, and picked up the rifle.

  They walked without speaking from the swaying shadows of the trees to the other body in the sunny field. Out of habit Broker knelt and checked for the carotid pulse. Nothing. He retrieved the Magnum and stuffed it in his belt.

  They started to shiver in the bright sun, up to their knees in a gorgeous quilt of orange and Canada hawk weed, the red clover, ox-eyed daisies. Amid the wind-ruffled flowers, they swatted with exaggerated reflexes at flies that blundered into their bare arms. One fly, gross as a gumdrop, wallowed, buzzing, in a pool of blood trapped in the left corner of Sunglasses’s mouth. Their eyes met over the corpse and acknowledged that it just got big-time real.

  With an exaggerated roughness to glove her bare hands, Nina rolled over the corpse and squatted gingerly, avoiding the mess in the grass. She felt for his wallet, found it, opened it, and said, “We just killed a Fret.”

  Broker read the name on the Louisiana driver’s license: William Bedford Fret. It was a day of cousins. He dropped the wallet and looked up the hill. A deck extended off the side of the cabin on stilts and someone was moving up there.

  “You think there’s more of them?” Nina asked as she pulled a cell phone from the back pocket of Sunglasses’s jeans. Her voice was too calm, strait-jacketed.

  “I don’t know!” His fingers clenched on the rifle and his shout sounded like nerve bundles tearing.