The Price of Blood pb-1

by Chuck Logan

  His raw tone tripped Nina into a shudder of delayed shock. He watched her blunt the tremor of mortal fear with a spasm as old as warfare. She dropped the cell phone and kicked the body viciously. A reflex he’d seen many times in combat. “Piece of shit,” she muttered and stepped back and hugged herself, prickly with the frostbite of sudden death at high noon. “How’d you get him?” she asked quietly. “You were behind the tree.”

  Broker glanced up the slope. “I didn’t.”

  About a hundred and eighty yards up through the wildflowers and alfalfa, glass twinkled. He walked a few steps, unhooked the binoculars from the oak branch, and focused up the hill.

  On the deck of the cabin, the vague shape materialized into a stick figure slumped in a chair. It was pitched forward, emaciated elbows planted on the railing with forearms twisted in bondage to a sniper-sling on a scoped rifle. Broker sharpened the focus on the man’s hollow face.

  Jimmy Tuna was smiling.

  48

  “Mannlicher-carcano,” rasped Jimmy Tuna by way of greeting, thrusting the old-bolt action rifle in his wasted arms as they trudged up the steps to the porch. “Found it inside. Tony’s bosses must keep it here as a kind of joke. Same rifle Oswald got Kennedy with.” He flipped up the bolt and yanked it back and sent a twinkling yellow cartridge casing somersaulting into the sunlight. As the brass skittered on the cedar planks, he shot the bolt forward and carefully leaned the weapon against the deck railing. “Who says the Italians don’t make good stuff?” He grinned and sagged back into his chair, exhausted.

  Jimmy Tuna, fifty-eight going on Lazarus, was a husk-his two hundred pounds of twenty years ago had wilted to a hundred twenty. His large nose had once trumpeted abundant appetites. Now it protruded, a bone beak stuck in carrion. The concentration required to shoot Sunglasses looked like it had gobbled up a big hunk of his remaining life.

  A faded army-issue baseball cap shaded his eyes and his roadmap-veined arms poked like sticks from a sagging black T-shirt that bore the exuberant motto: GO FOR THE GUSTO!

  “Gusto” was crusted with dried vomit. Baggy khaki trousers, also fouled, enveloped his legs. Like a tree boil, his left hip made a grotesque angle, pushed out against the pants. The toenails on his bare feet had a mucus-colored curl of accelerated growth and, piled there, in the old redwood lawn chair in the sun, his face was a chiaroscuro going to black and he smelled like the first hour of death.

  He pitched back in the chair and removed his cap and his head was more skull than face: a cadaverous jack-o-lantern with eyes that burned like brown coals. Nothing was left inside the loose sack of his skin but the galloping disease.

  And a secret.

  Broker placed the cooler on the deck and yanked the.44 Mag from his belt and placed it on the railing along with the cell phone. Nina leaned the Mini-14 alongside. They just stared at him, panting, catching their breath, and recovering from the last ten minutes. Face to face. Finally.

  Tuna grinned. “Sorry I didn’t put out party favors for old home week.” He extended a clawlike right hand. “How you doing, Phil?”

  Broker took the hand. Tuna tried to generate some of his old strength and his old grin. He was drenched in sweat and his grip felt like slimy cold pasta. “Think there’s any more of them?”

  Broker shook his head, “Just the two, I think.” He pointed to the portable telephone. “One of them had that.”

  Tuna shook his head. “Won’t work out here. I’ve been watching them all morning, but they stayed in the trees. I couldn’t get a shot. I even thought they might be with you.”

  “They’re LaPorte’s boys. They were overconfident. They told us.”

  “How’d you get the other one?”

  “Nina got him. She snuck a.45 past Sporta.”

  Tuna nodded. “Tony’ll have to dump them in the swamp. He won’t like that, but he’s done it before. Guys he works for use this place for more than deer hunting.” He brightened. “You get ahold of Trin?”

  Broker nodded. Tuna leaned back and glided behind his eyes. His vision focused and he asked, “You figure it out yet?”

  Broker chewed his lip. “Cyrus found some gold next to the chopper wreck. Your note said-”

  Tuna cackled and held up a shaky hand. “Be patient. Let me tell it my way.” He coughed and looked around. “Well, shit. You turned into a fuckin’ cop. Which don’t surprise me, you always had that Boy Scout look in your eyes. And you found me but this ain’t NYPD Blue you’re messin’ in, kid. Uh-uh.” He coughed again and glanced down into the oak grove.

  Broker looked around and said, “Will the shots bring cops?”

  “Hell no, way out here? And I been plunking away from this deck for a week with this old piece to kill time.” Tuna’s sunken eyes fixed in space. “Now that’s an odd phrase, don’t you think? Kill time.”

  He held up a withered hand and turned his attention to Nina. “Forgetting my manners. Hello there, Miss Pryce.”

  “Hello, Jimmy,” said Nina evenly. “So this is where you got to with your ‘funeral’ money.”

  With difficulty he put his hand in his trouser pocket and withdrew a folded bank check. He handed it to her. “Didn’t need your money, but I had to bait the hook. Sorry about the puzzle palace you had to go through to find me. Cyrus has been on me for years. Guards. Other inmates coming at me. Thank God for conservative Republican bankers. Cyrus couldn’t get into those records.”

  “How the hell did you find Trin?” asked Broker.

  “That was hard. But I had a lot of time. You talked to the bank in Ann Arbor, right?”

  “I did,” said Nina. “And Kevin Eichleay.”

  Tuna nodded. “Kevin told the banker, said Trin looked like hell. The Commies must have worked him over good. Reeducated him. But he’s there. And he’s Trin. Was going to be my ace in the hole.” Tuna gritted his teeth at a stab of real or psychological pain. “Yours now.”

  “What does he know?”

  “He knows I’m his padrone. I’m a fuckin’ one-man charity. Set up his vet’s home for wayward Viet Cong. Helped him get started in the tour business. I was coming as a tourist. Now you and Nina are going in my place. I paid him to set up a tour. Hanoi to Hue. Reserved rooms both places for two weeks. Didn’t know when you’d show up. What’d he say to you?”

  “He thinks you’re still in the joint.”

  “I used Tony’s phone. Called him up a week ago. Told him I was detained. That I was sending you instead.”

  “He wanted to know when our plane arrived, pretty straightforward stuff.”

  “The revolution musta gone to hell, huh? They’re all nuts to make a buck off tourists over there now. Trin too, I guess.” He fell back heavily into the chair, spent.

  “All these years. You were planning to go back for it…” said Broker.

  “Yeah. I was dumb back in seventy-six. Thought I could bankroll the trip with that bank job. Not dumb anymore…aw, shit.” He feebly waved his hand. “Take a break.” He pointed to the Coleman cooler and his hollow eyes took on a keen luster of anticipation. “What’s for lunch?”

  Nina took out eight cold bottles of San Miguel beer and some ham and cheese sandwiches. There was a Tupperware container in the bottom. It contained a neatly folded white cloth napkin. Tuna held out his hand, fingers fluttering in a gimme gesture. She handed over the cloth, which he unfolded with great ceremony. A plastic packet full of white powder lay in the center.

  He flipped up a corner of a towel that covered a low redwood table next to his chair and revealed a syringe, a spoon, and a length of rubber tubing. Methodically he tied off his frail arm and pumped his fist. Then he pushed some of the powder into the spoon with his little finger. He thumbed a plastic lighter and cooked up. When the chemical bubbled and cooled to liquid, he inserted the syringe and drew down a shot. Then he pumped his hand again.

  “Never used smack, not even in the joint. I even joined AA once. Now it’s the only medicine that works,” he said cheerfully, and his hand floated
out and touched the plump vein on the hollow of Broker’s right elbow. “Man, what I wouldn’t give for that storm sewer you got in your arm.”

  In the short noon shadows they watched Tuna fix. Watched him tremble and nod back in his chair until spittle dribbled from his caked lips and his eyes turned up into his head like a shark before it bites. His voice surged. “So,” he said, grinning directly into the sun. “What took you guys so long?” Then he vomited at a leisurely pace, fouling the emaciated wattles at his throat and his shirt with a mealy steam of dog food that reeked of stomach acid. His bowels released and his upper lip curled up to reveal bloody gums and long, yellowed teeth. Sightless eyes wide open, Jimmy Tuna glared at them like a raging Jolly Roger.

  49

  “Now what? He’s out cold. What if he dies on us?” Nina muttered. Had to be ninety in the shade. Her arms still bubbled with goosebumps. One hand hugged the small grinning skull and crossbones on her shoulder.

  “He’ll come around. We’re what’s keeping him alive,” said Broker. Suddenly he was very thirsty. He saw the powerline running into the cabin. “Let me get this beer out of the sun.” He went into the cool interior. The kitchen was right inside the door. He tried a light switch, saw that the electric worked and spied the icebox. He put the beer inside, found an opener in a drawer next to the sink, and opened two bottles. San Miguel. Tuna’s old favorite.

  Nina entered the kitchen, paused for a moment, got her bearings and disappeared into a back room. She returned with towels and clean folded clothing. Then she filled a basin with water and went back out to the deck.

  Broker followed her outside and stood in a patch of shade and sipped his beer. Nina bent over Tuna and methodically removed his fouled trousers, bundled them, and tossed them aside.

  Broker averted his eyes from Tuna’s emaciation and the tumor that torqued out of his left hip. The Tuna he remembered from twenty years ago had been muscled like a Greco-Roman wrestler. “Do you have to do that right now?”

  “Not the first time I’ve seen a man mess his pants,” she muttered and cast a dirtied towel aside and rinsed a fresh one. She tossed the dirty water over the patio, slapped the messy trousers in the empty basin, and handed it to Broker. “Lend a hand, this old jailbird just saved our lives.” Broker set down his beer and went for more water.

  Tuna lolled in their hands as they washed his white loose flesh and then pulled on new underwear, a pair of baggy cotton trousers, and a clean T-shirt. Washing their hands in the kitchen they heard someone moving on the stairs…

  Tony Sporta stuck his curly head into the kitchen. Sweat dripped from his nose. “He shit his pants again,” he said. “And there’s two dead guys in the woods.” He frowned like he wasn’t sure which of his observations vexed him most.

  “Jimmy says you should put the dead guys in the swamp,” said Broker.

  “Are you sure you’re a cop?”

  “Way down in the swamp,” said Broker.

  Sporta threw his hands in the air. He paused long enough to stick the.44 revolver in his pocket and then marched down the stairs, cursing. His voice carried all the way down the field to the trees.

  Nina came out of the cabin and stood next to him. “What will Cyrus do now?”

  “Keep after us until he knows where it is…” Some wooden wind chimes rattled in the breeze. Tuna’s paper lungs made a shallow rustle. Cicadas buzzed in the brush. “Should have told you before. We may have an ally inside LaPorte’s bunch. We’re supposed to think so, anyway,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Someone who hates LaPorte.”

  “Broker!”

  Broker grinned. “His wife.”

  Nina laughed sarcastically. “Wonderful. It’s Terry and the Pirates. And now we got Lola the freaking Dragon Lady.” She rolled her eyes. “All I need. Some glamorous facelift bitch who has a boat named after her.” She squinted. “You slept with her, didn’t you-”

  “No I didn’t,” said Broker frankly. “She says we have…mutual interests.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “We needed an in with them. Well, I’m in,” Broker patiently explained. “LaPorte has a roving eye for younger women for breeding purposes.” He wiped a handful of sweat from his brow. “Lola thinks she may get to Vietnam and get pushed off that boat that’s named after her and accidentally drown. So turnabout is fair play.”

  Nina reached up and clipped his chin. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you go to New Orleans alone. You don’t know anything about women. I tried to tell you in Ann Arbor. They,” she paused, “we, are your weak spot.”

  Broker cleared his throat. It was different, explaining this to the woman you slept with the previous night and who turned out to be, in addition to Audie fucking Murphy, Annie fucking Oakley. “She wants someone to, ah, sort of disappear her husband in the course of events. She gets to wear black for a while and haul in the family estate.”

  “Someone, Broker? When did you develop this subtle speech impediment?”

  “Okay. Me.”

  Nina frowned. “I thought we agreed. I don’t want LaPorte murdered. I want him tried.”

  Broker stood up, irritated. “Nina, goddammit! There’s no way in hell that can happen.”

  “Sonofabitch, I hate this soap opera shit! She bought you off. That’s how you got that gold.”

  “She helped me take it, that’s true-”

  “Fuck you. You got what you want and now you’re getting cold feet.” She scowled. “I got in bed with you…”

  And saved my life. Broker tried to placate her. “We can still nail him. Not exactly the way you want, but maybe we can get him busted by the Vietnamese as a thief. You’ll have to settle for that.”

  Jimmy Tuna stirred and opened one cadaverous eye. Then he smiled so slowly that his teeth appeared one by one like corroded yellow bullets in the wrinkled maw of his lips. He croaked emphatically, “Wrong.”

  50

  “Thirsty,” said Tuna. He fanned his mouth. Parched. Nina darted into the cabin and returned with two open bottles of iced beer. He nodded and asked very politely, “Tony brought me some cherries last night, in a bowl in the icebox?” Nina turned promptly and returned with the large bowl of cherries. She placed them on the table next to Tuna’s chair and handed him one of the chilled bottles. She tucked the extra between his legs in the baggy folds of his trousers.

  Tuna drank one beer in a long dreamy gurgle. He set the empty aside and picked up the fresh bottle. He held the ice-sweating glass to the inside of his papery left forearm and sighed. Then his other hand fumbled on the table for a pack of Pall Malls. In slow motion he lit one and inhaled. Exhaled and coughed violently.

  “Shit’s probably in my lungs,” he said as heroin merriness flooded his sunken cheeks and twinkled in his cratered eyes. Seeing the corpselike figure animate with the strange current of energy and thinking about the rednecks laying stiff in the shade of an oak tree had the perverse effect of making Broker hungry. He chewed one of the ham and cheese sandwiches and washed it down with San Miguel.

  Tuna began to eat the cherries, ferrying them one by one in his taloned hand, savoring them with a gluttonous sucking of lips and tongue. He spit the pits onto the deck where they collected like tiny red bodies. Ants formed industrious columns, going after the shreds of pulp.

  Nina smiled tightly. “I wish there was some way we could record this.”

  The stoned laughter that gushed from Tuna’s cherry-stained lips sounded like a flock of insane birds. There was some of the muscular oily humor of the old Tuna in that laugh. “How many words you think I got left? A thousand? Five hundred? I’ll do my talking to people, not a goddamned machine.”

  “Okay,” said Nina, crossing her arms and waiting patiently.

  Tuna cackled and his eyes and voice went into a glide. “Paget’s disease,” he whispered. “Four Purple Hearts and I walked away from each of them. Fucking Indians have casinos. Nigger kids got high-top tennis shoes, nine millimeters, and crack franchises. I
got a fortune in gold and I get cancer. In prison…”

  He smiled luridly. “The medical book says, get this,” he quoted: “‘The dread complication of Paget’s disease is osteosarcoma, which fortunately occurs in fewer than one percent of the patients.’” He sucked on his Pall Mall. “That’s quite a word-dread.”

  He bit his cracked lips. “It’s in my rectum now. And my bladder. And my kidneys. When it gets to my lungs…hat roi.”

  Hat roi was the Vietnamese phrase for “all gone.”

  “Like taking a crap through a turnstile.” Tuna tried to laugh and began coughing again.

  His eyes moistened. “We had some great days, Phil. Quang Tri City. That was like a chapter out of the fucking Bible. Nobody even knew. Remember?”

  “Yeah, Jimmy.”

  Tuna took a deep breath. “Okay. I’ll give it to you straight. We left you and Trin…” He spun out the Vietnamese name and the sound twisted on the hot afternoon like a cool shadow. “Hell, we did more than that. We gave them Trin. We knew Pryce was crazy enough to go try to get him out.”

  “Pryce didn’t know?” demanded Broker.

  “Mama Pryce. You kidding? Him and Trin didn’t know shit.” Tuna chortled. “Trin’s gonna freak…”

  Broker couldn’t imagine anything more distant from an angel than this talking corpse. But he’d just sprung Broker from Purgatory and put an avenging sword in his hand. Broker took a clean breath of fire.

  Now Tuna looked Nina straight in the eye. “I killed your father. The plan was Cyrus’s. But I pulled the trigger. He was dead before we got to Hue.”

  Nina stared at him, stone cold. Her voice buckled down tight. “And the pilots went along with this?”

  “They were Air America, Cyrus’s cronies from Laos. Hell, by then they’d flown more dope than the Medellin cartel.”

  “Go on,” said Nina. Tip of the iceberg.

  “After we hit the bank I changed the plan a little,” said Tuna. He hefted the empty beer bottle and smiled helplessly. Nina averted her face. Broker went into the house and returned with two more bottles. When Tuna had taken a drink, Broker asked his main question: “Why’d you do it, Jimmy?”