by Chuck Logan
“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.
Time to go inside for repellent.
Broker took Nina into his bedroom and, as he smeared on Muskol, told her to keep Irene in the cabin and to keep Tank with them. He unlocked his gun cabinet and quietly showed her where he kept the double-ought for the twelve-gauge. Then he removed his military issue Colt .45 from a drawer.
He disliked handguns. If it came to a real fight, give him a shotgun or a rifle. But the Colt was a heavy reliabl
e chunk of American history, good for hitting, which was more his style. He cleared it, checked it, and loaded it, easing the slide forward. He tucked it into his waistband and pulled a hooded sweatshirt on to conceal it.
He figured this way: Cops were on the road and he’d only be seconds away down on the beach and the dog would alert him. In the dark, Broker trusted Tank’s instincts and speed more than two trained men. Nina queried him with her eyes, turning them toward his folks on the porch. Broker raised a hand in a calming gesture. She nodded and leaned the shotgun in the bedroom corner behind the door.
They had started standing closer together. “You sure about this?” he asked. For the first time in his life he wasn’t aware of their age difference.
“Don’t fight it,” she replied in a steady voice that matched her steady grave eyes. The sound of her voice tingled in his chest like danger.
Back in the kitchen he took out a glass, opened the icebox, fumbled with an ice tray, threw a couple cubes into the glass, dug a bottle of Cutty Sark from a cabinet and poured in a finger of Scotch. On second thought, Broker, usually a temperate man, poured in another three fingers. He’d need it to loosen his tongue.
Irene smiled a prescient smile as he came out on to the porch. She and Mike always sensed the difference in their son when he put on his gun. The big German shepherd sensed it too with the peculiar clairvoyance of his breed. He moved protectively to Irene’s side and nuzzled her thigh.
“Cops on the road. Something’s up,” said Mike casually.
“Uh huh,” said Broker. “In a little while I want you to take Irene into town, have a few drinks, and check into a motel on me.” Broker handed his father a fifty-dollar bill.
“Dirty movies on cable TV,” said Irene. Mike wiggled his shaggy eyebrows.
“Keep Tank close while we’re down on the beach,” Broker cautioned his mother. To Nina he said, “Don’t get carried away, it’s still early.” Then he and Mike took their beverages down the path to the water’s edge.
With his Spirits and his drink, Broker sat in an armchair of granite and listened to the murmur of the lake. Mike lit the firewood and removed his pipe from his chest pocket. Out on the water, a loon cried and Broker shivered, shriven by the haunting wilderness a cappella.
The bite of the Scotch and a smoke did not wash away the taste of the dandelion tea that curled under his tongue like an old root system. He raised his eyes up the column of flames and followed the stream of sparks up to the star-crazy sky and picked out the Big and Little Bear and the Pole Star and Arcturus and Vega—and right now it looked like a black target shot through with a million bullet holes.
16
“DAD, THERE’S ONE THING I WANT YOU TO KNOW. I never took, all these years. And my kind of work, I had chances.”
Mike sucked on his empty pipe and placed a stick on the fire. “Yeeaah,” he said slowly. “So?”
“I’m thinking of taking something.”
“You talking about straight-out stealing?” asked Mike.
“I don’t think so. See, the fact is…” Broker laughed and threw out his arms in an absurd posture. “I’m the only cop in Minnesota who’s blown up a jail to break the inmates out and who’s been investigated for robbing a bank of ten tons of gold bullion.”
“Ah,” Mike exclaimed softly like a man who had just been handed a key.
“Vietnam. I was the last swinging dick out. April 30, 1975.”
“This gold…?”
“National Bank in Hue City.”
“And you robbed this bank for the army?”
“No, I went in to break a Vietnamese guy out of jail. I was the diversion for robbing the bank, but, see, I didn’t know about the bank. I was the fall guy.”
“Ha…” Mike exhaled.
Broker took a stiff pull on his Scotch. “All these years I thought that girl’s father had set me up. I trusted him. You might say it soured me on people. Now I’m not so sure I got it right.”
Mike carefully placed one knee on the other and grasped the top knee in both hands. “We always thought you had something big in you, Phil. Irene is of the opinion that you were born in the wrong century. Me, I worried you had one of those…syndromes.”
Broker leaned back and savored another mouthful of Scotch, letting it roll medicinally from one side of his mouth to the other. How to communicate the mood that had gripped Vietnam at the end?
“There were five of us, four Americans, one Vietnamese, the same guys who came back for me at Quang Tri City.”
“I remember,” said Mike.
“Her dad yanked me back over to Nam to work with them again in a Special Intelligence unit. When the bottom fell out in April of seventy-five, we became part of the evacuation effort…”
Broker stared at the swirling pattern of the fire. What people had before electric lights and television. Where they saw their hopes and dreams and fears. He became lost in the flicker the flames painted on the lapping water and his voice sounded far away.
LaPorte was a colonel by then, Pryce still a major, Tarantuna a master sergeant. For a month they flew around the collapsing Republic of South Vietnam trying to salvage Vietnamese agents who had worked for American programs—an alphabet soup of acronyms—CORDS and Phoenix and PRUs. It was like running into a burning house to find scattered pictures from a family album.
Pryce had been closest to Trin, knew the language and the culture, they had worked some deep clandestine games over the years. The rumor was that Pryce had talked Trin into leaving the Viet Cong after Tet of ’68. LaPorte had the rank but Pryce was the ramrod.
“We grabbed whatever was around, helicopters, boats, sometimes we based in Laos, other times off ships in the South China Sea. We snuck into collection points in the central provinces. Trin did the dangerous work, working behind the lines, lining up evacuees. The command structure was disintegrating, we glommed on to whatever was around.”
Down in Saigon, the lemming rush to the sea was over and the last chopper had taken off from the embassy roof. They were winding down, calling it quits, afloat on the departing fleet off the coast.
“We were waiting for Trin to bring out one last group to the coast. Then Pryce learned from a holdout radio site that Trin had been nabbed on the street in Hue City. Trin was being held in the old MACV advisors compound with a group of high-ranking officers and politicals.”
A crazed huddle on the deck of a decrepit minesweeper LaPorte had commandeered for them. Cognac and the Gauloises and a slow voltage electrocution of adrenaline on empty. The insane notion was put forth by Pryce and seconded by Tuna—they didn’t leave Trin in 1972, so why should they leave him now. LaPorte wasn’t even there, he was stuck pulling refugees out of the sea around the port city of Danang. They had to expedite the raid on the radio.
“We decided to go in and get Trin out. Real nuts. But that’s what we decided to do. LaPorte got us a helicopter.”
They sat down over a street map of Hue City with one of Pryce’s agents who’d made it out with a floor plan of the prison. Hopefully, the victory-drunk North Vietnamese might be literally drunk, celebrating on this particular night.
Broker, with Quang Tri City on his mind, volunteered to lead the ground component of the operation.
The last time Broker saw Ray Pryce he was on the deck of the minesweep that had crept in close to the mouth of the Perfume River. Hue City was sixteen kilometers upstream. A Chinook helicopter sat ready on the deck. Broker would go in early, by boat, set some diversions and then blow the jail. The Chinook would rendezvous with them and pull them out. Broker had barely met the pilots. It was all—hey hubba-hubba—let’s get this fucker over with.
Before midnight, Broker, with six of Trin’s South Vietnamese commandos, slipped up the Perfume River in a fishing boat under the cover of a rain squall. After they set their diversions, the plan was to crack the jail at 3 A.M., free as many prisoners as possible, and get them to the broad lawn on the riverfront where the old province helicopter pad had b
een. Pryce and Tuna would come in with the Chinook, barrel down the river, land, and pluck them out.
Broker had walked the streets of Hue back in ’72 and ’73. Now the streets were strewn with flags and clutter from a victory march. That night he crept through garbage in the back alleys, clad in black fatigues with greasepaint on his face and a black watch cap pulled down tight. He was not particularly thrilled or frightened. He was too preoccupied with not screwing up. But it was a mind bender—everyone was leaving and he was going back in.
They set their diversions at a radio tower, a barracks, and the city hall. Just before they blew the plastique, he remembered hearing a dull rumble in the humid rain. Unafraid of the American Air Force, an unbroken convoy of trucks crossed the Perfume River bridge with their lights on, ferrying reinforcements and supplies down National Route 1 to the south.
Then life accelerated and time slowed amid the confused stutter of one last fire fight in the shadows of the blown building. The durable smile of Colonel Trin appeared in the doorway of a cell and Broker made his radio call. They ran for the riverfront and waited for the Chinook.
He remembered hearing the rotors and seeing the shadow of the big chopper flit through the flames from the diversion fires. But it swooped down two blocks away from their location. Frantic, he’d called on his radio. No reply. The helicopter struggled back aloft with a heavily laden cargo net. Wands of sparking groundfire batted around the chopper as it disappeared into the gloom.
They’d been abandoned in the hostile city. North Vietnamese soldiers—angry at the rude nightcap to their victory celebration—boiled out of buildings and swarmed the streets. Broker and his team and the freed prisoners split into small groups and it was every man for himself. A steady cacophony of small-arms fire stalked them.
Trin made Broker hide his radio and survival kit, then doff his weapons and remaining gear. They dove into the river and swam to the lower story of a restaurant built over the water. Trin left Broker in the care of the proprietor, a Frenchman, who hid him in his cellar.
