Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

The stuff of curses.

Broker’s Beach was rebuilding on unlimited credit from Fatty’s bank, retired Det. Phil Broker installed as manager. Mike had moved up from ballpeen hammers. He could carry out the garbage now. Irene was debating giving up painting loons and trying sunsets.

Jimmy Tuna had succumbed to cancer just about the time that Cyrus LaPorte said he had.

Nina…

Broker pushed the taped CNN broadcast in the VCR and watched it again. A dreary Air Force runway pecked by rain, a Pacific mountain range in the background. Color guard. The band playing. The camera zoomed in at a stately pace and focused on the lumbering C-130 that had just landed from Hanoi. The reporter’s voice-over tried for dignity but was breathless. “…Part of the ceremony accepting the return of her father’s remains from Vietnam.” The goddamn media. Ray Pryce was taking second billing at his own funeral.

Broker had been invited. He’d declined. Not really his kind of scene.

Ray finally got his flag. It draped the coffin being rolled from the back of the transport. And then the camera moved in on the color guard and framed Maj. Nina Pryce, reinstated in the army and promoted on a wave of publicity that she had not honored with a single comment. Major Pryce just stood at attention.

Her hair was longer now and the camera stayed on her face, which had filled out in a way that Broker liked, especially the color in her cheeks. But she showed no expression. Dry eyed. The slick under her eyes came from the rain.

Then, slowly, the camera moved off and then roamed up the left front chest portion of her uniform, over the Silver Star and the Purple Heart and jump wings and paused on the blue rectangle with the silver Kentucky rifle and the silver wreath.

Then they showed the film clip of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs pinning the Combat Infantry Badge on her. Under presidential pressure, the secretary of the army, an appointed civilian, had crafted the citation to hurdle over the Army regs. “…retroactive award to an individual for performance of exceptional duty…”

The Little Dutch Girl had poked her finger through the dike.

Then came the panel of legal experts giving background. Cyrus LaPorte, who had been recalled to active duty for his impending courts-martial, had his own CNN logo and his own theme music.

Next came the clip from the roundtable of talking heads. Cut to the sound bite of a talcum-smooth conservative Republican, a million perfect teeth: “This trick that the president forced down the military’s throat will cost him the election.”

Political commentator Mark Shields bounced up and down, laughing.

Switch to Bob Dole shaking his head.

Then the news anchors came back on and anchor-talked and the female one enunciated like a drama student, “A recent CNN poll conducted among army personnel predicts by a wide margin that men won’t accept this history-making precedent.”

“Some men,” said Broker. Then he yawned and rewound the tape to the shot of Nina that framed her from hips to chest. He noted that her uniform skirt was fitting rather snug around the middle.

“Broker, you sonofabitch,” she had yelled on the phone in an amazed voice when she’d received the results. “Now what?”