Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

Broker hadn’t worn a uniform for almost twelve years. From the beginning he’d excelled at working alone. His flair for one-man undercover investigations resulted in invidious Serpico jokes and a detective’s badge and eventually a unique job offer and promotion to detective lieutenant from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

He targeted drugs and illegal weapons. A free agent, he putted through Minnesota counties in his handyman’s truck. He coordinated with sheriff’s departments, county task forces, the attorney general’s office and the feds, usually DEA and ATF.

Automatic military assault weapons were showing up on the street in Minnesota. Broker had been using Washington County, east of the Twin Cities on the Wisconsin border, as a base because Rodney lived there. On this case, he reported to the Washington County, east of the Twin Cities on the Wisconsin border, as a base because Rodney lived there. On this case, he reported to the Washington County sheriff.

As he climbed the stairs he took a deep breath. He hadn’t been in the BCA office in St. Paul for two years. He had never set foot in this county building beyond the garage, where he kept his personal vehicle. He had an unreasonable reaction to offices that bordered on claustrophobia.

It was worse now that the jargon and techniques of corporate voodoo had crept into police work. Now they had “solvability tables” to evaluate cases. His dad, who had been driven out of law enforcement by paperwork, called it flatassitis. Male Brokers were genetically resistant to it.

He averted his face from the security camera mounted in the corridor and went through the locked door into the squadroom. The tightness hairballed in his stomach. His ex, Kimberly, had wanted him to be a clotheshorse cop and play department politics. Wanted him to work in an office. Deputy chief maybe. Then run for politics.

He glanced around nervously. Here come the Lilliputians with a million yards of thread. And the mimeo paper. Death by paper cut. Don’t bunch up, boys-they’ll get you all with one memo .

J.T. Merryweather and Ryan were going over paperwork with a couple of Washington County detectives in a makeshift command post in a corner of the investigative unit. They’d nailed Rodney’s cohorts and the lab in Pine County at the same time that Earl and company went down. They looked like they’d slept in their shirts.

“In case you’re confused at your surroundings, this is a police station,” joked J.T. with his sharp features shuffled in a touchy mix of Caribbean and Saracen razor blades. “You notice the modular office spacers designed to promote efficiency, the tidy stacks of paperwork, the new computer system with which we try to keep cowboys in the field legal.”

Broker’s slightly feverish eyes roamed over the off-white computer plastic that packed the room. The stuff reminded him of the armor worn by the Imperial storm troopers in Star Wars . Now the fuckers had occupied every office in America.

He thrust his bandage, big thumbs up. “Two months medical leave. Without me out there, you guys will be breaking down the wrong doors. I can see it in the papers-Waco North.” A chorus of groans came from the tired cops.

J.T. rose to his feet and shook Nina’s hand. “Been a while, Captain Pryce.”

“Ten years, J.T., and it’s just plain Nina.”

“I was rooting for you when you were on TV. Other than having super bad timing yesterday, how’d you turn out?”

“Broker thinks I’m crazy.”

“Uh-huh. How’s that man going to know from crazy. C’mon, I’ll get your things from the property room.”

John Eisenhower appeared in the hall and motioned to Broker to join him in his office. The sheriff’s gun belt lay on a chair under a Norman Rockwell print of a Depression-era cop and a runaway kid sharing adjoining stools at a soda fountain. John had affected a folksy touch now that he was out in the eastern burbs. But Broker knew him from St. Paul, a cop right down to his depleted uranium heart. Broker sat down. This little color-coded laminated card with a fingerprint lay on the desk facing the visitor’s chair. Test your stress level .

They talked shop for a few minutes. Would Rodney handle in a continuing sting? Ryan wanted to use him to check out the gang-bangers over north in Minneapolis. Broker was unsympathetic to the notion. Rodney was an infant monster. He should be chained up in a damp, leaky basement in Stillwater Prison and bricked over until he resembled a cavefish. Eisenhower’s china-blue eyes circled above the fruitless conversation, watching Broker. He ended by saying, “Sorry about the thumb, but you need some time off…” He paused, eyes probing.

Broker deflected the close attention to detail in the sheriff’s eyes. It was a game they had played off and on for more than a decade of working together. Eisenhower was an excellent administrator who’d never lost the touch of a field man. And he had the confidence to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of a brilliant subordinate, which he knew Broker to be. He’d brought Broker in as a deep undercover, unknown, in the beginning, even to his own investigative unit, answerable only to himself. But he didn’t understand Broker.

John had done his time working undercover. A good undercover man should be able to fool the assholes, who were not thinking too clearly to begin with. But Broker could fool anybody, even very smart people. And he did it by boldly being himself, which is to say, by being blunt as a locked safe. Sometimes John thought Broker was really presenting his true undercover act when he was in an office, like now. And this disquieted John.

Not even scary J.T. Merryweather, who had partnered with Broker in St. Paul, who was as remote and hostile as a man could be, and who was the only human that Broker minimally confided in, knew the whole story behind Phil Broker.

Several years back, in St. Paul, John had asked a sharp, no-nonsense, female FBI psychologist, who had dated Broker, why she thought he was a cop and where he got his style. The woman, who profiled criminal pathology for a living, had obviously thought about this before and took her time responding.

John Eisenhower, who had graduate degrees in criminology and sociology hanging on his wall, was still disturbed and intrigued by her answer, which he remembered almost verbatim: “Broker got stung somewhere in his background and will not discuss it. Period. As to why he’s a cop-that’s easy. Phil’s a fugitive from modern psychology. He’s a romantic primitive who loves to hunt monsters. He expects them. Monsters were in the fairy tales he’d been taught as a child. Grendel in Beowulf was not a victim of domestic abuse or faulty nurturing. He’s a cautionary totemic being, representing evil, greed, violence, and excess. He believes in monsters because only heroes can stop them. So he can’t conceive of living without a weapon and pair of handcuffs in case he encounters one in the checkout line at the grocery.

She’d thrown in a bittersweet spark of intuition: “In a world of monsters, boys can climb the beanstalk and sail for Treasure Island and contend for the hand of a princess. And what are monsters anyway…except adults as seen through the brave eyes of a child.”

The moment passed. Eisenhower resumed his practical gaze and said: “We pulled a background check on the girl. She won a Silver Star and a Purple Heart in the Gulf. So that’s Nina Pryce.”

Broker nodded. “I was in the army with her father.”

Conversation paused a beat. The only thing Eisenhower knew about Broker’s army time was typed in impressive blank verse on his DD214. “Just bad timing, the way she turned up, huh?” he asked, but his eyes said, Broker, you’ve been out there too long running your lone wolf number. The girl was a slip .