Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

Man, if ever there was a poor choice of words .

Broker lurched awake and bumped his hand as he sat up and saw a familiar line divide sky and water and felt the brisk tonic of lake air coming through the open windows. Superior. They were past Duluth, into the Minnesota Arrowhead. But something was wrong. He immediately put his good hand to the small of his back. Uh-huh. He looked over the seat.

Nina hunched forward slightly, tense behind the wheel with her eyes riveted to the rearview mirror. The Beretta was tucked under her right thigh, the handle angled back where she could grab it easily.

“Not funny,” said Broker.

“I can shoot this thing better than you can. When’s the last time you qualified?”

That pissed him off. “ Pull over .”

“The green Saturn, rental plates, staying way back. Been following us since we left Stillwater.”

“Ni na .”

Reluctantly, she jerked onto the shoulder in a hail of gravel. She got out and opened the rear hatch. Broker stood up, stretched and looked back down the two-lane highway. A truck with a boat whooshed by. A camper. No green Saturn.

He glared at her, not quite awake. With difficulty, he reholstered his pistol with one hand and got behind the wheel.

“You’re mad at me, huh?” she said.

Broker grimaced in pain when, out of habit, he put his left hand on the wheel as he shifted through the gears. “Why should I be mad at you? You sail into my life and practically get my thumb chewed off. Hell no, I’m not mad at you,” he muttered. Despite the sleep, he still nodded behind the wheel.

She folded her arms across her chest and stared out at Lake Superior. They rode in an intricate silence. He could feel her will tearing laps around him. He recalled that when she was at the University of Michigan she just missed the cut for the women’s Olympic swim team. Free style. Where she developed that great butt and the strong arms. Now he wished she had put all that energy into swimming; put it anywhere except aimed at him.

So he concentrated on the road that curled through rocky bluffs dressed with clinging white cedar and pine. Cresting a broad turn around a rock face, Broker glanced into the rearview and saw the green dot make a turn about a mile back. He stared at Nina. For the third time in ten minutes the right front tire drifted into the shoulder, and the Jeep wrenched as Broker shakily over-corrected.

“You’re a mess,” said Nina.

“I don’t bounce back quite as quick as I used to,” he admitted.

“You need a bath, a meal, and a good night’s sleep. It’ll keep till then but you have to listen to me and not cut me off like you did before.” She glanced over her shoulder. “We don’t have a whole lot of time.”

Broker confirmed, as they drove into Devil’s Rock, that a green Saturn with tinted windows and rental plates was trailing them into town. He groaned to himself and remembered something that his mom, the astrology nut, always said about Saturn being the Teacher.

He turned abruptly, wheeled a fast U-turn through the parking lot of Fatty Naslund’s bank, and got behind the Saturn long enough to make sure of the plates. The Saturn ran Devil’s Rock’s one stoplight, accelerated, and disappeared along the waterfront.

“Glove compartment. Cell phone. Gimme,” said Broker.

Nina opened the phone and Broker took it in his good hand. He punched in the number with his thumb.

“Devil’s Rock Public Safety.”

“Give me Tom Jeffords. It’s Phil Broker.”

“Hey, Broker, Merryweather told Tom some guy ate your thumb. That true?”

“Yeah, yeah, Tom there?”

“I’ll patch you through.”

“Chief Jeffords.”

“Tom, it’s Broker.”

“No shit, we heard-”

“Later. Look, I just drove into town and I got some citizen in a green Saturn, plates lima lima gulf six two niner, been on my ass since I left Stillwater. I’m heading for Dad’s place. Can you have somebody check him out and call me?”

“You think somebody wants your other thumb?”

“You tell me. I’m off the clock.”

Broker handed the phone back to Nina. “Could be Earl has a friend looking for some payback,” he said.

Nina shook her head. “Guy followed me from New Orleans. Same flight.”

“We’ll see.”

“Yes we will.”

North of town Broker turned off on a gravel road and stopped in front of a billboard that advertised the Broker’s Beach Resort. A dusty CLOSED sign now bannered it. Broker got out and lowered a chain that closed off the access road. As he returned to his truck, he noticed the green car pulled onto the shoulder, about two hundred yards up the road.

It was getting harder now to dismiss Nina as a paranoid; even more difficult to banish the ten-ton shadow beginning to lurk just below his thoughts. We’ll see, he soundlessly challenged the blip of green up the highway.

Nina’s view in the passenger seat was blocked by brush and Broker said nothing to disturb her. Assuming he was in someone’s binoculars, he took his time. He mused at the cascading irony coming off Jimmy Tuna’s cryptic note. He had learned the basic premise of undercover life from Nguyen Van Trin during the one, and only, and unusually, candid private conversation he’d ever had with the man. Go solitary. Even the most trusted comrade will telegraph. Trust no one .

He got back in and drove down toward the shore. They broke through the pines and he mused how other people said their childhood environs looked smaller when they revisited them as adults.

No way Lake Superior was ever going to shrink.

The Brokers owned two thousand feet of wild lake frontage, arced in a cove and spectacularly fanged with granite. Tall old red and white pines, which had been preserved from the clear-cut at the end of the last century, cloaked the cabins from the highway. Broker’s personal cabin, sometimes rented as overflow, clung to a rock promontory to the side of the resort behind a privacy screen of gnarled white birch, balsam, alder, and mountain ash.

What he really wanted to do was pull the Jeep into the drive, walk down to the beach, strip off his clothes, and dive off his favorite rock into the icy clean water. Then fire up the sauna and do it again. He turned off the key and sagged over the steering wheel.

“Still magic,” said Nina.

“Yeah,” he nodded.

“Oh oh,” said Nina. “Something new.”

A seriously large, hundred-fifty-pound silver, black, and tan shepherd bounded from the brush and planted his square paws on the side of the Jeep. His nails drew screeches on the paint and a tongue the size of a size sixteen red lumberjack sock hung between his big pointy teeth. “Hey, get down, Tank,” Broker yelled as he got out and tussled with the dog. Nina cautiously got from the passenger side and kept the briefcase that contained her map tight against her side.

“Is he…safe?”

“Hell no,” said Broker, shaking the ruff of fur around the dog’s neck. “He was too aggressive for St. Paul K-nine so I brought him up here. Mike and Irene squared him away, didn’t they, Tank.” Tank cocked his huge head and his yellow eyes tracked Nina’s every move.

Nina squinted at the dog and then at Broker’s eyebrows. “There’s a family resemblance. And like…human intelligence behind those eyes.”

“Yeah, retarded human intelligence,” said Broker, cuffing the dog playfully. “Come on, let’s go see the folks.”

Halfway down a trail paved with split granite Tank stood alert, growled deep in his chest, and swung his head toward the road. Broker gripped his choke chain and brought him to heel.

“Do we have company?” Nina asked.

“Maybe,” said Broker and they kept walking down into a natural amphitheater cragged with immense bedrock terraces, some the size of three-story buildings. As a boy, Broker thought it looked like a huge, wrinkled pile of gray elephants.