Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

“Okay, but I’ll have to wake up Tom. This guy’s really a cop. He’s in our jurisdiction without bonafides.”

“This has nothing to do with police work.”

“I gotta take the stuff he was bringing out of your house.”

Broker nodded. “Just keep it quiet.”

“Gotcha.” Lyle went back up the steps. “On your feet,” he ordered.

“How ’bout you take off the cuffs, huh?” said Fret. “Seeing’s I’m a brother officer-”

“You ain’t shit,” said Lyle. “I saw on Sixty Minutes last week about the NOPD. Feds busted twenty of you guys and the crime rate in New Orleans went down eighteen percent.”

“Listen, dickhead, I realize you got it rough up here in the woods going round scooping bear shit off the roads-”

“Move,” said Lyle Torgeson. With a menacing glance, Broker warned Nina to stay clear as he handed the map over to Lyle. Coated with goosebumps, he walked Lyle and his prisoner up the drive to Lyle’s cruiser. Mark Halme shined his flashlight and led Broker into the thick brush on the shoulder of the highway. They stopped and Broker knelt and put his hand on the still warm mound of dark fur.

Halme shined his light on the silver whistle and the electric stun gun that lay next to the dog’s body. He speculated, “That guy had a lot of balls letting that dog in close enough to zap him with the Tazer.”

“Real good or real desperate,” said Broker.

“I already took some pictures. I’ll be at the cabin the rest of the night in case there’s more of them,” said Halme. He gingerly folded the Tazer and the whistle in plastic evidence bags and backed away, giving Broker some room.

Broker jerked nervously. Mosquitoes starting to flock. He fished a crumpled pack of cigarettes and matches from his pocket, lit up, and blew smoke at the insects. It was quiet now except for the waves breaking on the shore. Hyper alert, he could hear his sweat dry, feel the salt crack on his skin.

He took his vows seriously. He’d upheld the ones he’d sworn to the U.S. Constitution and to the people of Minnesota. His failed marriage he still wore like crippling chains.

The Cyrus LaPorte he had known wouldn’t use the likes of Bevode Fret. For the first time he formed the thought that maybe it was LaPorte who had not minded his vows. But it was wrapped in hot angry instinct.

For the dog alone I’ll hurt you bad, General .

Back off. Think. Cool gears of reason shifted through the wrath. Sorting it. Delaying it. He lifted the huge shepherd in his arms and plodded back to the cabin. Nina confronted him, shaking in her torn shirt. There were purple claw marks down her shoulder and on both arms. She had trouble breathing.

“Now you believe me,” she insisted and her voice rasped, barely under control. Then she saw the dead animal. “Aw, God.”

Broker nodded and laid Tank down. Then he noticed the blood oozing from her bruised throat in the porch light. The dark shape of Fret’s thumb prints. “Your neck?”

“Bastard tried to choke me.”

“I’ll take you to the hospital-”

“I don’t need a fucking hospital. I need some fucking help .”

Broker patiently hoarded his anger, pushing it into his heart like icy bullets into a spring-loaded magazine. “Get cleaned up, make some coffee. There’s a cop named Mark Halme staying close. I’ll be back after I talk to this Fret.”

“He won’t tell you anything.”

Broker squinted in the harsh light at the damage on her throat. Sonofabitch, she’d been fighting for her life .

“He’ll tell me a lot,” he said slowly. “But I’ll tell him more and then he’ll tell LaPorte…”

Nina shook her head in a quandary of pain and anger. Broker clamped a hand on her shivering shoulder. “You’re not alone anymore, okay?”

She set her lips to keep them from quivering. “We’re going to take LaPorte down,” she said.

Broker narrowed his eyes. “We’ll see. I’m on my way to lay the opening move on Fret.”

Nina collapsed into his arms in a tremendous release of anxiety and laughed. Quickly she sobered. “Where do you keep a pick and shovel?” she asked, squaring her shoulders. “You can’t dig with that hand and your dad can’t and I sure as hell won’t let Irene do it.”

Broker knelt and patted the stiffening fur. “Wait for Mike. He’ll want to pick the spot.”

The north shore dawn rolled the fog in off the big water and glossed the black granite boulders with glacier sweat and it was the first day of June. Broker stood on the waterfront across from the police station and sipped coffee and waited for Tom Jeffords. Lyle was inside the cop shop running Fret on the computer.

Jeffords showed up in sweats, running shoes, and a light windbreaker. Unshaven, he nodded as he eased from his Chevy pickup. He reached out his hand for Broker’s coffee cup and took a sip. “Lyle says we got big city bullshit before breakfast?”

“Fucker killed Mike’s dog.”

“Lyle told me. Why, Phil?”

“Remember that kid who stayed with Kim and I? Nina Pryce.”

“Sure. Your army brat surrogate kid sister, the celebrity.”

“She grew up,” Broker said laconically. “This guy says he’s a cop followed her up here from New Orleans. Played real rough with her.”

“Lyle’s got him for burglarizing your house and assault. The dog will be impossible to prove. He could claim self-defense. You want to press the breaking and entering?”

“Not yet. Want to talk to him first.”

“This headed in the direction of me doing you a favor?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

Jeffords turned Broker’s injured hand in his fingers, winced and said mildly, “You started smoking again.”

They went into the station and Lyle handed them a sheet of fax paper. “He’s dirty. Administrative leave from NOPD, implicated in narcotics and two homicides. Case dropped. Circumstantial. No witnesses. Sound familiar?” Lyle handed over a plastic card. “He also had this in his wallet. Registered PI with New Orleans.”

“Big deal,” said Jeffords, “you can send away to a magazine and get one of those.”

Lyle held up the map. “All this trouble over a piece of paper.”

Jeffords unrolled the map. “Hmmm. This is the coast of…Vietnam.” He took out a sheet of paper that had been rolled inside the map. The murky graphic could have been a close-up of a rock formation in a lunar crater. “What’s this?”

Broker had avoided taking a good look at the contents of Nina’s briefcase up until now. He shrugged, but he felt his stomach tighten and the part of his mind that was an intricate museum of facts drew a connection to a picture he’d seen in a National Geographic article. Sidescan sonar . A shape emerged in the wavy gray lines. The unmistakable rotor masts of a Chinook cargo helicopter. Not on the moon, on the ocean bottom. He looked at Tom and shrugged. “I don’t know. Yet.” Then he said, “Is there a Xerox in town big enough to copy the map and this thing, good copy?”

“Maybe at the hospital,” said Jeffords.

“Could Lyle run copies on the QT while we talk to this guy?”

“I can do that,” said Lyle. “One other thing. I had Gloria at the motel pull his phone bill. He made two calls to New Orleans and received one back. All the same number. Listed to a Cyrus LaPorte.”

Broker instinctively disliked former New Orleans detective sergeant Bevode Fret. Not just because he wore a men’s cologne that had little girls in its ads. Or because he oozed casual superhero violence out of a Nietzschean comic book. When Broker walked into the detention room where they were holding Fret, the southern cop nodded and smiled at him in sinister welcome.