Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

Broker cautioned her again. “None of this is proof. The fact LaPorte may have found gold in the ocean doesn’t connect him with the alleged robbery or your dad’s death.”

“But he was in command,” said Nina.

“True,” said Broker patiently. “But he wasn’t there. And Tuna would have to change his story and impeach his earlier testimony, which means he’s a liar. And he’s dying. LaPorte has the right to cross-examine his accuser. And there’s no court with the jurisdiction to charge LaPorte for a criminal act during an undeclared war twenty years ago in a country that doesn’t even exist anymore.”

Nina stood up and put her hands on her hips. “Wrong. When you take that oath to the U.S. Constitution, it’s forever, mister. I told you. Tuna knows a way.” She spun and tramped up the path to the cabin. A minute later she came back down the path and tossed a thick oxblood-covered text book into his lap. Broker read the cover: UNITED STATES CODE ANNOTATED, TITLE 10, ARMED FORCES, 1 TO 835.

Broker clicked his teeth. The UCMJ. The Uniform Code of Military Justice. A Post-it note marked the pages. He opened to it and struggled through a paragraph underlined in yellow marker: “803. Article 3. Jurisdiction to try certain personnel: (a) Subject to section 843 of this title (article 43), a person who is in a status in which the person is subject to this chapter and who committed an offense against this chapter while formally in a status in which the person was subject to this chapter is not relieved from amenability to the jurisdiction of this chapter for that offense by reason of a termination of that person’s former status.”

“Define ‘certain personnel,’” said Broker.

“Once you’re in, and you’re an officer type and you’re eligible for a pension, you’re never really out. There’s precedent. I ran it kind of obliquely by a JAG guy I know. They reactivated a retired colonel in the seventies and tried him for misappropriating canteen funds in Vietnam in nineteen sixty-six.”

“Where’d you get this?”

“That’s my point. I didn’t underline that. Jimmy Tuna did. It was in the package he left the day he stood me up at prison. That note and the Newsweek page were folded, marking the section.”

Broker was impressed. It suggested another level to the thing.

Her eyes sharpened to pencil points. “So you’re a cop. Solve me a bank robbery.”

She was working on a full body flush of anticipation. Broker leaned away from her infectious excitement. “You got stars in your eyes. We need evidence,” he cautioned.

“Why would Jimmy give me the UCMJ unless he had evidence? But I need you to find him .”

“Before God does,” said Broker. “And we could still come up empty. And if you really want to nail LaPorte, it may not happen in the strict legal sense.”

“No. You can get the pieces any way you want, but I do it by the book. He gets tried. It gets on the record. My dad gets his name cleared.” Very serious, she planted her knuckles on her hips.

He reappraised Nina Pryce again. This time with pure intuition. She thought LaPorte’s head on a platter could pave her way back into the army. So she had a little Pluto in her, too. And stars in her eyes. Two, at least. One for each shoulder. He said, “I’m going to get some of it-”

“That’s your business.” She looked away. “I won’t help you steal. But what I don’t see, I don’t know.”

“This will go down in Vietnam. No sense letting the Communists have it.”

“It,” said Nina coolly.

He gazed across the turbulent plain of Lake Superior. There were three of them now. The third being a tangible presence that neither he nor Nina would invite out of the silence. The faint, dry rustle crept down the centuries, twisted serpentine through the bones of Cortes and Pizarro and Sir Francis Drake, and whispered in his ear.

Nina went into the cabin and came out stripped down to a pair of shorts, a running bra, and an old pair of Reeboks. She tied the red bandanna around her forehead and collected a pick and shovel and walked toward the lodge. Broker could see his dad sitting at the kitchen table, in a rectangle of yellow light that was framed in the shadow of the house under the darkening sky. Mike cupped his chin in his hands and stared out over the lake.

Broker climbed to the end of his promontory and watched while Irene and Mike showed Nina where they wanted the hole dug, in a rocky cleft overlooking the shore. Nina spread her feet and hefted the pick in her hands. Then she set to work with a slow, powerful rhythm. Fifty yards away and above her, Broker watched the flat muscles of her back and shoulders swing smoothly and oil with sweat.

She put down the pick and started with the shovel, difficult going because she lacked the proper footwear, but she didn’t flinch and soon a dark ring of sweat soaked into her shorts. Then she went back to the pick and swung it to the fitful smash of waves breaking against the tiers of stone. Last night the Big Water lay placid under a “Bali H’ai” sunset. Today whitecaps rode the north wind and it looked like Victory at Sea out there.

Broker was not prone to admitting it, but he added up to more than just a set of balls and fast-twitch muscles. Once, back when he still showed up for evaluations at the BCA, he’d taken a routine MMPI psychological profile. He was graded by an uptight office guy who told Broker he tested out with a deviant male identity.

Broker took the test results to a lady he was dating who did profiles for the FBI. After much teasing she interpreted the grade and, that night, staring at her bedroom ceiling, she told him that the MMPI was culture-bound and dated. “Your sensitivity range graphs out within normal parameters for a woman. Off the charts for a male. That must have freaked out the guy who graded it.”

Broker had intuition.

With his eyes he saw a young woman digging on the rocky beach; bandanna fluttering in a rising wind, she looked like a slender buccaneer. But his intuition was starting to fathom that she was a new kind of woman for a new century. And she had the spirit to march into the spooky old woods with the U.S. Code and drag LaPorte out like a gutted deer and face down the U.S. Army. She would use her dad, who was dead, and Broker, who was living right now, to do it. Goddamn. She probably would be the first woman to get the CIB.

He visualized the crossed bones below the skull tattoo on her glistening shoulder. She’d want to get her way. So did he…

He’d known ambitious women. But Nina was the first one who came utterly without insecurity. She didn’t crave power. She had it already, inside her. Call it charisma. Leadership. It was power. He sure felt it start to pop when their fingers touched. But she was young and she hadn’t mastered the voltage. He could wind up electrocuted if he got too close.

And gold didn’t tempt her. She demanded justice, but she also figured she was owed advancement and silver. She would trade a treasure for vindication, for LaPorte’s scalp, for reinstatement in the army, and eventually for a tiny drop of silver, fashioned in the shape of the five-pointed star that brigadier generals wear on their shoulders.

And he reflected that the search for Jimmy Tuna would be fraught with puzzles and traps and it was poetic justice that the game might end in Vietnam where the ambush was invented.

Down on the beach the hole was chest deep. Nina climbed out and lowered in the lump of tarp, and, without pausing, hurrying now, with sidelong glances at the roiling sky, she filled in the grave.

Then, as it began to sprinkle, she patted the mounded dirt and laid down the shovel and carried a towel and soap down the granite polyps to the water’s edge. She stripped off her work-fouled clothes and waded up to her thighs in the crashing surf and scrubbed as lightning scurried across the horizon. Thunder banged the bedrock and the first fat raindrops sizzled around her. It was magic light. The sun hid. Storm charge and ozone shook the air like a shaman’s rattle. Untextured by shadow, every surface-the rocks, her skin, the heaving water-shone with its own luminous electricity.