Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

She rinsed her hard arms and reached up to embrace the furious sky and the gray wall of rain that dashed across Superior, like the hooves of running ponies, straight for her.

Broker didn’t know if Amazon hoplites really fought on the plains of Troy, and he didn’t know if America was ready for them now. He knew he wasn’t. But goddamn, man…

There it is.

Broker was happy.It was storming. He had a building crisis on his hands. He got on the phone and enlisted Tom Jeffords to expedite a charter flight to Ann Arbor while he called the warden’s office at Milan Federal Prison. He introduced himself as Det. Lt. Phillip Broker of the Minnesota BCA and set up an interview with Waldo Jenke for late afternoon.

Tuna had made a point of soliciting money he didn’t need. So follow the money Jimmy did have. It took longer to find out how Tuna handled his finances. His case manager was off for the weekend. After hopping around the prison switchboard Broker finally schmoozed a supervisor, who checked the computer. Tuna had given power of attorney to a banker in Ann Arbor. The Liberty State Bank on Michigan Street.

“I know where that is,” said Nina.

“We have a problem, there’s this thing called the Right to Financial Privacy Act. We’d need a subpoena, a search warrant. I could start that rolling if I had an open case going…”

He reached for the phone again and called a college friend in Stillwater who ran a travel agency and who owed him a few favors. Broker explained to Don Larson at Larson’s Travel that he might be needing some tap-dancing on the scheduling computer.

Larson asked was it national or international.

Broker winked at Nina and pulled his passport from his back jeans pocket and slapped it down on the table. Casually he told Don to check on two round trips to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Nina laughed and held up her palm for a high five.

Larson reminded him to make sure that his passport was current, to contact the Vietnamese embassy for visas, and to check with the travel clinic at Ramsey Hospital in St. Paul for recommended shots.

Then Broker had him book a Northwest flight to New Orleans from Detroit early tomorrow morning and a return trip to Minneapolis the following morning. He left it to Don to find him a room. And another flight from Detroit back to the Twin Cities for Nina. She could grab a room at the airport Holiday Inn and wait until he returned from New Orleans. Then he asked Larson to expedite two visas. They’d mail the applications to his office. Larson groaned.

Nina checked the slim local yellow pages and found a photo shop that took passport photos. They needed two each for the visa forms. They both sat down and filled out the paperwork.

“Port of entry?” asked Nina.

“Hanoi. Never been there.”

“Purpose of visit?” asked Nina straight-faced.

“Vacation,” said Broker, just as straight-faced.

He winced at his thumb, which ached, and went back to the phone and checked with Tom again. Two more calls had come into the switchboard at the Best Western for Bevode Fret from LaPorte’s number in New Orleans. And Fret had used a police phone to call LaPorte before they took him to the county jail.

Then Broker dug in his closet and dressed casually in a light sports coat, jeans, loafers, and a summer shirt. He tossed an extra shirt, a change of underwear, and a travel kit in his overnight bag and retaped his thumb. He changed from his hideout holster to a break-away shoulder rig that fit neatly under his left armpit and stuffed in the Colt.45.

Nina watched him pack in silence. He set his bag aside and rummaged in his dresser drawers and became agitated. Christ. Did I lose it ? Ha. He took out a pendant on a fine yellow chain. She held out her hand to inspect it.

The tiger tooth was tipped and mounted in yellow metal and discolored from years in the drawer. She pressed her thumbnail into the metal and made a slight dent.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“Luck.” Broker hung it around his neck and tucked it into his shirt. Then he took out his wallet and unfolded the note with Tuna’s scrawled handwriting. He pointed to Trin’s name. “He gave it to me.”

On the way to the airstrip, they stopped at the photo shop, had pictures made, checked in with Jeffords, and left Tuna’s note and LaPorte’s original map and sonar graphic in his safe in a plain envelope. Next they stopped at the post office, where they express mailed the visa forms with their passports to the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, D.C. Broker wanted to stop for a quick haircut but Nina counseled against it. Keep the ponytail. It would fit in better with the New Orleans scene. An hour later they were winging east, skirting the storm over Superior in a Cessna.

It was raining when they landed in Ann Arbor and continued to rain as they cabbed into town. From Nina’s cramped student apartment, Broker reconfirmed his appointment with the warden’s office at Milan. Nina drove her Volkswagen Horizon over the familiar route to the prison. Broker toyed with the tiger tooth through his shirt.

Milan was a three-story brick structure and could have been a big trade school except for the apron of concertina gleaming in the rain on the chain link outer fence and the rifle towers dotting the inner walls.

They signed in at the bubble, a guard station walled by thick bullet-proof glass. Broker showed his badge and checked his weapon. Access into the visitors’ area was regulated from the bubble through a heavy-barred electrically controlled door. Waldo would be escorted through this sally port and patted down by the guards. After the interview he would be strip searched.

Beyond the sally port, Broker detected the low grumble of institutional uneasiness. He believed that a prison was a thousand-eyed animal that could intuit a cop through steel walls. He imagined the malice beading and starting to drip.

Broker had requested extra privacy, so they were led down a corridor past the regular visitors’ rooms. The guard walked them through another locked door and out onto a patio that was like an aviary, surrounded on three sides and partially roofed beyond the overhang with chain link fencing.

The guard jerked his head. “How’s this for out of earshot?”

Broker nodded. The guard pointed to a small table with several chairs in a dry spot out of the rain under an overhang. They walked to the table and waited. Out in the mist, cars with their low beams on slowly traveled a slick black road in the emerald gloom of the Michigan countryside.

Waldo Jenke’s stiff white brushcut scraped the top of the door frame and he oozed toward them with the Silly Putty gait of a Don Martin cartoon from old Mad magazine in size-sixteen tennis shoes. Somewhere around 350 pounds, Broker’s head would just reach and fit into the hollow of the convict’s massive armpit. He wore a freshly laundered baby blue sweatsuit. He had showered recently and Broker could clearly smell corn starch on his skin in the damp air.

He had mild pink eyes and very white skin, a killer albino rabbit who could bench press six hundred pounds. His doughy face was blank. “What’s this about?” he rasped.

Then he saw Nina and his eyes eloquently explored her face and roved her body. She had put on khaki slacks, a Madras blouse, sandals, and a scarf that matched the blouse to conceal the bruises on her throat. Jenke’s eyes stopped on the bruises on her forearms, then they slid down her body and fixed on the hard flesh of her bare ankles. He motioned to the guard watching through the window in the door. The guard entered. Jenke whispered to him. The guard turned to Broker.

“He’s got a book in his cell he wants to give the girl. What do you think?”