Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

“Why in the hell do you stay around here?”

Hiram shrugged and rolled his cigar stub across his broad lips and said frankly, “Mr. Cyrus and I attached, like a cancer. Problem run in both our families.”

Broker slipped his hand in his pocket and palmed one of Nina’s hundred-dollar bills. He slid it across the table until their fingers touched. Hiram smoothly drew his hand back and dropped it in his lap.

“Royale LaPorte’s hand really in the safe in the study?” asked Broker.

Hiram’s eyes popped, polished hard as marbles. A gleam of fire deep inside. “Marie Laveau pack that dead hand in a special jar way back. Mr. Cyrus check on it every morning.”

“Where’s the key?”

“Never leaves his body. Wear it on a cord around his neck.”

“He a sound sleeper?”

“Like out cold when he been drinking and lately he been drinking, especially with Mr. Bevode gone.”

Another hundred-dollar bill moved swiftly across the table.

“That kid, Virgil, he any good?” Broker asked.

“Little dope fiend. Surprise Mr. Cyrus let him have a loaded gun. His big brother slap him up alongside the head more than once for blowin’ that toot.”

“So, not real alert.”

“Not after midnight.”

Broker stood up and walked to the small rectangular louvered window and cranked it open a few inches more and squinted at a patch of fitful sky. “Storm tonight,” he said.

Hiram grinned. “Big one. Probably tip over some of them brick and mortar graves around town. Scatter bones. Dogs be busy in the morning.”

“What would scare the shit out of Mr. Cyrus?”

Hiram grinned broadly and extended his withered right hand and delicately squeezed the shiny clip of bone on the chain around Broker’s neck. He winked elaborately.

Broker tucked the tiger tooth charm into his shirt, buttoned his sports coat, and reached over and shook Hiram’s hand.

The old man opened his palm and saw a third folded hundred. He leaned back and grinned. “Be nice if Mr. Cyrus and Mr. Bevode be gone and Miss Lola be in charge in this house. Maybe we chuck that plastic shit and be polishing the silverware again.”

Broker was out the door, pushing through the broiling kitchen onto the lawn but there was no fresh air, just a poisonous steam of magnolias and azaleas against the sticky iron lilacs. Head down, he shouldered through the blurred watercolors of the wedding party and out the front gate onto St. Charles and, from the corner of his eye, he caught the arc of a flung bouquet flash against the leafy swaying air and the outstretched hands and then, as he walked away, he laughed hilariously when he heard the happy applause.

There was music, but he didn’t hear it. He walked the cramped streets of the French Quarter, looking for a barbershop. The grillwork sagged from the galleries like twisted metal guts and the people looked like lost groupie-pilgrims searching for a rock concert. A tattooed man walked by carrying a full-grown python over his arms and shoulders. Broker shook his head. Warm weather all year round was like life support for a lot of people that a good blizzard would weed out.

He grabbed a pay phone in a shopping arcade and dialed Nina’s number in Ann Arbor. Busy. Sweat ran in his eyes. He was a boreal hunter in the near tropics and right now he was shedding his winter coat. Melting. He spied a barber pole and recalled that barbers were originally surgeons. The pole stood for bloody ribbons. Bandages.

He told the barber to take it up above the ears. The dark ponytail went in one crisp snip. Not for Lola. He wasn’t going to truck all that hair through Vietnam in the summer.

If Nina found the way to Jimmy.

He hoped her copper friend was on the job. It occurred to him that if she were here she’d veto what he was going to do. Nina would put Lola off limits in two seconds flat.

But he needed a backdoor into LaPorte. Even if it swung both ways. He smiled. A handle…

The barber sheared off his burrs and Broker emerged like scrubbed bark, clean, eyebrows trimmed, but still rough to the touch. Then came steaming towels. After today, he owed himself a close shave. So he sighed and closed his eyes and enjoyed the taut scrape of the straight razor on his throat.

He allowed himself a minute of enjoyment, then he asked the barber for the Yellow Pages. As the barber massaged tonic around his temples Broker called the nearest Hertz rental and arranged for a car.

Then he hailed a cab, went to Hertz, and filled out the paperwork on the vehicle, hit the street, and parked in the nearest mall. He took some of Nina’s money shopping.

In a sporting goods store he bought a pair of black Nike crosstrainers, a baggy pair of dark cotton slacks, a loose long-sleeve matching shirt, two pairs of dark cotton gloves, a cheap charcoal gray raincoat, and a pair of thin black rubber galoshes. He searched for a heavy, strong-stitched grip bag. Finally he bought a stout black bowling bag. Then he went to a hardware store and picked up a small Wonder Bar and a sturdy razor-sharp scissors. On the way out he grabbed a couple of souvenir T-shirts for Mike and Irene.

No phone messages back at the hotel. He called Nina’s apartment in Ann Arbor. Busy again. He dug the note from his wallet where he’d noted Nina’s flight from Detroit to Minneapolis-St.Paul and called J.T.’s machine. He left another message reminding his old partner to meet her.

He took a long cool shower. Then he changed the dressing on his thumb, doused it in hydrogen peroxide, and bandaged it loosely.

He took a Jax beer from the small refrigerator under the TV and lay on the four-poster bed and talked for an hour on the phone to Northwest Airlines, rescheduling his departure. During long periods on hold, he watched the fan turn slowly on the high ceiling. Then he called Nina again. Still busy.

He picked up the TV remote and scanned the cable channels and happened on an installment of Prime Suspect , the BBC series featuring Helen Mirren as Inspector Jane Tennyson. He opened another beer and watched for a while.

The thing about this British cop show was: no guns . Intricate storyline, snappy dialogue you had to pay attention to, and no guns. Broker stretched out, sipped his beer, and wondered what it would be like to catch a bad guy who spoke in complete sentences. And no guns.

He turned off the TV and watched the late afternoon shadows ink in the curlicue grillwork on the balconies across the street. Fireflies of faraway lightning flickered through the tall gallery windows.

Was Lola for real? Did it matter? She was right about one thing: No one would report that gold to the police if it went missing.

He reached for the phone and called Nina in Ann Arbor. This time he got through.

“I miss you,” she said with wispy intuition. She sounded like a woman who had been sitting watching a phone, except she’d been on the damn phone for hours.

“Down here everybody’s smiling and we’re all lying through our teeth. I called but your phone’s been busy.”

“I called some people.”

“What kind of people?” He sat up.

“Some army folks. Don’t worry. I’m being cool. Just trying to get a line on the MIA office in Hanoi. I intend to recover Dad’s remains.”

Jesus, Broker knuckled his forehead. “Is that cop still with you?”

“I’m drowning in testosterone and guns. Tomorrow I’ll be knee deep in his pals from the bank all the way to the airport.”

“Okay. Call J.T. and confirm your flight and arrival time. He’ll go with you to the Holiday Inn. I’ll meet you there tomorrow afternoon.”

“What are you going to do?”

“LaPorte wants to talk to me in the morning so,” he paused to hurtle a canyon of omission, “tonight I’ll treat myself to a meal and maybe catch some jazz.”