Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

“All gone now.”

“Yeah.”

Nina tossed her head and aimed a puff of breath at her mussed hair. “Oh I don’t know, I just got rolled around by a little of that aura.” She grinned.

Broker slowly clipped her chin with affectionate knuckles. Nina took his cigarette and rolled over and dragged experimentally, holding the smoke between her thumb and index finger.

“In a funny way it’s guys like my dad who held me up in the army. The dinosaurs,” she said, handing back the smoke. “Just a bunch of old white men bitching about upper-body strength.”

“Powell wasn’t an old white man, he didn’t want you guys in the foxholes.”

“He’s wrong. Hell, I’m not a fanatic. I know that most women can’t handle it. But what pisses me off is that they won’t admit that most men can’t handle it either.” She laughed. “John Wayne is still the macho symbol of the soldier. Did you ever see John Wayne run in a movie. No. He always walked.”

“I kinda liked the way he walked.” Broker grinned.

“He was tippy and overweight. He would have dropped dead on a PT test.” She turned to him frankly. “Look at me, what do you see?”

“A damn good-looking female human,” said Broker playfully.

“Right. A female human who weighs about the same as Audie fucking Murphy.” She set her jaw. “Maybe I’ll make it, maybe I won’t. Whoever makes it, she won’t be off the PC funny farm that took over after Tailhook…

“In the end we’ll do it the old-fashioned way.” She sat up and linked her arms around her knees. “It’s just arithmetic. More and more of us are in forward positions. And we’ll be in some dead-end posting and there’ll be a total clusterfuck-like the Rangers in Somalia. When the body parts stop dripping from the trees, the pile of dead ovaries will be bigger than the pile of dead testicles. That’s how you get a soldier’s attention. With a bucket of blood. We know about blood. Hell, we should all be awarded Purple Hearts when we get our first period.”

Broker chose his words carefully. “I think it’s older. We decided we can get dirty in wars and we always lie about how fucked up it really is. If women start getting dirty the same way, who’s going to raise the kids?”

She licked her index finger and chalked a number one in the dark. Her lips curved down. “So how was I? Dirty?”

“Nina…”

Her lips formed a smile but she wasn’t smiling. “I shot two Republican Guards no farther away than it is to that doorway. They came around a burning track. They hesitated. I didn’t. I’ve never felt bad about those two guys in the moral sense. But sometimes I wish I’d had a kid before I killed my first man in combat.”

The Jericho eyes were back and the pliant lover of twenty minutes ago departed her like vapor. She stood up and walked to a chair where she’d thrown her luscious black dress. She picked it up and held it for a moment and rocked it against her cheek. Then she dropped it to the floor and when she turned to him again she wore her nakedness like a tailored Class-A uniform. She planted her knuckles on her hips again and teased, “So, now are you going to tell me where you got the hickey on your neck?”

Broker woke up and stretched. For a wonderful half second he drowsed with an adolescent languor until an odor smacked him that was about as far from the memory of lovemaking as you can get: Hoppe’s gun-cleaning solvent.

A shower had knocked the quaff from Nina’s hair and her face was bare of makeup. She wore baggy jeans, a pebble-gray T-shirt, and busted tennis shoes. He sat up and squinted. Probably changed to the bigger jeans because he’d said that dress was too tight at the store…

Her pant legs were drenched almost to the knees. Cockleburs stuck to them. Wet grass and bits of brush were pasted to her rubber soles. He reached for his car keys on the bedside table. Gone.

“What the hell?”

“I took the Jeep up into the hills. Ran a few rounds through the.45 to see where it shoots,” she said mildly as she held up the pistol. “A foot off to the left at eight o’clock over approximately fifty yards…”

Broker rubbed his eyes. “Let me have that cannon. Take the Beretta, it’s lighter.”

Nina hefted the Colt’s weight and said fondly, “Uh-uh, this lump of iron is the longest continuing in-service military handgun in the world for a reason.”

She sat at the table by the kitchenette surrounded by bore brushes, patches and plastic bottles, little wire brushes, cleaning rods, and a box of pistol ammunition. His Beretta lay to one side, obviously oiled. Her fingers flew, reassembling the Colt. The slide ratcheted forward with a springing snap. She fixed him with a direct, scrubbed morning stare. “Last night doesn’t mean I’m your squaw, you got that?”

“C’mon-” said Broker.

“It could complicate taking care of business, agreed?”

“Just a weak moment,” said Broker.

“A choice I made. Nothing weak about it,” she said with finality.

Broker made a face and needed to brush his teeth. Grumbling, he headed to the bathroom.

At the sink he wondered how he would get his Colt back. Should have brought the shotgun. Maybe they should stop on the road and buy one. He’d never relied on handguns, which he considered wildly inaccurate in the hands of normal people-he recalled the army pistol-shooting trophy in Nina’s apartment in Ann Arbor-unless you were an obsessive-compulsive nut who spent thousands of hours at the range. Which she could very well be.

Broker continued to grumble through a shower and a shave. When he came out, he dressed quickly. They packed their bags, clipped on their security belts, jammed guns in their waistbands, left their T-shirts untucked to cover them, and walked from the fancy room without looking back.

Broker jump-started his heart with three thimbles of espresso on the deck of the fern-elegant pastry shop next to the resort. As Nina had a vegetable omelet he watched the pewter sky heat up over the lake. With uncharacteristic ennui he wondered if he’d ever see snow again. Then they hit the road. Nobody tailed them as far as he could determine.

Nina read aloud from Tuna’s prison jacket while Broker monitored the rearview. “Graduate degree in business administration from the University of Michigan extension service. Two years of Vietnamese. Graduate courses in international investment. Tuna and I were going to school together.”

“Biding his time, getting ready for something. He always was a tricky guy but-”

“But what?”

“He always had bad luck.”

“No shit.”

In an hour they had crossed through Duluth and Superior, Wisconsin, and were speeding south on the road they’d originally taken up to Mike and Irene’s. The early morning haze burned off and humidity hugged the fields and tree lines like a lazy bejeweled python. Barefoot, early summer day, when the yellowjacket stings you in the soft flesh under your instep in the tall wet grass.

They didn’t talk much. The map lay open on Nina’s lap. Twenty years telescoped for Broker. Twenty years in which he had failed at a marriage and put a lot of guys and two or three women in jail. Not much to show. He glanced at Nina, who stared straight ahead. He wondered if some of her concentration was morning-after blues. Passion and spontaneity had overruled precaution last night.

He smiled tightly, remembering his mother’s maxim: Our only real job here on earth is to replace ourselves .

But the fact was, when you’re driving toward who knows what with loaded guns in your pants, you’re a long way from workaday hedges against reality like condoms and diaphragms. Seeming to sense his thoughts she turned and asked, “How are you doing, Broker?”