Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

Tony slumped behind the wheel. “He’s got money saved. He could’a gone to the Mayo.” They got out of the truck and Sporta pointed. A child’s blue plastic sled, with a length of yellow plastic clothesline attached, lay in the brush at the edge of the swamp. “Put the cooler in there and drag it.” Broker wondered if that’s how Sporta had ferried Jimmy Tuna across.

“The road picks up again after fifty yards, goes through a little oak woods and then there’s a field that leads up to the cabin. When you come out of that woods he might be watching you through a rifle scope so don’t move sudden.” Sporta grumbled, “If he’s awake. Sometimes he messes his pants. It ain’t pretty up there.”

Broker and Nina waited beside the cooler while Sporta took a gun case from the back of his truck, pulled out a 12-gauge pump, and loaded it. “I’ll be down a little ways back from the gate. I’ll come back in two hours and meet you here.” He climbed into his truck, leaned the shotgun out the passenger side window, and studied them. “I hope this is worth it. For him and for you.” Shaking his head, Tony Sporta backed down the road. They waited until the sound of his engine had receded in the distance.

“Turn around,” Nina said crisply, unsnapping her jeans’ button and starting the zipper.

Broker faced away with a smile, listened to a rustle of denim. A huge, snow white sanitary napkin bounced off his leg and tumbled into the water. “Christ, that looks like a diaper,” he quipped.

“Very funny,” said Nina. “You can turn around now.”

He did. With a broad grin he stared at the large pistol in her hand. “I gotta ask? Did it involve penetration?”

“No. It’s all angles and knowing how to take advantage of the terrain. Forget it. The Freudian implications will just screw up your mind.” Nina possessively jammed the Colt into her waist band and pulled down her shirt. They placed the cooler in the sled and waded into the swamp.

Knee-deep in the gluey sediment and halfway across, they heard a sharp slapping report. They both ducked. Jumpy. And then Broker pointed to a channel of moving water and a broad pool ahead of them. A whiskery, beady-eyed knob cruised like a U-boat. “Beaver alerting,” he said.

They continued to slog. He blinked away sweat, more dripped from his fingers. The beaver had plugged him into the humid bog, sensitive to every soft buzz and chirr, to the ticking eyes of insects. He studied the shadow fan of spring ferns along the far bank, the tremble of pitcher plants that strained like flat green elephant ears from a punky log, the dry rattle of reeds. A slick orange blight of mushrooms pushed through the limp bark of a white birch and he thought: cancer.

Broker lifted one foot from the warm, soaking tickle of the mud and heard the suction pop and echo through the reeds. A brood of black ducks squirted from some bulrushes and the mama duck’s doting quacks sounded suddenly foreboding. He scanned the grove of red oaks beyond the swamp grass where the road emerged from the water. The beaver was closer to the far shore than to them.

“I think you’d better give me the pistol,” he said to Nina.

“No fucking way,” she said.

Broker clicked his teeth and wondered if someone could have gotten in ahead of them. And if so, how? They climbed back on dry land and left the sunlight. He lifted the cooler from the plastic sled and carried it in front of his chest and winced at the slosh of ice cubes on glass at his every step. Nina fell in close behind him. Halfway through the oak trees he heard the musty crunch of a boot come down on dry acorn shells.

The laconic southern voice called out, “Hi there.”

Two of them. they stepped from the cover of the trees about sixty yards ahead, camouflaged in the shadows at the edge of the grove. Through the foliage, Broker could see an open field dance in the breeze, purple with wild alfalfa and red clover and a spray of wildflowers. The corner and the shingled roof of a cedar plank cabin at the top of the hill was just visible.

The one who had called to them resembled Danny Larkins’s description from Ann Arbor: lean, weathered, sunglasses. He stood casually in a faded blue workshirt and jeans, with his hands on his hips, next to the trunk of a thick oak tree. A pack frame leaned against the tree. A pair of binoculars dangled from a low branch.

The other one did not fit Larkins’s description as ordinary. He was skinny as the rickets and wore a gray T-shirt and a tractor cap. He covered them offhand with a Mini-14 from which curved a thirty-round magazine.

It was turning into a regular plague of rednecks.

“Stay behind me,” said Broker to Nina, who had embraced his back in feigned terror.

“I need five more yards,” she whispered and nudged him. Awkwardly, he held the cooler in his raised hands and stumbled forward. Please, God, don’t let her try something stupid with the handgun . In this bad light. At extreme range. In a semi-automatic rifle’s sights. Sweat electrified his eyes and the alfalfa and sweet clover beckoned, ravishing, normal, in the sun. Their hot perfume struck him dizzy. He heard the crickets, bees. They were so damn close.

“Put the cooler down to the side and stay in front of me,” she whispered in a husky high-diver’s voice.

Very slowly Broker set down the plastic box. Then he took another uncertain step forward and raised his hands.

“That’s good. Relax. We ain’t going to hurt you,” called out Sunglasses. “If you’re carrying anything under those shirts, now’d be the time to drop it. Real slow.”

Broker shook his head. Raised his hands higher. Hoping that his hands going up would distract the rifleman from the way his knees trembled in a tense crouch.

“It’s like this,” called Sunglasses. “We know he’s up there and we been waiting for you to show. We got a feeling he won’t talk to us.”

“How’d you find us?” Broker called back. He looked around, shook his head.

“We hired one of those electronic nerd guys. We tapped your telephone, you dumb shit. Then we went to the cheese factory and followed the fat man in last night. We camped out with the fuckin’ bugs so we ain’t real cordial. Now, listen up. What I got in mind is the girl stays with us and you go up and talk. You know what the general wants.”

“How’s Bevode doing?” yelled Broker. Talking to buy some time. Sporta said that Tuna had a rifle. These guys didn’t seem to know. If he could get up there…

“Cousin Bevode’s looking forward to seeing you, that’s for sure. He wanted to be here but he had to go to the dentist.”

“You! Don’t move there,” yelled the one with the rifle.

“ Nina ,” whispered Broker, sensitive to the faint rustle behind him.

“Get clear,” said Nina in a cold, determined voice.

“Honey,” yelled Tractor Hat in an amused drawl as he brought his rifle up, “put that popgun down. You can’t hit shit at this distance and I can pick your titties off.”

“Move fast,” shouted Nina and he knew she was going to do it and all he could do was follow the play. Broker dived. From the corner of his eye he caught a flash of her coming to a point, hair spilling forward, tongue stuck in the right corner of her mouth, as she took a basic bull’s-eye shooter’s stance: body turned forty-five degrees away from her target, right hand sweeping the big Colt up. Extending. Steadying.…Before he hit the dirt he cringed when he heard the two shots: a close-by whap from the Colt and the crack and simultaneous, air-tunneling shock wave of a rifle bullet…

Passing above them, snapping branches through the overhead.

Sunglasses yelped in a thoroughly amazed voice, “Holy Shit!”