Highway One south of the smoking pile of bricks that had been Quang Tri City. Thousands of refugees and dispirited ARVN soldiers crossed that bridge to an illusion of safety. Then Jimmy Tuna blew it under the first T-54 stupid enough to attempt to cross.
They walked to Hue City with barely a hundred men, all that remained of Trin’s regiment. Back home the public didn’t know. They didn’t care.
The army knew. LaPorte’s Stand added another flourish to his legend. They said he was on a fast track to being General of the Army. A West Point maverick out of New Orleans, he vowed to stay in Vietnam to the very end, with Tuna and Pryce and Col. Trin. And it was at the very end that Broker was invited back into the company of these “Last Dogs” to aid in the Evacuation. And that’s when LaPorte’s career was virtually destroyed and Broker, Tuna, and Trin narrowly missed dying.
Nina’s father brought them all down when he went into business for himself and died in dishonor.
Broker had been briefly stationed at Fort Benning with Ray Pryce and had met his family and had supper at his home. After Pryce’s death, in the awkwardness of youth, and believing that the sins of fathers should not be visited on children, Broker had tried to be a comfort to the dead man’s family when all their other friends shunned them.
After that visit, Nina kept track of him. She’d written long tortured letters to him throughout her adolescence. Then she’d run away from home in Michigan at sixteen, hitchhiked to Minnesota, and presented herself in the midst of Broker’s failing marriage. With her mother’s permission, he gave her shelter for the entire summer before her senior year in high school. J.T. Merryweather pointed out that the gawky teenage girl was the straw that broke the bitch’s back and sank Broker’s marriage. J.T. thought it was a good thing-Broker got free and Nina straightened out. For a while.
Smart as hell, she finished her undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan in three years. Broker attended her graduation. Nobody was surprised when she squared away the huge chip on her shoulder and enlisted in the army. The new volunteer army required some of the old action and needed a certain kind of young person to stiffen its ranks. The kind of kid who’ll walk out there and stick her finger in some roadkill. Nina had been like that at twenty-one.
Cards came at Christmas and always on his birthday. And he’d read about her and seen her on the network news after Desert Storm.
Then, last January, she flipped out again and emerged like a Valkyrie, riding a blizzard that roared in from Wisconsin.
Unable to locate him, she had pestered J.T., who, in an uncharacteristic lapse, gave in and passed on Broker’s Stillwater number-a mistake-because he was using the house to set up a ring of outlaw bikers. So he met her in a restaurant in Hudson, Wisconsin, a little to the south and across the St. Croix River. She had driven straight through the storm, rounding Chicago from Ann Arbor, where she was going to graduate school.
She was an obsessed, compulsive mess.
She’d had two severe blows in two years. Her unpleasant exit from the army, then her mother’s death. Leukemia.
She didn’t talk about that. Instead, she was back in the past, fixated on her father. She talked about “the cover-up.”
And Broker explained patiently; he’d been there when it happened and at the classified hearings afterwards. He was no fan of any organization, certainly not the U.S. Army, but the investigation had been thorough. He couldn’t get through to her. From the time that she was a little girl, Nina believed fanatically that the army had it wrong. Now she added a new twist. She believed her dad had been scapegoated by Cyrus LaPorte.
It was a hard sell. In Broker’s book, Caesar’s wife was more reproachable than Cyrus LaPorte.
But Nina had made contact with Jimmy Tuna, who had failed big time as a civilian and had killed a guard and wounded several bystanders during a bungled bank robbery in New York in 1976. He was tried and sentenced to twenty to thirty in the Milan Federal Penitentiary in Michigan. He’d been there nineteen years. Last January Nina had “discovered” him.
She had expected Broker to drop everything and come to Michigan-he could get an interview with Tuna, she said. She had this deranged notion that Tuna would only talk to him, Broker, his former comrade in arms.
And him thinking. Twenty years, Nina. Twenty goddamn years ago. In plain language, Broker had told her to grow up. She called him a “chickenshit bastard” and stormed off. Watching her leave he had to admit that she had grown up. He also discovered that she had an effect on him. She had this way of getting under his skin.
Broker sat up in bed and groaned, and not because of his aching thumb. He definitely didn’t want to deal with it. He had other problems. It had levels. It involved his core beliefs. No fucking way.
Morning was a renewal of small engines. Lawnmowers and a chainsaw growled somewhere-the first green, gasoline, and grass-scented blast of summer. A rectangle of sunlight fell through the open hospital-room window and rapped him on the forehead. He opened his fogged eyes and smelled coffee. Nina held the cup to him. She had changed out of her trashy outfit and had washed her face. Now she wore faded tomboy jeans, a washed-out green cotton blouse with ruffles, and beat-up tennis shoes. A storm of tired freckles prickled her obvious hangover. He looked at her and some perverse part of his brain that lacked common sense was hearing “Green-sleeves.”
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“All right.” Broker’s wooden tongue batted furball words. He took the cup in his right hand.
“Good,” said Nina as she looked him over like a piece of busted equipment, estimating its longevity.
Then she had to be questioned by ATF while Broker debriefed with Ed Ryan. When Ed left, they cleaned and splinted and rebandaged the thumb. He received a prescription for an antibiotic the doctor affectionately called “gorrillacilian.” The doctor told him he could ease the pain by putting his hand on his head. The stitches could come out in two weeks. He should have full use of the thumb in two months. The knuckle joint and tendons were basically intact. The problem was infection.
They released Broker from the hospital at nine A.M. An unmarked squad car drove them to a pharmacy, where he filled his prescription, then to the sheriff’s office in the new brick county-government complex. They brought him in through the garage and up a back stairwell so that no one would see him.
10
When Broker started as a St. Paul cop, his mother, Irene, had expressed disapproval that he’d misconstrued all the lore she’d fed him with her mother’s milk. “Just…contrary,” she said sadly. “You go to Vietnam when everybody else is leaving and now this.” His dad, Mike, had scratched his cheek and said, “I think she wanted you to be a college professor. Something like that.”
Broker hadn’t worn a uniform for almost twelve years. From the beginning he’d excelled at working alone. His flair for one-man undercover investigations resulted in invidious Serpico jokes and a detective’s badge and eventually a unique job offer and promotion to detective lieutenant from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
He targeted drugs and illegal weapons. A free agent, he putted through Minnesota counties in his handyman’s truck. He coordinated with sheriff’s departments, county task forces, the attorney general’s office and the feds, usually DEA and ATF.
Automatic military assault weapons were showing up on the street in Minnesota. Broker had been using Washington County, east of the Twin Cities on the Wisconsin border, as a base because Rodney lived there. On this case, he reported to the Washington County, east of the Twin Cities on the Wisconsin border, as a base because Rodney lived there. On this case, he reported to the Washington County sheriff.
As he climbed the stairs he took a deep breath. He hadn’t been in the BCA office in St. Paul for two years. He had never set foot in this county building beyond the garage, where he kept his personal vehicle. He had an unreasonable reaction to offices that bordered on claustrophobia.
It was worse now that the jargon and techniques of corporate voodoo had crept into police work. Now they had “solvability tables” to evaluate cases. His dad, who had been driven out of law enforcement by paperwork, called it flatassitis. Male Brokers were genetically resistant to it.
He averted his face from the security camera mounted in the corridor and went through the locked door into
