The Price of Blood

He’d inherited a granite foundation all right, but he hadn’t built anything on it. He’d backed into it like a bunker. Now here was this really big idea inviting him to come out and play.

Damn her.

Broker woke Nina in the parking lot of a roadside bar and grill outside Superior, Wisconsin, and said: “Breakfast.” Inside, he wanted a table in the rear, behind a partition if possible, where he could rest his bandaged hand on top of his head. He ordered pancakes, eggs, sausage, and a large orange juice.

Nina had a vegetarian omelet and black coffee. She ate quickly, efficiently, taking on fuel as her alert eyes scanned the eatery. When Broker had trouble getting his pancakes into bite-sized hunks with only his fork, she leaned over with her knife and fork and cut his food for him.

“Broker, I feel awful. Walking into…”

No she didn’t. In a high-stakes game, she’d go for mission over men every time. She was a Pryce. He was her expendable commodity. “Forget it. Probably would have gone down the same anyway. Guy like Earl.”

Nina sipped her coffee and her eyes tracked the other diners, came back, and rested on Broker’s face. “So what happened to Mike?”

Broker lowered his hand from his head and carefully draped it on the back of a chair. “He took a calculated risk. Then he had an accident and some real bad weather.”

He explained the fix they were in. How gradually, working summers, they’d converted their lakeshore into a cabin resort. Built eight cabins. Mike Broker had quit laying stone and went into the resort business full time at the end of the eighties. Built up a pretty good business, too. Then he got the bug and decided to upgrade everything. He figured if he could put in some improvements he could go highball on a mortgage and use the loan to build a snazzy lodge.

“Last year he got an interim construction loan from the bank. Between ice out and fishing opener he planned to reroof all the cabins and put in new plumbing, Jacuzzis, new wood stoves, some ambitious stonework for a new lodge. Once the improvements were in he’d get a better assessment for a mortgage and use the mortgage money to pay off the construction loan and complete the lodge.

“We had a mild winter so in March he hired a big crew, thinking he could gang up all the work. He was supervising a cement pour and it got away from him. He ruptured himself. And then everything went wrong. When the work crew took him to the hospital a freak straight-line storm tore in and-well, the cabins were exposed, most of the roofs were torn off, and the interiors got clobbered by water damage. The trenching for the plumbing weakened some of the foundations and they washed out.

“He was laid up in the hospital for three months with complications. The guy he hired to help Irene salvage the construction got overextended and the interim loan money ran out. The place was in shambles and Mike lost the whole season. Bills piled up and now the bank’s breathing down his neck. He started out owning a million dollars plus a slice of prime shoreline free and clear and now he could lose it all.”

“I have some money,” she said.

“Do you have a quarter of a million bucks?”

“No,” she said and lowered her eyes for a heartbeat of polite compassion. She came up iron gray and prima facie. He had given her more ammunition. He had a need. She had a plan. It could be desirable. “But I know who does. There should be enough to go around. Smart guy like you could figure out a way to get a little for your bother.”

Broker lost his appetite and tossed his napkin on his unfinished breakfast. She was right behind him, reminding him to take two more antibiotics and some Tylenol, insisting on paying the tab. As they approached the truck she asked for the keys.

“Nah,” said Broker, but then he staggered and his knees misfired and he stood fighting for balance and blinking in the warming sun.

“It’s all hitting you. You’ll put us in a ditch.” She took the keys, opened the rear hatch and arranged his bag and her suitcase and made a pillow of some blankets that were there and ordered him to take a break.

She was right. Broker crawled into the back and stretched out and she helped him get comfortable with his bad hand propped up behind his head on the blankets. Then she leaned over the seat with a road map and said, “It’s been a while.”

“Cross through Duluth, then follow North Sixty-one up the shore.” He stabbed at the map with his good hand. “If I’m not up, wake me before we get to Devil’s Rock.”

The Tylenol filed down the sharp edge of the pain and the sunlight coming through the windows, combined with the pancakes, pulled a drowsy shade down on his fatigue. His eyelids fluttered. The whir of the tires on the road lulled him. Broker was a sound sleeper and never dreamed, so the image he carried into sleep was not manufactured by his unconscious. It was his last thought before he dropped off. Ray Pryce’s square, freckled face. “Don’t sweat it, Phil; I’ll get you out, you can take that to the bank.”

Man, if ever there was a poor choice of words.

Broker lurched awake and bumped his hand as he sat up and saw a familiar line divide sky and water and felt the brisk tonic of lake air coming through the open windows. Superior. They were past Duluth, into the Minnesota Arrowhead. But something was wrong. He immediately put his good hand to the small of his back. Uh-huh. He looked over the seat.

Nina hunched forward slightly, tense behind the wheel with her eyes riveted to the rearview mirror. The Beretta was tucked under her right thigh, the handle angled back where she could grab it easily.

“Not funny,” said Broker.

“I can shoot this thing better than you can. When’s the last time you qualified?”

That pissed him off. “Pull over.”

“The green Saturn, rental plates, staying way back. Been following us since we left Stillwater.”

“Nina.”

Reluctantly, she jerked onto the shoulder in a hail of gravel. She got out and opened the rear hatch. Broker stood up, stretched and looked back down the two-lane highway. A truck with a boat whooshed by. A camper. No green Saturn.

He glared at her, not quite awake. With difficulty, he reholstered his pistol with one hand and got behind the wheel.

“You’re mad at me, huh?” she said.

Broker grimaced in pain when, out of habit, he put his left hand on the wheel as he shifted through the gears. “Why should I be mad at you? You sail into my life and practically get my thumb chewed off. Hell no, I’m not mad at you,” he muttered. Despite the sleep, he still nodded behind the wheel.

She folded her arms across her chest and stared out at Lake Superior. They rode in an intricate silence. He could feel her will tearing laps around him. He recalled that when she was at the University of Michigan she just missed the cut for the women’s Olympic swim team. Free style. Where she developed that great butt and the strong arms. Now he wished she had put all that energy into swimming; put it anywhere except aimed at him.

So he concentrated on the road that curled through rocky bluffs dressed with clinging white cedar and pine. Cresting a broad turn around a rock face, Broker glanced into the rearview and saw the green dot make a turn about a mile back. He stared at Nina. For the third time in ten minutes the right front tire drifted into the shoulder, and the Jeep wrenched as Broker shakily over-corrected.

“You’re a mess,” said Nina.

“I don’t bounce back quite as quick as I used to,” he admitted.

“You need a bath, a meal, and a good night’s sleep. It’ll keep till then but you have to listen to me and not cut me off like you did before.” She glanced over her shoulder. “We don’t have a whole lot of time.”

14

Broker confirmed, as they drove into Devil’s Rock, that a green Saturn with tinted windows and rental plates was trailing them into town. He groaned to himself and remembered something that his mom, the astrology nut, always said about Saturn being the Teacher.

He turned abruptly, wheeled a fast U-turn through the parking lot of Fatty Naslund’s bank, and got behind the