The Price of Blood

Nina watched him pack in silence. He set his bag aside and rummaged in his dresser drawers and became agitated. Christ. Did I lose it? Ha. He took out a pendant on a fine yellow chain. She held out her hand to inspect it.

The tiger tooth was tipped and mounted in yellow metal and discolored from years in the drawer. She pressed her thumbnail into the metal and made a slight dent.

“What’s that for?” she asked.

“Luck.” Broker hung it around his neck and tucked it into his shirt. Then he took out his wallet and unfolded the note with Tuna’s scrawled handwriting. He pointed to Trin’s name. “He gave it to me.”

On the way to the airstrip, they stopped at the photo shop, had pictures made, checked in with Jeffords, and left Tuna’s note and LaPorte’s original map and sonar graphic in his safe in a plain envelope. Next they stopped at the post office, where they express mailed the visa forms with their passports to the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, D.C. Broker wanted to stop for a quick haircut but Nina counseled against it. Keep the ponytail. It would fit in better with the New Orleans scene. An hour later they were winging east, skirting the storm over Superior in a Cessna.

It was raining when they landed in Ann Arbor and continued to rain as they cabbed into town. From Nina’s cramped student apartment, Broker reconfirmed his appointment with the warden’s office at Milan. Nina drove her Volkswagen Horizon over the familiar route to the prison. Broker toyed with the tiger tooth through his shirt.

Milan was a three-story brick structure and could have been a big trade school except for the apron of concertina gleaming in the rain on the chain link outer fence and the rifle towers dotting the inner walls.

They signed in at the bubble, a guard station walled by thick bullet-proof glass. Broker showed his badge and checked his weapon. Access into the visitors’ area was regulated from the bubble through a heavy-barred electrically controlled door. Waldo would be escorted through this sally port and patted down by the guards. After the interview he would be strip searched.

Beyond the sally port, Broker detected the low grumble of institutional uneasiness. He believed that a prison was a thousand-eyed animal that could intuit a cop through steel walls. He imagined the malice beading and starting to drip.

Broker had requested extra privacy, so they were led down a corridor past the regular visitors’ rooms. The guard walked them through another locked door and out onto a patio that was like an aviary, surrounded on three sides and partially roofed beyond the overhang with chain link fencing.

The guard jerked his head. “How’s this for out of earshot?”

Broker nodded. The guard pointed to a small table with several chairs in a dry spot out of the rain under an overhang. They walked to the table and waited. Out in the mist, cars with their low beams on slowly traveled a slick black road in the emerald gloom of the Michigan countryside.

24

Waldo Jenke’s stiff white brushcut scraped the top of the door frame and he oozed toward them with the Silly Putty gait of a Don Martin cartoon from old Mad magazine in size-sixteen tennis shoes. Somewhere around 350 pounds, Broker’s head would just reach and fit into the hollow of the convict’s massive armpit. He wore a freshly laundered baby blue sweatsuit. He had showered recently and Broker could clearly smell corn starch on his skin in the damp air.

He had mild pink eyes and very white skin, a killer albino rabbit who could bench press six hundred pounds. His doughy face was blank. “What’s this about?” he rasped.

Then he saw Nina and his eyes eloquently explored her face and roved her body. She had put on khaki slacks, a Madras blouse, sandals, and a scarf that matched the blouse to conceal the bruises on her throat. Jenke’s eyes stopped on the bruises on her forearms, then they slid down her body and fixed on the hard flesh of her bare ankles. He motioned to the guard watching through the window in the door. The guard entered. Jenke whispered to him. The guard turned to Broker.

“He’s got a book in his cell he wants to give the girl. What do you think?”

“Fine,” said Broker.

The guard nodded. “Take a few minutes to fetch it.” He went to the door. They heard him speak to someone in the hall.

Jenke’s watery eyes finished their rove over Nina and then fixed on Broker and stopped at his taped thumb. He studied the discolored, stitched flesh with interest. His blunt rabbit nose nuzzled the scent of the wound.

He smiled slightly. His yellow baby teeth were imbedded in massive gums, like crooked kernels of new corn stuck in a cob of bubble gum.

“You know what this is about,” stated Broker.

“I ain’t saying shit,” Jenke replied with great deliberation. Then, in a display of elaborately guarded reflexes, he removed a single cigarette from the pack in the kangaroo pocket of his sweats and lit it with a plain matchbook. His big white fingers fluttered. Elegantly long, the fingernails were manicured and dusted with talc.

Minutes passed. Nina untied the scarf and retied it. Jenke showed two inches of gum in a horrible grin when he saw the bruises on her throat.

Then he crushed out his smoke and lit another and leaned back, a torpid mountain of flesh. His lips puckered and his chest jerked. Wreaths of smoke rings floated on the damp air and softly tore apart in front of Nina’s face.

“You notice how I talk funny?” he asked her.

“I noticed,” she said evenly.

“Reason is, when I was a kid Andy Devine was my favorite actor. He talked like that because when he was a kid he got stabbed in the throat with a fork.” He grinned. “So I stabbed myself in the throat with a fork.”

The door opened and the guard came through. He had a battered, water-damaged, blue softcover book in his hand. Broker saw the embossed crucifix on the cover and recognized it as an old Armed Forces New Testament. Jenke took the book and said to Broker in a gravel whisper, “Get the screw out of here.”

Broker jerked his head at the guard, who nodded and went through the door and watched through a heavy glass window reinforced with mesh. They were alone on the patio.

As if conveying an object of ceremony, Jenke placed the Bible in the middle of the table. He opened it and pointed to the faded name written on the flyleaf: S. Sgt. James Tarantuna. Again the inquisitive gaze, prompting. Broker nodded.

Jenke opened the Bible to the place marked with the photograph of Nina. Her college graduation picture. He removed the picture and held it face up in his palm. Then he leaned forward.

Jenke smiled and flicked the picture in his long fingers, turning it over with almost magical speed. They both read the note printed on the back in blocky ballpoint pen: If he stole it, why’s he buried with it?

Nina drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Porcupine sweat stabbed the muscles of Broker’s chest where the cool, gold-tipped arc lay, prodding his banging heart.

Buried implied dig as in dry land. That’s what Tuna’s grave-digger fixation was about.

He glanced at Nina and saw the same thought ignite in her eyes. They both crouched forward, ready to race from the prison like it had just caught on fire.

“We’re cool,” said Broker, dry-mouthed.

“Absolutely,” said Nina in a steady voice.

Jenke watched their reaction, not particularly impressed, and then prompted with his eyes. You got it. Broker nodded. Yes. Jenke withdrew the picture and artfully, beyond the guard’s line of sight, tore it into quarters, which he hid in his spacious palm as he raised his cigarette to his lips. Quick as a snake he fingered the pieces into his mouth and methodically chewed and then swallowed. Then he nodded a final time. Their business was concluded. His favor to Jimmy Tuna was discharged. Broker didn’t care to