3
He turned off at The Hinckley Exit and went down the road until he saw the cantilevers of the Grand Casino flared against the fir and spruce. The Ojibwa’s Revenge, it looked like the Flying Nun’s hat getting ready to take off. Just for lunch, he told himself as he wheeled into the lot. He walked into a campfire cloud of tobacco smoke and felt the electronic surge of the slots.
The patrons were mostly weathered retirees; smokers with lined faces from fifties television. Like an indigenous cargo cult, they bent to the machines in disciplined ranks and made a collective wish. If they all hit the right combination, VE and VJ Day would come pouring back in a silver avalanche.
He put a few dollars’ worth of quarters in the poker slots, cast an envious eye at the high stakes black jack tables, lost his quarters, had a hamburger and a vanilla shake, and left the casino with a sugary jingo-jango rushing in his veins.
Back on the road he headed east into the wooded back country. Out of habit he worked a jigsaw on the gravel roads, weaving in and around some lakes. He fiddled with the radio, lost the signal from the Cities and finally turned it off and just cruised, kicking up a trail of dust. He skirted the St. Croix State Forest and came up on his destination, a small general store and tavern that Tabor owned on a crossroads. He rolled by the store, checking the cars parked outside. Tabor’s new Ford Bronco, several pickups. He turned around at a logging road and on the way back he tested the pager to make sure it was working. Then he parked in front of the tavern.
Jules Tabor sat at the wheel of the Bronco. He motioned to Broker to pull his rig around to the back of the building. Tabor parked in front of a large pole barn. He got out, worked a combination lock, pushed open the doors, and waved Broker in.
Tabor pulled the door closed behind Broker’s truck. Broker got out and they shook hands. Broker always noticed this archaic ritual. Most of the people he dealt with were way past guaranteeing a deal with a handshake.
Tabor had a face like rare prime rib as befits a K-Mart country squire and member of the Chamber of Commerce. Broker figured that, like a lot of serious right-wingers, Tabor had solid half-truths pumping in his big fatty heart. His political allies, unfortunately, had leaked out of a Bosnian Serb circle jerk. Broker took it in stride. He’d dealt with passive-aggressive hippies and rabid pseudo-anarchists, lethal pint-sized Hmong mafia, and frothing Black nationalists. Geekers, all of them, with their IQs wired directly into their assholes, as far as Broker was concerned. So now here was potbellied Jules Tabor with a graying mass of hair and skidmarks of clandestine reverse John Brown zeal streaked in his blue eyes. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt and a tie with a trout on it and his chest pocket bulged with pens clipped into a plastic holder stamped with the logo of his car dealership.
Tabor’s eyes swelled with gun hormones.
“Got it right here in the back,” said Broker. He dropped his tailgate and rummaged in his tools. Tabor winced disapprovingly at the disorder. Broker opened the hinged door to his false bottom compartment and slid out the mean black rifle and handed it to Tabor, who held out his arms like a man picking up his grandson for the first time.
“I gave him your money. It’s all yours,” said Broker.
Tabor cradled the rifle/launcher in his arms and looked at Broker in anticipation. Broker handed over the three rounds for the launcher.
“Those are high explosive, you can get illumination, smoke, and buckshot,” said Broker.
“I got to try it out,” said Tabor.
Broker rubbed his hands together and warily glanced around.
“I mean I’ll take it back on my land. Give me an hour,” said Tabor. It was a statement not a request.
“You, ah, know how to load it?” asked Broker.
Tabor grinned. “Got a manual.” He wrapped his new possession in the blanket, stuffed his pockets with 40mm high-explosive rounds and left the pole barn.
Broker closed the doors and waited a few minutes to make sure he was alone. Then he opened the door to his truck, rummaged under the seat, and pulled out a frayed copy of the
There was an old easy chair in the barn and he sat there, drinking the rest of the coffee from his Thermos, reading with one ear cocked. Twenty minutes later he heard three spaced, faint crumps. Half an hour after that, tires crunched outside the building. Broker stuck his pocketbook back under his seat.
Now for the hard part. “You want the other five and the ammo it’ll be three thousand apiece and another thousand for two hundred rounds of HE. So sixteen grand. Then you guys split my fee. At my place. Tomorrow,” said Broker.
Tabor squinted. “I thought it was like this time, you carry.”
Broker shook his head. “I agreed to connect you. Now he’s seen your money and you’ve seen a gun. I don’t want to carry any more money or guns on this deal.”
Zeal departed from Tabor’s blue eyes. A shrewd car dealer took over. “I don’t know-”
“Look, I drive up the interstate with a truck full of machine guns and grenade rounds, it’s a risk.”
Tabor folded his big arms over his barrel chest. “I don’t like going down to the Cities-”
“Stillwater ain’t the Cities.” Broker worried the gravel with the toe of his boot. “We got a problem. Look, there’s other people interested in this stuff.”
“Who?”
Broker shrugged. “I don’t know, some gangs over north in Minneapolis, so my guy says.”
“You’d sell military weapons to the niggers?” Tabor frowned.
“Well, naturally I don’t want to…”
Tabor sucked on a tooth, reached in his hip pocket, and took out a pocket calendar, flipped it open, sucked his tooth again. “What time tomorrow?”
“Around two in the afternoon.”
“Sixteen thousand,” said Tabor.
“In cash.”
“Okay. And I’ll bring the two guys who want to meet your supplier. Like we talked about.”
Broker shrugged carefully.
“What time was that?” asked Tabor.
“Two P.M. sharp.”
Broker winced because Tabor, the small businessman, was actually writing it down in his calendar. Probably in detail. Five machine guns, meet Broker, 2 P.M. in Stillwater. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
“Deal,” said Tabor, extending his large, firm hand. Feeling odd, Broker took the handshake and got back in his truck. He left Tabor standing in his pole barn rotating an empty 40mm shell casing in his large fingers with that weird light in his eyes like he was going to free the oppressed white slaves.
Things were going so well that Broker briefly entertained the notion that he was in step with luck. He couldn’t resist stopping at the casino on the return trip. In ten minutes the dollar slots gulped down a hundred bucks of his own money in a hiccuping slur of electronic chimes. So much for luck. Grumbling, he walked to a phone and dialed.
A very ill-humored black voice answered. “What?”
“Rodney’s on for noon. The buyers are on for two P.M.”
“Check. What’s with the bells. Where the fuck are you?”
“The Grand Casino.”
“You been out there too long, Desperado.”
At ten in the evening, Broker sat in his living room in front of the TV and wrote down the winning Powerball numbers and methodically checked his thirty tickets.
Thirty losers. He tore up the tickets and threw them at the TV. Then he reached for the phone and punched a 218 area code and a number north of Duluth.
“Cheryl, it’s Broker. Let me talk to Fatty.”
