The Price of Blood

Fatty Naslund’s voice came on the line as lean and trim as cold hard cash. “Yeah, Broker, I figured you’d be calling.”

“Where we at, Fatty?”

“Thirty days. I can’t hang my ass out there exposed longer than that on a quarter mil note.”

“Thanks, man, how’s my dad doing with it?”

“Mike? You know. Stoic. Like his son.”

4

Rodney had come and gone, but not without some difficulty. So far it was running smoothly. Broker hummed “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” an old habit from the dope deal days, as he straightened up the living room.

Two in the afternoon. Sunlight filtered through the dusty venetian blinds on the living room windows and cut mote-filled stripes across his couch. He was proud of his couch, a garish fabric design that resembled burning tires in black, yellow, and green. He had found it on the I-94 shoulder about a mile west of the Hudson Bridge. Must have fallen off a Goodwill truck. Broker was on it, had it in the back of his truck in a minute flat.

He had a Goodwill armchair to go with the couch and that did it for the living room unless you counted the stripped down Harley chopper frame that sat on a poncho with its steel innards neatly arranged around it and smelling faintly of gasoline. And the hunk of marble that perched on a beer case for a coffee table.

And the whole wall of books in cheap pine shelves, used paperbacks, mostly, that he’d bought by the crate from the bookstores that lined Stillwater’s main street.

Besides the five dully gleaming M16A2/203s lined up in a row on the couch and the ammo boxes stacked to the side, the books were the only orderly objects in the whole damn house.

Broker smiled in anticipation. Antsy for it to get over.

Right on time, a brown Econoline van with tinted windows and-hello-Alabama plates pulled to the curb in front of his house and Tabor stepped from the passenger side wearing powdery soft stonewashed jeans and a matching jacket, an oatmeal-colored sweatshirt, and a pair of blinding white Nike crosstrainers. Looks like a coach. Broker tested the battery in his beeper. C’mon, coach, it’s game time, baby.

So Tabor’s buyers were out of state and they packed some muscle. The driver had arms like he juggled railroad ties and a beer-pudding belly filling up a loud red T-shirt. As they came up the steps, Broker read the slogan on the shirt spread around the silhouette of an assault rifle.

MY WIFE YES

MY DOG MAYBE

MY GUN NEVER!

The other guy, who’d been riding in the back of the van, was lean, with close-cropped silvery hair, and he wore a nylon running suit. He carried an attache case. Yes. He was the guy to watch. He looked like he’d been seriously trained at some time in his life and had kept up the habit.

Broker met them on the porch steps. Tabor introduced his companions. Red beer gut was Andy. Running suit was Earl. Earl took Broker’s hand and pierced him with pale blue lifer’s eyes and said “Howdy, pleased to meet you,” in a deeply sincere southern accent.

Earl did not let go of Broker’s hand. He had vicegrips for a forearm and the more Broker saw of Earl the more Tabor looked like a balloon with the air going out of it. Okay, so Earl’s the man. So he wasn’t surprised when Earl gave orders in a quiet drawl. “Andy, you go in there and take a look around.”

Andy nodded. “Most ricky tic, Earl.”

“Hey,” said Broker, breaking Earl’s hold with a sharp twist of his hand, “Tabor, what is this?”

Tabor smiled. “It’s their money.”

So. Okay. Broker wondered if they would try to take him off. In his previous dealings with handshaking Jules Tabor that eventuality had not occurred to him. But Earl was a kind of dangerous cottonmouth with a soft voice and cold swampwater in his veins. What the hell was Earl doing up here in the recently unfrozen north? Why, shopping away from the federal heat down south. Fucking machine guns. Where is my brain. Should have stayed with grass.

Broker and Earl deciphered each other for two minutes and silently agreed; they were natural enemies. Broker’s face was relentlessly northern European, an angular German forging under the lobo eyebrows, with a touch of his mother’s stormy Norwegian melancholy informing his eyes. Earl’s face was a True Believer knot, cracked with stress, yanked way too tight. But Broker detected dangerous reserves of strength seething in Earl’s pale eyes. Like he’d grown up breathing poisonous ideas.

Andy came back to the front door. “He’s all right, Earl, keeps a messy house but seems all right. Stuff’s in on the couch. Nobody else here.”

“Where’s the guy?” Earl asked.

Broker tapped the pager on his belt. “He calls in half an hour, leaves a number. If everything’s cool, he drops by, you meet. I get paid and you go off and develop a business relationship.”

“Suppose that’s sensible,” said Earl. Everyone smiled.

Broker let his surface relax. “You boys had me going for a while there. C’mon in and have a beer.”

That’s when two cars rounded the corner. The first, an airport cab, pulled up right behind the van. With a soft squeal of tires, the second car, a green Saturn, pitched forward on its suspension and suspiciously backed up and disappeared around the block. Everyone halted in mid-stride on Broker’s squeaky porch steps.

He saw who was in the cab and, given a choice, at this precise moment, Broker would have preferred to see a nuclear fireball blossom on the North Hill of Stillwater, Minnesota. And he just fuckin’ knew. His life was about to spectacularly blow up right in his face.

Again.

5

N ina Pryce !

She was intense and she was not bad looking and she had been famous once for a few brief days and she was a goddamned freak who trailed a guidon of tragic purpose. And she was getting out of the airport cab.

Broker groaned. Quicksand. Under his feet.

A pair of seriously athletic thighs and calves hinged by perfect carved knees swung from the car door followed by a lithe young woman in an outrageous apricot miniskirt, sandals, and a flimsy tan top that had these string things holding it up. Bare shoulders and a bronze cap of short hair caught spears of sunlight.

Her big, gray Jericho eyes were danger deep and nothing but intelligent-problem was, they fed current into a challenge to the world to knock them down. And he saw the spidery, brand-new skull and crossbones tattoo that grinned a merry fuck you on the supple, defined muscle of her left shoulder. And-aw God-she stood up with that sinewy ramrod presence that couldn’t be disguised in the trashy good- time-gal duds she wore.

There is a quality that is scary enough in a man. Broker found it mildly terrifying in an attractive woman. The Germans, naturally, had a word for it. They called it Stramm.

The rest of the world called it military bearing.

She’d be about twenty-nine now. Five eight and put together, in her case, like a brick latrine. As she paid the fare and slung her bag over her shoulder and hauled out a suitcase, Tabor, Earl, and Andy put their eyes on Broker. Broker smiled. It was his innate smile and revealed his soul and the lessons of his life in a flicker through the grate of his rugged features. The smile said: Fuck me dead.

Broker did the only thing he could do, he laughed.

He’d always thought that she was nice to look at as long as she didn’t move. Nina in motion suggested the Waspish grace of training events that involved guns, swords, and horses. And she was moving and she glowed with