The Price of Blood

just screw up your mind.” Nina possessively jammed the Colt into her waist band and pulled down her shirt. They placed the cooler in the sled and waded into the swamp.

Knee-deep in the gluey sediment and halfway across, they heard a sharp slapping report. They both ducked. Jumpy. And then Broker pointed to a channel of moving water and a broad pool ahead of them. A whiskery, beady- eyed knob cruised like a U-boat. “Beaver alerting,” he said.

They continued to slog. He blinked away sweat, more dripped from his fingers. The beaver had plugged him into the humid bog, sensitive to every soft buzz and chirr, to the ticking eyes of insects. He studied the shadow fan of spring ferns along the far bank, the tremble of pitcher plants that strained like flat green elephant ears from a punky log, the dry rattle of reeds. A slick orange blight of mushrooms pushed through the limp bark of a white birch and he thought: cancer.

Broker lifted one foot from the warm, soaking tickle of the mud and heard the suction pop and echo through the reeds. A brood of black ducks squirted from some bulrushes and the mama duck’s doting quacks sounded suddenly foreboding. He scanned the grove of red oaks beyond the swamp grass where the road emerged from the water. The beaver was closer to the far shore than to them.

“I think you’d better give me the pistol,” he said to Nina.

“No fucking way,” she said.

Broker clicked his teeth and wondered if someone could have gotten in ahead of them. And if so, how? They climbed back on dry land and left the sunlight. He lifted the cooler from the plastic sled and carried it in front of his chest and winced at the slosh of ice cubes on glass at his every step. Nina fell in close behind him. Halfway through the oak trees he heard the musty crunch of a boot come down on dry acorn shells.

The laconic southern voice called out, “Hi there.”

47

Two of them. they stepped from the cover of the trees about sixty yards ahead, camouflaged in the shadows at the edge of the grove. Through the foliage, Broker could see an open field dance in the breeze, purple with wild alfalfa and red clover and a spray of wildflowers. The corner and the shingled roof of a cedar plank cabin at the top of the hill was just visible.

The one who had called to them resembled Danny Larkins’s description from Ann Arbor: lean, weathered, sunglasses. He stood casually in a faded blue workshirt and jeans, with his hands on his hips, next to the trunk of a thick oak tree. A pack frame leaned against the tree. A pair of binoculars dangled from a low branch.

The other one did not fit Larkins’s description as ordinary. He was skinny as the rickets and wore a gray T- shirt and a tractor cap. He covered them offhand with a Mini-14 from which curved a thirty-round magazine.

It was turning into a regular plague of rednecks.

“Stay behind me,” said Broker to Nina, who had embraced his back in feigned terror.

“I need five more yards,” she whispered and nudged him. Awkwardly, he held the cooler in his raised hands and stumbled forward. Please, God, don’t let her try something stupid with the handgun. In this bad light. At extreme range. In a semi-automatic rifle’s sights. Sweat electrified his eyes and the alfalfa and sweet clover beckoned, ravishing, normal, in the sun. Their hot perfume struck him dizzy. He heard the crickets, bees. They were so damn close.

“Put the cooler down to the side and stay in front of me,” she whispered in a husky high-diver’s voice.

Very slowly Broker set down the plastic box. Then he took another uncertain step forward and raised his hands.

“That’s good. Relax. We ain’t going to hurt you,” called out Sunglasses. “If you’re carrying anything under those shirts, now’d be the time to drop it. Real slow.”

Broker shook his head. Raised his hands higher. Hoping that his hands going up would distract the rifleman from the way his knees trembled in a tense crouch.

“It’s like this,” called Sunglasses. “We know he’s up there and we been waiting for you to show. We got a feeling he won’t talk to us.”

“How’d you find us?” Broker called back. He looked around, shook his head.

“We hired one of those electronic nerd guys. We tapped your telephone, you dumb shit. Then we went to the cheese factory and followed the fat man in last night. We camped out with the fuckin’ bugs so we ain’t real cordial. Now, listen up. What I got in mind is the girl stays with us and you go up and talk. You know what the general wants.”

“How’s Bevode doing?” yelled Broker. Talking to buy some time. Sporta said that Tuna had a rifle. These guys didn’t seem to know. If he could get up there…

“Cousin Bevode’s looking forward to seeing you, that’s for sure. He wanted to be here but he had to go to the dentist.”

“You! Don’t move there,” yelled the one with the rifle.

“Nina,” whispered Broker, sensitive to the faint rustle behind him.

“Get clear,” said Nina in a cold, determined voice.

“Honey,” yelled Tractor Hat in an amused drawl as he brought his rifle up, “put that popgun down. You can’t hit shit at this distance and I can pick your titties off.”

“Move fast,” shouted Nina and he knew she was going to do it and all he could do was follow the play. Broker dived. From the corner of his eye he caught a flash of her coming to a point, hair spilling forward, tongue stuck in the right corner of her mouth, as she took a basic bull’s-eye shooter’s stance: body turned forty-five degrees away from her target, right hand sweeping the big Colt up. Extending. Steadying.…Before he hit the dirt he cringed when he heard the two shots: a close-by whap from the Colt and the crack and simultaneous, air-tunneling shock wave of a rifle bullet…

Passing above them, snapping branches through the overhead.

Sunglasses yelped in a thoroughly amazed voice, “Holy Shit!”

Broker rolled. Processed. Tractor Hat was down. Sunglasses was backpedaling, reaching under his shirt. Broker was on his feet in a sprint. Nina swung the pistol to the second man, who was bringing out a long-barreled heavy revolver, but still moving backward, chastised now, seeking cover on the sunny side of the big oak tree, with his back to the field.

Broker covered ground. Charging a.44 Magnum as the Colt cracked bark off the oak tree. Good. Keep his head down. But Sunglasses had that big revolver leveled and was flattened in good cover and was drawing a bead on Nina, who stood in the open.

“Run,” screamed Broker. Ten yards out and closing. Sunglasses had to make a decision. His mournful leather-strap features shook into a wrinkled toothy grin. Keeping the tree between himself and Nina, he swung his arm, taking his time, as Broker hurtled in his sights.

Broker closed his eyes when he heard the shot. Diving in blackness, maybe toward the constellation Orion, he tackled the man. When he opened his eyes, aside from a sharp pain in his bruised right shoulder where he and the gunman had smashed into a sharp gnarl of oak root, he determined he was unhit.

Sunglasses had lost his sunglasses and now his sad brown eyes opened wide, leaving shock, going for the mystery dropoff. He twitched once on the fragrant mattress of alfalfa. A tiny storm of striped bees rose from the clover as if exiting the body and a dark stain drenched the left armpit of his blue denim Oshkosh shirt.

“Nina,” Broker yelled. Shaken. Hyperventilating. She stood calmly with the pistol dangling from her hand. “You hit?”

She shook her head and walked slowly toward the unmoving, face-down shape of the man with the rifle. The Colt slug had knocked him back and over a full turn.

Broker ran toward her, grabbed her, and checked her for wounds. She put her hand on his shoulder, briefly touched the back of his neck and then wormed from his embrace and hooked her muddy tennis shoe under the body and rolled it over. The man who inhabited the now-still flesh had worn a gray T-shirt with a Rebel battleflag across the chest. A ragged blood-ringed hole was punched two inches to the left of the crossed Stars and Bars.

Broker started to say lucky shot, but then he remembered how he’d scoffed at her trophy in Ann Arbor. He kept his mouth shut, stooped, and picked up the rifle.