They walked without speaking from the swaying shadows of the trees to the other body in the sunny field. Out of habit Broker knelt and checked for the carotid pulse. Nothing. He retrieved the Magnum and stuffed it in his belt.
They started to shiver in the bright sun, up to their knees in a gorgeous quilt of orange and Canada hawk weed, the red clover, ox-eyed daisies. Amid the wind-ruffled flowers, they swatted with exaggerated reflexes at flies that blundered into their bare arms. One fly, gross as a gumdrop, wallowed, buzzing, in a pool of blood trapped in the left corner of Sunglasses’s mouth. Their eyes met over the corpse and acknowledged that it just got big-time real.
With an exaggerated roughness to glove her bare hands, Nina rolled over the corpse and squatted gingerly, avoiding the mess in the grass. She felt for his wallet, found it, opened it, and said, “We just killed a Fret.”
Broker read the name on the Louisiana driver’s license: William Bedford Fret. It was a day of cousins. He dropped the wallet and looked up the hill. A deck extended off the side of the cabin on stilts and someone was moving up there.
“You think there’s more of them?” Nina asked as she pulled a cell phone from the back pocket of Sunglasses’s jeans. Her voice was too calm, strait-jacketed.
“I don’t know!” His fingers clenched on the rifle and his shout sounded like nerve bundles tearing.
His raw tone tripped Nina into a shudder of delayed shock. He watched her blunt the tremor of mortal fear with a spasm as old as warfare. She dropped the cell phone and kicked the body viciously. A reflex he’d seen many times in combat. “Piece of shit,” she muttered and stepped back and hugged herself, prickly with the frostbite of sudden death at high noon. “How’d you get him?” she asked quietly. “You were behind the tree.”
Broker glanced up the slope. “I didn’t.”
About a hundred and eighty yards up through the wildflowers and alfalfa, glass twinkled. He walked a few steps, unhooked the binoculars from the oak branch, and focused up the hill.
On the deck of the cabin, the vague shape materialized into a stick figure slumped in a chair. It was pitched forward, emaciated elbows planted on the railing with forearms twisted in bondage to a sniper-sling on a scoped rifle. Broker sharpened the focus on the man’s hollow face.
Jimmy Tuna was smiling.
48
“Mannlicher-carcano,” rasped Jimmy Tuna by way of greeting, thrusting the old-bolt action rifle in his wasted arms as they trudged up the steps to the porch. “Found it inside. Tony’s bosses must keep it here as a kind of joke. Same rifle Oswald got Kennedy with.” He flipped up the bolt and yanked it back and sent a twinkling yellow cartridge casing somersaulting into the sunlight. As the brass skittered on the cedar planks, he shot the bolt forward and carefully leaned the weapon against the deck railing. “Who says the Italians don’t make good stuff?” He grinned and sagged back into his chair, exhausted.
Jimmy Tuna, fifty-eight going on Lazarus, was a husk-his two hundred pounds of twenty years ago had wilted to a hundred twenty. His large nose had once trumpeted abundant appetites. Now it protruded, a bone beak stuck in carrion. The concentration required to shoot Sunglasses looked like it had gobbled up a big hunk of his remaining life.
A faded army-issue baseball cap shaded his eyes and his roadmap-veined arms poked like sticks from a sagging black T-shirt that bore the exuberant motto: GO FOR THE GUSTO!
“Gusto” was crusted with dried vomit. Baggy khaki trousers, also fouled, enveloped his legs. Like a tree boil, his left hip made a grotesque angle, pushed out against the pants. The toenails on his bare feet had a mucus- colored curl of accelerated growth and, piled there, in the old redwood lawn chair in the sun, his face was a chiaroscuro going to black and he smelled like the first hour of death.
He pitched back in the chair and removed his cap and his head was more skull than face: a cadaverous jack- o-lantern with eyes that burned like brown coals. Nothing was left inside the loose sack of his skin but the galloping disease.
And a secret.
Broker placed the cooler on the deck and yanked the.44 Mag from his belt and placed it on the railing along with the cell phone. Nina leaned the Mini-14 alongside. They just stared at him, panting, catching their breath, and recovering from the last ten minutes. Face to face. Finally.
Tuna grinned. “Sorry I didn’t put out party favors for old home week.” He extended a clawlike right hand. “How you doing, Phil?”
Broker took the hand. Tuna tried to generate some of his old strength and his old grin. He was drenched in sweat and his grip felt like slimy cold pasta. “Think there’s any more of them?”
Broker shook his head, “Just the two, I think.” He pointed to the portable telephone. “One of them had that.”
Tuna shook his head. “Won’t work out here. I’ve been watching them all morning, but they stayed in the trees. I couldn’t get a shot. I even thought they might be with you.”
“They’re LaPorte’s boys. They were overconfident. They told us.”
“How’d you get the other one?”
“Nina got him. She snuck a.45 past Sporta.”
Tuna nodded. “Tony’ll have to dump them in the swamp. He won’t like that, but he’s done it before. Guys he works for use this place for more than deer hunting.” He brightened. “You get ahold of Trin?”
Broker nodded. Tuna leaned back and glided behind his eyes. His vision focused and he asked, “You figure it out yet?”
Broker chewed his lip. “Cyrus found some gold next to the chopper wreck. Your note said-”
Tuna cackled and held up a shaky hand. “Be patient. Let me tell it my way.” He coughed and looked around. “Well, shit. You turned into a fuckin’ cop. Which don’t surprise me, you always had that Boy Scout look in your eyes. And you found me but this ain’t
Broker looked around and said, “Will the shots bring cops?”
“Hell no, way out here? And I been plunking away from this deck for a week with this old piece to kill time.” Tuna’s sunken eyes fixed in space. “Now that’s an odd phrase, don’t you think? Kill time.”
He held up a withered hand and turned his attention to Nina. “Forgetting my manners. Hello there, Miss Pryce.”
“Hello, Jimmy,” said Nina evenly. “So this is where you got to with your ‘funeral’ money.”
With difficulty he put his hand in his trouser pocket and withdrew a folded bank check. He handed it to her. “Didn’t need your money, but I had to bait the hook. Sorry about the puzzle palace you had to go through to find me. Cyrus has been on me for years. Guards. Other inmates coming at me. Thank God for conservative Republican bankers. Cyrus couldn’t get into those records.”
“How the hell did you find Trin?” asked Broker.
“That was hard. But I had a lot of time. You talked to the bank in Ann Arbor, right?”
“I did,” said Nina. “And Kevin Eichleay.”
Tuna nodded. “Kevin told the banker, said Trin looked like hell. The Commies must have worked him over good. Reeducated him. But he’s there. And he’s Trin. Was going to be my ace in the hole.” Tuna gritted his teeth at a stab of real or psychological pain. “Yours now.”
“What does he know?”
“He knows I’m his padrone. I’m a fuckin’ one-man charity. Set up his vet’s home for wayward Viet Cong. Helped him get started in the tour business. I was coming as a tourist. Now you and Nina are going in my place. I paid him to set up a tour. Hanoi to Hue. Reserved rooms both places for two weeks. Didn’t know when you’d show up. What’d he say to you?”
“He thinks you’re still in the joint.”
“I used Tony’s phone. Called him up a week ago. Told him I was detained. That I was sending you instead.”
