The Price of Blood

Pickett’s Charge. The hollow growl emanating from back in his throat sounded like the sound effects in The Exorcist.

8

The doctor looked like Ben fucking Casey, with copious chest hair sticking out of his green scrub shirt. He sauntered like a deeply tanned visitor from Olympus on a slum tour through the seedy mayhem of the house. He smiled, amused at the macabre banter circulating among the heavily armed law-enforcement types forming a brawny huddle over Broker and Earl.

He snapped on thin rubber gloves and tapped a bulging vein on Earl’s red, swollen neck and said, “Hmmmm.” John Eisenhower, the Washington County sheriff, walked into the room. Broker had worked undercover with Eisenhower years back in St. Paul. Eisenhower proceeded to study the situation, alert blue eyes in his blunt blond features. Broker knew the look. John was learning something…new.

“What are you going to give him?” asked Eisenhower.

The doctor held a syringe in one hand, a vial in the other. “Ketamine,” mused the doctor. “The question is how much.”

“Knock him out,” urged J.T. “Fast.”

The doctor shook his head. “Give him too much, he could go into spasm. Cardiac arrest.”

“So?” J.T. was impatient. He gestured with the big black Glock automatic in his hand.

The doctor smiled, enjoying himself. “There’s a liability question,” he said.

“Stick him,” ordered J.T.

“What if his teeth are loose and he swallows one and chokes?” speculated the doctor, inserting the needle in the vial, playing with the pressure on the plunger, estimating his dose.

Broker, his eyes pin dots in a waterfall of sweat, muttered, “Nothing wrong with his fuckin’ teeth.”

“I could get sued,” pondered the doctor.

“All these nervous coppers, you could get shot,” explained J.T.

Ed Ryan squatted next to the doctor. “I’m the ATF special agent in charge. Give the shot. Now.”

“Yeah, but who backs me up if I get sued?” replied the doctor.

“Now,” said Ryan, in an icy voice.

Earl, imprisoned in a dozen pairs of hands, shied back from the needle. The doctor pointed to Earl’s upper right arm. Earl’s shirt exploded away in J.T.’s hands. It reminded Broker of a bunch of cowboys and cowgirls hog- tying a steer. Earl snorted as the needle popped into his deltoid. He seemed to levitate, thrashing in the imprisoning hands. There was an audible snap. A huge ATF guy spoke up apologetically: “Sorry ’bout that.”

“A wrist,” offered a calm detached female voice. Nina.

“About three minutes to kick in,” said the doctor. He smiled. “One possible side effect of ketamine is that he could go into a psychotic delirium for as long as twenty-four hours.”

“Nice touch,” admired J.T.

“I thought you’d like it,” said the doctor.

Broker puffed mightily on the cigarette and watched the drug seep into Earl’s mad eyes. Everyone took a strong hold and waited. Earl tried to beat the clock. Tried to grind through the wood splints. Broker flashed on Jaws-watching the shark come over the transom. Nina wiped sweat from his forehead. She held his free hand.

Finally, Earl’s snarls began to moderate into a ghastly yawn. Slowly the pressure on Broker’s thumb cranked back. Earl’s eyes fluttered and the steely muscles of his face drooped. Broker felt a gruesome suckling sensation as Earl’s loose, bloody lips slipped over his thumb. Earl made a sound like a drooling baby. Ga ga goo.

Earl began breathing in anesthetized, blood-smeared dopery. “Aha,” said the doctor serenely as he removed something from Broker’s bloody thumb. “Did someone hit this guy in the mouth before the bite?”

“You could say that,” said J.T. Merryweather.

“Loose canine,” said the doctor, holding up Earl’s tooth. “That’s probably what saved your thumb.” One of the medics moved in and irrigated the wound with stinging disinfectant. “Move it,” the doctor ordered Broker.

Broker gritted his teeth and sent messages into the gashed flesh. The digit moved.

“Okay, we have intact tendons. Don’t know about nerves. Clean it like hell all the way to the ER. The human mouth is the dirtiest thing there is.”

Squads and unmarked cars from the Washington, Dakota, and Ramsey counties’ Task Force jammed the brick emergency entrance portico of the Riverview Memorial Hospital. Rodney, who’d been arrested at Broker’s house- Broker had been arrested with him to keep his cover consistent-sat cuffed in the back of one of them, forgotten for the moment. But as Broker climbed from an ambulance, aided by cops, Rodney raised his cuffed hands and aimed an index finger, cocked his thumb. Through the window Broker saw his lips form a “Bang.”

Word got out over the radios that one of the assholes had bitten off Broker’s thumb. Security got lost in the scramble to come and gawk. It was a real mess. His cover was blown to smithereens. Nina squeezed his good hand and smiled helpfully. Through a veil of blue curtains, Broker saw Earl wheeling by, thrashing against restraints on a gurney. “Mama, Mama,” he screamed. “There’s snakes in my poop!”

A pissed-off ER surgeon and his team shooed the rubbernecking cops from his triage. “Out. It’s a bite. No big deal. So get the hell out of here.”

Nina refused to budge.

“She stays,” said Broker.

“You’ll get some time off work now,” said Nina in a matter-of-fact voice, eyes fixed on Broker’s wound.

“Huh?” Broker watched needles. Tetanus in his butt. Then Novocain in his thumb, then this curved job that strung catgut through what looked like a torn flap of extra-large pigskin glove attached to the palm of his left hand.

“You see, I’m in a little trouble and I could use a guy like you,” said Nina.

“Wonderful.” Broker watched, resigned, as the doctor stitched and tied.

9

Broker didn’t want to hear it.

They gave him Dilaudid and put him in a hospital bed. He needed rest, they said. Fat chance. With Nina curled up on a chair at his side, alternately sleeping and watching him.

She was his doppelganger, come haunting.

It was about her dad. It was always about her dad. She still didn’t get it. Ray Pryce had stranded him in a real tight spot and almost got him killed. But it wasn’t like that at the beginning. Dilaudid dripped into the adrenaline void and the memory flickered like slow-motion cinema.

May Day 1972, QTC-Quang Tri City- Stalingrad South

North Vietnamese regiments supported by tanks and artillery fought South Vietnamese regiments supported by the U.S. Air Force in the rubble of Quang Tri City. The rubble had been pounded to gravel. The North Vietnamese regiments had won.

The tank was a low-slung Russian T-54, with a smooth round turret like a green steel igloo, from which protruded the biggest cannon Broker had ever seen. Dozens of other North Vietnamese tanks picked through the junky bricks on the muggy summery morning. Except this one had just pushed a wall over on 2nd Lt. Phil Broker, who had become separated from his unit and who was now pinned under a slab of cement and imprisoned in a bristle of rebar whiskers. Stuccoed in mortar dust and twenty-one years old, he was for sure going to die because he was dumb enough to get caught in a losing battle in a lost war.

A hatch opened on the turret and a tanker shouldered up and removed his goggles, a smile broadened across his insect-tough Tonkinese face. The treads clanked back, grinding masonry; and the tank realigned, beetle fashion,