The Price of Blood

it.”

The Cajun reversed the powerful motor and backed the boat into the gentle swells. The torn white trousers swayed over the gunwale and leaked twisted crimson stripes like a wet, dirty American flag.

Casually, Bevode nodded at the bloody drag trail at his feet and said to one of the mercs, “Rake up this sand. Cyrus don’t need to see this shit.”

Then he walked up the beach and towered over Broker. Save the Whales had come ashore in the second boat. He knelt a few feet away, with Nina, opening a first-aid kit.

Nina pitched on her back, supported on her elbows, trembling the full length of her body. And that was shock.

Save the Whales shook his head and eased down Nina’s jeans. “Between you and Virgil you sure put some miles on this girl,” he said laconically.

Bevode winked at Broker. “Don’t worry, she’s all right. I just nicked her. So what’d you do with my little brother?” he asked.

“He’s gone into rice farming,” said Broker, fighting to get the words from his dry mouth. “Organic farming. You know, where you dump human shit in the fields.”

“Well, he always had a problem, you understand. Drugs. I told him he should clean up his act. Wouldn’t listen. So we found a way for him to be useful.”

Bevode was totally relaxed, standing there, enjoying watching Broker appreciate the situation. He reached in his pocket and brought out a plastic flask of sun lotion. SPF 30. He dabbed it assiduously on his face.

Broker braced himself, he was starting to shake. Bevode just smiled and walked away. He was in control. And Bevode knew that was harder for Broker than dying, knowing that Bevode was in control.

Slowly, pensively, Cyrus LaPorte walked back up the beach.

Trin was separated from the other Vietnamese and sat alone in the shade of a willow. Hands in his lap, he was lightly guarded, if at all. Bevode squatted and patted him on the head, got up, and walked back to where Nina sat sullenly trying to beat the shaking-bleeding, handled, filthy jeans pulled to her knees.

Save the Whales ordered Nina to remove her underpants. She refused so he did and she began to shiver while he inspected the laceration. He splashed on some iodine. She seemed to embrace the reality of the sting. Bevode ordered her to stand up. She pulled up her panties and stood. Then he told her to walk. She took a few steps. Blood and iodine trickled down her thigh and around her knee like veins in marble.

“See,” he said, “she’s just fine.” In a gesture of crude possession Bevode laid the whip handle between her legs. With venom eyes, she drove her will into the sand and refused to shake. Bevode waited patiently, toying. She tried to spit, but she was too dry. He smiled. Despite all her conviction, she trembled uncontrollably.

Broker got to a crouch. One of the mercs put him down with a rifle butt.

Save the Whales stepped forward and peeled down her pants again and slapped a tape compress along the ragged red pencil that ran below her hip up into her left buttocks. Nina modestly pulled up her underpants and went to reach for her pants and Bevode, playfully, snagged them with the front sight of his rifle and held them from her.

“Uh-uh, I kinda like to watch you walk with blood on your ass.”

Broker’s sight was fractured. More brilliant than normal but cracked. Trin still wouldn’t meet his eyes. Fucking Trin. Make a deal with the maggots eating your corpse.

Bevode was saying, “Now I got me a whole work crew of people who mostly walk funny.”

Save the Whales tied Broker’s hands behind his back. Then Nina’s. Trin sat in the shade, his face a fixed mask, averted, unreadable. They didn’t tie him up.

LaPorte came up the beach dragging his feet through the surf like General MacArthur, his hands still clasped behind his back. “Everything all right?” he asked Bevode crisply.

“Yes, sir.”

“Take one of the boats. Run the gimps back to the house and clean it up. Take Louis along for the translating. I’ll keep Trin here with me.”

It was absolutely quiet on the beach. Just the lulling swish of the waves. LaPorte’s men unloaded the remaining dinghy. They set up a camp table, chairs, and an umbrella and brought several large coolers ashore. One of them unfolded the tripod of a surveyor’s sextant.

The normal-sounding cadence of profanity carried from the water line. Men working in hot, humid conditions and bitching. The sound pecked at walls of shock.

LaPorte walked over to Broker. “Pardon our little act. We are scouting hotel sites on the coast. You’ll rest as long as it’s light and be fed. Tonight, after we’re reasonably sure no one is going to wander through, we’ll get down to business.”

He started to walk away, paused, and turned.

“I would have given her a divorce, you know. But she was…well, greedy,” said LaPorte, slowly shaking his head. “And there was something else. She lied to me. Don’t lie to me, Phil, and render service. You and the girl just might come out of this.”

The vets were loaded into the boat and Bevode and one of the mercs motored them off up the coast. LaPorte sat with Blue Shirt and Trin at the camp table. They talked and drank from glistening green bottles they took from one of the coolers. LaPorte talked on a radio, presumably to someone on the Lola.

Nina’s voice muttered, striving for control, “He’s going…to have to change…the name…of his fucking boat.”

Broker looked away. Every muscle fiber in her body struggled to contain the uncontrollable shivering. Patches of her skin shuddered. Sick dog jerky. Broker discovered that he couldn’t look her in the eye.

Not physical. Pain she could take. No. He glanced at the pit site. The loose sand had settled into a slight concave depression. He’d brought her to within fifty yards of where her father lay…

He looked out to sea. His father had said that death approached with a slow deliberate tread. Gradually you got to see its features, know its habits.

Death wiggled on Bevode’s leash, smack in his face, so close that he had to wait for it to back up a few feet to get a good look at it. Broker was ashamed that, in these first moments, he thought only of himself.

73

Broker confronted the paradox of hope during the benign interval of planning that followed in the aftermath of Lola’s murder. Hope played hide and seek in the hot sun. Hope was fickle enough to root on the gallows steps.

Why were they allowed to live?

He and Nina were handled efficiently, like important merchandise. They were frisked and Broker was allowed to keep the glass vial. Then they were positioned apart so they couldn’t communicate. But they were hand-fed water and energy bars by Save the Whales.

Snatches of conversation carried to him. They would lay low for the day and see if there was a local reaction to Bevode’s shooting. LaPorte sounded better informed now about the deserted nature of the place.

Trin.

Broker was blindfolded and was marched off the beach. His hands brushed the baking masonry of one of the old graves, where he was stored in the shade so he wouldn’t spoil.

He lost track of time. The day broke down into simple experiences. When he sat, his tired body ached. When he lay down, it didn’t hurt as much. He found himself creeping after the shade along the round walls, staying ahead of the sun. He was fed and watered and allowed to relieve himself. His bound hands were checked and loosened slightly. They needed him for his hands and his back.

To dig it up? They had more men, in better condition.

One of the European mercenaries gave him a cigarette. Communication was practical, without animosity, conducted on the level of skilled animal handlers. He waited, kenneled in his blindfold.

For Bevode, who would come out at dark.

Later, afternoon maybe, Broker heard LaPorte’s voice getting louder, casually discussing his manpower problem. His tone had changed. Less anxious. In practical matters he consulted the one he called Marc, Blue Shirt: