with the patience of gravity. He finally slumped forward through the ether of an alcoholic dream and pitched toward the floor in a slow-motion fall, but the floor had turned to transparent glass beneath his feet and he crashed through, down into the private catacombs where he walled off his dead. And he saw Hank Sommer’s long, quiet body in its own private room and Hank’s sightless eyes startled open and looked up.
And a whole heap of bodies stood up in a forgotten place called Quang Tri City. They were schoolboys from Hanoi and farm boys from the provinces and they formed a circle and he saw that their hair and fingernails had grown long since 1972.
Nimble as spiders, they swept in to get him.
Chapter Thirteen
Nina Pryce.
If ever a name destroyed sleep. He lurched up, ducked, and discovered he was in bed wearing nothing but his shorts. How’d he. .
Amy Skoda appeared next to his bed smiling, with her eyes mostly clear and her hair in place. She held a coffee cup out to him and he saw the room-service tray with a coffee carafe on the bureau next to the TV.
“Actually I know more about you than I let on last night. I know you married Nina Pryce,” she said.
Broker studied the T-shirt she wore, which he’d last seen folded in his duffel. The black one with new orleans spelled out in white alligator bones. Below the hem, lamplight glossed the blond fuzz on her thighs.
She cleared her throat and handed him the coffee. “After Desert Storm, Nina had a small following. Not quite Mia Hamm, but loyal. I almost went into the army because of her.”
Broker grimaced slightly at the subject of his wife. Amazon-Dot-Kill: she had achieved a certain female- soldier notoriety in the Gulf. He took the cup and sipped. The coffee helped his hangover, which was less overt pain than a massive energy drain. “So why didn’t you?” he asked.
“Hey, I’m out there but I’m not
The words were rote and spun from his mouth. “She didn’t just fight next to the men in the desert. She led a company of them against three times their number of Republican Guards and she won. It sort of alienated the patriarchy.” He cleared his throat. “That, and the fact that she wouldn’t suck titty with the Witch Hook Feminists. She caught it from both ends and they ran her out of the army.”
“But she got back in. She’s in Bosnia.”
Macedonia, actually. Probably Kosovo. He didn’t know exactly. The unit she was in now, Delta, didn’t officially exist. “Clinton stuck his nose in,” Broker said, employing the name like an all-purpose subject, verb, and object. He waved the subject away. “I, ah, don’t remember getting in bed.”
Amy shrugged. “I got up to pee and found you passed out on the floor. So I tucked you in.”
“You picked me up?”
“You’re big but you’re not that big.”
Broker found her style distressingly familiar.
“I took your pants off, too. Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not pregnant and your virginity is intact.”
He let that one slide, too, and just stared at her. “You don’t look hungover.”
“Oh, I’m hungover; I just don’t whine about it.”
He couldn’t win, so he knuckled his frizzed hair, gathered the sheet toga-fashion around his waist, grabbed his jeans, and went into the bathroom. When he emerged, shaved, showered, and dressed, she had changed back into her rumpled hospital duds.
“Thanks for collecting me last night,” she said frankly. “I would have tried to walk to my car and wound up in a snowbank.”
He nodded and opted for brevity. “Bad night.”
“Do you want to know the kicker?” She flung open the curtains and Broker winced at the roar of sunlight and the cloudless blue sky. Lake Shagawa twinkled placid as a millpond. Then she said quietly, “I called in. They’re flying him down to the Cities in half an hour. Thought you might want to say good-bye.”
The plows had left the parking lot iglooed with piles of snow. As they threaded toward Iker’s truck, Broker, feeling achy and fogged over, reached for a cigar.
Amy laughed.
“What?”
“The eyebrows. And the cigar. You look like a cross between Sean Connery and Groucho Marx.”
Broker grumbled, threw the cigar away, got in, started the truck, and drove into town through a convention of yellow county snowplows. All around, Ely’s residents wore Minnesota weather-cowboy grins and were chipping away at the drifts with shovels and snowblowers.
A block from the hospital Amy touched his arm. “Better let me out here. It probably won’t look right, us walking in together.” As she got out of the truck they heard the whack of a helicopter on approach at the hospital helipad.
The chopper had triple tail fins, which made it a BK 117 American Eurocopter; it was dark blue with white diagonal stripes and the letters smdc on the fuselage. It carried a pilot, a registered nurse, and a paramedic.
It was the kind of expensive ride only real sick people take.
Broker drove through the shadow of the Eurocopter and into the lot where the plows had created white cubbyholes with twelve-foot walls. He parked in one of them as the chopper landed on the other side of the white maze, and he got out of the truck and walked toward a knot of people standing on the hospital steps. Milt, wearing a borrowed sweat suit under his parka, his arm in a sling, with a barely civil smile on his face, stood like a man on a mission. He was listening to an officious-looking woman in a pants suit. She was talking but she was clearly on defense, arms crossed over the briefcase clasped to her chest.
Nearer the door, in the shadows, Allen slumped against the brick wall in his blue parka and baggy loaner jeans and a sweatshirt. His hair drooped to complement his sunken eyes and the twenty-four-hour beard that darkened his face.
The stunned woman standing next to Allen looked like all the mothers Broker’d ever seen who had lost their children at the state fair.
Jolene Sommer, the trophy wife, was not the Barbie Doll Broker had expected. She was neither blond nor tanned. Her dark hair, olive skin, and restless green eyes flew Mediterranean flags against her white-trash name. In her bittersweet glance, he glimpsed something rare that had been shattered when she was a kid and cheaply put back together.
She was in her early thirties, stood about five eight, and weighed maybe 120 pounds. The dark hair twisted in natural curls around her shoulders, and her cheekbones were wide under the broken emerald eyes, and her lips were full and her nose straight. She wore no obvious makeup to complement the quiet shades of gray and charcoal of her turtleneck sweater, slacks, tailored wool coat, and the soft leather of her boots. She had removed her gloves. A simple gold band marked her left hand.
Broker instantly disliked the young guy wearing shades who stood next to her; he disliked the way they looked so good together; he disliked their palpable aura of familiarity.
Further, he disliked beauty in a man; the torch-singer glow of a Jim Morrison or a young Warren Beatty who hid cocaine secrets behind aviator sunglasses. He disliked the casually tousled thick blond hair, every strand of which seemed individually groomed and placed. He disliked the insouciant hip-slouched promise of youth, the easy sex in either pocket. And he disliked the man’s flat-bellied athleticism, so innocent of aches and pains.
Mostly, he disliked his own disapproval.
This had to be the old boyfriend. Broker was painfully reminded of all the lean young army ranger officers who rubbed elbows and flirted with his wife half a world away.
Ex-wife?
Whatever.
If Jolene was Bonnie, this had to be Clyde. Okay. He was a six-footer and python-smooth and strong. Looking more carefully, Broker found his flaw; this was a guy who couldn’t maintain his cool. It was the way he’d dressed
