by Chuck Logan
“Nina, you never could drink,” stated Broker. “No drinking. Go clean up.”
“Let her be,” puffed Earl. “If her New Orleans cop shows up it’s his tough luck. Hell, she alone’s worth the trip up here.” He turned to Andy. “Check ’em out,” nodding at the military hardware. Then Earl swung the briefcase up on the marble slab.
“Aw right,” breathed Broker.
“First why don’t we look in the lady’s purse and suitcase, just to keep the game friendly,” said Earl. “Jules, check it out.”
While Tabor went into Nina’s things, Earl paced the room. He stopped at the bookcases and scanned the titles.
“You read a lot for a guy who fixes washing machines,” he said flatly.
“The dude I bought this place from left them.”
“Uh-huh, he liked history.”
Tabor wheezed and stood up. He tossed items from the purse on top of the briefcase. “Airline ticket. Northwest flight from New Orleans landed not over an hour ago. Two thousand, three hundred, and change in cash. Another two thousand in travelers checks. College ID from the University of Michigan. Driver’s license issued to Nina Pryce, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Picture matches.”
Earl raised his eyebrows. Nina swigged on her pint and shrugged. She lit a cigarette like she’d watched too many French movies and almost coughed when she inhaled. “The suitcase,” said Earl.
“Clothes, travel things, toothpaste, makeup, and this.” Tabor stacked a pile of manila folders and a roll of paper on the coffee table.
Broker’s sternum vibrated like a wishbone being cranked back for a big wish. He stared at Nina hard. She held his eyes with an unshakable conviction that was out of place in this room, at this moment, with these people.
Earl riffled the pages in the top folder and squinted at Nina. “Very interesting,” he breathed. “Xeroxed copies of some kind of classified military inquiry. Fort Benning, July 1975. Just gets curiouser and curiouser, don’t it?”
He paged through the folders and studied the contents of a slender one. He held up a photostat for Jules and Andy to see. “Copy of a police report on a Cyrus LaPorte. For misdemeanor assault in a federal prison.”
Broker groaned out loud.
Earl squinted and his lumpy jaw muscles rippled, mulling as he rolled open the map. “This what you stole?”
“Yep,” said Nina.
“Isn’t LaPorte the retired general, the one with the boat?”
Nina smiled and crossed her legs. They were the kind of legs that laughed at nylons, and they sliced the air like scissors.
Broker, not known for attacks of nerves, felt a mild panic corkscrew up his spine. He had to take control of the situation. “We’re through with the preliminaries. Nina’s going to walk down to the corner for a pack of cigarettes-” he said.
“Uh-uh. I kinda like having her around,” said Earl. “Go ahead. Open it.” He nodded at the briefcase.
Broker stooped and shot back the latches. Hello, sixteen grand. He opened the top and stood upright, tensed, hands floating at his sides. “What the fuck is this shit?”
The briefcase held a King James Bible, a video cassette tape, and a.45 semiautomatic Colt pistol. The pistol butt was a vacant cavity. Empty. In the ominous silence, Nina giggled. Broker felt the raw nerves in her giggle tickle him like poison ivy. He saw she was starting to lose it to the booze. Damn. Broker started to sweat.
“I thought I was dealing with Tabor, who are you, coming in here like this,” he seethed at Earl, “with this…bullshit.”
Earl reached over, acquired the pistol, brought a magazine from the pocket of his jacket, inserted it and racked the slide. He did not set the safe. With the pistol hanging casually in his hand he proposed in a calm voice, “We all sit here for a few minutes and get acquainted and see if anything unusual happens. We already got notice of one cop in the area. Let’s see if a million Yankee cops come through the door.”
Across the room Andy methodically worked down the row of weapons, clearing bolts, checking chambers, toggling with the breech of the launchers. A cold metal snap and precision clacked in the tense room.
Nina leaned forward and looked into the briefcase and plucked out the cassette and studied the label. In the process she spilled a little of the cognac. The amber liquid splashed lightly on her knee and trickled slowly between her thighs.
“The truth about the alleged Holocaust. Lectures by Rev. Earl Devine,” she read. Broker watched her eyes. The cloudy shiver in them. Little muscles at the corner of her lips twitched. “You gotta be fuckin’ kidding,” she said.
“Watch it, pottymouth,” said Andy. “Earl’s an ordained minister. Just thought you should know.”
“You need a bath, Nina,” said Earl. “I can smell you.”
“Not as good as I can smell you, Elmer.”
Earl chuckled. “Andy, Jules tells me that Mr. Broker carries a nine-mil Beretta in a hideout over the crack of his ass under that baggy T-shirt. Take a look.”
Broker put up with a rough hand stiff arming his neck, another frisking his back. “He’s clean, Earl.”
“Check his socks.” Andy did.
“Take the battery out of that pager,” said Earl.
Andy unclipped the device and dumped the battery to the floor. Uh oh, thought Broker. Then Andy tossed the pager to Earl who placed it on the marble slab next to the briefcase. With a casual show of force he raised the butt of the.45 and smashed the plastic device.
“This isn’t going to work. My guy won’t show unless he beeps a number,” said Broker. “Deal’s off. And you people are outta here. Nina, get upstairs.”
“I’m enjoying my conversation with Elmer here,” she said. There was murder in her eyes, way more complicated than these good old boys could ever know. It was time to pull the plug. Fuck the money.
Andy giggled at Nina’s defiance. “Nice for a man to be taken so seriously in his own house.”
“You just shut up, Broker,” added Earl with a thin smile. “This lady don’t add up and she’s got some explaining to do. The kind of explaining that might take all night,” said Earl with a thin smile.
Broker shot a poison look at Nina. The anger in his voice was real. “What the hell are you doing here, goddammit!”
Nina tipped the bottle up, swallowed, and sneered.
“Gawdamn,” grinned Earl, “do that again, honey, I love the way you swallow.”
“I just want my fucking money,” muttered Broker. Earl waved him silent with the big Colt.
6
They waited. Sweat ran down Broker’s ribs and pooled in his shorts. He paced, shadowed by Andy. Jules Tabor stood at the window and watched the street. Earl went upstairs, found Broker’s pistol, came down and scouted the backyard; then he brought a chair from the kitchen and sat facing Nina, knees almost touching, and read through the dossier material that had been in her bag. He glanced up. “What good is this? Most of it’s crossed out.”
“That’s the Freedom of Information Act for you,” said Nina as she suicidally finished the pint. Then she picked up the video cassette and studied the blurb on the back.
Earl set the dossiers aside and spoke to Jules. “Go out to the van, check out the street for about five more minutes then pull in back. We’ll load up there. Andy, look around for some rope to tie them up.”
“Hey-” Broker started to protest. Earl snapped the.45 on him.
“Sorry, Broker, I came to do business with an arms dealer and I wind up with a redheaded chick with a suitcase full of government documents. You lose, buddy.” He grinned at Nina and his voice lowered, husky, thick in his throat. “So we’re going to take you folks for a ride. Get to know you a little better.”
Broker wasn’t believing this. Standing there on razor blades and Earl was blushing. Where’s the goddamn money? He had to see the money and the guns together.
It was strange in the room. The five rifles lined up. Earl’s dry rustling breath. Andy rummaging in the kitchen. The skeletal Harley fra
me like a boned-out steel cheetah.
Nina wasn’t impressed. She curled her lip and tossed the video cassette into Earl’s lap. He twitched pleasurably.
“You write that copy on the back?” Nina mused. “The Jews made it all up, huh. The SS. The death camps.”
Earl cleared his throat and said in a reasonable voice, “There’s eyewitness accounts that the camps were built after the war. It’s a side of things that should be heard.”
Broker watched her bunch into a sinewy coil in the chair. He could feel the lances of adrenaline advance out of her pores.
“Hey, Earl,” said Andy, coming in with a roll of duct tape, “come away, man, the bitch is drunk.”
Broker heard the van engine start, listened to the sound move from the street along the side of his house into the backyard. Andy ripped off a length of tape. Like fingernails on a blackboard.
Then Nina’s voice took on the flat meter of the army officer she had been for six years. “Be advised, mister, my dad liberated one of those nonexistent camps…”
Broker tensed when he saw her eyes cloud with holy wrath. Aw God, here comes “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
“And he told me the GIs were so damn…taken by what they saw that they wouldn’t even shoot those guards. They killed some of them with their…bare…hands!”
Nina Hour. Broker wasn’t fast enough. She came up from her hip with the pint held by the neck and swung it in a backhanded chop like a cleaver across Earl’s nose.
Glass and bones cracked. Andy dropped the tape and went for his pocket and pulled out a thick bone-handled gravity knife and started to flick it open with his big thumb. But some tape was tangled on his fingers and that gave Broker a precious second. First he had to deal with Andy. He pivoted and smashed an elbow in Andy’s surprised face but then he had to go after Earl, who had sprung from the chair with blood pouring from his swelling nose. Earl, raging, growling, and evidently in shock that he had been struck by a woman, dropped the.45 and plucked the shattered bottleneck from his chest and threw it at Nina, who ducked, and it crashed through the window and, with the breaking glass and Earl’s roar, Broker finally felt it start to happen outside.
7
Tabor screamed in the backyard. A stampede of running feet shook the house. Earl, oblivious in rage, raised his hand to slap Nina-which was a real serious culture-bound mistake on Earl’s part. She leaned back and Earl’s open hand swatted thin air. She rebounded like a piston and forked a rigid arc formed by her right thumb and the knuckle of her index finger up under Earl’s chin. Earl instinctively tucked his neck into his hunched shoulders. The force of Nina’s blow was absorbed in the powerful tendons of his neck, not the vulnerable throat.
Tires squealed and the reek of burning rubber torched in from the street; car doors slammed and the back door slammed. They were coming in with all their usual tact of bull elephants. Andy went past Broker running for the kitchen and Broker went for Earl who now had his hands on Nina.
Andy screamed when he saw a tall black man, whom God had made without a waist, so that his pumping hips and thighs jointed in a power train to his ribs, doing a hundred-yard dash across Broker’s grubby kitchen straight at him.
St. Paul Det. Jarrel “T-Bone” Merryweather was pure onyx black and his shirt was an ivory off white and his tie of expensive silk. J.T. came on screaming at the top of his ex-drill-sergeant lungs, managing to smile at the same time because he really ate this shit up. J.T. didn’t take the time to vest up because he knew there was only one way to get through a door, which was first and fastest, because Broker had taught him how to do it. He held a 12-gauge Remington riot pump steady before him with the muzzle gaping like an open onrushing manhole straight to Redneck Hell: “Freeze-you fuckin’ piece of shit-I’ll blow your mother-fuckin’ head loose from your fat cracker ass!”
Broker heard a groan as Andy collapsed to his knees and somewhere Tabor was yelling how he wanted to see his lawyer and other people were in the room giving Andy his rights but he was giving his full attention to Earl and Nina was getting in the way trying to step in and kick Earl and catching Broker in the ribs a couple of times and Earl had this confused little boy lost look in his eyes as his cheeks popped like chicken bones because he’d strayed too far from home in Alabama, and-ha, mother fucker-Brokers from Minnesota had met Alabamians before, in July 1863, at a place called Cemetery Ridge and, like his ancestors before him, Earl had come too far north and walked into the remorselessly moving parts of Det. Lt. Phillip Broker of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
But then Earl rallied and, with an insane red-and-gray bloodshot flapping in his eyes, surprised Broker by clamping the edge of Broker’s left thumb in his teeth, as he mashed down and Broker felt the teeth sink into the skin, the muscle, and the bone of the top joint.
Earl’s jaw muscles pulsated through the blood running down his face and Broker screamed when J.T. butt-stroked Earl with the 12-gauge to make him let go. The jarring pain traveled-electric, incandescent-up his arm.
“Don’t,” screamed Broker.
Earl wouldn’t let go. He growled even though he was covered with cops grabbing at him, and his neck and jaw continued to surge, leathery and lethal as some damn snapping turtle.
Five pairs of hands searched for a hold on Earl’s face. Fingers clawed in his nostrils, yanking back, while Earl growled and shook his head and Broker screamed.
Procedure went to hell in the bizarre circumstance. “Phil, don’t move,” shouted Ed Ryan, the ATF agent in charge. “Grab that fucker’s head. Stabilize it. Don’t let him shake like that, he’ll bite it off.”
Somebody in a vest and black cap was cuffing Nina.
“J.T., keep her close,” Broker yelled, rolling his eyes toward Nina, and Merryweather, who’d been taping the caper off the wire in Broker’s pager, pushed the officer away from Nina and took the guy aside, explaining. And Broker was sure that the terrible crunching sound that he heard with his ears, but also was hearing inside his body traveling up his arm, was his thumb being bitten off.
A dozen officers, Robocopped in black body armor, bore down in a twenty-four-handed grab-ass all over Earl who continued to growl and tried to thrash. They sought leverage on the bulging muscles of Earl’s neck and jaw, experimentally jabbed him in the eyes; one guy had a wooden spatula from the kitchen and was trying to pry between Earl’s teeth. Earl had these serious teeth. The spatula broke.
“Man will not let go. I’m gonna have to cap the sucker,” said J.T. Merryweather loudly for effect, resigned, dubiously setting down the shotgun and drawing his pistol.
“You can’t shoot a guy for biting somebody,” a voice yelled.
“Hell I can’t, he’s attacking an officer. Just shoot him a little bit, to make him stop.”
A woman deputy from Dakota County wondered aloud, academically, “Where exactly would you shoot him?”
Sweat poured into Broker’s eyes. The pain was incredible, immobilizing, and it was just a thumb.
Several paramedics pushed through the house, which was now crawling with men and women wearing badges and armed to the teeth and the Washington County SWAT team was there and they were all pumped up on adrenaline and the smell of sweat and fresh blood and everybody was talking at once and the radios were crackling.
And voices. “Who’s the chick? What’s she doing here?”
And “Secure that money on the floor.”
And Nina. “That’s mine.”
Broker floated in an excruciating fog, wrapped in fiery cotton candy that dripped sticky red from the mangled knuckle that was locked in Earl’s jaws. Somebody blurted on a radio, “No shit, one of the assholes bit off Broker’s thumb.”
They eased him off his knees to the floor so that Earl, stretched out like an alligator, lay between Broker’s spread legs, breathing in short snorts, with worms of snot crawling on his upper lip. His face had turned a demented purple and orange with some parts showing through the blood a horrible fish-belly white an
d the engorged veins popped out on the twisted crimson cables of his neck muscles.
“Got a doctor coming,” yelled a medic. His cohorts quickly took wood splints from their bags and jammed them between Earl’s teeth. As they worked, Broker noticed the contents of Nina’s purse, which lay scattered beneath him. He reached down with his good hand for the pack of Gauloises. Like the cognac, her father’s brand. He found the lighter in her purse and lit it. Despite the pain, the bright pink airsacs in his lungs collected in a happy banzai charge and ran straight for the nicotine.
The medics carried on in awed, too-loud voices. A spirited professional discussion about the problem Earl presented.
“I’ve read about this, surge of adrenaline, ancient survival mechanisms-”
“Strongest muscle group in the body-”
“Stuck together. I thought that meant intervaginally?”
“Bad joke. Bad joke.”
They had worked the splints between Earl’s teeth to buy Broker time but debated that they couldn’t pry the jaws apart without risking a surge that would take Broker’s thumb with it.
A medic shouted into an emergency radio. “We can’t bring him in. They’re attached. Sure we’re trying to keep him calm…whad’ya mean, don’t let him wander around. He’s not in shock, he’s fucking being eaten.”
The medic handed off the radio and knelt beside Broker. “Okay. It’s a tricky one so the doctor’s coming with a shot. We gotta keep his neck immobilized, we’ve stabilized the biting pressure, but if he gets to whipping his head around…Hey, the guy’s got serious neck muscles.” Another medic, a husky blonde wearing a Washington County Paramedic jacket, narrowed her eyes at Broker. “You shouldn’t be smoking,” she lectured, just like a good Minnesotan.
“Fuck you! Get him offa my hand!”
Nina was there, watching him. Broker peered into her merry, adrenaline-drunk, gray eyes. Speckled blood blended naturally with her freckles. A slight bruise darkened her left cheekbone. She stifled an absurd laugh.