Free The Price of Blood by Chuck Logan Page B

lawyers, and whose angry confused attempts to defend Nina’s absent father only stacked the evidence against him, Phillip Broker said good-bye to the army .
    The method he chose was to take the lieutenant and throw him bodily through the front door and send him sprawling on the sidewalk. Then he stomped his Corcoran jump boot down on the clipboard and smashed it to smithereens. The lieutenant opted for a retrograde maneuver, ass backward through the nearest shrubbery .
    Marian Pryce, sensing that Broker was necessary to her daughter at this moment, signaled with her dry eyes and took a last cardboard box from the kitchen counter and carried it out the door. The moving van pulled away. Marian waited in her car .
    Nina stood her ground, defiantly alone in the empty house. Broker, knowing nothing of children, knelt and said to her, “I want you to walk out of here like you own the place .”
    To underscore the point, Broker had escorted her down the rows of houses to a playground. They sat in the swings and their heels made swirls in the hot, chalky-red dust. Nina said nothing. Her large eyes roved the base, vacuuming in detail .
    And then Broker had said the words that he’d come to regret: “If you ever need anything, you know, help, come find me .”
    She’d nodded solemnly. Down the block, her mother blew the horn. Nina’s eyes were fixed in a stare across an empty parade field, on a limp American flag hanging in the dripping heat .

13
    L IKE THE DOCTOR SAID, BROKER’S HAND DID NOT throb so badly when he put it on top of his head. It was awkward driving this way and for the moment, with Nina asleep, he didn’t feel so foolish, but the posture suggested the gesture of a slow-witted man pondering an enormous dilemma.
    Which wasn’t that far off, the dilemma part. Easiest thing would be to reject her story wholesale. Just not think about it.
    Drawing strength from the premise of leaving the past undisturbed, he sketched out what he would do: first off, not get mad at her. How was she to know he’d be working. Talk to her, humor her and then, at the right time, gently hand her off to a professional. He knew people. It would have to be a woman, but it was a stretch finding a woman therapist qualified to appreciate the lonely piece of ground that Nina had staked out for herself.
    Problem being, what she needed for a shrink was a bare-ass Celtic warrior-priestess with her nipples dunked in blue woad.
    She was like him. Therapy was for other people, people who worked in offices. Got a personal problem? Tell it to the chaplain. In other words: tough shit. His eyes darted to the rearview mirror. He had seen the Saturn yesterday. Damn if he hadn’t caught some of her contagious paranoia.
    He was well beyond the city traffic now and the limboland where tract houses chewed into tree lines. He smelled fresh manure and the contours of freshly plowed fields eased his eyes. A tiny green John Deere tractor dragged a mustard sail across the horizon.
    Gripping the wheel with his knees, he used his good hand to adjust the rearview mirror, glanced at Nina, and shook his head. Gingerly he poured some more coffee.
    She just had to learn.
    That was easy for him to say. She’d watched her mother struggle raising her and her brother, working as a legal secretary in the Detroit suburbs. Before her looks went, Marian Pryce married a lawyer in the office. A practical marriage. So her kids could live in a better neighborhood and attend college. Nina had hated the work-obsessed man, who drank too much and was never home. Her mother pretended not to notice the drinking and started to lose her grip thread by thread. Nina blamed the army lynch mob for that too.
    Broker had met the guy at Nina’s graduation party and couldn’t remember his name. He’d done his family the courtesy of making full partner at the firm before he dropped dead of a massive coronary on the ninth hole of the Bloomfield Hills Country Club.
    Broker had played at every kind