The Price of Blood Read Online Free PDF

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 frame 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
    T ABOR 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