The Big Law pb-2

by Chuck Logan

  They wouldn’t let him write his story and this was for keeps. Jesus, Tom. You’re too far out in front of this thing.

  You could get yourself killed. Something new in the shudder of fear beckoned him. Held him tight. The excitement.

  And then, a cool, veteran insight squinted down twenty years of seedy crime stories- I’m not the logical person to get killed, am I. Tom savored the dizzy drama, almost out-of-body, looking down, watching his own thoughts. Plans were forming.

  Plans.

  He began this way, in a dry voice. “Pull over. We have to talk.”

  She slowed and then turned off on a wide portion of shoulder. Tom said, “It’s the money in the back. If there are bad guys and they follow us, we need to hide it.”

  Her brow furrowed. She removed the glasses. “Not exactly secure back there, is it?”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “So,” she said with aimless practicality. Her attitude was strong on mission and weak on details. Clearly she needed help.

  But then…

  There was Ben Franklin’s enigmatic smile.

  He fixed his vision on a line of spruce across the road. A flock of crows detached from the trees and rose in a black scatter against the wool sky.

  “A murder of crows,” said Caren.

  Her words yanked the hair on the back of his neck up on end. He jerked around and faced her.

  She shrugged. “My dad used to say that, back in North Dakota. There’s probably a dead deer over in those trees.”

  “We could put the tape in a luggage locker in Duluth, at the airport. And hide the money somewhere,” he suggested.

  Caren considered, nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “Where can we hide the suitcase? I don’t want to be seen dragging it into a public place.”

  She mulled his question. In less than a minute, she had an answer. “Keith’s dad has an old hunting shack up the Witch River trail, just past Lutsen. He moved to Florida after Keith’s mother died, but he keeps up the taxes on it. There’s a filled-in cistern back in the woods. We could put it there.”

  “Good,” said Tom, who didn’t have a better idea. It THE BIG LAW/85

  would have to do. He opened his door. “Take a break. Let me drive the rest of the way,” he said equably. They traded places, and as he put the car in gear, his eyes beheld the wheeling turmoil of the crows.

  Two tense, mostly silent, hours later they arrived in the port city of Duluth. Tom knew the area and drove to the airport.

  Caren didn’t even blink when he told her to change seats and drive the car around the parking lot and pick him up at the terminal front entrance. He quickly found the security lockers, put the tape in one locker, dropped coins in a second locker and left it empty. He ducked in the gift shop to buy a Minnesota highway map.

  Outside, feeling more confident, taking control, he climbed back in the car and handed Caren the key to the empty locker. Then they studied the map. She pointed to a local road, just past Lutsen. The turn off for the cabin.

  They left Duluth and headed up Highway North 61. What if, he thought. What if I was alone in this car? Like the land, his thoughts changed, becoming rougher, wilder. Fields and oak trees were left behind. Granite-toothed hills and pine trees overlooked the road. What if she just disappeared? Superior paced them, an endless stampede of whitecaps.

  They stopped in Two Harbors at a Holiday, so Tom could buy some industrial-size black plastic garbage bags and a roll of duct tape. Caren bought a pack of Marlboros and returned to the car. Tom went to a public phone on the wall next to the fruit display. He stared at a pyramid of oranges, took out Garrison’s card and called the FBI office in St. Paul.

  “Garrison’s not in,” said the agent who answered.

  “Tell him it’s Tom James. I’m with Caren Angland and we’re in danger. I’ll call back in an hour. Make sure he’s there.” Tom saw it developing as a classic plot, not a news story; feed Garrison the broad details to start, save the best for last.

  Back on the road, in motion. Was he reporting it? Or was he living it? He stepped on the gas.

  Signs: CASTLE DANGER, GOOSEBERRY STATE PARK. BEAVER BAY and SILVER BAY, where immense chalk clouds balanced over hulking relics of the iron mining industry. The road was narrow, two lanes curling and dipping.

  Getting remote, wilder.

  Tofte, Lutsen, and then Caren showed him where to turn on the gravel road that twisted up a ridge. A small sign with the number 4. Away from the familiar highway, even with the windows up, and the heater on, Tom could hear the trees groan in the wind, an eerie sound that disturbed his city-trained ears. And he could feel the deep-woods chill. At Caren’s direction he slowed and then stopped. A dark narrow lane carpeted with pine needles wandered into the trees. The access was barred by a logging chain strung between two pines.

  Caren got out and felt around the roots of one of the chained trees. She held up a rusted Sucrets tin. Opened it and took out a key. Tom forced the rusty Yale lock open and dropped the chain. Drove in. Put the chain back up.

  Tom checked the deserted road. Just the low howl of the wind, the heaving pine crowns. Alone.

  A hundred yards up the bumpy track they came to a sagging cedar plank cabin on a boggy pond. Caren’s expression fit right in; it was the most desolate place Tom had ever seen.

  The cistern was another hundred yards from the cabin, in thick undergrowth and jack pine. It took Caren half an hour to find it. Stonework from another century jutted from the moss and pine needles. Rusted sheets of buckled metal bolted to gray wormwood heaped over the sides. A mattress spring.

  Orange, flaking refuse; decaying tin cans.

  Back at the car, Caren stood hugging herself in the cold while Tom dragged the suitcase from the cargo hatch. Acting as if he were checking the locks, he slipped his THE BIG LAW/87

  hand in, pulled out a packet of bills and stuffed them into the zippered, inner security pocket of his jacket.

  All right, Tom. You just crossed the line.

  Feels… alive.

  Then he doubled and redoubled garbage bags over the luggage as protection against water damage. When he finished, he secured the bundle with loops of duct tape.

  Carrying the suitcase on his shoulder, he was soon sweating and dizzy from exertion. She tapped him on the arm and spelled him with the bag. Amazing. She wasn’t even breathing heavily.

  Aerobics at the spa. Gym rat.

  At the cistern, he carefully rearranged the rusty mess to make room for the bulky package. Then he eased the bundle into the cranny he’d prepared and placed layer after layer of corroded debris over it. The frozen ground was stiff as steel.

  They left no footprints. He took this as a sign.

  As he used pine needles to scrub the rust off his hands he wondered if he could find the place in the dark. He’d counted his steps back to the cabin. One hundred and six. When he emerged from the trees he took a visual fix on a wind-damaged birch tree to the right of the cabin. If he stood in front of the birch, the direction to follow through the trees was two o’clock.

  He realized he was staring at Caren’s back as she huddled in her baggy denim jacket, smoking a cigarette. He tapped her on the shoulder and put his hand out for one of her cigarettes. He tore off the filter and lit it with her plastic Bic.

  First time in ten years he’d had one. He inhaled. Breathing poison felt right. Hot little sparklers of nicotine sizzled in his fingertips. But then-no. Smoking was back-sliding, one of Tom James’s weak habits. He was moving away from Tom James. Moving fast. He stamped the cigarette out on the cold ground.

  They were all alone out here. He looked at his hands, which were nicked, raw and bleeding slightly from working at the cistern. The slight labor had raised several blisters.

  Weak. But getting stronger.

  Back in the car, Tom wrote down the exact mileage on a business card as they turned onto the gravel road. He made another mileage notation when they reached the highway.

  For a min
ute he studied the intersection, sketched a collapsed billboard for a landmark. Then he dropped the car in gear and drove north toward Grand Marais, and beyond it, Devil’s Rock.

  18

  Kit was down for her nap. The dishwasher and the clothes drier hummed their safe lullabies. Stacks of clothes were folded with precision in two plastic baskets next to the kitchen table. Morning chores were done. That wasn’t true.

  With Kit, the work never ended.

  When he and Nina had gone off to take on the world, she had quit the army, had been a grad student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. When they got back, she was pregnant and he thought…

  He paused. Aired out the resentment. Moved on.

  Banks of thermal windows lined the lakeside wall. A desk.

  Low shelves full of books. Gathering dust, except the ones about child rearing…

  The window casements still smelled of new maple and cedar. The whole house smelled new. Like Kit smelled new.

  Like his life did.

  An olive drab, rectangular metal box sat on his desk, the shape and cover latch identifying it, to a veteran’s eyes, as a fifty-caliber ammo can. But this one was outfitted with a cedar liner. Broker ordered it out of a catalog, full of cigars, from a warehouse in North Carolina. He popped the lid, removed a corona and snipped it in half with a guillotine cutter he carried in his pocket. He put half back in the box and stuck the other half in his mouth.

  He patted his stomach where it strained slightly against his waist band. Off cigarettes for six months. Eight pounds over his best weight. He had been through hundreds of cigars and a lot of frozen yogurt. He had yet to light one of the cigars.

  He mulled over them, rolled them in his lips, then clipped off the end when they started to get soggy and chewed them and cut them down to a nub. An interim step. Insurance against reaching for a cancer stick in times of stress.

  Like now.

  It would be all right. Jeff would be here. Steady Jeff.

  Seventeen years ago-God, that long-they’d all been up here, cases of beer, steaks. Steelhead fillets from the nearby Brule River on the grill. Sleeping bags lined up on the plank floor of the then one-room cabin. Jeff, Keith, John Eisenhower, J.T. Merryweather. Wives and girl-friends. Caren laughing.

  Rookies. Crazy brave. Run every red light in town to be the first one to get shot at.

  Pieces of Caren lingered, literally. Nina had unearthed ar-tifacts during her pregnancy, as she and Broker emptied out the old cabin in preparation for the wrecking crew-a cup with a lipstick mark on the rim, a slinky, black knit dress stuffed in the back of a drawer. Nina in her eighth month, at first self-conscious, then bewildered that her body could swell up like special effects. Not the best time for her to find old snapshots of lithe, sable-haired Caren.

  In the female hierarchy, Nina disapproved of Caren, whom she saw as a woman who attached herself to men. To Nina, Caren’s home remodeling business was an affluent hobby.

  Not serious work.

  Nina’s current idea of serious work was to parachute into Belgrade and personally arrest Radovan Karadzic.

  A car swerved off the highway at reckless speed and interrupted his rumination. Broker moved through his house, toward the sound of frozen gravel ricocheting across the hardpack. The gray Ford Crown Victoria drifted in a four-wheel, controlled skid around a turn and down the driveway.

  Unmarked cop car. Keith had gotten in front of her. Broker watched his former friend, partner and boss snap the big car out of the slide, rock it to a stop, roll from behind the wheel, cross the drive and trudge up the porch steps. Broker met him at the front door.

  Behind the menacing sunglasses, Keith’s features twitched like mummy ribbons coming undone.

  He was an inch taller, thicker and had a gregarious side; he would look at home at a prayer breakfast, something Broker could never do. He’d been to the FBI Academy.

  Broker always suspected there was an uptight fed inside him, filing applications in triplicate, trying to get out.

  The grievance list was long; Keith had made Broker’s life miserable until he left the St. Paul Police Department and went to the BCA, Bureau of Crinimal Apprehension, to get away.

  He’d hunkered down in his new life, within walking distance of the Canadian border, and now here was Keith, coming up his steps. But not the old control-freak Keith; this Keith was a shiver of barely contained fury. Broker opened the door.

  “C’mon in. No sense freezing,” said Broker in a calm, almost inaudible voice. He noted Keith’s sloppy appearance, the underscent of alcohol layered by Certs.

  So the stories were true.

  Keith reacted with caution, knowing that voice and the trip wire tension it conveyed. He nodded, removed his sunglasses and swung his head. Fatigue threaded his eyeballs, bloody wires around the jonquil iris. A day’s growth of rust-blond beard roughed his jaw. “Christ, I was hoping she’d be here. She shouldn’t be driving the way she’s fucked up.”

  “Getting hit can do that to you,” said Broker.

  Keith looked away. His eyes tracked the high-beamed living room, the blaze of new wood, skylights-and stopped on the fireplace. Broker’s one indulgence, a fearsome, coiled gilt bronze dragon’s head, an actual hood ornament off a tenth-century Viking long ship, weighing over a hundred pounds, was bolted to the chimney over the mantel. Attracted, Keith walked to the serpentine metalwork, reached up and clasped it in both hands, like a derelict Norseman making a vow.

  He rubbed his bleary eyes. “God. What’d this set you back?” Looked some more. “Place looks like a goddamn mead hall now. “Frowned. Curled his lip. “You still don’t own a computer.” He pointed to the brightly colored plastic baby toys heaped in boxes by the Franklin stove. “Where’s the kid?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Nina?”

  “She’s overseas, Keith.”

  Keith grimaced. He pointed to the table. “Can I sit down?”

  “Coffee?” asked Broker.

  Keith nodded and went for a chair. Broker walked to the kitchen counter and the coffeemaker. They moved with de-corum, walking on eggshells. Broker returned with two coffee cups. Another car came down the drive.

  Keith came around in a half crouch. Then he collapsed back in his chair when he saw that it was a tan on brown county sheriff’s Bronco. Sheriff Jeffords got out of the truck wearing a patrol belt with a full load. Keith swung his eyes on Broker.

  “Sorry, Keith. I thought we might need an umpire,” said Broker, waving the big lawman in.

  “Great, Jeff,” said Keith. “Another fuckin’ runaway to the fuckin’ woods.”

  Jeff was six two, weighed 240, had sandy iron hair and quiet brown eyes. Banded in a cold leather gun belt, he creaked when he walked into the room. “How you doing, Keith?” he asked as he padded to the coffeepot.

  “Not so hot,” said Keith.

  “You know,” said Jeff, giving him his chilly lawman’s eye,

  “they got this new law for cops. Pop your wife and it’s domestic abuse and you lose your right to carry a gun. You heard of that new law, Keith?”

  Keith sagged and reached in the pocket of his over-coat.

  He pulled out an empty plastic pharmacy bottle and placed it on the table with a decisive click. “I found it in the bathroom this morning. Empty. Couple of pills were in the toilet bowl.”

  Broker reached over and read the prescription aloud:

  “BuSpar.”

  “Read the rest of it,” said Keith.

  “Caution: Do not stop taking this medication abruptly without consulting your physician.” Broker and Jeff exchanged glances.

  Keith reached in his other pocket and brought out a mangled photograph. He tossed it on the table.

  There was a slight, but tribal, tightening of jaws all around.

  Quietly, with distaste in his voice, Broker said, “Who is he?”

  “Tom James. Reporter for the St. Paul paper.” Keith expelled a lungful of air.

  “And�
�,” said Broker.

  “And”-Keith strained his breath between clenched teeth-“Caren has a borderline personality disorder. She’s been seeing a shrink for a year…”

  Two vertical worry marks deepened above the center of Broker’s thick eyebrows.

  “She’s anxious, depressed,” explained Keith.

  Broker looked away. “Caren and I didn’t agree on a lot of things, but she was always resilient.”

  “The strain got to her,” said Keith, looking him straight in the eyes.

  “The strain, huh?” queried Broker. Time slipped, missed a beat. It seemed they’d had this conversation before.

  Keith exhaled. “Yeah. Of living with me.” He nodded at the empty pill container. “She quit taking the medicine four, five days ago and went totally snake shit.”

  “What about the reporter?”

  Keith muttered under his breath. His eyes swung, trapped.

  “The little creep is witch-hunting me. I’m real quotable these days.”

  “We heard,” said Jeff.

  “Well, it must have been a slow news day because he came out to dig some dirt. And the shape she’s in…” He shook his head. “I just lost it. Went after both of them. This time it’s my job. The press’ll blow this thing way out of proportion.”

  Caren said she might be bringing someone. Broker took a breath. Hit an air pocket. Why bring a reporter? Great.

  Caren would show up. His kitchen table would be an autopsy slab for dissecting a failed marriage and Keith’s dead career.

  “Who took the picture?” he asked.

  Keith looked away. “I followed them, I wanted something, to get in her face.”

  “Besides a fist?” asked Broker.

  Leather hitched. Jeff shifted from boot to boot.

  “What happens if you stop taking the pills suddenly?”

  asked Broker.

  Keith enunciated in a weary voice. “Overreaction to stress.

  Violent mood swings.” Then, with elaborate precision, he quoted, “A propensity to misperceive reality.”

  19