The Big Law (1998) Read online

  Tom grinned, raised his right hand with the phone and slowly swung it back and forth. Beauty queen wave.

  "Okay," said Garrison. "They have you. Hang on."

  "I want a trade," insisted Tom. "I just saw him kill his wife, man. They'll get me if I give you that tape." Tom's voice rose hysterically, a quavering shout that tumbled, echoing against the snow-draped pines. The cops below him reacted, crouched. One of them raised the shotgun.

  "Easy, easy," said Garrison. "We can protect you."

  "Bullshit, you can protect me. This is big. I want to go away. I want a deal."

  There was a moment of silence. "He wants the Program," stated Garrison, as if he were inspecting the thought coming from his lips. Words were exchanged in the FBI office far away. Garrison said carefully, "If what you have is good, it can be arranged."

  "No, no. I want it all spelled out. In writing and notarized. You fuck people all the time in Witness Protection."

  "Calm down, Tom. We'll take care of you."

  Tom swooned again. "Promise," he said in a thready voice.

  "Absolutely, I promise," said Garrison.

  Tom blinked. The cops were just yards away. One was square, muscular, with a neatly trimmed black mustache. Same uniform as the county sheriff's, at Broker's house. He carried a crackling radio. The other wore highway patrol maroon and had the shotgun. Tom transferred the phone to his left hand and grabbed his leg and felt the blood go warm and sticky between his freezing fingers. With a groan he pitched forward. His victorious smile wore a beard of sticky white snow.

  Then the county cop was bending over him, turning him, doing something to his leg where it hurt. Cutting his trousers. Some bandage. The other one squatted with the shotgun, peering into the woods. The first one finished tying on the compress and gently took the cell phone from Tom's cramped fingers.

  "Deputy Torgerson, Cook County," he said into the phone. "We have him. Right. Not bad. Flesh wound, left calf, just broke the skin. Shock. No sign of Angland or the woman. We have backup coming. Thank you much for the assist."

  Tom pawed feebly for the phone. The deputy handed it to him.

  "Garrison," Tom said softly. Dreamily.

  "Right here."

  "If I go into Witness Protection can I choose my own name?"

  And Lorn Garrison laughed, a discharge of tension. "Well, as long as it's, you know, ethnically compatible. Can't be Gomez." Har. Har.

  An idle snowflake landed on the tip of Tom's nose.

  He composed the lead to the biggest story he would never write in his life: St. Paul Police Lieutenant Keith Angland, the target of an FBI investigation, apparently killed his wife, Caren, because she was threatening to turn an incriminating videotape over to federal authorities.

  Perfect. A million bucks for seed.

  He offered a muffled laugh to the beautiful chaotic snow. Gomez. That's funny, Garrison. Then he raised his bloody hand to his mouth and it tasted like the sea and tears and dirty pennies. He licked his lips and smiled.

  It was going to be great.

  23

  "Pretty. Pretty." Kit, her choking episode forgotten, jumped on the porch. Her first real snow floated down with indifferent wonder. Cheryl Tromley, the closest neighbor, hovered in the cabin doorway.

  "Pretty. Pretty." Like Caren's epitaph.

  Cheryl had to come over on foot because her car was in the shop. Jeff and Broker rushed through changing the rear tire on Jeff's Bronco. Keith. Bastard had punctured tires on both their vehicles.

  Jeff didn't have spare manpower; he'd flagged his men to the Kettle. Now he placed and hoisted the jack. Broker cranked off wheel bolts and replaced the spare while a stoic cop voice crackled over the police radio.

  "That's what the wounded guy said. She went in the Kettle. Angland shoved her."

  Broker compartmentalized, functioned. But he was hearing and seeing through a constricting tunnel. He spin-tightened the wheel bolts. James shot. Caren gone. He and Jeff had misread it. Let it get by them.

  Their eyes met. Silently blamed themselves. Our fault.

  And Caren. Gone. Broker blinked. The word formed in his mind: Gone. Sucked down into crushing turbines of ice water. Drowned. The oxygen exploded to jagged crystals in her lungs.

  Stopped. Ended. Dead.

  Jeff ratcheted down the tire jack and kicked it away. He slammed Broker's shoulder. "C'mon, c'mon." Broker snugged up the bolts, flung the tire wrench and scrambled into the passenger seat.

  The cop on the radio kept talking in an eye-of-the-storm Chuck Yeager voice that reminded Broker of the army: Keith had climbed down into the Kettle spillway and clung to the icy rocks next to the pothole. In a bizarre turn, James had been in cell phone contact with the FBI field office in Duluth.

  "I told her to come here and I left her out there alone with that idiot James," said Broker. He trembled at a sudden chill. "There's something wrong about that guy."

  "We'll question him, hold him if I have to," said Jeff, driving in a controlled fury, wearing steel bracelets that Broker had nipped with a bolt cutter. He expertly corrected a four-wheel skid. Bad snow and he was doing sixty. He reached behind the seat, pulled out a wool blanket and shoved it at Broker. "Wrap up."

  "What?"

  "Cover up. You're in mild shock."

  Broker threw the blanket over his shoulders, shook his head, disbelieving. "Keith's capable of a lot of things. But not killing Caren. Not up there. Christ, he proposed to her up there."

  "Keith's a bastard," Jeff reminded him.

  "Right. A cold, efficient bastard. This is too sloppy, especially with a doofus like James for a witness."

  Jeff ground his teeth. "James could be confused."

  Broker nodded. "Maybe they got into it again, struggled and Keith's pistol went off. Caren got in between and slipped. That's plausible in this weather."

  "Doesn't add up. Kit choking," said Jeff. Broker had told him about the incident. "What happened to that piece of money?" he asked.

  Broker grimaced. "Dropped it. Now with the snow…"

  "Worry about that later. One thing at a time," said Jeff. More radio traffic. They listened to cop blank verse and tried to piece it together.

  A highway patrolman responding to Broker's 911 call had spotted Keith's Ford and James's station wagon at the lodge across the highway from the park. While he waited for backup, he'd grilled the Naniboujou clerk. That's when James's 911 call came into the dispatcher, in Grand Marais. But James hadn't given them a location. By then, two cops were headed up the ridge acting on the clerk's story.

  And suddenly, the FBI pops up on the phones, into their radio net and are in phone contact with James. They worked a radio relay with the officers through Grand Marais.

  The feds threw a long shadow of big-time, big-city trouble across Keith Angland.

  The state trooper and a Deputy Torgerson found James, wounded, on the trail. Torgerson had put a call into Devil's Rock First Responders when he went in after James. The medics came in by a shorter back road and stretchered James out. Angland was now the focus of the rescue. Possibly injured, suffering shock or remorse, stuck down on the lip of the Kettle. The only qualified police climbers were hours away in Duluth or up in Ontario. No time. The medics had brought a rope. Torgerson, who had a lot of water rescue time in the coast guard, went down after Keith.

  James was already en route by ambulance to the clinic in Grand Marais when Jeff wheeled into C. R. Magney. Cruisers from Cook and Lake Counties and the state patrol were slewed at odd angles, motors still running. Silently rotating police flashers lashed the thickening snow and streams of exhaust. Lurid swipes of blue and red.

  Before they had time to get out, the radio crackled. "At the Kettle, say again," said Jeff.

  "Jeff, we got him out. Lyle's about froze. We're bringing them out the back way, by the gravel pit."

  Jeff keyed the mike. "Meet you there." He wheeled the Bronco into a fishtailing U-turn and aimed back for the highway.

  "But I
don't want anything for the pain," insisted Tom James, who had avoided physical pain all of his life and now was catching up fast. Tom made the doctor nervous; the way he sat up, supporting himself on his hands, staring at his bare legs stretched out on a gurney in the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic. And the way he held his coat in a death grip in his bloodstained hand.

  The doctor removed the soaked compress the paramedics had tied on his left calf. Angland's bullet had gouged a small trench from the fleshy muscle. There was enough concavity for him to see tiny bits of veins in the welling blood, threads from his pants.

  "I'd better freeze it," the doctor said. "This is going to hurt when I clean it out."

  "No," said Tom. He stared into the doctor's blue eyes and saw them waver ever so slightly. Sweat formed on the physician's upper lip. Tom had a sudden insight that the doc was uneasy, working on someone who wasn't numbed.

  More new knowledge.

  "Tell me everything you're doing," said Tom.

  "What?" said the doctor, blinking sweat.

  "I want to watch," said Tom.

  They hauled Keith Angland out strapped in a Stokes rescue stretcher. He still wore the sodden dark wool overcoat under a blanket. Ice polyps swung in his blond hair thick as Popsicles. With his arms crossed rigidly across his chest, he looked part embalmed pharaoh, part demented yeti.

  Snow blazed point blank. A group of cops huddled to form a windbreak for Lyle Torgerson. Out of stretchers. Lyle had to walk. "Damn tricky," Lyle chattered from his blankets.

  "What happened to his pistol?" asked Jeff.

  "Dropped it in the Kettle," said Torgerson.

  "He say anything?" asked Jeff.

  Torgerson shook his head. "Just keeps staring at his hand."

  Broker envied him. Growing up, he'd always wondered what it would be like, going down there into the Kettle.

  Broker knelt to the stretcher. "Keith, what happened?"

  Keith stared. Jellied eyes. His face looked like something bird-eaten and dead a month on the beach. Broker looked away, but an eloquent controlled horror in Angland's fixed gaze seduced him back.

  "Keith, it's all right. We got you…" Jeff's voice startled him, jogged his memory. Broker remembered a steamy afternoon in thick brush near Cam Lo; a soldier desperately trying to carry water to a buddy in his bare cupped hands.

  Keith protested with a violent wrench of his ice-fringed head. Like burned-out stars, his eyes sought out Broker. Then he collapsed back into the blankets. One of the paramedics said, "We better look at that hand."

  "Huh?" Broker grunted.

  "His forearm and hand's all fucked up." The medic peeled back the blanket, eased up Keith's sleeve. Broker grimaced. The claw marks started halfway up Keith's inner left forearm and ripped down into his palm. Curls of flesh more than an inch deep, exposing muscle and tendon shriveled in gruesome ripples. Then Broker saw the shreds of red flesh splayed under Keith's fingernails.

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," muttered Jeff. He crossed himself. The medic felt for leverage on the clamped fist. Dead fingers, white as folded piano keys. The medic bore down with both hands. Finally the stiff fingers parted.

  Broker studied the pattern of the wounds and revisited the fatal undertow in Keith's eyes. Then he lowered his gaze to Caren's gold wedding band, imbedded in a thick paste of blood in Keith's shredded palm.

  Speechless, Broker and Jeff exchanged grim stares. Then, quickly, they helped load Keith in the waiting ambulance. As it pulled away, a cop waved Jeff to a county cruiser. Broker followed, heard the radio squawk:

  "Jeff, you gotta get to the clinic fast. We been invaded," yelled Madge, the Grand Marais radio dispatcher.

  "Define…invaded," gasped Jeff.

  "Feds."

  24

  A black helicopter had landed in Grand Marais, smack in the parking lot of the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic.

  On the way in, the dispatcher debriefed them. The invaders were FBI, agents from St. Paul and Duluth. The chopper was Army Reserve out of the Twin Cities, up at the Duluth Air Base for winter ice testing.

  As the caravan from the Kettle drove up the Gunflint Trail, they saw the Blackhawk, dark and sleek, props drooping in the moderating snow like a steel dragonfly.

  Two FBI men stood guard at the helicopter. The side hatch was open, and Keith, on the stretcher, was visible inside. Like a Praetorian, one of the feds held on Uzi at port arms across his chest. The other held a small radio. The freezing mob from the Kettle got out of their cars and started toward the helicopter. When the fed with the Uzi stepped forward, Jeff, incensed, withered him. "Point that thing down range, sonny, or you're under arrest."

  Helicopters. State-of-the-art weapons and communications gear in plain view. Broker and Jeff exchanged squints. The feds loved this. Called it going "high profile."

  "Who's in charge?" demanded Jeff.

  "Garrison. He's inside," said the Uzi holder.

  They went inside. Nurses and orderlies stood in the corridor by the reception desk, stymied and blinded by a blaze of FBI badges. When Doc Rivard started out to check Keith in the chopper, one of the feds accompanied him.

  "Wait a minute, hold on you," yelled Jeff at the agent.

  "FBI. Outa the fucking way," the agent stated coolly, holding his badge up.

  Jeff ripped off his fur cap and flung it on the floor. "My county, goldarnit. Nobody move."

  "Yeah," said the very worked-looking state patrol trooper who'd partnered with Lyle Torgerson up to the Kettle.

  "Yeah," chattered Lyle Torgerson, throwing off his blankets.

  Five more feds came down the hall in a pack, surrounding Tom James, who sat in a wheelchair. They were configured in a politically correct tartan that looked like big-city America slouching toward the millennium. One black, one Chicano, one Asian woman and two white men. Broker had always disliked government types and considered them beyond pigment and gender. Their pinstripes were branded clear through their skin and onto their internal organs.

  James sat mum, clutching his brown parka in his arms. He'd been hastily outfitted from the clinic lost and found. A blanket was thrown over his shoulders, old felt boot liners on his feet. A blaze orange wool hunting cap on his head. Bare shins—one of them tightly bandaged—showed below his hospital gown. Broker was stunned to see a sturdy armored vest Velcroed around his torso. The feds formed a human barrier around him.

  "What the heck?" Jeff pointed at James and thrust out his chin.

  The Head Fed was a rangy six-foot-two silverback in a dark gray wool suit, a metallic silk gray tie, and two-hundreddollar shoes. Well preserved, midfifties. His creased tanned face was out of place in winter. He affected a brown felt 1940s hat, the brim turned down over one eye.

  Looking more like someone who drew his pay from Allan Pinkerton than from Louis Freeh, he said, "Hi, boys." Out came the magic badge. "Lorn Garrison, Special Agent, temporarily working out of St. Paul. Who are you?" Easy smile over an easy southern accent. The motley crew of freezing Cook County lawmen appeared to amuse him.

  Jeff, hands on hips, blocked their path: "What are you doing?"

  "James is a federal witness. And I'm taking Angland in for probable cause. Exigent circumstances," said Garrison evenly. He withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his suit coat pocket and slapped it into Jeff's hand. "And if that doesn't cool your jets, here's a writ of habeas for them both, signed by a federal judge in Duluth an hour ago."

  "Bull," protested Jeff, "Angland is my prisoner and James is my witness."

  "Don't look like you booked Angland yet to me," observed Garrison. "Read that piece of paper and be warned."

  Broker lunged forward and grabbed at James's throat. "Where'd my kid find a hundred-dollar bill to choke on, you fucker?" James shied away, terrified. The biggest fed jumped forward.

  But the powerful hands that spun Broker out of the way were Jeff's. "You're a civilian, Broker; stay clear," he admonished.

  Garrison pointed at Broker. "Who's this?"

  "He's wi
th me." Jeff was mad.

  "You better get him, and yourself, under control," advised Garrison. He narrowed his eyes. "This is federal business."

  "Get off it," stated Jeff. "We've just had a woman maybe murdered and you're taking my witness and my suspect."

  Garrison whipped out a cell phone and consulted a

  small note pad. "It's Jeffords, Sheriff right? End of the World County. Nowhere, Minnesota."

  Jeff waved his arm. His cops surged forward and took a blocking stance across the hall.