The Big Law

all those Germans came at him out of the black winter forest.

Because he didn’t run, he made a difference. A man wearing a VFW hat said that at the funeral.

Stay mad.

She jammed numbers into the kitchen phone. First ring. She shut her eyes. Her lips moved silently. Second ring.

“What,” Phil Broker’s voice, drugged from deep sleep.

“It’s me,” said Caren, and it was as if just a few feet separated them across a dark room. Despite the hour and the bruised pain, she lightly touched her hair with her fingertips.

Smiled. Which hurt. This was so crazy. She wondered if he ever thought of her. But his voice dispelled that fantasy quickly.

“Caren,” he said, flat, direct.

The new wife was younger, vital-shot people in Bosnia with machine guns for all she knew. They had the kid. God.

“I’m in trouble,” she said with a tone of rising alarm just ahead of a wall of tears.

“Calm down.” Concern in Phil’s voice sounded like a stallion stamping, impatient to be harnessed; moving him to old familiar ground, to the thing he loved most-a crisis.

She knew that about him and counted on it now.

Panic caught at her throat. She blurted: “I’m leaving him, Phil. He hit me.”

Broker asked, “Is he there with you?” She didn’t answer.

“Caren?”

“I’m here. He’s gone now.”

“Walk away. Get out. If you really want to pull the plug, call nine-one-one. Get some people around you.”

“Aw God, I’m so damn fucked up.”

“Just leave. Get in the car and drive.” She didn’t answer right away and his voice sped up. “You still there?”

And she finally said it. “Phil. It’s real trouble. I need help.

I need to get someplace safe. I need to talk to you about what to do.”

One second ticked. Two. He decided, “C’mon up.”

“You sure?” Some hope.

“Get moving. If you need some help getting out I can call-”

“No caveman stuff, okay?” Getting stronger.

“Okay. Just do it.”

She thought of the reporter, James. People had already been hurt. Gorski had been hurt dead. She didn’t want James on her conscience. Tried to picture him. A nebbish, in need of a haircut, with glasses, soft blue eyes, a soft mustache and his rumpled corduroy soul.

“I have one stop to make first. I might bring somebody.”

She hung up before he could respond and retrieved the card from her parka and punched in Tom James’s home phone number.

11

Broker stared at the telephone on the bedside table and tried to change the subject, which was difficult when you’re having a conversation with yourself.

Kit stood up in her crib, through the connecting doorway, hands on the rail, doing chubby knee bends. She watched him, smelling like cow pie. Big X-ray eyes. With her ears like radar dishes and a fresh new mind that absorbed everything.

Like him thinking-the first time he saw Caren she was standing in a Macalester College gym with a dozen other neighborhood women. Broker, the bad street cop, was there to teach a class in self-defense. To his hot young eyes she’d looked good enough to be in Hollywood. But she didn’t go to Hollywood. She stayed in Minnesota and kept marrying cops.

Broker rubbed his eyes. Zombie Daddy. He went to Kit, who had begun to cry, placed her on the changing table and changed a three-wipe pooper, dusted on powder, strapped on a dry Huggies and snapped her back into her sleeper.

Then he walked with his baby on his shoulder.

Thinking.

Caren. Coming here. Today. Into his new world of diapers, cleaning, cooking and folding baby clothes. Not to mention…

Nina, who watched him from a framed photo on the bedside table with her smiling Pict princess smile and her freckles like Scotch-Irish war paint under a fur cap. Camouflage fatigues, a flak vest and a pistol belt strapped around her waist. Black camouflage oak leaves fastened on her collar.

Major Mom.

Broker grimaced and said to his wife’s picture, “I said I’d give her a good listen. Okay?”

Then.

Keith, you idiot. Domestic assault. There’s that new law.

They’ll take your gun away, son-they’ll put you out to pasture answering phones and force you out of the job.

Serves you right for being smart enough, or dumb enough, to steal my wife.

Ex-wife, Broker reminded himself.

Sonofabitch hit her, she said.

Some buttons still lit up.

It took him half an hour to get Kit back to sleep. Then he pulled on his Sorel boots and a jacket and stepped out on the front deck. Unseen, Superior heaved and splashed behind a curtain of fog. Lots of things were up and moving out there in the fog. Like Caren. And if she was coming, Keith wouldn’t be far behind.

12

Tom abandoned Ida to the mysteries of the curling iron in her steamy bathroom and went home to clean up. Grumbling at the cold, he kicked his VW along Shepard Road, skirting the Mississippi River bluffs. Dawn spiked the eastern horizon, bitter as flint roses.

Disheveled, his hair uncombed, he tramped up from his parking garage and waited as a load of scrubbed office worker ants unloaded from the elevator. He rode up to the fourteenth floor, walked to his door, stooped, picked up the morning paper, turned the key and went in.

As he tossed the newspaper on the table, a large manila envelope slid out. The business card was fastened by a squeeze-clasp: THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. SPECIAL AGENT LORN GARRISON.

He grabbed the envelope, tore it open and pulled out an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of himself and Caren Angland talking over a horizontal Christmas tree at Hansen’s Tree Farm.

Oh boy.

His hand went to his phone. Heard the interrupted tone.

Message. He tapped in the code for his voice mail. Caren Angland’s voice, tight, shaking: “Take some precautions.

Keith knows that we met and he’s acting very…crazy. He hit me. Call me immediately.” She left a number.

Tom punched in the number and Caren answered on the first ring. “Mrs. Angland? It’s Tom James. I just got your message. Are you all right?”