The Big Law

orgasm.

He had his own call sign: Tango. If he stepped outside the secure house, Lorn keyed his little black radio and said, “Tango is walking in the campus. Look sharp up on the ridge.”

Juice.

How had he lived his life without it. Now he saw the world through the eyes of a tiger. Like in the poem. Stalking the burning night.

His posture changed. The strength of his grip. The way he walked would change too, when his leg healed. He was becoming A Force to Be Dealt With.

And he was gambling for high stakes, stringing a U.S. attorney along to make a deal, betting on the outcome of a videotape he had never seen. The clock was running. Keith Angland was in St. Paul Regions Hospital, under guard, recovering from hypothermia and frostbite. Tom had given up the locker key; an agent from Duluth had retrieved the video and was en route.

He needed that tape to be as good as Caren said it was; so he could get his deal before Angland starting talking. If the tape was good, Tom could deny anything Angland said.

C’mon tape.

Tom had one real worry. Broker, the suspicious bastard.

What if Angland talked to Broker? Could Broker and that North Woods sheriff find a way to screw up his deal?

His flesh wound, just a deep scratch, was his proud badge of courage. It had been cleaned and freshly bandaged by a doctor earlier in the morning. The medic said he could walk on it if he used common sense. Garrison kept him under guard, at a safe house tucked into the river bottom at the base of a wooded bluff on the Wisconsin side of the Saint Croix River. They were about five miles south of the Hudson Bridge. Afton, Minnesota, was just across the thin ice. Tom searched for Caren Angland’s house, a toy cube in the distance, against the gray mist of the Minnesota shore.

Two agents stood guard on the cabin’s first floor, trading off with two more who had cold duty in parkas, pile caps, and mittens with the trigger finger cut out so they could handle scoped rifles in the surrounding woods.

The house was stocked to accommodate a family, so Tom found needle and thread in his room. The first night he carefully unraveled the lining to his parka and tucked the hundred-dollar bills around the hem. Slowly, carefully, he resewed the lining. The insulated padding disguised the paper and camouflaged the rustle.

Now. Get rid of the envelope he’d used to hold some of the bills. He went into the bathroom. About to tear it up and flush it. Then he noticed the return address.

MAJOR NINA PRYCE

OPERATION CONSTANT GUARD

APO AE O9787

CJCMTF (CAMP MCGOVERN)

That, he thought, might be useful. He tucked it in his pocket.

Broker and his kid presumed to rob his glory. His desire to strike back at them was a flaw that would get him in trouble.

It flared up once an hour.

“Control that,” he muttered aloud. First get your deal.

Waiting.

Lorn allowed him to check his voice mail at his apartment.

Every TV station in town, plus CNN, had logged in, plus the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Duluth News Tribune, the other two big papers in the state. Some messages he saved to listen to over and over. Others he erased. The one from Layne Wanger he saved: “Hey, Tom, sure would like to talk to you,” etc. Sprinkled between the business calls were hushed inquiries from Ida Rain:

“Tom, if you hear this please know that I understand how difficult it is for you to communicate right now. How is your leg? We’re all so proud of you. Just let me know you’re all right. Love you. Ida.”

God. He curled his lip. Listen to her. Bubbling with…pride. She was probably yakking to everybody in the newsroom how she’d been intimate with Tom James. Hi Ida.

Bye Ida.

Erase. Erase.

When he wasn’t monitoring the calls he read about himself in the papers. The story was still sketchy. Mainly it came from the Cook County sheriff, Tom Jeffords, because no one else involved would talk to the press. In Jeffords’s account, Tom assumed the role of mystery witness and victim in the events at the Devil’s Kettle that resulted in the alleged murder of Caren Angland and the arrest of her husband by the FBI.

Tom had been whisked into hiding by the feds because he was involved in their chain of evidence against Keith Angland.

But the feds had taken Angland into custody for racketeer-ing, not the murder of his wife. It was a trade-off. The feds could use the RICO statutes to ask for stiffer sentencing than the state could, even under its first- degree-murder statute.

Proving first-degree murder against Angland would be difficult.

And the feds weren’t going to share their witness.

Jeffords put it this way: “All parties assume Keith Angland killed his wife, but without a body, a witness, a weapon, or any material evidence other than a nine-one-one tape that doesn’t mention Angland by name-it falls in a legal crack-technically, no crime was committed. We have to carry Caren Angland as missing, presumed dead.”

No crime was committed.

More magic.

The safe house was outfitted with a computer, printer, and copier-fax. Happily, the computer was on-line, so Tom could browse the Web. Mainly, he scouted out information on the Witness Protection Program. Or WITSEC, as Lorn referred to it.

He didn’t really need to bone up on WITSEC. He’d read a book about the U.S. Marshals Service in the last year, and he had a fundamental knowledge of the program.

If the tape was good, he’d have no problem getting in.

He’d be all right. Just had to be patient and don’t do anything dumb. That’s how most people got caught. They did something dumb.

Tom’s dumb hang-up was a recurring fantasy. He imagined Broker’s chubby baby, now big as a cow, sitting in the woods, at the cistern where he’d hidden the money. One by one, she ate the bills.

That’s really dumb, Tom, he told himself. But every hour the crazy image rolled by, like a goddamn crosstown bus.

He found himself wondering if the kid was precocious and could communicate with her father. Tap her foot like a trained pony. Tell him what had happened in the workshop.

Broker had put his hands on Tom’s throat, wanted to hold him on suspicion.

There it was again. Baby Huey, eating his money; crapping green like a goose.

Broker wouldn’t be so tough if he weren’t worried about his kid all the time. Cops were weird about their kids. He’d done a story on a cop once who got in trouble for running background checks on the boy who was dating his daughter.

He was somebody now. He didn’t have to take shit from hicks. Maybe write a little something. Send a note to the fancy pants wife in the army, too. Give her something to think about.

Don’t mess with Tom.

Tom opened a new file and began to play with words. Not the straightforward AP style that characterized his reporting.

No, this was a mood piece. This was twitchy.

Send a little love note to Broker. And the wife.

Just a page to keep him up nights.

Only mail them if he got into the program.

His fingers flew over the keys, inspired. He went over it a few times, hit the spell check, polished here and