The Big Law

Two million dollars.

Tom squirmed in his chair and crossed his legs. He was actually getting a hard on. Terry stopped the tape and thumbed rewind. Lorn was saying, “…and bring some equipment so we can copy this thing.” He turned, one hand over the receiver and spoke to Tom. “Sharkey says you done good. I got a feeling you’re flying first class.”

Tom endeavored to look like a dutiful citizen. Lorn was back talking to a U.S. attorney in charge of a midwestern task force.

“Tony doesn’t have Kagin’s balls. He’s too old to do more time. He’s got a bad ticker. He definitely could flip. Come over here and have a look at this thing. Get a search warrant for Angland’s house to see if that money is still there. Right.

See ya.”

An hour and a half later, Tom watched a dozen justice department attorneys huddle around the VCR after viewing the tape. A crew was making duplicates. The Minnesota U.S.

attorney was there grinning his slightly bucktoothed grin.

But Joe Sharkey, the prosecutor out of Chicago, was the one cloud walking.

Sharkey was the man to make the deal. Short, intense, with pinstripes on everything he wore, including his socks, he strutted, with his thumbs hooked in his pinstriped sus-penders. The other suits in the room congratulated him in awed voices, “Joe, this is a career-defining case.”

Sharkey set his narrow jaw in his knife-edged face.

And he’d say, “If Sporta flips on Kagin, we’ll be into the Italians and the Russians. Jesus…they’ll have to build a whole new Marion, we’ll get so many bad guys.”

The lawyer gave off an unholy glow, like, boy, am I gonna look good at the press conference when I spring this one.

Already dreaming of a corner office at Justice.

Tom continued to stand quietly, meekly, reverently. Until finally, the attorney let Lorn Garrison lead him across the room to meet the man who delivered the tape into his hands.

“Homage is due,” said Sharkey, throwing a wiry arm over Tom’s shoulders and hoisting his can of Coke.

“Here, here,” saluted the room full of feds.

The attorney smiled broadly. “You want to disappear, Mr.

James-shazam. I personally sprinkle you with pixie dust.”

“But I still have to pass with the Marshals,” Tom wondered aloud.

“Hey, you’re not some bottom-feeding thug,” said Sharkey.

“The tape is pure platinum. You’re going to be flying up there right behind the pilot, trust me. You’re gone.”

Tom smiled modestly.

Twenny bricks.

That night Agent Terry escorted Tom back into St. Paul, so he could remove clothes and toilet articles from his apartment. When Terry used the bathroom, Tom slipped into the corridor and dropped his letters down the mail chute. Then Tom packed a single bag and never looked back.

Shazam.

27

All his life he had come up here and watched the Devil’s Kettle lash the Brule in an endless crack-the-whip against the granite walls, then disappear into the depths of the earth. It had always been a mystery. As a little boy, he believed a monster lived down there, thrashing in the raging current. When I grow up, he’d told himself, I’m gonna catch that monster.

A clump of iris turned black on the snowy rock in the center of the Brule River. The rock overlooked the pothole and was assumed to be the place where Keith Angland threw his wife to her death.

Or, more accurately, to the first stage of her death, mused Broker as he rehashed the conclusions he and Jeff had aired earlier today. He stood on the observation platform over the Kettle, rolling an unlit cigar in his mouth.

Apparently she didn’t go in all the way, so Keith had to risk his own life, climb down, and shove her the rest of the way, inch by inch, while she clawed his arm to bloody ribbons.

Of course, given the terrain and the weather, this method of coup de grace virtually insured he would need assistance to climb back out. That, or take his chances getting down the icy cascade, then off the partially frozen and extremely treacherous river.

No one seemed to remember that Keith had a weapon.

Even though he’d shot James. If he was so bent on killing Caren, who was clinging to the rocks about thirty feet below, why not lean over and squeeze off one or two rounds and let gravity take it from there. Keith had a basement full of marksmanship trophies.

And why would Keith shoot a reporter and then let him get away? Keith ran marathons. James was the original couch potato.

The theory Jeff and Broker suggested was more plausible: a confused struggle in the snow on slippery footing. But two of the parties to that scenario had survived, and neither of them would talk about it.

Broker rotated his neck and shoulders. Working out the tension. You gave up this line of work, remember, he told himself.

And then-the FBI touches down like a tornado, sweeps up Keith and James, and disappears. They don’t even interrogate Jeff or me. If I was working this case I’d damn sure want to know why Caren would drive three hundred miles to see an ex-husband she hadn’t spoken to in five, six years…

Broker was finding his way out of the wind tunnel of shock and remorse. Hearing old music; the compulsion to solve something. Two days in a row he had left Kit with Jeff’s wife, Sally, and had climbed the trail up to the Kettle.

A lot of people were making the trek. A few were gawkers.

But mostly they were women paying their respects. After Duluth television sent a remote team to film on this spot, women came to lay flowers. The story rolled down a familiar nightmare alley-abused wife dies at the hand of her violent husband.

The reporter had done her homework and pieced together a story from interviews with cops and medics who had been involved in the rescue at the Kettle. She depicted Caren running for her life from her current husband to the protection of her previous husband. The TV bullshit incensed Broker deeply.

Especially the nuance of unrequited romance that connected him to the story like black crepe crime-scene tape.

The first night was the worst. Caren visited his sleepless thoughts as he lay awake listening to the rise and fall of Kit’s breathing in the crib next to him. He imagined Caren, perfectly preserved, in a time capsule of ice water, deep within the granite folds of the earth, or five miles out, gently turning in the crystalline bowels of Superior.

Her blue lips stuck on the request: Phil, I need your help.

But then, he could reduce it to a much simpler, visceral knot in his stomach: Kit turning blue, choking, and that smug weasel, James, knowing why.

The feds pulled a curtain of official silence over the death at Devil’s Kettle. After a few calls to the federal prosecutor in Minneapolis, Hustad, the new Cook County attorney, saw it was futile to build a case against Keith Angland. Tom James was unavailable, held incommunicado in federal custody.

The word drifting up the cop jungle-telegraph to Jeff was: Witness Protection for James. Caren’s death was lost-but not forgotten, the feds insisted-in the shadow of something big.

The story rolled from Duluth downstate and washed against an official stonewall at the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office and lost momentum. After a few days, the pilgrims stopped coming to the Kettle. Caren’s story, like all news stories, ended.

America shopped toward Christmas. Life went on at the decibel level of a radio commercial written for third