The Big Law

grade comprehension.

Sound bite metaphysics.

Caren was dead.

Shit happens.

Blip.

Unconcerned, the Kettle sucked the Brule River underground as it had done since the glaciers piled up the ridge, too powerful and unapproachable to give up its secret.

Broker walked back down the trail, rolling his shoulders, working out the kinks. He snipped a soggy inch off his cigar and stuck it back in his mouth.

Jeff called that night: Quick, turn on the tube. Duluth.

Channel 13. With Kit under his arm, Broker tapped the remote. The opaque gray screen turned into the Minneapolis U.S. attorney. He stood at a podium in front of a phalanx of Cheshire-smiling feds. He said that Caren Angland had not died in vain. She had provided taped evidence-through the intercession of Tom James-to a federal investigation.

Based on that evidence, her husband, Keith, was being questioned by a federal grand jury for conspiring to murder a federal informant.

The conference veered out of control when the U.S. attorney confirmed that, yes, a human tongue had been delivered in a fake bomb to the FBI office in the St. Paul Federal Building a week ago. He termed this “a taunt from the Russian mob.” He added that the presumed-dead informant’s name and return address were on the package. And that the man’s car and some of his clothing had been found in the Saint Croix River, near Scandia, Minnesota.

Testing at the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia, confirmed that the tongue belonged to a male.

Then the U.S. attorney introduced a federal strike force prosecutor, a dapper, short man named Joe Sharkey, from Chicago. Sharkey explained that Keith was just one target of his investigation, and a minor one. A Chicago mobster captured talking to Keith on Caren’s tape had copped a plea and turned federal witness.

“How big is this?” asked a reporter.

“Big as Sammy Gravanno. We’re looking at an interlocking case involving the Italian and Russian Mafias.”

The report added a local follow-up, querying a spokesman for the St. Paul Police Department about Keith Angland.

“That’s a federal matter, no comment,” said a dour department media representative.

As soon as the report ended, Jeff called back. “Holy cow.

Keith trafficking in human tongues? Two flavors of Mafia?

She ever mentioned a tape?” he asked.

“This is the first I heard,” said Broker.

“She must have wanted you to see it. Why?” asked Jeff.

“Don’t know. But James does. He knew about the tape.

He had to be talking to the FBI. How else could they come out of nowhere so quick.”

“And I was right there, big as a barn, wearing a badge. If I’d of known what kind of danger Caren was in…,” mulled Jeff.

“Probable cause, at least,” said Broker.

“You bet. I’d have cuffed Keith before he cuffed me. And I would have put some people around Caren- fast.”

“But you couldn’t, because we didn’t know where she was.”

“James could have told us. But he didn’t,” said Jeff.

“Yeah, I think maybe he started out working on a story and ended up working on something else,” said Broker.

“Like what?”

“What did Kit choke on?”

“Hmm…,” said Jeff.

“It’s about money,” said Broker.

The books were all read. The tippy-cup finished. He sat in the rocking chair with the weight of the child on his shoulder.

Her vulnerable breath rose and fell against his throat, magically clean and innocent. Broker rocked and thought.

On a night fourteen years ago, in this very room, which was smaller then, just a shack, Keith Angland showed up to go hunting without his gear. No rifle, no hunting clothes.

“The strain is getting to her, you working all this hairy undercover stuff. You’re never there. You never talk to her.” And finally. “I love her and you don’t,” he’d said. “What you love is the action.” And he’d been right. Then.

In fourteen years, the world had turned upside down. Keith had been too rigid to bend with the times. He had cracked wide open and madness and murder had gushed out. And Broker…

Broker rose slowly from the rocking chair, carefully balancing the sleeping baby on his shoulder, and walked the length of the spacious living room to the windows overlooking the lake. The cabin where he and Keith had their showdown over Caren was now a three-bedroom lake home.

And it did resemble a mead hall, complete to the detail of the snarled dragon’s head over the fireplace. One huge high-peaked room, pinned with beams, sited parallel to the shore.

The wall that faced the lake was all thermal glass, banks of windows. Opposite the windows three bedrooms and a bath.

The tall fireplace dominated one end of the long room, an open kitchen filled the other. He’d never used the big fireplace and was saving that for Christmas. Kit’s toys, books, and a rocking chair sat next to an old Franklin stove raised on a dais of tile between the living room area and the kitchen.

Where they lived, by the fire.

His hideaway.

By recent occupation, Kit’s father was, by some accounts, a pirate.

Now, like a pirate, he brooded from his granite point, down on the rising northwest wind that herded white- plumed six-foot waves into his rocky cove. When the lake whipped up, he fondly remembered illustrations in romantic books for boys: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped or Treasure Island. Wind-swept crags. Tempest seas.

Another issue Caren had with him. Never growing up.

Chasing adventure.

Two years ago, he had done exactly that. Now he paid his bills with a MasterCard drawn on a bank in Bangkok.

For runaround cash he used a VISA attached to a numbered account at the Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong. Funds seeped via electronic interbank transfers into his account in the Grand Marais Bank, always less than $10,000 a transaction.

Rebuilding this house called for real money, so, last year, he’d declared a half million in taxable income. Broker’s nest egg was a ton of Vietnamese imperial gold bullion and ancient Cham relics, tucked in a bank vault in Hong Kong.

Broker had found it, dug it up and smuggled it out of Vietnam. His treasure hunt had also turned up a mate. And a child. Had bought him freedom. Room to get away. But it hadn’t stopped the world from coming in on him.

He carried Kit to her crib, gently lowered her to her blankets and stuffed animals.

What the hell. A man should be able to handle whatever was in front of him. Kill an enemy, field dress a deer, fix the plumbing, read a rectal thermometer and stay up, worried, all night, with a croupy baby.

Back in the kitchen, he glanced at Nina’s picture pinned to the bulletin board. You stayed on the Widow Maker without getting bucked off, this is your life.

Across the length of the dark living room, the dragon glinted in tightly wound contortions against the chimney stones. And this too is your life. And there was room in his life to find out what really