The Big Law

In the dark, he showered, shaved and tucked toilet articles into his light travel bag. One ear was cocked to Kit’s slightly congested breathing. He checked to make sure the humidifier was working properly. Then he leaned over the crib and placed the inside of his wrist along her forehead. She sprawled, ravished by sleep, in an orgy of stuffed animals: Cucaracha Dog, Good Night Bunny, Pooh, and Kitty.

The emotion tugged him; never left her before.

He had been with her constantly since the doctor, a woman who wore red rubber boots on the floor of the operating theater of the Stillwater Hospital, had dug and levered in Nina’s slit stomach with a tool that resembled a stainless steel spatula. She’d yanked Kit out like a scowling purple potato trailing a tuberous umbilical root.

Nina’s hips were more narrow than generous, and Kit’s head had been ninety-ninth percentile. Nina dilated, effaced, and it was gridlock. There were also questions about the wounds in her hip. Bullet fragments could have damaged the birth canal. The doctor waited three hours, said the dreaded word complications, examined Nina again and went for her knife.

They wheeled her into surgery for the prep; he paced in a waiting room, clad in a mask, gown and shoe booties.

Waiting to be summoned. Alone, he had dropped to one knee and fumbled his first daddy prayer.

Into your hands-something like that. The only other time he’d touched knee to ground he’d been a green twenty-one.

All around him, Vietnamese troopers were writing prayers on slips of paper and burning them in the predawn darkness.

The wisps of smoke summoned the helicopters that flew him to his first battle.

He touched a lock of his daughter’s copper hair. Learned it backward, all about death before he had any idea about life. He eased the door shut behind him.

With a cup of coffee, he went over his meager brief-case on the kitchen table. Just a spiral notebook, the two hate letters-originals for the FBI agent, Xerox copies for Broker’s use-a laminated county ID he’d had made at the courthouse. And the Colt. The.45 caliber automatic pistol made a stumpy steel question mark, snugged in a holster and curling straps.

Shaking his head, he took the pistol back to his study and locked it in the lower desk drawer. This trip was about talking, not rousting people. He didn’t see the need for a weapon.

Then he went over the schedule he’d put together on the phone yesterday. Meet with Garrison, the FBI man, this afternoon in St. Paul. Tomorrow he’d visit Keith at the Washington County Jail, then grab a late lunch with his ex-partner J.T. Merryweather at the St. Paul cops. J.T. had been cool to him on the phone. Even John Eisenhower had sounded a little distant. Garrison, however, sounded eager to talk to him.

Only one Dr. Ruth Nelson was listed with St. Paul direct-ory assistance. She’d confirmed she had treated Caren and agreed to talk to him very reluctantly.

He’d reserved a room at a Best Western in Stillwater, near the jail. All set.

The morning was mild by local standards, above freezing.

He was finishing his coffee out on the deck when Sally Jeffords wheeled up in her station wagon. She got out and waved, a rugged version of Tipper Gore. He went down the stairs to meet her and explained his concern about Kit being a little stuffed up, what time she’d gone down last night and what she’d had to eat. Sally took a thermos of her own coffee from the car-she preferred hazelnut, he drank Colombian-and with a People magazine for company, tramped up his steps. After Kit was up, Sally would bundle her off to her house.

Broker put his bag, briefcase, and thermos in the Jeep, drove into town and pulled into the Blue Water for breakfast.

Lyle Torgerson’s patrol car was parked alone in front. Broker knew it was Lyle because Lyle always backed into parking slots so he could leave quickly.

A tempting mist of sausage, eggs and hash browns dangled over the grill. Lyle sat in the front booth, where he could look out on the waterfront, now shrouded in fog. He was reading the Duluth News Tribune.

Broker slid in across from him. A waitress brought a cup of coffee. After eyeing the grease feast on Lyle’s plate, Broker ordered, “Oatmeal, whole wheat toast, big orange juice.”

Lyle raised his eyebrows over the top of the paper and commented, “Off to the Cities. How’s it feel to be back in harness?”

Before Broker could respond, the deputy reached across the table, peeled a square jack-o’-lantern sticker from the sleeve of Broker’s parka and deadpanned, “When I go visiting federal prisoners, I learned it’s best to leave my stickers home.”

Lyle was square, muscular and his uniform looked as trim at the end of his shift as it did when he put it on last night.

Twenty and out of the coast guard, most of it driving a cutter on the big lake.

“You never wanted to work down in the Cities, did you?”

asked Broker.

“Not once. Too many rats in the cage.” Lyle yawned. He was a wilderness deputy. His idea of an adrenaline high was to take a snowmobile alone into a blizzard after a lost hunter.

Or a Boston Whaler out into ten-foot waves to rescue some dumbass sailor. He didn’t mind wolves, bears, thirty below zero, or drunk hermits stockaded into cabins with deer rifles; but the image of a full moon perched on top a housing project on a sweaty July night filled him with unease.

Broker ate his oats and said so long to Lyle, went across the road, gassed up at the Amoco and checked the air pressure in his tires. Then he pointed the Cherokee south to go see the fallen man who had stolen his first wife.

Broker liked having the North Woods at his back door to disappear into. Living a half-hour drive from Ontario, he agreed with the Canadian perspective of American culture as the “Excited States.” Traveling south was a moral plunge.

Into the cities of the plain. Broker was not church-going, but he held to an Old Testament notion that cities were incubat-ors of temptation, greed, and all the deadly sins.

Jeff and Broker bantered this subject every deer season, and Jeff always pointed out, in his blunt sly manner, that the Ojibway and Cree had never been city dwellers, and they’d concocted the Windigo-the snowbound demon spirit who embraced all the lurid potential of long winters in the great outdoors: cannibalism, incest, and murderous rages of wigwam fever.

Broker was undeterred. He argued that nature, unobstructed by jet planes, freeways, sirens, strip malls, and billboards, was necessary for the normal development of our brains.

Human imagination, he insisted, evolved because our ancest-ors watched the subtleties of foliage playing in the breeze, or studied cloud formations and the patterns of wind and shadow on water. Soon there was Mozart.

Yeah, real serene, Jeff agreed; Mozart would love it up here with the chain saws, snowmobiles, and now we got those Jet Skis.

But Keith was a pure city guy. He’d go to the woods but only to shoot a deer to stuff and hang in his paneled den.

The den was his spiritual retreat, with a beer close and the big screen flashing with football gladiators. The sound of cheering crowds fueled his soul. Broker liked loud silences.

Big skies and big nights: Orion. The borealis.

To Broker, urban America amounted to lousy working conditions, an anomaly that nature would eventually rub out. Keith, like a spider, gravitated to the center of the humming web of rules that made a city run. He loved the intricacies of organization, of the law. Of man-made things.

He loved control and the idea of enforcing. His flaw was his perfectionism. Broker saw the tidal wave of social bullshit coming, made his plans and walked. Keith, absorbed in meticulous detail, read it wrong, mocked it, and it had slapped him down.

And he’d proven more fragile than anyone thought.

He took your wife.

Didn’t want her anyway.