by Chuck Logan
“Keith, it’s all right. We got you…” Jeff’s voice startled him, jogged his memory. Broker remembered a steamy afternoon in thick brush near Cam Lo; a soldier desperately trying to carry water to a buddy in his bare cupped hands.
Keith protested with a violent wrench of his ice-fringed head. Like burned-out stars, his eyes sought out Broker. Then he collapsed back into the blankets. One of the paramedics said, “We better look at that hand.”
“Huh?” Broker grunted.
“His forearm and hand’s all fucked up.” The medic peeled back the blanket, eased up Keith’s sleeve. Broker grimaced.
The claw marks started halfway up Keith’s inner left forearm and ripped down into his palm. Curls of flesh more than an inch deep, exposing muscle and tendon shriveled in gruesome ripples. Then Broker saw the shreds of red flesh splayed under Keith’s fingernails.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” muttered Jeff. He crossed himself. The medic felt for leverage on the clamped fist. Dead fingers, white as folded piano keys. The medic bore down with both hands. Finally the stiff fingers parted.
Broker studied the pattern of the wounds and revisited the fatal undertow in Keith’s eyes. Then he lowered his gaze to Caren’s gold wedding band, imbedded in a thick paste of blood in Keith’s shredded palm.
Speechless, Broker and Jeff exchanged grim stares. Then, quickly, they helped load Keith in the waiting ambulance.
As it pulled away, a cop waved Jeff to a county cruiser.
Broker followed, heard the radio squawk:
“Jeff, you gotta get to the clinic fast. We been invaded,”
yelled Madge, the Grand Marais radio dispatcher.
“Define…invaded,” gasped Jeff.
“Feds.”
24
A black helicopter had landed in Grand Marais, smack in the parking lot of the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic.
On the way in, the dispatcher debriefed them. The invaders were FBI, agents from St. Paul and Duluth. The chopper was Army Reserve out of the Twin Cities, up at the Duluth Air Base for winter ice testing.
As the caravan from the Kettle drove up the Gunflint Trail, they saw the Blackhawk, dark and sleek, props drooping in the moderating snow like a steel dragonfly.
Two FBI men stood guard at the helicopter. The side hatch was open, and Keith, on the stretcher, was visible inside.
Like a Praetorian, one of the feds held on Uzi at port arms across his chest. The other held a small radio. The freezing mob from the Kettle got out of their cars and started toward the helicopter. When the fed with the Uzi stepped forward, Jeff, incensed, withered him. “Point that thing down range, sonny, or you’re under arrest.”
Helicopters. State-of-the-art weapons and communications gear in plain view. Broker and Jeff exchanged squints. The feds loved this. Called it going “high profile.”
“Who’s in charge?” demanded Jeff.
“Garrison. He’s inside,” said the Uzi holder.
They went inside. Nurses and orderlies stood in the corridor by the reception desk, stymied and blinded by a blaze of FBI badges. When Doc Rivard started out to check Keith in the chopper, one of the feds accompanied him.
“Wait a minute, hold on you,” yelled Jeff at the agent.
“FBI. Outa the fucking way,” the agent stated coolly, holding his badge up.
Jeff ripped off his fur cap and flung it on the floor. “My county, goldarnit. Nobody move.”
“Yeah,” said the very worked-looking state patrol trooper who’d partnered with Lyle Torgerson up to the Kettle.
“Yeah,” chattered Lyle Torgerson, throwing off his blankets.
Five more feds came down the hall in a pack, surrounding Tom James, who sat in a wheelchair. They were configured in a politically correct tartan that looked like big-city America slouching toward the millennium. One black, one Chicano, one Asian woman and two white men. Broker had always disliked government types and considered them beyond pigment and gender. Their pinstripes were branded clear through their skin and onto their internal organs.
James sat mum, clutching his brown parka in his arms.
He’d been hastily outfitted from the clinic lost and found. A blanket was thrown over his shoulders, old felt boot liners on his feet. A blaze orange wool hunting cap on his head.
Bare shins-one of them tightly bandaged-showed below his hospital gown. Broker was stunned to see a sturdy armored vest Velcroed around his torso. The feds formed a human barrier around him.
“What the heck?” Jeff pointed at James and thrust out his chin.
The Head Fed was a rangy six-foot-two silverback in a dark gray wool suit, a metallic silk gray tie, and two-hundred-dollar shoes. Well preserved, midfifties. His creased tanned face was out of place in winter. He affected a brown felt 1940s hat, the brim turned down over one eye.
Looking more like someone who drew his pay from Allan Pinkerton than from Louis Freeh, he said, “Hi, boys.” Out came the magic badge. “Lorn Garrison, Special Agent, tem-porarily working out of St. Paul. Who are you?” Easy smile over an easy southern accent. The motley crew of freezing Cook County lawmen appeared to amuse him.
Jeff, hands on hips, blocked their path: “What are you doing?”
“James is a federal witness. And I’m taking Angland in for probable cause. Exigent circumstances,” said Garrison evenly.
He withdrew a folded sheet of paper from his suit coat pocket and slapped it into Jeff’s hand. “And if that doesn’t cool your jets, here’s a writ of habeas for them both, signed by a federal judge in Duluth an hour ago.”
“Bull,” protested Jeff, “Angland is my prisoner and James is my witness.”
“Don’t look like you booked Angland yet to me,” observed Garrison. “Read that piece of paper and be warned.”
Broker lunged forward and grabbed at James’s throat.
“Where’d my kid find a hundred-dollar bill to choke on, you fucker?” James shied away, terrified. The biggest fed jumped forward.
But the powerful hands that spun Broker out of the way were Jeff’s. “You’re a civilian, Broker; stay clear,” he admonished.
Garrison pointed at Broker. “Who’s this?”
“He’s with me.” Jeff was mad.
“You better get him, and yourself, under control,” advised Garrison. He narrowed his eyes. “This is federal business.”
“Get off it,” stated Jeff. “We’ve just had a woman maybe murdered and you’re taking my witness and my suspect.”
Garrison whipped out a cell phone and consulted a small note pad. “It’s Jeffords, Sheriff right? End of the World County. Nowhere, Minnesota.”
Jeff waved his arm. His cops surged forward and took a blocking stance across the hall.
Garrison smiled tightly. “Sheriff, have you ever talked, person to person, with Janet Reno.” He poised his finger over the phone buttons.
“Oh, c’mon,” protested Jeff.
“I shit you not, pardner,” said Garrison offering the phone to Jeff.
The silence in the clinic hallway sharpened the contrasting parties to the lopsided standoff. One side shivered from the cold with icicles literally dripping from their noses. The other exuded steely-eyed imperial high confidence. Warm and dry, they were organized in a wedge formation around James and the wheelchair. The agent who stood next to Special Agent Garrison wore body armor under her London Fog trench coat and rested an Uzi automatic on her hip.
Jeff stared at the legal writ in his hand. He knew the judge who had signed it. Garrison, sensing an opening, closed up his phone and moved closer. “Look, I don’t like it either, hotdogging it in your jurisdiction,” he temporized.
“The law-” Jeff insisted.
“C’mon, Jeffords. There’s the law and then there’s The Big Law, know what I mean.” He wrote a number on a card and handed it to Jeff.
“I’m going to want to interview him,” insisted Jeff.
“Sure, that’s my direct line,” said Garrison. “Call me in St.
Paul.”
They were done in. Out of fight. And the feds had the writ, signed by a judge. Exhausted, battered by the cold, sniffling and red faced, they stood by, numb, while the feds formed a human shield around James and rushed him out the front door. The doctor came into the ER, shivering. “The one in the chopper has frostbite on his fingers. He has to get to a full-care hospital. Either they take him or we call Lifelift out of Duluth.”
As the person formerly known as Tom James rolled past them he couldn’t resist flipping Broker the bird and sneering,
“Give my love to your fat little kid.”
“I told you,” Broker seethed to Jeff between clenched teeth.
“I heard it,” said Jeff.
When they hoisted Tom into the helicopter, he saw Angland and had a moment of fright, fearing Angland would accuse him, blab his version. Wrapped in blankets, Angland’s eyelids just fluttered. Possibly sedated, he didn’t seem to know where he was.
Tom leaned back, savored the moment. He’d never been in a helicopter before. Guns. Radios crackling. Sizzling circuits. Star Wars lights winking on the control panel. All to guard him. This was like…Tom Clancy.
25
Tom had wind in his hair, playing chicken with the world, driving a coast-to-coast convertible 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 there. He scrolled to a clean screen and typed Phil Broker, General Delivery, Devil’s Rock, Minnesota. Then he typed the wife’s military mailing address. Quickly, he printed out the sheets.
The desk contained basic office supplies, which he took to his room, along with the printed material. Using a Kleenex to mask his fingers, he folded the sheets with the writing on it and slid them in envelopes. Then he used a scissors to cut out the addresses. The desk drawer had a Glue Stic, which he used to affix the addresses to the envelopes. There was also a roll of first-class stamps. Recently purchased. Madonna and child. The stick’em kind. No need to lick. Carefully, again employing Kleenex, he stuck one stamp on Broker’s envelope, eight on the other.
Now he just had to wait until he could sneak them in the mail. He slipped the envelopes into a copy of Newsweek and tucked them under his mattress.
Lorn Garrison sat across the kitchen table, rolling a blue tip safety match in his lips. Ex-smoker. He watched Tom read the stories about Caren’s death and Angland’s arrest for the tenth time. Then he leaned over, gathered all the sections and piled them in the wood box. A Franklin woodstove, fire blazing, sat on a pedestal in the center of the room. Lorn bunched one of the sections and tossed it into the flames.
“A little advice,” he said. “Our recommendation carries a lot of weight with the U.S. attorney when he makes his decision to put somebody in the program. But the final say is up to the Marshals Service. And they are real sticklers for detail.
“If the marshals see you drooling over your press clippings, they’ll figure you’ve got an ego connection to your past. They won’t take a chance on you. Catch my drift.”
