You fuck people all the time in Witness Protection.”
“Calm down, Tom. We’ll take care of you.”
Tom swooned again. “Promise,” he said in a thready voice.
“Absolutely, I promise,” said Garrison.
Tom blinked. The cops were just yards away. One was square, muscular, with a neatly trimmed black mustache.
Same uniform as the county sheriff’s, at Broker’s house. He carried a crackling radio. The other wore highway patrol maroon and had the shotgun. Tom transferred the THE BIG LAW/123
phone to his left hand and grabbed his leg and felt the blood go warm and sticky between his freezing fingers. With a groan he pitched forward. His victorious smile wore a beard of sticky white snow.
Then the county cop was bending over him, turning him, doing something to his leg where it hurt. Cutting his trousers.
Some bandage. The other one squatted with the shotgun, peering into the woods. The first one finished tying on the compress and gently took the cell phone from Tom’s cramped fingers.
“Deputy Torgerson, Cook County,” he said into the phone.
“We have him. Right. Not bad. Flesh wound, left calf, just broke the skin. Shock. No sign of Angland or the woman.
We have backup coming. Thank you much for the assist.”
Tom pawed feebly for the phone. The deputy handed it to him.
“Garrison,” Tom said softly. Dreamily.
“Right here.”
“If I go into Witness Protection can I choose my own name?”
And Lorn Garrison laughed, a discharge of tension. “Well, as long as it’s, you know, ethnically compatible. Can’t be Gomez.” Har. Har.
An idle snowflake landed on the tip of Tom’s nose.
He composed the lead to the biggest story he would never write in his life: St. Paul Police Lieutenant Keith Angland, the target of an FBI investigation, apparently killed his wife, Caren, because she was threatening to turn an incriminating videotape over to federal authorities.
Perfect. A million bucks for seed.
He offered a muffled laugh to the beautiful chaotic snow.
Gomez. That’s funny, Garrison. Then he raised his bloody hand to his mouth and it tasted like the sea and tears and dirty pennies. He licked his lips and smiled.
It was going to be great.
23
“Pretty. Pretty.” Kit, her choking episode forgotten, jumped on the porch. Her first real snow floated down with indifferent wonder. Cheryl Tromley, the closest neighbor, hovered in the cabin doorway.
“Pretty. Pretty.” Like Caren’s epitaph.
Cheryl had to come over on foot because her car was in the shop. Jeff and Broker rushed through changing the rear tire on Jeff’s Bronco. Keith. Bastard had punctured tires on both their vehicles.
Jeff didn’t have spare manpower; he’d flagged his men to the Kettle. Now he placed and hoisted the jack. Broker cranked off wheel bolts and replaced the spare while a stoic cop voice crackled over the police radio.
“That’s what the wounded guy said. She went in the Kettle.
Angland shoved her.”
Broker compartmentalized, functioned. But he was hearing and seeing through a constricting tunnel. He spin-tightened the wheel bolts. James shot. Caren gone. He and Jeff had misread it. Let it get by them.
Their eyes met. Silently blamed themselves. Our fault.
And Caren. Gone. Broker blinked. The word formed in his mind: Gone. Sucked down into crushing turbines of ice water. Drowned. The oxygen exploded to jagged crystals in her lungs.
Stopped. Ended. Dead.
Jeff ratcheted down the tire jack and kicked it away. He slammed Broker’s shoulder. “C’mon, c’mon.” Broker snugged up the bolts, flung the tire wrench and scrambled into the passenger seat.
The cop on the radio kept talking in an eye-of-the-storm Chuck Yeager voice that reminded Broker of the army: Keith had climbed down into the Kettle spillway and clung to the icy rocks next to the pothole. In a bizarre turn, James had been in cell phone contact with the FBI field office in Duluth.
“I told her to come here and I left her out there alone with that idiot James,” said Broker. He trembled at a sudden chill.
“There’s something wrong about that guy.”
“We’ll question him, hold him if I have to,” said Jeff, driving in a controlled fury, wearing steel bracelets that Broker had nipped with a bolt cutter. He expertly corrected a four-wheel skid. Bad snow and he was doing sixty. He reached behind the seat, pulled out a wool blanket and shoved it at Broker. “Wrap up.”
“What?”
“Cover up. You’re in mild shock.”
Broker threw the blanket over his shoulders, shook his head, disbelieving. “Keith’s capable of a lot of things. But not killing Caren. Not up there. Christ, he proposed to her up there.”
“Keith’s a bastard,” Jeff reminded him.
“Right. A cold, efficient bastard. This is too sloppy, especially with a doofus like James for a witness.”
Jeff ground his teeth. “James could be confused.”
Broker nodded. “Maybe they got into it again, struggled and Keith’s pistol went off. Caren got in between and slipped. That’s plausible in this weather.”
“Doesn’t add up. Kit choking,” said Jeff. Broker had told him about the incident. “What happened to that piece of money?” he asked.
Broker grimaced. “Dropped it. Now with the snow…”
“Worry about that later. One thing at a time,” said Jeff.
More radio traffic. They listened to cop blank verse and tried to piece it together.
A highway patrolman responding to Broker’s 911 call had spotted Keith’s Ford and James’s station wagon at the lodge across the highway from the park. While he waited for backup, he’d grilled the Naniboujou clerk. That’s when James’s 911 call came into the dispatcher, in Grand Marais.
But James hadn’t given them a location. By then, two cops were headed up the ridge acting on the clerk’s story.
And suddenly, the FBI pops up on the phones, into their radio net and are in phone contact with James. They worked a radio relay with the officers through Grand Marais.
The feds threw a long shadow of big-time, big-city trouble across Keith Angland.
The state trooper and a Deputy Torgerson found James, wounded, on the trail. Torgerson had put a call into Devil’s Rock First Responders when he went in after James. The medics came in by a shorter back road and stretchered James out. Angland was now the focus of the rescue. Possibly injured, suffering shock or remorse, stuck down on the lip of the Kettle. The only qualified police climbers were hours away in Duluth or up in Ontario. No time. The medics had brought a rope. Torgerson, who had a lot of water rescue time in the coast guard, went down after Keith.
James was already en route by ambulance to the clinic in Grand Marais when Jeff wheeled into C. R. Magney. Cruisers from Cook and Lake Counties and the state patrol were slewed at odd angles, motors still running. Silently rotating police flashers lashed the thickening snow and streams of exhaust. Lurid swipes of blue and red.
Before they had time to get out, the radio crackled. “At the Kettle, say again,” said Jeff.
“Jeff, we got him out. Lyle’s about froze. We’re bringing them out the back way, by the gravel pit.”
Jeff keyed the mike. “Meet you there.” He wheeled the Bronco into a fishtailing U-turn and aimed back for the highway.
“But I don’t want anything for the pain,” insisted Tom James, who had avoided physical pain all of his life and now was catching up fast. Tom made the doctor nervous; the way he sat up, supporting himself on his hands, staring at his bare legs stretched out on a gurney in the Sawtooth Mountain Clinic. And the way he held his coat in a death grip in his bloodstained hand.
The doctor removed the soaked compress the paramedics had tied on his left calf. Angland’s bullet had gouged a small trench from the fleshy muscle. There was enough concavity for him to see tiny bits of veins in the welling blood, threads from his pants.