“I’d better freeze it,” the doctor said. “This is going to hurt when I clean it out.”
“No,” said Tom. He stared into the doctor’s blue eyes and saw them waver ever so slightly. Sweat formed on the physician’s upper lip. Tom had a sudden insight that the doc was uneasy, working on someone who wasn’t numbed.
More new knowledge.
“Tell me everything you’re doing,” said Tom.
“What?” said the doctor, blinking sweat.
“I want to watch,” said Tom.
They hauled Keith Angland out strapped in a Stokes rescue stretcher. He still wore the sodden dark wool overcoat under a blanket. Ice polyps swung in his blond hair thick as Pops-icles. With his arms crossed rigidly across his chest, he looked part embalmed pharaoh, part demented yeti.
Snow blazed point blank. A group of cops huddled to form a windbreak for Lyle Torgerson. Out of stretchers. Lyle had to walk. “Damn tricky,” Lyle chattered from his blankets.
“What happened to his pistol?” asked Jeff.
“Dropped it in the Kettle,” said Torgerson.
“He say anything?” asked Jeff.
Torgerson shook his head. “Just keeps staring at his hand.”
Broker envied him. Growing up, he’d always wondered what it would be like, going down there into the Kettle.
Broker knelt to the stretcher. “Keith, what happened?”
Keith stared. Jellied eyes. His face looked like something bird-eaten and dead a month on the beach. Broker looked away, but an eloquent controlled horror in Angland’s fixed gaze seduced him back.
“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.”