Chuck Logan - The Big Law

Quite possibly she was impaired. Concussion perhaps.

Out on the road, alone with him. With a priceless tape and at least a million dollars. Spiraled off on a tangent, reliving her first marriage.

“Is he still a cop?” he asked.

She shook her head. “He got rich. His folks have this cabin resort in Devil’s Rock, he plays at managing it sometimes.”

Tom cleared his throat. “Is he quick-tempered? Calm?”

Armed? Dangerous? Still in love with you?

She removed her sunglasses, inclined her head and searched for words. “He used to watch that Robert Redford THE BIG LAW/83

movie- Jeremiah Johnson -over and over. Every year, just before deer season. It used to drive me nuts.”

“Be serious.”

“I am. It drove me right up the wall, every November.”

She cranked her neck and stared at the rearview mirror. “I hope nobody is following us. Something bad always happens at the end of a car chase.”

“So, does he know about…the stuff on the tape,” Tom thought out loud.

“Not yet. I need you to act as go-between? To, you know, set up a meeting. Let him know it’s serious and not just some dumb fight I’m having with Keith.”

Tom stared out the window at the toothpick wreckage of a cornfield. A woman has a fight with her husband. The husband hits her. She runs for help to her former husband.

The two husbands dislike each other. The only thing they agree on-being cops-is that they hate reporters. Tom could wind up being a lightning rod for all the hot emotions zig-zagging around. She could be dissembling-it could be a romantic triangle that involved at least one alleged murder, some crooks, more than a million bucks and an FBI investigation.

What if Caren and Keith made up? It could happen.

They’d have this tearful and probably sexually very hot re-union. Then Keith would get up, take a leisurely Clydesdale pee, and make Tom James disappear along with the guy whose return address was on the bomb hoax.

They wouldn’t let him write his story and this was for keeps. Jesus, Tom. You’re too far out in front of this thing.

You could get yourself killed . Something new in the shudder of fear beckoned him. Held him tight. The excitement.

And then, a cool, veteran insight squinted down twenty years of seedy crime stories- I’m not the logical person to get killed, am I . Tom savored the dizzy drama, almost out-of-body, looking down, watching his own thoughts. Plans were forming.

Plans .

He began this way, in a dry voice. “Pull over. We have to talk.”

She slowed and then turned off on a wide portion of shoulder. Tom said, “It’s the money in the back. If there are bad guys and they follow us, we need to hide it.”

Her brow furrowed. She removed the glasses. “Not exactly secure back there, is it?”

“No it isn’t.”

“So,” she said with aimless practicality. Her attitude was strong on mission and weak on details. Clearly she needed help.

But then…

There was Ben Franklin’s enigmatic smile.

He fixed his vision on a line of spruce across the road. A flock of crows detached from the trees and rose in a black scatter against the wool sky.

“A murder of crows,” said Caren.

Her words yanked the hair on the back of his neck up on end. He jerked around and faced her.

She shrugged. “My dad used to say that, back in North Dakota. There’s probably a dead deer over in those trees.”

“We could put the tape in a luggage locker in Duluth, at the airport. And hide the money somewhere,” he suggested.

Caren considered, nodded. “Makes sense.”

“Where can we hide the suitcase? I don’t want to be seen dragging it into a public place.”

She mulled his question. In less than a minute, she had an answer. “Keith’s dad has an old hunting shack up the Witch River trail, just past Lutsen. He moved to Florida after Keith’s mother died, but he keeps up the taxes on it. There’s a filled-in cistern back in the woods. We could put it there.”

“Good,” said Tom, who didn’t have a better idea. It THE BIG LAW/85

would have to do. He opened his door. “Take a break. Let me drive the rest of the way,” he said equably. They traded places, and as he put the car in gear, his eyes beheld the wheeling turmoil of the crows.

Two tense, mostly silent, hours later they arrived in the port city of Duluth. Tom knew the area and drove to the airport.

Caren didn’t even blink when he told her to change seats and drive the car around the parking lot and pick him up at the terminal front entrance. He quickly found the security lockers, put the tape in one locker, dropped coins in a second locker and left it empty. He ducked in the gift shop to buy a Minnesota highway map.

Outside, feeling more confident, taking control, he climbed back in the car and handed Caren the key to the empty locker. Then they studied the map. She pointed to a local road, just past Lutsen. The turn off for the cabin.

They left Duluth and headed up Highway North 61. What if, he thought. What if I was alone in this car ? Like the land, his thoughts changed, becoming rougher, wilder. Fields and oak trees were left behind. Granite-toothed hills and pine trees overlooked the road. What if she just disappeared ? Superior paced them, an endless stampede of whitecaps.

They stopped in Two Harbors at a Holiday, so Tom could buy some industrial-size black plastic garbage bags and a roll of duct tape. Caren bought a pack of Marlboros and returned to the car. Tom went to a public phone on the wall next to the fruit display. He stared at a pyramid of oranges, took out Garrison’s card and called the FBI office in St. Paul.

“Garrison’s not in,” said the agent who answered.

“Tell him it’s Tom James. I’m with Caren Angland and we’re in danger. I’ll call back in an hour. Make sure he’s there.” Tom saw it developing as a classic plot, not a news story; feed Garrison the broad details to start, save the best for last.

Back on the road, in motion. Was he reporting it? Or was he living it ? He stepped on the gas.

Signs: CASTLE DANGER, GOOSEBERRY STATE PARK. BEAVER BAY and SILVER BAY, where immense chalk clouds balanced over hulking relics of the iron mining industry. The road was narrow, two lanes curling and dipping.

Getting remote, wilder.

Tofte, Lutsen, and then Caren showed him where to turn on the gravel road that twisted up a ridge. A small sign with the number 4. Away from the familiar highway, even with the windows up, and the heater on, Tom could hear the trees groan in the wind, an eerie sound that disturbed his city-trained ears. And he could feel the deep-woods chill. At Caren’s direction he slowed and then stopped. A dark narrow lane carpeted with pine needles wandered into the trees. The access was barred by a logging chain strung between two pines.

Caren got out and felt around the roots of one of the chained trees. She held up a rusted Sucrets tin. Opened it and took out a key. Tom forced the rusty Yale lock open and dropped the chain. Drove in. Put the chain back up.

Tom checked the deserted road. Just the low howl of the wind, the heaving pine crowns. Alone.

A hundred yards up the bumpy track they came to a sagging cedar plank cabin on a boggy pond. Caren’s expression fit right in; it was the most desolate place Tom had ever seen.

The cistern was another hundred yards from the cabin, in thick undergrowth and jack pine. It took Caren half an hour to find it. Stonework from another century jutted from the moss and pine needles. Rusted sheets of buckled metal bolted to gray wormwood heaped over the sides. A mattress spring.

Orange, flaking refuse; decaying tin cans.