Chuck Logan - The Big Law

Back at the car, Caren stood hugging herself in the cold while Tom dragged the suitcase from the cargo hatch. Acting as if he were checking the locks, he slipped his THE BIG LAW/87

hand in, pulled out a packet of bills and stuffed them into the zippered, inner security pocket of his jacket.

All right, Tom. You just crossed the line.

Feels… alive .

Then he doubled and redoubled garbage bags over the luggage as protection against water damage. When he finished, he secured the bundle with loops of duct tape.

Carrying the suitcase on his shoulder, he was soon sweating and dizzy from exertion. She tapped him on the arm and spelled him with the bag. Amazing. She wasn’t even breathing heavily.

Aerobics at the spa. Gym rat.

At the cistern, he carefully rearranged the rusty mess to make room for the bulky package. Then he eased the bundle into the cranny he’d prepared and placed layer after layer of corroded debris over it. The frozen ground was stiff as steel.

They left no footprints. He took this as a sign.

As he used pine needles to scrub the rust off his hands he wondered if he could find the place in the dark. He’d counted his steps back to the cabin. One hundred and six. When he emerged from the trees he took a visual fix on a wind-damaged birch tree to the right of the cabin. If he stood in front of the birch, the direction to follow through the trees was two o’clock.

He realized he was staring at Caren’s back as she huddled in her baggy denim jacket, smoking a cigarette. He tapped her on the shoulder and put his hand out for one of her cigarettes. He tore off the filter and lit it with her plastic Bic.

First time in ten years he’d had one. He inhaled. Breathing poison felt right. Hot little sparklers of nicotine sizzled in his fingertips. But then-no. Smoking was back-sliding, one of Tom James’s weak habits. He was moving away from Tom James. Moving fast. He stamped the cigarette out on the cold ground.

They were all alone out here. He looked at his hands, which were nicked, raw and bleeding slightly from working at the cistern. The slight labor had raised several blisters.

Weak. But getting stronger.

Back in the car, Tom wrote down the exact mileage on a business card as they turned onto the gravel road. He made another mileage notation when they reached the highway.

For a minute he studied the intersection, sketched a collapsed billboard for a landmark. Then he dropped the car in gear and drove north toward Grand Marais, and beyond it, Devil’s Rock.

Kit was down for her nap. The dishwasher and the clothes drier hummed their safe lullabies. Stacks of clothes were folded with precision in two plastic baskets next to the kitchen table. Morning chores were done. That wasn’t true.

With Kit, the work never ended.

When he and Nina had gone off to take on the world, she had quit the army, had been a grad student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. When they got back, she was pregnant and he thought…

He paused. Aired out the resentment. Moved on.

Banks of thermal windows lined the lakeside wall. A desk.

Low shelves full of books. Gathering dust, except the ones about child rearing…

The window casements still smelled of new maple and cedar. The whole house smelled new. Like Kit smelled new.

Like his life did.

An olive drab, rectangular metal box sat on his desk, the shape and cover latch identifying it, to a veteran’s eyes, as a fifty-caliber ammo can. But this one was outfitted with a cedar liner. Broker ordered it out of a catalog, full of cigars, from a warehouse in North Carolina. He popped the lid, removed a corona and snipped it in half with a guillotine cutter he carried in his pocket. He put half back in the box and stuck the other half in his mouth.

He patted his stomach where it strained slightly against his waist band. Off cigarettes for six months. Eight pounds over his best weight. He had been through hundreds of cigars and a lot of frozen yogurt. He had yet to light one of the cigars.

He mulled over them, rolled them in his lips, then clipped off the end when they started to get soggy and chewed them and cut them down to a nub. An interim step. Insurance against reaching for a cancer stick in times of stress.

Like now.

It would be all right. Jeff would be here. Steady Jeff.

Seventeen years ago-God, that long-they’d all been up here, cases of beer, steaks. Steelhead fillets from the nearby Brule River on the grill. Sleeping bags lined up on the plank floor of the then one-room cabin. Jeff, Keith, John Eisenhower, J.T. Merryweather. Wives and girl-friends. Caren laughing.

Rookies. Crazy brave. Run every red light in town to be the first one to get shot at.

Pieces of Caren lingered, literally. Nina had unearthed ar-tifacts during her pregnancy, as she and Broker emptied out the old cabin in preparation for the wrecking crew-a cup with a lipstick mark on the rim, a slinky, black knit dress stuffed in the back of a drawer. Nina in her eighth month, at first self-conscious, then bewildered that her body could swell up like special effects. Not the best time for her to find old snapshots of lithe, sable-haired Caren.

In the female hierarchy, Nina disapproved of Caren, whom she saw as a woman who attached herself to men. To Nina, Caren’s home remodeling business was an affluent hobby.

Not serious work.

Nina’s current idea of serious work was to parachute into Belgrade and personally arrest Radovan Karadzic.

A car swerved off the highway at reckless speed and interrupted his rumination. Broker moved through his house, toward the sound of frozen gravel ricocheting across the hardpack. The gray Ford Crown Victoria drifted in a four-wheel, controlled skid around a turn and down the driveway.

Unmarked cop car. Keith had gotten in front of her. Broker watched his former friend, partner and boss snap the big car out of the slide, rock it to a stop, roll from behind the wheel, cross the drive and trudge up the porch steps. Broker met him at the front door.

Behind the menacing sunglasses, Keith’s features twitched like mummy ribbons coming undone.

He was an inch taller, thicker and had a gregarious side; he would look at home at a prayer breakfast, something Broker could never do. He’d been to the FBI Academy.

Broker always suspected there was an uptight fed inside him, filing applications in triplicate, trying to get out.

The grievance list was long; Keith had made Broker’s life miserable until he left the St. Paul Police Department and went to the BCA, Bureau of Crinimal Apprehension, to get away.

He’d hunkered down in his new life, within walking distance of the Canadian border, and now here was Keith, coming up his steps. But not the old control-freak Keith; this Keith was a shiver of barely contained fury. Broker opened the door.

“C’mon in. No sense freezing,” said Broker in a calm, almost inaudible voice. He noted Keith’s sloppy appearance, the underscent of alcohol layered by Certs.

So the stories were true.

Keith reacted with caution, knowing that voice and the trip wire tension it conveyed. He nodded, removed his sunglasses and swung his head. Fatigue threaded his eyeballs, bloody wires around the jonquil iris. A day’s growth of rust-blond beard roughed his jaw. “Christ, I was hoping she’d be here. She shouldn’t be driving the way she’s fucked up.”

“Getting hit can do that to you,” said Broker.

Keith looked away. His eyes tracked the high-beamed living room, the blaze of new wood, skylights-and stopped on the fireplace. Broker’s one indulgence, a fearsome, coiled gilt bronze dragon’s head, an actual hood ornament off a tenth-century Viking long ship, weighing over a hundred pounds, was bolted to the chimney over the mantel. Attracted, Keith walked to the serpentine metalwork, reached up and clasped it in both hands, like a derelict Norseman making a vow.