Serves you right for being smart enough, or dumb enough, to steal my wife.
Ex-wife, Broker reminded himself.
Sonofabitch hit her, she said.
Some buttons still lit up.
It took him half an hour to get Kit back to sleep. Then he pulled on his Sorel boots and a jacket and stepped out on the front deck. Unseen, Superior heaved and splashed behind a curtain of fog. Lots of things were up and moving out there in the fog. Like Caren. And if she was coming, Keith wouldn’t be far behind.
12
Tom abandoned Ida to the mysteries of the curling iron in her steamy bathroom and went home to clean up. Grumbling at the cold, he kicked his VW along Shepard Road, skirting the Mississippi River bluffs. Dawn spiked the eastern horizon, bitter as flint roses.
Disheveled, his hair uncombed, he tramped up from his parking garage and waited as a load of scrubbed office worker ants unloaded from the elevator. He rode up to the fourteenth floor, walked to his door, stooped, picked up the morning paper, turned the key and went in.
As he tossed the newspaper on the table, a large manila envelope slid out. The business card was fastened by a squeeze-clasp: THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. SPECIAL AGENT LORN GARRISON.
He grabbed the envelope, tore it open and pulled out an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of himself and Caren Angland talking over a horizontal Christmas tree at Hansen’s Tree Farm.
Oh boy.
His hand went to his phone. Heard the interrupted tone.
Message. He tapped in the code for his voice mail. Caren Angland’s voice, tight, shaking: “Take some precautions.
Keith knows that we met and he’s acting very…crazy. He hit me. Call me immediately.” She left a number.
Tom punched in the number and Caren answered on the first ring. “Mrs. Angland? It’s Tom James. I just got your message. Are you all right?”
“No. Where are you?”
“My place at Kellogg Square, downtown.”
“Go someplace where there are other people, don’t stay alone,” she cautioned.
“What’s going on?” A cold shiver wrinkled his scalp.
“If you want a story, I’ve got one. But I can’t talk on the phone. Where will you be in two hours?” She sounded mad.
Mad was good.
Tom’s blood pressure climbed a red inch up the roots of his hair. “At the paper.”
“I’ll pick you up, out front. Don’t tell anyone you’ve talked to me. Two hours exactly.” She hung up.
He’d barely replaced the receiver in the cradle when three emphatic raps sounded on the door. Caveman knuckles.
Angland? Jesus. Could be. Tom stood rooted to the carpet, paralyzed by stage fright. “Who is it?” he croaked.
“Lorn Garrison, FBI.” Southern inflection twanged like a thrown knife.
Oh boy. Sweating, giddy, Tom turned the knob, opened.
Lorn Garrison filled the doorway. He had pale blue eyes, a long pouchy face and a tobacco smile under a brown felt hat from a departed era.
A big guy with a badge and a gun, like Angland; six two, solid, with a white starched shirt riveted to his barrel chest.
He wore a heavy olive drab trench coat over a houndstooth sports jacket, a burgundy tie, dark slacks and glossy black wing tips. Fifty plus and fit.
He extended a calloused, manicured right hand. “Lorn Garrison, good morning Tom, glad to meet you.” Garrison wagged Tom in his big hand. “Can I come in?”
“Ah, sure. Can I see a badge?”
Garrison flipped open his coat. A badge and ID card were clipped on his belt, along with the patterned grip of a holstered automatic pistol back there. “I’ll skip the fore-play,”
said Garrison. He nodded at the glossy photo. “If you’re smart, you’ll share some information.”
“You were following me?” Tom flushed, gulped the words.
The agent stifled a smile. His practiced eye toured Tom’s grim efficiency apartment. The chairs and table were cheap seconds from a Futon factory. Unpaid bills cascaded off the desk next to his cheap computer. Garbage wasn’t emptied.
Flies buzzed.
Tom took a deep breath and ran his hand through his frizzed hair. With more precision, he said, “You were following her.”
“And we have no idea why she’d reach out to someone like you. Enlighten us.”
“She didn’t approach me, I went looking for her,” Tom insisted.
“Sure, Tom. We all got to protect our sources. So what’d she say?” Garrison loomed over him.
“Let me see your badge and ID again,” demanded Tom.
Garrison placed his broad hand, palm out, on Tom’s chest and plopped him back and down onto the couch. “Listen carefully. We checked. You’re on probation. You’re one fuck-up from being tossed out of your job. How you got on to this, I have no idea. But here we are. Now, you can be stupid, in which case you’ll be subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury, or you can be smart.”
Tom uncluttered his mind of sticky impediments and conceits like the First Amendment, confidentiality, fairness, ethics and the public’s right to know. He cleared his throat.
“What happens if I’m smart?”
Garrison’s eyes were as sympathetic as an empty patch of prairie sky. “You maybe get some attention, you know, get 60 / CHUCK LOGAN
to be the hot shit reporter you’ve dreamed of being your whole ordinary, messy little life.” He thumped his knuckle on the picture on the table. “So what’daya say.”
You get some attention.
Jackpot cherries. All lined up. He didn’t even hesitate. “I just talked to her on the phone, when you knocked on the door. She’s scared. She wants to meet. She says she has a story.”
“Good.” said Garrison. He patted Tom on the shoulder.
It was patronizing. Tom didn’t care. He smelled a deal.
Garrison smiled. “How’d you like exclusive rights to a story that would get you out of the doghouse.”
Tom sat up straighter. His chest puffed up. “Try me,” he said.
“Can you swim, Tom?” asked Garrison.
“Sure,” said Tom.
“I hope so, because the water’s about to get real deep.”
“Go on,” said Tom.
“Two days ago the federal building emptied out because of a bomb scare. That package was addressed to me, personally. What do you think happened?”
Tom shook his head. “The bomb squad called it a hoax.
There’s a rumor about a tongue being in the box the bomb came in. But nobody can confirm that.”
“Not rumor, fact. A male human tongue. They ran tests on it at the lab in Quantico. The return address was the home of a key undercover informant who disappeared three days before the bomb hoax.”
“Why was it addressed to you?”
“To send me a message. I brought the snitch into town to do a special job. We’re assuming his forwarding address is the bottom of the Mississippi.”
“This is St. Paul. Not New Orleans,” Tom thought out loud.
“Same river, except up here it freezes over,” said Garrison.
Tom asked dryly, “What was he working on?”
Garrison smiled. “Revealing the identity of a dirty St. Paul cop who’s helping certain people set up a narcotics distribution network in Minnesota.”
“Angland,” Tom said. By Tom James.
“Don’t jump to conclusions, we need proof,” warned Garrison, “not talk, not allegations-evidence. Now I know,”
Garrison paused, “it’s a privileged relationship. The sinner and the priest, the dying man and the doctor. The pissed-off wife and the reporter. The problem with pissed-off wives is pissed-off husbands can throw their testimony out of court because of this thing called spousal immunity.”
“What’s your point?”
Garrison shrugged. “You go off half cocked and print something you could prejudice an investigation,” cautioned Garrison. “But if you help us get the whole thing, you can have the story from the inside. Right now, we’re curious what his wife knows and if she’s willing to talk to us.”