Keith smelled like spoiled meat washed in disinfectant. He sat in a blocky ModuForm armchair. The large dense blob of furniture was molded from a pebbly rubberized substance that looked, in color and texture, as if Barney the dinosaur had been run through an auto compactor and turned into a seat. The chair, designed for prisons, weighed two hundred pounds.
He wore loose blue denim jail utilities and blue slippers.
His shirtsleeves were rolled up, showing biceps. Frankenstein stitches in his left arm twisted like centipedes sleeping in the packed muscle. Yellow disinfectant discolored the seamed forearm. He’d lost fingernails on three fingers on his right hand to frostbite, and they were scabbed over, blackened.
His left hand was clamped in a fist in his lap. His hair was short, sidewalled and bristly. No sunglasses allowed here.
His yellow eyes were hard, clear and shiny as frozen ball bearings. In them, Broker felt the icy embrace of the Devil’s Kettle, and, possibly, the fixed stare of mental disorder.
Despite his present circumstances, Keith held his powerful body with the erect bearing of a mad warrior monk.
On the top of his left hand, a patch of infected skin puffed up a blue tattoo of a three-barred Russian cross.
Crude, self-inflicted; probably with the straight end of a safety pin and ink from a felt tip.
Self-laceration.
What happens to a perfectionist who loses his rule book.
He opened his curled left hand. And Broker saw that he wore Caren’s wedding ring on the little finger. What was left of the little finger. The first joint had been amputated, and the stub closed with stitches. The skin under the gold wedding band was swollen, marbled with purple bruising.
He wore his own ring on the next finger. His fingers twitched, and the gold bands jingled.
Keith stood up. Instinctively, they circled each other in a sort of preliminary dance. They did not shake hands. The room was wedge shaped, with three holding cells built into one wall. The cells were empty, and the doors were open.
A guard podium was on the other wall. The camera peered, bracketed in the corner.
Broker evoked it all with the sound of his name: “Keith.”
Keith laughed soundlessly. His eyes roved the walls. “This place is really something. Last night I smelled cigarette smoke. It’s been bothering me all day. How the hell did someone sneak a cigarette in here. You quit, didn’t you?”
“About six months ago.”
“What made you do it?”
Broker looked straight in the icy eyes. “Well, the baby.”
“Uh-huh. Maybe I only imagined I smelled smoke. My taste is all screwed up since…” He held up his hands. His eyes continued to travel the walls. “You know, I never even smoked a joint in my life. You did, though. You had to, working undercover.”
“Yeah, Keith.”
Keith shook his head. “You think they’ll legalize drugs?”
It was an absurd conversation, but Broker was carried along. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Me either. It’s job security. Like the buffalo. They support a way of life-cops I mean, and corrections, the people who work in and build places like this.”
“What the hell happened, Keith?” The hang-fire question cooked off.
Keith avoided eye contact. “What happened,” he savored the words. “Who is owed an explanation.” Again, the soundless laugh. The dead eyes crawled over the monotonous brick pattern. “Maybe I’m the one that’s owed an explanation.” He raised the damaged hand and felt along the stone wall. “These walls won’t last, not like, say, an Inca wall. I saw this thing on Nova. I could spend my life staring at an Inca wall. But this…”
He let the thought get away, pressed his forehead against the bricks. “Maybe I got tired of fat cop faces. You ever notice how many fat cops there are.” His disfigured left hand explored the unyielding brick. “Maybe that’s what happened.”
“Why’d you put me on your list?” Broker asked.
“Why’d you ask to be invited?” Keith shot back. A muscle in his left cheek jumped under the skin. His fingers jerked, clinking the wedding rings together in a nervous tic.
“Thought you could tell me what happened out at the Devil’s Kettle.” Clink-clink-clink.
“What happened is I never intended for her to get hurt.
She just had to stick her nose in.” Clink. Clink. Clink.
“That doesn’t answer my question.” Clink-clink-clink.
Keith spat on the floor. “Uh-uh. C’mon.” He jerked his head at the camera. “The FBI is listening to everything we say.”
Broker held up the picture Garrison had given him. Keith shook his head. “You? Carrying water for the feds? I smell that fucking Garrison.”
“He took me to Wisconsin yesterday. We stood over your mother’s grave and he told me what a bad mother-fucker you are,” said Broker.
Keith grinned, took the photo, ripped it in half and let the pieces fall to the floor. “Did you check out the Russian cross, with the three bars?” He raised and twisted his left hand, turning the palm in so the tattoo confronted Broker. Stepped closer. “See the little one on the bottom that’s crooked?” His fingers squirmed. Nerves. Gold circles clicking.
“Keith? You want to talk or play games?”
“I am talking. The reason it’s crooked goes back to a dispute in the early church, in the second century. This faction insisted that the cross should remind people that Christ really was human and he really suffered.” The rings clinked. “That little bar represents the footrest, where the condemned braced their weight. See? Crucifixion was all about muscles giving out, the chest cramping the lungs. Slow asphyxiation. The pain gets more and more excruciating. They writhe and twist the footrest…”
Keith smirked. “I learned that on the History Channel.”
“Was it like that when Alex Gorski got it?” Broker asked in a low voice.
“Excuse me, did I hear right?” Keith cupped his hand to his ear. “Got it? The death of? The problem with ‘the death of?’ is-we’re fresh out of bodies.”
Keith sneered and rubbed his chin with his gruesome black fingertips. “Give me a break, you were never a detective. Go back to the fucking woods. Pretend life is a show on public television. Get used to it. Old cop dilemma-you know who did it, but you just can’t prove it.”
He was changing, like a diver going deeper. His face altered, distorted by the pressure. The lips pulled tighter, creating a ruthless mask wiped clean of illusions. He was getting ready. He would go to federal prison where strangers would try to kill him, on principle, because he was a cop. Broker started to turn away from the willful madness, the jingle of the rings. To the camera.
Keith raised his left hand, blue infected tattoo, nightmare stitches, stumpy little finger and ring finger beating out the demented rift. Clink-clink-clink. Clink. Clink. Clink. Clink-clink-clink…His voice boomed in the cell. “Hold it. I didn’t say you could leave. I brought you here for a reason. You owe me an explanation.”
Broker tensed at the contemptuous tone of command.
“Were you fucking my wife, you shit?” hissed Keith, exploding forward, driving Broker off balance, back through the open door to one of the cells. They smashed into the tight masonry pocket, tripped over the stainless steel combin-ation sink and toilet. Keith’s hand at his throat smelled like rotting flesh.
“Think fast. Cells aren’t miked,” Keith rasped.
Broker’s reflexive defensive left hook glanced off Keith’s face. Felt like hitting a pig, hard gristle. But very alert now.
They clinched. Keith’s voice, low, sinister in his ear: “Find James.”
“Wha-?”
“In your yard, James said Caren took the money.”
The outer door burst open. Incoming shoe leather. Keith continued to whisper, “Check Afton. False wall under the antelope. Key, garage light.”
Three guards dove into the cell, tackled Keith. He swung as they tangled him up. Broker took the punch on his arms.
With manic strength, Keith wrenched free, charged. Broker saw the stinging left hand coming, a glitter of gold rings that snapped his head back. Stunned, he got off a wild right hook, which connected with Keith’s nose. They clinched again.
Went down. Keith’s hot sour breath taunted, low, “Catch me a thief.”
Broker saw it was two deputies and Lorn Garrison piled on Keith. This time, breathing heavily, they bore down and cuffed him. “Outside, Angland,” panted a deputy. They hauled him to his feet. Keith shrugged, his nose was bleeding.
He smirked at Garrison.
“How’s it feel, Lorn, to have spent your whole career in law enforcement peeking through keyholes?”
Garrison shoved Keith aside and went to help Broker to his feet.
Keith grinned again, and his gaze locked on Broker’s eyes with icy traction. He hurled his voice like a curse: “You owe me, fucker…”
The last Broker saw of Keith Angland was his broad denim-covered back as the deputies dragged him, yelling, from the transport room. His voice carried crazy off the brushed stone walls: “Owe me…”
The shout ended in a collision of flesh and bone on brick.
“Watch your step there, Keith,” a deputy sang out.
Without a word, another deputy handed Broker the two halves of the torn photograph and escorted Broker and Garrison back up to the master control bubble.
The deputy said, “You want a first aid kit for your face?
See the doctor?”
Broker shook his head.
“We told you he was fucking nuts,” the deputy said in a tired pitiless voice. He turned on his heel and slipped back into the maze, his outline shimmered, then swam away through layers of soundproof, armored glass. Broker and Garrison exited the locked perimeter. Garrison retrieved his weapon from the wall vault, and they left the building.
Garrison dabbed a handkerchief at Broker’s right cheek.
“Got you a little mouse out of the deal.”
Gingerly, Broker took over the hankie and moved his jaw around. He was grateful for the shock of the fight, and the blow to the face. It disguised his rising excitement.
Keith, you devious creep, what are you up to?
In a bruised voice, he said, “He’s not exactly feeling remorse about his wife.”
Garrison shrugged. “Had to try.”
“So,” said Broker. “I tried. What about James?”
The sympathetic Garrison of yesterday had changed into a practical horse trader.
“I can’t bring him back, even if I could, shoot-not like I got a lot of incentive. Keith didn’t say anything new in there.
Just accused you of banging his old lady. You, ah, weren’t banging her, were you?”
Broker flung the bloody hankie at the FBI man’s face.
Garrison plucked the cloth in midair, squinted. “Didn’t think so. But what’d he mean, about you owing him?”
Broker shook his head. “You never meant to cut me in on James.”
Garrison’s shrugged again. Not arrogant, just realistic.
“You know how it is.”
“Yeah,” Broker quipped bitterly, “it’s tough poop.” A concept he was preparing his daughter for.
Garrison smiled, sad, wise, cynical. With a trace of mournful music in his voice, he admonished, “Now you put some ice on that cheek, hear?”