Absolute Zero (10 page)

She plucked a long strand of hair, let it fall, and blew it away. “Any rate, Daddy would say, Get past the excitement and find something that works.” She drew her wrist across her cheek and trapped the single tear she’d shed. “Is that what you had, Broker? Something that worked?”

“You’re drunk,” Broker said.

“Sorry, I never killed anybody before. I’ll do better next time.”

“You’re saying you did it? Premature extubation, whatever?”

Her eyes came to points through the booze. “No way. I was strictly by the book. Something like this is usually a system failure.”

“What? A machine malfunctioned?”

“No, a human system. A procedure broke down.”

“So it just
happened
?” Broker asked.

“Shit happens on bumper stickers—but nothing just happens in a recovery room. Somebody fucked up and it wasn’t me.”

With that said, Amy lurched to her feet and promptly lost her balance. Broker was up, none too steady himself, and caught her, and her hair and lips buzzed his cheek as her full, warm weight sagged in his arms.

“Your lucky night,” she whispered as her eyes rolled up expressively. “Ever get puked on by a pretty woman?”

Broker dragged her toward the ladies’ room.

He was mindful of
Iker’s stern advice but where would she go in her condition? Where was her car? Where did she live? He just couldn’t leave her and, to his current inebriated way of thinking, they
were
linked. Tied in a black crepe bow by Hank Sommer.

So he drove home drunk for the first time in more than twenty years with an unconscious woman passed out in the passenger seat. Tonight, home was the overbuilt Holiday Inn out on the lake.

He made it to the parking lot without incident and put the truck in neutral to sit awhile and balk at the complex intersection of his pragmatism, his innate puritanism, and his sudden need not to be alone tonight. How was he going to get her past the receptionist? She was dead weight. He’d have to sneak her in.

So he drove to the end of the lot, parked, went around to the passenger side, and eased her out and slung her over his shoulders in a rescue hold. His knees faltered, then steadied. Judging by her solid muscle tone, she’d drunk all her milk growing up and did her exercises, too. With her thigh warm under his biceps he lurched off, around the back of the motel.

His room was on the bottom level, with French doors opening on a patio overlooking the lake. But he’d forgotten the number and, pawing one-handed in his pocket and balancing Amy on his shoulder, he discovered he’d lost the card key envelope with the number on it and he wasn’t sure the card opened the patio door anyway.

So he lowered Amy carefully into a plastic lawn chair and dragged up another chair to position her feet so she wouldn’t fall over. Wisps of snow began to stick to her face and hair.

Only be a minute, he promised.

Huffing, he jogged around the building and into the lobby where the receptionist gave him his room number. Floating through the lobby, he felt like a helium-filled balloon in a parade, but he made it down the stairs and found his room and struggled with the key card and, finally, he was in.

Amy.

He threw back the curtains, opened the patio door, and stepped outside. She was still slumped in the chairs twenty yards away, with a faint beard of snowflakes on her cheeks. Quickly, he carried her into the room, plopped her on the first double bed, and dusted the snow from her hair and her face. He removed her parka and boots to make her comfortable. That’s when he saw the blood, a rusty stipple on the front of her tunic and down the hip of her pants.

Sommer’s blood was following him.

He didn’t like the idea of her sleeping like that, in Sommer’s blood. Awkwardly, he positioned her arms above her head and worked with her tunic, easing it up and seeing, feeling, the warm heft of her upper body and smelling the faint shadow of the fragrance of her underarm. The back of his hands grazed the taut straps and the full ivory cups and he saw the single fold across her smooth stomach.

Next he peeled off the socks, then the baggy blue pants, and she had long, well-muscled legs and maybe Allen was right, a cross-country skier, and she had tomboy scars on her chiseled knees and red polish on her toenails. Just his luck to find another Title Nine Lioness.

Broker took the outfit to the bathroom, ran cold water, and tried to scrub out the blood with a washcloth and face soap, but it wasn’t going to happen. So he rinsed the clothes, wrung them out, and hung them on the shower rail.

He went back to the bed, blinked at the baby-blue panties stretched between her defined hip bones, and raised his eyes to the bra, and that presented a dilemma.

His wife—he was careful not to think her name because the phonics might cast or break a spell—his wife—well, she had smaller breasts, for one thing. And the stretch marks ironed on her stomach. Yes. But what he was getting at was, she never slept in her bra. He was almost certain of that.

He studied the garment, which was nothing flashy. A sensible Maidenform. He eased up her shoulder. Just the two eyelets in the back. Now. He’d placed her on the first bed coming in from the patio which put the other bed between her and the bathroom. And he’d be in that bed if he didn’t move her. So. First he had to transfer her to the bed closer to the john. That way she wouldn’t have to deal with going past him in the dark, which might make her uncomfortable waking up in the middle of the night in a strange room.

It was different picking her up with most of her clothes off; the sheer abundance and scent of her hair and her flesh and the carnal breath of alcohol combined to make him dizzy. Especially the smooth, warm way she slid in his arms. Carefully, he hoisted her to the second bed, turned down the covers, and eased her between the sheets. Then he raised the shoulder and unsnapped the bra to reduce the constraint. He did not remove it. Leaving her privacy intact, sort of. He tucked the covers up to her throat.

He gently reached down and pulled a strand of hair across her lips and cheek and went back and touched her cheek again with the back of his knuckles. Pretty girl. Broker shook his head and felt it all drop on him. What had happened to Hank Sommer was worse than death. The problem with having a highly developed code of duty was the flip side—the shame when you screwed up.

Had Amy screwed up? Had he?

He had to shake these doldrums. Write it off to lingering shock and the unaccustomed booze. He took two steps back and lowered himself into a chair because the bed was too far away right now. No, that wasn’t it. The bed had become fearful.

He could shut his eyes. But would he ever open them again?

He watched Amy’s chest rise and fall peacefully, which caused him to yawn. To fight off the lethargy he sat bolt upright and reached for the small writing table next to the chair and clamped his hands on to the edge.

He held on so tight his fingertips blanched white, because he had to stay awake, because the sleep he now imagined was bottomless, laced with black bubbles, like his look down into the glacier water. Because he’d never take sleep for granted again.

But his eyelids pressed down and the bubble of his willpower burst, and sleep opened its arms and waited with the patience of gravity. He finally slumped forward through the ether of an alcoholic dream and pitched toward the floor in a slow-motion fall, but the floor had turned to transparent glass beneath his feet and he crashed through, down into the private catacombs where he walled off his dead. And he saw Hank Sommer’s long, quiet body in its own private room and Hank’s sightless eyes startled open and looked up.

And a whole heap of bodies stood up in a forgotten place called Quang Tri City. They were schoolboys from Hanoi and farm boys from the provinces and they formed a circle and he saw that their hair and fingernails had grown long since 1972.

Nimble as spiders, they swept in to get him.

Nina Pryce.

If ever a name destroyed sleep. He lurched up, ducked, and discovered he was in bed wearing nothing but his shorts. How’d he . . .

Amy Skoda appeared next to his bed smiling, with her eyes mostly clear and her hair in place. She held a coffee cup out to him and he saw the room-service tray with a coffee carafe on the bureau next to the TV.

“Actually I know more about you than I let on last night. I know you married Nina Pryce,” she said.

Broker studied the T-shirt she wore, which he’d last seen folded in his duffel. The black one with new orleans spelled out in white alligator bones. Below the hem, lamplight glossed the blond fuzz on her thighs.

She cleared her throat and handed him the coffee. “After Desert Storm, Nina had a small following. Not quite Mia Hamm, but loyal. I almost went into the army because of her.”

Broker grimaced slightly at the subject of his wife. Amazon-Dot-Kill: she had achieved a certain female-soldier notoriety in the Gulf. He took the cup and sipped. The coffee helped his hangover, which was less overt pain than a massive energy drain. “So why didn’t you?” he asked.

“Hey, I’m out there but I’m not
that
cutting-edge. Nina wants to fight next to the men.”

The words were rote and spun from his mouth. “She didn’t just fight next to the men in the desert. She led a company of them against three times their number of Republican Guards and she won. It sort of alienated the patriarchy.” He cleared his throat. “That, and the fact that she wouldn’t suck titty with the Witch Hook Feminists. She caught it from both ends and they ran her out of the army.”

“But she got back in. She’s in Bosnia.”

Macedonia, actually. Probably Kosovo. He didn’t know exactly. The unit she was in now, Delta, didn’t officially exist. “Clinton stuck his nose in,” Broker said, employing the name like an all-purpose subject, verb, and object. He waved the subject away. “I, ah, don’t remember getting in bed.”

Amy shrugged. “I got up to pee and found you passed out on the floor. So I tucked you in.”

“You picked me up?”

“You’re big but you’re not that big.”

Broker found her style distressingly familiar.

“I took your pants off, too. Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not pregnant and your virginity is intact.”

He let that one slide, too, and just stared at her. “You don’t look hungover.”

“Oh, I’m hungover; I just don’t whine about it.”

He couldn’t win, so he knuckled his frizzed hair, gathered the sheet toga-fashion around his waist, grabbed his jeans, and went into the bathroom. When he emerged, shaved, showered, and dressed, she had changed back into her rumpled hospital duds.

“Thanks for collecting me last night,” she said frankly. “I would have tried to walk to my car and wound up in a snowbank.”

He nodded and opted for brevity. “Bad night.”

“Do you want to know the kicker?” She flung open the curtains and Broker winced at the roar of sunlight and the cloudless blue sky. Lake Shagawa twinkled placid as a millpond. Then she said quietly, “I called in. They’re flying him down to the Cities in half an hour. Thought you might want to say good-bye.”

The plows had left the parking lot iglooed with piles of snow. As they threaded toward Iker’s truck, Broker, feeling achy and fogged over, reached for a cigar.

Amy laughed.

“What?”

“The eyebrows. And the cigar. You look like a cross between Sean Connery and Groucho Marx.”

Broker grumbled, threw the cigar away, got in, started the truck, and drove into town through a convention of yellow county snowplows. All around, Ely’s residents wore Minnesota weather-cowboy grins and were chipping away at the drifts with shovels and snowblowers.

A block from the hospital Amy touched his arm. “Better let me out here. It probably won’t look right, us walking in together.” As she got out of the truck they heard the whack of a helicopter on approach at the hospital helipad.

The chopper had triple tail fins, which made it a BK 117 American Eurocopter; it was dark blue with white diagonal stripes and the letters smdc on the fuselage. It carried a pilot, a registered nurse, and a paramedic.

It was the kind of expensive ride only real sick people take.

Broker drove through the shadow of the Eurocopter and into the lot where the plows had created white cubbyholes with twelve-foot walls. He parked in one of them as the chopper landed on the other side of the white maze, and he got out of the truck and walked toward a knot of people standing on the hospital steps. Milt, wearing a borrowed sweat suit under his parka, his arm in a sling, with a barely civil smile on his face, stood like a man on a mission. He was listening to an officious-looking woman in a pants suit. She was talking but she was clearly on defense, arms crossed over the briefcase clasped to her chest.

Nearer the door, in the shadows, Allen slumped against the brick wall in his blue parka and baggy loaner jeans and a sweatshirt. His hair drooped to complement his sunken eyes and the twenty-four-hour beard that darkened his face.

The stunned woman standing next to Allen looked like all the mothers Broker’d ever seen who had lost their children at the state fair.

Jolene Sommer, the trophy wife, was not the Barbie Doll Broker had expected. She was neither blond nor tanned. Her dark hair, olive skin, and restless green eyes flew Mediterranean flags against her white-trash name. In her bittersweet glance, he glimpsed something rare that had been shattered when she was a kid and cheaply put back together.

She was in her early thirties, stood about five eight, and weighed maybe 120 pounds. The dark hair twisted in natural curls around her shoulders, and her cheekbones were wide under the broken emerald eyes, and her lips were full and her nose straight. She wore no obvious makeup to complement the quiet shades of gray and charcoal of her turtleneck sweater, slacks, tailored wool coat, and the soft leather of her boots. She had removed her gloves. A simple gold band marked her left hand.

Broker instantly disliked the young guy wearing shades who stood next to her; he disliked the way they looked so good together; he disliked their palpable aura of familiarity.

Further, he disliked beauty in a man; the torch-singer glow of a Jim Morrison or a young Warren Beatty who hid cocaine secrets behind aviator sunglasses. He disliked the casually tousled thick blond hair, every strand of which seemed individually groomed and placed. He disliked the insouciant hip-slouched promise of youth, the easy sex in either pocket. And he disliked the man’s flat-bellied athleticism, so innocent of aches and pains.

Mostly, he disliked his own disapproval.

This had to be the old boyfriend. Broker was painfully reminded of all the lean young army ranger officers who rubbed elbows and flirted with his wife half a world away.

Ex-wife?

Whatever.

If Jolene was Bonnie, this had to be Clyde. Okay. He was a six-footer and python-smooth and strong. Looking more carefully, Broker found his flaw; this was a guy who couldn’t maintain his cool. It was the way he’d dressed for this occasion that gave him away. His black suit, black shirt, black tie, and the glasses looked like an early Halloween costume or the garb of a limo driver who’d booked a really good ride. And in contrast to the other people gathered here, he put out such a fulsome cloud of barely suppressed well-being, he almost sparked.

Allen crooked his arm and summoned Broker with a nervous wag of his finger, shouting to be heard over the helicopter.

“Broker, come over here, Hank’s wife wants to meet you. Jolene, this is Phil Broker, the guide. He paddled us out to get help.” Allen’s voice was controlled and grave and his eyes stayed focused at knee level.

“Heads up, Jolene; this is the canoe guy,” echoed the young man in black as he took her elbow and steered her. Allen immediately acquired her other elbow and both of them attempted to squire her forward. It looked like a tug-of-war over the spoils, and Hank’s brain wasn’t even cold yet.

Broker felt the heat go to his hands. He had no right to be indignant. But he was.

He became more irate as they continued to hang on her arms as Jolene Sommer reached for his hand. She moved like a person really eager to meet new people, and her sweaty clasp was more a grab for something solid than a handshake. “I truly appreciate what you did,” she said, searching Broker’s face.

Broker wanted to convey something but, rather than grope for words, he remained silent and Jolene continued to hold on to his hand. Looking too deeply, almost impolitely, into her eyes, Broker blinked and stepped back. She still had Allen holding one elbow, the smooth young guy clamped on the other.

His impulse was to pull her away, take her aside.

But he was the stranger here so he nodded, released the handshake, and stepped farther back. The guy in black then effortlessly moved in, squeezed Broker’s elbow, and took a long billfold from his inside jacket pocket. With one-handed flash he manipulated three $100 bills and tucked them into Broker’s hand. “For your trouble, fella; thanks again.”

He’s dealt blackjack, thought Broker, who wanted to see his eyes.

So, slam-bam-dismissed. Okay. But old radar started to track. While he studied what was wrong with this picture he remained low-key. He slipped the bills into his pocket, like they expected a humble canoe guide to do, and folded his hands below his waist like an usher, and waited.

Milt concluded his nontalk with the lady in the pants suit, who retreated inside the hospital. He spotted Broker and walked over with the forward momentum of a slightly damaged armored vehicle. They shook left hands. Milt extracted a business card and said, “I’ll be in touch. I can reach you at the lodge, right?”

Broker nodded, took the card. “Who’s the lady you were talking to?” he asked.

“Oh, her? She’s small-fry. The risk management flak for this place. Fortunately, they’re part of the Duluth system and Duluth has deep pockets.”

“Lawsuit,” Broker said.

Milt narrowed his eyes. “Word is two nurses heard the anesthetist admit she took the breathing tube out too soon.”

Broker nodded politely—like it was all over his head— and then pointed toward Sommer’s wife and her sleek companion. “How’d they show up so quick?”

“Charter out of St. Paul.”

“Who’s the guy?”

Milt narrowed his eyes a fraction tighter, as if this were more information than a loyal canoe guide needed to know. After a beat he said, with a ripple of distaste, “Earl Garf, he’s the remnant from her checkered past we discussed.”

“Uh-huh. What’s he do now?”

Milt shrugged. “What all the smart young ones do, computers.” He adjusted his sling, turned: “Well, ah, Christ, here comes Hank.”

An ambulance pulled out of the garage toward the waiting helicopter.

“Got to go, thanks for everything,” Milt said; quick handshake, fleeting eye contact. He was leaving Ely and the tragic vacation, locking back into the gravitational pull of his high-speed, high-stakes world. They all were. He stepped back to join Jolene and Allen as the gurney bearing the blanketed mummy bumped toward the helicopter door.

Eyes shut, Sommer’s face jutted under a clear plastic oxygen mask like carved Ivory Soap.

Broker’s lower lip went a little stiff as he recalled the tramp of ritual. Bagpipes at cop funerals. Taps sounding over rows of empty paratroop boots. He had wanted to thank Hank Sommer for saving his life.

But he was just the hired help so he kept his place amid the tragic procession. Sommer’s Ford Expedition was still at the lodge. The keys were hanging on a peg by the fireplace. All three clients had clothes and gear strewn from Ely to Fraser Lake. Clearly the departing friends and family were too preoccupied to collect belongings. He had Milt’s card.

The cortege escorted Sommer to the helicopter medics who loaded the gurney into the chopper. Mrs. Sommer, Allen, and Milt embraced awkwardly. Garf smiled directly into the sun.

Then Garf escorted all three of them to a waiting cab and they drove away. Broker squinted into the bright sky, and the wind sock on the hospital roof hung limp, and the only danger nature posed today was the flash of mild snow blindness.

The helicopter lifted off and in its place, on the far side of the helipad, Amy Skoda stood at attention, her hands balled loosely at her sides. She watched the helicopter, and Broker watched her until the engine faded and the plane itself receded into a dot in the south-eastern sky. Then Amy turned away and came across the parking lot.

Broker coughed three times. Then he sneezed. The sneeze blew the sharply stacked sun-and-shade design of the brilliant day into runny watercolors. Dizzy, he put his hand out and felt Amy’s firm grip steady him.

“Must be hungover,” he mumbled.

She rested a cool hand on his forehead. “I don’t think so. You went swimming in ice water in a blizzard. You fried your resistance paddling out. You’ve caught a cold.”