Absolute Zero (22 page)

Broker climbed into the Jeep and turned the key. “I’ll be back tonight.”

“Sure you will,” J.T. said.

The constellation Orion tilted
on the horizon like a sideswiped road sign, and Broker was driving way too fast and thinking how his whole life had been a struggle to stay within the rules. His distaste for procedure had turned his stint in law enforcement into a personal method-acting spree. No one had ever stayed undercover for ten years. But he had. In local cop gossip, the Broker Syndrome superseded the Stockholm Syndrome.

And apparently Earl had pulled up some relic of Broker’s old undercover persona that was still floating around in the computers. Obviously, the “revelations” had favorably impressed Jolene Sommer. Broker, driving seventy mph down a winding country road, wasn’t about to discourage her.

Even his idea of settling down had been extreme, marrying a woman who wanted to be Joan of Arc. But he had tried to live in a conventional world of rules.
I do. For better or worse. Daddy
.

Didn’t work.

The cold fields and tree lines sparkled with willful diamonds of excitement in his high beams. He was playing with other people’s lives. Yeah, well, he didn’t belong pulling a plow, did he?

So take a break. Take a chance. Blow the carbon out of your pistons.

You’re bargaining
. That’s what Nina would say if she were here. She wasn’t jealous. She knew the score. The world was complicated. Stuff happened.
But we do believe in consequences, don’t we?

Jolene was a passing opportunity, and latching on to her could be a revenge game. Was he getting back at Nina? Maybe.

Probably.

And as he turned into the driveway and snaked between the old pine trees he thought how this wasn’t for Sommer anymore, was it?

This was for him.

He looked around. No sign of Earl’s van. It could be in the garage. Broker didn’t care. Bring him on.

Before he got out, he saw her silhouette framed in a rectangle of light in the open doorway with a hip against the jam in the oldest posture in the world.

And as he came up the steps, still not able to see her face, just her shape, he wondered who she was and would he ever find out. And it wasn’t like adultery because he was separated and she was basically a widow, and like Amy said, she just observed a shorter decent interval than most people. And apparently, tonight, so did he.

“So,” she said. No perfume. No candles, no wine, no fire in the fireplace. She looked careworn in a pair of old jeans and a faded green blouse, and her short hair was frazzled and her green eyes were beyond weary. Just—
so, here we are.

Fast through the darkened house, wordless down the stairs into the bedroom. Broker looked once at the closed door to Sommer’s studio, then he winced at the baby monitor on the bedside table. The deep, distant sound of Hank Sommer’s breathing rose and fell like surf.

“He’s asleep,” she said as she reached over and turned the volume down on the monitor.

“Earl?”

“Off brooding. Probably plotting against you. I don’t expect him back until late tonight, if at all,” and she turned off the light. And it was just her shape again, defined by a night-light. Like in the doorway.

When he reached for her she pulled back long enough to look seriously in his eyes and say, “Just never lie to me, okay?”

It was the only pause before they got at each other.

* * *

“I’m starting to think
sex is like a shakedown cruise. It’s how you really get to know somebody,” Jolene said to the darkened ceiling when her breathing returned to normal.

“I never thought of it like that,” Broker said. He was surprised at how tentative their physical introduction had been. He’d come at this thinking it would be impulsive, like feeding time at the tiger house. Everybody definitely getting their whiskers wet. Yet, while the lovemaking was carnal, the intimacy was chaste. She had been fragile, almost like she was holding her breath the whole time. Now she looked vulnerable and double-naked in the faint light. Dutifully, she’d turned the volume back up on the monitor, and now Hank’s sleeping breath haunted the dark room.

And Broker was thinking how when you’re young and in bed with a new woman it was an occasion for ego and vanity and it was all surface sensation. Because when you’re young, basically, all you own is your body.

But when you grew older and had been knocked around in a couple marriages, it went deeper than your skin. Now he felt like a trespasser in someone else’s life. And he’d taken a flyer on impulse and overlooked precautions. He was very aware it wasn’t his bed. Broker looked around to make sure he knew where the exits were.

Jolene sat up and hugged the sheets around her. “I used to think sex was about people possessing each other. I’d get jealous. I needed a lot of reassurance.” She smiled a wry smile and touched the hair on his chest. “Of course, I was drinking then.”

“It’s okay,” Broker said, and immediately he regretted the words because they were the same tone and weight of feeling he used with his little daughter when she suffered a minor hurt. “I mean . . .” he started to say.

“Shhh,” she stilled him with a cool finger to his lips. “It’s not okay. When you’re dependent, you do things. Things . . .” She shook her head and her eyes swam up, conjuring. Quickly, she masked the brightness in her gaze with a raw expression. “I worked as a dancer in this scummy joint once. I took it all off and stuck it in their faces. And they’d tuck dollar bills in my . . .” She grimaced, looked away. “Dollar bills. You’d think I would have held out for fifties or at least twenties.”

“Jolene.” Broker sat up, simultaneously feeling an urge to hold her and to run. Like a lot of things lately, this was not turning out the way he’d pictured it.

She grinned at him and it was the kind of grin that would be cruel if it wasn’t on a wild animal that didn’t know better. “Sobriety changes you, all right,” With a faint curl to her lip, she said, “I used to have a pussy. Now I have a vagina.” She raised an eyebrow. “That’s progress.”

“Take it easy,” Broker said.

“
You
take it easy,” she shot back, coming up off the sheets, suddenly sharp and brittle. “You’re only the second guy in my life I’ve ever been in bed with sober. You got that?”

In the awkward silence that followed they both pulled away a little and covered themselves with the sheets. Broker had the distinct impression they were both wishing they could smoke a cigarette. She was the first to break the silence, speaking to the ceiling.

“Earl’s waiting for me to give it up, start drinking and crawl back to him. Christ, Allen; he’s like a little kid waiting for a cookie. You—you’re not so easy to figure,” she said.

“What’s hard to figure?”

Jolene turned on her side, propped herself on an elbow, and her hand unconsciously explored the missing waves and volume of her shorn hair. She said, “How many guys show up to return a car and wind up in bed with the lady of the house in two days?”

The lady of the house. So that’s who she was.

Broker sat up in full-blown character and scratched his chest. “You mean guys who go to work and do what their asshole bosses tell them to do, who drive the speed limit, who watch their wives get fat, and who sneak dirty movies and beat their meat?” He cocked his head at her, reached out, and gently tapped her lips with his index finger. “You opened the door, not me.”

She brushed the remark aside. “The thing about you is no flaws, no character defects. You’ve never really been weak or sick, have you?” She sat up and the sheet fell away from her breasts and, like Allen had predicted, they were perfect 36 Cs that stayed tucked and pointed on their own. “Can we cut the bullshit?” she said.

“I’m all for that.”

“You spent time inside, right?”

“C’mon, I spent twenty-three days in Stillwater; I was barely through with orientation when my lawyer got my conviction thrown out.”

“Technicality?”

“Hell, no. The cops got a snitch to lie.”

“And?”

“Some people I know got him to tell a different lie. What’s the big deal? It was a long time ago. And that’s not who I am anymore,” he said emphatically.

“But you did things.”

“Did things?” Broker frowned. “What is this? You’ll show me yours if I’ll show you mine?”

“We already did that. You did things,” she repeated.

“I did things,” he affirmed.

“What things?”

“Look, Jolene. Some people, when they’re young, they don’t go in for nine-to-five, you understand?”

She squinted at him. “Answer the question.”

Inwardly excited, he smiled. He was auditioning, like he was on the job again. But he wasn’t working. That part of his life was over. So what was he doing?

Pretending?

Broker winced. “Okay. Probably not the kind of things that you think. I arranged things.”

“That’s a little vague,” she said.

“I used to believe people should have the right to smoke grass and own guns, okay?”

“Your conviction is for assault.”

“When you arrange things, you guarantee the bona fides of the seller and the buyer, and you secure the transaction. If someone gets out of line, you have to straighten them out.”

Jolene again evaluated his words and matched them to his expression, to the relaxed potential of his body. “But you don’t do that kind of stuff anymore?” she inquired.

“These carloads of very heavily armed black guys started showing up from Chicago and L.A. Crack changed the whole street scene and I got out ten years ago. I made some money and socked it in a little resort up on the North Shore before real estate went through the roof. It was a good investment and I’m comfortable. I suppose getting older had something to do with it.”

“But you still keep your hand in?” she asked.

“Say what you mean.”

She sat up straighter and swung her head, tossing hair that was no longer there. “You said you owed Hank.”

“I owe Hank.”

“I need you to arrange something.”

“Go on,” Broker said cautiously.

“I need you to get rid of Earl.”

“Wait a minute.” Broker held up his hands. “I don’t do . . .”

“No, no, silly; I mean I want you to put Earl back where he was before Hank’s accident. Which is at a polite distance and respecting boundaries. I don’t want him hurt. At least not hurt too bad. And I want him to understand I’m going to pay him what I owe him.”

Broker was relieved at the genuine sound of her request which fit the dimension of the debt he owed her husband. And he was consoled that his guilty little fling had now moved on to a practical next step.

“So?” Jolene prompted him.

“I can do that,” he said.

“There’s one thing I want you to understand,” she said. “I want you to remove Earl from my life. I do not want you to replace him.”

“Jesus,” Broker grinned and shook his head. “You don’t exactly go through a lot of Kleenex, do you?” He reached for his pants.

“I have feelings,” Jolene said circumspectly, “but I keep them to myself.”

They stood on the
back deck, collars turned up as the evening chill syphoned off the baked-bread warmth of the bedroom. Broker smoked a cigar and watched the running lights of a solitary boat on the slowly freezing St. Croix River. When he turned, he could see into Hank’s studio sickroom through the patio doors. Hank was illuminated in his bed by a lamp—still life with coma.

Like when he was working and trampled on people, he rationalized the twinge of guilt, telling himself he was out to get a bad guy.

“Earl and I did things, too,” Jolene said. “But we never got caught. I guess we were social criminals,” she reflected. “Sort of like social drinkers, you know; they quit when it starts interfering with their lives.”

“What things?” Broker grinned as he mimicked her voice and tone.

“Remember that movie
The Color of Money
? Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Tom Cruise, you remember them?”

Broker nodded. “I remember, they were two punks and Paul Newman taught them to be hustlers.”

“Two
talented
punks, thank you. Well, that was us completely. Especially Earl. He was this brash, talented jerk. And I guess he still is. And I even look a little like Mastrantonio, don’t you think? There’s some Italian on my mother’s side.”

Broker studied her. “She has more hair, you’re taller. What things?”

She squirmed away, evading in a wheedling voice. “You
know
, stealing things, selling dope. Dumb kid’s stuff. Then we moved to Seattle and Earl got real heavy into computer code on the ground floor at Microsoft. For a while it seemed like we’d straightened out, but his temper got him in trouble. We split up for a while when he joined the army. He was in Desert Storm, all dressed up with nowhere to go. He felt cheated. Then he came home and we disappeared into Seattle during our Kurt Cobain–Courtney Love period. Earl meddled in coke and cyber crime and I got very heavy into drinking.”

Broker shook his head. “Kurt who?”

She smiled and patted his cheek. “That’s what I like about you. Anyway, we woke up one morning and I decided I had to get clean, so we came back to Minnesota.”

“And that’s when you met Hank?”

“My hero.” Jolene smiled fondly. “The thing about heroes is first they save you, then they try and change you. He tried to explain to me that you don’t have to settle for the life they give you. He said that’s what this country is all about. It’s why people left Europe and came here in the first place. They were criminals and were persecuted, but they came here because it was this new thing in the world, in history . . .”

Jolene stretched her hands and attempted to grasp something in the air.

“I didn’t really hear what he was saying until after his accident. Now I’m beginning to understand. Being sober is my New World. People can change. Look at you, you changed, didn’t you?”

Broker, blindsided by her earnest language, didn’t trust his voice and remained silent. She continued talking.

“Except I made one big mistake. I panicked when Hank left me in this money bind. Now Earl thinks . . .”

Broker shrugged. “Can you blame him? Any man you take up with right now is going to have one eye on a huge malpractice settlement.”