Absolute Zero (26 page)

Broker shook his head. He’d had enough of the Cities. “When I worked the streets, back in the Dark Ages, we’d rough up the riffraff for bothering their betters and call it asshole control. Now, of course, everybody is empowered, especially assholes, and you have to be more civil.”

“And?”

Broker chose his words carefully. “You and me have sort of detoured off the record here?”

Milt nodded. “I’d say we’re pretty much operating on your old turf.”

“Okay. Consider a hypothetical—”

“We’re just talking, right?” Milt said.

“Yeah,” Broker said. “What if Garf has this excessive, electronic financial profile involving more credit card numbers than he charges items to? What if someone made a copy of his hard drive, but it was too complicated for him to figure out. Of course, Washington County and St. Paul have cyber cops who might have a different opinion, if the disks were to fall into their hands.”

Milt nodded. “All speculation, of course; but a simple quid pro quo.”

Broker nodded. “Garf moves out of the house and out of Jolene’s life. After a certain interval, he gets to watch me destroy the disks. No police involvement. I think Hank would approve. I get the impression he wanted Jolene to have a chance to outgrow the likes of Garf. I’m going to try and give him his wish. But, if Garf goes, there has to be provision for the money Jolene legitimately owes him. I want to be able to tell him that.”

“Understood. After Garf’s gone, I’ll take it up with Jolene,” Milt said.

Broker watched Milt tug at his lapels, straighten his tie. “So, do you think people can change?”

“Do you?” Milt bounced it back.

They explored each other’s faces for a few beats, then Broker stood up. “What about this deposition?”

Milt came around his desk to walk Broker to the door. “You know, I don’t think you’re the kind of guy I want to put on the stand.”

“You mean, where the other side can cross-examine me,” Broker said, mock-serious.

They shook hands.

Driving east out of St. Paul, Broker took less and less relish in the prospect of hassling Garf. It had degraded to the level of an onerous duty, like carrying out the garbage. And it reminded him that one of the reasons he’d lost interest in routine police work was the time spent shooing human rubbish away from the tidy lives of the Milton Danes and the Allen Falkens.

He shook his head, concentrated on driving, turned off the freeway, and threaded through the congested traffic and sprawling strip malls until his wheels struck country gravel. Driving the solitary back roads was an exercise in nostalgia—trying to make time stand still and hold on to the world he’d grown up in. Sometimes he thought that if he stayed out here on the margins long enough, he might come back into style. But truthfully, he knew now that even Garf was part of something new that was passing him by.

Amy left a note
tacked on the door:
WENT FOR A RUN
. Her bags were stacked on the porch, ready to go. So Broker phoned Jolene, got the machine, and left a message inquiring when Garf would be home.

Then he went back outside and walked down the gravel road that curved past the barn toward the fields and the paddocks. The wind had picked up. Overhead, fast-moving clouds jammed a busy sky. Sunlight and shadow alternated, slap-dash, on the paddocks’ bright tin roofs and the red barn lumber and the mowed green alfalfa fields. Standing on the high ground behind the paddocks, he spotted a flicker of blue and made her out, running the gravel road in a wind suit, on the far side of a long, undulating parcel of standing corn.

He tried to imagine Jolene running. Couldn’t see it.

Just wasn’t her style.

He lit a cigar, enjoying the bite of the smoke and the chilled scent of alfalfa stubble. A broken V formation of Canada geese passed high overhead, their wild calls plunging down the cold air.

He timed his walk back toward the house so he’d meet Amy as she jogged down the driveway, past the swaying willows. She slowed to a walk and watched him approach as she pulled an ear-warmer strip from her head and shook out her hair.

Broker held up his hands and inclined his head. Teeth together in a wayward smile, he said, “I was thinking . . .”

She measured him with a stare.

He continued, “Maybe next week, when I get back to Ely, we could have dinner.”

Amy placed her hands on her hips, not necessarily because of what he’d said; more like that’s the way she walked it out, cooling down from a run. But she moved in a wary semicircle around him and her voice was apprehensive. “You were, huh?”

“Sure. You know, go out to a restaurant.”

Her chin rose in measured intervals. “You mean, take me out to dinner?”

“That’s what I said,” he said.

“No. You said, we can have dinner.” Her diction was deliberate, hammered.

Broker composed himself. “Amy, could I take you out to dinner?”

“You asking me to go on a date?”

Broker exhaled. “Yes.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said, tossing the reply airily over her shoulder as she walked toward the house. Then, louder, she asked, “Have you had lunch?”

He followed her into the house and they wound up back in the kitchen. She removed her wind jacket and he could smell the sweat simmer in the navy blue fleece that molded her torso. Looking for something to do, he approached the red light on the Mr. Coffee and poured the inky dregs into the cup he’d used this morning.

“That’s been warming all day,” she said.

Broker shrugged and continued to pour.

She fluffed her hair and faced the cupboards. “It’s always a challenge, finding your way around a stranger’s kitchen.”

Broker took his evil coffee to the table and sat down. She moved to the refrigerator, opened it, and inspected the shelves. She took out a plastic container.

“Ostrich chili?”

“Sounds good.”

The social temperature in the kitchen gradually warmed as she found a pot, put it on the stove, played with the gas settings, then pried the cover off the Tupperware container. After she gave him a second medium-stern look, he finally got it and rose from his chair and searched the cupboards for bowls and silverware and glasses, which he arranged in two place settings on the table.

“So, how did it go with Milton Dane?”

“We talked,” Broker said.

“Did you give a formal deposition? I mean, did he ask you questions about me?”

“Like what?”

“You saw Nancy leave her post. You were in the recovery room after it happened.”

“No,” Broker said. “We never got around to that. Not today.”

“The wife,” Amy said, spooning globs of cold chili into a black pot.

“You got it. The wife, the boyfriend, the money. Hank adrift in limbo.”

She turned. “You left yourself out of the cast.”

“I don’t belong in it. I’m just passing through.”

“What about the accountant?”

“I think he was the victim of foul play, I think it involved Hank’s money, and I think her ex-boyfriend was in up to his neck. But I can’t prove it. So I have to let it go for now.”

Amy set the flame under the pot and looked through the clipboards until she found a package of Saltine crackers. She twisted her lips in a wondering expression and went to the refrigerator. “I saw this article in
The New York Times Magazine
about black people’s kitchens and white people’s kitchens.”

“Yeah?”

“Whites have Coke in the refrigerator. Blacks have Pepsi.” She opened the door. There was a two-liter, plastic bottle of Diet Pepsi in the lower door shelf.

They both shrugged. The small mystery contributed to the gradual warming in the kitchen: tiny taste bursts of tomato sauce and chili powder popped over the simmering pot; a film of steam blotted the corners of the window over the sink.

“You’re different today. So what’s changed?” she asked.

“I figured out the difference between attraction and propulsion.”

“Oh, boy, physics.” Amy evaluated him warily.

“Sometimes if you find yourself hurtling toward someone it might not be attraction so much as what you’re running away from.”

Amy smiled cynically. “The wife.”

“No, someone,” Broker protested.

“So this is hypothetical?” she asked.

“Not exactly.”

“The wife,” Amy repeated.

“Okay, for the purposes of argument. Say I go over to Jolene’s place to return Hank’s vehicle and I have suspicions about the accountant’s death which I can’t make pan out. But I’m feeling bad about what happened to Hank and I see her dealing with these problems so I sort of step in . . .”

“Step in?” Amy was amused.

“Yeah, you know . . .” Broker gestured with his hands.

“I got an idea what you stepped in,” Amy said.

Broker objected. “That’s not the point. What I’m trying to say is I have all this . . .” His hands attempted to manipulate an invisible object in the air. “. . . stuff in my life that’s hanging fire—Nina leaving with my kid, my marriage—and I wasn’t dealing with it. So I’m rebounding off that. It explains, but does not excuse, getting involved too quick in—”

“Oh, so now you’re involved?”

“No, I mean, if my life were in order I probably wouldn’t have stuck my nose in.”

“Oh, now it’s your nose?” On the stove, the chili was starting to simmer.

“You’re not listening to me,” Broker said, getting a little hot himself.

“Sure I am,” she said too casually. “You went to bed with her; what’s the big deal?”

“Amy?”

“That’s not an answer. You went to bed with her and now you feel bad about it and you expect me to give you . . . sympathy? Now suddenly you want to take me to dinner.”

Amy flipped the box of Saltines across the room. It hit Broker’s chest and spiraled to the floor. “Make your own goddamn lunch.”

She paced the length of the room, wheeled around, and quipped, “So what did you do with Hank? Stuff him in the closet?”

“I thought we were having a serious conversation,” Broker said, standing up suddenly, rattling the bowls and silverware on the table.

“How can we have a serious conversation when you won’t tell me the truth,” Amy said.

They stared at each other as a cloud of scorched chili reared in the air.

“The truth,” Broker said with a perplexed look on his face.

“A basis for trust,” Amy said, speaking in her best practical voice.

“Look,” he gave in, “it only happened—”

“How typical,” Amy smiled sweetly as she spun, walked from the kitchen, through the living room, and up the stairs.

The pot on the stove puffed out black fumes, the smoke alarm on the ceiling began to shriek. He heard her footfalls continue to stomp in the hall upstairs. A door slammed. Broker got up on a chair and hit the reset button on the alarm. Then he jumped off the chair, grabbed the pot of burnt chili, and—Ow—immediately drew back his hand. He looked around for a towel, found one hanging over the sink, grabbed the pot handle a second time with the towel, and carried it out to the porch. When he came back in, the alarm was screeching again, so he opened the window over the sink, searched for the switch to the ceiling fan, found it, turned on the fan, then climbed back on the chair and turned the alarm off.

Wreathes of smoke hung in the air like the aftermath of battle. Okay. Get out of the house. Feed the birds.

The nimble clouds of
an hour ago now massed into cold gobs. The wind had acquired knuckles.

Hunched over, Broker walked through little squalls of swirling leaves toward the outer paddocks. As he neared them, a crowd of curious hens drifted along the fence line, their stubby wings slightly lowered to warm their long legs. Their big eyes fixed on him like cartoon question marks.

He glanced up at winter clouds in October and very much wanted this detour in his life to be over. He ducked into the first paddock and was soon busy, elbowing his way through clumsy hens who crowded around him as he dumped five-gallon plastic buckets of feed into bins. The bigger males hung back while their harems fed. If one put in an appearance, mindful of J.T.’s warnings, Broker exited the pens and just heaved the feed sidelong at the bins over the gates. In each paddock he checked to make sure the water reservoirs were full.

Half an hour later he came back up the gravel path toward the barn. A grind of downshifting gears drew his eyes toward the road and he saw a flash of an auto chassis streak over a dip and disappear behind a tree line. Then a gust of wind stood him up and he looked at the sky which was darkened to the point where he wanted to check out the weather channel. He’d lost track of the speeding car. Probably the wind.

His last chore was to feed Popeye in the barn.

“How you doing today, you and hit-and-run punk,” Broker said, as he carried a last bucket of feed toward the pen and saw Popeye’s big stupid eyes bob more than nine feet in the air at the end of his skinny neck.

The wind groaned through the barn’s wooden walls and somewhere hanging farm equipment clanged like Gothic wind chimes, and at first Broker didn’t hear it. Then he did—the sound of something hard pounding the fender of the tractor parked behind him. A mean cadence, off the rhythm of the wind.

He turned. The source of the noise was a shiny new baseball bat in Earl Garf’s hand.

Another guy stood behind Earl, a big guy who also wielded a bat. Broker looked past Earl, at the big guy who was wearing a baggy leather bomber jacket, extra large to allow room for his massive arms. There was a fake bomber-group insignia on the left breast of the coat. A diving vulture. Broker had seen the jacket before.

Rodney had been wearing it more three years ago when Broker busted him for selling machine guns.

“Hiya, shithead,” Earl sang out. “I believe you have something that belongs to me.” Earl had dressed for the occasion in black leather—a long belted trench coat. As Broker’s gaze shifted from Rodney to Earl and back again, Earl loosened the belt on the coat and flexed his shoulders.

“Binds the arms,” he said. Then he raised his bat like a hitter warming up and took an experimental swing at the air. His tongue played along his lower lip in anticipation. Earl didn’t see Rodney, behind him, getting a good look at Broker and crinkling his wide forehead in surprise.

“Eyebrows?” Rodney said. “Oh, fuck me.”