Absolute Zero (32 page)

He was moving in
the back of a car and it was all black outside the boxy windows. Not far away he sensed terrific cold. But here, inside, bundled in his bedding, the sensation of motion was enjoyable. Especially enjoyable considering the last thing he remembered was Allen coming in through the patio door to suffocate him with a pillow
.

Now he was just inches from a snoozing Amy Skoda, whose hair tickled his cheek and smelled like herbal shampoo. She reclined beside him. They were like Roman lovers at a feast.

Maybe he had dreamed the scene with Allen.

Maybe he was dreaming now.

In the front seat Broker and Jolene discussed procedure. If it turned out that Hank could make a case that Nancy Ward, the recovery-room nurse, had acted with malicious intent, Broker insisted on calling the St. Louis County sheriff’s office.

Jolene thought Milt should be in on the decision. But she understood Amy’s status and was willing to hold off on Milt until the next round of communication with Hank.

Broker shook his head. “We don’t know how much energy he’s got left, how long this can go on. I want someone else around to verify what we’re doing.”

Jolene worried her lower lip between her teeth, squinted at the luminous numerals on her digital watch, and looked out the window.

“Okay,” she said. “But we wait for the morning. I want him to get a full night’s rest.”

Broker nodded. “How we doing back there?” he asked, calling over his shoulder.

There was no answer. Jolene twisted in her seat. “They’re both asleep.” She turned back around and gave the silence between them enough time to go from informal to personal. Then she inclined her head. “You and me; we’re water under the bridge, right?”

Broker did not answer so she extended her hand and poked a finger in his right thigh. “So you were a cop?”

“Who says?”

Jolene tossed her head toward Amy in back. “Miss Goody Two-shoes told me.”

“It was a long time ago,” Broker minimized.

“You should have told me, you really should have,” Jolene said.

Broker shrugged.

“An undercover cop?”

“I worked some time undercover.”

“Is that where the police record came from, made up for working undercover.”

“Yeah.”

“What about drugs? Did you work around drugs?” Jolene asked.

“Some. I didn’t like working drugs. Mostly I went after illegal gun traffic,” Broker said. He braked slightly as the loneliest, coldest, eight-point buck in Northern Minnesota trotted stiffly across the frost-bleached highway.

“Really? I thought cops were big into busting people for drugs,” Jolene said.

“They are. It’s their buffalo, the resource that supports their way of life. We should legalize them, like booze.”

“That’s radical for a cop.”

“Ex-cop.”

“Okay, ex-cop.” Jolene nodded respectfully.

Broker returned the nod. “People can learn how to quit getting high. You’d agree with that.”

“I’d agree with that,” Jolene said.

“Yeah, well, try to learn how to quit being dead after you’ve been shot five times in the chest with a Tec Nine converted to full auto.”

“And the drugs are the reason a lot of people are shooting each other,” Jolene said.

“There you go,” Broker said.

“Sort of like what Hank used to call a worldview, with the buffalo and everything,” Jolene said with a wry smile. Then she turned away and stared out the window. The dashboard lights created a transparent mirror effect in the glass, and she saw her face superimposed on the darkness.

Of the many hard parts to this thing, the hardest was that she still liked him a lot.

No one wanted to
turn off their cars in this weather. An inferno of auto exhaust clouded the air and made the vehicles in the parking lot of Tobie’s look like they were on fire. Allen, always prepared, popped his trunk, opened his winter survival bag, and pulled out a fleece sweater and his Goretex parka, put them on along with a warmer hat and gloves. Then he closed the trunk, picked up his medical bag, walked over to the green Chevy van, knocked, and then opened the door.

Garf’s hair was askew and silver-tipped with ice. His face looking like raw Polish sausage. He sat behind the wheel with his bare chest peeking between the askew hospital robe that he wore under his coat. His empty left sleeve stuck out akimbo, his left hand was in a sling and poked from the coat and rested on the steering wheel. He looked demented, Shakespearean, in that getup.

There was this big pistol sitting in his lap.

Allen, getting in, sitting down, had learned about guns working his way backward from wound ballistics at Regions, back when it was Ramsey County Emergency. He identified the weapon as an old, 1911 military-model .45. It made a big hole and had been designed specifically to knock a man down with one shot.

“Okay,” Garf said, sliding his right hand over the handle of the pistol and pointing it at Allen. “The next thirty seconds are the most important of your life. Talk.”

Allen stared into the muzzle of the pistol and took a moment to anesthetize the stammer of panic he felt swelling up in his gums and teeth and tongue. Then he smiled tightly and peppered Earl with concise sentences: “You talked to Hank, I talked to Hank. You told him what happened to Stovall. I told him how I accidently gave him the wrong medication in the recovery room up there. He can hang both our asses.” Allen checked his watch. “Ten seconds. Anything else you want to know?”

Garf stared at Allen for a long time.

Allen, reassured, continued in a more relaxed tone. “I saw Broker and Amy bring you into the ER early this afternoon. I went to the house and was in the kitchen when they were in the studio with Hank. When they did the alphabet-board bit. I heard them on the baby monitor. Then I went around the back of the house and hid under the deck when Jolene came out and called you. I tried to get in and do it quietly with a pillow but they came back and I had to leave. Sorry.”

Garf had to laugh. “The fucking baby monitor?” Then he narrowed his eyes. “A pillow? What happened to, you know, the Hippocratic Oath?”

Allen smiled. “What’d Jolene mean when she said this is NoDak serious?”

Garf lowered his eyes and scratched the pattern on the wooden handle of the pistol with a fingernail. It made a distinct sound. Maybe the hinge of fate.

Allen continued. “I get the impression you and she have been here before.”

Garf’s eyes came up. Allen thought they might have been very nice eyes once and had been filled with many possibilities. Garf said, almost tenderly, “And this is your first time.”

Allen, all business, brushed the comment aside. “So how are you going to find the place? Ask everybody in town?”

Garf took a deep breath, winced; mistake, his ribs.

“I remember how to get there,” Allen said. “And what were you going to do with them after you shot them full of great big holes? There’s ballistics to worry about. And messy body fluids. And what about Hank. He has to stick around, you know. There’s millions of dollars at risk.”

Garf shifted his feet, turned away, and stared at the frost crystals gnawing through the window glass.

Allen opened his medical bag, scooped up a bag of lactated ringers along with glossy bends of IV tubing. “Now, listen to me,” he said. “If you and Jolene do it my way, we can get out of this.”

Machines quit when it
got this cold. They were damn near the only thing traveling on wheels.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a smart idea,” Broker said as he took an exit just past Virginia and pulled into an Amoco station. It was a different kind of storm, invisible, like J.T.’s vampire in a mirror. They couldn’t see it because it didn’t snow.

It didn’t snow because the cold had killed anything that tried to move, including the wind.

He got out to pump the gas and Amy and Jolene sprinted for the john, and they were all stunned almost dumb by the temperature. Road salt bleached a gritty borax-white on the metal skin of the Jeep. They could almost hear the steel molecules shriek as they hugged tight.

“Jesus,” Jolene said, hoofing back from the can, hands over her bare ears. Her breath made a cloud thick enough for the children of Israel to follow through the wilderness.

“Twenty-seven below,” Broker said, coming back from paying for the gas. “If the wind comes up, the windchill will be fatal. End of story.” He handed out Styrofoam cups of coffee from a cardboard tray, candy bars, and snacks of beef jerky.

Jolene, who wasn’t wearing her hat, shook her head. “It makes you crazy.”

“Grease up,” Broker said, offering her a jerky.

The cold was bad enough on the deserted Interstate. When they creaked through the empty streets of Ely, they left the blacktop and the comfort of artificial light behind and crunched onto the gravel. The high beams converted the trees and swamp grass into sinister patterns at the side of the road, and the cold became lunar, utterly foreign to warm flesh.

And J.T. was right about his Jeep. It didn’t look like much on the outside but everybody in the Chrysler plant in Detroit must have been having a good day when they made it, because the car had heart and kept pulling through the cold.

They turned at a frost-shriven sign—uncle billie’s resort—and drove down the wooded drive. Broker stopped the Jeep in front of the lodge and got out and looked up at the ice-pick stars.

He left them in the Jeep with the heater running while he dashed inside, turned up the furnace, started a fire in the fireplace, and folded out the sleeper couch for Hank.

Then he came back and he and Amy each took one side and lifted Hank from the back of the Jeep and hauled him in a two-man fireman’s carry. Scurrying beside them, Jolene hesitated when she heard an eerie, twanging, hollow sound.

“What’s that?”

“Ice forming on the lake,” Broker said.

Jolene went inside and balked at the moose head with its horns spread out from over the mantel. She shook her head. “Men are really pretty weird, you know?”

Then she and Amy made Hank comfortable on the rolled-out couch. They folded blankets to insert under his knees and calves to elevate his feet. Broker brought them pillows and quilts to prop up his back and sides.

Jolene changed Hank’s diaper and administered a water drip to his gastro tube. Amy shook her head in amazement.

“This guy may have a tricky airway but he has an incredible set of lungs.”

“There’s no justice,” Jolene said. “Two packs of Camel straights a day all his life.”

Hank continued to sleep.

Broker squatted by the fire and watched the two women work side by side and couldn’t help comparing them—the way they moved, the way they wore their jeans. Amy filled hers to the brim while Jolene’s seemed to follow along with her. Amy’s naturally freckled aura and her trim lines were maintained by constant patrols of exercise and denial. He suspected that if her discipline faltered she would put on weight.

They moved between the kitchen stove and the fireplace, trying to convince themselves they were warm. Amy made a pot of hot tea.

Broker listened to the roof timbers creak as he fought mild disorientation. They really hadn’t been out in it; but just the idea of temperatures this cold got inside their brains and slowed their thoughts.

His and Amy’s, anyway, because they became drowsy, lazing near the fire. Jolene reacted in the opposite direction, nervous, pacing; she explored the lodge, she fretted over Hank’s minute-by-minute condition. She kept looking at her wristwatch, fingering the pager clipped to her belt.

Amy opened and heated cans of soup; found the ingredients for toasted cheese sandwiches. As they ate, Broker mentioned contacting Deputy Dave Iker. You know, like let’s get this show on the road.

Jolene reacted testily, accused him of reneging on the deal.

After the meal, she continued her pacing. She switched on the satellite TV, tore through the channels, turned it off.

Broker figured these nervous tics were all the stuff she’d been keeping in, the strain from looking after Hank for the last week. Now, with Hank showing signs of stirring from his coma, she was dropping her guard, getting a little spacy, letting it out.

She started and her right hand went to her pager, which must have vibrated against her hip because she pressed the button and focused on the number on the viewer. Immediately her head came up and she looked gravely, directly into his eyes.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Nothing, some wrong number,” she said.

It was a look he remembered from somewhere. He had to stop himself and think back. Maybe that night just before they went to bed.

“I’m going out for a smoke,” Jolene said abruptly, her face suddenly stiff, her words jerking. But she pulled a box of Marlboro Lights from her jacket pocket and opened it. The first cigarette snapped and broke apart in her fingers. She ignored it and selected another one. Put it in her mouth.

Broker didn’t know that she was a closet smoker. But it made sense, given the AA background, the stress of dealing with Hank.

Jolene pulled on her coat, hat, and gloves and said, “I won’t be long.”

As she went out the door, Broker joined Amy in front of the fire. “What do you think?” he asked, nodding at Hank.

“I keep pinching myself.”

“Yeah,” Broker grinned. “I know what you mean. It’s kind of profound.”

“You read about things like this once in a while. A patient wakes up from a coma.” She bit her lip and her eyes rolled up hopefully. “I don’t want to jinx it by wishing it comes true.”

He stooped to add more kindling to the fire and fiddled with the poker. A lot had changed in the last few days since he’d left his sickbed in this room and traveled south to the Cities.

Thinking about how he’d nailed Earl, he smiled, remembering the T-shirt: old age and treachery will always win out over youth and strength. It took the edge off the paranoia about his wife hanging out with younger men.

Another thing. He felt even with Amy now. Hank really had cleared the air between them.