Absolute Zero (34 page)

Hank was resolved to
go out on his kind of play; he’d bet it all on one gesture. Either he’d get the needle or a response.

Allen was startled and his hands began to shake—from excitement, he told himself. This
was
exciting. So he smiled stiffly and studied Hank. “So you really are in there? Have you been eavesdropping again?” He couldn’t help giving in to a twitch of clinical fascination.

Hank blinked twice.

“Two means yes,” Allen said. “Okay. Just a minute then.” He dug Amy’s famous crumpled alphabet paper out of his pocket, smoothed it out, and held it up. Hank’s sneering eyes fixed on it and Allen granted their hot wish. “You want to talk?”

Two blinks.

Allen let his finger rove the groups and Hank began to blink.

“P”

“U”

“S”

“S”

“Y”

Hank shut his eyes.

“Bravo, Hank; crude to the end,” Allen said, but a film of sweat started to form across his forehead and on his upper lip. After everything he’d accomplished he was back where he’d started; the object of Hank’s offhand contempt. Allen felt an impulse to plunge his thumbs into those eyes and squash them like grapes.

Hank’s eyes popped open. Now he was sweating, too. They glared at each other.

“I win; you lose. Top that,” Allen smiled kindly and then he swept his upturned hand to the letter groups like a waiter indicating the way to a table.

“D”

“U”

“M”

“Who? Me? Really. I’d think the opposite was true.”

“T”

“H”

“E”

“Y”

. . .

“U”

“S”

“E”

. . .

“U”

. . .

“K”

“I”

“L”

. . .

“U”

“You mean Earl?” Allen’s voice quavered a bit. He heard car motors turn off. Doors slam. A drop of his sweat fell on the paper, blurring some of Amy’s letters.

Two blinks.

“. . . And Jolene?” Allen’s voice turned dry and he swallowed a stammer; the novelty was wearing off, this pointing and blinking.

Two blinks.

The door opened and Allen dropped the paper. His hurried gesture held Earl and Jolene’s attention for a beat.

“What’s going on?” Earl asked.

“Nothing,” Allen said.

Earl eyed him for another moment, then said, “We have him in the Jeep. Now what?”

“Like I said, you drive the Jeep, I’ll follow in my car. We find a spot for him to go off the road. Jolene, you start wiping the place down. Anywhere you touched before we got here. We come back, do a walk-through, load Hank, and that’s it.”

Then Allen walked back to the bedroom and thumbed the white plastic gauge open to the bottom of the roller clamp and the Fentanyl started to flow into Amy’s IV.

Jolene watched him do it.

Efficient, practical; he could have been turning off the lights.

She watched the narcotic streamline into Amy’s blood. Her hips raised into a wanton arch on the bed, her head thrust back, her eyes revolving up. The euphoric spasm collapsed as Allen and Earl went out the front door and she watched Amy writhe, chin on chest, tongue protruding, drool starting to flow down her chin into a curl of thick, white-blond hair trapped beneath her cheek.

Jolene turned away and resented them for leaving her alone with
this
. And she shut her eyes and saw cops and lawyers and judges. She saw matrons forcing her to strip and sticking their fingers in her and making her put on prison cottons.

And
THAT
was the future if she didn’t do
THIS
.

Goddamn Broker shouldn’t have lied to me, she told herself.

But she couldn’t take her eyes off Amy, couldn’t stop watching her breaths getting shallow and coming further and further apart.

Never hurt anybody when I was sober before.

She spun and stalked into the living room, fished in her coat pocket, took out her cigarettes, lit up, and paced in front of the fireplace. About three drags into her Marlboro she darted a glance at Hank.

Hank looked back.

Great, she thought, now he’s awake and watching. Maybe he’d been listening all along.

Maybe he knew Amy was in the next room with a slack, stoned grin on her face, dying; that they were parking Broker in the woods where he’d freeze to death; that Allen was going to kill Hank’s eyes.

“This isn’t me,” she told Hank. “Uh-uh.”

Hank continued to stare at her so she amended her wishful declaration: “This isn’t me most of the time. It certainly isn’t who I want to be.”

Shaking now, she went back into the bedroom and studied the IV hook up.

“Fuck,” she said.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

What if?

Experimentally, her Latex-clad finger curled around the back of the blue clamp, her thumb caressed the small white plastic wheel. She listened to Amy’s thready breathing.

Why would she paint her fingernails a dumb color like that?

Her thumb debated, moving the wheel up and down. She saw how simply it worked. Flattening the tubing and cutting off the flow. All comes down to this cheap plastic piece of shit, probably cost eighty-nine cents, probably some nine-year-old kid made it in Singapore or China.

Fuck.

She thumbed the wheel up the track and then down the track. Up, down. She pulled away, nervously puffing on her cigarette, and left the white wheel at the top of the clamp. Off.

For now.

It’ll give me a little time to think.

She went back in the living room and paced in front of the fireplace.

Allen was such a mixture of innocent lamb and cold, efficient operator. And Earl was all smiles, like a big cat who was lying back for the moment, sort of amazed by the machinations of this dazzling killer mouse who’d danced onto the scene. Who was trying to impress her.

And she knew what Earl was thinking: Allen was another loose end, a tricky one, for sure; but he’d have to be dealt with. She turned and saw Hank still watching her like an old billy goat.

“What?” she shouted at Hank’s relentless eyes.

Two blinks.

“Oh Christ, when is this going to stop?”

Two more blinks.

She sat on the edge of the fold-out couch and toyed with the wrinkled sheet of paper that Allen had dropped. This insistent new sound whistled from Hank’s mouth. A jerky panting sound.

Everyone else had; why not me? She started smoothing out the sheet of paper. Amy had this tall, bold way of printing; strong letters, upright, nothing weak about them. She was like Broker, probably—never sick, no flaws.

She could imagine them walking around in the fucking woods, being healthy together.

“Okay, okay,” she said and let her finger linger on the alphabet game. Hank’s eyes snapped from group to group and line to line.

“H”

“I”

“T”

“Hit?” she puzzled. Then she saw the longing in his eyes, shining through the clay of his flesh. Hank always could put a lot into a glance. And she wasn’t so bad when it came to fast reading of a pair of eyes. She inhaled and exhaled in a very exaggerated manner.

Two blinks.

“You want a hit?”

Two blinks.

“Aw, God.” She slid across the blankets, turned, and reclined next to Hank. She wished she could shake out her hair the way he liked. Yeah, well, she wished a lot of things.

“You and me, honey; like in
Casablanca
, remember, when smoking was sexier than sex.”

She leaned over and, as she kissed Hank on his motionless lips, she felt his breath mingle with hers. Then, she turned her hand so the cigarette fit between his lips and sealed her cupped fingers over his mouth.

Bogey one last time.

Hank sucked in and the nicotine mushroomed in his lungs, invaded the air sacks, and pillaged through his blood, and he could feel his entire circulation system brighten up like a mile of Christmas lights strung through a bombed, blacked-out city. It made the sperm dust jump.

This was the tough lady he’d fallen in love with the moment he saw her walk into that church basement. He’d thought to soak in her like the proverbial fountain, but she was no fountain; she was a Raymond Carver short story when he met her, up to her neck in low-rent heartbreak, with the tatters of her alcoholism not quite tucked all the way in. Now here she was with her growing pains, stranded in a North Woods
Crime and Punishment.

His heart began to beat faster. There wasn’t much time left. And she was the only legacy he had.

Jolene lowered her head to Hank’s shoulder and could have cried. But if she were the crying type she couldn’t come out of this on top. Which she fully intended to do, one way or the other. So she appreciated the last hand Hank was playing, having his last smoke before they put on the blindfold. And now he was blinking again.

She removed the cigarette from his lips, flipped it into the fireplace, and held up the paper.

“A”

“L”

. . .

“K”

“I”

“L”

“L”

. . .

“E”

“R”

“L”

. . .

“W”

“A”

“R”

“N”

“What am I supposed to do? This isn’t exactly an ideal situation.”

“G”

“E”

“T”

. . .

“T”

“O”

. . .

“F”

“I”

“G”

“H”

“T”

. . .

“U”

. . .

“W”

“I”

“N”

Oh, shit. Hank felt the control slipping away as a flutter of color blotted his concentration. Coming to smother him. He blinked wildly.

“What?” Jolene yelled. The paper was starting to come apart, damp from her sweaty hands.

“S”

“A”

“V”

“E”

. . .

“T”

“H”

“E”

“M”

“Easy for you to say,” Jolene said, and then she saw his eyes revert to their loopy aimlessness. She shook his shoulder. “C’mon, Hank, don’t go away now. Christ!”

She got up and hugged herself in front of the fire. Looked past the kitchen, at the hall to the bedroom where she’d paused Amy’s slow-motion Fentanyl toboggan.

Save them
. How? Allen had the plan. Earl had the gun.

But Hank was right, it wouldn’t be that hard to get them going at each other.

But Allen was the only one who could fix Hank’s eyes and keep all the secrets safe.

But what if Allen didn’t disable Hank’s eyes. What would Hank say then? See, that was the rough part—she didn’t know.

Staring at the flames, she imagined the opposite of fire. And that’s what was going on out there in the dark. Broker’s body was slowly filling up with ice-cold. The diving-seal syndrome. His fingers and toes would go first, freeze white and hard as piano keys as the blood drained from his extremities and pooled around his heart and lungs. It would abandon his brain and would make a last-ditch stand in the engine room.

Gee, all the neat stuff I’ve learned.

He lied to me
.

The bottle of scotch they’d used to marinate Broker shimmered in the firelight, on the desk next to the fireplace. With his fingerprints on it.

She stared at the rubber gloves on her hands. They made her feel removed from life. A ghost. Not really here.

Johnny Walker Red Label.

Festive.

She’d never liked scotch. She’d liked invisible alcohol that didn’t overpower your breath. She’d been a vodka drinker. Sneaky. Vodka Seven. Gimlets. Fruity tastes.

Story of your life with Earl. Sneaky.

The whole idea with Hank was to get away from that.

Look at it, two-thirds full. A color somewhere between piss and raw gold.

How long is it now, Jolene? Fourteen months?

I came to believe that a higher power could restore me to sanity.

A sane, safe little sheep, following Allen and Earl to the chunk of change at the end of the rainbow. She’d get her wish, she’d be a rich wire mother.

Jolene shuddered.

The warm part of her, the cloth mother trapped in the bottle, called out to her. She peeled off the rubber gloves and reached out her hand.

Jesus, what a night
for cold-blooded murder.

Allen and Earl stood talking about how they were going to do it. Their freezing breath mingling with car exhaust in the crossed high beams of the Cherokee and the Saab. Broker was slumped in the passenger side of the Jeep, his cheek flattened against the windshield.

The Fentanyl for Amy was clean, almost like extreme medicine; but this was killing a man.

And Allen, who had Hank’s cryptic message streaming with a coldness all its own inside his mind, was very aware that once the killing started there were no rules governing Earl and Jolene, beyond sheer self-interest and the reach of their arms and what they held in their hands.

And Earl had the gun.

Such was the flavor of Allen’s thinking as he discussed how Broker would die.

“So, how exactly are we going to do this?” Earl standing there, no hat, with his blond hair frizzed out wild; he looked like a lame Nazi rock star in the outlandish, one-armed black leather trench coat.

Allen kept staring at Earl’s sternum, bare; the young, healthy skin fogged with red chilblain under the clumsy coat. Back in the lodge, in his medical bag, Allen had a scalpel. Easy in under the sternum and up, prick the heart. He’d bleed out internally. Less mess.

Which left the problem of disposal. Allen shook his head; he was becoming disoriented by the cold. One thing at a time.

“We have to make it look like he lost control and went off the road.”

“The road we came in on?” Earl asked.

“I think a secondary road in the woods would be better. We don’t want him found right away. Something less traveled. With a sharp turn.”

“Okay. What we can do is put him behind the wheel, wedge his foot on the gas, and hold down the clutch and put the Jeep in gear. Then we get back out of the way, use something—a stick—to pop the clutch, and off he goes into a tree.”

“We just have to make sure it hits hard enough to shatter the windshield,” Allen said.

“What if he wakes up?”

“With everything he’s got on board? Plus, hypothermia tends to put you to sleep.” Allen shook his head.

Earl grinned. “For a long fucking time.”

“Let’s get going,” Allen said.
Lights
, he thought.
Music.

A mile of back road from the lodge, Allen turned down a logging trail that was cushioned with frozen pine needles and leaves that crunched like cornflakes. He followed it along a swamp or the edge of a lake until it curved back into the woods. He slowed, and then crawled around a tight left turn and a down a short slope. At the bottom of the incline the road turned left again in front of a stack of pulpwood logs.

Six feet high, twelve feet long. Which was perfect—denser than a single tree, more mass targets to hit. And the frozen ground was virtually free of snow, just a few leftover clots like dirty melted marshmallows.

He stabbed his brake lights to alert Earl behind him. Earl stopped, cranked down the window, and leaned out. Allen had his window down too and yelled back, “This is it. Back up to the top of the hill. I’ll go to the bottom, turn around, and put my lights on the pile of logs.”

The Jeep backed slowly up the hill. Allen continued on, positioned his car clear of the turn, and left it running, lights on, so his high beams illuminated the target. Then he yanked six logs out in the top tier, so they extended and drooped like tusks toward the road. One of them was bound to come through the windshield and hopefully brain the driver. Then he jogged up the slope.

Earl had parked the Jeep just above the lip of the short hill, pointed toward the logs. He tried to pull Broker over behind the wheel. But his sling made it too awkward.

“You got to help me with this,” Earl said.

Allen nodded and swiftly positioned Broker. Earl said, “I got it in neutral, so jam his right foot between the floor mat and the accelerator.”

Allen accomplished this with some difficulty; it was a tight working space, it was dark, and the cold was dazing.

The engine raced.

“Okay,” Earl said. “It’s a nineteen-ninety model, so no air bag to worry about. Now we need a stick.” So they hunted for a branch, discarded several, and finally a slightly bowed six-footer met Earl’s approval.

“This is the tricky part. I’m going to push in the clutch with this stick and you have to shift into first and get back out of the way when I release the clutch. You ready?”

“Ready.”

Their voices were magnified by the desolation and the cold. Allen could see sweat freezing on Earl’s chin stubble and glisten on his abdominal muscles. How was he doing this without a shirt?

The Jeep’s engine whined, being wound tighter and tighter.

And Broker was slumped forward in the harness of the seat belt. Allen could not see his face. Allen felt a nuance of remorse. Broker was the innocent bystander sentenced to die by the rules of triage.

“Here we go,” Earl yelled. He eased up on the stick so the engine wouldn’t stall, and, as the Jeep lurched forward, he yanked the stick altogether.

The Jeep rumbled forward, picked up speed, and plowed down the slope. Allen and Earl were already running downhill when it smashed diagonally into the pulp logs with a hollow thud of metal, frigid plastic, and shattering glass. The engine whined once and then quit.

Silent. A slight smell of burning electric circuits and one headlight still on, making a fractured pool of illumination.

“The light is good, lets the battery run out,” Earl said.

Two of the logs Allen had pulled out ripped a long gaping hole in the windshield. Even better, one of them had struck Broker a glancing blow to the head and Allen had seen him jerk on his seat belt tether like a crash-test dummy. The driver’s-side door sprung out, stuck open on its broken hinge.

Panting huge white clouds, Allen and Earl inspected the results. The ground beneath their feet was hard as brown, rippled iron and left no tracks. Broker now had blunt trauma to the skull going for him in addition to being drugged and gavaged with scotch. A thick curd of blood and torn scalp matted his left temple and eyebrow. A fast dribble broke out of the mess, streaked down his left cheek, and dripped from his chin. His dark sodden hair was spangled with flat, translucent pebbles of windshield glass. His breath made a trickle of steam. Allen wanted to be sure Broker was dying, so they stood for long minutes, stamping their feet and hugging themselves in the insane cold, watching Broker’s life leak away.

“Look,” Earl said, “his blood is freezing solid off his chin.”

“Okay, let’s go,” Allen said.

They rode back side by side in the Saab, happy for the powerful heater, the comfortable upholstery, the solid performance that kept the wheels turning.

“There’s something we have to talk about,” Allen said.

“Oh, yeah?” Earl asked.

“It’s about Jolene. When the insurance company sees that the anesthetist they’re defending has committed suicide, they’ll probably be in a mood to write a check. That will be tempting after what she’s been through. You have to convince her to hold out. After tonight, Milt will be more determined to go for a jury trial.”

“Which means a lot more money,” Earl said.

“Which means a lot a more money,” repeated Allen. “But there’s a catch.”

“Always is,” Earl said.

“You have to move out of the house.”

“So you can move in?” Earl laughed. “Look, I’ve already been through this. I understand, I’m out, okay?”

“Good. That way Milt will think he’s easing Jolene away from your influence and under his own.”

“Uh-huh. Somebody should tell him that Jolene is always under her own influence. Except when she was drinking. And if she hasn’t reached for a bottle after what happened today, she never will again.”

“But you see what I’m getting at?” Allen asked.

“Yeah, you and Milt want me out of the picture.”

Allen laughed politely.

And Earl joined him, ha-ha. But then Earl surprised him with his answer. “I hear you. No bullshit, Allen, this is a class magic trick you put together tonight. You got us off the hook. And I won’t fuck it up. But let me tell you one thing about Jolene. She’s loyal. She and I have been on and off for years, but we always took care of each other. And we’ll keep doing that. The question is, what are you going to do?”

“I’m doing it,” Allen said.

“I mean, are you going to get moral qualms if the boy-girl thing with you and Jolene doesn’t work out the way you want it to, which, count on it—with her—it won’t.”

“It’s not like I want to marry her,” Allen said.

“I hear you, look what happened to the last guy who did,” Earl said with a straight face.

Allen attempted to control the mirth welling up on his face and then decided, no, it was spontaneous, and that was part of the reason he was in this. So he let the laughter come out.

Earl joined him and soon they were both caught in a laughing fit.

“I don’t know if this is appropriate,” Allen said, struggling to get his composure back.

“Why not, we’re going to win it all. No need to be greedy, there’s enough to go around,” Earl said.

Allen drove the last mile back to the lodge trying to feel less paranoid about Earl. They got out and tramped up the steps.

“Okay, we clean up, bundle Hank back in the van, and go home.”

“Sounds good,” Earl said, twisting the doorknob.

Earl balked and spun around. “It’s locked.” In a sudden fit of anger he pounded his fist on the door. “C’mon, Jolene, open the fucking door. It’s cold out here.” Then he turned and smashed at the door with his good elbow.

Nothing.

Allen reached to restrain him. “Don’t, you’re leaving marks on the door, we don’t want it to look . . .”

Earl flung Allen off. “Get your fucking hands off me.”

“We can’t afford complications,” Allen shouted. “Stop trying to break in the door, it makes it look like somebody was here. It’ll ruin everything we’ve done. What if there’s an alarm?”

A thought briefly crowded the anger from Earl’s eyes. Then he narrowed them. “There’s no alarm out here. So what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. She locked the door.”

They stood for a moment, shivering. Allen, stamping his feet, said, “Let’s go back to the car and sit a minute; maybe she’ll open the door. She had to hear you beating on the door.”

They got back in the Saab and Earl turned on the radio and got some college station out of Duluth and he made an attempt to listen to a discussion of gay, lesbian, and cross-gender issues on campus. Rankled, he banged off the station.

“Jesus Fucking Christ, can you believe this shit? You know Bob Dylan came from up here? Now this?” He kicked Allen’s dashboard. “Like fucking Iraq,” he muttered cryptically.

Several minutes of very awkward silence went by.

“What do you think?” Allen asked.

“She’s up to something,” Earl said.

Allen said, “There’s always an open window. My dad used to say that; let’s try the windows.”

They heaved out of the car, hunched their shoulders, and immediately began to shiver violently. “We have to take it easy, the cold is making us a little nuts,” Allen said as diplomatically as he could. “You go around that way, I’ll go the . . .”

“Uh-uh,” Earl disagreed, and pulled the pistol out of his pocket for emphasis. “We go together.”

Seeing the gun, Allen felt a deep tremor of fear start in his chest, and the wellspring of the stammer that had tormented the first sixteen years of his life started up. The procedure was starting to unravel into human-system failure. He nodded. “Right, let’s go together.”

Methodically, they began working their way around the lodge and found it to be a very well-built, one-story structure of cedar planks with tightly fastened combination storm windows. And all the curtains were drawn and the lights were out. There was a mud porch but the backdoor was locked.

Furious, Earl kicked at this rear door and screamed, “Jolene, quit fucking around. Open the door.” He stepped back, squared his shoulders, and shook his head. “This is bullshit.”

Allen watched it rear up, the thing he feared above cancer cells and hidden arterial bleeders—human irrationality—as Earl swung the pistol and shattered a pane of glass on the back door. He pushed the gun hand through the broken pane and twisted the doorknob.

“There, we’re in.”

“You cut yourself,” Allen said in a dull voice, pointing to the red smear on the Earl’s rubber glove.

“Just a nick,” Earl said, moving into the a darkened room, feeling for a light switch.

“Don’t touch anything. Let me bandage the hand and clean up the blood. It’s evidence. Think.”

Being in from the cold improved Earl’s mood slightly but he still growled, “I’ll think after I find what Jolene’s up to.” He eyed Allen suspiciously, as if to say:
What are you and Jolene up to?

“Your hand,” Allen repeated.

“Okay, let’s fix it up.” Earl had stopped calling for Jolene. Now they proceeded cautiously, turning on lights as they went. They moved from the rear of the lodge down a central hallway, past the door to the room into which they’d moved Amy.

Allen noted that the door was closed. As he went by he tested the knob. It rotated half a turn and stopped.

Locked.

But by then Earl was in the main room and had turned on the lights. “What the fuck?” he blurted.

Hank was gone from the daybed.

“The bedroom door is locked,” Allen said.

“Jolene, goddammit!” Earl roared and moved his gun from the weak fingers of his left-hand sling, which had been carrying it, so he could hold the cut on his right hand close against his chest, to stop blood dripping on the floor. Heedless of the blood trail, now he transferred the pistol to his bloody right hand.

Allen, still stunned by the cold, struggled to recover his concentration. Flashes of personal terror helped. He had to think. He had fallen in among the patients and his plan had collapsed for want of qualified help.

He moved swiftly to his bag, knelt, and forced his stiff fingers to function. He took out sterile gauze pads and a roll of adhesive tape. Earl watched him intensely; but not so intensely that he saw Allen slip the scalpel, handle down—a number-ten blade in a number-three holder—up the cuff of his jacket.