Absolute Zero (36 page)

Thick arterial blood sprayed his face and as he lurched back he saw another shape racing toward him. A familiar lily scent came through the bloody taste of sticky copper pennies.

“Jolene?”

But she raised the clubbed stock of a shotgun and smashed it at Allen’s bloody face and knocked him into a whole new universe of suffering. Even as he reeled in pain, an airtight, rational pocket of his mind protested:
Jolene, I-I lov-ve you, this-s isn’t fair. Look at all I-va-va da-done. I saved you. I set you up for life.

Earl had collapsed on him, drenching him with blood, but something else. Allen’s last kick had glanced up off Earl’s chest and passed under his armpit and tangled in the sling, and now that Earl had toppled over double, the tightly knotted trench-coat belt had twisted with the sling and trapped Allen’s leg and—oh, shit—the big klutz was falling off the dock.

“Jolene, help,” he shouted.

Earl’s dead weight was slipping toward the ice like entrails sliding from a gutted carcass. And he was pulling Allen with him.

“Jolene?”

She hit him again with the gun stock. No. Not hit. She figured out what was going on. She was pushing him with the gun, shoving him over the side. Prying him. Her eyeballs were focused tight-white neon.

“Bitch,” Allen screamed.

It was a long way to the ice. Earl’s body was heaped, facedown, piling up accordion-like three feet below the level of the dock. Allen’s hips were hung on the edge. He seized a steel pipe that served as a piling with his left hand, and he raised the knife in his right hand to menace Jolene.

They both paused to gather their strength, eyes inches apart, the thick clouds of their breath mingling.

Then, Allen heard a crash and bubbly wallowing sound. Earl’s weight cracked the thin ice and began to sink. Jolene swung the gun butt at Allen’s hand on the piling. Unsteady, her first stroke missed. Allen’s slashed back at her with his knife.

And he missed, too.

As she moved in to strike again, Allen instinctively let go of the piling and grabbed at her, clamped his fingers into the waistband of her jeans, jerking her forward, down on her knees.

They teetered on the edge of the dock, Jolene flailing with the shotgun, but feebly, in too close to do any damage.

Allen still had the dexterity in his hand to reverse the direction of the slim knife, twirling it daggerlike. He made a fist and swung overhand, throwing all his remaining strength in a powerful haymaker. She shoved the gun at his face, blinding him momentarily. Amid a confusing lurch of movement, he felt the blade plunge deep, through muscle. He wrenched it free and struck again, overhand, and felt it sink past the muscle into bone.

The closest phone was at the lodge.

Annie’s truck headlights streaked down the driveway and he barely heard the shot through the ringing in his ears as they turned into the parking lot. That’s when he saw Jolene bolt from the porch holding something in both hands. Trailing ragged jets of breath, she sprinted toward a hulking shape, and that was Earl staggering down the boat dock.

Broker couldn’t open the door handle with his frozen paws. All he felt was a numb jarring back up his arm.

“Help,” he yelled to Annie. “Open the open. OPEN THE DOOR!”

The truck was still moving as Annie leaned over and jerked the door handle. Broker rolled out and immediately collapsed as his numb feet failed. He yelled, “Get outa here. Somebody’s got a gun.”

He looked around. Where’s Amy?

Then—shit. He picked up motion at the end of the dock. Someone crawling. Earl was after her, had to be her. So that’s where Broker headed, following Jolene, but, Christ, his hands and feet were solid cubes and he toppled forward. He struggled up and tried to run on the wooden blocks. Fell again.

Get up. Save Amy.

BLAAM! Another gunshot whistled in the dark. He turned to Annie in the truck and shouted, “Annie, get out of here. Do it.
Now
.”

She didn’t need a second prodding. She floored it and reversed up the drive. And now he was alone and somebody had a gun.

Wonderful. He staggered on his square feet.

Voices now. But underwater voices. Slow, garbled.

Not just slow, frozen slow. Even more sluggish because ice cubes had replaced his brain. Each step required all his concentration.

Then he saw them outlined in silver moonlight, and the violent white smoke of their breath. Amy wasn’t there. Now Earl was down and Jolene and Allen Falken were fighting on the end of the dock.

Allen? What the fuck . . . ?

Earl was tangled up with Allen somehow. Make that Earl’s body, because it looked like Earl didn’t live there anymore. His body had slumped over and was dragging them both off the dock. Jolene was swinging a shotgun at Allen. Allen was swinging back.

Broker kept lurching down the dock, dragging his frozen feet like Boris Karloff.

Then Earl’s dead weight jerked Allen over the edge, which caused Allen to yank Jolene down in turn. Broker kept coming, slipping now in a lather of icy blood. When he saw the twinkle in Allen’s fist, reflex took over and he dived as the knife streaked overhand.

Broker flung out both his arms to block and cover Jolene, and collided with the squirming bodies. A hot wire stung deep into his left shoulder, withdrew and struck again, going deep into his left arm above the elbow joint. This time it stayed put.

Pain was abstract; there was so much going around that this new arrival had to stand in line. Amy had said cold sequesters sedation. It sequestered pain, too. Or, maybe, after the last hour or so, pain had just become his natural habitat.

Allen’s bloody hand slipped off the skinny haft and, desperate for purchase, he grabbed Jolene’s shotgun with both hands. Jolene immediately released the gun and Allen slipped farther down, let go of the gun, and clawed at her clothing. Her shirt tore and her stomach trembled slick, fish-belly white. Her knees pumped, churning ice water in Allen’s face.

“Please,” Allen screamed as his weight, anchored to Earl, pulled Jolene farther over the edge, which jerked Broker over, belly down on the planks. Broker’s right arm pawed for a grip, and, anchored around a piling, his left arm was extended across Jolene’s chest and hooked under her chin. Jolene thrashed, hip deep in the water, and grabbed the arm with both hands. Her hold broke the flex of his elbow and she slid deeper into the water, and Broker pitched over with her.

He knew the water at the end of the dock was deep, perhaps twelve feet, and the ice, while thin enough to break under a falling body, was strong enough to hold somebody down who became trapped beneath it. If she went into the hole after Earl and Allen, she’d be gone forever.

Glacier water stung Broker’s forearm and they all jabbered—wild—the North Atlantic protest-dialect of the drowning freezing. In the hoarse bedlam, Allen’s face contorted in a forest fire of white breath, level with Jolene’s squirming hips, splashing up to his neck in the black lake water and broken ice, trying to avoid Jolene’s fierce kicks.

“Please!”

Jolene writhed on Broker’s bad arm, going after Allen, kicking and kicking until his last scream ended in a thrashing garble of bubbles. Allen Falken’s eyes bulged in disbelief as the water blinded him, and the weight of Earl’s body slowly towed him down.

Utterly focused, Jolene kicked at the top of his head and deliberately held him under. It was dead, silent work punctuated only by the hysterical rasp of her breath and a stream of fading bubbles.

Then there was just Broker and Jolene and the vast silence that dwarfed simple words like
help
. And the burning stars. And then the urgent panic of their breathing resumed.

Allen’s last drowning spasm broke her grip on Broker’s arm. For a frantic beat Jolene turned and threw out her hands, trying to grab and climb Broker’s hooked arm, but her hands slid off his icy sleeves.

When the water reached her lips she shouted, “No, goddammit!” She surged up reaching, and the pain exploded full red and grinding in Broker’s left elbow, as Jolene’s right hand caught behind the haft of the scalpel. She anchored her left hand across her right wrist and held on.

Then Broker felt a buoyant lift to the pain. Nothing was pulling her down anymore. She’d floated free from Allen’s dead weight.

He tried to lift her, but his shoulder was stiffening and he couldn’t move. If he released his hold on the piling they would both go in and under the ice.

Teeth chattering, they stared at each other.

He was back where he began, at the mercy of the glacier water, and he had lost his strength and she was dying by inches and degrees. Within his grasp.

“Try to climb my arm,” he croaked.

She responded with a spasm of shaking. Then she gritted her teeth, let go with her left hand, and tried to reach past him for the dock, but it was too far and the effort almost cost her her grip on the knife imbedded in his elbow. She locked her left hand back on her right wrist. He saw she had no strength left.

“Hold on.” His voice rasped like a frigid ignition trying to turn over. Hers wasn’t much better.

She shuddered. “I’m good, I had a toddy.” But he could see she was losing it, slipping into the water.

The stars were their sequined shroud. And dancing among them, Broker saw the blue shimmer of the aurora. Now red. Then red and blue together slapping the dark trees, rippling on the ice.

He had wanted so much to save her and here she was dying in his arms, starting to sag lower in the water as the scalpel blade began to work free. He should say something. He should . . .

The stark blank verse of police radio traffic intruded on his grave-side sermon. And he turned his face and saw that the light show was earthbound, financed by St. Louis County and originating from the rotating flashers on two cruisers, two ambulances, and a fire truck.

Many men’s voices, now, shouting, breathless. Stabbing flashlight beams. Then the clump of pounding feet. The dock shuddered as several figures in tan and gray St. Louis County parkas belly-flopped on the planks next to Broker. Arms shot out, someone—maybe Dave Iker—clamped a hand into Jolene’s short, icy hair, couldn’t get a grip, and then grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and lifted her bodily.

As Jolene was hoisted from the water there was a moment when she and Broker were face-to-face. Her lips jerked, cramping her features into a horrible grin.

“Jesus, Broker; you look like shit.”

More hands pulled them in, swaddled them with blankets. Broker rasped, “Jolene, what happened?”

“I called nine one one,” she croaked back.

“But what happened?” he repeated.

She raised her face past him to the stars and, this time, all her facial muscles fired on cue and she did smile.

Broker held it together
long enough to tell the cops to look for two bodies under the ice. Then they loaded him into an ambulance and the shock, the intense cold, and his wounds finally hit him. He stared at Hank, who lay asleep or unconscious on an adjoining stretcher, thought for a moment, and muttered, “We have to feed the birds.”

A paramedic applied pressure bandages to Broker’s head and arm, ran an IV, and, in the course of calming him down, gathered that Broker was referring to J.T. Merryweather’s abandoned ostriches.

In the other ambulance, Jolene lay under blankets on her own stretcher and listened to the medics work on Amy right next to her. When they had stabilized Amy’s vital signs, one of the paramedics turned to Jolene and asked her how she was doing.

And Jolene said, “I want to talk to my lawyer.”

Broker heaved on soft
morphine waves. Eddies. He was reminded of the movie
Midnight Cowboy
—everybody talking at him, can’t hear most of what they’re saying.

“Well, it’s about two weeks till deer opener,” Dave Iker said, “and I figure, if all else fails, we can wire a stick to your stump in place of a trigger finger. You might have luck with that arrangement.”

“Or,” Sam, the giant deputy, said, “since you’re now qualified on the car bomb, maybe we could find where the deer congregate and pursue that technique.”

The jokes were getting old by his second day in a room at Ely Miner Hospital. He contributed drugged smiles and an occasional wiggle of his head. Otherwise they had him immobilized on the bed.

Amy was recovering in another room from the Narcan cocktail that reversed her Fentanyl overdose. Once Jolene walked by his bed with Milt Dane. Someone said the St. Louis County attorney had set up shop down the hall in another hospital room and Hank was blinking out a statement.

Two grand juries were in the works—one up here and another down in Washington County.

It was said that the wife’s role in everything was murky.

In moments of lucid pain between morphine doses, Broker recalled Jolene calling him out into the night and her shocked yell, “What’s he doing here?” just before Garf hit him on the head.

Had she been clinging to his arm in fear or trapping his arm so he couldn’t fight back?

Broker lay on his back with his arms and legs extended and elevated on cushions. A bald patch of his scalp was held in place by fifteen stitches. It felt like someone had launched a rocket off his charred left cheek.

The stab wounds in his shoulder and upper arm had been cleaned and lightly bandaged. Sterile gauze separated his fingers and toes, which were flushed a vivid pink and were bulbous with blisters.

The local cops had a pool going, betting on how many fingers and toes Broker would lose. Shari Swatosh, the paramedic, had signed up for the long-shot wager, opting for all twenty fingers and toes, plus his winky.

Dr. Boris Brecht had spent four years as an army doctor, most of them in Alaska with ski troops of the mountain division. He thought the pool was very funny. He wore a stethoscope around his neck, and a blue denim shirt with a Mickey Mouse decal embroidered on the chest pocket. He wagged his finger to reassure Broker. “Blisters that go all the way down to the tips of fingers and toes are good. Pink is good.”

As he inspected Broker’s bubblegum toes, he was mainly concerned about infection. Yesterday, when they’d brought Broker, Amy, and Jolene into Emergency, Brecht had immediately suspended Broker’s hands and feet in a huge sitz bathtub. He’d kept the water temperature between 100 and 108 degrees. He’d cleaned and stitched Broker’s wounds as he sat in the tub.

Through thick goggles of shock, Broker had watched his pallid fingers and toes slowly change from ivory to blush and start to sting as the blood crept back.

“Reaction to extreme cold varies from person to person,” Brecht had explained. “Certain groups are more susceptible than others. Blacks are three to six times more susceptible than whites. People born down South are four times more vulnerable than people born up north. Genetically, people with type O blood are more predisposed to cold trauma than type A or B.

“Basically, you weren’t out that long. And you’d ingested a lot of alcohol, and alcohol tends to dilate blood vessels. That’s
not
a recommendation to drink in the woods.

“You might loose some fingernails and toenails but, as long as infection doesn’t set in, you should recover full function. There’ll be some minor nerve damage and your extremities will be more vulnerable in the future. Probably you should work on your coping skills when it comes to cold weather.”

“Like Florida,” Sam counseled.

Broker went out with the morphine tide.

He woke in the
darkened room and heard a studied hush of machine-made beeps and sighs circulate in the corridor. Blue ghosts in white shoes drifted silently up and down the hall, passing his open door. One of them paused, looked in, and treaded soundlessly toward him.

Just a shadow at first, backlit by the hall lights. Then, as she emerged from shadow, he saw it was a lean woman, hatchet-faced, with her dark hair in a bun. And she held something in her upraised hand. Broker’s heart began to beat faster when he saw it was a syringe and nurse Nancy Ward was coming right at him.

Sequestered, Amy’s word again. It felt like his fears and his facts were suspended in morphine free fall. But then Nancy smiled warmly and push the shot into his IV and he felt the latest gentle wave lift and cradle him.

“You know what I think,” Nancy said, as she checked his dressings, his blisters, took his temperature, and checked his pulse. “He just thought he was so damn smart and we were a bunch of hicks up here. Doctor Mister Allen Falken. Well, you and Amy showed him, didn’t you? Turns out he was just another dip-shit swampy.”

Broker smiled, a nodding idiot smile he’d mainly seen on people he had busted.

Nancy adjusted and fluffed his pillows. “The word is the reporters are going to start showing up tomorrow, but it’s pretty much over; Mr. Sommer, I mean. He did his blinking for the prosecutor and now he’s slipped into a coma for real.”

In the Temple of Morphine, there is no bad news. Broker continued to smile.

“You just lie back and take it easy, because you have a visitor,” Nancy said.

Then Nancy disappeared and another slender blue figure took her place. Amy’s hair looked out of place and her face was pale, like the Roto-Rooter had been through her entire circulation system. She had a plastic bracelet on her wrist and an IV in her arm, just like he did, except her IV bag was on a stand that rolled on casters beside her.

“We have to stop meeting in this place,” Amy said.

Broker grinned.

“God, look at you. I’ll bet you haven’t smiled this much ever. Listen, I talked to Boris and he says your hands and feet—don’t worry, you’re going to be fine.”

She paused, picked up a sippy cup with a flexible straw from the bedside table, and held it to his lips. Broker, cotton-mouthed, gratefully sucked the ginger ale. “Have to keep your fluids up,” Amy said, then she put down the cup.

“One of the paramedics told Dave Iker you were babbling about ostriches, so Dave came to me and I explained about the farm. So Dave called down to Washington County and your friend, the sheriff, had a deputy go around to J.T.’s neighbors and find a guy who knew how to watch the place. The birds are all right.”

Broker continued to grin.

Amy cocked her head. “Jolene told me it was the baby monitors.”

As Amy talked, Broker tried to fit his mind around the story according to Hank. The whole thing about Allen giving the wrong meds. Garf and Stovall.

Broker tried to listen from behind his soft morphine window. Maybe this was what it was like for Hank. People talking at him.

“The St. Louis County prosecutor asked the questions with an alphabet board. Hank blinked back the answers.” Amy clicked her teeth. “They were pretty short answers. How Jolene got Allen and Earl fighting each other. But there were these gaps . . .”

Broker couldn’t stop grinning.

“Like, how did they control Jolene? Or was she playing along for time? I guess we’ll never know because her lawyer cut an immunity deal for her to testify before the grand jury.”

Amy held up her hand and rotated her palm. It didn’t mean anything to Broker. Amy shook her head. “I forgot, you’re drunk. My fingernails. She came by to check on me earlier this evening. She brought polish remover and new polish. She painted my fingernails red . . .”—her non-IV hand floated up—“and she put up my hair.”

Broker grinning, long-glide. Hair?

“Jolene and I don’t have a lot in common; she didn’t exactly graduate from Women’s Studies, did she? All I know is, she saved my life.”

At some point, she went away and left him alone to ponder simple things; Jolene saved Amy and he saved Jolene. And nobody saved him, this time, except himself, and that’s the way it should be.

In the morning the
morphine tide went out and Broker was beached on dry pain. Pain brought the virtue of clarity. And the scent of lilies.

When he opened his eyes she was standing looking down at him. She seemed to have grown an inch and maybe it was her posture, like she’d laid down something heavy. Maybe it was him being flat on his back.

Milt Dane stood in the doorway; floated was more like it. He wore recent events strapped to his back like a jet pack, and he tended to zoom around a few inches off the floor. A layered legal situation was taking shape in which he represented Amy, Nancy Ward, and Jolene against Allen Falken’s insurance underwriters.

Probably it was just the residual morphine, punching up the edges and textures, that made Jolene look like a page out of the kind of glossy magazine that he never read. He’d heard about Madison Avenue sneaking tiny, subliminal death heads into images of invincible beauty. But he didn’t see any grinning skulls in her green eyes.

Milt must have brought some of her clothes because she wore perfect-fitting Levi’s, a white T-shirt, and a short leather jacket. Her face glowed, baptized in glacier water and born again clean. They stared at each other for a long time and his eyes were full of questions. Her eyes brimmed, but not with answers for him.

“So what do you think?” she said.

Broker thought about it. “I think you were more implicated in what happened than Amy or myself could testify to.” Her lawyer was present. Broker didn’t really expect a reply. So he summed it up. “I’ll never know if you did the right thing or just the smart thing.”

Jolene smiled, and all Broker learned from her smile was that she was deep enough for mystery. She patted his cheek. “Hank used to say, ‘I didn’t make the world.’ Well, I didn’t make the world, either, but I’m sure as hell going to live in it the best way I can from here on out.”

She bent forward and kissed his forehead. “Another thing, be patient. I think your wife’s going to call. A smart woman doesn’t leave a guy like you loose for long.”

Probably she was right. Then she turned, and it was clear from her expression that she was busy and had places to go. When she left the room, Milt came over to Broker’s bed and gently touched his undamaged shoulder.

“You’re not such a bad guy for an ambulance chaser,” Broker said, “but the next time you want to take a canoe trip, tell you what—don’t call me.”

Milt squeezed the shoulder. “Thanks,” he said. His eyes drifted to the doorway where Jolene had disappeared. “Without you, we would have lost her.”

Broker nodded and for a moment he absorbed the low-key, leaving-on-a-jet-plane vibrations Jolene and Milt put out. Then he asked, “Hank?”

Milt looked away, shook his head.

Broker nodded again. Then he inclined his head and his eyes toward the doorway. “Like I said, watch yourself when you get in among those rocks.”

The exhausting ordeal with
the letters had ended. He’d done his best and then his mind had just turned to sand. Whatever happened now, it would happen without Allen and Earl. And without him.

Jolene had taken her first steps and would just have to take her chances. Just like he’d have to take his chances with whatever came next.

He had come full circle. Milt and Jolene tucked him in and hovered for a moment over his bed. Then, slowly, they backed away and turned out the lights.

So he waited in the dark. Beside a trail he knew it would come down.

At first it was just a color—yellow—and then, as it moved closer, it assumed the shape of a man. He understood this was merely manifestation; the way he chose to experience it.

So he made himself tidy inside and remembered the first time he’d seen it coming, calm, like this. All the other times it grazed him with a lurid action beat: shock, fear, pain, adrenaline hemorrhaging, and the brimstone reek of cordite.

It had been on a late morning when the air was the color of steaming tea. This yellow blur floating against the ferrous-red dirt and all the green God ever made. It was hot that day. The sky was the blue heart of a Bunsen burner. They were sweaty and dirty and dressed, as usual, to kill. They were sprawled along the path, taking a break next to baked, fallow fields that were cracked and choked with weeds.

And Hank and his squad were kin to the weeds: poisonous, itchy, and bristling with stickers. They had all gotten so dirty they would never be clean again. And then they saw the yellow come floating, a man in saffron robes and bare feet.

Gook in the open.

Reflex rifles came up, the solitary figure filled a few peep sights.

Hey, man, check this dude out, someone yelled, the way he walks.

It’s cool. Just one of those monks, walking.

The peeps moved off.

And he came on with his shaved head and his bare feet and his saffron robe swaying and his sturdy brown arms swinging. A man who moved like a clean, upright flame. His clear brown eyes focused right through and beyond them, like they were mud from somewhere else that had gotten out of control and had acquired guns and airline tickets to his country. And Hank had remembered absolutely recognizing how this guy knew exactly what he was doing. He was walking one hundred percent present in the moment and every one of them watching were wishing like hell they were someplace else.

Absolutely perfect goddamn walking.

Just look at the way he placed his foot in the dust, the way his heel came down and then his instep, and the ball and then the toes. This guy could teach the world to walk.

They’d watched him come on, one step at a time, and by the time he passed them they were all up on their mud feet.

Eyes right.

Hank was a grown man the day he learned to walk. And he never forgot the presence of that moment and how it had a one-pointed heft and carry to it; simple, like a country song about a hanging in the morning.