Absolute Zero (7 page)

As they retreated back toward the garage, Broker watched Brecht, Amy, and the nurse shove the gurney toward the open elevator. Allen walked last, his hands held high, poised. Amy bent over Sommer, worked his jaw between her hands, opened his mouth, and looked into his throat. “Oh shit, this guy’s got an airway from hell,” she said merrily.

“But you can intubate him?” Allen asked.

“I can intubate him anywhere, anytime,” she shot back, a little cocky, a little high on the action.

The elevator doors closed behind them.

Milt lay in the ER
room cubbyhole draped in a floral-patterned hospital smock with an IV in his arm and an ice pack on his swollen right shoulder.

“That smock had to be recycled from Martha Washington’s drapes,” Broker said. He was feeling good. Tired as hell but good.

“Oh
please
,” Shari groaned. Then she bent over Milt and said, “You probably tore a muscle and went into spasm in the plane.”

“I’d rather break a bone than tear a muscle,” Milt said as his eyelids fluttered and he struggled to stay awake.

“I hear you,” Shari said.

“Hank?” Milt asked, drifting.

“Allen is operating,” Broker said.

“For the report, what happened out there?” Iker asked.

Milt twitched, a modified shrug. “Straight-line winds dropped on us. Worst water I’ve seen on a lake. Hank had a hernia and he paddled his ass off. That’s when he blew his gut. He and Broker swamped. Broker pulled him out.” His eyes rolled toward Broker. “Guess he got his adventure to write about,” Milt said, smiling weakly.

A lean woman in a blue smock and trousers came up silently in tennis shoes. She wound her dark ponytail into a hair net and pulled on latex gloves.

“Some day, eh, Nancy?” Shari said.

The nurse raised her brows, which emphasized the circles of fatigue under her eyes. “I worked all night watching two wards, now I still got them plus recovery when they bring that guy up.”

They chatted quickly, then the nurse syringed a dose of pain reliever into Milt’s IV, pointed to the puddle of water on the floor, and politely waved them off.

Broker and Iker followed Shari back into the empty garage. Sam and the Tahoe were gone. It was a busy afternoon.

Shari opened a locker, threw them towels, and turned her back. While they stripped and dried off, she rummaged around, clucking, obviously enjoying the fact that the two sweatshirts she heaved back to them were decorated with really hideous logos. Mismatched sweatpants followed.

While Shari made appropriately disparaging remarks, they put on the dry clothes and blue slippers. They went back into the hospital and padded down a corridor walled with floor-to-ceiling plate glass that churned, aquarium-like, with silent snow.

“Worse than the Halloween storm in ninety-one,” Iker said. Broker, too tired to comment, plodded on to the staff lounge and flopped on a couch. In less than a minute he was chin on chest in a deep nod. He came up from the nod and heard Iker ask Shari what was going on downstairs in the operating room.

Shari pointed to her stomach and drew her finger down to her crotch. “They cut him open and lift out his intestines. Then they snip out the perforated section and sew it back together. After that they wash out his stomach cavity real good. They have to repair the hernia, but because of the presence of infection, they won’t use a patch, so they stitch him up the old-fashion way.”

“Ouch,” Iker said.

Broker didn’t hear the rest of the conversation because he was fast asleep.

“Hey, Broker, wake up, man.”

“Wha . . . ?” Broker lurched forward and checked his watch. It was just past noon. He blinked and saw Iker’s square, smiling face.

“They’re done. They’re bringing him up to the recovery room.”

They turned through the halls, entered the ER corridor, and Broker could almost feel the sunbeams peeking around the corner. The only person not smiling was Hank Sommer, who was sprawled out on a gurney, trussed in his own ugly floral gown. The agony that had gripped his face for twenty-four hours had melted away. With his mouth open in a long yawn he looked—if not peaceful—certainly burned-out stoned.

Directly over Sommer, Amy, the gray-eyed nurse-anesthetist, pulled off her bonnet in a triumphal gesture, shook out shoulder-length hair, and pushed the gurney. Nancy, the busy nurse, with her hair coiled in a net, hauled the other end. They steered the bed into a small room and detoured around a tall cart on casters that looked like a Craftsman tool chest with red drawers, and parked him next to the wall.

“What’s the crash cart doing here?” Amy asked.

“Mike wanted it prepositioned.”

Amy rolled her eyes and nodded at a trayful of tiny drug bottles and syringes positioned on the bed between Sommer’s feet. “I hear you, he wants all my stuff ready, too.” Then they switched Sommer from a mobile monitor to the bigger monitor bolted to the wall. The wired beep beep beep of his pulse, blood pressure, and oxygenation graphed steadily across the video screen.

Allen shuffled down the hall flanked by Brecht and Judy, the nurse who’d helped unload the Tahoe. They all wore blue tunics, trousers, blue booties over their shoes, and blue bonnets. Like rakish ascots, blue masks hung loose at their throats.

To Broker they seemed to move with the quiet swagger as would a blue-uniformed bomber crew who had just pulled off a dicey mission. And there was no doubt who the pilot was. Allen’s throat and a wedge of chest showed through the V-neck of his scrub blouse, and a spatter of Sommer’s blood dotted the hem. His strong hands swung at his sides as he took his victory lap along the surgeon track, that fine line between the kill floor and The Resurrection.

Broker added his grin to the wave of admiration.

Allen pulled off his bonnet and ran a hand through his matted hair. The corners of his lips dimpled up and, in a grateful gesture, he held up his right palm to shoulder level and high-fived Broker.

“So he’s all right?” Broker asked.

Allen nodded and showed even teeth in a tired grin. “Hey. He lucked out. He had a good surgeon.” More seriously, he said, “We caught it in time. He should be fine. Fine,” he repeated, and scuffed his feet and tripped off balance, and Broker noticed that as he moved farther away from the OR, he seemed to diminish in stature. To physically shrink.

Broker reached out to steady him and Allen blinked, then squinted as his eyelids trembled. “I’m all in,” he said. “Pooped.”

“I hear you,” Broker said, craning his neck to see into the small recovery room.

“Let the anesthetist make sure Sommer’s all the way awake and stabilized. A few minutes,” Allen said.

A congratulatory huddle formed in the corridor—Iker, Shari, Broker, Brecht, and Mike, the very comforted-looking administrator. After a moment, Broker stepped away and poked his head into the recovery room and listened to the medical chat.

“He’s breathing well, sats good, rhythm stable,” Nancy said.

“Okay,” Amy said as she scanned the monitors. “Let’s rouse him, get him to raise his head, squeeze a finger, swallow.” Amy leaned over Sommer. “And wait for the eyelids, the littlest muscles are always the last to come back. Who’s got the Narc keys?”

“Got them right here. I’ve got everything today.”

“Get twenty-five milligrams of Demerol and give it IV.”

Nancy went to a closet next to the oxygen outlet, opened the locked door, and went in. Amy moved the tray from the foot of Sommer’s bed, looked around, and then placed it on a corner of the crash cart. Nancy returned with a slender syringe.

“Wait a sec. Let me get him talking,” Amy said, propping her elbow next to Sommer’s head. She leaned down and dangled her index finger in the loose fingers of his right hand. “Can you blink? Can you squeeze my finger?” she asked.

Sommer’s eyes swam around, fluttered. He pressed her finger and tried to move.

“Take it easy,” Amy said, patting his arm. “You’ve got a few stitches in your abdomen.”

Sommer pursed dry lips. “ ’peration.”

“That’s right. You’ve had an emergency operation that went just fine and now you’re in the recovery room.”

He blinked, focused, blinked again. “High,” he said slowly.

“Hello, yourself.”

“No. Stone . . .” He took a breath, wheezed. “Grog . . .”

“Yep. We gave you something. We’re about to give you some more of the good stuff.”

“Hi,” Sommer said.

“Right, you’re stoned, huh,” she said.

Sommer raised his head and attempted to look around. “No,” he said more distinctly. “Hello.” He studied her. “You’re pretty,” he said in a halting voice. Then he squinted at the badge on the front of her blue tunic that read: amy skoda, crna. “You’re pretty, Amy,” he said, a little surer.

Amy executed a modified curtsey and said, “Thank you, and you’re lucky to be alive.”

Sommer blinked, the electric beep speeded up, and his voice sank. “Where?” he struggled to raise his up on elbows. Fell back.

“It’s all right,” Amy reassured him. “You’re in a hospital.”

His eyes turned to dark tunnels, remembering. “Storm.”

Amy nodded. “Mister, you’ve had quite an adventure.”

“Others?” he whispered, almost inaudible.

That’s when Amy saw Broker edging through the door. She backed away from the bed, signaling to Nancy, hooking two fingers, squeezing her thumb in a squirting gesture. Nancy injected the Demerol into Sommer’s IV, then discarded the used syringe in the Sharpes Box.

“Sorry, Mr. Broker, if observers are a hindrance, they will be removed,” Amy announced as she put her palms on Broker’s chest and backed him out into the hall. Then her stern expression relaxed into a smile. “Let him rest a few more minutes.” Her hands lingered a beat longer than necessary and then she poked the logo on Broker’s garish yellow sweatshirt with a straight finger. “Oh my,” she said. A crawly drawing of a plump wood tick with a grinning cartoon-bug face bannered the shirt, with the caption:

Natural Wood Ticklers.
Sexual Aids & Muskie Lures.
Camp’s Bait Shop
Hayward, Wisconsin.

“If I didn’t have a sense of humor, that might offend me,” she said, maintaining direct eye contact.

Broker, never good at small talk—and wondering how she knew his name—asked, “Do I know you?”

Her face went from warmly inviting to snappy attention as her eyes shifted past Broker. “Dr. Falken.”

Allen, gray with fatigue, shambled up and gestured with an upturned palm. “How’s he doing?”

“He’s out of the woods,” Amy said with a straight face. “Vitals are normal. He roused, raised his head, squeezed my finger, swallowed, and told me I was pretty.”

“Are you treating for pain?”

“Nancy gave him twenty-five milligrams of Demerol. I’m going to get him something cool for his throat.”

Amy breezed past and Broker watched her model the possibilities of baggy blue trousers as she walked down the hall. “She’s pleased with herself,” he said.

“Yes, nice, ah, glutes. Nordic skiing, diagonal stride, would be my guess,” Allen yawned. He blinked and continued in a more serious voice, “She was extra careful extubating him and bringing him out of anesthesia. He has a tricky throat to work in. She’s as good as or better than anyone I’ve worked with in Level One, so she’s earned some strutting rights.” As an afterthought, he said, “She’s wasted on this place.”

Then he patted Broker on the shoulder and drifted back down the hall and sat heavily on a folding chair. At the other end of the corridor Amy Skoda stopped to chat with Iker. They both looked up at Broker at the same time, and Amy batted her eyelashes, then lowered her gaze, walked away from Iker, and turned out of sight down the hall.

Then Broker nodded out on his feet and came back when he started to lose his balance. Dead-tired, he saw some movement. Iker and Shari started toward the dispatch room across from the ER cubbyhole and the yells started.

“Heads up, gang! We got another one!”

“What now?”

“No problem, relax, a broken arm, lacerations,” called Brecht. “A drunk tried to drive a snowmobile through a birch tree. Thing is, that Tahoe they’re using as an ambulance got stuck on the street, so we’re going to have to manhandle the stretcher in.”

Broker went to the garage, slipped back into his wet boots, and went to the street in front of the hospital, where deputy Sam had mired the Tahoe in a drift. Amid much yelling, they hauled another man lashed to a Stokes stretcher into the garage. Lumps of frozen blood the size of jelly beans stuck to the new patient’s face and he smelled of alcohol and gasoline. A bloody pressure bandage was wrapped on his head.

Tracking snow, they stomped in through the garage and transferred the guy to a treatment table in the vacant emergency cubbyhole. Milt had been moved deeper into the building.

“This one’s mine,” Brecht said and he commenced the call for tests and service. Amy appeared at Broker’s side, handed him a Dixie cup full of chipped ice, and said, “Hold this a sec.” Up close, in addition to the gray eyes, she had long lashes. And she smelled good. Neither medicinal nor cosmetic.

But clean. And just so . . .
there
.

Broker kicked off his snowy boots and put his dry slippers back on as Amy joined the ER doc and bantered for a moment. Then she broke away and returned down the hall. “No big deal, a broken leg,” she said, taking back her Dixie cup.

Whoa!

Broker came up sharp on the balls of his feet, his eyes darted. Heard something . . .

“You all right?” Amy asked.

Broker held up his hand.
Stop. Listen
. He stared at the skinny nurse with the black ponytail, who had been watching Sommer and had been out into the snow briefly to help with the new arrival. She was now hurrying up the hall toward the recovery room.

Broker, who could hear his daughter cough across a crowded auditorium, detected it through the medical chatter. Cued by his hard eyes, Amy and the other nurse caught it one beat later. Allen, sitting zombielike in the corridor, lurched up in his chair, raised his head, and turned.

The once rhythmic beep-beep-beep of Sommer’s monitor was improvising in a minor key.

Booop . . . booop . . . booop . . .

“Oh fuck!” The color drained from Amy’s face and the Dixie cup went flying and ice chips skittered over the waxed linoleum floor as she sprinted down the hall.