Absolute Zero (2002) Read online

  "Means I know both of you. I'll just finish my drink and go sleep on a desk, thank you." He tipped a finger to his forehead at Amy, grabbed Broker by the elbow, and steered him across the room and out the front door. He did not stop to finish his drink.

  No wind now. Just the big quiet and the big snowflakes drifting down like tiny parachutes.

  Iker took a stance and eased back his coat so Broker could see the cuffs and the clip-on-hide-out holster on his belt from which protruded the patterned grip of a stubby Colt Python. Dave Iker stood six one, weighed 205, and was no slouch in the physical department, and right now he looked slightly dangerous, like he was working.

  "Okay. It's like this. She's a little vulnerable right now." Iker's voice was reasonable, but his cop body language said, watch the fuck out here. "I know her family. She's been a perfectionist since she was a kid, so she's going to take this thing pretty hard."

  Jesus. "What . . . ?"

  "Hey look, age-wise, she's still a kid compared to you. And she knows your marriage is on the rocks. And just maybe she's got a little thing for you. And you're not helping matters playing twentyfive-year-old cowboy coming to the fucking rescue . . . so go easy and don't take advantage . . ."

  "I wouldn't . . ." Broker protested.

  "I know you wouldn't. Just don't. And another thing. I don't know what the story is between you and your old lady but don't take it out on drunks. Not in my town. The body slam on that lush was unnecessary. That was excessive force. Jesus, Phil, you know better. The lone wolf UC days are over. You're a goddamn civilian . . ."

  Iker was working. Broker was being warned. He stepped back, chastised. "Hey, Jesus, Dave . . ."

  "Just . . ." Iker gave him a tight cop smile that really was no smile at all and made a pressing down "cool it" gesture with his open hands. He shook his head. "Look. It's been a bad day. Let's not have a bad night." He punched Broker on the arm. Hard. "So, you okay?"

  "Yeah, sure." Broker was replaying the shock and fear on the

  snowmobiler's face when he plowed into him, and seeing Amy, stepping in, with the pained look in her eyes.

  "Drop my truck at the office in the morning," Iker said as he turned and walked to a county cruiser. Broker waved vaguely, and he was thinking how none of this was supposed to happen. He came here to hide and wait out his . . . problem. Now there was all this

  stuff.

  Shivering, he stood alone on the street and watched Iker's taillights disappear around a corner. Then he went back into the bar, returned to Amy's table, and the words came out before he got them lined up right. "Look, I'm sorry, going off on that guy. I just have a lot on my mind."

  "Oh you do, do you," she said making her eyes a little wider.

  "Well, I guess you do, too. Can I sit down?"

  "Sure, as long as you understand I don't need any more of that kind of help." The gray eyes, though dipped in alcohol, still cut.

  Broker nodded and pulled up a chair while Amy flagged the bartender and held up two fingers. The waitress, eyes lowered, brought the two glasses on a small round tray, put them down, made change, and retreated.

  "They know," Amy whispered, looking after the waitress. "This is a small town. Everybody knows about Sommer."

  Broker rotated the double shot in his fingers and raised his eyebrows. "Do you always drink like this?"

  "I never drink. It's a filthy depressant. Cheers."

  He drank and the two burning ounces seared through the roof of his mouth and up his sinuses.

  "Now take off. I really don't need any help," she said, squaring her shoulders, sitting up straighter. A gesture that wasn't supposed to be taken seriously.

  "Yes, you do," Broker said and he figured she'd been the bright, sharp tack all her life and maybe sometimes she got ahead of herself.

  "I do?"

  "Yeah, we're linked," Broker said. "You left your post to come out in the hall and chat me up, remember."

  Amy shook her head and her hand floated up and touched her hair. "Nancy was with him."

  "She left her post to get the new patient. Who was in charge?"

  She met his eyes on the level from behind her fort of shot glasses, and he could find no excuses in her defiant gaze. She did not impress him as someone prone to making fatal mistakes, and her choice of occupations was an alert exercise in avoiding exactly such an outcome. "No, that's too simple. Something else happened," she said firmly.

  "Something?" he asked.

  "Look, you should probably leave me alone."

  "Sorry."

  "What? Are you one of these guys who finds tragedy a turn on?" Amy asked.

  "Takes one to know one, huh?"

  "I guess." Amy looked away and her profile, big-eyed and cleanly featured in a tumble of bright hair, contrasted with the dull residue of the snowmobiler's blood on the wall behind her chair.

  "You're one of his friends," she said.

  "No. I rented them the gear and went along to help around camp. I paddled out to get help."

  She turned full-face to him, lowered the gray eyes, and raised them slowly, which felt good to an old, married, recently deserted guy who was getting drunk. "You don't look like a canoe guide," she said.

  So it begins. He thought to play his part, so he inclined his head to go along. Huh? What? Me? But he remembered Iker's warning.

  A little clumsy now, Amy said, "You have more . . . range." Her hand drifted out and her cool right index finger floated over the pale stripe on his ring finger. "You, ah, forgot your wedding ring."

  "Separated," he said, not sure if it was the right word. There wasn't a word for people in his situation. Fucked, maybe.

  She started to say something, stopped, and let the calm finger touch a hollow of bone and tendon above the joint of thumb. "Nice veins," she said.

  They paused to look off in different directions while the waitress came to their table, stooped with a small bucket of hot water and disinfectant, and scrubbed the dots of Arctic Cat's blood from the wall and the floor.

  When the waitress left they resumed looking at each other and it was clear there was no trivial human clutter between them, and Bro

  ker stood on a high board feeling his breath, and he could see it all play out in easy, sexy stages. But it was a game and he didn't play games with women.

  "C'mon, cut the crap. Iker told me you were asking about me," Broker said.

  She slumped. "Figures, you used to be a cop. You guys stick together." She looked around, furtively.

  "What?"

  "This isn't smart, you and me having this conversation. I shouldn't talk about . . . things. That lawyer on the trip with you . . ."

  "Milt."

  "Yeah, I heard Milt is already asking questions half zoned on Percodan." She took a deep breath, let it out. "There's this peerreview process and there'll be a root-cause analysis session."

  "An in-house investigation?"

  Amy shook her head. "It's not . . . legal—of course Milt would love to hear what's said—but it's confidential, protected from discovery. It's more like this forum for medics to talk through an event and find out what went wrong without fear of punishment."

  "So you think there'll be a lawsuit?"

  She snorted. "C'mon, of course there'll be a lawsuit, and I'll wind up taking the heat. It's the logical finding. The anesthetist screwed up somewhere. But it's not like I intubated an esophagus. I'm not going to lose my license."

  She stared mute as the alcohol shut down a whole layer of her facial muscles. With a numb smile she continued, "If you got rid of doctors and nurses every time they made a mistake and croaked somebody in postop, you'd have to close half the hospitals . . ."

  Through the veil of booze, Broker tried to listen patiently and get a feel for the person behind the bitter words. Amy was indignant and pissed more than guilty or sad. But he lost his concentration, except to fixate on physical details like the way a sturdy purple vein on her throat throbbed and her habit of making little water circles on the
table with the bottom of a glass and then erasing them with her finger.

  "It really cracks me up," she was saying. "Remember those guys who got killed in Somalia, that mob dragged them around on TV? You remember that?"

  Broker nodded.

  "How many was that they killed?"

  "I think it was eighteen dead," said Broker, the reader of history.

  "And it freaked everybody out. Now we just drop bombs and don't use ground troops . . ."

  She lost her place and Broker did, too. Then she leaned forward and wrinkled her forehead.

  "How many people do you think die as a result of accidents and negligence in hospitals every year—take a guess?"

  "I don't know, Amy."

  "Depending whose numbers you pick—how about between sixty and ninety thousand. That's every year. Funny isn't it, how we set priorities. Eighteen soldiers die doing their job. It gets on TV and it changes the foreign policy of a country. And we tolerate those kinds of numbers in the health-care system. Hell, we killed more people this year than the fucking army did."

  "Amy, I think you're being a little hard on yourself."

  She obliterated water rings with the heel of her fist. "You want to see real nightmares, check out an emergency room in the Cities on a Saturday night."

  "Saturday nights and summer full moons," he agreed.

  Amy sat back, peered into an empty shot glass. "Amen. Emergency room nurse, Hennepin County Medical Center, three years before I went to anesthesia school."

  "The kind of nurse who dated cops?"

  "Oh, yeah." Her eyes conjured up 5 A.M. in Minneapolis at the end of the graveyard shift. Empty streets. Everything closed. "And I'd come home alone, sad, on the holidays and my mom would suggest I take up some activities, you know, get back into piano. Or dancing . . ."

  Amy stretched and slowly leaned her head to the side, which was neat because of the way her hair cascaded slowly, strand by strand.

  ". . . Mom was always big on lessons. Ballet almost destroyed my ankles. Every year before high school I had to face The Nut

  cracker. Now there's an aptly named show. I was a mouse and worked up to an angel." Her brief smile nicely illuminated a happy childhood. "Mom wanted me to be the Sugar Plum Fairy." She shrugged. "And my dad—he'd look down the table kind of owly over the turkey and say, 'Can't you find a nice boy?' "

  Amy composed herself and recited. "The reason I know Dave

  Iker is because my dad used to bring him home for coffee when

  Dave was an itty, bitty deputy and my dad was a sergeant. Stan

  Skoda went from the CCC Camps to North Africa, to Sicily, to Italy.

  He came home and worked in the mines. When the mines closed he

  became a cop." She sighed and raised her eyes. "Jesus Christ,

  Daddy—the nice boys all want to fix my computer."

  She plucked a long strand of hair, let it fall, and blew it away. "Any rate, Daddy would say, Get past the excitement and find

  something that works." She drew her wrist across her cheek and

  trapped the single tear she'd shed. "Is that what you had, Broker?

  Something that worked?" "You're drunk," Broker said. "Sorry, I never killed anybody before. I'll do better next time." "You're saying you did it? Premature extubation, whatever?"

  Her eyes came to points through the booze. "No way. I was

  strictly by the book. Something like this is usually a system failure." "What? A machine malfunctioned?" "No, a human system. A procedure broke down." "So it just happened?" Broker asked. "Shit happens on bumper stickers—but nothing just happens in

  a recovery room. Somebody fucked up and it wasn't me."

  With that said, Amy lurched to her feet and promptly lost her

  balance. Broker was up, none too steady himself, and caught her,

  and her hair and lips buzzed his cheek as her full, warm weight

  sagged in his arms. "Your lucky night," she whispered as her eyes rolled up expres

  sively. "Ever get puked on by a pretty woman?"

  Broker dragged her toward the ladies' room.

  He was mindful of Iker's stern advice but where would she go in her

  condition? Where was her car? Where did she live? He just couldn't

  leave her and, to his current inebriated way of thinking, they were

  linked. Tied in a black crepe bow by Hank Sommer.

  So he drove home drunk for the first time in more than twenty

  years with an unconscious woman passed out in the passenger seat.

  Tonight, home was the overbuilt Holiday Inn out on the lake.

  He made it to the parking lot without incident and put the truck in neutral to sit awhile and balk at the complex intersection of his pragmatism, his innate puritanism, and his sudden need not to be alone tonight. How was he going to get her past the receptionist? She was dead weight. He'd have to sneak her in.

  So he drove to the end of the lot, parked, went around to the passenger side, and eased her out and slung her over his shoulders in a rescue hold. His knees faltered, then steadied. Judging by her solid muscle tone, she'd drunk all her milk growing up and did her exercises, too. With her thigh warm under his biceps he lurched off, around the back of the motel.

  His room was on the bottom level, with French doors opening on a patio overlooking the lake. But he'd forgotten the number and, pawing one-handed in his pocket and balancing Amy on his shoulder, he discovered he'd lost the card key envelope with the number on it and he wasn't sure the card opened the patio door anyway.

  So he lowered Amy carefully into a plastic lawn chair and dragged up another chair to position her feet so she wouldn't fall over. Wisps of snow began to stick to her face and hair.

  Only be a minute, he promised.

  Huffing, he jogged around the building and into the lobby where the receptionist gave him his room number. Floating through the lobby, he felt like a helium-filled balloon in a parade, but he made it down the stairs and found his room and struggled with the key card and, finally, he was in.

  Amy.

  He threw back the curtains, opened the patio door, and stepped outside. She was still slumped in the chairs twenty yards away, with a faint beard of snowflakes on her cheeks. Quickly, he carried her into the room, plopped her on the first double bed, and dusted the snow from her hair and her face. He removed her parka and boots to make her comfortable. That's when he saw the blood, a rusty stipple on the front of her tunic and down the hip of her pants.

  Sommer's blood was following him.

  He didn't like the idea of her sleeping like that, in Sommer's blood. Awkwardly, he positioned her arms above her head and worked with her tunic, easing it up and seeing, feeling, the warm heft of her upper body and smelling the faint shadow of the fra

  grance of her underarm. The back of his hands grazed the taut straps and the full ivory cups and he saw the single fold across her smooth stomach.

  Next he peeled off the socks, then the baggy blue pants, and she had long, well-muscled legs and maybe Allen was right, a crosscountry skier, and she had tomboy scars on her chiseled knees and red polish on her toenails. Just his luck to find another Title Nine Lioness.

  Broker took the outfit to the bathroom, ran cold water, and tried to scrub out the blood with a washcloth and face soap, but it wasn't going to happen. So he rinsed the clothes, wrung them out, and hung them on the shower rail.

  He went back to the bed, blinked at the baby-blue panties stretched between her defined hip bones, and raised his eyes to the bra, and that presented a dilemma.

  His wife—he was careful not to think her name because the phonics might cast or break a spell—his wife—well, she had smaller breasts, for one thing. And the stretch marks ironed on her stomach. Yes. But what he was getting at was, she never slept in her bra. He was almost certain of that.

  He studied the garment, which was nothing flashy. A sensible Maidenform. He eased up her shoulder. Just the two eyelets in the back. Now. He'd
placed her on the first bed coming in from the patio which put the other bed between her and the bathroom. And he'd be in that bed if he didn't move her. So. First he had to transfer her to the bed closer to the john. That way she wouldn't have to deal with going past him in the dark, which might make her uncomfortable waking up in the middle of the night in a strange room.

  It was different picking her up with most of her clothes off; the sheer abundance and scent of her hair and her flesh and the carnal breath of alcohol combined to make him dizzy. Especially the smooth, warm way she slid in his arms. Carefully, he hoisted her to the second bed, turned down the covers, and eased her between the sheets. Then he raised the shoulder and unsnapped the bra to reduce the constraint. He did not remove it. Leaving her privacy intact, sort of. He tucked the covers up to her throat.

  He gently reached down and pulled a strand of hair across her lips and cheek and went back and touched her cheek again with the