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  “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 Broker 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 peer-review 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 Nutcracker. 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 noth
ing 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 expressively. “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 fragrance 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 cross-country 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 back of his knuckles. Pretty girl. Broker shook his head and felt it all drop on him. What had happened to Hank Sommer was worse than death. The problem with having a highly developed code of duty was the flip side—the shame when you screwed up.

  Had Amy screwed up? Had he?

  He had to shake these doldrums. Write it off to lingering shock and the unaccustomed booze. He took two steps back and lowered himself into a chair because the bed was too far away right now. No, that wasn’t it. The bed had become fearful.

  He could shut his eyes. But would he ever open them again?

  He watched Amy’s chest rise and fall peacefully, which caused him to yawn. To fight off the lethargy he sat bolt upright and reached for the small writing table next to the chair and clamped his hands on to the edge.

  He held on so tight his fingertips blanched white, because he had to stay awake, because the sleep he now imagined was bottomless, laced with black bubbles, like his look down into the glacier water. Because he’d never take sleep for granted again.

  But his eyelids pressed down and the bubble of his willpower burst, and sleep opened its arms and waited with the patience of gravity. He finally slumped forward through the ether of an alcoholic dream and pitched toward the floor in a slow-motion fall, but the floor had turned to transparent glass beneath his feet and he crashed through, down into the private catacombs where he walled off his dead. And he saw Hank Sommer’s long, quiet body in its own private room and Hank’s sightless eyes startled open and looked up.

  And a whole heap of bodies stood up in a forgotten place called Quang Tri City. They were schoolboys from Hanoi and farm boys from the provinces and they formed a circle and he saw that their hair and fingernails had grown long since 1972.

  Nimble as spiders, they swept in to get him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Nina Pryce.

  If ever a name destroyed sleep. He lurched up, ducked, and discovered he was in bed wearing nothing but his shorts. How’d he . . .

  Amy Skoda appeared next to his bed smiling, with her eyes mostly clear and her hair in place. She held a coffee cup out to him and he saw the room-service tray with a coffee carafe on the bureau next to the TV.

  “Actually I know more about you than I let on last night. I know you married Nina Pryce,” she said.

  Broker studied the T-shirt she wore, which he’d last seen folded in his duffel. The black one with new orleans spelled out in white alligator bones. Below the hem, lamplight glossed the blond fuzz on her thighs.

  She cleared her throat and handed him the coffee. “After Desert Storm, Nina had a small following. Not quite Mia Hamm, but loyal. I almost went into the army because of her.”

  Broker grimaced slightly at the subject of his wife. Amazon-Dot-Kill: she had achieved a certain female-so
ldier notoriety in the Gulf. He took the cup and sipped. The coffee helped his hangover, which was less overt pain than a massive energy drain. “So why didn’t you?” he asked.

  “Hey, I’m out there but I’m not that cutting-edge. Nina wants to fight next to the men.”

  The words were rote and spun from his mouth. “She didn’t just fight next to the men in the desert. She led a company of them against three times their number of Republican Guards and she won. It sort of alienated the patriarchy.” He cleared his throat. “That, and the fact that she wouldn’t suck titty with the Witch Hook Feminists. She caught it from both ends and they ran her out of the army.”

  “But she got back in. She’s in Bosnia.”

  Macedonia, actually. Probably Kosovo. He didn’t know exactly. The unit she was in now, Delta, didn’t officially exist. “Clinton stuck his nose in,” Broker said, employing the name like an all-purpose subject, verb, and object. He waved the subject away. “I, ah, don’t remember getting in bed.”

  Amy shrugged. “I got up to pee and found you passed out on the floor. So I tucked you in.”

  “You picked me up?”

  “You’re big but you’re not that big.”

  Broker found her style distressingly familiar.

  “I took your pants off, too. Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not pregnant and your virginity is intact.”

  He let that one slide, too, and just stared at her. “You don’t look hungover.”

  “Oh, I’m hungover; I just don’t whine about it.”

  He couldn’t win, so he knuckled his frizzed hair, gathered the sheet toga-fashion around his waist, grabbed his jeans, and went into the bathroom. When he emerged, shaved, showered, and dressed, she had changed back into her rumpled hospital duds.

  “Thanks for collecting me last night,” she said frankly. “I would have tried to walk to my car and wound up in a snowbank.”

  He nodded and opted for brevity. “Bad night.”

  “Do you want to know the kicker?” She flung open the curtains and Broker winced at the roar of sunlight and the cloudless blue sky. Lake Shagawa twinkled placid as a millpond. Then she said quietly, “I called in. They’re flying him down to the Cities in half an hour. Thought you might want to say good-bye.”