Absolute Zero Page 24

  Probably.

  And as he turned into the driveway and snaked between the old pine trees he thought how this wasn’t for Sommer anymore, was it?

  This was for him.

  He looked around. No sign of Earl’s van. It could be in the garage. Broker didn’t care. Bring him on.

  Before he got out, he saw her silhouette framed in a rectangle of light in the open doorway with a hip against the jam in the oldest posture in the world.

  And as he came up the steps, still not able to see her face, just her shape, he wondered who she was and would he ever find out. And it wasn’t like adultery because he was separated and she was basically a widow, and like Amy said, she just observed a shorter decent interval than most people. And apparently, tonight, so did he.

  “So,” she said. No perfume. No candles, no wine, no fire in the fireplace. She looked careworn in a pair of old jeans and a faded green blouse, and her short hair was frazzled and her green eyes were beyond weary. Just—so, here we are.

  Fast through the darkened house, wordless down the stairs into the bedroom. Broker looked once at the closed door to Sommer’s studio, then he winced at the baby monitor on the bedside table. The deep, distant sound of Hank Sommer’s breathing rose and fell like surf.

  “He’s asleep,” she said as she reached over and turned the volume down on the monitor.

  “Earl?”

  “Off brooding. Probably plotting against you. I don’t expect him back until late tonight, if at all,” and she turned off the light. And it was just her shape again, defined by a night-light. Like in the doorway.

  When he reached for her she pulled back long enough to look seriously in his eyes and say, “Just never lie to me, okay?”

  It was the only pause before they got at each other.

  * * *

  “I’m starting to think sex is like a shakedown cruise. It’s how you really get to know somebody,” Jolene said to the darkened ceiling when her breathing returned to normal.

  “I never thought of it like that,” Broker said. He was surprised at how tentative their physical introduction had been. He’d come at this thinking it would be impulsive, like feeding time at the tiger house. Everybody definitely getting their whiskers wet. Yet, while the lovemaking was carnal, the intimacy was chaste. She had been fragile, almost like she was holding her breath the whole time. Now she looked vulnerable and double-naked in the faint light. Dutifully, she’d turned the volume back up on the monitor, and now Hank’s sleeping breath haunted the dark room.

  And Broker was thinking how when you’re young and in bed with a new woman it was an occasion for ego and vanity and it was all surface sensation. Because when you’re young, basically, all you own is your body.

  But when you grew older and had been knocked around in a couple marriages, it went deeper than your skin. Now he felt like a trespasser in someone else’s life. And he’d taken a flyer on impulse and overlooked precautions. He was very aware it wasn’t his bed. Broker looked around to make sure he knew where the exits were.

  Jolene sat up and hugged the sheets around her. “I used to think sex was about people possessing each other. I’d get jealous. I needed a lot of reassurance.” She smiled a wry smile and touched the hair on his chest. “Of course, I was drinking then.”

  “It’s okay,” Broker said, and immediately he regretted the words because they were the same tone and weight of feeling he used with his little daughter when she suffered a minor hurt. “I mean . . .” he started to say.

  “Shhh,” she stilled him with a cool finger to his lips. “It’s not okay. When you’re dependent, you do things. Things . . .” She shook her head and her eyes swam up, conjuring. Quickly, she masked the brightness in her gaze with a raw expression. “I worked as a dancer in this scummy joint once. I took it all off and stuck it in their faces. And they’d tuck dollar bills in my . . .” She grimaced, looked away. “Dollar bills. You’d think I would have held out for fifties or at least twenties.”

  “Jolene.” Broker sat up, simultaneously feeling an urge to hold her and to run. Like a lot of things lately, this was not turning out the way he’d pictured it.

  She grinned at him and it was the kind of grin that would be cruel if it wasn’t on a wild animal that didn’t know better. “Sobriety changes you, all right,” With a faint curl to her lip, she said, “I used to have a pussy. Now I have a vagina.” She raised an eyebrow. “That’s progress.”

  “Take it easy,” Broker said.

  “You take it easy,” she shot back, coming up off the sheets, suddenly sharp and brittle. “You’re only the second guy in my life I’ve ever been in bed with sober. You got that?”

  In the awkward silence that followed they both pulled away a little and covered themselves with the sheets. Broker had the distinct impression they were both wishing they could smoke a cigarette. She was the first to break the silence, speaking to the ceiling.

  “Earl’s waiting for me to give it up, start drinking and crawl back to him. Christ, Allen; he’s like a little kid waiting for a cookie. You—you’re not so easy to figure,” she said.

  “What’s hard to figure?”

  Jolene turned on her side, propped herself on an elbow, and her hand unconsciously explored the missing waves and volume of her shorn hair. She said, “How many guys show up to return a car and wind up in bed with the lady of the house in two days?”

  The lady of the house. So that’s who she was.

  Broker sat up in full-blown character and scratched his chest. “You mean guys who go to work and do what their asshole bosses tell them to do, who drive the speed limit, who watch their wives get fat, and who sneak dirty movies and beat their meat?” He cocked his head at her, reached out, and gently tapped her lips with his index finger. “You opened the door, not me.”

  She brushed the remark aside. “The thing about you is no flaws, no character defects. You’ve never really been weak or sick, have you?” She sat up and the sheet fell away from her breasts and, like Allen had predicted, they were perfect 36 Cs that stayed tucked and pointed on their own. “Can we cut the bullshit?” she said.

  “I’m all for that.”

  “You spent time inside, right?”

  “C’mon, I spent twenty-three days in Stillwater; I was barely through with orientation when my lawyer got my conviction thrown out.”

  “Technicality?”

  “Hell, no. The cops got a snitch to lie.”

  “And?”

  “Some people I know got him to tell a different lie. What’s the big deal? It was a long time ago. And that’s not who I am anymore,” he said emphatically.

  “But you did things.”

  “Did things?” Broker frowned. “What is this? You’ll show me yours if I’ll show you mine?”

  “We already did that. You did things,” she repeated.

  “I did things,” he affirmed.

  “What things?”

  “Look, Jolene. Some people, when they’re young, they don’t go in for nine-to-five, you understand?”

  She squinted at him. “Answer the question.”

  Inwardly excited, he smiled. He was auditioning, like he was on the job again. But he wasn’t working. That part of his life was over. So what was he doing?

  Pretending?

  Broker winced. “Okay. Probably not the kind of things that you think. I arranged things.”

  “That’s a little vague,” she said.

  “I used to believe people should have the right to smoke grass and own guns, okay?”

  “Your conviction is for assault.”

  “When you arrange things, you guarantee the bona fides of the seller and the buyer, and you secure the transaction. If someone gets out of line, you have to straighten them out.”

  Jolene again evaluated his words and matched them to his expression, to the relaxed potential of his body. “But you don’t do that kind of stuff anymore?” she inquired.

  “These carloads of very heavily armed black guys start
ed showing up from Chicago and L.A. Crack changed the whole street scene and I got out ten years ago. I made some money and socked it in a little resort up on the North Shore before real estate went through the roof. It was a good investment and I’m comfortable. I suppose getting older had something to do with it.”

  “But you still keep your hand in?” she asked.

  “Say what you mean.”

  She sat up straighter and swung her head, tossing hair that was no longer there. “You said you owed Hank.”

  “I owe Hank.”

  “I need you to arrange something.”

  “Go on,” Broker said cautiously.

  “I need you to get rid of Earl.”

  “Wait a minute.” Broker held up his hands. “I don’t do . . .”

  “No, no, silly; I mean I want you to put Earl back where he was before Hank’s accident. Which is at a polite distance and respecting boundaries. I don’t want him hurt. At least not hurt too bad. And I want him to understand I’m going to pay him what I owe him.”

  Broker was relieved at the genuine sound of her request which fit the dimension of the debt he owed her husband. And he was consoled that his guilty little fling had now moved on to a practical next step.

  “So?” Jolene prompted him.

  “I can do that,” he said.

  “There’s one thing I want you to understand,” she said. “I want you to remove Earl from my life. I do not want you to replace him.”

  “Jesus,” Broker grinned and shook his head. “You don’t exactly go through a lot of Kleenex, do you?” He reached for his pants.

  “I have feelings,” Jolene said circumspectly, “but I keep them to myself.”

  They stood on the back deck, collars turned up as the evening chill syphoned off the baked-bread warmth of the bedroom. Broker smoked a cigar and watched the running lights of a solitary boat on the slowly freezing St. Croix River. When he turned, he could see into Hank’s studio sickroom through the patio doors. Hank was illuminated in his bed by a lamp—still life with coma.

  Like when he was working and trampled on people, he rationalized the twinge of guilt, telling himself he was out to get a bad guy.

  “Earl and I did things, too,” Jolene said. “But we never got caught. I guess we were social criminals,” she reflected. “Sort of like social drinkers, you know; they quit when it starts interfering with their lives.”

  “What things?” Broker grinned as he mimicked her voice and tone.

  “Remember that movie The Color of Money? Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Tom Cruise, you remember them?”

  Broker nodded. “I remember, they were two punks and Paul Newman taught them to be hustlers.”

  “Two talented punks, thank you. Well, that was us completely. Especially Earl. He was this brash, talented jerk. And I guess he still is. And I even look a little like Mastrantonio, don’t you think? There’s some Italian on my mother’s side.”

  Broker studied her. “She has more hair, you’re taller. What things?”

  She squirmed away, evading in a wheedling voice. “You know, stealing things, selling dope. Dumb kid’s stuff. Then we moved to Seattle and Earl got real heavy into computer code on the ground floor at Microsoft. For a while it seemed like we’d straightened out, but his temper got him in trouble. We split up for a while when he joined the army. He was in Desert Storm, all dressed up with nowhere to go. He felt cheated. Then he came home and we disappeared into Seattle during our Kurt Cobain–Courtney Love period. Earl meddled in coke and cyber crime and I got very heavy into drinking.”

  Broker shook his head. “Kurt who?”

  She smiled and patted his cheek. “That’s what I like about you. Anyway, we woke up one morning and I decided I had to get clean, so we came back to Minnesota.”

  “And that’s when you met Hank?”

  “My hero.” Jolene smiled fondly. “The thing about heroes is first they save you, then they try and change you. He tried to explain to me that you don’t have to settle for the life they give you. He said that’s what this country is all about. It’s why people left Europe and came here in the first place. They were criminals and were persecuted, but they came here because it was this new thing in the world, in history . . .”

  Jolene stretched her hands and attempted to grasp something in the air.

  “I didn’t really hear what he was saying until after his accident. Now I’m beginning to understand. Being sober is my New World. People can change. Look at you, you changed, didn’t you?”

  Broker, blindsided by her earnest language, didn’t trust his voice and remained silent. She continued talking.

  “Except I made one big mistake. I panicked when Hank left me in this money bind. Now Earl thinks . . .”

  Broker shrugged. “Can you blame him? Any man you take up with right now is going to have one eye on a huge malpractice settlement.”

  “Including you?”

  “I just said it.” Broker nodded his head toward the house. “But this isn’t me.”

  She regarded him from the corners of her eyes. “So you don’t want the money and you don’t really want me . . .”

  “Hey, I don’t want to put my suitcase in your closet. But I wouldn’t mind seeing you again,” he said.

  Jolene laughed and unburdened the thought that was on her mind. “The problem with you is you’re too good to be true.”

  Broker shivered at her words, the way they sailed into the dark on her silken breath. He shied away when she poked a finger into his ribs. “Just another hero, huh? Like Hank. He never expected us to go the distance. He said it’s one of the big stories in life. People grow at different speeds. He figured I’d outgrow him the way I outgrew Earl.” She squared her shoulders and the cold night air was all the makeup she needed. “I’m just getting started,” she said.

  Broker asked, “So you figure out where you’re headed?”

  She inhaled, exhaled. “Just so we understand each other, I like you and I want to see you again, but I don’t see us, like, together long-term. The next guy I get involved with seriously will be somebody with fewer rough edges. Somebody safe.”

  “Somebody you can control?”

  “I didn’t say that.” She came up on tiptoes and kissed him, a frank, direct kiss midway between friendship and everlasting damnation.

  When the kiss ended she was practical. “About Earl—sometimes when he’s upset he can get, well, violent. And he knows some pretty thuggy guys.”

  “What I have in mind doesn’t involve rough stuff,” Broker said. “But I need to get at his computer for a couple of hours. Are you sure he won’t be back tonight?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “I had a peek at his computer screen and it looked like he was collecting credit card numbers.”

  “Credit unions. He hacks into credit unions and cleans out all the credit cards and sells them on the web.” Jolene smiled. “He swears he only drains off money from very wealthy people, like Robin Hood. What are you going to do?”

  “I have a set of disks for his Zip Drive in the car. If you’ll play lookout, I’ll copy his hard drive. Then, if he agrees to move off from you an appropriate distance, say after a few years, he can have the copies back. He doesn’t agree, we go to plan two and the disks wind up with the computer-crimes investigator at Washington County, and your basement will be full of cops and Earl goes away.”

  “Not bad,” Jolene said.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Jesus, it was a dump. A dump on Arcade on the east side of St. Paul where the mooks went to watch women get naked and rub up against them. And the air was poisonous with cigarette smoke, and he could see some very questionable substance fouled in the nap of the cheap orange carpet next to his shoe which wasn’t even dry yet. There was a bar and tables, and these alcoves with overstuffed chairs where the dancers did their thing.

  And that’s where Earl found Rodney, sunk in one of the chairs under a lap dancer who was chewing gum and working her hips to the beat o
f the Righteous Brothers, “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” Earl looked away. He was off human intimacy for the time being. He preferred to jack into high-shock plastic and a thick glass screen where the action was kept crisp, internal, and sanitary. People were just too messy. Even perfect-looking people like Jolene could be messy. Even Jolene leaked once a month.

  Fluids. Sweat. Tears. He thought briefly of Cliff Stovall in the woods.

  Blood.

  Pissed and shit himself, too. Disgusting.

  His fault. Not mine.

  Earl went back to watching Rodney and thought, I should throw him a fish. This should be a cow humping a big seal. Rodney should be going arf, arf.

  “C’mon, Rodney, we got to talk, man.”

  Rodney was stretched out on the divan chair, arms alternately bracing on the fat cushions or twitching at his sides. There was a sign on the wall: patrons aren’t allowed to touch the girls with their hands. But he could squirm his hips as much as he wanted. So his legs were spread and an ample G-string-and-pasty-clad transplant from West Virginia named Mavis was lashing him with her long, braided blond tresses as she straddled his hips and pumped him in sync with the music.

  Earl knew who Mavis was because this wasn’t the first time he’d met Rodney here and had to sit though one of her dry humps. She had bruises on her thighs and they looked about to pucker. All right for now, but headed for the cottage cheese shelf.

  Rodney’s head was thrown back and a silver chain glistened on his fleshy neck, and every time Mavis socked it to him, the Thor’s Hammer medallion on the chain jiggled in a fold of sweat.

  Like the governor’s, Rodney’s shaved head tapered smoothly up out of his overdeveloped neck. When the feds had him sweating down in seg at Oak Park Heights, he’d panicked. He’d imagined he heard moans in the dark and he felt the walls go clammy with nightmare sweat. In one of his worse moments, he had tattooed a swastika on the end of his prick with a tiny safety pin and a Bic refill. He did this as a token of goodwill toward the Aryan Nation. Any minute now Rodney hoped that his Nazi logo would squirt ecstatic black spiders.