Absolute Zero (2002) Read online

  "So now you and your ex-copper buddy have two choices, huh?" another wife's voice rattled in the telephone.

  "Yeah, I guess." Iker winced and held up the receiver at arm's length. Broker heard the wife say: "You can shovel snow or get drunk."

  Iker hung up, shrugged. "What are you going to do?"

  "Get a room at the Holiday Inn."

  "I got to finish filing this report. Maybe I'll see you at The Saloon later." Iker tossed Broker his truck keys.

  Broker left the courthouse, climbed in Iker's truck, and drove

  toward the Holiday Inn that overlooked Lake Shagawa at the edge of town. No way he was going to try the unplowed road to Uncle Billie's Lodge in these conditions. Iker's Ford Ranger barely grabbed traction in Ely.

  Moving at a crawl in four-wheel low, he went over some of the medical terminology he'd heard thrown around this afternoon: Sommer had suffered a significant "anoxic insult" and was currently comatose—in a coma due to oxygen starvation to his brain precipitated by respiratory complications following surgery. The informal opinion at Miner Hospital was that Amy Skoda had underestimated the amount of sedation in his system and took him off anesthesia too early in the operating room. Perhaps, someone speculated, she'd anticipated that the surgery would take longer, not allowing for Allen's speed and skill. Sommer's being hypothermic may have been a factor. Whatever the precipitating events, he developed trouble breathing in the recovery room.

  Nobody was there when he crashed, and the alarm on the monitor had not been set.

  As he left, Broker overheard someone console Amy. It could

  happen to anyone. But it didn't happen to anyone. It happened to Hank Sommer, the guy Broker had promised to get out of the woods. The guy he helped deliver to a warm, safe hospital where they preserved his heart and lungs and lost his brain. Wham. Broker hooked a frustrated fist at the steering wheel in a tantrum of flash anger, swerved, and almost lost control of the truck. Reflexively, he steered into the skid and came out of the spin.

  Take deep breaths through your nose. Check yourself. Usually he had a much longer fuse. The Holiday Inn was a deserted post-and-beam jungle gym with a cathedral ceiling and a bored, snow-hypnotized receptionist who smiled discreetly at Broker's attire. He carried in the duffel he'd retrieved from the dispatch desk, took a room, and went down a stairwell, opened a door, and stepped into a limbo of clean walls, curtains, and hotel furniture that could be anywhere-USA.

  And he just wanted to disappear.

  But he stripped down out of habit, went to the shower, and applied soap, shampoo, shaving lather, and a razor to peel off the

  cold outer layer of the last twenty-four hours. He rubbed a porthole in the steamed bathroom mirror and gauged his fatigue by the redness of his eyes. He took out dry jeans, a fleece pullover, and his spare boots.

  After he'd dressed, his hand moved toward the phone, thinking to call the hospital and check with Allen, who'd stayed behind to watch over Sommer and Milt. He withdrew his hand.

  You don't really know Hank Sommer.

  And it was like—all his life he'd worked the sharp end and he'd always been annoyed at the compulsion of people who couldn't resist adding their personal embroidery to the messy edge of tragedy. Now he discovered he was not immune to this character defect.

  He was dwelling on it. If you hadn't hassled Sommer so much during the storm he might not have pushed so hard, might not have ruptured himself.

  Try again, Broker.

  You fell apart out there and an injured man had to take up the slack.

  Either way, if Sommer hadn't paddled to the max they would have dumped in the middle of the lake, not ten yards from the point. Their bodies would be stiff white logs rolling among the rocks on the leeward shore of Fraser Lake. He'd gone on a canoe trip in only fair physical condition and his strength had faltered when the chips were down.

  These were ponderous thoughts to keep afloat in an ocean of fatigue, especially after the narcotic hot shower, and the bed beckoned, but so did the image of Sommer lying less than a mile away with his eyes closed, his heart beating, and his lungs sucking oxygen.

  And his head full of static.

  Broker lurched to his feet and grabbed his parka. Iker's wife was right. He needed a drink.

  The snow had grayed the early afternoon enough to switch on the streetlights and it was a bad day for a drive, but Broker took one, anyway. He pushed the Ranger through the small business district and followed the flashing blue light of a county snowplow out

  Sheridan Street to the outskirts of town, where the plow stopped,

  defeated by drifts on Highway 169. Broker turned around in front

  of the International Wolf Center and retraced his route.

  Ely was end of the road, a departure point for tourists paddling

  into the wilds. Things were different when Broker was a kid and

  spent part of his summers here. Then, the iron ore they dug up from

  the veins that literally ran under the town was so pure it could be

  welded directly on to steel.

  The iron fields were so potent they interfered with radio sig

  nals, and the rattle of boxcars full of ore had competed with the

  buzz of seaplanes flying fishermen into the paradise of northern

  lakes.

  The mines came to grief on the global marketplace. Miners who

  had landed on Iwo and Saipan were thrown out of work when the

  steel could be shipped in cheaper from Japan. In the late '70's the

  government annexed the lake country along the Canadian border as

  a wilderness preserve and banished the gasoline motor to keep the

  woods and water pristine. The bitter land-use controversy still

  flared.

  Broker switched on the radio, scanned the dial until he hit

  WELY. "Sally, your brother wants you to stay put. He's safe, he's

  made it to town and won't get back until this blow is over."

  WELY was one of two American radio stations licensed to

  transmit personal messages. The other was in the Alaskan bush. He

  turned off the radio and stared into the storm.

  Now the school district was shrinking. Income from vacationers

  didn't translate into the kind of jobs that supported families. Like

  his home ground on the Superior shore, another piece of his geogra

  phy was being changed by '90's Über wealth.

  Take it in stride, he told himself, keep moving, don't look back.

  Mike and Irene Broker had raised their boy to be a stoic. They

  had been inoculated against sentimentality by bumping up hard

  against the Depression and Hitler, and they'd passed the antibodies

  to their son. Broker understood the cultural message of his time.

  He'd been raised to fight Communists, and he had. He'd come home

  from his war refitted with a forty-gallon adrenaline tank.

  So he'd joked that he'd worn a badge to feed his action jones.

  But the fact was, if somebody had to remain vigilant in the night so

  others could sleep in peaceful beds, it probably should be somebody like him.

  A shape jerked at the corner of his eye and he almost wrenched the wheel—seeing things—an artifact of shock and fatigue, and he was back to taking deep breaths through his nose to steady down his jumpy thoughts. And he almost had to laugh—Christ, he'd come up here to get away and . . .

  He just had to maintain control and forward motion and balance. He used to be good at keeping things separate and filed into their own compartments. But it wasn't that easy to take this one in stride. He'd sprung a leak. Stuff was getting in. Stuff was getting out.

  His mom—well, Mom had always worried that he had too much imagination for police work. Peel back the bark, she'd said, and he was layered and impressionable. Like a ball of wax, Sommer said, things stick.

  A
nd the things that stuck were memories from more than twenty years of cleaning up after human beings at their worst. And suddenly he swerved again, but this time it was in his head, and he was back in the middle of the argument with his wife.

  And she'd said, Oh, I see, so it's all right for you to do it but not

  for me, is that it?

  The memory invoked all the hoarded resentments; she still thought she was indestructible at thirty-three. She took too many chances out there and left him home to rehearse attending her funeral with their daughter Kit . . .

  Right now Kit's absence ached in his arms and he could smell her milky sweet-sour breath and her copper curls and see her chubby face that was part Rubens and part Winston Churchill, and he could hear her pure laugh that was so uncomplicated by fear. He experienced a piercing memory of her a month ago as she struggled with the physical limitations of her limited grasp and discovered that she couldn't carry all her stuffed animals at once.

  She was going on three and by the time she was four she'd experience the death of something—a cat or a dog or a hamster. She'd find and poke her first roadkill. Fearless, like her mother, she'd probably lift the maggots on a stick.

  She was almost ready for The Lion King, which he'd screened. She'd see Mufasa trampled to death by stampeding wildebeests and

  watch little Simba vainly attempt to rouse his father from a perma

  nent sleep.

  Eventually, she would pose the question: Daddy, will you die? Will Mommy die? Will I die?

  Broker parked Iker's truck in a snowdrift in front of The Saloon

  on a desolate street in Ely and was in a fine mood when he pushed

  his way through the door, stamped off snow, and took over a table

  in the corner. The place was dim as a cave and sparsely populated

  by a few hardy snowmobilers and a storm-weary bartender and

  waitress.

  Broker was no drinker. For a thirst-quencher he preferred

  lemonade on a hot day, and his only use for bar culture had been as

  a fertile recruiting ground for bottom-feeding snitches. He always

  made a point to leave drinking scenes before the lip sync went hay

  wire and people's expressions became dissociated from their words.

  Uncharacteristically, he ordered a double Jack Daniel's and

  drank half of it. He gagged, flushed with sweat, and drank the rest,

  then sat back and waited for the numbness.

  He kept getting stuck on the inverted sequence of Sommer's

  mind being suffocated inside his living body, and the image obli

  gated him to reflect on his own fast parade of sudden death. "Traffic," Broker mumbled to his whiskey glass.

  August. Last year, on a sticky, humming, deep-green afternoon

  he and his father were out for a walk by the state capitol in St. Paul.

  They'd paused on a freeway overpass with the domes of the capitol

  and the St. Paul Cathedral bracketing them north and south, and

  rush hour on Interstate 94 clamoring below their feet. Mike Broker

  at seventy-nine took long mental vacations and tripped down rabbit

  holes of nostalgia because in the rabbit holes he was young and

  doing things that mattered. That hot August afternoon, Dad had

  looked down at the racing cars and said, "This is what it sounds like

  when a lot of young people die fast and unhappy in a tight spot.

  Hundreds of lives go screaming by each minute."

  Dad was talking about the first hour on Omaha Beach.

  The rush was not that loud in Broker's memory but it was audi

  ble enough to prompt ordering another double. After it arrived and

  he drank it, his thinking wobbled: Okay. The body dies first. Bud

  dhists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Christians could all agree on that much. The problem was—the major religions were designed for a medical reality that didn't anticipate CPR, ventilators, and dialysis.

  "Hey," Broker signaled across the dim, nearly deserted room to the waitress at the bar. "Give me another."

  Pocketing his change after the drink arrived he noticed that he was losing corners of seconds off his reflexes and that the fine muscle control at the tips of his fingers had turned blunt. But his thinking had profoundly elongated.

  So. Here's the deal. Sommer's body didn't die but his mind did, and now his stubborn flesh was holding HIM—his spirit, whatever—hostage inside. Broker shook his head, stymied at the physical geography of where Sommer was. And his layman's impressions about biomechanics did not encourage a solution. He understood vaguely that the "human" parts of Sommer's mind had been obliterated because the deeper cortex—the lizard brain—had sacrificed the higher functions to preserve the vital pumps: the heart, the lungs.

  Broker envisioned the embers of Sommer's life warming a lidless reptilian eye and he suddenly wanted someone to blame besides himself—so he looked around and, well, no shit, he'd been sitting here for ten, fifteen minutes and hadn't seen Iker hunched over a bar stool at the end of the bar. Iker had traded in his St. Erho sweats for a pullover, jeans, and a heavy leather coat.

  Like two aging Earp brothers, their eyes met, paused briefly to check each other's backs, and dropped back to their glasses.

  Then, scanning the room more carefully, he spied Amy Skoda sitting at a corner table with her back against the wall. Half her face was blacked out in shadow. The other half was caught in the neon haze from a Budweiser sign. She still wore her blue trousers, now tucked into car boots, and her open anorak revealed the ID badge clipped to her blue tunic.

  She moved her head forward into the light, their eyes met, and Broker saw reflected in her face the blame he felt burning in his own.

  Chapter Twelve

  Amy was not alone. Two snowmobile jocks, mistaking her troubled, fixed stare for an intoxicated cripple, had moved into chairs on either side and were treating her to drinks. And judging by the full shot glass in her hand and the empty one in front of her, she was not protesting.

  Broker was smart enough to know there's no fool like an old fool. He was just too burnt and boozed to listen to himself. So he thought—what the hell, why not give forty-seven going on twentyfive one last try? He heaved to his feet playing funky theme music in his head. Like Muddy Waters and Bonnie Raitt. I'm Ready. Dumb barroom stuff.

  He pushed his chair aside and fixed on the beefy one wearing the Arctic Cat knit cap who'd looped his arm around her shoulder. The guy was a chinless wonder, a regular evangelist for the lite worldview of a beer commercial.

  "Aw, c'mon, you can tell me about it," Arctic Cat said with great sincerity as his fingers grazed near the shape of her left breast.

  "Aw, God," Amy said, shoving the arm away.

  "Hey honey. It's all right." Arctic Cat, tone deaf to the lethal disgust in her voice, took encouragement as Broker came across the room surprisingly light on his feet and appeared on Arctic Cat's blind side.

  Amy had the right idea, and she clearly knew her anatomy. This

  time she grabbed Arctic Cat's hand and cranked down on his wrist. The husky snowmobiler grinned at her attempted armlock.

  She'd hit the same old problem—upper body strength. Arctic Cat was just too big.

  Broker experienced no such difficulty as he swiftly took over the arm grab from Amy, wrenched the wrist, and threw in an oldfashioned Iron Ranger hockey check.

  Arctic Cat's fleshy nose and lips briefly adhered to the wall like thrown Silly Putty before he oozed to the floor, leaving a wet smear down the pine paneling. His buddy stood up and discreetly took a step back.

  The man Broker had knocked down rolled over and sat up, holding his wrist; confused, blinking, he wondered aloud, "What's that she got me with? Musta been some kung fu?" His nose and lips commenced to bleed.

  "Nah," Broker said, amazed at the callous spring of his anger, "you're just fat, ugly, and slow."
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  Then Amy was between them with two deep furrows creasing her brow. She jammed both hands on Broker's chest, extended her arms, backed him off, and said hotly, "Hey, don't hurt him; take it easy, he didn't mean . . ."

  And Iker was there, moving fast and edgy for a big man; he shouldered Broker aside, flipped open his wallet, and badged the two guys. "Go away," he said tersely. "Now."

  While Iker soothed the bartender who had picked up the phone, the snowmobilers parleyed, recognized that they had strayed into the dangerous part of the zoo, and made the proper decision.

  "C'mon, let's go down the street."

  "But nothin's open down the street."

  "Let's go there, anyway."

  Amy handed the guy with the nosebleed a bar napkin with some ice inside and told him to apply pressure. After they left, Iker peered first at Broker, then at Amy and asked, "You two all right?"

  "Yeah, sure," Amy said quickly.

  "Hey, no problem," Broker said.

  "Sit down, Dave, have a drink," Amy said.

  Iker gave them a tight smile. "No thanks, I don't have the energy to get between you two. Not after today."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Broker said.