Absolute Zero (2002)

by Chuck Logan

  "Jolene?"

  But she raised the clubbed stock of a shotgun and smashed it at Allen's bloody face and knocked him into a whole new universe of suffering. Even as he reeled in pain, an airtight, rational pocket of his mind protested: Jolene, I-I lov-ve you, this-s isn't fair. Look at all I-va-va da-done. I saved you. I set you up for life.

  Earl had collapsed on him, drenching him with blood, but something else. Allen's last kick had glanced up off Earl's chest and passed under his armpit and tangled in the sling, and now that Earl had toppled over double, the tightly knotted trench-coat belt had twisted with the sling and trapped Allen's leg and—oh, shit—the big klutz was falling off the dock.

  "Jolene, help," he shouted.

  Earl's dead weight was slipping toward the ice like entrails sliding from a gutted carcass. And he was pulling Allen with him.

  "Jolene?"

  She hit him again with the gun stock. No. Not hit. She figured out what was going on. She was pushing him with the gun, shoving him over the side. Prying him. Her eyeballs were focused tightwhite neon.

  "Bitch," Allen screamed.

  It was a long way to the ice. Earl's body was heaped, facedown, piling up accordion-like three feet below the level of the dock. Allen's hips were hung on the edge. He seized a steel pipe that served as a piling with his left hand, and he raised the knife in his right hand to menace Jolene.

  They both paused to gather their strength, eyes inches apart, the thick clouds of their breath mingling.

  Then, Allen heard a crash and bubbly wallowing sound. Earl's weight cracked the thin ice and began to sink. Jolene swung the gun butt at Allen's hand on the piling. Unsteady, her first stroke missed. Allen's slashed back at her with his knife.

  And he missed, too.

  As she moved in to strike again, Allen instinctively let go of the piling and grabbed at her, clamped his fingers into the waistband of her jeans, jerking her forward, down on her knees.

  They teetered on the edge of the dock, Jolene flailing with the shotgun, but feebly, in too close to do any damage.

  Allen still had the dexterity in his hand to reverse the direction of the slim knife, twirling it daggerlike. He made a fist and swung overhand, throwing all his remaining strength in a powerful haymaker. She shoved the gun at his face, blinding him momentarily. Amid a confusing lurch of movement, he felt the blade plunge deep, through muscle. He wrenched it free and struck again, overhand, and felt it sink past the muscle into bone.

  Chapter Fifty-one

  The closest phone was at the lodge.

  Annie's truck headlights streaked down the driveway and he barely heard the shot through the ringing in his ears as they turned into the parking lot. That's when he saw Jolene bolt from the porch holding something in both hands. Trailing ragged jets of breath, she sprinted toward a hulking shape, and that was Earl staggering down the boat dock.

  Broker couldn't open the door handle with his frozen paws. All he felt was a numb jarring back up his arm.

  "Help," he yelled to Annie. "Open the open. OPEN THE DOOR!"

  The truck was still moving as Annie leaned over and jerked the door handle. Broker rolled out and immediately collapsed as his numb feet failed. He yelled, "Get outa here. Somebody's got a gun."

  He looked around. Where's Amy?

  Then—shit. He picked up motion at the end of the dock. Someone crawling. Earl was after her, had to be her. So that's where Broker headed, following Jolene, but, Christ, his hands and feet were solid cubes and he toppled forward. He struggled up and tried to run on the wooden blocks. Fell again.

  Get up. Save Amy.

  BLAAM! Another gunshot whistled in the dark. He turned to Annie in the truck and shouted, "Annie, get out of here. Do it. Now."

  She didn't need a second prodding. She floored it and reversed up the drive. And now he was alone and somebody had a gun.

  Wonderful. He staggered on his square feet.

  Voices now. But underwater voices. Slow, garbled.

  Not just slow, frozen slow. Even more sluggish because ice cubes had replaced his brain. Each step required all his concentration.

  Then he saw them outlined in silver moonlight, and the violent white smoke of their breath. Amy wasn't there. Now Earl was down and Jolene and Allen Falken were fighting on the end of the dock.

  Allen? What the fuck . . . ?

  Earl was tangled up with Allen somehow. Make that Earl's body, because it looked like Earl didn't live there anymore. His body had slumped over and was dragging them both off the dock. Jolene was swinging a shotgun at Allen. Allen was swinging back.

  Broker kept lurching down the dock, dragging his frozen feet like Boris Karloff.

  Then Earl's dead weight jerked Allen over the edge, which caused Allen to yank Jolene down in turn. Broker kept coming, slipping now in a lather of icy blood. When he saw the twinkle in Allen's fist, reflex took over and he dived as the knife streaked overhand.

  Broker flung out both his arms to block and cover Jolene, and collided with the squirming bodies. A hot wire stung deep into his left shoulder, withdrew and struck again, going deep into his left arm above the elbow joint. This time it stayed put.

  Pain was abstract; there was so much going around that this new arrival had to stand in line. Amy had said cold sequesters sedation. It sequestered pain, too. Or, maybe, after the last hour or so, pain had just become his natural habitat.

  Allen's bloody hand slipped off the skinny haft and, desperate for purchase, he grabbed Jolene's shotgun with both hands. Jolene immediately released the gun and Allen slipped farther down, let go of the gun, and clawed at her clothing. Her shirt tore and her stomach trembled slick, fish-belly white. Her knees pumped, churning ice water in Allen's face.

  "Please," Allen screamed as his weight, anchored to Earl, pulled Jolene farther over the edge, which jerked Broker over, belly down on the planks. Broker's right arm pawed for a grip, and, anchored around a piling, his left arm was extended across Jolene's chest and hooked under her chin. Jolene thrashed, hip deep in the water, and

  grabbed the arm with both hands. Her hold broke the flex of his elbow and she slid deeper into the water, and Broker pitched over with her.

  He knew the water at the end of the dock was deep, perhaps twelve feet, and the ice, while thin enough to break under a falling body, was strong enough to hold somebody down who became trapped beneath it. If she went into the hole after Earl and Allen, she'd be gone forever.

  Glacier water stung Broker's forearm and they all jabbered— wild—the North Atlantic protest-dialect of the drowning freezing. In the hoarse bedlam, Allen's face contorted in a forest fire of white breath, level with Jolene's squirming hips, splashing up to his neck in the black lake water and broken ice, trying to avoid Jolene's fierce kicks.

  "Please!"

  Jolene writhed on Broker's bad arm, going after Allen, kicking and kicking until his last scream ended in a thrashing garble of bubbles. Allen Falken's eyes bulged in disbelief as the water blinded him, and the weight of Earl's body slowly towed him down.

  Utterly focused, Jolene kicked at the top of his head and deliberately held him under. It was dead, silent work punctuated only by the hysterical rasp of her breath and a stream of fading bubbles.

  Then there was just Broker and Jolene and the vast silence that dwarfed simple words like help. And the burning stars. And then the urgent panic of their breathing resumed.

  Allen's last drowning spasm broke her grip on Broker's arm. For a frantic beat Jolene turned and threw out her hands, trying to grab and climb Broker's hooked arm, but her hands slid off his icy sleeves.

  When the water reached her lips she shouted, "No, goddammit!" She surged up reaching, and the pain exploded full red and grinding in Broker's left elbow, as Jolene's right hand caught behind the haft of the scalpel. She anchored her left hand across her right wrist and held on.

  Then Broker felt a buoyant lift to the pain. Nothing was pulling her down anymore. She'd floated free from Allen's dead weight.<
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  He tried to lift her, but his shoulder was stiffening and he couldn't move. If he released his hold on the piling they would both go in and under the ice.

  Teeth chattering, they stared at each other.

  He was back where he began, at the mercy of the glacier water, and he had lost his strength and she was dying by inches and degrees. Within his grasp.

  "Try to climb my arm," he croaked.

  She responded with a spasm of shaking. Then she gritted her teeth, let go with her left hand, and tried to reach past him for the dock, but it was too far and the effort almost cost her her grip on the knife imbedded in his elbow. She locked her left hand back on her right wrist. He saw she had no strength left.

  "Hold on." His voice rasped like a frigid ignition trying to turn over. Hers wasn't much better.

  She shuddered. "I'm good, I had a toddy." But he could see she was losing it, slipping into the water.

  The stars were their sequined shroud. And dancing among them, Broker saw the blue shimmer of the aurora. Now red. Then red and blue together slapping the dark trees, rippling on the ice.

  He had wanted so much to save her and here she was dying in his arms, starting to sag lower in the water as the scalpel blade began to work free. He should say something. He should . . .

  The stark blank verse of police radio traffic intruded on his grave-side sermon. And he turned his face and saw that the light show was earthbound, financed by St. Louis County and originating from the rotating flashers on two cruisers, two ambulances, and a fire truck.

  Many men's voices, now, shouting, breathless. Stabbing flashlight beams. Then the clump of pounding feet. The dock shuddered as several figures in tan and gray St. Louis County parkas bellyflopped on the planks next to Broker. Arms shot out, someone— maybe Dave Iker—clamped a hand into Jolene's short, icy hair, couldn't get a grip, and then grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and lifted her bodily.

  As Jolene was hoisted from the water there was a moment when she and Broker were face-to-face. Her lips jerked, cramping her features into a horrible grin.

  "Jesus, Broker; you look like shit."

  More hands pulled them in, swaddled them with blankets. Broker rasped, "Jolene, what happened?"

  "I called nine one one," she croaked back.

  "But what happened?" he repeated.

  She raised her face past him to the stars and, this time, all her facial muscles fired on cue and she did smile.

  Broker held it together long enough to tell the cops to look for two bodies under the ice. Then they loaded him into an ambulance and the shock, the intense cold, and his wounds finally hit him. He stared at Hank, who lay asleep or unconscious on an adjoining stretcher, thought for a moment, and muttered, "We have to feed the birds."

  A paramedic applied pressure bandages to Broker's head and arm, ran an IV, and, in the course of calming him down, gathered that Broker was referring to J.T. Merryweather's abandoned ostriches.

  In the other ambulance, Jolene lay under blankets on her own stretcher and listened to the medics work on Amy right next to her. When they had stabilized Amy's vital signs, one of the paramedics turned to Jolene and asked her how she was doing.

  And Jolene said, "I want to talk to my lawyer."

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Broker heaved on soft morphine waves. Eddies. He was reminded of the movie Midnight Cowboy—everybody talking at him, can't hear most of what they're saying.

  "Well, it's about two weeks till deer opener," Dave Iker said, "and I figure, if all else fails, we can wire a stick to your stump in place of a trigger finger. You might have luck with that arrangement."

  "Or," Sam, the giant deputy, said, "since you're now qualified on the car bomb, maybe we could find where the deer congregate and pursue that technique."

  The jokes were getting old by his second day in a room at Ely Miner Hospital. He contributed drugged smiles and an occasional wiggle of his head. Otherwise they had him immobilized on the bed.

  Amy was recovering in another room from the Narcan cocktail that reversed her Fentanyl overdose. Once Jolene walked by his bed with Milt Dane. Someone said the St. Louis County attorney had set up shop down the hall in another hospital room and Hank was blinking out a statement.

  Two grand juries were in the works—one up here and another down in Washington County.

  It was said that the wife's role in everything was murky.

  In moments of lucid pain between morphine doses, Broker

  recalled Jolene calling him out into the night and her shocked yell, "What's he doing here?" just before Garf hit him on the head.

  Had she been clinging to his arm in fear or trapping his arm so he couldn't fight back?

  Broker lay on his back with his arms and legs extended and elevated on cushions. A bald patch of his scalp was held in place by fifteen stitches. It felt like someone had launched a rocket off his charred left cheek.

  The stab wounds in his shoulder and upper arm had been cleaned and lightly bandaged. Sterile gauze separated his fingers and toes, which were flushed a vivid pink and were bulbous with blisters.

  The local cops had a pool going, betting on how many fingers and toes Broker would lose. Shari Swatosh, the paramedic, had signed up for the long-shot wager, opting for all twenty fingers and toes, plus his winky.

  Dr. Boris Brecht had spent four years as an army doctor, most of them in Alaska with ski troops of the mountain division. He thought the pool was very funny. He wore a stethoscope around his neck, and a blue denim shirt with a Mickey Mouse decal embroidered on the chest pocket. He wagged his finger to reassure Broker. "Blisters that go all the way down to the tips of fingers and toes are good. Pink is good."

  As he inspected Broker's bubblegum toes, he was mainly concerned about infection. Yesterday, when they'd brought Broker, Amy, and Jolene into Emergency, Brecht had immediately suspended Broker's hands and feet in a huge sitz bathtub. He'd kept the water temperature between 100 and 108 degrees. He'd cleaned and stitched Broker's wounds as he sat in the tub.

  Through thick goggles of shock, Broker had watched his pallid fingers and toes slowly change from ivory to blush and start to sting as the blood crept back.

  "Reaction to extreme cold varies from person to person," Brecht had explained. "Certain groups are more susceptible than others. Blacks are three to six times more susceptible than whites. People born down South are four times more vulnerable than people born up north. Genetically, people with type O blood are more predisposed to cold trauma than type A or B.

  "Basically, you weren't out that long. And you'd ingested a lot

  of alcohol, and alcohol tends to dilate blood vessels. That's not a recommendation to drink in the woods.

  "You might loose some fingernails and toenails but, as long as infection doesn't set in, you should recover full function. There'll be some minor nerve damage and your extremities will be more vulnerable in the future. Probably you should work on your coping skills when it comes to cold weather."

  "Like Florida," Sam counseled.

  Broker went out with the morphine tide.

  He woke in the darkened room and heard a studied hush of machine-made beeps and sighs circulate in the corridor. Blue ghosts in white shoes drifted silently up and down the hall, passing his open door. One of them paused, looked in, and treaded soundlessly toward him.

  Just a shadow at first, backlit by the hall lights. Then, as she emerged from shadow, he saw it was a lean woman, hatchet-faced, with her dark hair in a bun. And she held something in her upraised hand. Broker's heart began to beat faster when he saw it was a syringe and nurse Nancy Ward was coming right at him.

  Sequestered, Amy's word again. It felt like his fears and his facts were suspended in morphine free fall. But then Nancy smiled warmly and push the shot into his IV and he felt the latest gentle wave lift and cradle him.

  "You know what I think," Nancy said, as she checked his dressings, his blisters, took his temperature, and checked his pulse. "He just thought h
e was so damn smart and we were a bunch of hicks up here. Doctor Mister Allen Falken. Well, you and Amy showed him, didn't you? Turns out he was just another dip-shit swampy."

  Broker smiled, a nodding idiot smile he'd mainly seen on people he had busted.

  Nancy adjusted and fluffed his pillows. "The word is the reporters are going to start showing up tomorrow, but it's pretty much over; Mr. Sommer, I mean. He did his blinking for the prosecutor and now he's slipped into a coma for real."

  In the Temple of Morphine, there is no bad news. Broker continued to smile.

  "You just lie back and take it easy, because you have a visitor," Nancy said.