Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

“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 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.

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.