Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

She tossed her hair. “Whatever. And Nancy Ward, the recovery-room nurse, was having a bad day; she’d had a fight with her husband and she’d worked all the previous night. Technically, she’ll catch the brunt of a malpractice suit. It looks like she neglected to program Sommer into the monitor. So she takes the blame for leaving him untended. But I was in charge. So it comes back to me.”

“You agree with them?”

She crossed her arms across her chest.

“You don’t agree with them?”

She uncrossed her arms, then recrossed them, stood up, and changed the subject. “There’s this rumor how you smuggled two tons of buried gold through Laos into Thailand and banked it in Hong Kong? Dave says if you didn’t have connections in the FBI, the IRS would be all over you.”

The rumors. Broker waved his hand. “Hell, I should pull it out of the stock market, put it all back into bullion, and bury the stuff again.”

“Bury it? Like a pirate ?”

“Exactly.” He heaved up and went to the counter, selected a knife from the rack on the wall, and sliced an orange, then a lemon, followed by a lime. The tart citrus circles tumbled off the blade and laundered the air; orange, yellow, and green in a pile like tropical doubloons. He dumped the slices into another large pot, added a quart of cider, a generous splash of vinegar, two tablespoons of honey and a cinnamon stick, and set the flame.

Amy got up, joined him at the counter, and looked over his shoulder. “You’re going to have the most expensive urine in Minnesota.”

“Mom’s home remedy.”

“Whatever.” She held out her left hand. “Look, see that?” She pointed at a faint white line on the edge of her palm.

It was an old scar. He said, “So?”

“Thirty years ago, the summer you helped Billie put in the boat dock.” She pointed out the window toward the old, hump-backed dock jutting into the lake. “You cut a fishhook out of my hand. You were eighteen. I was seven.” She appraised him. “You don’t remember.”

He didn’t recall the fishhook. He remembered building the damn dock, though.

“You’re no fun today,” she said as she put on her coat. “I have something else for you.” She removed a bag from her purse and handed it to him. It contained a cardboard and cellophane toy box and a copy of the outstate edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune .

“What’s this?” There was a kid’s action-figure called War Wolf in the box-plastic wolf head on a pumped-up body, dressed in camo fatigues.

“Way uncool, Broker; everybody’s heard of War Wolf , the poor man’s Star Wars ,” Amy said, patting his cheek. “You know what else Dave said? He said you were lost in the modern world. I’ll bet you’ve never seen Seinfeld? Ally McBeal ?”

“Hey, knock it off, I read Doonesbury every once in a while. And I watch The Crocodile Hunter .” He held up the toy and hunched his shoulders, questioning.

“Read the paper, there’s an article about Hank Sommer in the feature section folded on top.”

Amy touched his cheek lightly once more, told him to keep washing his hands, and outside, clomped down the steps, got in her practical, reliable car, and disappeared into the early evening. She probably drove the speed limit when nobody was around.

As he turned his mom’s cider remedy down to a simmer he wondered if she kissed with her eyes open.

It was not much of an article, with just a tiny picture of Hank squeezed into the type. A bigger picture showcased the plastic toy.

Creator of War Wolf in Coma.

Timberry writer Hank Sommer was diagnosed as being in a coma due to complications following emergency surgery in Ely, Minnesota, last week. After a daring boundary-water seaplane rescue in a violent storm, Sommer was operated on to repair a rupture and perforated bowel suffered during a canoeing accident.

Milton Dane, prominent St. Paul attorney, is representing Sommer and his wife against the Duluth Medical Group that manages Ely Miner Hospital.

According to Dane, “Ely Miner violated the standard of care with respect to Sommer’s post-operative treatment. It is ironic that Hank survived the storm, the hypothermia, the rescue, and the surgery, only to be deprived of oxygen in a hospital recovery room.”

Irony has stalked Sommer throughout his writing career. His first two novels garnered critical attention but little in the way of sales. Then he wrote War Wolf , a satire in which a returning veteran afflicted with dioxin poisoning becomes a vengeful Communist werewolf.

Director Bruce Cook found a copy of War Wolf three years ago in the remainder bin. The movie-which earned over ninety-three million dollars-established Sommer’s career as a novelist. It also produced a financial bonanza for the author, who shrewdly negotiated lucrative deals on other War Wolf spin-offs, including the action figure and video games.

Broker shook his head, pushed up off the couch, put on his parka, and selected a cigar. Brandy seemed like a good idea, so he raided Billie’s liquor cabinet and poured two inches into a cup, hit the play button on Billie’s CD player, went out on the front porch, and sat down on the steps. Through the open door he heard Jay and the Americans kick in as he popped a match.

Cigar smoke clawed his throat, so he took a soothing drink by way of a solitary toast: Whiskey, Women, Work, and War-to Hank Sommer, who wears a coral snake on his wrist, who saved my life, who takes second billing to a kid’s plastic toy. .

C’mon, Broker, tell the truth, you voted for Ventura, didn’t you?

Yeah, Hank, damned if I didn’t. Just to spite the suits.

He looked out over the dark lake and shivered. Damn, it was cold for October this year. Tiny glints clamped down along the shore; there’d be a skin of thin ice in the morning.

Uncle Billie’s porch faced north up Lake One and as the night filled in, the edges of the pine crowns feathered out and melted into a black sky. As the tree line disappeared so did perspective. Broker was alone with a star dome virtually unblemished by artificial light and, except for the occasional airliner and the seldom satellite, it was the cosmos of the ancients.

The Big and Little Dippers hung high to the north around the polestar, and Orion hugged the eastern horizon. The summer triangle of Deneb, Vega, and Altair slipped away to the west a little more each night.

Mom, hoping he could be the artist she had never been, tried to nurture in him a sense of discovery, and never missed an opportunity to slip a few coppers of wonder into his piggy bank of instincts.

See the shapes of animals in the clouds. The constellations.

Dad taught him to find the real animal in the forest; the deer by his tracks, where he bedded, where he fed; by his rubs and scrapes. Honoring both his parents, he’d let his practicality cross-fertilize his imagination.

The Cities, stacked with high-rise humans, had never been his home. This was home and, as always, the wilderness beckoned with silent beauty, absent mercy. Broker sipped his brandy and mused how the death traps in nature were always feminine: oceans, mountains, deep woods. Which was as it should be because their victims were usually young, romantic, dumb men.

Jay and the Americans called it accurately:

Come a little bit closer

you’re my kind of man

so big and so strong. .

Moved by the rhythm of the old music, he didn’t have to travel far to find the memory of Jolene Sommer’s green eyes.

Broker stood up, poured out the rest of his drink, grimaced at the cigar, and threw it away. Getting cold, he went inside, shut the door, and placed another log on the coals.