Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

“It’s hard to tell. He could be looking at people. But Allen Falken doesn’t think so.”

“Oh.”

“Right, that was him in the car. He just dropped me off. Which makes it harder for you to go Sommer’s house, because Allen can ID you.”

“So what’s next?”

“I’m going back tomorrow for another look.”

“Okay, can I take your truck to do my Mall of America junket?”

“Sure.” Broker rubbed his chin. “Basically, it’s pretty grim over at Sommer’s.”

“You don’t look grim,” Amy observed.

Broker was not one to dream.

So the sudden flash of Sommer’s startling acetylene eyes jolted him awake and left him sitting up in the dark on the fold-out couch in J.T.’s unfamiliar living room.

Shadows strummed the wall above him as the wind pushed the willows back and forth. New night sounds murmured: the creak of the eaves, the furnace fan whirring on.

Sitting in the dark in one strange house he thought of another strange house. Sommer’s. Multileveled and full of people. Especially Garf, the wild card in the basement. Broker tried to imagine Jolene and Garf together in the cherry sleigh bed while Sommer treaded water in the next room.

He rejected the image, reformulated it, and put Garf back in the basement and saw Jolene, alone in the king-size bed. Did she sleep soundly or did she toss? Or did she really sleep in the narrow bed at Sommer’s feet?

Was she a diamond in the rough, or just an opportunist?

Jolene, Garf, Sommer, and the dead accountant were human puzzle pieces that he couldn’t make fit. And he wondered if Sommer would now be counted among the things he’d never know. Like where his daughter was sleeping tonight. He didn’t even know what country she was in.

What he did know was that he wouldn’t get back to sleep, so he felt around for his jeans, pulled them on, and carefully made his way between the shadowy furniture toward the kitchen.

Red digital numbers on the microwave stamped 5:29 A.M. in the dark. A moment later an appliance clicked on with a watery gurgle-J.T.’s preset coffeemaker. Upstairs, on the same schedule as the coffeepot, people stirred. Doors opened and closed. Water ran in pipes.

Broker went back to the living room, got his travel bag, and took it to the half bath off the kitchen. When he emerged shaved and dressed, he smelled brewing coffee and heard soft footsteps coming down the stairs.

J.T. padded through the doorway wearing jeans, a blue flannel shirt, and wool socks. He flicked on the light. “Amy’s still asleep. Denise and Shami are coming down for breakfast, so let’s take some coffee into the barn. Feed some birds.”

J.T. poured coffee into a thermos, sat down, pulled on a pair of work shoes, then got up and reached for a lined denim jacket. Broker took his coat and boots from the mud porch and soon they were walking toward the barn, testing the icy pre-dawn air in their lungs.

J.T. handed Broker the thermos and two cups, then withdrew a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from his chest pocket. “Even in Minnesota, I can still smoke in my own barn,” he said as he filled his pipe and squinted into the distance over Broker’s shoulder. Broker reached for a cigar and they lit up like two truant kids.

J.T.’s eyes had acquired a new habit of focusing beyond the person he was with and resting on a point in the sky. Even a blank night sky. He used to be a close watcher of people, and they had pretty much lived up to his expectations. Now he preferred to stay far away from most of them, to get beyond them. Growing his own corn, oats, and alfalfa he’d become addicted to the constant examination of wind, clouds, humidity, and the color of air.

They walked out to the paddocks, fed the birds there, returned to the barn, and continued to scoop feed into five-gallon plastic buckets and dump them in feeding troughs in one of the two pens that sectioned off the lower level of the building. Broker moved in easily among the leggy hens who drifted away and cautiously returned after he’d dumped their feed.

The barn was new territory for Broker, with its musty scent of oats and corn fermenting in cold wooden bins and the loft above, heavy with alfalfa bales. He had grown up north of Grand Marais on Lake Superior. He knew something about fishing, hunting, logging, and iron mining. But there were few real farms in the granite bedrock of Cook County, Minnesota.

“Watch out. They peck at glasses, watches, rings, pens. Shiny stuff attracts them,” J.T. said. Broker shouldered through the birds. He wasn’t wearing a watch. He sure wasn’t wearing a ring.

Then J.T. held out an arm to bar Broker from entering the second pen. In that pen, a solitary four-hundred-pound male stood nine feet tall, with his thick black plummage flexed, tipped with white feathers. The stubby wings and tail feathers came up and he coiled his long neck at them.

“Popeye’s my big, ornery male,” J.T. said “When he gets his wings out and his tail up, never get in front of him. He’s getting ready to attack. Always stay to the side.”

“How come you have him all alone in here?” Broker asked.

“I, ah, haven’t figured out how to move him back into a paddock. Last time I tried, he cornered me and almost kicked me to death. So I’m going to wait till he’s way, way out of season to try again.”

The reinforced plywood door to the pen shuddered when Popeye threw a kick as if to echo J.T.’s remarks.

“Jesus,” Broker said.

“Yeah. Ostriches throw a mean knuckle. They’re the only birds that have two toes on their feet. Check it out.”

Broker snuck a look into Popeye’s pen. Two toes, but one was little and one was real big with a thick ugly claw on it. “Ow,” he said.

“It’s no joke. They can kill a lion with one kick. He could disembowel a man, easy.”

After all the birds were fed and watered, J.T. led Broker through his incubator and hatchery rooms, now closed down because the birds quit laying their two-pound eggs in September. J.T. and Broker climbed some stairs and entered a long, comfortable studio paneled with barn wood.

A counter ran around the room and one side held an ammo-loading press and shelves of gunsmith paraphernalia. Farther down the counter a screen saver on a Gateway PC trailed bubbles, sting rays, and an occasional shark. Two space heaters were in place as backup, but J.T. crumpled some newspaper and tossed some kindling in a Fisher woodstove next to his computer desk, and soon had a fire crackling.

The other side of the room was outfitted with more counters fanning out from an industrial Singer sewing machine and racks of leather-working tools. Sheaves of tanned ostrich leather in black, maroon, and gray-some with a scale pattern, some with quills-hung from the walls. A picture window behind the sewing machine was an ebony mirror, filled with night.

Broker took the rocking chair by the stove and J.T. sat on the stool at his work counter. J.T. tossed a leather checkbook case to Broker. “You want to trade up?” he asked.

J.T.’s first prototypes had been stiff, the stitching not sufficient to hold the leather. He’d brought in a commercial sewing machine, learned a few tricks, and started backing the ostrich with calfskin, and now the items were supple. This new one was a little slicker than the one in Broker’s hip pocket.

“Shiny leather,” Broker said.

J.T. nodded. “An experiment. Out of a South African shipment.”

Broker handed it back. J.T. tossed it aside and picked a sheaf of printer paper from the counter. He poured more coffee and relit his pipe.

The calm expression of the ostrich farmer was overprinted by the suspicious frown of J.T. Merryweather, former homicide detective.