Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

“That’s going to show,” he said.

“I’ll wear long sleeves.”

“I owe your husband a big favor, more than chopping wood can repay,” Broker said slowly.

Jolene shook her head. “Earl’s my problem. And I have to learn how to handle him.”

He could still walk away. But maybe this was his entry into the curious dynamics of this house. So he said it and went over the line. “How about I just teach him some manners.”

After another of their loud silences, he reached in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and removed a card on which was printed:

Broker Fixes Things

Carpentry, Electric, Plumbing

Landscaping

The card was history-an artifact of his undercover persona. He was following his reflexes but he was working in midair, without a badge, without authorization.

But it felt good.

He took a pen from his jacket pocket, crossed out the old Stillwater address, and wrote down J.T.’s phone number and handed her the card. “I’ll be at that number for the next two days. You think about it.”

Jolene looked at the card, then at him. “You sure?”

Broker nodded. “Like I say, you think it over. Now, I’m going to put this away and leave.” He hefted the splitting maul, which weighed twenty pounds of forged steel. He carried it into the house and searched for the basement stairwell and followed a rising column of loud music and a steam of sweat, dirty laundry, and a faint under-scent of cannabis down the stairs off the kitchen.

Earl had converted the finished part of the basement into a computer crash pad. He had a futon, bench press, and weights in one corner. The rest of the space was a spaghetti junction of cables and lines connecting up two computers, two video monitors, a scanner, a TV and VCR, and a CD player set up on three tables. Piles of disks and software manuals littered the carpet.

Earl sat at his central computer nodding to the beat of ’NSYNC. Broker did not know the name of the group and vaguely understood that it was teeny-bopper music, and he wondered why a grown man was into those sounds.

Earl was selecting blocs of numbers off his screen and saving them to a file. Broker took a discreet step closer and studied the spreadsheet. Names. Addresses. Social security numbers. Sixteen-digit numbers grouped in fours. Then the heading: mother’s maiden name. And names, hundred of them.

Hmmm.

Because of the music, Earl did not hear him approach, so Broker watched for a few moments as Earl scrolled up more columns of names and numbers. And it looked to Broker’s cyber-challenged, but suspicious, eyes that Earl was in possession of a whole lot of other people’s credit cards.

Broker reached down and took an envelope with Earl’s name and a St. Paul address from a pile of bills on the desk and tucked it in his pocket. Then he leaned over and tapped off the CD.

Earl spun around, momentarily startled. Broker smiled and said, “Working hard, huh?”

Earl quickly moused an X in a box and closed the screen. “Code,” he said.

“Code, huh?”

“Yeah, I’m consulting on an encryption project for this firm in Bloomington.”

“Sounds complicated.”

“Some people find programming elegant. Actually I think it’s pretty fucking tiring,” Earl said slowly, carefully watching Broker casually swing the maul in his right hand back and forth like a Stone Age intruder in Earl’s little high-tech pod.

“I wouldn’t know,” Broker said.

“Tiring and stressful,” Earl said. “Gets old pretty fast when you go through two million lines of code to find one comma out of place. I used to work for Holiday, you know, the chain of gas stations. Trouble-shooting their network.”

“Sure, Holiday,” Broker said.

“They own you twenty-four hours a day. Beep you in the middle of the night. You’re not your own person.” He positioned his feet to get up, and leaned forward and found the wedge blade of the maul jammed against his chest. “What the fuck?”

“Hey, that’s one of those new, thin-screen jobs,” Broker said, nodding at the trim-line monitor. “That must have cost a few bucks.”

Earl started to get up again and this time Broker thumped him on the chest with the maul, causing him to drop back in his chair.

“I’m done with the wood, thought you’d like to know.” Broker jabbed the maul harder.

Earl was not intimidated. He grinned and shook his head. “Take a minute to think, old man. When you came down those stairs you were looking at a bloody nose. Now you’re headed for intensive care.”

“Nah,” Broker said, “I think you’re just another of those point-and-click pussies.” Broker heaved the maul, and the cool, liquid glaze of the screen exploded in a puff of glass and sparks in Earl’s face. The maul handle clattered, overturning his keyboard.

“You, you,” sputtered Earl as he knelt and yanked the monitor cords from an outlet box.

“Sorry, must be my Luddite tendencies coming out,” Broker said.

Earl was puffed with fury but his shirt and eyebrows and hair and lap were dusted with sticky pieces of broken glass. His hands, which had balled into fists, now opened to wipe the debris away from his face and eyes.

“Don’t touch her again,” Broker said, then he whipped out his wallet, fingered out the hundreds that Earl had given him up north, and flung them in Earl’s face.

Then he turned, walked up the stairs, out of the house, and got into the Jeep. He waited for a minute, watching the door to see if Earl would come out. It occurred to him that he probably needed a weapon if he was going to play these kinds of games again. But Earl didn’t show. So he scribbled Earl’s license plate on a scrap of paper, shifted into reverse, backed up, put it in first, and drove away.

Broker was smiling, enjoying the memory of the shocked look on Earl’s face when his computer monitor turned to glitter dust. For the second day in a row he had come to Hank Sommer’s house for the last time. He had a feeling he’d be back.

On his way to J.T.’s, Broker detoured through Timberry’s main commercial drag and spent half an hour purchasing some items in a CompUSA.

Earl looked funny with shards of computer glass dusted in his hair and his eyebrows, so Jolene left him sputtering in the kitchen and went downstairs. She saw the chopping maul lying in the havoc of the computer screen like a collision between Earl’s and Broker’s worlds, and she laughed harder. Coming back up the stairs she continued to laugh. So he yelled at her to clean up the mess and she told him to go fuck himself and he started to come at her.

So she stabbed the straight finger in his chest again and said, “See, dummy, I told you not to mess with this guy.”

Then that mean glower came over Earl’s face that made him look like a blond Klingon on Star Trek . And he stomped off, and to make some kind of point he took the keys to Hank’s Ford Expedition and drove off and left her alone.

Which suited her just fine and she had to smile. Broker, swinging his axe.

Feeling a little light-headed, she wandered into the living room and allowed herself one twirl. Whee. Sort of. When Hank had been. . normal, the house was more like school and he was the teacher she got it on with between classes. Not really hers.

Now she liked being alone in the house; well, alone with the wreckage of Hank. She liked to walk through the rooms, trying them on.

The idea slowly forming.

Her house.

She turned the volume up on the baby monitor in the kitchen so she could hear Hank. Then she paced the living room and touched the old-fashioned couch with its fat arms outlined with fat brass tacks. For months they’d trolled the St. Croix Valley and western Wisconsin, hitting all the antiques shops, finding Mission Oak furniture and Tiffany lamps. Funny man. He’d worked hard to make the whole place look like an old Humphrey Bogart detective movie. She understood what Hank was trying to do, how he had made up this house like a movie set and arranged her among the furniture. He had reached a certain age and made some money, and he had tried to live his life like entertainment. Which was similar to trying to stay high all the time. Trying to make your life into a story that was smoother or more exciting than it really was.