Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

“Yeah, yeah.” Broker handed J.T. the notepad with Earl’s license number and the envelope with his name and his St. Paul address.

“What’s this?”

“Could you run this guy for me, see what turns up?”

“You run him. Call John E. at Washington county. He’ll do it for you.”

“You still have a computer link to downtown. If I call John he’ll want to know why. And if he finds out I’m snooping around he’ll get curious about that, too. Next thing, unmarked cars will be following me around.”

“Which is, like, their job-you know-sworn officers, they do shit like that if they pick up on suspicious behavior,” J.T. said. “But, fact is, I could use your help around here over the weekend, so I’ll do your scut work.”

“Help?”

“I’m taking some birds to the slaughterhouse in the morning. The nearest USDA ostrich-approved butcher is in Iowa. And Denise’s sister’s place is on the way, so I’ll spring Shami from school one day and take the family for a long weekend. Leave in the morning, be back Sunday night. If, that is, you’ll feed and look after the stock.”

“Three days,” Broker said, liking the excuse to stick around.

“Friday, Saturday, Sunday.”

“I can do that. I don’t know about her.” He pointed to Amy, who continued to meditate back and forth along the fence.

“Tell her you’ll have the place to yourself, the two of you. You know, during the day you can go over to Sommer’s and rescue the hot wife, then you can come back here and play house with her. Get in a lot of practice that way.” J.T. smiled.

Gingerly, Broker approached Amy and chose his words carefully. “J.T.’s asked me to keep an eye on the place until Sunday night,” he said.

Amy took her time, with a sweet smile. Then she reached out and tapped him once on the chest. “I agreed to ride along for your hunch. But I’m going to skip your midlife crisis.”

She pulled a Mesaba Air Lines schedule from her pocket. Mesaba was the commuter air link from the Cities to points north. “I stopped by the airport on the way back from the mall. I’m going to see about a flight tomorrow. You will give me a ride to the plane?”

“Of course.”

“If you were smart you’d go back with me,” she said. “It doesn’t sound like a good situation over there, Sommer being at home instead of in a full-care facility. It sounds, well, dysfunctional.”

She was right, of course. When he didn’t respond, she continued. “Scenes like that tend to have these messy internal dynamics. They tend to drag well-meaning outsiders down to their level.”

Broker looked up at several female ostriches who bobbed their heads in big-eyed agreement behind Amy. After her sensible advice had faded, he asked, “So tell me something?”

“Sure.”

“Why does he look at me when I first walk into the room. I mean, right in the eyes. Just like somebody you know. Then his eyes start to roam.”

“That could be primitive reflexes, a reacting to shapes and sounds. Residual brain-stem stuff.”

“What do you look for if you think someone’s coming out of a coma?”

“False hope in the eye of the beholder,” Amy said.

“C’mon.”

“Okay, you look for signs of conscious thought and motor control. Blinking in patterns comes to mind. One for yes, two for no. If you have that you can progress to an alphabet board and communicate.”

J.T. appeared on the porch holding a cordless phone. “So what’s the plan?” he called.

“She’s catching a flight north tomorrow. I’m staying to watch the birds,” Broker yelled back.

J.T. waved and went into the house talking on the phone.

Broker said, “I need to stay and help him out.”

Amy nodded. “You guys are pretty good friends.”

Broker thought about it. “We were partners, we respect each other, but I don’t think we were ever good friends,” he said.

Amy inclined her head. “Why not?”

Broker shrugged. “We’ve talked this out over the years. Maybe it’s semantics. But we figured it’s a stretch for an intelligent white guy and an intelligent black guy to call themselves friends in this country. Especially if they’re cops.”

“But you get along great,” Amy said.

“Yeah, but would our friends get along, see? The problem is always other people,” Broker said. “As long as we’ve known each other, after work, we’d go unwind in different bars, we went home to different neighborhoods. It’s like two religions that coexist but can’t really mingle and still be themselves. So we belong to different-skin religions. It’s the term we made up to simplify things.”

“I don’t know if I like the implications of that way of thinking,” Amy said.

“I can dig it. You can afford to be liberal. You’re from Ely, where the biggest minority is timber wolves, with tourists a close second.”

They walked back toward the house. Halfway, she stopped him with a hand on his elbow. “I was right, wasn’t I, Sommer’s wife doesn’t bore you?”

“Amy, I won’t play games with you.”

She shook her head and released her fingers from his arm and said, “You won’t answer me, either.”

J.T. walked Broker through the feeding and watering routines. He’d already mixed his feed and run hoses. All Broker had to do was scoop and dump and turn spigots. Before supper, Amy and Broker helped Shami and J.T. load nine birds in a horse trailer. Loading involved selecting and moving birds from the outdoor holding pen into one of two smaller stalls inside the barn. The door on the stall was chest-high, inch-thick, reinforced plywood hinged to swing out away from the stall into the lower level of the barn where J.T. had backed up his trailer. When the door was open, it formed one half of a funnel; the trailer door supplied the other half.

If a bird was passive they moved in on either side and grabbed a wing and steered her into the trailer. And seven of the nine ostriches went easily. Two of then were touchy and aggressive. So J.T. gave Broker a long-handled barn shovel to fend off an attack by placing the blade across the bird’s breast if she charged.

He repeated his warnings about staying beyond the kick radius. And moving to the side of a bird, never frontally. As Broker held the bird at bay with the shovel, J.T. danced in and grabbed the head and quickly slipped on a black sleeve. Once hooded, the bird became docile.

As they maneuvered the second feisty female into a corner, hooded her, and put her in the trailer, the walls of the adjoining pen shook with sledgehammer impacts.

Popeye, the truck killer, was announcing his presence.

They closed the door of the left stall and J.T. pointed to the identical door of the right stall. Popeye hovered and hissed, his angry eyes nine feet above the floor, his wings up and out in a rampant threat display.

“I don’t want you going into his pen when I’m gone. Just drop the feed over the door into the side of the feeder and turn on the faucet. I’m serious. Don’t open this door, and you never want to be in front of him when his wings are up,” J.T. lectured.

In the house, as they were washing up for supper, the phone rang and Denise called out. “A call for Mr. Phil Broker from a Mrs. Jolene Sommer.”

Amy, helping set the table, did not look up. She shook her head slightly and continued placing silverware. Broker took the phone from Denise.

“Broker?”

“Yes.”

Jolene said, “Earl did some checking around and found a Phil Broker in a police computer who did time in Stillwater in 1989 for aggravated assault. Anybody we know?”

Broker exhaled audibly and did not answer.

“Yeah, well, Earl’s feeling a little lonely and threatened and is off looking for a friend of his whose brains are all down in his neck, if you know what I mean. I just thought you should know it could get rough if you’re thinking of coming back over here.”