Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

There was this interesting new edge to Jolene’s voice. Daring him.

Broker could feel Jolene gauging his silence on the other end of the connection. After an interval, she asked, “Are you?” she paused, then added, “Thinking of coming back here?”

Her voice skipped pretense and caution and cut straight to the danger. And it was Jay and the Americans in Broker’s head, and she was defying him to come a little bit closer. And she knew he knew it. It was just that simple.

And he was just that dumb. And she knew that, too.

Do it. Go.

“How about in an hour?”

“I’m here.” She hung up.

Broker hung up, turned, and Amy was standing two feet behind him.

“For what’s it’s worth, I think you’re headed for trouble,” Amy said simply as he stepped around her.

Good. About time something happened.

Broker had lost his appetite, so he walked out to the Quonset hut and levered open the door to his mangled truck. He reached behind the seat, under a tarp, and removed a winter-survival pack containing some highway flares and clothing. Then he took out a 12-gauge shotgun, shells for it, and a sack of cleaning tools.

He sat on the bent running board and disassembled the old Mossberg, a practical, no-frills farm gun with a cut-down, barely legal, barrel, which he swabbed, and sprayed some WD 40 on the slide and the safety. He reassembled the piece and worked the slide, thumbed the safety on, then off, and cleared it. Satisfied it was in working order, he stuffed four double-aught rounds into the magazine, wracked one in the chamber, set the safe, and wrapped it in a blanket. Then he took the gun and the survival bag to the Cherokee loaner. He folded down the rear seat, making a handy compartment so he could quickly reach back, flip up the prone rear seat backrest, and access the weapon. Then he tucked the box of double-aught shells and his survival kit in with the gun.

As he shut the Jeep door and turned around he saw J.T. standing in front of him with a manila folder in his hand.

“This guy isn’t that heavy,” J.T. said.

“Really?”

J.T. opened the folder and handed Broker a sheet of fax paper. He squinted at the smudged writing on the ruled form. It was a fax of a photo negative, an old police report from Redmond, Washington.

Officer responded to report of a fight at the Microsoft offices. Subject was a programmer who had an argument with a superior and assaulted the CEO who tried to intervene. Subject was arrested and escorted from premises and held overnight. No assault charges filed.

“So nothing, so that’s it?” Broker said, smiling slightly, but not entirely relieved. His instincts told him Earl Garf was still trouble.

“But look where it happened. Microsoft. So, for the hell of it, I called out there. They’re two hours behind and I got a sergeant in records who remembered the incident.”

“Good memory.”

“Not exactly, what he said was, ‘Oh, yeah, the guy who took a swing at God. He’ll never work in the computer industry again.’ ”

“God, huh?” Broker said.

“Yeah, your boy Earl tried to punch out Bill Gates. Know what else the Redmond cop said? He said that if he would have controlled his temper and kept his nose to the grindstone he’d be a cyber millionaire now. He was in on the ground floor. They fired him and rescinded all his stock options before they were vested.”

“That’s interesting. But this guy is still an asshole,” Broker said.

“But not exactly a heavyweight,” J.T. said. Then he paused with droll apprehension, “unless. .”

“Unless what?” Broker grinned.

“Unless he’s the vampire,” J.T. said, raising his eyebrows in mock-foreboding. The vampire was their lingo for the hypothetical perp who didn’t cast a reflection in mirrors, who left no trace, no fingerprints or tracks. Who was way too smart to get caught.

They both laughed. And Broker said, “I don’t think so. He’s just another asshole who deserved to be jammed up, and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to chase him off and give Sommer’s wife some breathing room.”

“So, you want some company so you don’t fuck this guy up too much?” J.T. asked with a flavor of the old days in his tone.

“It’s not like that,” Broker said.

“Right. Story of your life. Nothing is what it looks like, huh?” J.T. shook his head.

Broker climbed into the Jeep and turned the key. “I’ll be back tonight.”

“Sure you will,” J.T. said.

The constellation Orion tilted on the horizon like a sideswiped road sign, and Broker was driving way too fast and thinking how his whole life had been a struggle to stay within the rules. His distaste for procedure had turned his stint in law enforcement into a personal method-acting spree. No one had ever stayed undercover for ten years. But he had. In local cop gossip, the Broker Syndrome superseded the Stockholm Syndrome.

And apparently Earl had pulled up some relic of Broker’s old undercover persona that was still floating around in the computers. Obviously, the “revelations” had favorably impressed Jolene Sommer. Broker, driving seventy mph down a winding country road, wasn’t about to discourage her.

Even his idea of settling down had been extreme, marrying a woman who wanted to be Joan of Arc. But he had tried to live in a conventional world of rules. I do. For better or worse. Daddy .

Didn’t work.

The cold fields and tree lines sparkled with willful diamonds of excitement in his high beams. He was playing with other people’s lives. Yeah, well, he didn’t belong pulling a plow, did he?

So take a break. Take a chance. Blow the carbon out of your pistons.

You’re bargaining . That’s what Nina would say if she were here. She wasn’t jealous. She knew the score. The world was complicated. Stuff happened. But we do believe in consequences, don’t we?

Jolene was a passing opportunity, and latching on to her could be a revenge game. Was he getting back at Nina? Maybe.

Probably.

And as he turned into the driveway and snaked between the old pine trees he thought how this wasn’t for Sommer anymore, was it?

This was for him.

He looked around. No sign of Earl’s van. It could be in the garage. Broker didn’t care. Bring him on.

Before he got out, he saw her silhouette framed in a rectangle of light in the open doorway with a hip against the jam in the oldest posture in the world.

And as he came up the steps, still not able to see her face, just her shape, he wondered who she was and would he ever find out. And it wasn’t like adultery because he was separated and she was basically a widow, and like Amy said, she just observed a shorter decent interval than most people. And apparently, tonight, so did he.

“So,” she said. No perfume. No candles, no wine, no fire in the fireplace. She looked careworn in a pair of old jeans and a faded green blouse, and her short hair was frazzled and her green eyes were beyond weary. Just- so, here we are.

Fast through the darkened house, wordless down the stairs into the bedroom. Broker looked once at the closed door to Sommer’s studio, then he winced at the baby monitor on the bedside table. The deep, distant sound of Hank Sommer’s breathing rose and fell like surf.

“He’s asleep,” she said as she reached over and turned the volume down on the monitor.

“Earl?”

“Off brooding. Probably plotting against you. I don’t expect him back until late tonight, if at all,” and she turned off the light. And it was just her shape again, defined by a night-light. Like in the doorway.

When he reached for her she pulled back long enough to look seriously in his eyes and say, “Just never lie to me, okay?”