Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

Long pause. Then: “Who the hell is this?”

“Professor Rath.” Allen smiled.

“What a minute,” Garf said through the road noise. Then. “Okay. I know who you are. Give me a reason why I should continue this conversation.”

“Because it turns out we have a lot in common. Where are you right now?” Allen asked.

“Heading north. I just passed Cambridge.”

“Stop at Tobie’s when you get to Hinckley,” Allen said. Tobie’s restaurant was the traditional halfway pit stop to Duluth. “What are you driving?”

“I’m in the van. Freezing my ass.”

“Park in the lot, stay in the van. I’ll find you.” Allen switched off the phone and stepped on the accelerator. It was an amazing sensation. His life was rolling like dice.

He was moving in the back of a car and it was all black outside the boxy windows. Not far away he sensed terrific cold. But here, inside, bundled in his bedding, the sensation of motion was enjoyable. Especially enjoyable considering the last thing he remembered was Allen coming in through the patio door to suffocate him with a pillow .

Now he was just inches from a snoozing Amy Skoda, whose hair tickled his cheek and smelled like herbal shampoo. She reclined beside him. They were like Roman lovers at a feast.

Maybe he had dreamed the scene with Allen.

Maybe he was dreaming now.

In the front seat Broker and Jolene discussed procedure. If it turned out that Hank could make a case that Nancy Ward, the recovery-room nurse, had acted with malicious intent, Broker insisted on calling the St. Louis County sheriff’s office.

Jolene thought Milt should be in on the decision. But she understood Amy’s status and was willing to hold off on Milt until the next round of communication with Hank.

Broker shook his head. “We don’t know how much energy he’s got left, how long this can go on. I want someone else around to verify what we’re doing.”

Jolene worried her lower lip between her teeth, squinted at the luminous numerals on her digital watch, and looked out the window.

“Okay,” she said. “But we wait for the morning. I want him to get a full night’s rest.”

Broker nodded. “How we doing back there?” he asked, calling over his shoulder.

There was no answer. Jolene twisted in her seat. “They’re both asleep.” She turned back around and gave the silence between them enough time to go from informal to personal. Then she inclined her head. “You and me; we’re water under the bridge, right?”

Broker did not answer so she extended her hand and poked a finger in his right thigh. “So you were a cop?”

“Who says?”

Jolene tossed her head toward Amy in back. “Miss Goody Two-shoes told me.”

“It was a long time ago,” Broker minimized.

“You should have told me, you really should have,” Jolene said.

Broker shrugged.

“An undercover cop?”

“I worked some time undercover.”

“Is that where the police record came from, made up for working undercover.”

“Yeah.”

“What about drugs? Did you work around drugs?” Jolene asked.

“Some. I didn’t like working drugs. Mostly I went after illegal gun traffic,” Broker said. He braked slightly as the loneliest, coldest, eight-point buck in Northern Minnesota trotted stiffly across the frost-bleached highway.

“Really? I thought cops were big into busting people for drugs,” Jolene said.

“They are. It’s their buffalo, the resource that supports their way of life. We should legalize them, like booze.”

“That’s radical for a cop.”

“Ex-cop.”

“Okay, ex-cop.” Jolene nodded respectfully.

Broker returned the nod. “People can learn how to quit getting high. You’d agree with that.”

“I’d agree with that,” Jolene said.

“Yeah, well, try to learn how to quit being dead after you’ve been shot five times in the chest with a Tec Nine converted to full auto.”

“And the drugs are the reason a lot of people are shooting each other,” Jolene said.

“There you go,” Broker said.

“Sort of like what Hank used to call a worldview, with the buffalo and everything,” Jolene said with a wry smile. Then she turned away and stared out the window. The dashboard lights created a transparent mirror effect in the glass, and she saw her face superimposed on the darkness.

Of the many hard parts to this thing, the hardest was that she still liked him a lot.

No one wanted to turn off their cars in this weather. An inferno of auto exhaust clouded the air and made the vehicles in the parking lot of Tobie’s look like they were on fire. Allen, always prepared, popped his trunk, opened his winter survival bag, and pulled out a fleece sweater and his Goretex parka, put them on along with a warmer hat and gloves. Then he closed the trunk, picked up his medical bag, walked over to the green Chevy van, knocked, and then opened the door.

Garf’s hair was askew and silver-tipped with ice. His face looking like raw Polish sausage. He sat behind the wheel with his bare chest peeking between the askew hospital robe that he wore under his coat. His empty left sleeve stuck out akimbo, his left hand was in a sling and poked from the coat and rested on the steering wheel. He looked demented, Shakespearean, in that getup.

There was this big pistol sitting in his lap.

Allen, getting in, sitting down, had learned about guns working his way backward from wound ballistics at Regions, back when it was Ramsey County Emergency. He identified the weapon as an old, 1911 military-model.45. It made a big hole and had been designed specifically to knock a man down with one shot.

“Okay,” Garf said, sliding his right hand over the handle of the pistol and pointing it at Allen. “The next thirty seconds are the most important of your life. Talk.”

Allen stared into the muzzle of the pistol and took a moment to anesthetize the stammer of panic he felt swelling up in his gums and teeth and tongue. Then he smiled tightly and peppered Earl with concise sentences: “You talked to Hank, I talked to Hank. You told him what happened to Stovall. I told him how I accidently gave him the wrong medication in the recovery room up there. He can hang both our asses.” Allen checked his watch. “Ten seconds. Anything else you want to know?”

Garf stared at Allen for a long time.

Allen, reassured, continued in a more relaxed tone. “I saw Broker and Amy bring you into the ER early this afternoon. I went to the house and was in the kitchen when they were in the studio with Hank. When they did the alphabet-board bit. I heard them on the baby monitor. Then I went around the back of the house and hid under the deck when Jolene came out and called you. I tried to get in and do it quietly with a pillow but they came back and I had to leave. Sorry.”

Garf had to laugh. “The fucking baby monitor?” Then he narrowed his eyes. “A pillow? What happened to, you know, the Hippocratic Oath?”

Allen smiled. “What’d Jolene mean when she said this is NoDak serious?”

Garf lowered his eyes and scratched the pattern on the wooden handle of the pistol with a fingernail. It made a distinct sound. Maybe the hinge of fate.

Allen continued. “I get the impression you and she have been here before.”

Garf’s eyes came up. Allen thought they might have been very nice eyes once and had been filled with many possibilities. Garf said, almost tenderly, “And this is your first time.”

Allen, all business, brushed the comment aside. “So how are you going to find the place? Ask everybody in town?”

Garf took a deep breath, winced; mistake, his ribs.

“I remember how to get there,” Allen said. “And what were you going to do with them after you shot them full of great big holes? There’s ballistics to worry about. And messy body fluids. And what about Hank. He has to stick around, you know. There’s millions of dollars at risk.”