Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

Allen, less patient, now shook the box of gloves.

Jolene and Earl exchanged questioning glances.

“Fingerprints,” Allen said. “You have to wipe this place down while we take care of Broker. Anything you touched.”

Jolene and Earl pulled on the tight rubber gloves. A knot of birch popped in the fireplace, showering the hearth with sparks, and they jumped. Allen, focused and calm, did not.

“Broker,” Jolene said.

“We were thinking, so we stopped at a liquor store,” Earl said. He pulled a brown paper bag from his trench-coat pocket with his good hand and removed a fifth of Johnny Walker Red Label scotch. “We prime him with this stuff, we dress him less than perfect for the weather, and put him in his truck, take him in the woods, stage a crash, and leave him for the cold.”

“And Hank?” Jolene almost whispered.

Allen was taking items out of his bag and arranging them on a rough coffee table. “When we finish here, and get Hank back to town, I’ll inject his eyelids with something that will numb them so he can’t blink.” The drug was Botox-botulism toxin. It was commonly used in cosmetic surgery to smooth out wrinkles. Allen would inject it in the levator muscles to immobilize the eyelids.

Jolene stared at him. “Something?”

Allen smiled. “I could have brought it along and done it here but then you wouldn’t need me anymore, and maybe Earl would shoot me and dump me in the woods because I know too much.”

“Not bad,” Jolene said.

“Now,” Allen said. “Amy was an anesthesia provider, so she’d have some sophisticated ideas about getting high. I’m going to give her a long run for a short slide.” He and Earl each took one of Amy’s arms and lifted her to the fold-out couch. They dropped her next to Hank and their shoulders touched. Her weight shifted and her long hair drifted across her face.

“Wait a minute,” Jolene said, touching her own short hair nervously. For the first time she noticed that Amy had taken off her sweater and was wearing a kind of neat print blouse, with a blue-patterned cave painting of stick figures on gray and gold. Her fingernails were painted this deep purple. “You’re going to leave her there?”

Allen and Earl stared at her.

Jolene said, “I mean, if I have to clean up, I don’t want to watch while she. .”

“Okay, let’s put her in a bedroom,” Allen said. They struggled through the kitchen and down a hall. Arms folded across her chest, Jolene followed them.

The bedroom was cold and musty; there was just an antique mahogany four-poster bed and matching dresser. There were used prescription pill bottles on the dresser and a World War II picture. A tube of Ben Gay lay on the night table. It was the kind of room where an old guy lived alone.

Allen and Earl hoisted Amy to the bed and arranged her with pillows behind her back, to make her appear comfortable. Allen went back for his bag.

Earl said, “So, we thought-if they’re traveling together, they could be romantically involved.”

“That’d be my guess,” Jolene said dryly.

“Then what if the lodge is found in some disarray, evidence of drugs scattered around in the wake of Amy’s suicide. And some booze. It might look like Broker was distraught over Amy. He finds her dead, he gets high, drinks too much, and takes off on a fuck-the-world drive too fast; he goes off the road, knocks himself out, shatters the windshield. .” Earl grinned.

Allen’s calm voice continued behind her, in the doorway. “Then we clean up after ourselves, go back home, and no one knows we were here. We read about them in the newspapers. Northwoods lovers claimed by suicide and grief.” He paused. “What do you think?”

“You’re the doctor,” Jolene said.

Jolene had remained mostly quiet. Now she turned and studied Allen’s face, which looked haggard, with a day’s growth of beard.

Anticipating her question, Allen said, “Someday, when this is over, when the money is in the bank, when Hank is in the ground, and you and Earl have worked out the terms of your relationship-perhaps we could see each other.”

Earl snickered. “C’mon, you guys, let’s keep it clean.”

They were gone, out of his range of vision, somewhere else in the house to where they’d taken Amy. It was just about over. For Amy, for Broker, for him. It infuriated him that Allen, Jolene, and Earl were going to win.

Hank’s thoughts were just embers, but the thing that was coming for him was clearer now. Almost distinct.

But at this moment he was riveted to the story unfolding in front of him.

Allen’s patient courtship of Jolene was based on bad math. Allen had factored in three deaths: Amy’s, Broker’s, and, eventually, Hank’s.

The expression on Earl’s face corrected the arithmetic. When the time was right, Earl would add Allen to the total.

And Jolene was the catalyst, the fire, thought Hank, that we have all swarmed to. And being a drunk, she would always backslide to Earl in moments of crisis.

Hank had heard everything since they came inside. He could not see Amy and Broker, but he understood the play. He had glimpsed Allen, Earl, and Jolene through lidded eyes as they caucused in front of the fire at the foot of his bed.

Allen was very thorough on details and methods, but he should have stayed with working inside immobile, drugged bodies. The outsides of alert moving bodies were still beyond his aptitude. Allen wasn’t ten words into his brilliant plan when Hank realized that Earl was going to kill him. Earl, who knew a good thing, would assist Allen in staging Amy’s suicide and leaving Broker out in the cold. He’d watch approvingly while Allen destroyed Hank’s eyelids. He’d wait until Allen had outlived his usefulness, presumably after the malpractice case was resolved, and after Allen had quietly finished the job of murdering Hank in a medically plausible way.

Then Earl would make Allen disappear.

And at the every end, Jolene would figure out a way to pension off Earl and seize the last, highest grip on the situation-eagle claws.

Too bad. Jolene, Earl, and Allen held great potential as characters if only he could script them before Allen came at his eyes with the needle.

Of the three, the only one he held any hopes of redemption for was Jolene. Of course, he was biased.

Allen came back from the bathroom down the hall where he’d emptied two square lactated plastic ringer bags. After he passed them through the fingers of Amy’s right hand to acquire her fingerprints, he hung the bags from a handy tine on the left antler of a European-mounted twelve-point white-tail deer rack on the wall over the bed.

He took two long, glistening lengths of plastic tubing from his bag. Again the trick with the fingers, like she was handling them. They were jointed and each had a blue clip with a white wheel. Then he did something with needles, hooking one tube to the other at a joint.

“The hard thing is starting your own IV,” Allen said. He took out a strip of rubber tourniquet and he tied it around her arm above the elbow. Then he turned Amy’s left hand, evaluating the network of now-plump blue veins feeding between her knuckles. As her fingers spread open a tightly folded piece of paper fell on her lap.

Allen paused to unfold it.

“It’s the alphabet thing,” Jolene said.

“Crude,” Allen said, smoothing the paper on Amy’s jeans. “All wrong. The letters shouldn’t be arranged in normal sequence. They should be grouped according to priority of which letters are most frequently used in speech.”

“Well, it worked good enough,” Jolene said.