Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

Silence after the mechanism. Like they heard.

Jolene blurted, “Earl, I got a gun in here. A shotgun was in the closet. I’ve been thinking, and no way I’m coming out if Allen is there.” The slight slur and wavering control in her voice was real, not faked. Thank you, Johnny Walker.

“Open the door,” Earl said.

“I don’t trust him and the more you’re around him I don’t trust you,” she shouted.

“Open the door, now!”

Jolene took a deep breath, removed the chair, shoved the lock latch, and cracked the door.

The big.45 came up smoothly at the full extension of Earl’s right arm so the business end of the barrel made a cool circle against Allen’s forehead.

Under his breath, Earl said, “Sorry, but you got to go along until I get her calmed down. Jolene management is an art I have spent a lifetime acquiring.”

Allen stared at the door, at the sounds of the chair moving, the latch freeing up. He was not reassured. They were getting tricky on him. They were deviating from his plan, and now there was the wild card of Jolene’s drinking on the play.

The door opened an inch, just enough to see one of Jolene’s eyes over the huge tube of a shotgun that poked out at them. The sour musk of alcohol was unmistakable on her breath.

“Okay, Jolene, see?” Earl wagged the pistol in Allen’s face.

“I’ll only talk to you if we’re alone,” Jolene said.

Allen spoke up. “Jolene, put down the gun. Where’s Hank?”

“Shut up,” hissed Earl.

Jolene’s voice was quick to capitalize on the edge of anger and frustration in Earl’s: “Don’t you see what he’s doing?”

The pistol pressed against his forehead was a steel tether that held Allen motionless. The shotgun sticking out the door was pointed at his chest. They were ganging up on him. Allen felt a rivulet of nervous sweat streak down between the scalpel handle and the hollow of his right wrist.

So this is what it’s like to be a patient. This was street surgery. He was on their level, which was the level of desperation and anger and drunken decision-making. He had lost control of the situation and was smack at the bottom of the behavioral ladder with the two classic caveman options: he could try to run or he could fight. Not fight conceptually, like with the Fentanyl. This time it was fight with his hands.

“Earl, honey,” Jolene blurted. “I was so worried when you went off with him that you wouldn’t come back.” Her voice teetered on an alcohol crutch and was beautifully nuanced with fear, need, and tiny tugs of long-dormant affection.

“You and me,” Earl said.

“There it is,” Jolene said.

“For Christ’s sake, you two,” Allen’s voice cracked with distress.

The hammer on the big Colt clicked back. “Hands on your head. Now slowly turn around.” As Allen turned, the pistol left his forehead and returned as an insistent prod at the base of his neck. “Outside, Allen. Move,” Earl ordered.

This numbing awkwardness must be shock, thought Allen. In disbelief, he raised his hands carefully, so as not to dislodge the scalpel. “I don’t get it; I came all this way to show you a way out of this mess.”

“Shut up. Now, real easy, get out your car keys.”

“My car keys?” Allen gulped, uncertain.

They were into the main room now, heading for the door. Then they were outside where the cold clamped down, solid, crushing.

“Get out your keys and open the trunk of your car,” Earl said.

Allen’s teeth chattered as hysterical laughter almost took him, because he couldn’t tell if his shaking jaw was the stammers or the temperature. He flashed on the image of his car in long-term parking at the St. Paul Minneapolis International Airport. A ripe smell would seep from the trunk around spring thaw.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Allen said.

Earl’s reasonable tone was at odds with the impossible temperature, with his misshaped posture and attire, bare-chested in the heavy coat, the humped sling.

“Allen, listen carefully. She’s got a gun and she’s boozed up. And she’s got Hank in there. She won’t come out as long as you’re walking around free. So I’m going to tuck you away for a while, disarm her, talk her down, and get us all back on the same page. We still need you to fix his eyes, right?”

“Why do I have to get in the trunk?” Allen protested.

“What would you prefer? More fresh air? How about I nail you to a fucking tree. C’mon-get in the trunk.”

Allen stared at his car. He was certain that if he climbed into that trunk he would never get out alive. His eyes darted left and right. There was enough moonlight to make out a lattice of birch trees against the star-blistered sky. A dull glare of ice glimmered on the lake. A few feet away were bristles of frost-coated, weathered white planks. A sturdy boat dock extended twenty yards into the lake.

But the boat dock led nowhere. There was no place to run. Earl had the gun.

Carefully he lowered his right hand to his right jacket pocket and began to work out his key ring. As he did he let the handle of the scalpel slide down into his palm.

Allen had only a second to decide. He pulled out the keys, letting them jingle; then as he thumbed through the keys, searching for the right one, he fumbled, then dropped the key ring.

For a beat Earl’s eyes followed the keys. Then he said, “How come you don’t have your gloves on?”

In that fraction of a second, Allen let the scalpel drop from his sleeve. His fingers caught the familiar curved handle, twirled the knife, and, in one smooth decisive movement, he wheeled and struck upward at the notch where Earl’s ribs joined over his diaphragm.

* * *

The moment that Earl marched Allen away from the door, Jolene slipped out of the room and shadowed them down the hall. As they went out the front door she tore through the main room, going through drawers, checking shelves, looking for a box of shotgun shells.

Nothing.

So this was making amends to people we have harmed.

With an empty shotgun. Right.

And all she had was part of the truth to go with. Even if it damned her. She grabbed at the phone on the desk, which was hard-wired so the emergency dispatcher could trace the call. Strangely, as she punched in the numbers, she was not thinking of Amy, or Hank, or Broker out there in the dark; she was thinking of that poor, dumbass NoDak store clerk.

“Nine one one,” the operator said. “Is this a life-and-death situation?”

“They’re going to kill us next,” Jolene shouted.

“Who’s trying to kill you?”

“One of them’s a doctor. He gave the nurse an overdose of narcotics to make it look like suicide, and the guy who lives here-he drugged him and put him out in the cold to die. He’s in a red Jeep. An old one. Please send me some help.”

“Calm down, where are you now? What kind of narcotics?”

“Uncle Billie’s on Lake One outside of Ely.” Jolene held up the empty glass ampule. She wasn’t sure how to pronounce it, so she sounded it out: “Fentanel, I think it says. Goddammit, hurry; we need cops and an ambulance.”

The gunshot rearranged the flimsy architecture of her resolve and she screamed, “They’re shooting.”

Jolene dropped the phone, seized the shotgun like a club, and yanked open the door. There were witnesses and there were witnesses and, goddammit, it was time to pick and choose.

The problem was thatwhen Allen spun to strike, so did Earl.

“Hey,” Earl shouted, irritated. Swatting at Allen’s face with the big pistol. He did not see the tiny wafer of the world’s sharpest steel streak up.

But Allen was not used to sticking scalpels into moving targets. He attempted to adjust the angle of his thrust to compensate for Earl’s sidestep. Earl grunted when the blade went in.