Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

Broker flung out both his arms to block and cover Jolene, and collided with the squirming bodies. A hot wire stung deep into his left shoulder, withdrew and struck again, going deep into his left arm above the elbow joint. This time it stayed put.

Pain was abstract; there was so much going around that this new arrival had to stand in line. Amy had said cold sequesters sedation. It sequestered pain, too. Or, maybe, after the last hour or so, pain had just become his natural habitat.

Allen’s bloody hand slipped off the skinny haft and, desperate for purchase, he grabbed Jolene’s shotgun with both hands. Jolene immediately released the gun and Allen slipped farther down, let go of the gun, and clawed at her clothing. Her shirt tore and her stomach trembled slick, fish-belly white. Her knees pumped, churning ice water in Allen’s face.

“Please,” Allen screamed as his weight, anchored to Earl, pulled Jolene farther over the edge, which jerked Broker over, belly down on the planks. Broker’s right arm pawed for a grip, and, anchored around a piling, his left arm was extended across Jolene’s chest and hooked under her chin. Jolene thrashed, hip deep in the water, and grabbed the arm with both hands. Her hold broke the flex of his elbow and she slid deeper into the water, and Broker pitched over with her.

He knew the water at the end of the dock was deep, perhaps twelve feet, and the ice, while thin enough to break under a falling body, was strong enough to hold somebody down who became trapped beneath it. If she went into the hole after Earl and Allen, she’d be gone forever.

Glacier water stung Broker’s forearm and they all jabbered-wild-the North Atlantic protest-dialect of the drowning freezing. In the hoarse bedlam, Allen’s face contorted in a forest fire of white breath, level with Jolene’s squirming hips, splashing up to his neck in the black lake water and broken ice, trying to avoid Jolene’s fierce kicks.

“Please!”

Jolene writhed on Broker’s bad arm, going after Allen, kicking and kicking until his last scream ended in a thrashing garble of bubbles. Allen Falken’s eyes bulged in disbelief as the water blinded him, and the weight of Earl’s body slowly towed him down.

Utterly focused, Jolene kicked at the top of his head and deliberately held him under. It was dead, silent work punctuated only by the hysterical rasp of her breath and a stream of fading bubbles.

Then there was just Broker and Jolene and the vast silence that dwarfed simple words like help . And the burning stars. And then the urgent panic of their breathing resumed.

Allen’s last drowning spasm broke her grip on Broker’s arm. For a frantic beat Jolene turned and threw out her hands, trying to grab and climb Broker’s hooked arm, but her hands slid off his icy sleeves.

When the water reached her lips she shouted, “No, goddammit!” She surged up reaching, and the pain exploded full red and grinding in Broker’s left elbow, as Jolene’s right hand caught behind the haft of the scalpel. She anchored her left hand across her right wrist and held on.

Then Broker felt a buoyant lift to the pain. Nothing was pulling her down anymore. She’d floated free from Allen’s dead weight.

He tried to lift her, but his shoulder was stiffening and he couldn’t move. If he released his hold on the piling they would both go in and under the ice.

Teeth chattering, they stared at each other.

He was back where he began, at the mercy of the glacier water, and he had lost his strength and she was dying by inches and degrees. Within his grasp.

“Try to climb my arm,” he croaked.

She responded with a spasm of shaking. Then she gritted her teeth, let go with her left hand, and tried to reach past him for the dock, but it was too far and the effort almost cost her her grip on the knife imbedded in his elbow. She locked her left hand back on her right wrist. He saw she had no strength left.

“Hold on.” His voice rasped like a frigid ignition trying to turn over. Hers wasn’t much better.

She shuddered. “I’m good, I had a toddy.” But he could see she was losing it, slipping into the water.

The stars were their sequined shroud. And dancing among them, Broker saw the blue shimmer of the aurora. Now red. Then red and blue together slapping the dark trees, rippling on the ice.

He had wanted so much to save her and here she was dying in his arms, starting to sag lower in the water as the scalpel blade began to work free. He should say something. He should. .

The stark blank verse of police radio traffic intruded on his grave-side sermon. And he turned his face and saw that the light show was earthbound, financed by St. Louis County and originating from the rotating flashers on two cruisers, two ambulances, and a fire truck.

Many men’s voices, now, shouting, breathless. Stabbing flashlight beams. Then the clump of pounding feet. The dock shuddered as several figures in tan and gray St. Louis County parkas belly-flopped on the planks next to Broker. Arms shot out, someone-maybe Dave Iker-clamped a hand into Jolene’s short, icy hair, couldn’t get a grip, and then grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and lifted her bodily.

As Jolene was hoisted from the water there was a moment when she and Broker were face-to-face. Her lips jerked, cramping her features into a horrible grin.

“Jesus, Broker; you look like shit.”

More hands pulled them in, swaddled them with blankets. Broker rasped, “Jolene, what happened?”

“I called nine one one,” she croaked back.

“But what happened?” he repeated.

She raised her face past him to the stars and, this time, all her facial muscles fired on cue and she did smile.

Broker held it together long enough to tell the cops to look for two bodies under the ice. Then they loaded him into an ambulance and the shock, the intense cold, and his wounds finally hit him. He stared at Hank, who lay asleep or unconscious on an adjoining stretcher, thought for a moment, and muttered, “We have to feed the birds.”

A paramedic applied pressure bandages to Broker’s head and arm, ran an IV, and, in the course of calming him down, gathered that Broker was referring to J.T. Merryweather’s abandoned ostriches.

In the other ambulance, Jolene lay under blankets on her own stretcher and listened to the medics work on Amy right next to her. When they had stabilized Amy’s vital signs, one of the paramedics turned to Jolene and asked her how she was doing.

And Jolene said, “I want to talk to my lawyer.”

Broker heaved on soft morphine waves. Eddies. He was reminded of the movie Midnight Cowboy -everybody talking at him, can’t hear most of what they’re saying.

“Well, it’s about two weeks till deer opener,” Dave Iker said, “and I figure, if all else fails, we can wire a stick to your stump in place of a trigger finger. You might have luck with that arrangement.”

“Or,” Sam, the giant deputy, said, “since you’re now qualified on the car bomb, maybe we could find where the deer congregate and pursue that technique.”

The jokes were getting old by his second day in a room at Ely Miner Hospital. He contributed drugged smiles and an occasional wiggle of his head. Otherwise they had him immobilized on the bed.

Amy was recovering in another room from the Narcan cocktail that reversed her Fentanyl overdose. Once Jolene walked by his bed with Milt Dane. Someone said the St. Louis County attorney had set up shop down the hall in another hospital room and Hank was blinking out a statement.

Two grand juries were in the works-one up here and another down in Washington County.

It was said that the wife’s role in everything was murky.