Absolute Zero (18 page)

J.T. cleared his throat; wrinkles appeared on his neck as he drew his head back between his broad shoulders and tried to stand up and scratch his forehead. “I been meaning to talk to you.”

“My truck?” Broker insisted.

“It’s in the Quonset,” J.T. said, pulling on his coat and moving toward the door.

Broker and Amy followed J.T. back out into the cold and they tramped after him across the yard to the large equipment shed. J.T. pushed open the doors and flipped on a light. A tractor and a John Deere bailer were parked in the foreground. A bobcat sat beyond them, and parked in the rear was the shape of Broker’s sleek Ford Ranger, shrouded in a huge blue tarp.

Broker walked forward, grabbed a handful of tarp, yanked, and then groaned. The windows on both doors were gone, nothing but pulverized shatter-glass hanging in the corners. The door panels were caved in and so were the fenders and wheel wells. The sides of the truck bed were cratered. The tailgate was dimpled.

His truck looked like a Roman legion had hauled it in a field and used it for catapult practice.

“I can explain,” J.T. said as Broker began to space out his cussing.

“Goddamn mother fucker . . . I let you use this to bring in
hay
?”

“Well, it involved hay—straw actually. See, I was taking bedding straw into the paddock where I used to keep Popeye and . . .”

“Son of a bitch, shit!”

“. . . and the sucker decided to take on the truck. Amazing he could kick that high.”

“Kick?” Broker voice was strangled. “A
bird
did this?”

“If it helps any, I damn near didn’t get out of that pen intact,” J.T. offered. “It’s not like you paid full boat for the thing. I remember how you had the fix in at the police auction. You had your eye on that truck since the time you confiscated it on that meth bust up in Pine County.”

Broker growled and stomped out of the Quonset and paced back and forth. He noticed Denise and Shamika standing on the porch. After making fleeting eye contact they both diplomatically scooted to Denise’s Accord and drove away.

Hearing J.T.’s boots crunch up on the cold trap-rock behind him, Broker walked to where J.T.’s glossy Chevy Silverado was parked next to the house. “Well,” Broker announced, “I’m going to need to
drive
something.”

“Uh, wait. No way, man. You can’t use the Chevy. I sort of promised that to Amy to go shopping. But, ah, you can use the Cherokee.”

“The Cherokee?” Broker swung his gaze to the ten-year-old boxy red Jeep that sat next to the Chevy. It looked like an experiment to determine how much rust could be balanced on top of two axles.

“The Leper Colony?” Broker protested.

“Not much to look at, I agree; but everything under the hood is rebuilt, got new rubber, heater’s good. Oil changed every three thousand miles,” J.T. added.

Amy smiled and patted the fender of the Silverado. “So which of you guys is making breakfast?”

After breakfast Amy took
off on her shopping errand and Broker had some time to kill before his coffee date with Sommer’s ex-wife. So he helped J.T. rearrange bales in his hayloft for a few hours. Then he washed up, changed his shirt, started up the old Jeep, and headed for St. Paul.

Broker picked up Interstate 94 coming in over the St. Croix River from Wisconsin just west of the Hudson Bridge. Then he drove twenty miles to where the city of St. Paul was rising from the hundred-year blahs. The talk was all about the Minnesota Wild’s new hockey arena that would dominate the redeveloped riverfront. St. Paul was swinging her tail after decades of being eclipsed in the shadow of Minneapolis.

Broker was aware of this primarily because he had trouble finding a place to park. On his third try, he squeezed into a ramp and then walked to the newspaper building on Cedar Ave.

Dorothy Gayler was tall and lanky in a long dark coat, with shiny black hair cut in a precise page boy that brought to mind Prince Valiant from the Sunday comics. The hard October light emphasized the faint lines that branched off her eyes and down her cheeks. She made no effort to disguise any of it with makeup.

She picked him out easily from the busy early afternoon street crowd. He did not have a cell phone jammed to his ear. He wore jeans and the blaze-orange fleece jacket.

“Mr. Broker,” she said, extending a lean, knuckle-prominent hand. They shook. “There’s a coffee shop in the skyway, shall we?” He nodded and she led the way. They went in the newspaper lobby, mounted a stairway, and entered the skyway, which was a covered, elevated walkway system that connected all the downtown buildings and allowed St. Paul residents to travel between buildings out of the winter weather.

“Are you located in Ely?” she asked.

“No, my uncle has an outfitters there. I was just helping him out.”

“And what is it you do when you’re not guiding canoe trips?”

“I have a small resort on Lake Superior, north of Grand Marais.”

“So you don’t get down to our city much, do you?” she asked.

Broker smiled at her cordial, city-mouse condescension and followed her through the busy skyway past banks and boutiques and into a coffee shop decorated with just do it Nike posters and swooshes and lots of chrome.

Several highly caffeinated young people jerked their eyes up from their laptop computers, perused Broker’s rustic attire, then returned to their screens.

Dorothy ordered coffee, insisted on paying, and they found a table. After she sat down, she shook off her coat and scarf. The muscles of her neck and throat were firm and clean. He caught a whiff of chlorine. A swimmer, he thought.

She came directly to the point. “You said on the phone you wanted to know more about Hank, because he saved your life.”

“Yes.”

“Well, if he did save your life then you have the essence of who he was; you see, he was all about taking care of people. Oh, he tried to be a reporter for a while but it wasn’t his nature.”

“Oh, really?” Broker, who rated reporters about equal with hyenas, was curious.

“Hank always said a newspaper is a place where reporters wait for something bad to happen to someone else, for someone to tattle on someone. Then they swoop in and do a trim job on reality to fit their byline and a deadline.”

Broker’s expression showed amused surprise.

“Oh,” Dorothy waved his reaction away, “I’m no cherry. Twenty-six years in the trenches. I admit, when I was starting out I thought I would have a
career
. But, as Hank never tired of pointing out, here I am, chained to the copy desk in a word factory, stamping word widgets toward a pension like all the rest of the hamsters.” She smiled. “That’s what he called people trapped inside corporations.”

“Running in those wheely things,” Broker offered.

“They’re called exercisers,” Dorothy rectified, then continued. “That’s why he got involved with the Newspaper Guild and became the business agent. Reporters amused him, calling themselves professionals,” she allowed herself a small smile. “The National Labor Relations Board classifies them as skilled tradesmen.” Dorothy tossed a profligate hand. “So he was our junkyard dog who protected us from management.” She fixed Broker with a stare. “But it wasn’t enough.”

“You mean the money?” Broker asked.

Dorothy’s eyes evaluated him. “Were you in the war, Mr. Broker?”

“I was a little old for the Gulf.”

“That was not a war, that was a TV show. The last real war.”

“I see. Yes. I was.”

Dorothy sipped her coffee and pursed her full lips. “Hank used to say there are two kinds of soldiers: the kind who fight and the other kind.”

“Keep going, I’m with you so far,” Broker said.

“Have you heard of a place called the Ashau Valley?”

“Yes, I have.” He recalled the Annamite Mountains which bordered Laos emerging out of morning mist.

“There was a hill in the Ashau that was briefly infamous in 1969,” Dorothy said.

“Hamburger Hill.”

“Yes. Hank was a buck sergeant in the 101st. He took his squad of twelve men up that hill. When they all became casualties he was issued ten replacements. Nine of them became casualties. That’s a casualty rate of 190 percent. He went up the hill five times.”

Broker nodded. “The red teardrops tattooed on his forearm.”

Dorothy smiled. “Hank lived a contradiction. He wanted to take care of people but only if they were engaged in extremely destructive behavior.”

“You mean?”

“I mean, obviously, his marriage to Jolene
Smith
.” She paused on the common name with a twitch of scorn. “Have you met her?”

“Yes, she’s, ah,” and here Broker paused a beat too long.

Dorothy’s steady brown eyes glinted. Then the shine evaporated and she batted them. Coy. “Younger? And very attractive. With a touch of true grit that Hank apparently found irresistible.” Dorothy smirked at Broker’s polite frown.

Broker lowered his eyes and took a sip of his coffee.

“Oh, come now, Mr. Broker, let’s not be shy. How old are you? Forty-five?”

“Forty-seven.”

“So I have three years on you. Big five-oh.” Dorothy smoothed her fingertips down her cheek. “Ten years ago I was still attractive. Twenty years ago I was downright sexy. Now I’m—what would you say? Striking? Well-preserved?”

Broker drew back instinctively from her flash of claws and soft venom.

Dorothy smiled, hitting her stride. “Have you noticed how aging leading men are paired with hard-body bimbos in the movies—Sean Connery, Harrison Ford?”

“I don’t see that many movies,” Broker said.

Deftly, Dorothy pointed at the naked stripe on his ring finger. “What happened there?”

“My wife and I are separated.”

“First marriage?”

“Second marriage.”

Dorothy’s eyes locked on like missile radar. “How old is she?”

Broker cleared his throat. Dorothy raised her eyebrows in merry expectation. Broker said, “She’s thirty-three.”

“And why did you break up?”

“So she could pursue her career.”

Dorothy flashed a steely smile. “Well, good for her.”

For a moment all Broker heard was the natter of keyboards at the surrounding tables. He struck back. “Bitter,” he observed.

Dorothy cocked her head, insinuating her face a little to the side. “I stuck by him. I edited his hopelessly purple, overwritten copy. I held his hand when he was insecure. And then, as soon as he made some money, he left me for a hot little bitch.” Reflex smile. “I’m not bitter, Mr. Broker; but sometimes I cannot help but feel the comfort of a certain justice.”

Broker thought, but did not voice, another cliché that would never die:
Hell hath no fury
. . .

As quickly as it came, the ice storm passed on Dorothy’s face.

“Of course,” she said, “Jolene was very much in need of rescue. Very much in need of someone to take care of her,” she delivered these words with the deliberate cadence of a woman who could clearly take care of herself.

“Are you saying he put himself in jeopardy marrying her?”

“Oh,
premeditated
jeopardy. Have you been to the house since they brought him home, AMA—
against medical advice
?”

“Yes.”

Dorothy pursed her lips. “I visited once. I thought the baby monitors were a nice touch. Did you notice a big, buff lout lurking in the basement named Earl Garf?”

Broker cleared his throat. “Perhaps she observes a shorter decent interval than the rest of us,” he said, stealing Amy’s line, which went over big because Dorothy’s voice swelled rich with malice.

“Oh, that was very good for . . .”

“A resort owner?” Broker smiled. Dorothy smiled. And their eyes rattled together briefly like crossed foils.

Enjoying herself, she lowered her eyes, and when she looked up she had leaned forward across the table and tilted her head slightly so her eyes revolved. One hand drifted up and touched her hair.

“Have you ever heard of the old badger game?” she asked.

“Young woman hustles old guy. Young boyfriend in the wings. It crossed my mind.”

“Because it’s the truth. Hank knew it from the start. It’s what attracted him, don’t you see?” Dorothy smiled. “Mr. Broker, do you believe people can change?”

For an ex-cop it was a no-brainer. “No way.”

“Me either. But Hank believed people could change. He thought Jolene could change. So that was his lion-in-winter delusion—that he could help her change before she took him to the cleaners.”

Broker rotated his coffee cup in his fingers. “So the accident up north just accelerated things.”

Dorothy raised her eyebrows. “And tremendously upped the odds. Now she will reap a huge malpractice settlement. She won the lottery.”

“You seem to have accepted all this?” Broker wondered.

“He was guilty. He gave me a very generous divorce settlement. And, despite everything, I knew how unhappy he was. He wanted to be a writer, you see.”

“I thought he was?”

“
War Wolf
? My God, he did that as a joke. A satire,” she rolled her eyes. “The fact was, he just couldn’t tell a story that wasn’t totally encrusted in bullshit. Then this bizarre windfall of Hollywood money fell on him. He left me. Bought the river house, found a new group of friends, started drinking again, and went back to AA where he discovered Jolene. Don’t you see . . . “

She leaned forward. “He couldn’t
write
a decent story so he bought one to
live
in. And now Jolene Smith—who never graduated high school, by the way—is writing the ending.”

Broker looked Dorothy straight in the eye. “In the plane, coming out after the storm, he was raving. But he distinctly said to me, these exact words, ‘Tell Cliff Stovall to move the money.’ ”

Dorothy shrugged. “I know Cliff’s wife. She told me Cliff was restructuring Hank’s finances off-limits to Jolene. She was already writing checks to Garf, the boyfriend.”

Broker leaned forward. “But Stovall is dead in some weird scenario in the woods. The same week as Hank?”

Dorothy apparently accepted Stovall’s death with equanimity. “Have you spent much time around drunks, Mr. Broker?”

“No.” Only as much time as he had to. He’d gone through the treatment-therapy motions with some cops when they tanked. But no.

“Do you subscribe to the disease theory of alcoholism?”

Again he balked. And she finished for him.

“No, of course, you’re old school. You might pay lip service to the fashionable babble but underneath you think it’s a moral weakness, don’t you?”

“I think that if you’ve got a drinking problem and you don’t have good health insurance to pay for inpatient treatment you’re shit out of luck in the enlightened state of Minnesota.”

“But is it a moral weakness?”

“Yeah,” Broker said. “If you’re sick all you can do is get well. If you’re bad you can redeem yourself and be good.”

Dorothy laughed. “You and Hank would have gotten along just fine. But whether you believe it’s a disease or a stigma, in the end, it kills people in very ugly ways. Hank, Cliff, and Jolene Smith met in an AA group. They were drunks. You know what they tell alcoholics in treatment? They tell them that one out of three will make it clean and sober. One will struggle back and forth between relapse and recovery. And one will die a pretty horrible death. And that’s exactly what Cliff Stovall did.”

Broker nodded. It was a familiar description. “The guy on either side is going to get it.”

Dorothy raised her cup in a salute and said, “Well, Mr. Broker; it certainly looks like Jolene Smith was the guy in the middle.” After a moment, she sniffed, “Probably not the first time she was in between two men with her ass and her mouth on the same axis.”