Absolute Zero (23 page)

“Including you?”

“I just said it.” Broker nodded his head toward the house. “But this isn’t me.”

She regarded him from the corners of her eyes. “So you don’t want the money and you don’t really want me . . .”

“Hey, I don’t want to put my suitcase in your closet. But I wouldn’t mind seeing you again,” he said.

Jolene laughed and unburdened the thought that was on her mind. “The problem with you is you’re too good to be true.”

Broker shivered at her words, the way they sailed into the dark on her silken breath. He shied away when she poked a finger into his ribs. “Just another hero, huh? Like Hank. He never expected us to go the distance. He said it’s one of the big stories in life. People grow at different speeds. He figured I’d outgrow him the way I outgrew Earl.” She squared her shoulders and the cold night air was all the makeup she needed. “I’m just getting started,” she said.

Broker asked, “So you figure out where you’re headed?”

She inhaled, exhaled. “Just so we understand each other, I like you and I want to see you again, but I don’t see us, like, together long-term. The next guy I get involved with seriously will be somebody with fewer rough edges. Somebody
safe
.”

“Somebody you can control?”

“I didn’t say that.” She came up on tiptoes and kissed him, a frank, direct kiss midway between friendship and everlasting damnation.

When the kiss ended she was practical. “About Earl—sometimes when he’s upset he can get, well, violent. And he knows some pretty thuggy guys.”

“What I have in mind doesn’t involve rough stuff,” Broker said. “But I need to get at his computer for a couple of hours. Are you sure he won’t be back tonight?”

“Pretty sure.”

“I had a peek at his computer screen and it looked like he was collecting credit card numbers.”

“Credit unions. He hacks into credit unions and cleans out all the credit cards and sells them on the web.” Jolene smiled. “He swears he only drains off money from very wealthy people, like Robin Hood. What are you going to do?”

“I have a set of disks for his Zip Drive in the car. If you’ll play lookout, I’ll copy his hard drive. Then, if he agrees to move off from you an appropriate distance, say after a few years, he can have the copies back. He doesn’t agree, we go to plan two and the disks wind up with the computer-crimes investigator at Washington County, and your basement will be full of cops and Earl goes away.”

“Not bad,” Jolene said.

Jesus, it was a
dump. A dump on Arcade on the east side of St. Paul where the mooks went to watch women get naked and rub up against them. And the air was poisonous with cigarette smoke, and he could see some very questionable substance fouled in the nap of the cheap orange carpet next to his shoe which wasn’t even dry yet. There was a bar and tables, and these alcoves with overstuffed chairs where the dancers did their thing.

And that’s where Earl found Rodney, sunk in one of the chairs under a lap dancer who was chewing gum and working her hips to the beat of the Righteous Brothers, “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” Earl looked away. He was off human intimacy for the time being. He preferred to jack into high-shock plastic and a thick glass screen where the action was kept crisp, internal, and sanitary. People were just too messy. Even perfect-looking people like Jolene could be messy. Even Jolene leaked once a month.

Fluids. Sweat. Tears. He thought briefly of Cliff Stovall in the woods.

Blood.

Pissed and shit himself, too. Disgusting.

His fault. Not mine.

Earl went back to watching Rodney and thought,
I should throw him a fish. This should be a cow humping a big seal. Rodney should be going arf, arf.

“C’mon, Rodney, we got to talk, man.”

Rodney was stretched out on the divan chair, arms alternately bracing on the fat cushions or twitching at his sides. There was a sign on the wall: patrons aren’t allowed to touch the girls with their hands. But he could squirm his hips as much as he wanted. So his legs were spread and an ample G-string-and-pasty-clad transplant from West Virginia named Mavis was lashing him with her long, braided blond tresses as she straddled his hips and pumped him in sync with the music.

Earl knew who Mavis was because this wasn’t the first time he’d met Rodney here and had to sit though one of her dry humps. She had bruises on her thighs and they looked about to pucker. All right for now, but headed for the cottage cheese shelf.

Rodney’s head was thrown back and a silver chain glistened on his fleshy neck, and every time Mavis socked it to him, the Thor’s Hammer medallion on the chain jiggled in a fold of sweat.

Like the governor’s, Rodney’s shaved head tapered smoothly up out of his overdeveloped neck. When the feds had him sweating down in seg at Oak Park Heights, he’d panicked. He’d imagined he heard moans in the dark and he felt the walls go clammy with nightmare sweat. In one of his worse moments, he had tattooed a swastika on the end of his prick with a tiny safety pin and a Bic refill. He did this as a token of goodwill toward the Aryan Nation. Any minute now Rodney hoped that his Nazi logo would squirt ecstatic black spiders.

“Rodney?”

“Almost,” Rodney panted. “I’m close.”

“C’mon, Rodney, this is taking all night,” Mavis said. “You’re into deep overtime, my man.”

“Just a little more,” Rodney said.

“Rodney, baby, like—I’m getting all chafed raw. You can’t leave that zipper open like that. You know the rules.” She gingerly climbed off him and kissed him on his shiny skull. “Better luck next time.” Rodney held up a handful of bills. She plucked them and jiggled off into the gloom.

Rodney watched her go, pouting, “Thirty-two, man, and it’s all over. Just can’t get it up anymore.”

Earl shook his head. “Give up the steroids, Rodney. They’re shrinking your testicles into snow peas.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Morosely, Rodney zipped his fly and struggled to his feet. Six foot three, 260, twenty-four-inch arms. He could bench six hundred. Earl’s war elephant. “C’mon,” he said, “let’s get some grease.”

They cruised and debated restaurants and settled on a Famous Dave’s.

“You’re buying, right?” Rodney asked as they settled into a booth.

“Sure. Go for it.”

When the waitress arrived, Rodney recited, “I’ll have the giant slab of ribs, double cornbread, two cobs of corn, and bread pudding for dessert.”

They made small talk about the weight room until the food arrived. Rodney was always more agreeable eating. Halfway through the rack of ribs, Rodney looked up and wiped his chin. “So what exactly you want to do?”

“Scare a guy,” Earl said.

“How scared you want him?”

“Like a broken-knee scared. Louisville Slugger scared.”

“What’d he do?”

“He’s bothering Jolene. I want him to go away.”

“Jolene.” Rodney’s eyes revolved and were dreamy for a moment. “She still quit getting high?”

Earl nodded. “Started going to meetings.”

“Yeah, and married some old guy?”

“Uh-huh, except the old guy’s dying and this other dude is bothering her.”

“And this is something you can’t handle on your own?”

Earl leaned forward. “I just want you for backup. I don’t want to work up too much of a sweat.”

“Right,” Rodney smirked. “You’re the brain, this messy physical stuff is beneath you.”

“I’m the one using the bat, Rodney.”

“Sure, right. So who is this guy?”

“He’s from up north, he guides canoe trips in Ely.” Earl was about to explain the connection, but he decided not to. Rodney had been spooked in Oak Park Heights and had been doing a lot of coke. He didn’t follow stuff the way he used to.

Like right now. Rodney was staring at the carnage of rib bones on his plate, his eyes kind of misfiring and trying to focus. He said, “You know, I gotta be careful.”

Earl nodded his head. “Look. This guy is going to take one look at you and shit his pants.”

Rodney squinted at him. “Yeah? There’s two kinds of guys who shit their pants. There’s the kind who shits and freezes and there’s the kind who shits his pants more like—what it is—a figure of speech that floods him with testosterone and adrenaline, you dig?” Rodney spread his lips in a lazy shark grin with strings of pork and gristle stuck between his teeth. “Then this second kind of guy comes over and kicks the living dog shit
out of you
.”

“Not this guy,” Earl said. “This guy is over the hill, almost fifty. He’ll be scared. I guarantee. Then I’ll touch him up a little with the bat and he’ll head back for the sticks.”

“You ever seen the inside of Oak Park Heights?” Rodney asked suddenly.

“Christ, Jesus, no,” Earl said indignantly. They sent people who did his kind of crime to Sandstone, the federal lockup north of Hinckley which was a country club compared to OPH. In fact, Sandstone was like a postgraduate seminar in computer hacking; they had some sharp operators in there. A guy could learn a lot.

“It’s like this big rectangular basement, four levels of meat-locker buried in the ground, and down in the middle they have this yard. There’s a baseball diamond and all, but it’s hardly ever used, and you look out through this narrow window with these two fat bars called mullions and there’s three tiny flower beds and this one tree they just planted. This one skinny little sapling that probably will never make it through the winter. And that’s what you see for the next twenty years.”

Rodney shook his head. “One fucking little tree. Man, growing up in Minnesota, I always took trees for granted.”

“Rodney,” Earl said firmly, trying to bring the guy back on task. “Tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up.”

“And go where?”

“He’s staying out on this farm in Lake Elmo.”

Rodney’s eyes balked and his broad forehead furrowed. “Canoes? Farms? This really is not my preferred line of work.”

“Look. We get him alone, he sees you and is paralyzed with fear. I whack him around a little and give him his walking papers and that’s it. You earn three hundred bucks for just standing around. How’s that?”

“That’s fine, if it goes down like that.” Rodney held up a greasy rib bone and gestured. “But if it looks in any way funny, I’m out. If I look sideways they’re going to bust me. I ain’t gonna get raked over on account of something pissant like this.”

“Don’t worry. Look, I need one favor. Trade cars with me tonight. I have to snoop around to make sure where he’s staying and he knows what I drive.”

Rodney shoved his car keys across the table, caught Earl’s toss.

“Take it easy on the wheels, it’s Jolene’s husband’s Expedition. And here,” Earl slipped him a folded hundred. “Go back and get your lap wet. See you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, and yeah,” Rodney said, snapping a rib bone between his molars and sucking on the end.

Earl took 94 east
to the river, then turned south on 95 and cruised the house in Rodney’s Trans Am. He turned off his headlights and slowly rolled down the driveway. Uh-huh. Like he figured. Broker’s busted-down Jeep was still there. Settling in.

Okay. His mind raced ahead. First get rid of Broker. That would give Jolene some space to climb down off her high horse. She’d come around. She was bound to come around not sleeping for a week. He just hoped she didn’t start hitting the bottle again.

So Earl backed up the drive and went up the dead-end access road and waited in a small park where the road intersected the highway. Where he’d have a good view of passing cars. He put on his Walkman and ran some Eminem.

Three times through the tape, more than an hour later, Earl was shuffling his shoes in the compost of Burger King wrappers clogged around Rodney’s accelerator when a pair of high beams cut the gloom: the beat-up red Jeep. Okay.

“Got in the cookie jar, didn’t you, you fuckin’ hick,” Earl said grudgingly as he eased onto the road and followed the Jeep, still keeping his lights off, seeing by the faint light of a sickle moon. “So you’re feeling pretty good.”

He and Jolene weren’t that way anymore and hadn’t been for years. More like weird siblings. Whatever. Think of something more pleasant. Like what a boost it was going to be swinging the bat into Broker’s knee. He visualized the patella and tibia powdering. He would see Broker crawl. See him cry.

The fantasy brought an agreeable flush.

This was what he wanted. Screw Microsoft and all the time he spent in that fucking desert over there, never once firing his weapon. Sometimes he figured the only real thing he’d done in his life was finishing off that gut-shot store clerk in North Dakota after Jolene messed it up. He didn’t count Stovall as a kill. That was an accident. Either way, it was Jolene who got him into both of those scenes.

Just like she was getting him into Broker, who, he hoped, would take a cue and go away with just a broken leg.

Well, he’d know pretty soon.

By now the ride was getting tricky, and Earl had to let his fantasies go and pay more attention to following the Jeep through a back-road grid until it finally turned into a darkened farm. Earl drove on by and parked behind the first tree line past the house. Just a hundred yards away, he watched the lights come on in the house, probably the kitchen, then the bathroom, then they switched off.

He waited another ten minutes, then he walked back toward the house, past the tall shadow of the barn where some kind of animals were moving around behind a fence. Earl shivered, nervous now, worried about dogs. But there were no dogs and he used a pencil flashlight to copy the number off the mailbox. Then he stepped onto the lawn and wrote down the fire number. He’d driven UPS delivery in the sticks and knew that fire numbers were the most reliable way to quick reference a residence. Just call up the local sheriff’s office and tell them you’re a lost UPS driver and give them the fire number; the rural cops’ dispatcher would talk you right in. And that’s what he’d do tomorrow.

Sleep tight, sucker.

Half an hour later
he quietly let himself into Hank’s house and tiptoed down to the basement. Immediately, he hit the rewind on the long-playing videotape in the VCR that recorded from the hidden camera in Jolene’s bedroom.

He tapped on the monitor and punched play, got an empty bed illuminated by just enough night-light to make it interesting, even arty. He ran rewind, hit play, more bed; so he went back and forth until on his tenth or eleventh try . . .

“Oh, wow.”