Absolute Zero (33 page)

Mainly he felt confident again. More like his old self.

Broker felt an icy draft and the front door opened and Jolene stuck her head in. “Hey, Broker. There’s something out here you should check out.”

He heaved to his feet, hung the poker back on its stand, and walked toward the door. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure. It’s by the woods.”

“Probably a deer,” Broker said, stepping through the door.

Jolene took him by the wrist and the elbow and tugged him toward the steps. “Over here . . .” Suddenly she clamped down on his wrist and gasped. “Jesus Christ, what’s
he
doing here?”

Broker spun.

The rush he felt didn’t come from outside. The pine branches in the yard light were still as statues. It came from inside his chest and speeded up his eyes.

“Trick or treat, motherfucker!”

The voice hissed behind his back. Galvanized, Broker yanked against Jolene, who clung to him. So he had to fling her aside and spin, raking back his left elbow, cocking his right fist.

His elbow swept empty space and he thought he glimpsed a grotesque smile on Earl Garf’s bruise-streaked face.

He heard Amy scream, turned to find her, which was a mistake, because Earl clubbed the butt of the .45 down behind his left ear and it all went black.

Amy had screamed, “Look out,”
but the man had already stepped across the doorway and struck Broker from behind. Broker’s knees gave out and he crumpled to the porch. Coming forward, she recognized the belted black leather trench coat Earl had worn in the barn earlier today, except now it had an empty sleeve and Earl Garf had his left arm in a sling.

Earl sneered and commenced to kick at Broker who was trying to push himself up off the porch. When kicking didn’t satisfy him, he bent over and swung the pistol again, and the steel hitting Broker’s skull sent a sickening slap into the dark. Broker fell forward and lay still.

Jolene grabbed Earl’s good arm and screamed, “What’s he doing here?” Seeing Jolene moving to intervene, Amy had the racing contextual thought that this was more of the same from earlier—the hostility between the two men carried to absurd lengths.

And Earl looked crazy right now, with his bare chest red with cold against a torn hospital patient’s robe under the heavy coat. When he aimed a kick at Broker she saw his bare ankle between the cuff of his jeans and his Nikes.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Jolene yelled, pushing forward.

Earl swung the pistol at Jolene, backed her off, and yelled, “Just shut up and do what I say.” Then he lunged across the porch, his eyes burning up with cold, and she saw what Jolene had seen. There was someone else out there.

Suddenly, Amy knew she was next.

Immediately she set her feet to bound back into the lodge. She’d been raised up here. She’d played in this building as a child. She knew where Uncle Billie kept his guns—in the closet in his bedroom—and she knew there’d be a twelve-gauge pump and she knew how to use it.

But Earl pointed the pistol at her face and her feet wouldn’t move fast enough, which gave him time to snake out a foot and trip her. Then, as she tried to regain her balance, he shoved her roughly against the doorjamb and forced her to her knees.

And in that moment, with her face smarting like a red pincushion and the air all freezing needles, she saw the other person heave into the light.

“What the hell,” Jolene blurted.

“It’s cool,” Earl reassured her.

Allen Falken stood over Amy with a syringe in his hand. In the other he held a black medical bag. In an open space between two sliding plates of panic, Amy noticed he was wearing latex gloves and he needed a shave.

“How’re we doing?” Allen asked conversationally as he stepped over Broker. Then, as he knelt, he said, “Earl, take hold of Amy, would you; I want her absolutely still.”

Through another window of shock, Amy recognized the calm authority of a surgeon greeting his team as he entered the OR.

She scrambled to escape, which prompted Earl to grab her around the waist with his good arm. Earl smelled like spoiled meat and disinfectant.

“Hello, Amy,” Allen said. “This will sting a little but then you’ll find it quite pleasant. Five hundred milligrams of Ketamine will produce a hypnotic effect. But you know all about that.” He jabbed her in the thigh, right through her jeans.

Amy’s panic immediately lost its jerky gallop and she rolled out and up with the graceful thrust, and she was alone and poised in a slow-motion dive into a wide pool of peace. A beautiful vertical entry. No splash. A perfect 10.

* * *

Allen quickly drew another
shot from a stopper bottle and injected it in Broker’s thigh. Then he addressed the shock on Jolene’s face as he took out a box of rubber gloves. “Put these on, please.”

“Wait a fucking minute here,” Jolene said, looking to Earl.

Allen smiled at her. “How’s Hank? Has he been blink-talking any more? Giving away any more family secrets?”

“How do you . . . ?”

“In a minute,” Allen said. “Right now, let’s drag her inside and shut the door. It’s cold out here.”

He and Earl manhandled Amy through the doorway and laid her on the wooden-plank floor near the fireplace.

“Earl? What’s going on here?” Jolene demanded.

“There’s three of us now,” Earl said. “He’s got the plan and I’ve got the gun and you better have the smarts to go along.”

“That’s clear as mud,” Jolene said.

Allen continued to smile patiently. “We’re going to put Hank back to where he was before he started this blinking business.”

“He hasn’t
stopped
blinking that I know of,” Jolene almost shouted.

“I’ll get to that later. First we have to deal with her,” he pointed to Amy, “and him.” He jerked his head toward the door.

“Deal?” Jolene said.

“Kill, okay?” Earl said. “Only Allen is going to do it nice, not sloppy like you had in mind.”

Jolene slumped her shoulders. “Jesus, how’d we wind up
here
?”

“We arrived one step at a time,” Allen said. He pointed at Earl. “Him.” Then he pointed at Jolene. “You.” Finally he tapped his own chest. “Me.”

Jolene shook her head.

Earl tried to explain. “Jolene, he knows everything. He saw Broker and Amy together when they took me to the hospital, so he went to the house and heard you three guys doing the alphabet thing on the baby monitor, then he went in back and heard you on the cell phone calling me.” He turned to Allen. “Just tell her straight-out. Trust me, it works better that way with her,” Earl said.

Allen nodded, then gently explained. “Killers, plural, remember. Earl is one killer and I’m the other.” Allen spoke in the factual tone he used when discussing a patient’s case with family members. “In the hospital, when Hank was in the recovery room, I gave him the wrong medication when I found him unattended. No one saw me, and when I realized what I’d done I assumed it would look like a respiratory arrest caused by a sloppy nurse-anesthetist and a lazy nurse. So I turned off the alarm on the monitor and left the room.”

Why, you fucker
, Jolene was careful not to say.

“See, nothing but cool,” Earl did say.

“At first I thought it was a mistake, that I was confused from fatigue. But the more I thought about it I realized I don’t make mistakes of that magnitude. So, on some level, I must have been acting deliberately. The crude explanation is that I allowed my personal feelings to intrude on my relationship with a patient. It’s always been obvious I’ve been very attracted to you, Jolene. And I saw how Hank didn’t appreciate you. And it’s been hard, watching you go through this ordeal.”

“Wow,” Earl said, starting to grin again.

“You did that to Hank?” Jolene balled her fists.

Allen went on in his patient voice. “And Earl did that to Stovall and you were ready to do it to Amy and Broker. And here we all are.”

“Jolene, listen,” Earl said, “he’s got this really cool idea. We hide the bodies in plain sight.”

“And the Ketamine only gives me ten to fifteen minutes to set it up,” Allen again offered them the box of Latex gloves.

“Set what up?” Jolene asked.

“Her suicide. See, she feels so bad about what she did to Hank, she just can’t live with it. Allen will stage it with drugs and stuff to make it look exactly the way an anesthetist would do it,” Earl said.

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.

Allen folded the paper and slipped it in his pocket.

Agitated, Jolene said, “Allen, for Christ’s sake, she’s waking up.”

Amy moaned softly, her eyes revolved as Allen placed his needle, checked his blood back-flash into the IV, removed the actual needle, left the IV stent in place, and hooked it to the tubing.

“She’s semiconscious, she won’t really be aware. Because—” he opened a bottle containing a white liquid and poured it into the bag on the left—“she’s about to really relax with five hundred cc’s of Propofal in a slow drip.”

The white stuff dripped down the tubing and Allen raised Amy’s right hand and used her fingers to thumb the wheel on the blue roller clamp.

Amy sighed and rolled her eyes up into her forehead. Allen pursed his lips and patted her leg. In a remote voice, he said, “You won’t feel a thing. I couldn’t let them shoot you, could I?”

Then he held up a glass ampule full of clear liquid and swiftly cracked it open between the two red lines on its nozzle and deposited the contents in the bag on the right.

Jolene, watching his nimble fingers, was reminded of someone who was adept at assembling things that came in boxes, good at reading instructions.

“Now, this is one hundred cc’s of Fentanyl, a very potent narcotic and the anesthetist’s drug of choice. They’re famous for abusing it and miscalculating their highs, so a lot of them OD on the stuff,” Allen said. “We leave the clamp closed on this drip for right now, let her loll around in the induction agent, then I’ll open this clamp all the way, it’ll feed through the port into the other IV tube, and in a minute she’ll be apneic.”

“Apneic?” Jolene said.

“Stop breathing.”

They left the bedroom, put on their coats, and joined Earl on the front porch. Earl had rummaged around in Broker’s travel bag and replaced Broker’s boots with tennis shoes. He found a light fall jacket on the coat rack by the door and pulled it loosely over Broker’s shoulders. Broker was turned over on his back and he kept instinctively cringing into a fetal position in an effort to keep warm.

Seeing that, Jolene looked away.

“I managed to get a third of the bottle into him,” Earl said. “But I think the drug is wearing off. What if he wakes up?”

“We don’t want him totally overdosed. He’s got to drive, remember?” Allen said. “Now, go bring our cars down here, transfer Hank’s bedding to the van, and then put Broker in the Jeep. You can drive him,” he said to Earl. “I’ll follow in my car.” He tossed his car keys to Earl, who handed them to Jolene.

Broker flopped back and forth on the porch, Ketamine going out, the scotch coming in.

“See,” Allen said. “It’s like he’s drunk. You can probably coax him to his feet and walk him to the car.”

This last idea genuinely excited Earl, who began to address Broker in a deeply sympathetic tone. “Come on, buddy. Time to get up. We gotta go feed the ostriches.”

“Cut the shit,” Jolene said.

“Aw, why? I kinda like the idea of him walking to his reward. Better’n me having to carry the sucker.”

The two of them managed to get Broker to his feet and walked him down the steps. Allen watched them stagger off toward the Jeep. Then he went back inside and stood for a moment, warming his hands at the fire. He turned and found himself staring directly in Hank’s very open, alert, angry eyes.

“Well, hello,” Allen said, curious.

Very deliberately, Hank cocked his left eye at Allen and winked.