distance from her. It was like a wake in there, so Broker went back in the hall and saw Allen pacing, bent forward, as if he were walking uphill. Allen blinked, focused, and recognized Broker, then walked over and patted him on the shoulder. The fatigue he’d kept at bay to perform the operation now poisoned his face into a haggard nicotine- yellow, and Broker read it all in the surgeon’s hollow stare. Save the guy and then. .
Allen attempted to smile. “I have to tell Milt. You know, he’s been asleep through all this.”
“What happens now?” Broker asked.
Allen slowly shook his head. “It depends on how long he didn’t get oxygen. He’s comatose. He could wake up in a few hours or in a few days, or it could be weeks. Or. .” Allen pursed his lips. “Once he opens his eyes he can be evaluated by a neurologist. Until then, we’re only speculating but. .” Allen faltered, his voice caught. “Jesus, look at him. He’s suffered some damage.”
“Some damage?” Broker repeated.
“Brain damage.”
“You mean?”
“I mean, she shouldn’t have pulled that tube so soon in the OR.”
“He was talking. They were talking. They were teasing back and forth,” protested Broker.
Allen made a weak, erasing gesture with his right hand. “I don’t know. It’s like. .” he swatted the air, “. . stop signs. Nobody obeys them anymore, they can’t be bothered to take the time.” A sound between a cough and a laugh rattled in his throat. “She was in a hurry, I guess.”
Then Allen continued down the hall to the nurses’ station and Broker watched him pick up the phone slowly as if the receiver were an anvil. Slowly, Allen pressed in the numbers and waited and then, as he began to talk, his facial expression collapsed inward like a piece of crumpled paper.
Standing ten feet away Broker could hear the stunned, vaguely familiar female voice protest over the phone, “No, what a minute, how could that happen? He was in the hospital, goddammit.”
Chapter Eleven
It was still snowing. But softer now, almost out of respect.
“Stop signs, huh,” mulled Dave Iker. “He’s got a point. World War Three will probably start some hot afternoon down in Minneapolis at a four-way stop.”
They were both pretty beat up.
Iker’s service belt reeked of wet leather, piled on his desk in the sheriff’s office in the Ely courthouse. They were still wearing the mismatched sweat suits from the hospital, and Iker’s purple and red sweatshirt bore the crude drawing of a bearded man holding a big grasshopper. The type underneath spelled:
ST. ERHO FESTIVAL, MENAHAGA, MINNESOTA
St. Erho was the patron saint who rid Finland of grasshoppers. Uncle Billie maintained that St. Erho’s Day, like St. Patrick’s Day, was an excuse to get drunk, because there never were grasshoppers in Finland.
Broker stared out the window at the moderating storm and it all went into a distracted glide, and he mused how lots of Finns had settled around Ely. Maybe because the lakes and forest and six months of winter reminded them of home. Or maybe their national ethic of fatalism attracted them to farm fields full of granite rocks.
Broker caught himself drifting, shook his head, and asked, “That nurse-anesthetist, Amy, she local?”
Iker nodded. “Ummm. Amy Skoda is one of the few who figured how to come back and earn a living.” He slowly raised his eyebrows. “She was asking about you, before it all went bad.”
“Skoda? She a Finlander?” Broker asked.
“Half Finnish, half Slovene; the cream of the local gene pool.” He threw an arm toward the wall where a procession of retired peace officers stared down from framed portraits. “Second picture up there. Stan Skoda’s kid.” Skoda filled the picture frame like an amiable fireplug and Broker vaguely remembered the man from hunting parties when Broker was in high school.
“Take a hike. I gotta make a call,” Iker said. The format glowing on his computer screen gave his face a lime tint as he hunched back to his chair and stared at the number jotted in his spiral notebook.
Broker nodded, got up, and went looking for the gents, as Iker reached for the phone. He had to make the duty call to Hank Sommer’s wife and explain the circumstances of the tragedy.
When Broker returned, Iker was predictably more gloomy.
“How’d it go?” Broker asked.
“She said ‘-but he was in the hospital’ three times.” Iker shook his head. “Could have been worse. That doctor, Falken, had already called and prepared her. She’s got this nice voice,” Iker said. “You know, like way down at the bottom of an air conditioner.”
Broker nodded. He knew how it worked; the phone rings and a strange cop from faraway invites a wife to take a sudden plunge to where she keeps her personal ideas about mortality.
Iker, who lived thirty miles of impassable highway to the west in Tower, then called his wife, made sure that she and the kids were all right, and explained the day’s events and how he was stranded with Phil Broker.
“So now you and your ex-copper buddy have two choices, huh?” another wife’s voice rattled in the telephone.
“Yeah, I guess.” Iker winced and held up the receiver at arm’s length. Broker heard the wife say: “You can shovel snow or get drunk.”
Iker hung up, shrugged. “What are you going to do?”
“Get a room at the Holiday Inn.”
“I got to finish filing this report. Maybe I’ll see you at The Saloon later.” Iker tossed Broker his truck keys.
Broker left the courthouse, climbed in Iker’s truck, and drove toward the Holiday Inn that overlooked Lake Shagawa at the edge of town. No way he was going to try the unplowed road to Uncle Billie’s Lodge in these conditions. Iker’s Ford Ranger barely grabbed traction in Ely.
Moving at a crawl in four-wheel low, he went over some of the medical terminology he’d heard thrown around this afternoon: Sommer had suffered a significant “anoxic insult” and was currently comatose-in a coma due to oxygen starvation to his brain precipitated by respiratory complications following surgery. The informal opinion at Miner Hospital was that Amy Skoda had underestimated the amount of sedation in his system and took him off anesthesia too early in the operating room. Perhaps, someone speculated, she’d anticipated that the surgery would take longer, not allowing for Allen’s speed and skill. Sommer’s being hypothermic may have been a factor. Whatever the precipitating events, he developed trouble breathing in the recovery room.
Nobody was there when he crashed, and the alarm on the monitor had not been set.
As he left, Broker overheard someone console Amy.
Wham.
Broker hooked a frustrated fist at the steering wheel in a tantrum of flash anger, swerved, and almost lost control of the truck. Reflexively, he steered into the skid and came out of the spin.
Usually he had a much longer fuse.
The Holiday Inn was a deserted post-and-beam jungle gym with a cathedral ceiling and a bored, snow- hypnotized receptionist who smiled discreetly at Broker’s attire. He carried in the duffel he’d retrieved from the dispatch desk, took a room, and went down a stairwell, opened a door, and stepped into a limbo of clean walls, curtains, and hotel furniture that could be anywhere-USA.
And he just wanted to disappear.
But he stripped down out of habit, went to the shower, and applied soap, shampoo, shaving lather, and a razor to peel off the cold outer layer of the last twenty-four hours. He rubbed a porthole in the steamed bathroom mirror and gauged his fatigue by the redness of his eyes. He took out dry jeans, a fleece pullover, and his spare boots.
After he’d dressed, his hand moved toward the phone, thinking to call the hospital and check with Allen,