Absolute Zero

waved vaguely, and he was thinking how none of this was supposed to happen. He came here to hide and wait out his. . problem. Now there was all this stuff.

Shivering, he stood alone on the street and watched Iker’s taillights disappear around a corner. Then he went back into the bar, returned to Amy’s table, and the words came out before he got them lined up right. “Look, I’m sorry, going off on that guy. I just have a lot on my mind.”

“Oh you do, do you,” she said making her eyes a little wider.

“Well, I guess you do, too. Can I sit down?”

“Sure, as long as you understand I don’t need any more of that kind of help.” The gray eyes, though dipped in alcohol, still cut.

Broker nodded and pulled up a chair while Amy flagged the bartender and held up two fingers. The waitress, eyes lowered, brought the two glasses on a small round tray, put them down, made change, and retreated.

“They know,” Amy whispered, looking after the waitress. “This is a small town. Everybody knows about Sommer.”

Broker rotated the double shot in his fingers and raised his eyebrows. “Do you always drink like this?”

“I never drink. It’s a filthy depressant. Cheers.”

He drank and the two burning ounces seared through the roof of his mouth and up his sinuses.

“Now take off. I really don’t need any help,” she said, squaring her shoulders, sitting up straighter. A gesture that wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously.

“Yes, you do,” Broker said and he figured she’d been the bright, sharp tack all her life and maybe sometimes she got ahead of herself.

“I do?”

“Yeah, we’re linked,” Broker said. “You left your post to come out in the hall and chat me up, remember.”

Amy shook her head and her hand floated up and touched her hair. “Nancy was with him.”

“She left her post to get the new patient. Who was in charge?”

She met his eyes on the level from behind her fort of shot glasses, and he could find no excuses in her defiant gaze. She did not impress him as someone prone to making fatal mistakes, and her choice of occupations was an alert exercise in avoiding exactly such an outcome. “No, that’s too simple. Something else happened,” she said firmly.

“Something?” he asked.

“Look, you should probably leave me alone.”

“Sorry.”

“What? Are you one of these guys who finds tragedy a turn on?” Amy asked.

“Takes one to know one, huh?”

“I guess.” Amy looked away and her profile, big-eyed and cleanly featured in a tumble of bright hair, contrasted with the dull residue of the snowmobiler’s blood on the wall behind her chair.

“You’re one of his friends,” she said.

“No. I rented them the gear and went along to help around camp. I paddled out to get help.”

She turned full-face to him, lowered the gray eyes, and raised them slowly, which felt good to an old, married, recently deserted guy who was getting drunk. “You don’t look like a canoe guide,” she said.

So it begins. He thought to play his part, so he inclined his head to go along. Huh? What? Me? But he remembered Iker’s warning.

A little clumsy now, Amy said, “You have more. . range.” Her hand drifted out and her cool right index finger floated over the pale stripe on his ring finger. “You, ah, forgot your wedding ring.”

“Separated,” he said, not sure if it was the right word. There wasn’t a word for people in his situation. Fucked, maybe.

She started to say something, stopped, and let the calm finger touch a hollow of bone and tendon above the joint of thumb. “Nice veins,” she said.

They paused to look off in different directions while the waitress came to their table, stooped with a small bucket of hot water and disinfectant, and scrubbed the dots of Arctic Cat’s blood from the wall and the floor.

When the waitress left they resumed looking at each other and it was clear there was no trivial human clutter between them, and Broker stood on a high board feeling his breath, and he could see it all play out in easy, sexy stages. But it was a game and he didn’t play games with women.

“C’mon, cut the crap. Iker told me you were asking about me,” Broker said.

She slumped. “Figures, you used to be a cop. You guys stick together.” She looked around, furtively.

“What?”

“This isn’t smart, you and me having this conversation. I shouldn’t talk about. . things. That lawyer on the trip with you. .”

“Milt.”

“Yeah, I heard Milt is already asking questions half zoned on Percodan.” She took a deep breath, let it out. “There’s this peer-review process and there’ll be a root-cause analysis session.”

“An in-house investigation?”

Amy shook her head. “It’s not. . legal-of course Milt would love to hear what’s said-but it’s confidential, protected from discovery. It’s more like this forum for medics to talk through an event and find out what went wrong without fear of punishment.”

“So you think there’ll be a lawsuit?”

She snorted. “C’mon, of course there’ll be a lawsuit, and I’ll wind up taking the heat. It’s the logical finding. The anesthetist screwed up somewhere. But it’s not like I intubated an esophagus. I’m not going to lose my license.”

She stared mute as the alcohol shut down a whole layer of her facial muscles. With a numb smile she continued, “If you got rid of doctors and nurses every time they made a mistake and croaked somebody in postop, you’d have to close half the hospitals. .”

Through the veil of booze, Broker tried to listen patiently and get a feel for the person behind the bitter words. Amy was indignant and pissed more than guilty or sad. But he lost his concentration, except to fixate on physical details like the way a sturdy purple vein on her throat throbbed and her habit of making little water circles on the table with the bottom of a glass and then erasing them with her finger.

“It really cracks me up,” she was saying. “Remember those guys who got killed in Somalia, that mob dragged them around on TV? You remember that?”

Broker nodded.

“How many was that they killed?”

“I think it was eighteen dead,” said Broker, the reader of history.

“And it freaked everybody out. Now we just drop bombs and don’t use ground troops. .”

She lost her place and Broker did, too. Then she leaned forward and wrinkled her forehead.

“How many people do you think die as a result of accidents and negligence in hospitals every year-take a guess?”

“I don’t know, Amy.”

“Depending whose numbers you pick-how about between sixty and ninety thousand. That’s every year. Funny isn’t it, how we set priorities. Eighteen soldiers die doing their job. It gets on TV and it changes the foreign policy of a country. And we tolerate those kinds of numbers in the health-care system. Hell, we killed more people this year than the fucking army did.”

“Amy, I think you’re being a little hard on yourself.”

She obliterated water rings with the heel of her fist. “You want to see real nightmares, check out an emergency room in the Cities on a Saturday night.”

“Saturday nights and summer full moons,” he agreed.

Amy sat back, peered into an empty shot glass. “Amen. Emergency room nurse, Hennepin County Medical Center, three years before I went to anesthesia school.”

“The kind of nurse who dated cops?”

“Oh, yeah.” Her eyes conjured up 5 A.M. in Minneapolis at the end of the graveyard shift. Empty streets. Everything closed. “And I’d come home alone, sad, on the holidays and my mom would suggest I take up some