Absolute Zero

Efficient, practical; he could have been turning off the lights.

She watched the narcotic streamline into Amy’s blood. Her hips raised into a wanton arch on the bed, her head thrust back, her eyes revolving up. The euphoric spasm collapsed as Allen and Earl went out the front door and she watched Amy writhe, chin on chest, tongue protruding, drool starting to flow down her chin into a curl of thick, white-blond hair trapped beneath her cheek.

Jolene turned away and resented them for leaving her alone with this. And she shut her eyes and saw cops and lawyers and judges. She saw matrons forcing her to strip and sticking their fingers in her and making her put on prison cottons.

And THAT was the future if she didn’t do THIS.

Goddamn Broker shouldn’t have lied to me, she told herself.

But she couldn’t take her eyes off Amy, couldn’t stop watching her breaths getting shallow and coming further and further apart.

Never hurt anybody when I was sober before.

She spun and stalked into the living room, fished in her coat pocket, took out her cigarettes, lit up, and paced in front of the fireplace. About three drags into her Marlboro she darted a glance at Hank.

Hank looked back.

Great, she thought, now he’s awake and watching. Maybe he’d been listening all along.

Maybe he knew Amy was in the next room with a slack, stoned grin on her face, dying; that they were parking Broker in the woods where he’d freeze to death; that Allen was going to kill Hank’s eyes.

“This isn’t me,” she told Hank. “Uh-uh.”

Hank continued to stare at her so she amended her wishful declaration: “This isn’t me most of the time. It certainly isn’t who I want to be.”

Shaking now, she went back into the bedroom and studied the IV hook up.

“Fuck,” she said.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

What if?

Experimentally, her Latex-clad finger curled around the back of the blue clamp, her thumb caressed the small white plastic wheel. She listened to Amy’s thready breathing.

Why would she paint her fingernails a dumb color like that?

Her thumb debated, moving the wheel up and down. She saw how simply it worked. Flattening the tubing and cutting off the flow. All comes down to this cheap plastic piece of shit, probably cost eighty-nine cents, probably some nine-year-old kid made it in Singapore or China.

Fuck.

She thumbed the wheel up the track and then down the track. Up, down. She pulled away, nervously puffing on her cigarette, and left the white wheel at the top of the clamp. Off.

For now.

It’ll give me a little time to think.

She went back in the living room and paced in front of the fireplace.

Allen was such a mixture of innocent lamb and cold, efficient operator. And Earl was all smiles, like a big cat who was lying back for the moment, sort of amazed by the machinations of this dazzling killer mouse who’d danced onto the scene. Who was trying to impress her.

And she knew what Earl was thinking: Allen was another loose end, a tricky one, for sure; but he’d have to be dealt with. She turned and saw Hank still watching her like an old billy goat.

“What?” she shouted at Hank’s relentless eyes.

Two blinks.

“Oh Christ, when is this going to stop?”

Two more blinks.

She sat on the edge of the fold-out couch and toyed with the wrinkled sheet of paper that Allen had dropped. This insistent new sound whistled from Hank’s mouth. A jerky panting sound.

Everyone else had; why not me? She started smoothing out the sheet of paper. Amy had this tall, bold way of printing; strong letters, upright, nothing weak about them. She was like Broker, probably-never sick, no flaws.

She could imagine them walking around in the fucking woods, being healthy together.

“Okay, okay,” she said and let her finger linger on the alphabet game. Hank’s eyes snapped from group to group and line to line.

“H”

“I”

“T”

“Hit?” she puzzled. Then she saw the longing in his eyes, shining through the clay of his flesh. Hank always could put a lot into a glance. And she wasn’t so bad when it came to fast reading of a pair of eyes. She inhaled and exhaled in a very exaggerated manner.

Two blinks.

“You want a hit?”

Two blinks.

“Aw, God.” She slid across the blankets, turned, and reclined next to Hank. She wished she could shake out her hair the way he liked. Yeah, well, she wished a lot of things.

“You and me, honey; like in Casablanca, remember, when smoking was sexier than sex.”

She leaned over and, as she kissed Hank on his motionless lips, she felt his breath mingle with hers. Then, she turned her hand so the cigarette fit between his lips and sealed her cupped fingers over his mouth.

Bogey one last time.

Hank sucked in and the nicotine mushroomed in his lungs, invaded the air sacks, and pillaged through his blood, and he could feel his entire circulation system brighten up like a mile of Christmas lights strung through a bombed, blacked-out city. It made the sperm dust jump.

This was the tough lady he’d fallen in love with the moment he saw her walk into that church basement. He’d thought to soak in her like the proverbial fountain, but she was no fountain; she was a Raymond Carver short story when he met her, up to her neck in low-rent heartbreak, with the tatters of her alcoholism not quite tucked all the way in. Now here she was with her growing pains, stranded in a North Woods Crime and Punishment.

His heart began to beat faster. There wasn’t much time left. And she was the only legacy he had.

Jolene lowered her head to Hank’s shoulder and could have cried. But if she were the crying type she couldn’t come out of this on top. Which she fully intended to do, one way or the other. So she appreciated the last hand Hank was playing, having his last smoke before they put on the blindfold. And now he was blinking again.

She removed the cigarette from his lips, flipped it into the fireplace, and held up the paper.

“A”

“L”

. .

“K”

“I”

“L”

“L”

. .

“E”

“R”

“L”

. .

“W”

“A”

“R”