Broker let the statement hang unanswered. Three years retired from police work, he still retained the dissembling persona of ten years working deep undercover for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Before that he’d been a St. Paul cop. Before that, he’d caught some Communist metal during the last two years of that war people didn’t like to talk about and couldn’t forget.
After a polite interval, Allen asked, “You’re from Ely?”
“I’m not a local. I have a little resort over on Superior, north of Grand Marais. I’m just helping out my uncle on this trip.”
“So your family’s in the resort business?”
“You could say that.” It was an accurate if incomplete answer.
“So how are we doing on time?” Allen asked.
“We’re doing fine. If we can keep up this steady paddle till sundown.”
“Then what?” Allen said.
“We’ll have to stop. We can’t take a chance on getting turned around in the dark.”
“Agreed,” Allen said.
They paddled and portaged through the afternoon and, as the clouds sagged lower and the temperature dropped, the lakes sweated a fine late-afternoon mist.
“It’s funny,” Allen said, talkative again, “Jolene married a guy who had some money and she thought she’d get to go shopping in Paris, maybe see Florence. But Hank bought a big old fixer-upper and their life turned into
Allen turned. “I mean, you have to see this woman to believe her. A figure like hers. The thought of stretch marks drives her crazy.”
“Sounds like one of those trophy wives,” Broker said. He imagined her blond, tanned, and spa-rat skinny in Spandex.
“Absolutely. And like I said,” Allen lowered his paddle, turned, and cupped his hands generously to his chest. “You know, they stay aloft on their own.”
Broker laughed. “You seem to know a lot about the aerodynamics of Mrs. Sommer’s knockers.”
“I saw some topless pictures taken when she was an entertainer,” Allen said.
“Hmmm.”
“An exotic dancer,” Allen said. “Hank Sommer is not your normal writer and Jolene isn’t your normal writer’s wife.”
“And not your normal type of friends, either, huh?” ventured Broker.
“Touche. Very good. That’s Milt for you, he’s famous for collecting characters.”
Allen wore no ring on his left hand. “What about you? You said you were married?” Broker asked.
“Sore subject. I married my high school girlfriend. It didn’t survive my residency at Mayo. Now I can’t afford it,” quipped Allen. “Hell, I’m still paying off med school and the Crash of ’87. Certainly can’t afford it doing hernias and hemorrhoids for a freaking HMO.”
Allen took his frustration out on the lake and they fell into a brooding physical rhythm. The paddles rose and fell, filling time. Broker figured it had to be worse for Allen. His friend was slowly dying in a makeshift winter camp while he moved under muscle power at the same pace as French and Ojibwa fur traders three hundred years ago.
At dusk they came ashore and made camp, using the upturned canoe as a shelter. They brewed cocoa over a small fire, ate their energy bars, and, huddled back-to-back in their sleeping bags, fell into an exhausted sleep.
“Jesus, what’s. .?” Allen jerked upright and banged his head on the canoe.
“Wolves.” Broker, thrilling to the howls reverberating through the dark trees, pictured raw meat in the snow. He’d been awake for an hour, warming his hands over a low fire, listening; ten or twelve animals, more than a mile and a lake away.
“They don’t attack people, right?” Allen asked.
“Not here, not yet. In India they snatch infants and eat them. Population pressure probably.”
“We don’t have a gun,” Allen said.
Broker allowed a smile. It was the appropriate response. “C’mon. Let’s go,” he said.
The wolves ended their serenade as the dark leaked away, and by the light of a fuzzy dawn Broker hoped he didn’t look as numb with cold as Allen.
They ate a fast breakfast of instant coffee, chocolate, and Pemmican bars as their breath came in dense white jets. It was getting colder and they stamped their feet to get their circulation going. In the canoe, they fell into the same dogged rhythm, just their muscles yanking at the time and distance. Allen was not talkative today and put all his effort into the paddle.
They lasted two hours and had to beach, take a pee, and stomp around to restore the circulation in their hands and feet. The temperature hovered at freezing, and frostbite whiskered the air. They climbed back in the boat.
Lift, reach, dig, pull, recover.
Broker was watching hypnotic whirlpools of dark water spin away from his paddle when the first snowflake wobbled down almost big as a quarter. Broker glanced up hopefully, grabbing at an old Indian saying: Little snow, big snow; big snow, little snow.
“Another hour,” he shouted as the flakes plummeted here and there like crumbs from a huge white weight suspended above them. Lift the paddle, dig the water, lift the paddle. A tent peg of pain pounded between his shoulder blades each time he raised his arms and the rowing chant in the back of his mind mocked him.
. . When the joke will be on you.
Numb with the pain of the paddle, he didn’t notice at first. Then, faintly, he smelled the harsh flavor of wood smoke and raised his head and sniffed.
Definitely wood smoke.
He took the fumes like a dry-rope bit between his teeth and his paddle foamed the water and they rounded a point and saw a gay yellow tent pitched next to a green canoe on a storybook island. A man and woman relaxed in front of a fire.
“Phone?” Broker screamed as he flailed his paddle toward the campsite.
“PHONE!”
The man rose in a defensive crouch, alarmed by the manic energy of the two hollow-eyed men paddling toward him and his companion.
Broker’s voice sobered him. “We left a critical injury back on Fraser.
Galvanized, hearing Broker clearly, the man yelled, “Gotcha.” He dashed for his tent, emerged, ran to the shore, and handed over the button-studded black plastic wand.
The St. Louis County 911 operator switched the call through to the county deputy on duty in Ely and deputy sheriff Dave Iker picked up the phone. Broker recognized Iker’s voice. They exchanged quick greetings and then Broker described the situation. Iker dispatched his last cruiser not tied up in weather-related traffic accidents to meet Broker and Allen at Uncle Billie’s Lodge. Then he called the U.S. Forest Service seaplane base across town on Lake Shagawa.
Iker continued down his checklist. He alerted the northern team of the St. Louis County Rescue Squad, notified the state patrol, and requested the status of their helicopter. Then he called Ely Miner Hospital to put an ambulance on standby. The hospital dispatcher told him that all the medics were on the truck pileup out west on Highway 169. But the dispatcher would call Life Flight in Duluth and request a helicopter to fly to the hospital helipad. Ely Miner was a Band-Aid station that was not equipped to handle major emergency surgery on a critical patient.
When Iker left his office in the Ely courthouse only one Ely town cop remained in the building to cover the radios and Ely itself.
Outside, he saw low clouds skimming over the storefronts and spitting flurries, so he radioed for a weather
