The storm left behind gloomy flurries that stuck to their faces, melting and trickling down their cheeks. The breaking waves were gone, now sluggish swells slapped the bow of the canoe.
“If only she wouldn’t have called this morning.” Allen paddled furiously and stared ahead at the misty spruce crowns. “Can you believe it. He threw the cell phone away.”
“Nothing like a domestic dispute.” The remark rolled easy and world-weary from Broker’s tongue; a cliche from his background in law enforcement.
Allen paused to rest on his paddle and shake his head. “Typical. He does things on impulse, then he regrets it later. That’s been the story of his life since he met her.” Allen looked up and shook his head. “And how he met her, Jesus.”
“In an AA group, right?” Broker said, to keep the conversation going.
“Right, but the reason they met personally was, she walks in to this group of guys in this church basement-folding chairs, cinder blocks, no windows, the air full of cigarette smoke. .”
Allen said “cigarette smoke” like he’d just raised Satan.
“. . and she’s wearing this sweater and she has these perfect tits. So Hank and this other guy start to wager, like, are they for real or are they implants? So Hank is on the case. He takes her out for coffee-at this motel and gets her in bed and, he swears, no scars, they are real.” Allen continued to shake his head. “I was married. You know where I met my wife? In Sunday school.”
“So Sommer married a sweater girl,” Broker mused.
“Milt thinks she’s practically a gun moll. But he’s reacting more to her old boyfriend, that Earl character. He’s definitely a criminal element.”
Broker suppressed a grin at Allen’s language. He was getting an impression of Allen as a missionary-position Minnesota Normal.
“I guess some women find that attractive,” Allen said. “And Hank has a little bit of that in his past, too. You know, rough stuff.”
Broker cleared his throat and looked to his paddle. Getting into the locker-room swing of the conversation, he’d been on the verge of asking Allen to describe more of her.
They were silent for a while, just paddles shoving water.
Allen turned out to be surprisingly strong and steady on the paddle, which led Broker to revise his earlier judgment. The doctor, he decided, was used to digital results and was holding nothing but an analog wooden paddle in his hands, so he was more frustrated than fussy. And, far from being annoyed at Allen’s carping, Broker welcomed it because it filled the dreary monotony of sky and water.
Talk was good, because they had a lot of time to fill. Broker figured fourteen to sixteen hours of nonstop paddle and portage to the lodge. And they’d have to camp when it got dark. So add six more hours. If Sommer had twenty-four hours, they’d be cutting it close. And they still had to rely on a plane or helicopter to get him out.
The time stretched out in front of them. Old-fashioned, unplugged, slow Real Time with no crowds, no traffic, sirens, TV, telephones, email, or Internet. Just the creak of the canoe, the hiss and slap of the bow cutting the chop, and the dip of the paddles.
“How long have you guys known each other?” Broker asked.
“I met Hank through Milt. I met Milt at a seminar. He was the keynote speaker on malpractice. Milt invited me to a poker game where I met Hank. That was just after he got the movie deal for his book.”
“I don’t read much. .” Broker was about to say “fiction.”
“But you’ve been around,” Allen said quickly.
“How’s that?”
“Back by the fire, when we were stripping out of the wet stuff. Your shoulder, your back, and your right leg. I spent a month in Bosnia in ’94. Doctors without Borders. I’ve seen shrapnel wounds before.”
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 This Old House. Now he wants to fill it up with smelly cats and dogs. And maybe kids.”
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.
You just never know never know never know. .
. . 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. Do you have a cell phone?” The bow of the canoe clunked onto the rock beach.
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 update from the cops at the accident site to the west.
“We got us another October Surprise. It’s snowing like hell here, and Hibbing’s socked in,” came the reply. Hibbing was sixty miles south and west. “Two feet of snow predicted. Winds already gusting to forty mph. The state patrol is thinking about closing Highways Two and Seventy-one.”
“Sam, break out one medic and head back for Ely. We’re way understaffed here. There’s a critical stranded on Lake Fraser. I’m going in with the seaplane.”
“In this?”
“Affirmative. Call the hangar for details.” He keyed off the net and put his Ford Crown Vic in gear. Four minutes later he walked into the hangar at the seaplane base. Outside, a stubby red and white Dehaviland Beaver floatplane tossed on its pontoons at the dock. Inside, two pilots stood at the radio and the one with the mike in his hand said to Iker, “Where we’re at, Dave, is dispatch recommends no fly. I just talked to the state patrol. They’re not turning a prop in this. The Rescue Squad’s socked in and so is Life Flight out of St. Mary’s in Duluth. The National Weather Service just officially named it a blizzard and it’s going to clobber us in half an hour.”
“This isn’t a sprained ankle. We got a guy who’s going to die,” Iker said.
“That’s what I told them and it’s my call.” He depressed the send key on the mike. “I’m going up,” the pilot said to his dispatcher, clicked the mike twice, and turned to Iker. “Looks like just you and me. The paramedics are on that truck pileup.”
Iker nodded and said, “I got a cop and a medic on the way back in but we can’t wait.” They leaned over a map and Iker said, “One of the guys paddling out is a surgeon; we’ll zip him to the hospital just in case. I know the guide. He says the patient will be hard to find from the air with the snow. No tent. It’s not a normal campsite. They’re hunkered back in a rock hidey-hole on a low bluff. He says he can steer us in.”
“Where are they now?” the pilot asked. His eyes darted out the windows where the ground crew was readying the Beaver.
“Paddling in on Lake One. They should be at Billie Broker’s Lodge in about ten minutes.”
“Okay,” the pilot said. He was clear-eyed, clean-shaven, and neat in his Smokey Bear-green jacket, sweater, and trousers. He’d flown Black Hawk helicopters into Iraq and danced with blizzards working the Alaskan bush. He’d bailed out of flying commercial passenger flights because they were too boring.
“We got one shot,” he said. “We drop in on Lake One, pick your guy up, then fly to Fraser and find the stranded party.” He pulled on a jacket and moved through the hangar toward the pier. Outside, he shouted over the rising wind. “The tricky part is meeting this big bastard storm on the way back.”
The hangar chief signaled thumbs up, the preflight checks were complete. They threw a Stokes stretcher and a first-aid bag in the cramped cargo hold behind the cockpit and climbed in. The Beaver was built exceptionally tough to handle the rugged terrain of Northern Canada. With its fuselage slung and strutted under its long, square-tipped wing, it had all the charm of a back-country, three-quarter-ton mud hole truck.
The 450-horse Pratt and Whitney engine coughed a cloud of exhaust and the aluminum pontoons smacked forward over the chop. An orange windsock on a spit of land across from the dock blasted out at a three-o’clock right angle to its mast and pointed the way straight east.
Broker was paddling flat out, heading for the boat dock in front of Uncle Billie’s Lodge and the county patrol cruiser idling next to it. Then he heard the motor.
The engine growl came in low and fast, then strings of rivets caught the pewter light as the Beaver cleared the pines. Bottom heavy with big pontoon floats, it lunged down, practically set one wing tip in the lake, turned tightly, and splash-landed a hundred yards away.
Deputy Iker’s brown and tan uniform appeared in the open hatch. He commenced to yell and wave but Broker couldn’t hear over the roaring prop, so he sculled up to the pontoon.
“You the doctor?” Iker yelled. Allen nodded and Iker pointed to the shore and yelled again. “That cop will take you to the hospital.”
“I thought there’d be a helicopter?” Allen shouted.
“Take my word for it, you want this Beaver more than a helicopter.” Then Iker rolled his eyes at Broker. They’d had dinner five days ago and they went back a ways, working a county task force together when Broker was undercover with BCA.
“You,” Iker yelled at Broker, “are coming with me.”
He pulled Broker up on the pontoon, leaned out, waved to the cop in the dock, and pointed to Allen. The cop nodded. Allen pushed off and, facing about in the bow seat, began paddling for shore.
Broker and Iker tumbled into the cargo bay. Iker whirled his forefinger, the pilot leaned into the stick, the plane wheeled, the prop bit the wind, and they vibrated over the speed-bump waves.
“That was fast,” Broker yelled.
“Not fast enough. There’s a blizzard moving in.” Iker smiled thinly.
“But we’ll beat it back to Ely?” Broker asked.
Again the thin grin from the deputy as he banged Broker on the shoulder. “Hey, we eat this shit up, right?”
Broker blinked and shook his head. “We used to eat this shit up.”
“Yeah, well,” Iker tossed a thumb at the pilot, “he’s young. He definitely still eats this shit up.”