World of Trouble

by Ben H. Winters

  “Can you make coffee?” I ask Cortez.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Great idea.”

  Cortez stands, stretches, takes the necessary items from his golf bag and gets set up, while I think about blood. Two trails, one running out of the kitchenette and one running back.

  Coffee on the boil, Cortez goes back to rummaging for treasure, working his way down the shelving system, lifting each object to the light, quickly assessing, evaluating, moving on.

  “Training manual,” he says. “Porno mag. Empty shoebox. Sunglasses. Broken.” He tosses the mirrored state-trooper-style shades over his shoulder, shattering them further on the patterned-concrete floor of the garage. “Holsters. Could use these, maybe. Oh, goodness. Goodness gracious, Policeman. Binoculars.”

  He holds them up, bulky and black, points them at me like a birdwatcher.

  “Bad news,” he says. “You look like shit.”

  He takes the binoculars. He takes a bag full of cell phone batteries. I’ve stopped asking Cortez what good it all is, all of the collecting and acquiring and sorting. It’s a game to him, a challenge: keep gathering up useful objects until the world caves in and no one has any use for anything.

  I am aware of the possibility, of course, that it is Nico’s blood on the knife, in the sink, on the ground. It is too early to think about that, too early to reach that sort of conclusion.

  The most likely scenario, after all, is that this blood is the blood of a stranger, and these knives are totally unrelated to my current investigation. It’s just some terrible act of violence among uncounted terrible acts of violence occurring at an accelerating rate. We saw a lot of this on our journey, met people who confessed, whether in tearful remorse or in fierce defiance, to some unconscionable deed. The old lady standing guard over her grandson in an abandoned grocery store, who whispered how she had shot a stranger for six pounds of frozen hamburger meat. The couple at the truck stop that caught someone trying to steal the Dodge pickup they’d been living in, and in the ensuing confrontation ran him over.

  We called them red towns, the worst of the places, the communities that had fractured into chaos and lawlessness. We had different names for the different kinds of worlds that the world has become. Red towns: violence and grief. Green towns: pleasant, playing at make-believe. Blue towns: uneasy calm, people hiding. Maybe National Guard or regular army troops on scattered patrol. Purple towns, black towns, gray …

  I cough into my fist; the claustrophobic garage smell is getting to me, the reek of ancient cigarettes and exhaust. A grimy concrete floor in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern. A thought is twitching to life. Dim and uncertain. I sniff again, drop down onto all fours, digging my knees and palms into the hard concrete floor.

  “Policeman?”

  I don’t answer. I take a crawling step forward, toward the middle of the room, head angled down, staring at the floor.

  “Have you gone mad?” says Cortez, clutching a battered steel money box under his arm like a football. “If you’ve gone mad you’re useless, and I’ll have to eat you.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “Help you what?”

  “Butts,” I say, peeling off my sport coat. “Please help me find cigarette butts.”

  I crawl across the floor, from the back of the room out toward the garage doors, my shirt sleeves pushed up, my palms getting filthy. I use my magnifying glass, following the checkerboard pattern across the concrete: light squares, dark squares. After a moment Cortez shrugs, sets down the steel box, and we settle in, side by side like grazing cows, moving in slow patterns, staring at the floor.

  There are plenty of butts, of course: the floor of the parking garage, like all such places, is littered with the stubs of dead cigarettes. We hunt through the dust and grime of the floor and gather up all we can find and then I come up to a squat and sort them into two piles, checking each one carefully, holding it up and squinting at it in the light before consigning it to its place. Possibles and not possibles. Cortez whistles while he works, occasionally murmuring “madness, madness.” Most of the cigarettes are either generic, having no marking on the filter, or home-rolled, just twists of thin white paper with crusts of tobacco leaf spilling out the side.

  And then, after ten minutes—fifteen—

  “There it is.”

  There. I reach down and pluck up the grimy little twist of paper, the one I was looking for. I hold it up to the flat gray light. There.

  “Ah,” says Cortez. “A cigarette butt. I knew we could do it.”

  I don’t answer. I found it, as I knew in my secret policeman’s heart that I would. A single cigarette butt, snarled and torn, smashed to a ragged brown by the grind of a heel, shredded-leaf guts spilling out around the dirty wrinkle of the wrapper. I hold the stubbed-out butt carefully between two fingers like the broken body of an insect.

  “She’s here.” I stand up. I look around the room. “She was here.”

  Now it’s Cortez’s turn not to answer. He’s still staring at the floor—something else has caught his attention. My heart is heaving in my chest, swelling and receding like a tide.

  The cigarette market, like all markets for addictive goods, was violently disrupted by the impending end of civilization: skyrocketing demand and vanishing supply. Most smokers, old and new, have made do with foul-tasting generics, or scrounged enough loose tobacco to roll their own. But my sister, my sister Nico, has managed somehow always to be in possession of her favorite brand.

  I hold the butt up high. I sniff it. This object must be considered in combination with the plastic fork suspended in its struggle to hold open the door of the vending machine, and the conclusion to be heard from these two objects, these two small objects singing together, is that this is real. Poor addled Abigail didn’t pick the police station in Rotary, Ohio, at random from all the buildings in all the world. Nico really came here, she and her merry band of conspiracists and would-be heroes. I would almost say that she left the butt on purpose, maybe even kept smoking all these years on purpose, in defiance of my nagging, just so that she could leave this clue behind. Except I know that she kept smoking all these years because she was addicted to nicotine, and also because she enjoyed pissing me off.

  “She was here,” I say again to Cortez, who is muttering to himself, feeling along the floor with a forefinger extended. I slide the butt into a baggie and carefully place it in my coat pocket. “She is here.”

  “I’ll go you one better,” he says, looking up from the square of concrete he’s squatting on. “This is a trap door.”

  * * *

  I’ve been playing hide-and-seek with Nico for our entire lives.

  The weekend after the funeral—the second funeral, our father’s, early in June of the year I turned twelve—the movers were roaming around the house, boxing up my little life, carrying out my stash of comic books and my baseball glove and my twin bed, all my worldly store lifted out to the truck in one trip. I realized with a start that I hadn’t seen my baby sister for hours. I flipped out, charged through the house in a panic, ducking past the movers, throwing open the doors of the dusty empty closets, charging down to the basement.

  Out on the streets of Concord I clomped through patches of mud from the midsummer rain, up and down side streets, calling her name. I found Nico at last in White Park, giggling, hiding under the slide, getting sunburnt in a light summer dress, scratching her name in the dirt with a stick. I glowered and crossed my skinny arms. I was infuriated, already a roil of emotions from the move, the grief. Nico, age six, reached up and patted my cheek. “You thought I was gone, too, didn’t you, Hen?” Hopping up, taking my big hand between her two little ones. “You did, huh?”

  And now here I am in Rotary, Ohio, less than a week to go, bent forward at the waist with my fingers twitching, pacing like a lunatic in a circle around Cortez the thief, staring at his broad back where he’s hunched over a trap door trying to figure how to lift it.

  The secret door in the floo
r of the garage is a surprise, except it’s not a surprise. This is one of the things people are doing, people all over the world, digging holes or finding holes and climbing down inside them. The United States Army, according to rumor, has created vast networks of lead-lined bunkers for the evacuation of top brass and key executive branch officials, a reinforced underground universe extending from beneath the Pentagon all the way across Arlington. The city of West Marlborough, Texas, embarked on a three-month “all-city dig” to create a massive safe space for all city residents beneath a local high-school ball field.

  The relevant experts, in general, have been politely skeptical of such enterprises—of all the governments, the neighborhoods, the millions of private citizens digging into their Cold War–style redoubts. As if one could ever dig deep enough to withstand the blast. As if you could take enough groceries down there with you to survive when the sun disappears and the animals all die.

  “Son of a bitch,” mutters Cortez. He’s using my magnifying glass, peering, tapping the smooth stone floor with his big knuckles.

  “What?” I say, and then erupt in a coughing fit, overcome by excitement, anxiety, exhaustion, dust. I don’t know what. My throat burns. I’m standing right behind him, peering over his shoulder, shifting on my feet. Time is passing while we stand here, minutes are rushing past like stars flying by at light speed in a science-fiction serial. I check the time on my Casio. It’s 9:45 already. Can that be right?

  “Cortez,” I say. “Can you open the door or not?”

  “It’s not a door,” he says, sweating, pushing his thick black hair out of his eyes. “That’s the problem.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not a door?” I’m speaking too rapidly, too loudly. My words jangle back at me. I feel like I’m going crazy, just a little bit. “You said it was a door.”

  “Mea culpa. A door has a handle.” He jabs his finger at the floor. “This is a lid. A cover. There is an opening in the ground here, probably for a staircase, and somebody covered it over.”

  Cortez points to four places on the floor where he claims to see the ghostly remnants of post holes, the foundations of a stair rail. But even more telling, he says, are the four panels of the concrete itself: two dark and two light, laid more recently than all the others.

  “That’s the lid,” he says. “Those four pieces are one piece. They had a hand mixer, they poured a slab, they stamped and stained it to match the pattern of the floor and cut the edges to fit, and then they lowered it in.” He hands me back my magnifying glass. “You see where it’s cut?”

  I can’t, though. I can’t see any of this. I just see a floor. Cortez stands and cracks his back, turning all the way this way, then all the way the other. “The pattern was hand-corrected along the edges. The rest is machine-sawed. This here is done by hand. See?”

  I squint at the floor; I open my eyes as wide as they can go. I’m so tired. Cortez sighs with weary amusement and then hustles over to the big garage door.

  “Here,” he says, and pops the lock and flies it open. “You see that?”

  And the room is suddenly alive with tiny particles, all around, millions of tiny pieces dancing in the empty air.

  “Dust.”

  “Yes indeedy. Concrete is just tiny stones packed very tight. Someone uses a chop saw or a walk-behind to correct the edges of a lid, for example, and it makes a lot of dust. Like this.”

  “When?” I say. “When did they do it?”

  “You’re going to hyperventilate, Policeman. Your head is going to fall off.”

  “When was it?”

  “Might have been yesterday. Might have been a week ago. Like I said—concrete makes a lot of dust.”

  I squat down. I get up. I reach into my pocket, feel the photo of Nico, the fork, the cigarette butt now encased in a sandwich baggie. I squat again. My body refuses to be still. I feel coffee sluicing through me, bubbling black and nervous along my veins. The dust is stinging my eyes. I think I can see it now, the hairline fracture between the door and the floor. Nico is down there. Nico and the rest of them. She and her cadre arrived here and have built themselves some sort of ersatz headquarters, under a layer of smoothed rock in an old garage. Waiting down there for the next stage of the scheme to unfold—or have they given up, are they waiting now like ostriches, heads in the dirt below the station?

  “Let’s put a handle on it,” I say to Cortez. “Lift it up.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it would require strength, which we do not have.”

  I look down at my body. I have always been a thin man, and now I am a thin man after a month of granola bars and coffee. Cortez’s weight loss has resolved his fighter’s frame to a coil of sinew, but he’s hardly Mr. Universe—stronger than me, in other words, but not strong.

  “A handle doesn’t help,” he says. He is slowly rolling a cigarette of his own, layering in tobacco from a pouch he keeps in the golf bag.

  “So what do we do?” I say, and he laughs, watching me pace.

  “I’m thinking, man. I’m pondering. You keep walking in circles. Eventually you will fall over, and that will be amusing.”

  I do it. He is joking, teasing me, but I do, I keep walking, I can’t stop, I circle the lid in the floor like an orbiting star. My thoughts run back to my sister’s close compatriot, the one I tried to track down in Concord: Jordan, last name unknown. Jordan was introduced to me by Nico at the University of New Hampshire, when she went there with me to help on a case; he held, she suggested, some vague but critical position in the hierarchy of her conspiracy. What struck me about Jordan was the ironic overlay in everything he said. While Nico’s relationship with their secret revolution was always so earnest—they really were going to save the world—with this kid Jordan I always got a sense that he was playacting, posing, having a grand old time. Nico didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, this attitude in him, and their relationship therefore was just one more thing to make me uneasy. The last time I saw Jordan, Nico was already gone, a helicopter had borne her away, and he gleefully hinted to me about more secrets, deeper levels, aspects of their intrigues to which Nico was not privy.

  And then when I went back to find him, to demand of him where the hell she had gone, I found Abigail instead, baffled and abandoned Abigail, and from her I got here—to Ohio, to Rotary, to a door in the floor.

  “We have to get down there.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” says Cortez. “It might be impossible.”

  “We have to.”

  Cortez blows his smoke rings and the both of us stare at the floor. Jordan is down there, I know that he is, and Nico is down there too, separated from me only by this layer of cold rock, and all we have to do is peel it up and out of the way. I breathe—I sing a line of something—I am trying to get my feverish and overextended mind to slow, stop galloping long enough to make a plan, develop a strategy, when my dog races into the room, skidding on his small heels, claws scrabbling on the concrete. There’s something wrong. He’s barking like mad, barking to wake the dead.

  4.

  “It’s probably a possum,” says Cortez, breathing hard as we charge like maniacs through the woods. “Stupid dog probably wants to show you a squirrel.”

  It’s not a possum. It’s not a squirrel. That much I can tell from the way that Houdini is hurtling forward, all sparked up, racing and bounding despite that limp, a distinct stutter step as he careens through the undergrowth. We run after him, Cortez and I, through the dense woods that back up against the police station, crashing through the brush like the world is on fire. It’s not a possum or a squirrel.

  We tumble down a westward slope, along the muddy bank of a small creek, deeper into the woods, and then at last we come out in a small clearing, a leafy mud-specked oval maybe twenty-five feet around. Cortez and I step over a line of high bushes to get in there while Houdini noses under, tearing new cuts in his hide, not caring. Cortez has a hatchet clutched tightly in one fist,
and there is, I know, a sawed-off shotgun in the deep inside pocket of his long black coat. I draw my own weapon, the SIG Sauer, and hold it out ahead of me two-handed. The three of us form a semicircle at the edge of the clearing: man, dog, man, all panting, all staring at the body. It’s a girl, facedown in the dirt.

  “Christ,” says Cortez. “Christ almighty.”

  I don’t answer. I can’t breathe. I take a step into the clearing, steady myself. The image disappearing, reappearing, my vision clouding and unclouding. The girl is fully clothed: Denim skirt. Pale blue top. Tan sandals. Arms thrown out in front of her as if she had died swimming, or reaching for something.

  “That her?” Cortez says quietly. In three strides I’m across the clearing to the body, and by the time I get there I know that it’s not—the hair is wrong, the height. My sister has never worn a jean skirt. I manage the word: “No.”

  My body floods with relief—and then, immediately, guilt, crashing in like a second wave while the first is still ebbing. This girl is not my sister but she is somebody’s sister, or daughter, or friend. She is somebody’s something. She was. Facedown in the dirt in the woods, arms extended. Caught after a chase. Six days to the end.

  Cortez steps up next to me, the hatchet clenched like a caveman’s club. We’re a quarter mile into the stillness of the forest and you can no longer see the one-story police station behind us, or the small town of Rotary that is down the hill on the other side of the woods. We might as well be miles deep into timberland, lost in a green-brown fairy world, surrounded by wildflowers and mud and the curled yellow leaves that have drifted down to coat the forest floor.

  I kneel beside the body of the girl and roll her over, gingerly brush the dirt and wood chips off her cheeks and out of her eyes. She’s Asian. Pretty. Fragile features. Black hair, pale cheeks. Thin pink lips. Small gold stud earrings, one in each ear. She’s been in a fight; her face shows multiple lacerations and bruises, including a black eye, the right eye, swollen almost shut. And the girl’s throat is cut from end to end, one side to the other, a terrible slash beginning at a point just beneath her right ear and traveling in a curved line to a point just below her left. The sight is flatly horrific, the red vision of her throat’s insides, wet and raw, gashed out of the pale white flesh. Blood is dried in clustered drips along the length of the wound.