World of Trouble

by Ben H. Winters

  Cortez takes one knee in the mud beside me and murmurs: “Our Father, who art in heaven.” I glance at him questioningly and he looks up, smiling but uneasy.

  “I know,” says Cortez. “I’m full of surprises.”

  I’m looking at the corpse, at her neck, thinking about the rack over the kitchen sink, butcher’s knife, paring knife, cleaver, everything splattered and stained with blood, and then I am about to stand up and she breathes—a tiny but distinct movement of her chest, and then another. Rise and fall.

  “Whoa—” I say, “Hey—” and Cortez says “What?” while I scramble to find her pulse point, inches below her Adam’s apple, under the horrible wound. There it is, the faint cry of a pulse, a thready gallop under my fingertips.

  She has no business being alive, this kid, throat slit and lying in the woods, but there you go, here she is. I bend my head down close and listen to the shallow breaths. She’s desperately dehydrated, tongue thick and dry and lips cracked.

  Very carefully, very gently, I lift the girl and arrange her weight in my arms, supporting her head in the crook of my arm like a newborn baby’s.

  “It’s my fault,” I whisper, and Cortez says, “What?”

  “It’s all my fault.”

  We’re too late. That’s the feverish understanding that’s burning its way up my neck and my face, standing here cradling this victim: whatever happened out here has already happened and we missed it and it’s my fault. We took too long to get here from Concord, made too many stops, always my decision, always my fault. A girl, ten miles outside of Seneca Falls, she came screaming out of the woods beside the roadway: she and her brother had been trying to free the animals from the local zoo, the poor beasts were trapped and starving, and now a tiger had cornered the brother and run him up a tree. All of this one long terrified rush of words, and Cortez said it was a trap and to keep driving the cart—we were in a golf cart, we found it at a country club in Syracuse—but I said I couldn’t do that, I said we have to help her and he asked why and I said “she reminds me of my sister.” Cortez laughed, opened his door with the sawed-off trained on the girl. “Everything reminds you of your sister.”

  The episode with the tiger cost us half a day, and there were more, too many more, red towns and gray towns. In Dunkirk we pulled a family from a burning apartment building in the fiery wreck of downtown but then we had nowhere to take them, no way to offer them assistance of any kind. We just left them on the firehouse steps.

  It’s spitting rain, ugly and cold. Late morning. The dog is moving in anxious circles among the trees, the dirt, the clumps of yellow leaves. I hold the sleeping girl close in my arms like a honeymooner, start the walk back to the police station. Cortez goes ahead of us, swinging the hatchet, clearing brush and branches from the path. Houdini limping along behind.

  5.

  We called it Police House because that was the name the kids picked for it, a big isolated country house in western Massachusetts, near a dot on the map called Furman. A bunch of cops and retired cops and their kids and friends have banded together there to live out the last run of days in relative security, in the company of like-minded individuals. That’s where I was living, along with Trish McConnell and her kids, along with a handful of other old friends and new acquaintances, before I left to find my sister.

  Among those in residence at Police House, on the top floor, is a tough old bird with close-cropped gray hair named Elda Burdell, known as the Night Bird, or just the Bird. Officer Burdell retired at the rank of detective sergeant two years before I joined the force; at Police House she has eased into the roles of unofficial dean and resident sage. Not the leader, but the person who sits in the attic in her armchair drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from a stack of cases she showed up with, dispensing advice and wise counsel about everything. The kids ask her which berries are safe to eat. Officer Capshaw and Officer Katz had the Bird settle a bet about what the best lures are for catching trout out of the fast-moving stream a quarter mile from the house.

  Late on August 23, the day after my trip to Concord to visit Abigail, I took the long walk up the stairs to the attic to discuss a couple of matters related to my planned departure.

  The Night Bird offers me a Pabst, which I decline, and we speak quickly about the necessary arrangements, and then she gazes at me with a half smile while I linger at the doorway, one foot in, one foot out.

  “Something else on your mind, son?”

  “Well—” I hesitate, rubbing my mustache, feeling ridiculous. “I just wanted your take on something.”

  “Fire away.” She leans forward with her hands draped between her legs, and I launch in, I give it to her as briefly as I can: the rogue scientist formerly attached to Space Command, the supposed nuclear stockpile waiting somewhere in the United Kingdom, the standoff burst.

  The Night Bird holds up two fingers, takes a short sip from her beer can, and says, “I’ll stop you there. You’re going to ask if a standoff burst is plausible.”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Oh boy, oh boy, Officer. I’ve heard of all of them.” The Night Bird sets down the Pabst and reaches out a thick palm. “Hand me that, will ya? The red binder there.”

  As it turns out, Officer Burdell’s made a study of all the various scenarios; she’s been collecting all the sober theories and glittery-eyed Hail Mary pitches and gauzy counterfactuals, all the off-the-wall ideas presented as possible world savers.

  “The standoff burst, kid, you’re talking about a top ten fantasy. Top five, maybe. I mean, you got, what, you got your push/pull fantasies, your gravity tractor fantasies, your Enhanced Yarkovsky Effect fantasies.” She flaps open the binder to a particular page, gazes with amusement at the long columns of figures. “People do get a hard-on for that Enhanced Yarkovsky Effect. Probably the funny name. But it won’t work. They never got the numbers right on all that magnetic field shit.”

  I nod, okay. All the science is boring me, I want yes or no. I want answers. “So, but the—the standoff burst?”

  The Night Bird clears her throat, cocks her head at me sour for a second, not liking to be rushed.

  “Yes,” she says. “Same story. It would take calibration and it would take hardware. The calibration, maybe, maybe this Space Command guy has some good numbers, maybe he’s figured out the target velocity and that, but no one’s got the hardware. Gotta have a highly specialized delivery system, built specific to this thing. To the material strength, the porosity, the velocity. Maybe there’s a chance someone builds the right launcher, does the math, if the sumbitch was a couple years out. If it was ten years out, you could nudge it enough that by the time it gets close it sails by, it’s a miss.” She angles forward in the armchair. “But you’re telling me someone thinks they’re gonna do it with a standoff burst now?” She looks at her watch, shakes her head. “What are we—a month? Month and a half?”

  “Forty-two days,” I say. “So you’re saying there is no chance?”

  “No. Listen. Officer. I am saying there is less than that. There is less than no chance.”

  I thanked her politely for everything and went downstairs and finished packing.

  * * *

  “You know, I hate to say it,” says Cortez, carefully constructing a hand-rolled cigarette. “But this is a very attractive girl.”

  I look at him sharply. There is nothing in either his tone of voice or his salacious expression to indicate that he does, in fact, hate to say it. He’s needling me is what he is doing, saying exactly the thing I will find most unsettling. Other people have enjoyed teasing me in the same way: my old friends, Detectives McGully and Culverson. Nico, of course. I get it. I know what I’m like.

  “I’m just saying.” Cortez lights a smoke and enjoys a long, satisfied inhale, contemplating the girl’s slim body with open appreciation. I don’t say anything, not wanting to give Cortez the satisfaction of even a joking rejoinder, no mild “ha-ha” or straight-man rolling of my eyes. I scowl, waving cigarette smoke
away from the unconscious young woman, and he stubs the thing out on the floor.

  “Oh, dear Palace,” he says, and he yawns and stands up. “I’m going to miss you when I’m in heaven and you’re not.”

  I’m sitting on the toilet, beside the girl, whom we’ve laid out on the thin bare mattress, her hands tucked at her sides. The bed is just inside the bars, inside the actual cell part of the holding cell, along with the toilet and the sink and mirror. Cortez is on the other side of the room, the good-guy side, in the thin space between the bars and the door leading out to the hallway. That’s the only place I could find a ceiling hook for the saline bag, so that’s where it’s hung: on the good-guy side of the room, the sterile fluid dripping out of the bag, looping down through its tubing, through the bars and into the girl’s arm. When we left Police House, the Night Bird assembled a first-aid kit for me: reams of gauze and boxes of aspirin and bottles of hydrogen peroxide, plus two liters of saline in two one-liter bags and an IV start kit. When I told her I had no idea how to administer it, she scoffed and said just follow the instructions on the kit. She said it practically administers itself.

  Cortez follows my gaze up to the bag of fluid. “Doesn’t look like it’s coming out, does it?”

  “Well, it’s dripping at the top, see?”

  “Did you do it right?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s dripping.”

  “What happens if you did it wrong?”

  I don’t respond, but the answer is that she won’t get fluid and she’ll die. I check the Casio and it’s 4:45 in the afternoon. The watch was given to me, along with a rushed hug, by Trish McConnell’s daughter Kelli. “Mom is mad at you,” she said, and I said, “I know,” and she said, “I am, too,” but nevertheless she snuck the watch into my pocket, and I’ve been wearing it. When you press the side button it glows a pleasant blue-green. I love the watch.

  This girl does not appear to have been sexually assaulted. I checked—swiftly and gingerly and with the minimum possible physical contact, murmuring apologies, but I checked. Neither does she have abrasions at the wrists or elbows that would be consistent with having been bound. Just the throat, plus the contusions and lacerations to the face, along with other signs of violent struggle: bruises on her knuckles and shins, two torn fingernails. I collected tissue samples from under her nails with a tweezer and placed them carefully in one of the sandwich bags. Detective Palace’s Miniature Roving Evidence Locker. I cleaned and dressed the wound to her throat, applying Neosporin in a thin glaze along the wide obscene mouth of the cut. I ended up using too much gauze, extending the bandaging on either side well beyond the edges of the wound, reaching around to the back of her neck. It looks like her head has been cut off and reattached. The girl’s hair is perfectly black, falling away in two matted curtains from her face.

  I stand up from the toilet, turn away for a minute, waver on my feet. I’m starving. Exhausted. In my hand is the sleeping girl’s bracelet. It was in her shirt-front pocket, not on her wrist. Delicate fake gold, the sort of cheap token you get at a mall chain store, the kind of thing boys buy for girls in high school. There are charms dangling from it: a music note, a pair of ballet slippers. A tiny silver cluster of flowers, delicate and lovely.

  “Irises?” I murmur to myself.

  “Lilies,” says Cortez.

  “You think?” I feel the small weight of the chain in my palm. “Maybe they’re roses.”

  “Lilies,” he says again and yawns.

  I study the girl’s blank face and decide that her name is Lily. That’s why she has the bracelet. I need for her to have a name, for right now.

  “My name is Henry Palace,” I whisper to Lily, who can’t hear. Cortez gazes at me with amusement. I ignore him. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

  She doesn’t answer. She’s unconscious. I’m not sure what else to do. I have a weird sudden need to lie down on that mattress myself; a weird wish that it was me instead of her. I watch her breathing: shallow breath in, shallow breath out. I hold the bracelet in my palm, dull in the dirty gold light of the small gray cell.

  Cortez pushes off from the wall and leans against the bars and starts talking, absently, casually.

  “My mother was in a coma once. State hospital. Just two days. They brought her lunch and dinner, even though she was eating through a tube. Oversight, I guess. Or some dumb rule. Me and my brother ate it. It was good, too, compared to the food she usually provided for us.”

  He laughs. I give him a half smile. I am never quite sure, when Cortez rolls out one of his long, involved stories, how true it is, how embellished, how much fabricated from whole cloth. The first time I met Cortez he was holed up in an ersatz warehouse on Garvins Falls Road, sitting on a pile of loot, which was subsequently taken from him by his erstwhile romantic and business partner, Ellen. He has told me three versions of that story, all with substantively different details: she caught him unawares and chased him out with a hatchet; she tricked him in a bargain; she had another lover, who showed up with some friends and cleaned the place out.

  He’s wandered back into the cell now and he stands beside the small toilet, examining his wide, uneven face in the mirror. I ask him how his mother ended up in the coma.

  “Oh.” He cracks his knuckles. “You know. I cut school one afternoon to go home and smoke some weed, and I found her and her boyfriend, and the boyfriend was choking her. His name was Kevin. He had been a marine. He was choking her with two hands, like this.” Cortez turns from the mirror and mimes the gesture, knuckles knitted together around an imaginary neck, eyes bulging.

  “That’s awful.”

  “He was a bad man, Kevin.”

  “So she was choked, and lost consciousness?”

  He makes a vague gesture. “She was on crack also. They both were.”

  “Oh.” My eyes flicker back to the sleeping girl. “What about her? I’m presuming an OD.”

  “Bite your tongue.” Cortez presses his hand to his chest, mock horrified. “She’s not that kind of girl. Someone slashed her. She bled out. She—I don’t know. Her organs shut down.”

  “No.” I’ve been turning this over, trying to remember the medicine of it. Not my specialty. “If a person bleeds enough to lose consciousness then they keep bleeding until they die, unless someone is present to staunch the wound.”

  Cortez frowns. “You sure?”

  “Yes. No.” I am trying to remember. “I don’t know.”

  I shake my head in self-disgust. Why don’t I know? In five years, I might get to be good at this, at being a policeman. Ten years, maybe.

  Cortez turns back to the mirror. I squeeze my knuckles into my eyes, trying to resurrect lessons from basic first-responder trainings. Academy courses, professional readiness seminars. The throat is a narrow place clustered with vital structures—meaning that, whatever else has befallen this girl, she is in one respect extremely lucky: whoever sawed into her throat stopped shy of transecting the carotid artery, stopped shy of the jugular vein, the delicate piping of the trachea. A simple blood test could reveal whether some illicit substance is additionally involved here, but at this point a simple blood test is a concept from an alien universe, it’s science fiction. Mass spectrometry and immunoassays and gas-liquid chromatography, all of it belongs now to a bygone world.

  And the fact is that what Cortez said actually has the ring of truth. Not that kind of girl. But neither was Peter Zell that kind of guy. Nobody is the kind of person they used to be.

  I study Lily’s calm face, and then look up again at the saline bag. I think some is gone now. I think she’s beginning to rehydrate. I hope so.

  “Don’t worry, Sherlock,” says Cortez. “We’ll just wait for her to wake up and we’ll ask her what happened. Oh, unless it takes more than a week. If it takes more than a week, we’re fucked.”

  He laughs again and this time I give it to him, I laugh too, I roll my eyes and shake my head. Next week, we’ll all be dead. This station will be a pile of a
sh, and all of us inside it. Ha-ha-ha. I get it.

  * * *

  I leave Lily sleeping and Cortez smoking and tromp back through the woods to the crime scene.

  If Detective Culverson were here, he would do a quiet, focused reenactment—walk it through, play all the parts. The girl was splayed out, facedown, pointing westward. Which means she was running from this direction, tripped here perhaps—fell forward this way. I pantomime her last desperate running steps, throw my hands forward like Superman. Imagine falling and landing, do it again, falling and landing, sensing behind me the shadowy form of my pursuer, knife in hand, bearing down.

  There are plenty of distinct footprints in the thick mud of the clearing, but they’re from two hours ago, from us: the squared-off heel of my traveling Doc Martens, the wedge of Cortez’s cowboy boots. I can even see the circuitous routes of Houdini’s paw prints, dancing circles around the scene. But the ground around the girl is an indistinct mush of scuff marks, ambiguous indentations, ground-down leaves and clots of mud. Black traces in the surrounding brown. All signs of the assailant buried or washed away from the crime scene by the wet weather of the past two days.

  I trudge back through the woods to the station, emerge onto the gravelly driveway that horseshoes through what was once a neat municipal lawn and is now an ugly field. Uneven beds of zinnias surrounded by overgrown grass like an advancing army. In the center of the lawn are two flagpoles, two flags rustling listlessly in the light rain: the United States of America, the state of Ohio. I search as carefully as I can through the lawn, dividing it into a grid in my mind and moving through sector by sector. I find things that might be clues and might not be: a mound of peanut shells, a tangled half-foot length of twine. In a sector just north of the Ohio state flag I find three evenly spaced divots in the mud that look to have been left by tent poles.