World of Trouble

by Ben H. Winters

  Nico’s fine. Everything is going to be fine.

  I blink awake after a minute or two, shake a crick out of my neck, and get out my notebook and get to work.

  No, Billy and Sandy have no sledgehammer. No gas-powered jackhammer or drill. What they’ve got is fuel, enough to keep the RV running another couple days, just for the tunes; they’ve got beer and they’ve got chicken and that’s about it.

  Then I figure, what the heck, and I reach into my pocket and take out the yearbook picture from the plastic Concord Public Library sleeve and unfold it carefully, because it is beginning to crumble around the edges.

  No, they haven’t seen her. They haven’t seen many people at all, and definitely no adult version of this high-school girl with the glasses and black T-shirt and the wry expression. No one like that around here at all.

  3.

  Billy and Sandy’s little campground takes on a shabby glamour at night; they spare enough power to light the lanterns and do some close dancing under the yellow globes, weaving in and out of the cooker’s fragrant plumes. Sandy bobs her head lightly to the booming rock and roll, her long tangled red curls moving up and down, Billy’s hands wrapped around her waist like a life jacket.

  I stand up and brush the dust off my pants and watch them in the starlight glimmer and think about my dead parents. Maybe it’s missing Nico, looking for Nico, maybe it’s just the intensity of these days, wondering on some level what they would have made of it all.

  Every gorgeous New Hampshire September, when the leaves were in the first flush of turning and the sky woke up perfect blue, day after day, my father would say something like: “September is the queen of months. Not just here—everywhere. Everywhere in the world. September is perfect.” He’s standing out front with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, leaning forward with his palms flattened on the wood rail of the porch, breathing in the crisp smell of someone burning leaves a couple doors down. And then my mother, shaking her head, giving him that gentle tsk-tsking smile. “You’ve never been anywhere else. You’ve lived in New England your entire life.”

  “Oh, sure,” he says. “But I’m right.” Kisses her. Kisses me. “I’m right.” Kisses little Nico.

  The next chicken is named Augustus and he will be served at midnight, but I’ve got to get going. I’ve got work to do. I look past the RV, out at the street, and the street looks so black.

  Billy wanders back over to their ramshackle Rube Goldberg brewery to fill up his bottle, leaves Sandy swaying on the dance floor, and I find I have one more line of questioning to pursue.

  “What do you know about the police?” I ask him.

  “Say again, Hank?”

  He gazes at me while beer foams out of the dirty tap into his bottle.

  “Local law enforcement. In Rotary, I mean. Do you know anything about the police around here?”

  “Oh, they’re total assholes. Like all cops.”

  He clocks my expression and snorts, spraying liquid out of his nose. “Oh, no!” He laughs, swipes beer off his chin with the back of his hand. “I had a weird feeling about you, I totally—” He cuts himself off, hollers to Sandy, who is swaying, eyes closed, mumbling along with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” “Sandy, he’s a cop!”

  She keeps her eyes closed, raises one hand in an absent thumbs-up, keeps on swaying.

  “Listen, man, don’t bust me on the open container, all right?” He’s laughing, he can’t believe it. “It won’t happen again.”

  “I’m not a cop anymore,” I say. “My position was eliminated.”

  Billy pulls another big swig. “Shit, you know what? That’s what everyone should say. Whole planet, man.” He snorts. “Our position has been eliminated.”

  “So,” I say. “The local cops.”

  He shakes his head. “Yeah, like I said, no offense, man, but the cops around here were just your classic bully cops. They were when I was growing up, anyway, and it only gets worse, you know?”

  “How long did they keep working?”

  “With the big news, you mean?” Billy considers this, runs a beer-wet hand through his hair. “About two fucking seconds, most of ’em. Even the chief, Mackenzie, first-class pig that guy was.” He turns again. “Hey, Sandy, remember Dick Mackenzie?” Another eyes-closed thumbs-up from Sandy. “Pig, right?” Her thumb raises higher.

  “Shit, man,” Billy says, turning back to me. “As soon as this got to be a serious thing, it was fuck it like a bucket for most of those guys.”

  That’s the same story I got from Detective Irma Russel’s big leather log book—I can see it clearly, the notebook page where she wrote Jason quit, triple exclamation points. That’s how I ended up with my own brief employment as a detective in the Concord Police Department, Adult Crimes Unit. People quit, people died. A slot opened up unexpectedly. Silver lining.

  “Guess some of ’em kept at it a while, though,” says Billy. “The good ones. Till the riot.”

  “The riot?” I’m interested now. I squint to focus, shaking my head, shaking off the mild effects of my one beer. “What riot?”

  “Prison riot. State pen.”

  I blink. “Creekbed.”

  “Right, that’s right. This was—man—Sandy, do you remember, when was Creekbed?”

  “May,” she calls.

  “Nah.” Billy scrunches his face. “June, I think.”

  “June 9,” I tell him.

  “If you say so.”

  I nod. I do say so. Irma Russel’s last entry, June 9, neat handwriting, Heavenly Father keep a good eye on us, would ya?

  “This is from a buddy of mine who heard about it from a guy he knows, a meth head that was in there, who bragged about it apparently, sick fuck. Way the meth head says, everyone still walking around with a badge got sent down there to Creekbed State Penitentiary. I guess the guards had took off, left the bars locked, you know, and the inmates were getting cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs down there. Started basically thinking everyone’d forgotten about ’em, and they were gonna die in there.”

  Right. Which they would have—like caged rats—like Cortez’s mom’s boyfriend Kevin, the ex-marine. All the people who’ll be caught somewhere when Wednesday comes: all the prisoners, all the elderly or incapacitated on life support, those morbidly obese people who can’t leave the house without a piano mover. Everybody, really, all of us, trapped in place, like the damsel in distress in the old movie, tied to the tracks with the train barreling down.

  “So they set the damn place on fire,” says Billy.

  “The cops?”

  “No, man, the bad guys. My buddy’s buddy and his pals. There were like a couple hundred or more in there.” Billy’s beer is empty again; he presses the spigot to refill it. “They set their own joint on fire, just to call some attention, and whatever cops was left around here, the cops and the fire folks, the what do you call ’em—ambulance guys. All went down there. And then I guess things—uh, things got real nasty.” He looks over his shoulder at Sandy, and then leans in to continue the conversation sotto voce, as if to protect her from such conversations, from wasting a moment’s thought on this stuff. “Real nasty. As soon as a couple of ’em were rescued they were taking guns off the cops, shooting at the cops, the firemen and all. Locking folks in the fire, you know, just for …” He shrugs. “Just ’cuz.”

  He looks down into his bottle. “I mean, I don’t like cops”—he laughs a little—“no offense, like I said. But this …”

  He trails off, clears his throat, tries to pull the glimmer back into his smile.

  “Anyway, so that was about it around here, as far as police. Since then it’s every man for himself, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sure. I know.”

  “That about the story where you came from?”

  “Yeah,” I say, and I can see it, Concord on fire, the statehouse dome gleaming red with flame. “Just about.”

  Red towns, blue towns, black. It’s almost over. It’s almost here.

  I recor
d the conversation about Creekbed in my little blue notebook: the date, the sequence of events. I am considering as I write whether there might be some crossover here, some connection to Nico and Jordan’s group and their presence in Rotary, Ohio. What I know is that Nico was summoned out here as of mid-July, after this scientist with the clandestine plan was located in Gary, Indiana. Even if that much of it is true, which it probably is not, it is hard to imagine Jordan and his allies mustering the resources and strategic thinking to arrange a prison riot, a terrible fire, just to clear the few cops remaining from the Rotary, Ohio, police station.

  Still, though, I write it down. The thin pages of my notebook are smudged with new question marks.

  My grieving for Detective Irma Russel I condense into five seconds. Ten seconds. Not my story. Not my case. Still, though, you can picture it, the fiery prison, rescuers rushing in, gunshots, flames, people pounding on cell walls, screaming and burning behind thick glass doors.

  “Oh, and Billy, what I wanted to ask: Do you know anything about the station itself?”

  “Nah.”

  “When it was built? Whether there’s a basement?”

  “Man, I just said I don’t know anything about it.” Billy’s big tailgate-party smile wavers. Sandy wanders over to the home-brew setup, smiling vacantly. Billy is asking himself, how long am I supposed to give this guy? How many minutes out of however many minutes remain for the stranger with the notebook and the questions, who can offer nothing in return?

  “Thank you, Billy,” I say, and close my notebook. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “No sweat, brother,” he says, walking away. “I gotta go and kill Augustus.”

  * * *

  Now it’s time to leave, it really is. The moon is up.

  But I stand inside the RV with Sandy, watching Billy select and slaughter the final chicken of this twenty-four-hour period. Houdini remains outside, at the edge of the coop, his chin lowered in his paws, staring warily at Billy as he stalks among the waddling birds. Now there’s nothing left. Billy has got long yellow gloves on, pulled up almost to his elbows, and a heavy butcher’s apron over his bare upper body, tufts of black chest hair sprouting up over the top of the apron. The coop looks new; the crossbeams, connecting from post to post to post and strung with chicken wire, are of pine wood, smooth and regular two-by-fours, newly cut and precisely measured. The posts themselves are concrete. At the base of one of the posts of the coop is stamped a small three-letter logo, the single word JOY in all caps.

  “Hey. Hey,” I say suddenly. “Hey, Sandy. That chicken coop.”

  “Nice, huh?” She’s transfixed, watching Billy in his yellow gloves lift doomed Augustus out of the crowd.

  “Sandy, who built that coop for you all?”

  “The chicken coop?”

  “Yes, right. Who built it?”

  “This guy,” she says through a yawn. “This Amish guy.”

  “Amish guy?”

  Billy and the chicken a blur at the periphery of my vision. My mind rushing and racing. Billy lifts the bird by the neck, lifts it high as if considering the weight. Houdini’s eyes follow the squawking, flapping victim.

  This Amish guy, Sandy says, Billy encountered down in Rotary proper. “He was in town, putting up signs, basically. Odd jobs, concrete work. Will work for food, you know.” She looks at me, sees my intent expression—concrete work, I’m thinking, just two little words, concrete work—she keeps talking. “It was funny, actually, I was just telling Billy we had to make ourselves a coop for these damn things, and he says he’s got no idea how to do that. Half hour later, we run into these guys.”

  “These guys? There were more than one of the Amish guys?”

  “No. One Amish guy. A big guy, older guy, big thick beard, black with gray in it. Must have come from down county, that’s where they live out here. But he had a couple of foreigners with him, you know?”

  “Foreigners, as in CIs.”

  “Yeah. Exactly. CIs. Confused-looking sons of bitches. Chinese maybe? I don’t know. But they didn’t say a word, they just worked. Worked hard, by the way. The Amish guy, though, he was calling the shots.”

  “Did you get his name?”

  “You know what? I did not. I know Billy didn’t. I think we just called him Amish Guy for the four hours he was here. He didn’t laugh, but he answered to it.”

  Billy presses the chicken’s small pinched face down on the top of an upside-down wooden crate to hold it still. The chicken angles his head upward by instinct so it seems to be staring straight ahead, while Billy’s big hand steadies the wriggling round body. He brings the axe down in one long sweeping arc, slams the blade through the chicken’s tiny neck, and blood shoots out in all directions. Billy turns his head away, just for a second, an expression of pure horror and disgust. The chicken’s body jumps and he holds it steady with his hands. Houdini comes to life, barking like mad, watching the twitching corpse of the chicken, the blood spouting from the open neck.

  I pick up the pencil again and I get back into it with Sandy, taking everything down, writing quickly, all the new information, progressing rapidly toward the end of the notebook. Amish guy, up from down county—how far away is down county?—down county is forty miles. Two catastrophe immigrants on the crew with him—Asian men, anyway—but you’re sure he was the boss—he was the boss. Concrete work—you asked him to do the coop in concrete—no, he suggested it, he knows concrete, the hell do we know …

  My fingers gripping the pencil in the old familiar way, my heart doing the thing it does when I’m working, soaking up facts like a sponge, really gunning and going. Sandy’s eyes are wide and amused as I nod and nod and echo her words, circle back to get things right, breathing fast, experiencing a welcome burst of self-confidence, a belief in myself as possessing the instincts and the intelligence to do this work properly. Five years? Ten?

  I realize that my eyes are closed, I’m thinking hard, and then I open them and find that Sandy is staring at me—no, not staring, gazing, looking me over with a kind of abstract interest, and for a brief strange second it’s like she can see into my skull, watch the thoughts in there rotating and spiraling and orbiting each other in patterns.

  I clear my throat, cough slightly. There is a trickle of sweat running down her chest, disappearing into the space between her breasts.

  “What was her name?” she says.

  “Who?”

  “The woman. Any woman. One of the women.”

  I blush. I look at the floor, then back up at her. She had reminded me of Alison Koechner, but it’s Naomi that I say. I whisper the name—“Naomi.”

  Sandy leans forward and kisses me, and I kiss her back, pressing myself against her, my excitement about the investigation rolling over, accelerating, transforming into that other big feeling, that exhilarating and terrifying feeling—not love, but the thing that feels like love—bodies rising to each other, nerve endings opening up and seeking each other—a feeling I know, even as it floods into my veins and my joints, that I will probably never feel again. Last time, for this. Sandy smells like cigarettes and beer. I kiss her hard for a long time and then we pull apart. The moon is up and full and bright, coming through the kitchen windows of the RV.

  Billy is there. He’s watching in silence, holding the chicken by the stump of its neck, the plump body rotating in his fist, steam rising from the hot dead animal. Billy’s taken off his apron and there is a slick of sweat on his neck and shoulder muscles, blood flecked on his bare chest, blood splattered along the hem of his underpants. He smells like charcoal and dirt.

  “Billy,” I begin, and Sandy shivers slightly beside me, drunk or fearful, I don’t know. How absurd it’ll be if I just die here, right now, the end of the line, how ridiculous to die on day T-minus five from a shotgun blast in a lover’s triangle.

  “Hang out another half an hour,” he says. “Eat more chicken.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You sure?” he says. Sandy crosses t
he small space of the RV kitchen, hugs him around the waist, and he squeezes her back while he holds the chicken aloft. “I just gotta pluck him.”

  I could stay, I really could. I think that they would have me. I could stake out a space in the dirt by the Highway Pirate, slump down low in it, and wait things out.

  But no, that’s not—that’s not going to happen.

  “Thank you. Really,” I say. New facts. New possibilities. “Thanks a lot.”

  1.

  The way I figure it, if Cortez’s take on the spatial mechanics of the police station garage is correct, and that’s a thick wedge of concrete wiggled into that floor like a cork in a bottle, then they can’t have done it themselves. Someone was there after Nico and her gang went down, and presuming that everyone in the group descended together, then it was someone else—someone who was hired and paid for the gig, contracted to roll the seal across the tomb.

  Thus I am aware of a concrete job that was recently performed in this area, and I am aware of a group of men who were out offering themselves for odd jobs generally, but specializing in concrete.

  That’s enough. Away I go, rolling south on State Road 4 in the middle of the night.

  “Twenty or thirty miles,” says Billy, “that’s where the Amish farms start to crop up, the fruit stands and that. You can’t miss it.” Houdini’s in the wagon and my fat Eveready is duct-taped between the handlebars, sending a joggling uneven light down the highway ahead of us.

  As I pedal I can picture Detective Culverson chuckling at me and my rookie logic. I can see him, across our booth at the Somerset Diner, looking at me with quiet amusement, rolling his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. I can hear him poking at the holes in my theory like a loose tooth.

  He asks his pointed questions in his mild voice, rolls his eyes at Ruth-Ann, the waitress, who joins him in teasing good old Hank Palace before bustling off for more coffee.