Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II

by Ben H. Winters

  I come here every couple days. I don’t knock on the door, I don’t go inside. I stand across the street or skulk through the mud-splattered alley behind the store, leaning in toward the open windows to hear her voice, catch a glimpse of her. Today I slouch down low on a bus bench across the street from Next Time Around with a six-month-old issue of Popular Science held up in front of my eyes like a spy.

  The last time I spoke to Nico Palace it was April, and she was standing on my porch in a jean jacket, revealing with defiance and pride how she had taken advantage of her credulous policeman older brother, gulled me into using my law-enforcement connections to gain sensitive information about security at the New Hampshire National Guard facility on Pembroke Road. She had used me, not to mention her husband, Derek, who was likely executed or remanded to permanent custody as the result of her maneuvering. I was astonished and furious and I told her so, and Nico assured me—breathless with self-importance—that her machinations were all in the service of a profoundly important objective. She stood on my porch, smoking one of her American Spirits, eyes glittering with conspiracy, and insisted that she and her anonymous companions were working to save us all.

  She wanted me to ask for the details, and I would not give her that satisfaction. Instead, I told her that this project, whatever it was, was the worst kind of dangerous nonsense, and we have not spoken since.

  And yet here I am, turning the pages of Popular Science, reading for the millionth time about the soil composition under the Indonesian sea, and what that means for the ejecta that will be blasted into our atmosphere at impact—here I am, waiting to assure myself that Nico is safe. Once she was gone for two days, and I was anxious enough about her absence to spend three miserable hours crouched in that filthy back alley, listening through the windows until one of the scumbags within mentioned to another that Nico was down in Durham, mingling with the utopians and self-styled revolutionaries at the Free Republic of New Hampshire.

  The details I ignored. I just needed to know, as I need to know now, today, that she’s okay.

  At last the front door opens and a fat twenty-something boy with greasy hair emerges to dump out a bucket full of some fluid—urine? cooking oil? bong water?—and I see Nico, slight and pale and smoking, just inside.

  I wish I could abandon my sister to her cronies and her idiotic plans. I wish I could stop giving a flying fig, as my father used to say, about this selfish and petulant and ignorant child. But she’s my sister. Our parents are dead and so is my father’s father, who raised us, and it’s my responsibility to ensure, for now, that she stays alive.

  2.

  “Sit anywhere, hon.”

  It’s lunchtime but Culverson and McGully aren’t here, and as I slide onto a stool at the counter I feel a roll of anxiety. Every time someone isn’t there who is supposed to be, a part of my mind defaults to the certainty that they’re dead or disappeared.

  “It’s early yet,” says Ruth-Ann, reading my mind, as she comes over with the carafe of hot water and a tray of teabags. “They’ll be here.”

  I watch her walk back to the counter. The asteroid will come and destroy the earth and leave behind only Ruth-Ann, floating in the vast blackness of space, one hand clutched around the handle of her carafe.

  On the counter is the valedictory edition of the Concord Monitor, from a Sunday four weeks ago, and though I’ve surely read it cover to cover a hundred times by now, I pick it up to read it one more time. American and European bombing campaign against nuclear, general military, and civilian targets across Pakistan. The newly formed Mayfair Commission, subpoenaing the records of the Space-guard Survey and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The massive twelve-deck cruise ship, flying the Norwegian flag, that plowed into Oakland Harbor and turned out to be carrying more than twenty thousand catastrophe immigrants from Central Asia, women and children “packed like animals” into its holds.

  There’s a long feature story on the back about a young woman, a former Boston University law student, who has decided to head eastward, to Indonesia, a CI in reverse, to await the world’s destruction “in the epicenter of the event.” The article has a gently amused, “well, what do you know?” sort of tone, except for the quotes from the kid’s horrified parents.

  And then, in the lower-left corner of the front page, the short, anguished mea culpa from the publisher: lacking in resources, lacking in staff, it is with great regret that we announce that effective immediately …

  As Ruth-Ann centers my teacup on its saucer there’s a rush of noise from outside, someone pushing open the front door. I swivel, knock the teacup with my elbow, and it shatters on the floor. Ruth-Ann pulls out a double-barreled shotgun like a gangster from under the counter and aims it at the door.

  “Stop,” she says to the trembling woman. “Who are you?”

  “It’s okay,” I say, sliding off my stool, tripping over myself, rushing over. “I know her.”

  “He came back, Henry,” says Martha, frantic, pleading, her face flushed and pink. “Brett came home.”

  * * *

  I put Martha Milano on my handlebars somehow and bike her home like we’re old-timey sweethearts. Once we’re inside, once she’s slammed the door and worked down the column of locks from top to bottom, she makes a beeline for the kitchen and pantry, the one with the cartons of smokes—then stops herself, slaps her thigh, retreats to the sofa, collapses in a heap.

  “He was here?”

  Martha nods vigorously, almost violently, eyes popped open like a frightened child’s. “Right where you’re standing. This morning. First thing this morning.”

  “You spoke to him?”

  “No, no, I didn’t, not actually.” She shakes her head, starts chewing on a hangnail. “Didn’t get a chance to. He disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  Martha makes a swift up-and-down motion, like a magician tossing pixie dust onto the stage, whoosh. “He was here and then, just—disappeared.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  The room looks exactly the same as it did. It’s Martha who looks different. She is shakier on her feet than she was at our meeting yesterday morning, her pale skin even paler, marked by bright red splotches, like she’s been picking at spots on her face. Her hair does not appear to have been washed or brushed, and it flies off in all directions, thick and messy. I get a nasty feeling, like her anxiety over her husband’s disappearance has metastasized into something else, something closer to profound despair, even madness.

  I take out my notebook, flip to a fresh page.

  “What time was he here?”

  “Very early. I don’t know. Five? I don’t know. I was dreaming of him, believe it or not. I have this dream where he pulls up to the house in his old cruiser, the lights spinning. And he climbs out, in his boots, and holds out his hands to me, and I run into his arms.”

  “That’s nice,” I say, seeing it in my mind like a mini-movie: the blue cop-car lights splashing on the sidewalk, Martha and Brett running into each other’s arms.

  “But then, so, I woke up because there was this loud noise. Downstairs. It freaked me out.”

  “What kind of noise, exactly?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “A crack? A thud? Some kind of noise.”

  I don’t say anything, I’m remembering my own nighttime visitor, Jeremy Canliss, stumbling into Mr. Moran’s solar still. But Martha reads judgment in my silence, and she changes gears, her voice becomes brittle and insistent. “It was him, Henry, I know that it was him.”

  I pour her a glass of water. I tell her to start at the beginning, tell me exactly what happened, and I write it all down. She heard the noise, she lit a candle, waited at the top of the stairs, breathless, until she heard it again. Not daring to call out, assuming it was a violent-minded intruder and preferring to be merely burglarized than raped or killed, she stared down the steps until she recognized him.

  “You saw his face?”

  “No. But his—you know, his sha
pe. His body.”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s short, but he’s stocky. It was him.” I nod, wait, and she keeps going. “I called out to him, I ran down the stairs, but like I said, he was …” Her face collapses into her hands. “He was gone.”

  All of Martha’s wild energy fades; she sinks back into the sofa while my mind runs through the possibilities, trying to give her what credit I can: It might have been a house thief, plenty of those, who chose at the last minute, for some reason, to leave empty-handed. Someone unhinged, bent on violence, suddenly frightened or confused by his prey.

  Or, very possibly, it was nothing. The symptom of a desperately lonely and burdened mind, jumping at shadows.

  I rove around the downstairs rooms, doing my policeman routine, crawling on hands and knees, looking for footprints in the shag carpet. I investigate the windows one by one, running my fingertips carefully over the frames. Undamaged. Unopened. No signs of forced entry, no scatter of glass on the carpet, no scratches on the locks. If someone came in, they came in with a key. I pause at the door, running my hand along the long column of dead bolts and chains.

  “Martha, do you lock this door at night?”

  “Yes,” she says, “Yes, we always—I do all the …”

  She stops, bites her lip as she realizes where I’m heading here. Brett could not have come in through this door without her letting him in.

  “There are windows,” she says.

  “Sure. They are locked, though.” I clear my throat. “And barred.”

  “Right. But …” She looks around the small house helplessly. “But it was his house. He installed all those locks, all the bars, and—I mean—he’s Brett. He could—I mean, he could have gotten in if he wanted to. Right?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Of course. Anything’s possible.”

  I don’t know what else to say. The expression on her face, of pure and fierce belief, untroubled by evidence or common sense—it’s maddening, in its way, and all at once I’m infuriated and exhausted. I remember Detective McGully, questioning my motives, teasing but not really: That’s not a kind of money. I hear Trish, too: Have you checked the alternate dimensions?

  Behind Martha on the wall is a flat-screen TV, a flat cold rectangle, and I am struck by the object’s profound uselessness, a receiver for an extinct species of signal, a reminder of all that is already dead, a tombstone hung on the wall.

  Martha is muttering now, rubbing the sides of her face with the flats of her hands, working herself back up. “I know that it was him, Henry,” she says. “I told you that he was going to come back, and he came back.”

  I wander the apartment, try to focus my mind, see things from my client’s point of view. Brett comes back but doesn’t approach her, doesn’t stop to talk. Why? He’s not back, but there’s something he needs her to know. He wants to leave a message. I nod, turning this over, okay … so where’s the message? On the sofa, Martha Cavatone is clutching her face with both hands, her fingers covering her cheeks and chin and eyes like vines crawling up the wall of a house.

  “He was here,” she’s murmuring, talking to herself now, “I know that he was here.”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  I’m calling from the kitchen. I’m in the pantry. She rushes in and I turn around to stare at her. “Martha, you were right. He was here.”

  Astonished, I detach the perforated cardboard top of the uppermost carton of Camels. “Here,” I say. Martha’s eyes are as wide as paper plates. “He left you a note. Hid it where he thought you’d be sure to see it.”

  And I’m almost laughing, because this is what happens when you decide that a case is pure smoke—no solution, no chance. You find a clue, clear and incontrovertible. It’s got a date on it, for heaven’s sake. July nineteenth. Today’s date. I sit beside her on the couch to read what Brett Cavatone has written carefully in neat script.

  17 GARVINS FALLS #2 // MR. PHILLIPS // SUNSHINE SUNSHINE MINE ALL MINE

  Martha’s anxiety has drained out of her. She stands up straight, as steady as I’ve seen her, her brow untroubled, a gentle gleam in her eye. Her faith rewarded.

  “Does this note make sense to you?” I ask.

  “The last part does,” she says, softly, almost whispering. “Sunshine, sunshine, mine all mine. He would always say that to me. When we first got married. Sunshine, sunshine, mine all mine.” She takes the cardboard slip from me and reads it again, murmurs the words to herself. “He’s telling me so I know it’s him.”

  “And the rest of it? Garvins Falls?”

  “No. I mean—it sounds like an address, but I don’t know where it is.”

  It is an address. Garvins Falls Road is a winding industrial street, east of the river, south of Manchester Street. An industrial section, unmaintained and gritty even before the beginning of our current environment.

  “What about Mr. Phillips?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  Gently, I take the piece of cardboard from her hands and read it again. “Martha, I have to be sure of something. There was no one else who knew about this. ‘Sunshine, sunshine, mine all mine,’ I mean. This code phrase?”

  “Code phrase?” she says.

  Martha’s eyes focus on me and she’s giving me this pitying and perplexed expression, which I recognize from the old days, when I used to do things that surprised her—politely say “no, thank you” to a second glass of chocolate milk, or rise to turn off the TV immediately after our permitted half hour had elapsed.

  “It’s not a code phrase, Henry,” says Martha. “It was just a sweet little thing that we said to each other. A loving phrase we used. Because we loved each other.”

  “Right,” I say, slipping the piece of cardboard in my pocket. “Of course. Let’s go.”

  3.

  Martha and I leave the bike chained to her cement birdbath and walk together from the Cavatones’ home toward Garvins Falls Road, skirting downtown, sticking to the quiet backstreets, the neighborhoods with active residents-association patrols. Marginally safer; nothing is safe.

  My mind is buzzing with questions. If Brett really came back, if it was really him, then why? Why leave and then return? Who abandons his wife and comes back to leave a forwarding address?

  Martha is untroubled by the specifics. Martha is borne forward by gusts of joyful anticipation. “I can’t believe it,” she says—sings, almost, like a schoolgirl. “We’re just going to walk in there, and Brett’s going to be waiting for me. I can’t believe it.”

  But she can believe it. She does. She’s walking so fast down Main Street on the way to the bridge that I have to hurry to keep up, even with my long stride. I loop my arm through hers, try to temper her pace. Walking quickly isn’t safe—too many loose stones and ruts in the sidewalk. She’s in a simple black cotton dress and I’m in my suit, and when I see our reflection in one of the remaining plates of the plate-glass window at what used to be Howager’s Discount Store on Loudon Road, we look like time travelers, like voyagers rocketed forward from another era; the roaring twenties, maybe, or postwar, a fella and his dame out for a noonday stroll, who accidentally took a wrong turn and came out on a rubbled path in a collapsing world.

  There’s no sign to identify the building on Garvins Falls Road, no indication of what businesses are here, or used to be, just the number “17” stenciled in rust-colored paint on the brick wall outside. Inside, the lobby is decrepit and bare, and there’s no passenger elevator—just a heavy fire door with the single word STAIRS, and the rusting gated doors of a freight elevator.

  “All right,” I say, looking slowly around. “Okay.”

  But Martha is already in motion, rushing across the empty room and tugging open the door to the stairs. Then she steps back, confused, and I whistle lightly in surprise. Behind the door is nothing: the stairs are gone, literally gone, it’s just an empty shaft with a railing running up the walls. Li
ke the staircase has turned invisible, like it’s a staircase for ghosts.

  “Huh,” I say. I don’t like this. It’s purposeful, defensive, a fortification. Martha hugs herself as she stares up into the darkness of the stairwell.

  “We’ve got to get up there,” she says. “What do we do?”

  “Freight elevator. I’ll go first. You wait here.”

  “No,” says Martha. “I need to see him. I can’t wait anymore.”

  “We don’t know what’s up there, Martha.”

  “He is,” she says, jaw set, certain. “Brett is up there.”

  The doors of the elevator open immediately when I press the button, and Martha gets on, and I get on behind her, and my stomach tightens as the doors draw closed behind us. We lurch into motion. There’s a skylight in the ceiling of the elevator car and another one way up somewhere at the top of the shaft, sending down twice-distilled sunlight like a message from a distant star. As the car works its slow way upward, Martha, for all her bravado, tenses and takes a step closer to me. I can hear her murmuring prayers in the darkness, and she gets as far as “who art in heaven” when the elevator shudders to a stop and the doors groan open and reveal a room full of supplies: crates, pallets laden with jugs and cans, water bottles, shelving. And then a man hoots and launches himself into the elevator car, directly into my midsection, knocking the breath from me and forcing me backward into one dark corner. He lands on top of me and clamps a hand down over my face. I am smashed into the dirty floor with this man crouched above me like a wolf, a lycanthrope, his knees pinned into my shoulders, holding my mouth shut and jamming something hard and cold into the side of my head.

  I writhe. I try to speak and cannot. The stranger’s eyes are bright and narrow in the dim refracted light.

  “It’s a staple gun,” coos the man in my ear, low and lover-like. “But I modified it. Juiced it up a little.”

  He digs the staple gun harder into my temple, and I try to twist my head away and cannot. In the corner of my eye is Martha Cavatone, her mouth agape, her eyes distorted with fear. A tall woman is behind her, one hand pulling Martha’s head back by the hair and the other holding the keen end of a cleaver to her neck. Their pose is biblical, brutal, a lamb at the slaughter point.