Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II

by Ben H. Winters

  Nico, as I had suspected, has been down there numerous times. Apparently, her little clubhouse in Concord has something of a satellite office in the Free Republic. And, most important, she claims to know exactly how to get me in. “Oh, yeah,” Nico said, grinning, when I explained my dilemma, delighted to be in possession of something I need. “I know the place. I know it well. All the signs and shibboleths.” And when I explained who the client was, that the man I was looking for was married to Martha Milano, that only sweetened the deal—Nico was happy to pack a bag and come help me navigate the terrain.

  There was just one condition—and she said that, of course, narrowed her eyes like a gangster-movie tough guy and said, “There’s just one condition …” After the trip, when I had what I needed, I had to promise that I would sit down with her so she could explain what she and her friends are up to.

  “You bet,” I told her. We were sitting in Next Time Around on two filthy beanbag chairs, speaking in low whispers. “No problem.”

  “I’m serious, Hen.”

  “What?”

  “You have a way of saying you’re going to listen to something, but then when the other person is talking you’re up in your head having some sort of complicated policeman dialog with yourself about something else.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Just promise that when we sit down, and I lay it all out for you, you will listen with an open mind.”

  “I promise, Nic,” is what I told her, extracting myself with difficulty from the beanbag chair. Then I even looked her in the eye, to make sure she knew I was listening to her and not to any voices in my head. “I promise.”

  And so now we’re biking along 202, through the forested counties, past Northwood Center and Northwood Ridge, talking sometimes, singing sometimes, sometimes just gliding in silence, listening to the distant thud and whack of trees being cut down for firewood. It was harder for Nico than it was for me, everything that happened, the series of catastrophic events that marked our childhood. I was twelve and she was six when our mother was murdered in a Market Basket parking lot, and our father hung himself with a window cord, and we were sent to live with our stern and disinterested grandfather.

  It would be difficult for me to disentangle these three sequential and overlapping traumas, tease them apart and judge which affected me the most. I can say with confidence, however, that as painful as all of it was for me, it swept over my sister like an advancing wall of water—pulled her under and never let her up. At six she was a small flickering gem of a child: agile minded, anxious, curious, quick witted, chameleonic. And here comes this great thundering wave and it knocked her over and dragged her around, filled her with pain like water in the lungs of a drowning man.

  Somewhere east of Epsom, Nico begins to sing, something I immediately recognize as a Dylan song, except I can’t place it, which is odd to consider, that she might know one I don’t. But then Nico gets to the chorus, and I realize it’s “One Headlight,” the number by Dylan’s son.

  “Love that song,” I say. “Are you singing that because of Martha?”

  “What?”

  I veer in close, pedal up alongside Nico. “You don’t remember? That spring, she listened to that song nonstop.”

  “She did? Was she even around?”

  “Are you kidding? All the time. She made dinner every night.”

  Nico looks over, shrugs. Invariably we refer to that grim doom-heavy period of our mutual memory as that spring, rather than by the more cumbersome formulation that would be more accurate: “the five months after Mom’s terrible death but before Dad’s.”

  “Do you seriously not remember that?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t.”

  She gives herself a burst of speed, takes the lead again, and goes back to singing. “Me and Cinderella, we put it all together …” Houdini is in the wagon hitched to the bike, among the supplies, panting, joyful, his weird little pink tongue tasting the wind.

  * * *

  It’s past midnight when we get to India Garden, the terrible restaurant just off campus that was, for some reason, Nathanael Palace’s dining selection when I was a high school junior and we came to tour the campus. Dim multicolored lighting, indifferent employees; abundant portions of barely edible food, strangely textured and overly spiced. I had zero interest in attending the University of New Hampshire anyway. You only needed sixty credit hours for the Concord PD, so that’s what I did: sixty hours exactly at the New Hampshire Technological Institute and then off to the Police Academy. I figured Grandfather would be proud eventually, once I was on the force, but by the time I graduated he was dead.

  Nico and I kickstand our bikes and wander through the abandoned restaurant like visitors from a foreign planet. The sign’s been torn down and the windows and door smashed with a blunt object, but the inside is untouched, preserved as if for a museum display. Long rows of chafing dishes under long-cold heating lamps, rectangular tables tottering unevenly. The smell, too, is the same: turmeric and cumin and the faint resonance of mop water from the linoleum floor. The cash register, miraculously, has money in it, four limp twenty-dollar bills. I feel them between my thumb and forefinger. Worthless bits of paper; ancient history.

  Houdini has fallen asleep in the wagon, nestled amongst my jugs of water and peanut butter sandwiches and Clif Bars and first aid supplies, eyes fluttering, breathing softly, like a child. I lift him out and place him gently in a bed of empty rice sacks. Nico and I roll out sleeping bags and arrange ourselves on the floor.

  “Hey, what’s she paying you for this gig?” she asks.

  “What?” I say, pulling the little Ruger from my pants pocket and placing it beside my bedroll.

  “Martha Milano. What’s she paying you to find her deadbeat husband?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing really. I just …” I shrug, feeling myself get flush. “He promised her he would stay till the end. She’s upset.”

  “You’re a moron,” says Nico, and it’s dark but I can hear in her voice that she’s smiling.

  “I know. Goodnight, Nic.”

  “Goodnight, Hen.”

  * * *

  The flag of the state of New Hampshire has been removed from above Thompson Hall, and a new flag has been raised in its place. It depicts a stylized asteroid, steel gray and gleaming as it streaks through the sky, with a long sparkling contrail flashing out behind it like a superhero’s cape. This asteroid is about to smash not into the earth, however, but into a clenched fist. The flag is enormous, painted on a bed sheet, rippling buoyantly on the summer wind.

  “You shouldn’t be wearing a suit,” Nico tells me for the third time this morning.

  “It’s what I brought,” I say. “I’m fine.”

  We’re making our way up the long hill, overgrown with crab-grass and onion grass, toward the imposing castlelike facade of Thompson Hall. Houdini trots along behind us.

  “We’re going to a utopian society, run by hyperintellectual teenagers. It’s July. You should have put on some shorts.”

  “I’m fine,” I say again.

  Nico gets a pace or two ahead of me and raises a hand in greeting to the two young women—girls, really—coming forward off the steps of Thompson to meet us. One is a light-skinned African American girl with short tightly braided hair, green capri pants, and a UNH T-shirt. The other is pale skinned, petite, in a sundress and a ponytail. As we get closer, past the flagpole, they both raise shotguns and point them at us.

  I freeze.

  “Hey,” says Nico, nice and easy. “Not with a bang.”

  “But with a whimper,” says the white girl in the sundress, and the guns come down. Nico hits me with the smallest, sliest of winks—all the signs and shibboleths—and I exhale. This entire moment of peril has escaped the notice of my vigilant protector: Houdini is sniffing at the ground, digging up tufts of wild grass with his teeth.

  “Oh, hey, I know you,” says the short white girl, and Nico gr
ins.

  “Yes, indeed. It’s Beau, right?”

  “Yeah,” says Beau. “And you’re Nico. Jordan’s friend. You were here when we put up the greenhouse.”

  “I was. How’s that going?”

  “So-so. We got great dope, but the tomato vines will not take.”

  The black girl and I look at each other during this exchange and smile awkwardly, like strangers at a cocktail party. We’re not alone, I’ve noticed: Hanging out on the stone wall that extends from the right side of the building are two kids, all in black, each with a bandana pulled up over the lower half of his face. They’re stretched out on the wall, relaxed but watchful, like panthers.

  “You’re working perimeter now?” says Nico to Beau.

  “I am,” she says. “Hey, this is my girlfriend, Sport.”

  “Hi,” says the African American girl, and Nico smiles warmly. “This is Hank.”

  We all shake hands, and then Beau says, “Listen, sorry,” and steps forward, and Nico goes “Totally okay,” and they frisk us, one at a time, quick perfunctory pat-downs. They open the heavy duffel bag that Nico took with her from India Garden, unzip it, peek inside, then zip it back up. I’m empty-handed, just a couple of blue notebooks in the inside pocket of my suit coat; the handgun, Nico strongly suggested I leave back at the restaurant.

  “Why are you dressed like that?” Sport asks.

  “Oh,” I say, looking down and then up. “I don’t know.”

  I can feel Nico’s irritation rolling off her. “He’s in mourning,” says my sister. “For the world.”

  “All right, you guys are clean,” says Beau brightly. “As you know.”

  “Oh my God,” says Sport, bending to pet the dog. “So cute. What kind of dog is she?”

  “He,” I say. “He’s a bichon frisé.”

  “So cute,” she says again, and it’s like we’re in one of those alternate dimensions, just some folks hanging out on the front steps of campus: green lawn, blue sky, white dog, a group of friends. Detective McGully has remarked on the gorgeous run of summer weather this year. He calls it nut-kicker weather, as in, “that’s just God, kicking us in the nuts.”

  Good old McGully, I think in passing. Off and running.

  The boys on the wall are not introduced, but their aesthetic and affect are familiar; the kinds of young men one used to see on the evening news, rushing through city streets in clouds of tear gas, protesting the meetings of international financial organizations. These two seem confident and calm, long legs dangling over the stone walls of the university, passing a cigarette or joint back and forth, strips of ammunition pulled across their chests like seatbelts.

  “So, hey,” says Nico. “Hank is coming in with me, just for the day. He’s looking for someone.”

  “Oh,” says Sport. “Actually—” She stops, tenses up, and looks to Beau, who shakes her head.

  “You’ve been here before, so you’re good,” says Beau to Nico. “But unfortunately your friend has to be quarantined.”

  “Quarantined?” says Nico.

  Quarantined. Terrific.

  “It’s a new system,” Beau explains. She’s a small woman with a small voice, but she’s clearly not timid. It’s more like she’s insisting that the listener pay attention. “The idea came from Comfort, but there was a whole Big Group vote on it. In quarantine, newcomers are instructed in the function of our community. Divested of their old ideas about living in the self, and at the same time divested of their personal possessions.” She’s fallen into a rhythm, here, she’s reciting a set speech. “In quarantine a newcomer learns the way thing are handled at the Republic, and to prioritize the needs of the community over their needs as an individual.”

  “There’ve been a lot of people just, like, wandering in,” Sport adds more casually, and Beau scowls. She liked her official explanation better.

  “What people?” says Nico. “CIs?”

  “Yeah,” says Sport, “But also just—you know. Whoever.”

  “And so in quarantine,” says Beau, reclaiming the conversation, “we learn that the Republic is a system of responsibility, not just of privilege. That there is no such thing as a utopia for one—it must be a utopia for all.”

  Sport nods solemnly, picks up the phrase and murmurs it in echo: “no such thing as a utopia for one …”

  Okay, I’m thinking. Got it. Let’s cut to the chase here. “How long is quarantine?”

  “Five days,” says Beau. Sport winces apologetically.

  Damn it. Julia Stone is in there somewhere, I’m sure of it, seated between the Doric columns of one or another collegiate hall, with Brett Cavatone laying his heavy head in her lap. In five days, who knows? I take a look at Nico, who still looks relaxed, all smiles, but I can see the unease flashing in her eyes—this quarantine business is as much a surprise to her as it is to me.

  “But it’s easy,” says Sport. “Seriously. It’s in Woodside Apartments, the big dorm on the other side of Wallace? And in terms of the divestment or whatever, you can keep super-personal items. Family pictures and stuff.”

  “Actually, not anymore,” says Beau.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Comfort just decided.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “I didn’t even know they were conferencing on it.”

  “Yes,” says Beau. “No more personal or sentimental items. It’s rearview.”

  She says the word “rearview” with a definite and meaningful emphasis, like it’s been lifted from the language and glossed with a shiny new meaning, one accessible only to those who’ve undergone five days of quarantine at the Woodside Apartments. I look up at the banner, the flapping bed sheet, the proud standard of asteroidland.

  “Come on, guys,” says Nico. “Henry’s not trouble. Can we give him a pass?”

  “Like a hand stamp?” says Sport, but her laugh is fleeting; Beau is quiet, stone-faced.

  “No,” she says, and her hand drops back to the butt of her gun. “The quarantine is a pretty firm rule.”

  “Well, yesterday—” starts Sports, and Beau cuts her off. “Yeah, I know, and they got serious shit for it.”

  “Right, right.”

  Sport looks at Beau, and Beau looks over her shoulders at the Black Bloc guys, the crows watching us from the wall. Nice egalitarian utopian society, I’m thinking, everybody making sure everybody else is following the rules.

  “Listen—” I start, and then Nico turns a quarter turn toward me and stares, just for an instant, all the time she needs to tell me very clearly with her eyes and eyebrows to shut up. I do so. This is why I brought her, and I might as well let her do her thing; this is Nico’s element, if ever she had one.

  “Look, totally honest with you? This girl that Henry is looking for? Her mother is sick. She’s dying.”

  Beau doesn’t say anything, but Sport whistles lightly. “Sucks.”

  I follow Nico’s lead. “Yeah,” I say softly. “It’s cancer.”

  “Brain cancer,” says Nico, and Sport’s eyes grow wider. Beau’s fingertips remain on the handle of her gun.

  “Yeah, she’s got a tumor,” I say. “A chordoma it’s called, actually, at the base of her skull. And because the hospitals are all screwed up, so many doctors are gone, there isn’t much they can do.”

  I’m picturing McGully, of course, big vaudeville hands: six months to live … wakka-wakka. It was Grandfather who had the chordoma, though; they’re mostly seen in geriatric patients, but no one here seems likely to know that.

  Sport looks at me, then at Beau, who shakes her head.

  “No,” she says. “We can’t.”

  “All he’s got to do is find her,” says Nico softly, “let this kid know her mom is sick, in case she wants to say goodbye. That’s all. If it’s not possible, we understand.”

  “It’s not possible,” says Beau, immediately.

  Sport turns to her. “Don’t be a jerk.”

  “I’m just following the rule
s.

  “It’s not your mom.”

  “Fine,” says Beau abruptly. “You know what? Fuck it.”

  She stomps over to the steps and sits down sullenly while Sport walks over to the two on the wall and whispers something to the one with the cigarette, jokingly plucks it from his hands. Sport and the anarchists crack up—one lunges for his cigarette, the other shrugs and turns away—Beau sulks on the steps. They’re just a bunch of kids, these people: goofing around, flirting, fighting, smoking, running their principality.

  At last Sport trots back over to us, flashing a small thumbs-up, and I exhale, see Nico smiling from the corner of my eye. We get four hours, Sport tells us, and not a second more.

  “And come out through this exit. Okay? Only this exit.”

  “Okay,” I say, and Nico says, “Thanks.”

  “She uh—” she angles her head toward Beau. “She told her mom she was gay. Because of the asteroid. Radical-honesty time, right? Her mother told her she would burn in hell. So.” She sighs. “I don’t know.”

  Beau is still sitting on the steps, glaring at the sky. There are times I think the world is better off in some ways—I do—I think in some ways it’s better off. One of the anarchists slides down from the wall and ambles over, skinny and sloe-eyed, black bandana draped loosely at his collarbone. “Hey, so, four hours, man,” he says. He smells like hand-rolled cigarettes and sweat.

  “I told them,” says Sport.

  “Cool. And in the meantime, we gotta hold on to your dog.”

  The skinny kid reaches out his arms. Nico looks at me—I look at Houdini. I scoop him up, rub his neck, hold him for a long second. He looks into my eyes, then shakes his body and pulls for the ground. I put him back down, and he resumes chewing grass under the watchful eyes of his captors.