Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

  “I talked you into it.”

  Erik Littlejohn shakes his head, looks at me squarely, almost sternly. “I told her there was no sense in telling you.”

  I rise to look at him, and he looks back, unflinching.

  “Why?” I say.

  “What’s done is done. The incident with Sophia’s prescription pad was unrelated to Peter’s death, and there was no sense in telling the police about it.” He says “the police” like it’s this abstract concept, somewhere out there in the world, “the police,” as opposed to me, a person, now standing in their living room with an open blue book. “Telling the police would mean telling the press, telling the public.”

  “My father,” murmurs Sophia, then looks up. “He means telling my father.”

  Her father? I think back, scratch my mustache, and I recall Officer McConnell’s report: father, Martin Zell, in Pleasant View Retirement, the beginnings of dementia. “It was bad enough for him to know that Peter had killed himself. To find out also that his son had become a drug addict?”

  “Why put him through that?” says Erik. “At a time like this? I told her not to tell you. It was my decision, and I take full responsibility.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

  I sigh. I’m tired. My eye hurts. Time to go.

  “I have one more question. Ms. Littlejohn, you seem so certain that Peter killed himself. Can I ask what it is that makes you so sure?”

  “Because,” she says softly, “he told me.”

  “What? When?”

  “That same day. When we had lunch in my office. It already started, you know. There was one on the news. In Durham. The elementary school?”

  “Yeah.” A man who had grown up in Durham, the Seacoast area, he traveled back there to hang himself in the coat closet of his fourth-grade classroom, just so that the teacher, whom he had loathed, would find him.

  Sophia presses her fingertips into her eyes. Erik moves behind her, places his hands comfortingly on her shoulders.

  “Anyway, Pete—Peter said that if he were ever going to do it, it would be at that McDonald’s. On Main Street. You know, it seemed like a joke. But I guess—I guess it wasn’t, huh?”

  “No, ma’am. Guess not.”

  There you go, Detective McGully. How does this tragic tale make the guy into a murder victim? The answer is, it doesn’t.

  The fancy belt, the pickup truck, none of it matters. When his experiment with controlled substances had turned out to be a disaster—when he was discovered in his one audacious act of theft and betrayal—left with that shame and the lingering painful symptoms of withdrawal—faced with all that, and with the impending end of time—the actuary Peter Zell did another careful calculation, another analysis of risk versus reward, and went ahead and killed himself.

  Bam!

  “Detective?”

  “Yep.”

  “You’re not writing.”

  Erik Littlejohn looks at me, almost suspiciously, like I’m hiding something.

  My head hurts. The room swims; two Sophias, two Eriks. What did Dr. Wilton call it? Diplopia.

  “You’ve stopped writing down what we’re saying.”

  “No. I’m just—” I swallow, stand up. “This case is closed. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  * * *

  Five hours, six hours later, I don’t know. It’s the middle of the night.

  Andreas and I are outside, we’ve both escaped from Penuche’s, the basement bar on Phenix Street, from the din and the smoke and the grim dive-bar haze of it, and we’re standing on the grimy spit of sidewalk, neither of us having wanted to come out for a beer in the first place. Andreas was literally dragged from his desk by McGully, to celebrate me solving my case; a case I didn’t solve, and which was never really a case in the first place. Anyway, it’s awful down there, the fresh cigarette smell mingling with the stale, the TVs blaring, people crammed against the graffiti-marked load-bearing poles that keep the whole place from collapsing in on itself. Plus some wiseacre has larded the jukebox with irony: Elvis Costello, “Waiting for the End of the World,” Tom Waits, “The Earth Died Screaming,” and of course that R.E.M. song, playing over and over and over.

  It’s snowing out here, fat dirty chunks slanting down and ricocheting off the brick walls. I shove my hands into my pockets and stand with my head tilted back, staring up at the sky with my one working eye.

  “Listen,” I say to Andreas.

  “Yeah?”

  I hesitate. I hate this. Andreas draws a Camel from a pack, I watch balls of snow lose themselves in his wet mop of hair.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, when he’s got it lit.

  “What?”

  “About before. Spilling your coffee.”

  He chuckles woodenly, draws on his smoke.

  “Forget it,” he says.

  “I—”

  “Seriously, Henry. Who cares?”

  A small crowd of kids comes out of the stairwell that leads up from the bar, laughing like crazy, dolled up in weird pre-apocalyptic fashion: a teenage girl in an emerald ball gown and tiara, her boyfriend in full-goth black. Another kid, gender indeterminate, baggy shorts over plaid tights, broad red clown suspenders. Music drifts out from the open door, it sounds like U2, and then fades again as the door closes.

  “Newspaper says the Pakistanis want to blow the thing up,” says Andreas.

  “Yeah, I heard that.”

  I’m trying to remember what U2’s end-of-the-world song is. I turn away from the kids, stare at the road.

  “Yeah. They say they’ve figured it out, they can make it happen. But we’re saying we won’t let them.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “There was a press conference. The secretary of state, secretary of defense. Someone else. They said, if they try, we’ll nuke them before they can nuke it. Why would we say that?”

  “I don’t know.” I feel hollow. I’m cold. Andreas is exhausting.

  “It just seems crazy.”

  My eye hurts; my cheek. After the Littlejohns, I gave Dotseth a call, and he graciously accepted my apology for wasting his time, made his jokes about not knowing who I was, what case I was talking about.

  Andreas starts to say something else, but there’s honking to our right, at the top of Phenix, where the road crests and starts to bend down toward Main Street. Loud, boisterous honking from a city bus, picking up steam as it barrels down the street. The kids cheer and holler, wave at the bus, and Detective Andreas and I look at each other. City bus service has been suspended, and there was never a night-owl route on Phenix Street in the first place.

  The bus is getting closer, rattling fast, two wheels up on the sidewalk, and I go ahead and draw my service pistol and aim it in the general direction of the broad windshield. It’s like a dream, in the dark, a giant city bus, display lights spelling OUT OF SERVICE, sailing down the hill toward us like a ghost ship. Closer now, and we can see the driver, early twenties, Caucasian male, baseball cap backward, scruffy little mustache, eyes wide with adventure and delight. His buddy, black, also early twenties, also in a baseball cap, has the shotgun-side pneumatic door open and he’s leaning out and hollering, “Ya-hoo!” Everybody always wanted to do something, and here come the guys who always wanted to joyride in a city bus.

  The teenagers on the curb with us are dying laughing, cheering. Andreas is staring at the headlights, and I’m standing there with my gun out wondering how to play it. Probably do nothing, let them sail by.

  “Oh, well,” says Andreas.

  “Oh, well, what?”

  But it’s too late. He twists his body, flicks the half-smoked cigarette back toward the bar, and throws himself in front of the bus.

  “No,” is all I’ve got time for, one cold sorrowful syllable. He’s timed it, calculated the vectors, bus and man intersecting as they move through space at their varying speeds. Bam!

  The bus screeches to a halt and time stops, freeze-frame: the girl in the ball gown with her face hidden
in the crook of the goth kid’s arm—me with my mouth open, gun out, pointed uselessly at the side of the bus—the bus at a deranged angle, back end on the sidewalk, front end jutting into the road. Then Detective Andreas slowly peels off and slips down onto the street, and the bar crowd is streaming out and surrounding me and chattering and hollering. The joyrider and his friend climb down the steps of the bus and stand a few paces back from Andreas’s broken body, staring openmouthed.

  And then Detective Culverson is at my side, a firm hand on my wrist, gently lowering my gun hand to my side. McGully works his way through the crowd, pushing and shouting, “Cop!” waving his badge around, a Coors in the other hand, cigar in his mouth. He takes a knee in the middle of Phenix Street and lays a finger on Andreas’s throat. Culverson and I stand there in the center of the awestruck crowd, cold puffs of air drifting from our mouths, but Andreas’s head is all the way around, his neck is snapped. He’s dead.

  “Well, Palace, what do you think?” says McGully, heaving up to his feet, looking over. “Suicide, or murder?”

  1.

  “Good Lord Almighty, Henry Palace, what happened to you?”

  This seems like an awfully harsh assessment from a former sweetheart I haven’t seen for six years, until I remember what I look like: my face, my eye. I bring my hand up, adjust the thick stiff packet of gauze, smooth my mustache, feel the bristle of stubble along my jaw.

  “I’ve had a rough couple of days,” I say.

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  It’s six-thirty in the morning, and Andreas is dead, and Zell is dead, and Toussaint is dead, and here I am standing in Cambridge, on a footbridge over the Charles River, making small talk with Alison Koechner. And it’s weirdly pleasant out here, it must be over fifty degrees, as if crossing the Massachusetts state line has tripped me over into a southern latitude. All of it, the gentle spring breeze, the morning sun glinting off the bridge, the soothing ripple of the river in spring, it would all be pleasurable in another world, another time. But I close my eyes and what I see is death: Andreas flattened against the grill of a bus; J. T. Toussaint thrown back against the wall, a hole blown open in his chest; Peter Zell in the bathroom.

  “It’s great to see you, Alison.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  “I mean it.”

  “Let’s not get into all that.”

  The wild tangle of orchid-red hair that I remember has been cut to an adult length and corralled into a bun with a system of small efficient clips. She wears gray pants and a gray blazer and a small gold pin on her lapel: she really does, she looks terrific.

  “So,” says Alison, and draws from an inside pocket of her blazer a slim letter-size white envelope. “This friend of yours? Mr. Skeve?”

  “He’s not my friend,” I say immediately, raising one finger. “He’s Nico’s husband.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “Nico, as in your sister Nico?”

  “Asteroid,” I say, no need to expound. Impulse marriage. Shotgun wedding. Biggest imaginable shotgun. Alison nods, just says, “Wow.” She knew Nico when Nico was twelve years old, already not the kind of a person you imagined settling down. A sneak smoker, a snatcher of beers from the cooler in Grandfather’s garage, a succession of bad haircuts and disciplinary problems.

  “Okay then. So, your brother-in-law, Skeve? He’s a terrorist.”

  I laugh. “No. Skeve is not any kind of terrorist. He’s an idiot.”

  “The overlapping Venn-diagram section of those two categories, you will find, can be quite large.”

  I sigh, lean one hip against the rusted green steel of the bridge’s guard rail. A shell slides by, cutting through the surface of the river, the crew grunting as they shoot past. I like these kids, getting up at six in the morning to row crew, keeping in shape, sticking with their program. These kids, I like.

  “What would you say,” Alison asks, “if I told you that the United States government, long ago anticipating this kind of disaster, had prepared an escape plan? Had constructed, in secret, a habitable environment, beyond reach of the asteroid’s destructive effects, where humanity’s best and brightest could be relocated and made safe to repopulate the species?”

  I bring my palm up to my face, rub it against my cheek, which is only now beginning to emerge, from its numbness, into active pain.

  “I’d say that’s insane. It’s Hollywood nonsense.”

  “And you would be right. But there are those who are not as perspicacious.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” I’m remembering Derek Skeve lying on the thin mattress in his cell, his spoiled kid’s clowning grin. I wish I could tell you, Henry, but it’s a secret.

  Alison opens the white envelope, unfolds three pieces of crisp white paper, and hands them to me, and my impulse is to say, you know what? Forget the whole thing. I have a murder to solve. But I don’t. Not today.

  Three single-spaced typed pages, no watermark, no agency seal, pocked here and there with thick black lines of redaction. In 2008 there was a tabletop exercise convened by the Directorate of Strategic Planning of the United States Air Force, drawing on the resources and personnel of sixteen discrete agencies of the United States government, including the DHS, the DTRA, and NASA. The exercise imagined an event “above global-catastrophe threshold” in a “short-warning” scenario—in other words, exactly what has now come to pass—and considered every possible response: nuclear counterstrike, slow push-pull, kinetic options. The conclusion was that realistic response options would be limited to civil defense.

  I’m yawning, flipping forward. I’m still on the first page. “Alison?”

  She rolls her eyes slightly, the small gentle sarcasm so familiar that it squeezes my heart in my chest, and takes back the papers. “There was a dissent, Palace. An astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore named Dr. Mary Catchman insisted that the government act preemptively and build habitable environments on the moon. When Maia turned up, certain individuals convinced themselves that the DOD had embraced that dissent, and that these safe havens exist.”

  “Bases?”

  “Yes.”

  “On the Moon?”

  “Yes.”

  I squint into the gray sun, seeing Andreas plastered against the bus, slowly sliding down. IT IS SIMPLY TO PRAY. Secret government escape bases. People’s inability to face up to this thing is worse than the thing, it really is.

  “So, Derek was tooling around the Guard station on his ATV looking for, what, blueprints? Escape pods? A giant slingshot?”

  “Or something.”

  “Doesn’t make him a terrorist.”

  “I know, but that’s the designation. The way the military-justice system works right now, once he’s got that tag, there’s nothing that can be done.”

  “Well, I’m no fan of this guy, but Nico loves him. There’s nothing—?”

  “There’s nothing. Nothing.” Alison sends a long look out across the river, at the rowers, the ducks, the clouds easing along in parallel with the water line. She is not the first girl I ever kissed, but she remains the one I’ve kissed the most, in all my life thus far. “I’m sorry. It’s not my department.”

  “What is your department, anyway?”

  She doesn’t answer; I knew she wouldn’t. We’ve always stayed in touch, the occasional e-mail, phone numbers exchanged every couple of years. I know that she is based in New England, and I know that she works for a federal agency, operating at a level of law enforcement that is orders of magnitude beyond mine. Before we dated, she had wanted to go to veterinary school.

  “Any more questions, Palace?”

  “No.” I glance at the river, then back at her. “Wait. Yes. A friend of mine asked why we won’t let the Pakistanis try and nuke the asteroid, if they want to.”

  Alison laughs once, mirthlessly, and begins tearing the papers into strips. “Tell your friend,” she says, tearing the strips into smaller strips, then those into still smaller ones, “that if they hit it—which they won’t—but if they
do instead of one asteroid, we’ll have thousands of smaller but still devastating asteroids. Thousands and thousands of irradiated asteroids.”

  I don’t say anything. With her small efficient fingers, Alison feeds the tiny bits of paper into the Charles, and then she turns to me and smiles.

  “Anyway, Detective Palace,” she says. “Whatcha working on?”

  “Nothing,” I say, turn my face away. “Nothing, really.”

  * * *

  But I tell her about the Zell case anyway, I can’t help it. We’re walking up John F. Kennedy from Memorial Drive to Harvard Square, and I give her the whole story, top to bottom, and then I ask her, from a professional standpoint, what she makes of the case. We’ve arrived at a kiosk in what used to be a newsstand, now strung with Christmas lights, a squat portable generator humming outside, grumbling and hissing like a miniature tank. The glass of the newsstand is blacked out, and someone has taped two big pieces of cardboard across the front doors, written THE COFFEE DOCTOR on them in big black letters with a Sharpie.

  “Well,” she says slowly, as I hold open the door for her. “Not having examined the evidence firsthand, it certainly sounds like you reached the correct conclusion. Ninety-five percent chance, this guy was just another hanger.”

  “Yep,” I say.

  It’s dark inside the converted news kiosk, a couple of bare bulbs and another string of Christmas lights, an old-fashioned cash register and an espresso machine, squat and gleaming, parked like a tank on the black countertop.

  “Greetings, humans,” says the proprietor, an Asian kid, maybe nineteen, with a porkpie hat and horn-rimmed glasses and a wispy beard. He gives Alison a cheerful salute. “Pleasure, as always.”

  “Thanks, Coffee Doctor,” she says. “Who’s in the lead?”

  “Let’s see.”

  I look where he’s looking, seven paper coffee cups lined up on the far end of the counter, each cup with the name of a continent scrawled on it. He tilts a couple, rattles them, eyeballs the number of beans that have been tossed in each.

  “Antarctica. No contest.”

  “Wishful thinking,” says Alison.