Countdown City tlp-2

by Ben H. Winters

  Houdini is still yelping and pacing, a short tight wire of anxiety, jerking one way and then the other. I order him uselessly to calm. Clutching my weapons I step past the dog, moving slowly and deliberately until my shoulder is pressed against the front door.

  “It’s okay, boy,” I mutter, my heart hammering now, the handle of the knife sweating in my palm. “It’s okay.”

  From out the door’s small inset window I can see a slim shiver of light, a flashlight beam darting across the lawn. And what if Palace is murdered in a home invasion before he can start looking, I ask Detective Culverson silently. Then what happens to my old babysitter and her spark in the darkness?

  You hear these stories now, people trade them in stunned whispers, the tales of home invasion and physical assault. Leon James, up on Thayer, a former banker, beaten unconscious, the house stripped for copper. The two middle-aged women, old friends who had moved in together after their husbands went Bucket List. For them it was a gang of teenagers in gorilla masks, both women sexually assaulted and beaten nearly to death. The gorillas took nothing and were neither drunk nor high, simply on a rampage. That one I reported, when I heard about it—I knocked on the driver’s-side window of one of the Chevrolet Impalas planted on one of the corners, gave the house number and the woman’s name as they had been described to me. The young officer in the cruiser stared back at me blankly, said he’d fill out a report, and slowly rolled up his window.

  The flashlight beam is gone. I stare at the darkness, the overhanging trees, the summer-barren branches silhouetted against moonlight. My pulse galloping; Houdini’s rapid troubled breaths.

  And then a crash outside, somewhere on the lawn, the sound of breaking glass, followed a moment later by a man’s voice, low but distinct: “Shit. Fuck. Balls.”

  I push open the door and rush out, screaming, gun in one hand and knife in the other, like a barbarian rushing a medieval camp.

  I stop halfway across the lawn. There’s nothing. I see no one. There’s a row of streetlights along my stretch of West Clinton, but of course they’re all dead now, dimly reflecting the starlight, hanging from their poles like fossilized glass fruits. More noise: a scrape and then a crunch, glass on glass, and then more muttered cursing.

  The weight of the gun is unfamiliar; it’s smaller and more compact than the SIG Sauer P229 service revolver I used to carry on patrol. My friend Trish McConnell provided me with the Ruger just last week, after I mentioned that I was adhering to IPSS firearm rules and had no gun in my home. McConnell, a former colleague still on the force, later left the gun in a small manila envelope between my screen door and front door with a note. Take it, said the note. Please.

  Now I’m glad I’ve got it. I sweep the gun in a wide arc across the lawn, talking big in the darkness. “Stay where you are. Freeze and drop your weapon.”

  “I’m not—I don’t have a weapon. Shit, man, I’m really sorry.” That voice, croaking from my neighbor’s lawn as I approach—it’s familiar but I can’t place it, like a voice from a dream. “Fuck, man, I’m really sorry.”

  I stop walking. “Who is that?”

  “It’s Jeremy.”

  Jeremy. The kid outside the restaurant, three-day’s beard and a ponytail. I exhale. My pulse slows. For God’s sake.

  “I think I fell in, like, a trap or something,” he says.

  “Hang on,” I say. “I’m coming.”

  Jeremy’s in the ditch on Mr. Maron’s lawn, in a puddle of shards and thick pieces of broken glass. My eyes blink in the moonlight and I focus and find him, disheveled and confused, a gash like a stab wound in his forehead.

  “Hey,” he says weakly. “Sorry.”

  “It’s not a trap,” I tell Jeremy. I peer down at him, and he gazes back at me bashfully like a wounded fawn. “It’s a solar still.”

  “What’s a solar still?” he says, and then looks around him at the mess of glass. “I think I broke it.”

  I laugh out loud, feeling along with my wash of relief a muddled affection for this kid who has injured himself wandering around outside my house in the middle of the night. As if the stupid thing actually was a trap, and I’ve caught myself some kind of hapless fairy.

  “A solar still is a catchment system,” I say, “for capturing water from the atmosphere. My neighbor built it.”

  “Oh. Tell him I’m sorry.”

  “He’s dead,” I say. “What are you doing here?”

  Jeremy raises a hand to the cut on his head, winces, then inspects his blood-smeared fingertips. He looks much as he did at the restaurant: small guy, sensitive dark eyes, soft and unmasculine face. My neighbor, Mr. Moran, a jovial middle-aged bachelor shoe salesman, spent three weeks building the solar still before he was shot on July fourth by a group of vigilantes from an organization called American Soil. Mr. Moran was trying to pull them off a truck driver, who was leaving for the Cape Cod immigrant camp with food and first aid. The truck driver was murdered also.

  “Yeah, I’m really sorry,” says Jeremy again. “It’s just, I didn’t want Rocky to know I was coming to see you, and I couldn’t think of any particularly buyable reason to leave the restaurant early, so I had to wait till we closed.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Then I had to get over to the library to look up your address.”

  “Okay.”

  “You weren’t in the phone book, but there was another Palace—N. Palace?”

  “My sister,” I say. “She used to use my address for credit card applications.”

  “Oh.”

  He’s still lying there in the glass, which is where I want him until I know exactly what’s going on here. The main branch of the Concord Public Library is open twenty-four hours a day at this point, kept clean and lit by a skeleton crew of librarians and a cadre of volunteers.

  “Jeremy,” I say. “Why are you here?”

  “I just wanted to say, don’t do it. Don’t bring Brett back, I mean. Leave the guy alone.”

  “Come on,” I say, set down my knife and my gun and extend a hand down into the remains of the solar still. “Get up.”

  * * *

  “This was stupid.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I feel like a dummy.”

  “It’s okay.”

  Jeremy is sitting at my kitchen table now, a paper towel pressed to his forehead with blood seeping around the edges.

  “Seriously,” he says. “I feel like an idiot.”

  “Really,” I say. “Don’t worry about it.”

  I don’t press Jeremy about Brett, not yet, don’t ask him to expound on his purposes for trekking all the way across town to find me. I don’t want him to run, and that’s what it feels like: He’s embarrassed and disconcerted, and if pushed he’s going to say “forget the whole thing” and book it, off into the night.

  I light candles, get my camp stove going, put up a kettle for tea, and ask him a couple easy and casual questions. Jeremy’s last name, as it turns out, is Canliss, which sounds familiar, so I ask him to spell it.

  “Huh,” I say. “Are you from Concord?”

  “No,” he says. “Yes.” Exhales, resettles himself on the chair, getting comfortable. “Well, not really.”

  He was born here, he says, but then moved at fifteen months old. It’s a typical New England story: raised outside Montpelier; limped through high school; did some outdoorsy stuff; “drifted away from my family, kind of,” ended up in Portsmouth and then went to UNH for a semester; dropped out, tried one more time, dropped out again; and then he ended up here in Concord, crashing with some friends in a “shitty little house.” Then he got a gig at the pizza place, and then they announced the end of the world.

  “And what about Brett?” I say at last, very casual, pouring the tea, speaking softly and over my shoulder from the far side of the room. “Why don’t you want me to find him?”

  “I mean, look, it’s none of my business,” he says, and then gets quiet, and I focus on the water and the cups. When I t
urn back he’s rubbing his chin, and then he just goes, “Because, man, he’s just Brett, you know?” I set down the teacups and sit, waiting.

  “If he—” Jeremy raises his hands, as if literally groping for the words. “If he had to go, he had to go. You know what I mean?”

  “Not really. I don’t know him. Tell me about him.”

  “I don’t know.” He laughs uneasily, repeats himself: “He’s just Brett.”

  In this unspecific and tautological compliment there is a respect and admiration so deep it changes the timbre of his voice. When he says “Brett” it’s like how other people might say Elvis or Jesus. He’s not just any person—he’s Brett. Houdini is still trembling beneath the table, not yet convinced that the danger has passed. I get up and pour him out the last of the bag of kibble, a treat to calm his nerves. Sixteen bags left, now, ten servings per bag.

  “I’m sure he had his reasons,” Jeremy blurts out. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “What kind of reasons?”

  “Man, come on,” he says, ducking his head. “You know.”

  “I don’t. I really don’t. Were you close with him?”

  “No.” He peels the wadded paper towel from his forehead and bobbles it from hand to hand. “Not really.”

  “But he was a friend?”

  “Well, like a, a work friend, you know? From the restaurant.”

  “You worked together often?”

  “Yeah. Definitely. More before the stupid fucking asteroid.”

  I smile. A certain vividness absent from our current environment. Stupid fucking asteroid.

  “At first I thought he was boring, you know? Kind of a goody-goody. He’s religious, he’s doesn’t drink, he’s the boss’s son-in-law, all that.”

  I don’t have a notebook down here. No pencil. I’m nodding slowly, registering details, demanding of my midnight mind that it pay attention, catalog and order these incoming facts.

  “But hanging out with Brett, you’d suddenly go: oh. This guy’s cool. He’d make these weird jokes all the time, like under his breath, when you’re driving around. Smart jokes, like where you don’t get it exactly but you know it’s brilliant. He’d help you do shit you were bad at, without making you feel stupid.”

  I nod. I have known people like that, but for some reason the person who comes to mind is my grandfather Nathanael Palace, who raised Nico and me after the deaths of our parents, and who possessed the opposite sort of spirit: always ready to show you that you were bad at something, that you were doing it wrong.

  “Me and Brett used to sit on my steps and watch them drive the—what do you call ’em, the trucks full of prisoners?—in and out of the jail.”

  “Transport vans,” I say, shaking off the image of Grandfather, staying on target.

  “Right, right. And Brett would point at the vans and say, ‘There but for the grace of God, my friend. There but for His grace.’ Like he cared about me, you know? Not just me, either. He cared about people in general.”

  “And…” I pause, turn this over. “Did Brett talk about leaving? Going Bucket List, I mean?”

  Jeremy looks down. His cheeks color. “Shit, man. You ask a lot of questions.”

  “It’s in my nature. Did he talk about it or not?”

  “No,” he says. “Not specifically. But he was ready to go. You know?”

  “Did he have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know. No.”

  “You don’t know, or no?”

  “Maybe he did,” says Jeremy. “I think so, maybe, yeah.”

  “What girl?” I lean forward, my heart racing now, galloping. “Where?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, pulling back, recoiling from my eagerness. “I don’t know.”

  “Was there a girl who came in to the pizza place?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  He does know, though. He knows something. But he’s not going to tell me, not now. I rub my eyes with my fingertips. There’s something else that’s been on my mind. “Brett was a solid goody-goody, you said, religious. How did he feel about Rocky working off-ERAS?”

  “What?” He looks puzzled, upset.

  “I mean, sending him to the rummage, black-marketing?”

  “Wait,” says Jeremy suddenly, and slaps a flat hand on the table. “Stop. Look.”

  And then my anxious night visitor is talking so fast and so ardently that his mouth is like a blur in the darkness on the other side of the table. “If he wanted to go off and sow some wild oats or whatever, then he didn’t have to, like, get anyone’s permission.”

  “Not even his wife?”

  “No, not even his wife. I don’t know about you, man, but I don’t have the balls to just go off and do what I want. Whether it’s a chick, or parasailing, or I don’t know—whatever. Even now, I don’t have the courage.” Jeremy shakes his head in bitter self-recrimination, as if this is the ultimate character flaw, this lack of apocalyptic bravery. “But it looks like Brett did have the balls, right? And like I said, he was—he was just a solid citizen. So he should get to do what he wants, is all I’m saying. And I don’t think you or Martha or anyone should go off and try and drag him back.”

  He tosses the blood-soaked paper towel on the table and pushes back his chair.

  “That’s it, man. I’m sorry to bother you.”

  He stands up. I stand up. “I have more questions.”

  “Sorry about your neighbor’s thing, too. On the lawn. I’m really sorry.”

  And that’s it, he’s out the door, and given that I am no longer vested with any powers by the city of Concord to make him stay, I just watch him go, stumbling away in the darkness, a flashlight beam bobbling unevenly through the dark shapes of the trees. I’m contemplating the force of personality that my missing man must have possessed, to inspire the intense, if peculiar, devotion I’ve just seen. This kid may feel that he lacks courage, but he took a not-insignificant cross-city walk just now, in the unprotected darkness, to argue his friend’s case. Because he admires him. Because he wishes he had gone off somewhere, too.

  I go into the living room, carrying a candle on a plate like a Dickens character, and when I find a pencil and my notebook I write down what I remember, write as swiftly and carefully as I can: a chick? parasailing? Kind of a goody-goody. I sketch the tale of Jeremy’s childhood, write down his full name and stare at it. Such an old-fashioned term he used, sow some wild oats. “If he wanted to sow some wild oats or whatever…”

  When I’m done writing I lay down the pencil and stare into the flickering candle flame. The big question remains the one I asked Martha, twelve hours ago or however long ago it was: What do I do if I find him? If Jeremy is right, if Brett is out there sowing oats, and if I do by some miracle manage to track down this formidable character, this former state trooper—what then? I stroll up to this adult man doing what he pleases with his remaining scraps and shards of time, and say what, exactly?

  My name is Henry Palace, sir. Your wife would like you to please come home now.

  I blow out the candle.

  I tiptoe past my sleeping dog and hang my long legs over the edge of the sofa and close my eyes.

  The memories well up as they always do, and I push them away.

  These are the scenes that I have studiously blocked, and which I am aware that I have blocked. Not of my parents; my dead parents I have lived with for many years now, and I have integrated their absence and my grief deep into my character. But there is a more recent wound, a woman named Naomi whom I loved and who was torn from me, a loss as sudden and brutal as a gunshot in a darkened room. And I am aware that the appropriate thing to do, from a therapeutic perspective, would be to summon up the relevant memories, allow myself to face the trauma, expose it to the light and allow time to do its healing work.

  But there is no time. Seventy-seven days—seventy-six now—less than three months—who’s counting? There is no time.

  I push away the memories, roll over, and think about my
case.

  PART TWO

  The Long Way

  1.

  “Oh, sure, I know him. Serious man. Broad shoulders. Boots.”

  “That’s right,” I say, holding up the photograph, my missing man and his caught fish. “His name is Brett Cavatone.”

  “If you say so. I don’t think we ever got so far as to names.”

  The dairyman is an old New England farmer from a storybook, John Deere cap pushed back, sunburned forehead, crags beneath his eyes like coastal cliffs. I’m in his stall in one crowded corner of the Elks rummage, him behind his rickety card table, handwritten signs, a couple of ice-packed travel coolers as big as steamer trunks.

  “He was here frequently?” I ask.

  “Most days, yes, I believe he was.”

  “Was he here on Tuesday?”

  “Tuesday?” The slightest hesitation. He tilts his head. “No.”

  “I’m not asking about yesterday, you understand. Tuesday. Two days ago.”

  The old man pushes back his cap. “I know what day it is, young fella.”

  I smile tightly, peek in the old man’s cooler. He’s selling glass jars of milk and rough sticks of butter wrapped in wax paper. His chalk sign lists what he’d like in exchange: “chicken feed, in quantity.” Fresh fruit and juices, “in quantity.” “Underthings,” with a list of sizes.

  “I’m sorry to press, but it’s important. Are you certain this man didn’t come by on Tuesday morning?”

  “Nothing is certain but the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ,” says the farmer, glancing up at the ceiling of the Elks lodge basement and past it up to heaven—and then down to glower at Houdini, who is sniffing at his butter. “But no, I didn’t see him yesterday.”

  The dairyman snaps the lid closed on his cooler, and my dog and I move on, navigating through the crowded chaotic aisles of the rummage. It’s crowded in here but quiet, people picking their way alone or in small groups from table to table, stall to stall, murmuring hello, nodding, hushed. I watch a thin woman with freckles and sharp nervous eyes investigate the wares on one table: She lifts a block of soap, puts it down again, whispers something to the burly man operating the stall, who shakes his head.