Countdown City

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.

We cut across the room, Houdini and I, weave through the big ungainly piles of take-what-you-want scattered and heaped on blankets in the middle of the room. Broken shells of computers and phones, empty buckets and deflated soccer balls, big picked-over piles of the kind of useless articles once found in pharmacies and big-box stores: greeting cards, reading glasses, celebrity magazines. The really valuable objects are in the manned stalls: dairy goods and smoked meats, cans and can openers, bottles of water and bottles of soda. It’s all barter and exchange, though some stalls still have prices posted, dating from the peak of hyperinflation, before the dollar-economy collapsed: bar/soap, $14,500. Box/mac&cheese $240,000, then an arrow pointing to it, no more mac&cheese. One huge individual in a camouflage hunting jacket stands in the center of his uncluttered stall, silent and serious, under a sign reading simply GENERATORS.

“Bananas,” says a slovenly man slouching past in a windbreaker and hunting cap, muttering under his breath. “You want?”

“No, thanks.”

He moves on, addressing the room in general. “Real good bananas.”

I work the room, making the rounds, flashing Brett’s picture, tugging on the sleeves of the scavengers and tapping the shoulders of the ragged salesmen, meeting their grim and distrustful expressions with calm confidence, with my TV-detective cliché: “Pardon me, have you seen this man?” Everyone I ask gives the same story as the dairyman, with the same minimal level of detail: Yeah, they’ve seen him. Yeah, he was here a lot. One merchant, an earnest woman offering three kinds of jerky, as well as Bibles with laminated pages, remembers Brett fondly—she says he’s one of her favorite customers.

“We never did business together?” she says, turning the statement into a question with a mild uplift at the end of the sentence. “But some mornings we would pray?”

“For what, ma’am?”

“Peace,” she says. “Just peace for everyone?”

I move on, booth after booth, canvassing the rummage. It sounds like Brett was doing exactly what Rocky Milano sent him here to do, bargaining for perishables with the farmers and hustlers and thieves, digging through the scrap piles for things the restaurant could use: toilet paper, dish soap, candles, firewood, plates and spoons. And no one, it seems, saw the man on Tuesday morning.

As I work, the rummage gets busier, the noise and bustle increasing as the morning wears on. There’s a loud sharp burst of noise, two men throwing punches at each other’s head among the blankets of third-tier material, violently arguing over a battered Falcons football helmet. The proprietors of the rummage rush over, a collection of thin and rugged men with very short haircuts, swarming like a rugby team, chanting “out, out, out, out” as they hustle the combatants to the exit.

At a booth that says simply MISCELLANEOUS is a heavy-set woman with ghastly red hair piled and curled on her head, smoking a long and thin cigarette.

“Excuse me,” I ask her. “Do you have toys?”

“You mean…” She lowers her voice. The cigarette wobbles in the corner of her mouth. “Like, weapons?”

“No,” I say. “I’m looking for a particular toy. For a friend.”

She lowers her voice still further. “You mean, for sex?”

“No. Forget it. Thank you.”

Backing away I collide with someone and turn around, murmuring “excuse me.” It’s one of the proprietors, and he doesn’t say excuse me in return, just stands there with his arms crossed, sinewy and grave. He’s a wiry thug with two teardrop tattoos, one beneath each beady eye. They examined me carefully when I came in here, these guys, asked me three times how I knew McGully, skeptically appraised the old Mr. Coffee I had brought in, reluctantly, for barter.

Now this one looks me up and down: my suit jacket, my policeman’s shoes. He stinks of early-day beer and some kind of oily hair product.

“Good morning,” I say.

“You finding everything okay?” His voice is gravelly, deadpan. I get the message. “Come on, boy,” I say to Houdini. “Time to go.”

Halfway from the Elks rummage to my next stop I get off the bike in the heart of downtown and just take a long slow turn around the deserted sprawl of Main Street: crushed glass, broken shop windows, a couple of drunk teenagers on top of each other on a bench. It’s a ghost town. It’s one of those Western cowboy outposts they used to keep preserved as a living museum: Here there used to be a bookstore. Once upon a time, this was a gift shop. Long, long ago, that was a Citgo station.

I stare at the front door of the Concord Police Department for a few minutes, but I can’t go in. As a sworn officer I would push open that door, tip my head hello to the warm-eyed receptionist behind the bulletproof glass, and go get my assignment for the day. As a child, I would push through with both hands, and the warm-eyed receptionist was my mother.

Now, today, different world, I walk with my head down, anonymous and inconspicuous, counterclockwise around the building, past the sternly worded signs posted at ten-yard intervals on the cement berms ringing the perimeter. Sentries patrol the roof, among the bending thickets of antennae and the chugging generators, black-clad cops with semiautomatic rifles, slowly rotating their gaze, one way and then the other, like they’re guarding a besieged consulate in a chaotic third world nation. I find a position about a half block up School Street, almost at the YMCA, and crouch behind a Dumpster.

“Come on,” I say, waiting, watching the big garage doors that are now halfway rolled up, revealing a newly installed loading dock where the repair garage used to be. “Come on, buddy.”

The personnel turnover in the last few months has been dramatic, the police force remaking itself, sinking deeper into its core missions—not stopping crime, not investigating it or containing it, just keeping as many people alive and unharmed as possible. Keeping everyone alive to die later, as McGully puts it. But there’s at least one cop of my acquaintance who is still in there, and who I happen to know has recently taken up smoking, and who enjoys the day’s first cigarette break every day at twelve o’clock.

I check my watch. “Come on.”

Someone rolls up the big garage doors the rest of the way, and a pair of long flat metal ramps are clattered out off the lip of the loading dock. Cops scuttle down the cement steps to ground level, lining up pallets and carts and gesturing to one another and muttering into their walkie-talkies. I risk a closer look, ducking out from behind the Dumpster and walking slowly down the street, until I slump in the empty doorway of Granite State Ice Cream. The activity in the loading dock is increasing now, cops pouring in and out of the building, like robots, like ants, thick black uniforms heavy in the sun.

“Hello, Detective Palace. How’s retirement?”

She’s right on time and she’s smiling, finding space for herself beside me in the narrow doorway, no more than five feet tall even in the military boots, her Plexiglas riot mask tipped back to make room for the noontime cigarette.

“Officer McConnell,” I say. “I need your help.”

“Really?”

A flash of excitement followed immediately by wariness. We always enjoyed working together, Trish and I, first as fellow patrol officers and then during my brief stint on the detectives. But everything is changed now. She drags on the cigarette. “Okay, well, first I should warn you that if my sergeant sees me out here talking to you, I’m going to have to pretend you’re a perp, and probably tase you. I’m sorry.”

“Sergeant who—Gonzales?”

“No, Belewski. Gonzales? Carlos is long gone. No, Belewski, you don’t know him, but he’s looking for people to cut, and he doesn’t like us holdovers.”

She jerks her head, and we leave the doorway of the ice cream parlor, fall into step, walking uptown from headquarters.

“Is Belewski a fed?” I ask. “From out of town?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Army guy?”

“I can’t tell you that, Detective. Are you doing okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got enough to eat?”

“I’m fine. I’m working on this case.”

“Okay,” she says, nods, and her voice goes all business. “What have you got? Arson?”

“Missing person.”

“You kidding? Everyone’s a missing person.”

“I know,” I say. “But this is different.”

“Is it? Because a lot of people are missing. Like half the Eastern Hemisphere, just for starters.”

We’ve stopped walking outside what used to be a Subway sandwich shop: shattered front glass, furniture overturned, extensive graffiti on the sneeze guard of the toppings line.

“Those are refugees,” I tell her. “What I’ve got is a thirty-three-year-old Caucasian male, happy marriage, gainfully employed.”

“Gainfully employed? Are you drunk? Do you know what day it is?”

“He disappears from his workplace at 8:45 in the morning, never comes back.”

“His workplace?”

“Pizza restaurant.”

“Oh, dear. Maybe he fell into an alternate dimension. Have you checked the alternate dimensions?”

A small knot of policemen walk by, boots crunching on the broken glass on the sidewalk outside the Subway. One of them hesitates for half a second, looking from Trish to me; she stares back hard, gives him a curt nod. She wouldn’t really tase me—I don’t think so, anyway. McConnell looks different than she used to, more adult somehow; her small ponytail and short stature, which always struck me in the past as awkward and quasi-adolescent, seem this morning like the opposite: signs of maturity, readiness.

“Keep moving,” says McConnell, when her fellow officers are gone. “Let’s keep moving.”

I brief her on my investigation as we circle the block, giving her the high points, from memory: Martha Cavatone, wild eyed, wringing her hands; Rocky Milano and his defiantly bustling pizza place; my late-night visit from Jeremy Canliss, his strong suggestion that Brett has a girl somewhere.

“So the guy is getting laid. Or he’s getting drunk on a beach. What’s the point?”

We’ve made the circuit and are now back at the Dumpster where I was hiding out before, trash spilling out on all sides. I’ve got a foot and a half on McConnell, easy, and now she stares up at me, CPD headquarters looming behind her like an alien planet.

“He used to be a cop,” I say. “The husband.”

“Oh, yeah?” McConnell’s walkie-talkie crackles and mutters, and she looks at it, and then over at the loading dock, now swarming with bustling police.

“Yeah. A state trooper.”

She looks back at me, uncertain for a moment, and then her face changes. “You want the file.”

“Only if—”

“You asshole.”

She’s shaking her head but I press on, feeling bad, but I can’t help it—she’s the only person I’ve got left in there. “Concord is the HQ for the whole state now, right? So any paper related to state-force personnel will be here in the basement. Anything with the seal of the state of New Hampshire.”

McConnell answers slowly. “It’s not like it used to be, Hank. You don’t just stroll down to the basement and fill out a form with—what was his name? Wilentz?”

“Wilentz.”

She doesn’t seem angry, just sad. Resigned. “You don’t just go down and fill out a form and then Wilentz jokes around, makes you admire his stupid hat collection. I go down there now and request a file, I’ve got three supervisors who are total strangers to me asking what I want it for. Next thing you know that’s it, I’m done. I’m out on the streets doing whatever you’re doing all day.”

“Reading,” I say. “Teaching the dog some tricks.”

“That drug dealer’s dog? How’s that going?”

“Poorly.”

“They’re paying, Palace. You know that, right? That’s why I’m still in the uniform.” She spits out the word uniform, like it’s cancer. “A siren is going to blow, and then a truck rolls in.” She glances at her watch. “In forty-five seconds. And the shit that’s coming off there—food, water, supplies—as long as I’m in this gear, I get dibs. That’s how they’re doing this. That’s how there is any law-enforcement activity of any kind: because the assholes in the uniform get first crack.”

“I get it.”

“Do you? I cannot lose my job.”

McConnell’s daughter Kelli is nine years old; Robbie, I think, is five. Their father took off four years ago, before the asteroid, before any of this. “Barry went Bucket List,” Trish said to me once, “before Bucket List was cool.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have thought.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Really, I’m sorry.”

“Hank,” she says, quieter. A different tone of voice.

“Yes?”

“One day, when the time is right, I’m going to escape to a mansion in the woods, somewhere in western Mass., and I’m taking you with me. How’s that sound?”

“Sure,” I say. “Sounds good.”

And then McConnell, very quickly, reaches up and tugs on my mustache, hard.

“Hey.”

“Sorry. Something I’ve always wanted to do. Carpe diem, right?”

“Right.”

Then the siren goes off, loud and insistent, a tornado horn blowing somewhere on the roof of the CPD. McConnell mutters “shit” as her walkie-talkie blares to life, crackling out a string of code: “Team four-zero-nine, go alpha. Team six-zero-forty, go alpha.” The CB code is unfamiliar, and I ask McConnell what it means.

“It means I’ve got thirty seconds to get across the street and get back in character.” She grits her teeth and stares at me, shaking her head. “What’s the guy’s name?”

“Cavatone.”

“He was a trooper?”

“Until a couple years ago. But Trish, seriously, forget it.”

I feel bad now. She’s right. I never should have put her in this position. I have a permanent mental picture of Trish’s kids from a couple years ago, when she couldn’t find a sitter and dragged them to someone’s retirement party: Kelli, a thoughtful child with watchful eyes in a lime-green Hello Kitty shirt, Robbie sucking his thumb.

“Western Mass., Detective,” says McConnell. “You and me.”

She winks and flips down her mask, and she’s smiling, I can see it in the lines of her brow above the Plexiglas. Then off she goes, dropping into a hustle as the eighteen-wheeler rumbles in, the driver clutching the big wheel, white-knuckled as he rattles the thing into place. The police swarm its flat metal flanks like bugs on the carcass of a forest animal.

“Trish,” I call. I can’t resist. “If there’s coffee on the truck—”

Over her shoulder she flashes me her middle finger and disappears into the pack of cops.

Nico, my sister, is living in a used-clothing store on Wilson Avenue. That’s where she is, holed up with a small rotating cast of poorly groomed, slack-jawed, paranoid-delusional chuckleheads. My sister.

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 shape. 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.

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. Like 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.

We’re in this tableau, the four of us, as the doors of the elevator creak closed and we start down again, listening to the rusted clang of the chains.

“It takes about thirty-five seconds for the elevator to get down to the ground floor,” says the man on top of me, leaning his body forward to flatten me further. “The way we do it is, it touches down, the doors open, we roll out the bodies and hit the Up button.”

Martha screams and thrashes in the grip of the tall woman. I breathe through my nose, deep breaths.

“I don’t know what happens to the bodies. It seems too early for cannibalism, but who knows? They keep disappearing is all I know.”

The man’s chin is square and jutting. His hand is rough and it smells like Ivory soap. I started counting seconds as soon as he started talking; there are twenty seconds left.

“What I did was, I rigged the staple gun to the motor of a hedge trimmer, so it can really do some business. I got guns, but I’m saving up my bullets. You know how it is.”

The man grins, shining white teeth, a gap between the two in front. The elevator descends, the chains rattling deafeningly like exploding ordnance. T-minus ten seconds—T-minus nine—who’s counting?

“My friend Ellen, she just uses a butcher’s knife. No imagination, you know?”

“Fuck you, you dick,” says the woman holding on to Martha, glaring at the man. He puffs out his cheeks, looks at me like can you believe this one? T-minus two. One. The elevator touches down with a thud. My bones rattle. I brace myself.

“Who are you?” says the man, and takes his hand off my mouth, and I say, “My name is Henry Pal—” and he fires the staple gun with a whir and a click and my brain explodes. I scream, and there’s another scream, in the corner, it’s the woman, Ellen. I crane my neck and try to see through the pain-sparked flickers, red and gold stars flaring across my field of vision. Martha is biting the woman’s arm, kicking free.

“Fuck!” screams Ellen, raises her knife like a butcher, and Martha screams, “Phillips! Mr. Phillips!”

“Oh,” says the man, and eases off. “Well, shit.”

Ellen lowers the knife, breathes heavily, and Martha sinks down against the back wall of the elevator car, her face in her hands, sobbing.

A password. Of course. Mr. Phillips. Palace, you idiot.

Blood is rushing from the side of my head, down my forehead and into my eyes. I raise one finger and touch the wound, a hole the size of a dime, the small sharp object of the staple buried in the thin flesh of my temple.

My assailant tosses his weapon on the floor of the elevator. “Ellen, hit the Up button, will you, honey?”

There are more goods than I saw in that first glimpse, many more: a room full of boxes, each box overflowing with things—useful things. Batteries, light bulbs, portable fans, humidifiers, snack foods, plastic utensils, first aid supplies, pens and pencils and big pads of paper. The man, the one who just shot me in the head with his staple gun, he pats me on the back and grins wolfishly, opens his arms and does a proud half-turn around the room.

“Pretty nice, right?” he says, and then answers his own question, settling back in a swiveling chair. “It’s very nice. I obtained an Office Depot.”

He pilots himself across the room on the wobbly wheels of the chair and docks behind a wide L-shaped glass-topped desk, where he puts up his feet and unscrews the lid of a plastic jug of pretzels. I’m holding my palm up to the side of my head, blood flowing freely down my wrist, pooling inside my shirt sleeves. Martha is holding herself, trembling, looking fearfully at the woman with the butcher knife. A couple years ago, at this time, Martha Cavatone would have been at Market Basket, picking up something for dinner, or maybe at the bank, the dry cleaners. A year from now, who knows?

“See, I had a friend,” says our host from behind his glass-top desk. “An acquaintance, really, who owed me just a disgusting amount of money. This was last December. And you know, I had a feeling how this was going, this business with the asteroid. It was in the darkness still, hidden by the moon.”

When he mentions the asteroid, he gets a sort of wistful contented glimmer in his eye, like it’s the best thing that ever happened to him. Conjunction, is what he means. In December 2011GV₁ was still in conjunction, aligned with the sun and impossible to observe. It was not “hidden by the moon.” My eyes have landed on the water—boxes of jugs, ten jugs to the box, two stacks of ten boxes, side by side. Twelve jugs of water per box times ten times two.

“And this cat, this poor fellow, I went to him and said, look, forget the money. Because this guy, when he wasn’t making bad bets on sports, he was the manager of the Office Depot in Pittsfield. And the thing about Office Depot is that they don’t have just office things. They have a really extraordinary variety of merchandise.”

He sounds like a commercial for Office Depot, and he knows he does. He laughs, tosses his shoulder-length hair.

“Anyway, so the shit goes down, they say the world’s gonna end, and I’m in a position, you know? I had a copy of this guy’s keys, I had some friends lined up, I had a truck set aside, I had some gasoline.” He winks again. He shrugs. “So I obtained an Office Depot.”

“We did, Cortez,” says Ellen, curtly. “We obtained it.” She’s at the door of the empty stairwell, still holding her butcher knife.

Cortez grins at me, rolls his eyes slightly, like we’re in cahoots, he and I, boys versus girls. I study him, long black hair, bulging forehead, jutting jaw—he reminds me of a houseguest we had once when I was a child, a noted poet my father invited to give a lecture at St. Anselm’s. My mother said he was “ugly, in that handsome sort of way.”

I take another look at Martha, make sure she’s okay. She’s sitting down at a desk; the room is full of desks, glass-topped desks, hutch desks, imposing oak-top desks; many of them with locked drawers. A room full of stashes, hidden places, things squirreled away.

“Do you know this man?” I say, bringing the photograph of Brett out of my pocket.

Cortez gasps theatrically, puts his hands in the air. “Oh my God, you’re a fucking policeman.”

“No, sir.”

“Do it again,” he says, grinning. “With the picture. Ask me again.”

I place the photograph down in front of him. “Do you know this man?”

He slaps his desk, delighted. “A real-life policeman. It’s like an acid flashback.”

“Yes,” says Ellen quietly, from her side of the room, still holding the butcher’s knife. “We know him. He was here yesterday. You’re his wife?”

Cortez gives Ellen an irritated look while Martha nods, her eyes filling with refreshed hope as she looks around the room. She’s thinking, here—in this room. She’s reveling in the fact of his proximity, in space if not in time: He was here.

“Yes. He was here.” Cortez is looking me over, up and down, marveling still at the real-live policeman. “And he said that the woman would be coming alone, which is why I shot you with my staple gun.”

“It’s okay,” I say.

“I did not apologize.”

“Can I just…” Martha swallows. Her hands are trembling. She looks from Ellen to Cortez and then back to Ellen. “What did he want?”

“Stuff,” said Cortez simply.

“What?” says Martha.

I’m looking around again: the desks, the filing cabinets, the boxes of impulse-purchase nonfoods, fruit snacks and goldfish crackers and granola bars.

“What do you mean, what?” says Cortez, grinning. “That’s what he wanted. Stuff! Stuff for you, sweetheart.”

“I’m sorry,” says Martha. “I don’t understand.”

“Oh, honey,” says Ellen, glaring at Cortez, laying her hatchet down at last and putting an arm around Martha. “He paid us to take care of you. Until afterward.”

“Take care of?” says Martha, eyes wide. “What does that mean?”

“It means, give a bunch of fucking shit to.” Cortez sidles over to their side of the room and scoops up the big knife. “It means, not let to become dead.”

“Shut up, Cortez,” says Ellen. “It means he paid up front for us to provide enough stuff for you to make it till the end. Food, water, batteries, flashlights, clothes, tampons. Whatever.”

“And if you’re afraid of things going bump in the night, we do protection.” Cortez walks back to his desk, slides Ellen’s butcher knife into a drawer. “Right up until the end.”

“But not afterward?” I ask.

“Afterward?” Cortez cackles, kicks his legs up on the desk like a corporate raider. “Anyone making promises for afterward is a liar and a thief.”

I’m holding my bloody forehead, thinking this through, realizing along with Martha exactly what it means. Brett wanted her to be taken care of, which is a nice thing, except it means he knew that he was leaving. There is no longer any question of accident or foul play. Brett Cavatone left his wife with foresight, efficiency, and decisiveness. Martha is staring straight ahead, lost behind the large desk like a schoolchild in her daddy’s office.

“Excuse me,” she says, suddenly sitting up straight, her voice carefully controlled. “Do you have any cigarettes?”

“Yes, honey,” says Ellen, unlatching a trunk the size of a small bathtub. “Thousands of them.”

The pain from my new injury has reignited an old one, like a pinball bouncing against a bumper and lighting it up: a raw spot where I was once stabbed, just below my left eye. It was the drug dealer who stabbed me, the one whose dog is at my house right now, waiting to be fed.

“This protection. This is a service you offer?” I ask Cortez. “Have been offering?”

“It is.” He grins. “You interested?”

“No, thank you. How do people pay you for this service?”

“Stuff,” he says, the strong chin, the lopsided grin. “More stuff. Things I can turn around and offer to other folks. Items I can hang on to for a rainy day. For the big rainy day.”

“How did he pay you?” I say, holding up the photograph again.

“Ah!” Cortez rubs his hands together, eyes gleaming like coins. “You want to see?”

Pieces of metal, hunks of metal, scraps and stacks of it. Gleaming silver, contoured black plastic, glass and dials. I look at the pile, look at Cortez.

“It’s a vehicle.”

Cortez waggles his eyebrows mysteriously, having fun. We took the elevator down together in silence and then had to go outside, around the back, and down a rickety flight of basement stairs accessible now only by a sidewalk trapdoor. The basement of 17 Garvins Falls has a concrete floor, dim overhead bulbs hooked up to a noisy and foul-smelling biofuel generator. I lift one long flat plane of reinforced iron and find words painted on the other side in a childlike comic-book font: CALIFORNIA: GOLD RUSH COUNTRY!

“A U-Haul,” I say, and Cortez’s jagged grin widens. “Can you believe it?”

I can. I do. Rocky Milano was lying: he didn’t have his beloved son-in-law and right-hand man hauling furniture around the county on a ten-speed bicycle. That’s how a restaurant stays open: get ahold of a working vehicle, scam or barter for a supply of gas or some bootleg biofuel, make a reliable map of DOJ checkpoints to be avoided. No wonder Rocky is so aggrieved. He didn’t just lose a son-in-law and a top employee; he lost his most valuable capital asset. I wish I could go back to that room and ask him again, press him on all the half-truths and evasions. I’m not a cop, I’d say. I’m just a guy trying to help your daughter.

“What I told him is, if you’re gonna leave this, you gotta take it apart,” says Cortez. “I’ll get more on it, piece by piece, don’t you think?”

I don’t hazard a guess. I lift a gritty metal pole the length of my arm.

“Steering column.” Cortez titters, angles out his chin.

I wander among the pieces of the van, identifying the pedals, the seat belt straps, the slanting beveled iron of the loading ramp. The fractured shapes of something as ordinary as a U-Haul truck, it’s like a vision from distant memory, like I’m inspecting the butchered carcass of a mastodon. The two tire rims are stacked, one atop the other, the fat black rubber wheels beside them.

I straighten up and I look at Cortez, the Jesus-style hair, the mischievous smile. “Why would he trust you?” I ask. “To honor a bargain?”

He splays a hand across his breastbone, offended. I wait. “We’ve known each other, going back, that cop and I. He knows what I am.” He smiles like a magical cat. “I’m a thief, but I’m an honorable thief. He’s seen me get arrested, seen me get out and build right back. Because I’m dependable. A man of business has to be relied upon, that’s all.”

I pull the wad of gauze away from the side of my head—it’s soaked in blood—I put it back in place. Rocky Milano has not closed his restaurant, even though we’re in countdown land: he’s doubled down, intensified his commitment to his operation and his self-identity. So, too, with Cortez the thief.

“Plus, he said that if I went back on him, if I let anything befall his wife, he’d come back and murder me,” adds Cortez, almost offhandedly. “I’ve known people who say that and don’t mean it. It was my strong impression that this was a man who meant it.”

“And he gave you no indication of where he was going?’

“Nope.” Cortez pauses, smirks. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. Wherever he was going, he was in a goddamn hurry to get there. I teased the man about it. I said, for someone who is here to cut up a working vehicle and leave it behind, you sure want to get going. He didn’t laugh, though. Not one little bit.”

No, I think. I bet he didn’t. If Brett was as much of a straight shooter as I am sensing he was, if he was the decent and honorable character that emerges from everybody’s recollections, then he hated coming here. I can picture him, on the way to Garvins Falls Road, in this stolen van—tasting the bitterness of the measure he was taking, of putting his trust in this weaselly and self-regarding man. Brett Cavatone disassembling a U-Haul van, working swiftly under Cortez’s glittering gaze, not looking at his watch, just doing the job carefully and well until it was done.

My missing person was a man dying to leave, in a fever to leave, but who knew that leaving was wrong. He made a compromise with himself, struck a moral balance, did what he had to, to make arrangements for the woman he’d be leaving behind.

I say “thank you” to Cortez. He says “you’re very welcome” and bows. I go up to collect Martha.

On Garvins Falls Road, outside, the late-day sunlight a perfect golden gleam along the rutted sidewalks, I look back up at the building and Martha looks down at the street. It’s hotter than yesterday but still not uncomfortable. There’s a pair of perfect clouds teasing each other across the bright blue sky. Martha seems calm and composed, surprisingly so, considering what she has learned.

“I told you,” she says, very softly, and I say, “Excuse me?”

“I told you, he’s like a rock, that man. That’s how he is. He thinks of things. He’s so thoughtful. Even—” She smiles, turns her face up to the sun. “Even leaving me, he was considerate about it.”

“Yes,” I say. “Sure.”

In the distance, all the way back in downtown Concord, the deafening holler of the tornado siren. I can picture the truck rumbling into its dock, McConnell and the rest of the cops hurrying into place, forming their perimeter, preparing to unload.

“So, just to be absolutely clear, Martha,” I say, as gently as I can. “You no longer want me to find your husband?”

“Oh, no,” she says, startled. “Now I want you to find him more than ever.”

4.

People talk about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, like it just happened one day. All the dinosaurs were hanging out, all together in an open field, and the asteroid slammed down and destroyed them, killed them all and all at once.

Not so, of course. Some died on the day, no doubt about it, and probably a lot—but the whole business took years. Generations, maybe. They can’t say for sure. They know that a ten-kilometer asteroid exploded into the crust of the earth in the Yucatan Peninsula 65.6 million years ago, tearing a great gash from the planet and darkening the sky, and some of the dinosaurs drowned and some burned and some starved when the plants stopped growing, and some stumbled on through the new cold world. They ate what they could find and fought for scraps and forgot there had been an asteroid. Brains like walnuts, creatures of need, they knew only their hunger. A lot of species died. A lot of species didn’t.

This time, too, it’ll go both ways: Most people will die in October and in the brutal cataclysms that follow, and then many more will die later. The sudden death versus the lingering; the instant and certain versus the drawn-out and unpredictable. My parents both died suddenly, a finger-snap, a crack in time: One day my mother was here, and then she was buried, and then soon after that my father, bang, gone. With Grandfather, it was the long way: diagnosis, treatment, remission, relapse, new diagnosis, the wayward course of illness. There was one afternoon when we huddled at his bedside, Nico and I and a handful of his friends, said our goodbyes, and then he got better and lived for another six months, pale and thin and irritable.

Naomi Eddes, the woman I loved, she went the other way, the first way: bang and gone.

The best available scientific evidence suggests that on the day itself, the earth’s atmosphere will be riven by flame, as if by a prodigious nuclear detonation: over most of the planet, a broiling heat, the sky on fire. Tsunamis as tall as skyscrapers slam into coasts and drown everyone within hundreds of miles from impact, while around the globe volcanic eruptions and earthquakes convulse the landscape, splintering the crust of the world at all its hidden junctions. And then photosynthesis, the magic trick undergirding the entire food chain, is snuffed out by a blanket of darkness drawn down across the sun.

But no one knows. No one really knows. They have computer models, based on the Yucatan event, based on Siberia. But it all depends on final velocity, on angle of approach, on the precise makeup of the object and the soil below the impact spot. Probably not everyone will die. But probably most people will. It will definitely be terrible, but it’s impossible to say exactly how. Anyone making promises for afterward is a liar and a thief.

When I get home there’s a thick manila envelope jammed between the screen door and the front door, so that when I pull open the door the package falls out and lands on the porch with a thump. I crouch down and tear open the envelope with one finger and slide out a single manila file folder, thickly packed, stamped NEW HAMPSHIRE STATE POLICE FILE: BRETT ALAN CAVATONE (RET.).

“Thanks, Trish,” I murmur, and turn eastward toward School Street to toss her a salute, soft and sweet as blowing a kiss.

Stepping inside I close the front door carefully, not wanting a sharp slam to wake Houdini, who is snoring lightly on the sofa, curled with his face smushed into his own warm side. In the kitchen I light three candles and make tea. The police file is written in the clipped language of all such reports: a short story written in brief static bursts of institutional prose. The subject is referred to throughout as O. Cavatone. “O.” for officer. O. Cavatone graduated the police academy on such-and-such a date. On such-and-such a date he was assigned to Troop D of the Division of State Police with the rank of Trooper I; transferred north, then, to Troop F; recognized with a commendation and a small ceremony for saving the life of a traffic accident victim; promoted to Trooper II. Taken together, the pages speak to an admirable, steadfast career: no citations, no warnings, no blemishes on the record.

“The Governor’s Medal,” I say to myself quietly, turning a page, nodding appreciatively. “Very nice, O. Cavatone. Congratulations.”

Halfway down the fourth page, the quick log-line bursts of information give way to one long detailed paragraph, delving in some detail into one particular incident. It begins with the arrest report: four suspects accused of trespassing. The location is a slaughterhouse operated by a dairy farm called Blue Moon, near Rumney. The apparent mission of the alleged trespassers was to install hidden videotaping equipment, but they tripped alarms and were apprehended fleeing the scene. Subsequently, the suspects explained to the arresting officer—O. Cavatone—that their action was intended to gather evidence of inhumane and unhealthful treatment of the cattle: to “provoke horror and outrage,” says the report, “toward Blue Moon in particular and U.S. agricultural practice in general.”

The case rings a bell, the thing about the slaughterhouse. I get up and pace around the dark kitchen a little bit, try to remember it. According to the date on the file it was two and a half years ago, this arrest. I probably read about it in the Monitor, or maybe they went over it with us in the academy. An interesting sort of crime, an unusual category of motivation for this part of the world: political provocation, college kids in tie-dyed ski masks, planting video cameras.

Houdini murmurs in his sleep, growling a little. I sip my tea. It’s cold. I lift the file again, read the names of the perpetrators, all of whom had been charged with trespassing and two counts of criminal mischief. Marcus Norman, Julia Stone, Annabelle Demetrios, Frank Cignal.

I read these names again, study them, tapping my fingers. Why does O. Cavatone’s file include a detailed report of this particular case, why the full paragraph on this one arrest, when there must have been hundreds over the course of a six-year career?

The answer, as it turns out, is not hard to find. It is, indeed, highlighted—literally highlighted, on the next page of the record.

“Charges against all suspects dismissed; O. Cavatone failing on several occasions to provide appropriate testimony.”

The Blue Moon incident is the end of Brett Cavatone’s file. There is no discharge information, no report given of his dismissal or early retirement. The rest of his story I already know, more or less: Brett leaves the state troopers a few months later, at age thirty, and takes a job at his father-in-law’s new pizza restaurant. And then, three days ago, he disappears.

I rise and stretch, feeling my bones ache along the length of my body. My body is crying out for sleep—for sleep or for coffee. There’s a dull throbbing at my temple, and it’s only when I raise one finger to the small divot beside my eye do I recall that I was shot earlier today with a staple gun. I gently move Houdini over and lie down beside him in the darkness and then a few minutes later I’m up again, reopening the file—reading it again—and again—unable to stop—the impulse to discover speaking up in me like morning birds, like unruly children.

“I’ll have the lobster Thermidor,” says Detective Culverson.

“We don’t have that,” says Ruth-Ann, sighing elaborately.

“Coq au vin?”

“We don’t have that either.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Sorry.”

It’s midmorning the next day, Friday, and Culverson and Ruth-Ann are doing the kind of flirtatious give-and-take that I normally find amusing, but now I’m rat-a-tatting my fingers on the edge of the booth, shifting impatiently while they go through their bit. Detective McGully isn’t here yet, but that doesn’t matter, it’s Culverson’s opinion I want.

“Here,” I say, as soon as Ruth-Ann turns and heads back to the kitchen. “Okay.” I slide him the file. Not the whole thing, just the last two pages. “Tell me what you see.”

“This is the Bucket List guy?” He slowly unfolds his reading glasses. “Your babysitter’s boyfriend?”

“Husband.”

“Oh, I thought boyfriend.”

“Can you just have a look?”

Culverson lifts the pages and scans, glasses perched on the end of his nose, and quickly comes to the exact same conclusion that I did. “Looks like he got fired.”

“Yes.”

“But someone doesn’t want to say that.”

“Yes!” I beam at him. “Exactly.”

“Where the hell is McGully?” says Culverson, straightening up and peering at the door.

“I don’t know,” I say quickly, and tap the file. “But the question is why, right? Why is this guy fired? I mean, so he fails to testify.”

“Right. But he’s not getting fired for a no-show.”

“Right.” Pause. Take a breath. “But, what if he couldn’t show up.”

“What do you mean? You saying he was a drunk?”

Ruth-Ann returns with two bowls of oatmeal. “Lobster Thermidor,” she says, putting one down in front of me. “And coq au vin,” giving Culverson his.

“No,” I say, when she’s gone. “No, not a drunk.”

“Listen, Stretch, if you got some kind of stunning breakthrough to lay on me, then go ahead and do it,” says Culverson. He tucks a napkin into the collar of his shirt, spreads it down across his chest like a bib. “Maybe you haven’t heard, but life is short.”

“Brett named the specials.”

“What?”

“At the pizza place. Rocky told me—that’s the boss, the father-in-law—he told me. Brett leaves the force after this thing at the dairy farm, he comes to work at his wife’s father’s pizza restaurant, and one of his first jobs is: name the specials. All of them get classic rock names. Layla: a very unusual and specific name. Hazel: unusual and specific. Sally Simpson: unusual and specific. And then—Julia.”

He looks where I’m pointing, where I’ve laid my finger across the case file, at the list of suspects. Marcus Norman, Julia Stone, Annabelle Demetrios, Frank Cignal.

“Palace.”

“Of all the girls’ names in all the songs in the world?”

“Palace.”

“Even all the girls’ names in all the Beatles songs? Who picks Julia?” I jab my finger at the page. “Who but a man with a woman on his mind?”

“I’m not really a Beatles man,” says Culverson, stirring honey into his oatmeal. “You got any Earth, Wind, and Fire related clues?”

“Come on, Culverson.”

“I’m teasing you.”

“I know. But do you think it makes sense?”

“Honestly? No.” He grins. “You have gone for a walk, my young friend. You have wandered so far from the available evidence that I cannot see you anymore, tall as a telephone pole though you may be.”

“Maybe,” I say. I cross my arms. “But I’m right.”

“It’s possible,” he says. I’ve known Culverson for longer than anyone now living, except for my sister. Long ago, when I was still a child, it was Detective Culverson who solved the murder of my mother. “And hey, you know what? The world’s about to blow up. So, you know, knock yourself out. You have a last-known address for young Julia?”

“Yeah,” I say, tapping the file. “Durham.”

“Durham?” he says.

“Yeah. At the time of the incident, she was a rising junior at UNH.”

“So her last-known is on the grounds of the Free Republic. You’re ready to go door to door down there?”

“No. Maybe.” I grit my teeth. This is the hard part. “I actually know someone who might be able to help.”

“Oh yeah?” Culverson raises an eyebrow. “Who’s that?”

I’m saved by the bell. The door chimes, and McGully comes in with an old Samsonite suitcase like a traveling salesman. We look at him, Culverson and I, and Ruth-Ann looks over from her spot at the counter, at old McGully with his suitcase and his boots. No one says anything. That’s it—it’s like he’s already gone, fading from full color to black and white before our eyes. He stands at the threshold of the restaurant, in the antechamber by the cash register where the pictures still hang of the owner, Bob Galicki, shaking hands with various politicians, where there’s an old-fashioned gumball machine. The gumballs are gone now, the glass sphere shattered a long time ago.

Culverson leans back in his seat; McGully stares back at us in silence.

“Wow,” says Culverson. “Where to?”

“New Orleans,” says McGully. “I’m going to hoof it to 95, look for a southbound bus.”

Culverson nods. I don’t say anything. What is there to say? In the corner of my eye, Ruth-Ann is ramrod straight at the counter, carafe in hand, watching McGully in her doorway.

“You tell Beth?” Culverson asks.

“Nah.” McGully flashes his monkey’s grin, real quick, and then looks down at the floor. “I’ve been telling her, you know, we should get outta here, we should make a change, but she’s… she’s settled, you know? She’s not leaving the house. Her mom died in that house.” He looks up, then down again, mutters into his shirtfront. “I left her a note, though. Little note.”

“Hey,” I say. “McGully—” and he says, “No—no, you shut up,” and I say, “What?” and then suddenly he’s hollering, furious, stalking across the diner toward me. “You’re like a little kid, you know that?”

He leans over me in the booth. I shrink back.

“In your tidy little universe, with your notebooks, and the good guys and the bad guys. That shit is moot, man. That shit is over.”

“Easy,” says Culverson, half rising, “take it easy now,” but McGully keeps his finger in my face. “You just wait until the water runs out. You just fucking wait.” He’s snarling, showing his teeth. “You think this trooper you’re looking for, you think he’s a bad guy? You think I’m a bad guy?”

“I didn’t say that,” I murmur, but he’s not listening. He’s not talking to me, not really.

“Well, you wait until the taps stop working. Then you’ll see some fucking bad guys.” He’s bright red. He’s out of breath. “Okay?”

I don’t say anything, but he seems to want an answer. “Okay,” I say.

“Okay, smart guy?”

“Okay.”

I meet McGully’s eyes and he nods, eases off. No one else says anything. The boots squeak on the linoleum as he turns around, Ruth-Ann tsk-tsking at the scuff he’s leaving on her floor. Then the door chimes, and he’s gone: off and running. We look at each other for half a second, me and Culverson, and then I stand up, my oatmeal untouched on the table.

“So,” says Culverson mildly. “UNH, huh?”

“Yeah. Just a day, I figure. There and back.”

He nods. “Yup.”

“The only thing is, there’re these kids.” And I tell him about Micah and Alyssa, the business with the sword, and he says sure, he says he’ll look into it. We’re talking quietly, carefully, not moving much, McGully’s angry energy still buzzing around the room.

I tear the relevant piece of paper from my notebook, and Culverson tucks it into his shirt pocket.

“Go on ahead, Henry. Solve your case,” he says. “Get it right.”

I sit on my bus bench across the street from Next Time Around, the vintage clothing store, for thirty seconds, a minute maybe, gathering my nerve. Then I stand up, march over there, and knock on the front door.

No one answers. I stand there like a dummy. Somewhere farther down Wilson Avenue there’s a loud, muffled clang, like someone banging two trash can lids together. I knock again, harder this time, loud enough to rattle the glass panes of the door. I know they’re in there. I’m bending to peek in the curtained window when the door is jerked open and here’s the fat young man with the greasy hair, wearing a wool cap despite the heat.

“Yeah?” he grunts. “What?”

“My name is Henry Palace,” I begin, and Nico rushes over, rushes right around this guy’s hunched frame to hug me like a maniac.

“Henry!” she says. “What the hell?” But she’s happy, grinning, stepping back to look at me and then forward to hug me again. I take a look at her, too, take her in, my sister: a man’s white undershirt and camouflage pants, an American Spirit hanging like a lollipop stick from the corner of her mouth. Her hair has been cut short and choppy and dyed black; the change is dramatic and entirely for the worse. But her eyes are the same, twinkling and wicked and brilliant.

“I knew it,” she says, looks up at my face, still grinning. “I knew I hadn’t seen the last of you.”

I don’t reply, I smile, I peer past her into the cluttered room, the rolling racks and overspilling bins of clothes, the mannequins arranged in a variety of obscene poses. There’s a man in there on the floor asleep, shirtless, in a tangle of sheets, a woman sitting Indian-style, dealing herself a hand of cards. There’s an ersatz table, just a piece of plywood laid across two sawhorses, strewn with drawing paper and old newspapers. The store smells like must and cigarettes and body odor. The squat man in the wool cap leans across the prone body of the sleeper to reach a Bunsen burner and light his cigarette on its blue flame.

“So, what’s up?” says Nico. “What do you want?”

What I want, suddenly and fiercely, is to get my sister the hell out of this filthy squat, to extract her like one of those private detectives who pull kids from cults and reunite them with their parents. I want to tell her she has to leave this—this—this dorm, this hostel, this squalid storefront where she has decided to spend the last days of human history bedded down with this collection of lice-infested conspiracy theorists. I want her to give up whatever fantasies are driving her actions at this point and come stay where I can see her. I want to scream at her that for God’s sake she is all I have left, she’s the only person still living that I have a claim on, and her poor decision-making makes me depressed and furious in equal measure.

“Hen?” says Nico, dragging on her cigarette and blowing the smoke out her nose.

I don’t say any of those things. I smile.

“Nico,” I say. “I need your help.”