Martha, oh Martha, you hid your heart from me.
Martha, oh Martha, oh why?
So here I am, I’m crouched with Martha Milano and the door of the Easy-Bake oven is slightly ajar, and together we’re feeling the warmth of the one little bulb on our faces. I’m lying in the shadow of the blockhouse staring at Brett’s blasted skull. I’m slouched slack-jawed in a helicopter and my sister is slapping me, trying to keep me awake. I’m awake. Strange smells are drifting out of the Easy-Bake oven. There are low murmurs somewhere in the back of my brain, people talking in another part of the house.
I open my eyes. The strange white room is dim and candlelit, but my corneas burn with the brightness. I shut my eyes.
Martha, oh Martha, oh why?
She lied. A sin of omission, at the very least.
Where am I? What happened to Nico? The helicopter—the fort—the dog, where’s the dog?
She had a lover—Martha did. His name was N. Who was N.? She was untrue. She was the one who broke her marriage vow, who abrogated the contract, who risked her own salvation. There was a man who came into Rock ’n’ Bowl just as I was leaving. Norman. Wasn’t it? “Mr. Norman is here.” “No kidding? Already?”
I’m floating through textured air, bobbing and dipping. The smell is bad now, strong and acrid, like disinfectant, like maybe Martha and I are baking a mop head. Where am I? My God, and how?
Is there anything else you need to tell me, Martha—didn’t I say that? Didn’t I ask her? Anything else about your husband, your marriage? I try to peer from this distance into Martha’s secret heart: She must have felt that it didn’t matter, whatever she had done and with whom. She must have thought it irrelevant to the task at hand: her husband had gone, it didn’t matter why, and she just wanted him back.
But Martha, oh Martha, he’s not coming back.
I see Brett’s face again, the empty cratered space and the sharp sickly clean odor is all around me now. I sniff gingerly, my eyes still closed, like a newborn bunny rabbit, tasting air with the dew of the womb still drying on my nose. Bleach? Cleaning fluid?
More murmuring, more quiet voices.
And then suddenly a giant has got hold of my right side and is squeezing, huge brutal fingers digging into my flesh, trying to yank my arm off my torso like a flower petal. I writhe, remembering my injury. I feel like a broken toy, like I’ve been hurled from a height down onto cobblestones.
“Hank.” One of the voices, clear and loud. “Hank.”
I’ve never noticed before how sharp and clinical that name sounds, HANK, how curt and cold, HANK, onomatopoetic for the clink of a metal chain on a metal desk. My mind is moving, fast and strange. “Hank,” says the voice again, and it’s real; there’s a voice in the room. I’m in a room and there’s a voice in it, a person in it, standing close by me, saying my name.
I decide to go one eye at a time. I crack the right eye, and the light floods in. Silhouetted in the glare is a face I recognize. Two eyes, each encased in a glass circle, peering down at me like an amoeba on a slide. Above the pair of glasses a slash of bangs, a skeptical irritated face.
“Dr. Fenton?” I whisper. I open the other eye.
“What happened to you?” asks Alice Fenton.
“I was shot.”
“Thanks,” she says. “That’s literally the only part of the story I already know.”
“You’re upstairs,” I tell her.
“Yes. I quit the morgue,” she says. “Not enough doctors. Too many people who need help. Plenty of idiots getting themselves shot.”
I try to banter back at her but our conversation thus far has already exhausted me. I let my eyes drift closed again. Alice Fenton is a legend. She is or was the chief medical examiner of the state of New Hampshire, and for a long time I idolized her from afar, her technical mastery and perspicacity. A few months ago I had the opportunity to work with her for the first time, and her forensic skill helped me figure out who it was that killed some people. Naomi Eddes, for example, whom I loved. She is—Fenton is a legend.
“Dr. Fenton,” I say. “You’re a legend.”
“That’s great,” she says. “Go to sleep. We’ll talk later.”
“Wait. Hold. Wait.”
“What?”
“Just one second.”
I inhale. I get my eyes to open. I prop myself on my elbows and look around. The bedsheets and blankets are yellow-green in the pale light of the room. I’m in a flimsy powder-blue gown. I’m home. There’s an iron arm that once held an in-room television, now angling uselessly out of the wall like a metal tree branch. I need to go to Albin Street. I have to check in with my client. Hey, Martha? I’ve got a couple questions for you.
Dr. Fenton stands at the side of the bed, a stack of clipboards under one arm, her short compact form quivering with impatience.
“What?” she says again.
“I have to get going.”
“Sure,” she says. “Nice to see you.”
“Oh,” I say. “Great.”
She waits as I shift my legs toward the edge of the bed and my stomach heaves and thickens inside my body. Visions roll across my brainpan, double time: Martha crying; Brett staring; Nico smoking; Rocky in his office with his feet up. Naomi Eddes unmoving in the darkness where they found her. I stop moving my legs and tuck my chin down into my neck and manage not to vomit.
“Ether,” says Dr. Fenton with the barest trace of merriment. “You’re coming down out of a cloud of ether. My colleagues and I are down to the dregs of our pain meds. The DOJ promised a shipment of morphine and MS Contin by Friday, along with new fuel for the generators. I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, ether. Everything that’s old is new again.”
I nod. I focus on not being sick. My arm feels like one big tender bruise. I try to move it, to see if that would hurt it more or less, and I discover that it won’t move at all.
“I should say, Hank,” says Dr. Fenton, and I note that there is no remaining amusement in her voice, “it is very much within the realm of possibility that you are going to lose that limb.”
I listen, numb. Lose the limb. Sure. Of course. My pillow smells like dust, like other men’s blood.
Fenton is still talking. “I repaired the blood vessels in the ruptured brachial artery by excising the injured segment and performing a graft. But I—” She stops, gives a quick shake of her head. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I was cutting up corpses for the past twenty-five years, and now I’ve been doing general surgeries for approximately two weeks. Plus, you probably haven’t noticed, but it’s fucking dark in here.”
“Dr. Fenton,” I say. “I’m sure you did your best.” I reach laboriously across the bed with my good hand and pat her on the arm.
“I’m sure I did, too,” she says. “But you still might lose the limb.”
I try again to move my legs, and this time I get them a little closer to the edge of the bed. I’m visualizing my swiftest route from here, Concord Hospital at Pleasant Street and Langley Parkway, all the way to Albin Street in North Concord. I’m not cross with you, Martha. I just want to know the truth. The machines around us beep dully, their blinking lights dim and pale, feeble back-up-generator lights. My legs refuse to go any farther for the time being. My arm throbs and my body aches. The world swells up and gently spins around me. I feel myself slipping down, not unpleasantly, back into my cloud of ether. Naomi is standing where Fenton just was, gazing sweetly down at me, and my heart shivers in my chest. Naomi was bald, in life; apparently in the world to come she’s growing out her hair and it looks beautiful, like soft moss on a sea-washed stone.
I let my head fall back onto the pillow and the helicopter roars into view, Nico hollering from the hatchway, and then I’m in it, on it, feverish and confused, the wind rushing in and around us, Nico’s choppy hair fluttering like a field of black grass. The pilot is nervous and unsure—and young, so terribly young, a girl in her late teens or early twenties, wearing aviator glasses and jerking the levers uncertainly.
Nico and I fought for the whole trip: forty-five minutes of arguing, voices raised, screaming to be heard over the clatter of the copter blades and the deafening wind, telling each other not to be stupid. I told her she had to get out with me in Concord and stay with me at the farmhouse on Little Pond Road until the end, like we’d discussed. Nico refused, urged me instead to stay with her, went on and on about the asteroid, the bombs, hydrodynamic simulations and necessary changes in velocity. And through all of this we’re jerking back and forth in the skies over New Hampshire and my fever is climbing and then suddenly were descending haphazardly toward the landing pad atop Concord Hospital.
And as I was clambering out Nico said—what did she say? Something insane. As I stepped uncertainly onto the landing pad and turned around and pleaded with my sister through my haze of fever and pain to remain under my protection until the end—she told me not to worry.
“I’ll be fine,” she hollered, her hands cupped together. “Just e-mail me.”
I wake myself up laughing in the hospital bed. Just e-mail me. The words, the concept, like something from an unfamiliar language: Urdu or Farsi or the Latin of the Romans.
I ease my head back onto the pillow and breathe and try to steady myself a little. I can’t believe I let her go.
The insistent noise and fuss we have learned to expect from hospital rooms is absent now. No one charges down the hallway outside, no nurses in scrubs slip in and out of the door to check my fluid levels or bring dinner or adjust the bed. Every once in a while I hear a scream, or the squeaking wheel of a rolling cart, from some other room or from around some corner.
Eventually I get my legs off the bed and my feet on the floor, and I make my way over to where my clothes are heaped in a pile.
My arm is in a sling, wrapped elaborately in bandages and cinched tightly against my side. I find my watch. I find my shoes. I survey my clothing. The pants are wearable, but my blood-soaked shirt and jacket must be left behind, and I will stay in the hospital gown until I can stop at home and change.
After Martha’s house. First I’m going to stop at Albin Street and ask Martha a few questions.
Dr. Fenton is at the nurses’ station in the hallway, writing rapidly on the top clipboard on her pile. She looks up at me, shambling along the hall toward her, and looks down again.
“So—” I say.
“I get it,” she says. “You’re going.”
From an examination room behind Dr. Fenton there’s a steady anguished groaning. From another, someone is saying, “Just take it easy—just take it easy—just take it easy.”
“You should stay for twenty-four hours at least,” says Fenton. “You need to be observed. You need a course of antibiotics.”
“Oh,” I say, and look back over my shoulder at the desolate room. “Well, can I get that now?”
“I said you need a course of antibiotics,” she says, grabbing her clipboard and striding off. “We don’t have any.”
Houdini is waiting just outside the main lobby door of Concord Hospital, like a mafia bodyguard stationed at the sickbed of the capo. As soon as I emerge blinking into the parking lot in my pale blue gown he nods at me, I swear to God he does, and off we go.
My watch says it’s 11:15, and I know that means 11:15 a.m. because the sun is high and bright as Houdini and I make our way north across Concord. But I don’t know what day it is—I literally have no idea. I was dead in the dirt at Fort Riley for who knows how long, and then I was on a helicopter and then I was in a bed on the fourth floor of Concord Hospital floating in and out of ether for years and years.
I walk as fast as I can manage across the city toward Martha’s house, my dead arm tight in its harness, sweat dripping down my back and plastering my hospital gown against my spine. Looking around, examining the city after being gone, it’s like one of those puzzle pages in a children’s magazine: Look at these two pictures and spot what’s changed. Down Pleasant Street and then up along Rumford. Walls with new graffiti; cars that had one wheel gone and the hood popped open are now down to the rims all the way around, or the glass of the windshield’s been pried out with a crowbar. Or they’re actually burning, thick black smoke pouring out of the engine. More houses that have been left behind, front doors yawning wide. Telephone poles made into stumps.
Last week Pirelli’s Deli on Wilde Street was bustling, a cheerful violence-free dry goods rummage, with a couple of guys giving haircuts, of all things, in the back. Now the chain grate is pulled down over the doors and windows, and Pirelli stands on the sidewalk scowling, a strip of ammunition across his chest like a bandito.
Houdini is growling as we walk, bounding out ahead of me, his eyes fierce yellow slits. The sun beats on the sidewalks.
“Martha?” I bang on the door with my left hand, pause for a moment, then bang again. “Martha, are you in there?”
The Cavatones’ lawn had been the only one mowed, but now it’s starting to catch up with the others, wildness creeping in, the trim green fuzz growing out like uncut hair. My arm pulses suddenly, painfully, and I wince.
I knock again, waiting to hear those locks being thrown open, one by one. Nothing. I shout. “Hey, Martha?”
Across the street a window blind snaps open, a wary face peers out. “Excuse me?” I call. “Hey—” The blinds shoot closed again. A dog barks somewhere, down the street, and Houdini twitches his small head around in search of the challenger.
My fist is raised to knock again when the door jerks open and a strong hand grabs my wrist, and somebody in one quick motion drags me inside and kicks the door closed behind me. I’m pushed against a wall, my right arm sending out spasms of pain, and there’s hot breath in my face. A tumble of hair, a crooked chin.
“Cortez,” I say. “Hello.”
“Oh, shit,” he says, the good-humored voice, the laughing eyes. “I know you.”
Cortez lets go of my wrist, steps back, embraces me like I’m an old friend he’s picking up at the airport. “Policeman!”
His staple gun is dangling from his right hand, but he leaves it angled down, pointed at the ground. Houdini is out on the porch, barking like a madman, so I step over and open the door, let him in.
“Where did you come from?” Cortez asks. “Why are you dressed for the mental asylum?”
“Where’s Martha?”
“Oh, hell,” he says, and flings himself into the Cavatones’ fat leather Barcalounger. “I thought you were going to tell me.”
“She’s not here?”
“I don’t lie, Policeman.”
Cortez watches with amusement while I search the small house, working my way through the closets of the living room, opening all the ones in the bedroom and peering under the bed, looking for Martha or evidence of Martha. Nothing. She’s gone, and her clothes are gone: her dressers empty, wooden hangers dangling on her side of the closet. Brett’s sidearm is also gone, the SIG Sauer he left behind for his wife’s protection when he went off to play crusader in the woods. In the kitchen, sunbeams still play across the warm wood table, and the brass kettle sits happily in its place on the stove. But there’s no sign of Martha, and my case has come full circle: It’s a missing person, just a different person than before.
I return to the living room and point an angry finger at Cortez.
“I thought you were supposed to be watching her?”
“I was,” he says, the staple gun lying across his lap like a kitten. “I am.”
“So?”
“So, I failed,” he says, and looks up at the ceiling with theatrical misery, as if to ask what kind of God could allow this to happen. “I absolutely failed.”
“Okay,” I say, “okay,” patting my pockets for a notebook, but of course I have no notebook—I have no pockets—and my right hand is my writing hand. “Just tell me the story.”
Cortez needs no prompting. He stands, gestures animatedly while he talks.
“On Saturday I came by three times. Three times I came.” He holds up forefinger, middle finger, pointer, and his rhythm is like a Bible story: Three times I called your name and three times you refused me. Three times Cortez the thief came from Garvins Falls Road on a bike-and-wagon, laden with supplies for Martha, three times he did a “comprehensive walkaround” to ensure the safety of the small home, checking the doors and windows, checking the perimeters. Morning, midday, sunset. Three times he made sure all was well; three times he paraded himself around with large and visible firearms, so any thugs or rapists would be aware of the presence of an armed defender. Sunday, Cortez says, same thing: morning visit, noon visit, nighttime.
“And I told her, anything else you need, I provide it.” Cortez looks around the living room. “You want a muscular gentleman with a baseball bat sitting on this sofa all night long, you can have that. You want someone on the porch with a rocket launcher, we can make that happen.”
I raise an eyebrow—they do not sell rocket launchers at Office Depot—and Cortez grins, happy to explain, but I wave my hand for him to go on. I’m not in the mood.
“The woman is not interested in protection inside the house, but otherwise she is happy,” Cortez says. “Happy to have us around. As her husband had arranged.”
“Okay. And?”
“Okay, so same yesterday. But then today, I am here in the morning, just the same, and the woman is standing out on the porch, shaking her head and waving her hands.”
“She’s on the porch?”
“Yes, Policeman. With a suitcase.”
“A suitcase?”
“Yes. Suitcase. And she says, no thank you. Like I’m selling Girl Scout cookies. Like I’m a goddamn Jehovah’s Witness.” He puts on a mocking, feminine voice, says it again: “No thank you.”
Martha, oh Martha, what secrets had you hidden in your heart?
“It was like she was waiting for someone,” Cortez says, rubbing his chin. “Someone other than me.”
“Wait—” I say. I’m trying to capture all these details, arrange them in my head. “Wait one second.”
“What is it?” Cortez looks at me curiously. “You need me to repeat something?”
“Nothing,” I say, “No. Just—what day is it?”
“It’s Tuesday.” He grins. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just didn’t know what day it is. Please continue the story.”
What happened next is Cortez told her it wasn’t up to her, with all due respect he had been contracted to take care of her, and this wasn’t her arrangement to undo. If she didn’t want to see him, she could stay inside the house and he or his friend would drop off supplies and protect her from the outside. She insisted, no thank you, told him to leave her be, and then someone hit him on the side of the head.
“Someone hit you or her?”
“Me. I said me.”
“With what?”
“I do not know. Something hard and flat.” Cortez ducks his head, embarrassed. “I was hit very hard. I was knocked unconscious.” He steps back, raises his hands, looks at me wide eyed, like, Sounds impossible, I know, but that’s what happened. “I was out cold for I don’t know how long, not long I think, and when I woke up, she was gone. I went inside and ran up and down, three times I searched for her. But the house was as you see it. She is gone.”
“Holy moly,” I say.
“Yes,” says Cortez drily, and now it’s my voice he puts on, flat and solemn. “Holy moly.”
“So what are you doing here now, Mr. Cortez?”
“Waiting for her. A friend I have, Mr. Wells, is out looking while I wait—often the missing simply return. Ellen, meanwhile, minds the home front. Listen, I don’t care if that girl wants to be found or not. We’re going to find her. That cop comes back and finds her gone, I’m finished.”
“That contract, I think, has been abrogated.”
“Why? Oh—dead?” Cortez does not look saddened by this news. “Who killed him?”
“I’m working on it.”
He pauses, tilts his head. “Why?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll know when I find the killer.”
“I don’t mean why was he killed. I mean, why are you working on it?”
I take one more turn around the small house, Houdini close at my heels. I check the locks on the window, look for fingerprints, footprints, anything. Did someone do this to her, or did she do it herself, slip out from under the protection that Brett had arranged? Was she kidnapped? The suitcase says she was waiting for someone, presumably the mysterious Mr. N. But the mysterious Mr. N. is dead, right?
For a long time I stare into Martha Milano’s empty closet, and then I go back downstairs, find Cortez lounging in the recliner, his cigarette raised like a scepter.
“I tell you, this whole thing, it’s a bad sign,” he says. “Me losing track of someone I’m supposed to look after? That is a bad fucking sign.”
“For what?”
“Oh, shit, you know. For all of mankind. The whole human race.”
Back on Albin Street I look up at the sun. The city is hotter than it was last week, and you can smell it on the air—the reek of untreated sewage water drifting up off the river, of garbage that’s been dumped in the streets and out of windows. Sweat and body odor and fear. I should go home and change clothes, see if any damage has been done while I was away. Make sure that nothing has been taken from my store of food and supplies, all that we left behind.
“We really should, buddy,” I say to Houdini. “We should go home.”
But we don’t. We go back the way we came, down Albin, down Rumford, up Pleasant Street.
What few people there are on the streets are moving quickly, no eye contact. As we get closer to Langley Boulevard a man rushes past in a windbreaker, head down, carrying two whole hams, one under each arm. Then a woman, running, pushing a stroller with a giant Deer Park bottle strapped into it instead of a child.
I realize suddenly I have not seen a police car or a police officer or evidence of police presence of any kind since I returned to Concord, and for some reason the observation floods my stomach with a churning dread.
My legs are getting tired; my busted arm joggles against my side, tight and uncomfortable and useless, like I’m lugging a ten-pound weight around, to prove a point or win a contest.
I find Dr. Fenton right where I left her, working her way down her towering pile of charts, leaning against the counter of the nurses’ station, her eyes blinking and red behind the round glasses.
“Hey,” I start, but then another doctor, short and bald and bleary eyed, stops and scowls. “Is that a fucking dog? You can’t have a fucking dog in here.”
“Sorry,” I say, but Fenton says, “Shut up, Gordon. That dog’s more hygienic than you are.”
“Clever,” he says, “you fucking hack.” He disappears into an adjacent exam room and slams the door. Fenton turns to me. “What happened, Detective Palace? You get shot again?”
We take the unlit stairwell down to the crowded first-floor cafeteria: dirty linoleum tables and a handful of stools, a big plastic bin filled with mismatched cutlery, boxes of supermarket teabags and a row of kettles lined up on camp stoves. Dr. Fenton and I take our tea out to the lobby and sit in the overstuffed chairs.
“When did you stop working in the morgue?”
“Two weeks ago,” she says. “Three, maybe. The last month or so, though, we weren’t doing autopsies. No call for it. Just intake, preparing bodies for burial.”
“But you were still down there when Independence Day happened?”
“I was.”
The front door of the hospital crashes open and a middle-aged man stumbles in carrying a woman in his arms like a newlywed, her bleeding profusely from the wrists, him just yelling, “God you idiot, you idiot, you’re such an idiot!” He kicks open the door of the stairwell and lugs his wife inside, and the door slams closed behind them. Fenton lifts her glasses to rub her eyes, looks at me expectantly.
“I’m trying to I.D. a corpse that came in that night.”
“On the Fourth?” says Fenton. “Forget it.”
“Why?”
“Why? We had three dozen corpses at least. As many as forty, I think. They were stacked like firewood down there.”
“Oh.”
Stacked like firewood. My neighbor, sweet Mr. Maron of the solar still, he died that night.
“We weren’t able to process them properly, is the other thing. No photographs, no intake records. Just bagging and tagging, really.”
“The thing is, Dr. Fenton, this particular corpse would have been rather distinctive.”
“You, my friend,” she says, tasting her tea with a moue of displeasure, “are rather distinctive.”
“A man, thirties probably. Gold-capped teeth. Humorous tattoos.”
“How so, humorous?”
“I don’t know. Zany, somehow.” Dr. Fenton is looking at me bemusedly, and I don’t know what I had imagined: a tattoo of a rubber chicken? Marvin the Martian?
“Where on the body?” Fenton asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know the means of death?”
“Weren’t they all—gunshots?”
“No, Hank.” The words are dry with sarcasm, but then she stops, shakes her head, continues quietly. “No. They weren’t.”
Dr. Fenton takes off the glasses, looks at her hands, and in case I am correct in my impression that she is silently weeping I avert my gaze, try to find something interesting to look at in the dimness of the hospital lobby.
“And so,” she says abruptly, shifting back into her characteristic tone, “the answer is no.”
“No, there wasn’t anybody matching that description or, no, you don’t recall?”
“The former. I am relatively certain we did not see a body matching that description.”
“How certain is relatively certain?”
Dr. Fenton thinks this over. I wonder how it’s going upstairs for the desperate man and his wife, bleeding from her wrists, how they’re faring under the charge of Dr. Gordon.
“Eighty percent,” says Dr. Fenton.
“Is it possible a victim might have been taken to New Hampshire Hospital?”
“No.” she says. “It’s closed. Unless someone took a body there and didn’t know they were closed and dumped it in the horseshoe driveway. I understand—” She pauses, clears her throat. “I understand some bodies have been deposited in such a way.”
“Right,” I say absently.
She stands up. Time to get back to work. “How’s the arm?”
“So-so.” I squeeze my right biceps gingerly with my left hand. “I don’t feel much yet.”
“That’s appropriate,” she says.
We’re walking back to the stairway. I set my half-empty teacup down carefully on the floor next to a full garbage can.
“As circulation improves over the next couple weeks, you’ll start to get a persistent tingling, and then you’ll need physical therapy to work toward regular functioning. Then, around early October, a massive object will strike Earth and you will die.”
“So I go over there on Friday night, maybe two hours after you take off, and the playground is a no-man’s-land. The swings are cut down, just chains dangling, you know? The fence is kicked over, and the—what do you call it?—the jungle gym, it’s over on its side. I’m thinking maybe I’ve got the wrong place.”
“You’re at Quincy Elementary?”
“Yeah,” says Detective Culverson. “Quincy. The play field behind the school.”
“That’s right.”
The diner; the booth; my old friend with an unlit cigar, stirring honey into his tea, telling me a story. A fat double-bread-loaf indentation in the vinyl where McGully used to sit.
“So there I am like a dummy, holding this samurai sword. And don’t even ask how I got it, by the way. I’m standing there and I’m thinking, Okay, so, Hank’s little buddies have moved along, they’ve found some other squat. But then I see that there’s a flier: If you are the parent of… You know? One of those. It looks like they got scooped up.”
I exhale. This is good news. This is the best possible outcome for Alyssa and Micah Rose. A mercy bus came and took them somewhere indoors, with food and organized play and prayer circles three times a day. Ruth-Ann is sitting at a stool by the counter. She’s got her hot-water carafe, her pens arranged behind her ear, her little order notebook jutting out of the front pocket of her apron. Culverson is in his undershirt, off-white and yellowed and stained at the pits, because he’s lent me his dress shirt, which puffs out at my stomach and gaps at the collar.
“Was it the Catholics?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “Christian Science.”
“Sure,” I say. I’ve started in drumming the fingers of my working hand on the tabletop. Now that I know that my kids are okay, that they didn’t suffer from my absence these last few days, I’m ready to move on, lay out my case. I hustled down here to make sure I caught Culverson within the loose bounds of the lunch hour, so I could run down my missing-person-turned-murder, see what he thinks.
“So I went to the address on the flier. Warren and Green. I didn’t have descriptions so I asked for the names.”
“How are they doing?” I ask. “Are they happy?”
“That’s the thing,” says Culverson. “They’re not down there.”
“What?” My fingers freeze. “They’re not?”
“Nope. A lot of other kids are, though. I found one named Blackwell.”
“Stone,” I say. “Andy Blackstone.”
“Yup. Funny kid. But Andy says that your guys…” Culverson flips through his notes; he’s got a steno pad like we used to use for case notes; I bet he helped himself to a box from the CPD supply closet before we were cleared out of the building. “He says they were there but then they left before the head count.”
“Oh.”
“And that’s as far as I could get.”
“Oh,” I say again, and stare down at the grimy linoleum. I can’t believe I let them go. They were my responsibility, those kids, a self-imposed responsibility but a responsibility nevertheless, and I treated them casually, like objects—a file that could be turned over to a colleague. I chose instead to follow the case of Martha Milano’s missing husband, and every choice forecloses on other choices; each step forward leaves a thousand dead possible universes behind you.
I think of the small broken boats I saw from the window of the blockhouse: the drowning, the dead.
“Detective Palace?” Culverson says. “Your turn. Tell me about your case.”
I nod. I look up, take a breath. This is why we’re here. I’ve come this far. I talk fast, giving him the highlight reel: Julia Stone at UNH, Brett Cavatone at Fort Riley. The gunshot, the orange leaf from the ghillie suit, the diary page. Detective Culverson stops me after the mysterious Mr. N.
“Wait,” he says. “Slow down.” He clears his throat, looks thoughtful. “So, you got a girl who comes to you for help. Husband is Bucket List, she wants him back.”
“Yeah.”
“You find the husband, and right away he’s shot.”
“Yeah. By someone who knows how to shoot.”
“Military?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Someone who knows how to shoot.”
“Okay.”
“And then you get back home,” says Culverson. “How do you get home?”
“In a helicopter—that’s a whole other…” I shake my head. “Don’t worry about that. Skip ahead. I get home, I go over to Martha’s house this morning and she’s gone.”
“Any idea where she is?”
“No. Yes. I have a theory.”
Culverson raises his eyebrows, twiddles with his cigar.
“Okay,” he says. “Lay it on me.”
“Martha’s cheating on Brett with someone she calls N.”
“Right.”
“N. dies on the Fourth—at least, Martha thinks he dies. She writes of his death in her diary, but then Brett finds the diary, Brett decides this means his marriage is over, he’s free to go.”
“On his mission.”
“Crusade.”
“Crusade.”
“So he leaves. Martha’s confused and upset; she asks me to go out and find Brett. But while I’m out looking for him, the lover turns out not to be dead after all. They reunite, hit Cortez with a shovel, and leave town together.”
“Riding on a dragon,” says Culverson.
“You’re teasing me.”
“I am.”
Culverson widens his grin and drains the tea. In the silence I picture Alyssa and Micah. Where could they have gone? Where’s Martha? Where’s my sister?
It’s too quiet in here, unnervingly quiet: no radio playing from the kitchen, as there used to be, the cook Maurice singing along with a deep cut from Planet Waves. No muted clang of cutlery and murmured conversation from other tables, no humming ceiling fans. It occurs to me that this institution is in its twilight, not just the Somerset but this whole setup: young Palace putting the case to sage Culverson; Culverson pushing back, finding flaws. It’s untenable. It’s like the hospital, everybody doing their best on a project that is ultimately doomed.
“What I’m wondering about is that diary page,” he says. “You’re sure that diary page was the real McCoy?”
“Yes.” I pause. I stare at him. “No. I don’t know.”
“I’m talking about the handwriting,” he says. “You’re sure it was the girl’s handwriting?”
“No,” I say. “Yes. Dammit.”
I close my eyes and I can picture it, the block letters on the cinnamon-scented page: HE’S DEAD N. IS DEAD HE’S REALLY DEAD. I try then to hold it up next to the quote, transcribed from St. Catherine and taped up by Martha’s bathroom mirror: IF YOU ARE WHAT YOU SHOULD BE… but I’m uncertain, I can’t tell, and I don’t have that pink page anymore. It’s somewhere in the blockhouse, it’s drowning in the mud of Fort Riley or fluttering out over the ocean like a bird.
“I just didn’t think of it,” I say, appalled that I could have overlooked something so obvious.
“It’s okay,” says Culverson, signaling to Ruth-Ann with two fingers for more hot water.
It’s not okay. Nothing is okay. I toy with the mostly empty condiment jars: ketchup, mustard, salt. A plastic vase sits among them, bits of stem floating in a quarter inch of water at the bottom. It’s hot and dark in here, a couple stray beams of weak sunlight filtering through the dusty blinds. So simple. So obvious. The handwriting.
“I suppose it would be useless to note,” says Culverson, “that there is no point in investigating anything. It’s not like, you find this killer, and he’s locked up and you get a promotion. The office of the attorney general is shuttered. There are literally raccoons living in there.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I know all that.”
“And if your babysitter has really been kidnapped, what are you going to do? Rescue her with that cute little gun that McConnell gave you?”
“No.” I scratch my head. “Actually, I lost it.”
Culverson looks at me for a second, and then he bursts out laughing, and I do, too, and we both sit there cracking up for a second, Houdini staring at me with questioning eyes from where he’s stationed himself under the table. Ruth-Ann comes over to pour our hot water—that’s about all she’s got left, hot water, and there’s something funny about that, too, there really is. And I’m really dying now, pounding the table, making the condiment containers dance and slide around the surface.
“You guys are a couple of lunatics, you know that, right?” says Ruth-Ann.
We both look down, and then up at her. Culverson’s shirt billows around my slender frame like a nightdress. Tufts of graying chest hair poke out over the V-neck of his undershirt. We laugh all over again, about our own ridiculousness, and then Culverson remembers he wanted to tell me about poor Sergeant Thunder, the weatherman, who has been waiting outside on his porch since six this morning, apparently, waiting for the convoy that’s supposedly coming to escort him to the World of Tomorrow.
“I just know the dumb S.O.B.’s going to come over tonight,” says Culverson, “wanting to borrow a cup of everything.”
We collapse in fresh giggles, and Ruth-Ann shakes her head, over at her counter, turns back to the same issue of the Monitor everyone has been reading for a month.
“All right,” I say to Culverson at last, pushing the last small teardrops from the corner of my eyes with the back of my working hand. “I’m going.”
“Home?”
“Not yet. I’ve got a quick idea I want to follow up on, on the Martha thing.”
“Of course you do.”
I smile. “I’ll let you know what happens.”
Houdini gets up as I get up, looks sharply into the corners of the room, stands stiff and straight with head cocked to one side.
“Oh, wait,” says Culverson. “Hold on. Sit. Don’t you wanna see it?”
“See what?”
“The samurai sword, man.”
I sit. The dog sits.
“You said not to ask you about it.”
“Well, yeah, you know. People say all kinds of stuff.” He takes it out from under the table, slowly, one curved inch at a time: a real weapon, glinting in the pale light.
“Holy moly.”
“I know.”
“I said a toy sword.”
“I couldn’t find a toy one.” He tugs the sweaty undershirt forward off his chest. “Listen, Stretch. You go solve your case. I’ll find the kids.”
I try and fail to hide the pleasure that this announcement brings me. I bite my lip, employ the dry and sarcastic voice I have learned, over many years, from Detective Culverson. “I thought you said there was no point in investigating anything.”
“Yeah,” he says, and stands, lifting the sword. “I know what I said.”
“No way,” says Nico’s awful friend Jordan, staring at me in the doorway of the vintage clothing store. “You’re kidding me.”
He’s wearing jean shorts, the Ray-Bans, no shirt, no shoes. His hair is a slovenly mess. A blonde is passed out in a sleeping bag on the shop floor behind him, fast asleep, cheek pressed against the one slim bare arm thrown out from the bag.
“Jordan,” I say, peering behind him into the store, the cluttered bins, big black garbage bags overflowing with wool socks and winter hats. “What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing here?” he says, pressing a hand into his bare chest. “Ésta es mi casa, señor. What are you doing here?” He looks at me in Culverson’s oversized shirt. “Are you here for some clothes?”
“Nico said you were all going to the Midwest.” I can’t bring myself to say “to recon with the team.” It’s too ridiculous. “For the next phase of your plan.”
We’re still standing on the threshold of the store, desolate Wilson Avenue behind me. “These sorts of plans are changing all the time.” Jordan lifts one foot to scratch the opposite calf. “I’ve been reassigned. This is team holding-down-the-fort.”
The blonde girl makes a sleepy mew and stretches, rolls over. Jordan sees me watching her and grins wolfishly.
“Do you need something?”
“Yes,” I say. “I do.”
I step past him, into the shop, and Jordan makes a light tsk-tsk.
“Hey, that’s trespassing, dude. Don’t make me call the police.”
I know this tone of voice, it’s one of Nico’s favorites, glib and self-satisfied; it was her tone at UNH when she told me what was in the duffel bag: guns, maple syrup, human skulls.
Jordan stoops to tug a ratty yellow T-shirt from one of the disheveled piles on the ground and pull it on over his head. The room smells like mildew or mold. I look around at the clustered mannequins, some dressed and some undressed, some raising hands in greeting, some staring into the room’s dusty corners. Two of them have been arranged to shake hands, like one is welcoming the other to a board meeting.
“Jordan,” I say, “Is it possible…”
“Yes?”
He stretches out the word, simpering, like an obsequious butler. The shirt Jordan has selected has Super Mario on it, mustachioed and hydrocephalic and mock heroic. If I am remembering this incorrectly, or imagining it, what Nico told me on the helicopter, I am going to sound like a moron—I am aware of that. On the other hand, this man, of all the people in the world, already finds me ridiculous: my aesthetic, my attitude, my existence.
“Is it possible that you have an Internet connection in here?”
“Oh, sure,” he says, unhesitating, grinning, proud. “Why? You want to check your e-mail?”
“No,” I say. In my chest there is a starburst of excitement, possibilities sparkling to life like fireworks. “I need to do a search.”
We tiptoe past Sleeping Beauty to a door marked MANAGER’S OFFICE, where Jordan asks me to stare at the floor while he runs the numbers on a combination lock and lets us in. And there it is, in the tiny claustrophobic office space, jammed between a three-drawer filing cabinet and a small unplugged break-room refrigerator with a missing door: a desk of particleboard and glass, with a big ugly Dell computer, the tall processor tower listing alarmingly. Jordan sees my skeptical expression and brays laughter as he plops into the spinning office chair behind the desk.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” he says, leaning forward to depress the power button. “Do you think the head of the National Security Administration is offline right now? What about His Honor the President?”
“I can’t say I’ve really thought about it,” I say.
“Maybe you should,” he says, swiveling in the chair to wink at me. “You heard of sipper?”
“No.”
“No?” He spells it, S-I-P-R. “Never heard of that?”
“No.”
“What about nipper?”
“No.”
He cranes his head around, chuckles. “God. Wow. You’ve heard of Google, right? It starts with a G.”
I ignore him. I squint hopefully at the screen, feeling like I’m in the middle of some kind of elaborate practical joke. Indeed, in that long uncertain moment, waiting to see if the monitor’s black screen will come to life, I suddenly feel like maybe the whole thing is a practical joke, that this whole final year of human history is just a prank that’s been played on me, on gullible ol’ Hank Palace, and that all the world is going to jump out of the closet here in the manager’s office at Next Time Around and say “Surprise!” and all the lights will come on and all the world go back to how it was.
“Ah, come on, Scott,” says Jordan idly, interrupting my reverie. He’s staring at the still-blank screen, playing drums on his thighs.
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s this jackoff in Toledo who’s never up and running when he says he’s going to be.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s because of your limited policeman’s mind.” Again, I don’t take the bait; again, I remain impassive, waiting to get what I need. “The Internet isn’t one big thing hovering in the sky. It’s a bunch of networks, and people can’t get to the networks anymore because the devices that got them there are powered by lots and lots of electricity. So we built new networks. I got this shitty computer and three landlines and a 12.8 modem and a gas tank’s worth of juice, and I can connect to some dudes I know in Pittsburgh with the same setup, who can connect to Toledo, and so on into the beautiful forever. It’s like a super-old-school mesh network. Do you know what a mesh network is? Wait, lemme guess.”
He blows a bubble, pops it with one dirty fingernail. It’s maddening; he’s like an obnoxious seven-year-old that someone has installed at the helm of a vast international conspiracy.
“Of course, all the sites are mirrors, so a lot of stuff is missing or corrupted or what have you. But still impressive, right?”
“I would be a lot more impressed,” I say, “if we weren’t still staring at a blank screen.”
But even as I say it, the screen glows to life with the shimmering variegated panes of the Windows 98 logo, flickering ghostly like a hieroglyph on a cave wall.
“Oo,” says Jordan, leaning forward. “That kind of made you look like an asshole, the way that played out.”
I listen to the familiar hiss then click then beep of a dial-up modem making its connection. There’s a prickling sensation from deep somewhere in the nerves of my injured arm. I reach over with my left hand and squeeze the right biceps in its sling, massaging it with two fingers. Jordan clicks on the Start menu and calls up a blank screen, cursor blinking. He cracks his knuckles ostentatiously, like a maestro, while my mind buzzes and flits. I’m suddenly deep back into my casework, trying to decide what information I need most, what’s worth trying for. Jordan, however, makes no move to cede me the chair.
“You tell me what you’re looking for, and I find it for you.”
“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”
“Okay, so we move to option B, which is you fucking yourself.” He grins at me. “The way this thing works, you can’t just type in what you want. I gotta run code for every search.”
“Fine,” I say. “Fine.”
“And just so you know, in general the more trivial the information that you’re looking for, the less likely you’ll find it on our server. But of course, we all have different definitions of trivial, don’t we?”
Behind us we hear a rustling and Jordan yells, “Abigail? You’re awake?”
“Yes,” the girl calls back. “And not happy about it.”
“Can we get started?” I say, and Jordan tells me to fire away and I fire away. “I need to search something called the NCIC.”
“National Crime Information Center,” says Jordan, already typing.
“How did you know that?”
“I know everything. I thought you had that figured out?” he says, fingers still dancing across the keys. “Hey, you don’t need to access the Pentagon by any chance, do you?”
“No.”
“Oh well.”
I give him the details: Rocky Milano. White male, age approximately fifty-five to sixty. No known aliases.
He types. We wait. It works slowly, streams of text flutter past, the monitor flickers from gray screen to gray screen. All of the familiar soothing icons of human–machine interaction are absent: the hourglass, the whirling circles of light. Finally Jordan squints at the screen, shrugs his shoulders, and turns around.
“Nope.”
“Nope, what? It’s not working?”
“It’s working. I’m in there. But there’s no listing.”
“Is it possible you don’t have the whole thing?”
“The whole database?
“Yes. That this is an incomplete—what did you call it?”
“Mirror,” he says. “An incomplete mirror of the original archives.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Is it possible?”
“Oh, sure,” he says. “Very possible. Probable, in fact.”
I grimace. Of course. Nothing for good. Nothing for certain. I direct Jordan to get out of the FBI database and execute a simple Web search for Rocky’s name, setting us up for a fruitless fifteen minutes of scrolling through hundreds of hits—on the real Rocky and on dozens of other Rocky Milanos.
“Dude,” says Jordan at last. “What exactly are you looking for?”
I don’t answer. What am I looking for? The same rap sheet I was looking for when I was ten years old and “everybody knew” that Martha’s dad was a crook—that he had knocked over a liquor store, killed a guy with his bare hands. I’m looking for anything that would confirm my indistinct and ill-formed hypothesis that Rocky Milano had the wickedness of character and/or talent at long-distance riflery to gun down his son-in-law in cold blood to prevent him from reporting Rocky on IPSS violations and leave him counting down the earth from a jail cell.
“Okey-doke, darling,” says Jordan, spinning in the chair. “Time’s up.”
“Give me five seconds, okay?”
He rolls his eyes, counts: “One…”
I pace behind Jordan in the small room, trying to gather my thoughts and move on, push past the disappointment and irritation of this—of the whole thing. There’s no way to know anything anymore, is what it feels like. It’s started early, the era of terrible ambiguity scheduled to begin when Maia smashes into the Gulf of Boni and causes something terrible to happen but nobody knows exactly what. This age of uncertain terrors is metastasizing, growing backward, destroying not just the future but the present, poisoning everything: relationships, investigations, society, making it impossible for anyone to know anything or do anything at all.
“Hello? Nico’s brother?” Jordan is saying. “I got shit to do. Important shit.”
“Hang on. Wait.”
“Can’t.”
“Nils Ryan,” I say. “A state trooper.”
“Spells Nils.”
“No. Wait—Canliss. Can you look up the last name Canliss?”
Jordan sighs elaborately and then slowly turns back to the keyboard, letting me know one last time who is in charge of this operation. I spell the name for him and lean over his shoulder while he rattles the keys. First he checks the NCIC and there are no matches, which I did not think there would be, and then he executes a simple search. I lean farther forward, bent practically horizontal across his desk and watching the words flash to life, the lines of text roll up onto the screen, green on black.
“There,” says Jordan, launching backward from the desk on his rolling office chair, banging against my legs. “Does that help?”
I don’t answer. I’m off in the distance somewhere, I’m racing through the wilderness, I’m standing in a storm with my hands raised, reaching out for bits and flakes of ideas like falling snow. First I thought that Brett had been untrue to Martha, and then I thought that it was Martha who been untrue, but I had it wrong the whole time. All the wickedness lay somewhere else.
I know the name Canliss from Canliss & Sons, a vendor that had contracts with the Concord Police Department. When I was fresh on the force, three months in, Sergeant Belroy had the flu and I got stuck for three shifts doing accounts-receivable paperwork, and I remember the name. Canliss & Sons was a local concern, a New England outfit that sold the CPD specialized gear: night-vision goggles, Tasers, bipods. Ghillie suits.
Canliss & Sons of New England. I knew it. I knew that name.
“Hello? Nico’s brother?” says Jordan, waving his hands over his head like semaphore. “Are we done?”
“We are, yes,” I say. “We are done, and I’m going.”
“Wow,” he says, leaning forward to click off the monitor. “It’s like you’re allergic to it.”
“To what?”
“To saying thank you.”
“Thank you, Jordan,” I say, and I mean it, I do. “Thank you very much.”
He only turned off the monitor, I notice in passing, not the hard drive, meaning that my search is still sitting there, and my search history, a fact that does not make me wild with excitement. But I don’t have any more time to mess around. I have to go—I have to go right now.
So of course Jordan leaps up out of his office chair and stands in the doorway. He leans against the lintel; this is his default position, loafing light-heartedly in a doorway, malevolence and aggression teasing out from behind his child’s smile. As for me, I now have a clear and distinct mental image of Martha Cavatone, and she might be in Jeremy Canliss’s basement or she might be in the trunk of a car or under a patch of floorboard, and I must get to her and I must get to her now.
“Jordan, I have to go.”
“Yes, I know that,” he says, thumbs looped in the belt loops of his jeans, just hanging out. “You said. But I just wanted to ask. Do you believe us now?”
“Do I believe what?”
“Well, it’s just that Nico, you know, your sister, she was really hurt that you didn’t believe her. About everything. Our group, our plans, our future.”
He’s speaking in a leisurely adagio, doing it on purpose, absorbing my sudden desperate impatience and feeding it back to me as a taunting molasses rhythm. “You probably don’t realize how much you mean to her.”
I calculate my odds of just busting past the man and running out of here. He is small but compact, energetic, and though I am much taller I am also exhausted, I have been on my feet all day after a night in the hospital, and I have one arm that is useless to me.
“To be honest with you, I had forgotten all about it.”
“Oh, well,” he says, and shrugs. “I’m reminding you.”
I switch modes, drop into rapid-fire cop talk, keeping my voice even and open and honest. “Jordan, listen to me. There is a woman whom I believe to have been abducted and I need to help her right now.”
“Seriously?” he says, eyes bulging. “Are you serious? Gee, you better go! Are you going to stop at a phone booth on the way, Nico’s brother? Put on your cape?”
“Jordan,” I say. I think maybe I could take him, actually. I don’t care how many arms I have. “Move.”
“Take it easy, dude.” He blows a bubble, pops it with one finger. “All I asked is whether you believe us yet.”
“Do I believe that because you have a helicopter and Internet access, that means you have the capability to alter the path of an asteroid? No. I don’t.”
“Well, see, that’s your problem. Limited imagination.”
I barrel forward and roll my shoulder into him, but he just steps out of the way, sending me stumbling wildly out of the manager’s office. I straighten up and walk quickly toward the front of the shop, Jordan laughing behind me, and I’ve got the front door open and Houdini is waiting for me as instructed on the curb.
“It’s Nico’s problem, too, you know,” he says, and I stop with my hand on the door and turn back around. Such an innocuous comment, nothing to it at all, but something in the way he said it—or is it just that there’s something in the way he says everything?—I turn.
“What do you mean, it’s Nico’s problem, too? What is?”
“Nothing,” he says, and smiles wickedly, delighted, a fisherman hauling in a live one.
Jordan’s friend Abigail comes out of the bathroom, dressed in a flowery skirt and a tank top, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Jordan, did you know the water’s out?” she says.
“I did, actually,” he says. “I did. And I think we should probably stay in tonight.”
He’s talking to her but his gaze is locked on mine, and all the funny ha-ha clown nonsense is drained from his eyes and suddenly he’s all low-down nasty menace. “All I was pointing out, Mr. Palace, is that your sister suffers from a similarly limited imagination. Haven’t you ever felt that?”
I’m across the room in two long strides staring intently in his eyes and holding on to his arm with my one good hand. Abigail says “hey” but Jordan doesn’t flinch.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” he says, and the clown’s grin is back. “I’m just talking.”
I tighten my grip on his arm. When I first heard about this elusive organization of Nico’s was when she explained to me that her husband, Derek—who had thought he was on the inside, thought he understood it all—had been unknowingly sacrificed to a greater goal that he had no idea about.
“Where’s that helicopter going, Jordan?”
There is, then, a massive explosion. It sounds close—loud—like the stumbling tread of a dinosaur.
“Uh-oh,” says Jordan. “Looks like one of the rez associations is breaking out the big guns.”
“South Pill Hill,” Abigail says.
“You think?”
She nods and looks at him like, duh, of course.
“This is going to be some night,” says Jordan. “Like the Fourth.”
“Worse,” she says, gives him the look again. I’m standing here looking back and forth between the two of them. “Way worse.”
“What?” I ask angrily, even though I know exactly what they’re talking about: it’s what McGully said, exactly what he warned, shouting in the Somerset, just wait until the water goes out. “What do you know?”
“I know everything, man, remember?”
“It’ll be a kind of war,” says Abigail simply, talking softly from the doorway. “There’s one residents association that’s been hoarding Poland Spring bottles in the gym at the YMCA. Thousands of them. Another group has got a ton in the basement of the science center. Everybody’s been hearing the rumors, everyone’s got a plan to protect their own stash and go after the other stashes.”
“Or make a go at the reservoir,” says Jordan, peeling my fingers off his arm, one by one.
Abigail nods. “Well, yeah, the reservoir goes without saying.”
“It’s going to be like capture the flag, except with guns,” says Jordan, and Abigail nods again. “Lots of guns.”
As if to underscore the point there’s a second reverberating explosion, and it’s hard to say whether it was closer or farther than the first, but it definitely sounded louder. A pause, and then the chilling multilayered sound of a lot of people screaming at once, followed by the unmistakable typewriter rattle of machine-gun fire.
I’m listening to all this, breathing heavily, my head tilted to one side. It’s the overwhelming police presence that’s been keeping the fragile peace, everybody knows that, the DOJ cruisers, a cop on every block, that’s what’s prevented the wariness and anxiety of the population from bubbling over and bursting out like underground steam. I haven’t seen a single policeman today. Not a single car.
“Hey, Henry? You better get going. It’s going to be a busy night.”
It’s the one asset I have left, the one piece of law-enforcement equipment that I still carry with me, my bone-deep knowledge of the streets of Concord. I biked them as a kid and drove them as an adult, and now I walk swiftly and unerringly, from Wilson Avenue back up toward Main Street.
My house is back to the west, past Clinton Street, but I’m headed the other way. I just have to—I just have to get this done. That’s all.
Jordan was right: It’s going to be a busy night. I can hear gunfire coming from a dozen different directions and see smoke rising from a dozen distant fires. I pass a mob of people, thirty at least, walking down the street all together in a tight quasimilitary formation, dragging a trail of shopping carts lashed together with ropes and dog leashes. A family of five hightailing it on foot down the center of the road, dad carrying two kids to his chest, mom carrying one, looking back anxiously the way they came.
Detective McGully, glowering again in my memory, red faced and jabbing his finger: You just wait until there’s no water, you just fucking wait.
Houdini is scouting ahead of me with his mottled-fur flanks and predator’s sneer, lips pulled back over yellow canines. I bend forward, hastening my stride to keep up with him as we pass the Water West building, pass the statehouse, pass the McDonald’s where once upon a time I found the corpse of a suicide named Peter Zell hanging in the bathroom.
On Phenix Street, where the movie theater still stands, the marquee still advertising the final installment of Distant Pale Glimmers from two months ago, a guy wearing a baseball cap backward is rolling by on a skateboard, clutching what looks like a five-liter drum of spring water, trying to get somewhere fast. A young woman in flat black shoes and a housewife’s apron appears out of the doorway of the theater with a shotgun and shoots him in the side, and he topples off the board and into the street.
I keep going, faster and faster. I shake it off, shake it all away—the fleeing family, the woman with the shotgun, Jordan’s leering insinuation, Nico on her helicopter, Alyssa and Micah Rose at the Quincy Street playground—everything everything everything—I keep my head down and my mind focused on the case because I’m sick of wondering why I’m doing this, why I care. This is just what I have, it’s what I do.
I take the left off Route 1 before I get to the Hood Factory, then a sharp right into the little tangle of streets behind the prison.
It’s dusk now. The sun is pinking on the horizon line, getting ready to sink.
I drifted away from my family, kind of, was what Jeremy Canliss told me—drifted away, but not before he inherited some sniper equipment from Canliss & Sons, not before he learned how to use it. Spent some time on the rifle range, not a converted bowling alley but a real range, learned to take a crack shot from three hundred yards. The murder weapon might even have been a sniper rifle from Dad’s old supply. Unless he picked it up along the way, an unexpected piece of good fortune, fate smiling on his plan. After he followed me to UNH, after he made his own way past the unevenly attentive perimeter guards—suddenly here’s Julia Stone’s miniature armory, and Jeremy helps himself to a weapon from the same stash where Brett got his.
Because it’s clear now what happened: Jeremy wanted Brett gone, and then he followed me to make sure he stayed gone.
I’m running now. I’m almost there.
Canliss told me where he lives without intending to. At the other side of my kitchen table, sweating and stammering through his story, he said how he and Brett would sit on his porch, watching the thugs go in and out of the state pen, Brett saying “there but for the grace of God.” There’s only one short street that runs directly behind the New Hampshire State Prison for Men, and that’s Delaney Street, and when I get there my watch says it’s 8:45—Tuesday, I think, some-how it is still Tuesday, and darkness has drawn down along this short crooked street.
Normally it would take me an hour to work my way down a street of nineteen homes. But nine out of the nineteen are abandoned, front doors caved in, windows smashed or papered over. At one house, number six, on the north side, the tile of the roof has peeled off like skin, revealing the bent beams of the attic. Of the remaining ten houses, two have lit torches in the windows, and I decide to start with one of those, number sixteen Delaney Street. I rush across the darkness of its weedy lawn.
The prison is directly behind the house and it’s on fire, bright walls of flame coming up out of the building’s old western wing.
I raise my left fist and bang on the door, shouting “Martha!” and the door is answered by an elderly couple, cowering, hands in the air, the woman in a nightgown and the man in slippers and pajama bottoms, pleading with me to leave them be. I exhale, step back from the door frame.
“Sorry to bother you,” I say. I take a step down the porch, then turn back before they’ve closed the door.
“I’m a policeman,” I say. “Do you have food?”
They nod.
“How much?”
“A lot,” says the woman.
“Enough,” says the man.
“Okay,” I say. Our bones are rattled by a reverberant boom from the southwest, the area of Little Pond Road and the reservoir.
“Do me a favor, folks: Don’t answer your door anymore.”
They nod, wide eyed. “You mean, tonight?”
“Just don’t answer your door anymore.”
The wind is picking up, summer breezes transforming into a panicky wind, sending leaves skittering down the street and banging garbage cans together and fanning the flames jumping up off the roof of the prison.
Houdini bounds down the porch ahead of me and we go to the other torch-lit house, number nine Delaney Street. As we cross the lawn, Houdini barks at the ground and some nocturnal creature leaps away from him, rustling a row of bushes. Even in the darkness the heat is unrelenting. My arm sweats in the sling. It’s a rickety wooden porch, cluttered with old junk. The door is unpainted and there’s a big New England Patriots beach towel strung across the front windows. This is right—it seems right—like just the sort of house where a quasi-employed twenty-year-old jack-of-all-trades would be crashing with assorted friends and acquaintances. I take the steps, two at a time, my heart beating fast for Martha.
Cortez was hit on the head this morning, he said, three hours before I got there. I got there at around 11:30. That means Martha was taken twelve hours ago. I bang on the door and call out “Jeremy—” the story alive and clear in my head.
Jeremy loved Martha. Martha loved her husband.
But canny young Jeremy had seen into the husband’s secret heart, and he knew that what Brett wanted was to leave. He knew from long talks over grocery runs and late nights at the pizza joint that Brett’s heart was straining at the leash: Here was a strange and high-minded man who wanted to use the last months to do some furious good in the world—who felt sure, in fact, that God was calling him to do so. But he was trapped by another kind of goodness, bound by his marriage vows.
And so Jeremy’s plan, the forged diary page, the deceit, like something out of Shakespeare, something from the opera: exile the man by guile, take the woman by force.
“Jeremy?” I call again, rattle the handle.
Fresh gunfire rends the air like distant thunder, and I hear indiscriminate screaming and then, by some trick of the wind, snatches from a desperate conversation—“no, come on—no…” “shut up, you shut your mouth”—from some other crisis, some other corner of the city.
No one answers the door. The wind is rifling my hair, raising hackles on my neck. Time to get in there.
“Stay,” I tell the dog. “Stand guard.” He looks up at me, his head at a tilt, his teeth bared. “Anybody comes up the steps, bark. Anybody comes out but me, attack. Okay?”
Houdini settles on his haunches at the top of the stairs, silent and purposeful. I haul back and kick, hard, with my right foot. The thin wood splinters; my body explodes in pain. The tissue shrieks in my sewn-up arm. I scream and double over and scream again, hold my head down until the pain concludes its route along the lines of my leg into the arm and back down to the ground. Houdini stands there, eyes wide with sympathy and wonder, but keeping in position as I have instructed.
“Good boy,” I mutter, breathing in and out, in and out. “Good boy.”
When I can move I go inside, into a dark and cluttered living room, one flickering torch burning down in a vase. A suitcase is propped against the back wall, half open, a few T-shirts spilling out like clustered snakes. An unplugged refrigerator lies on its side in the front room like a beached whale; someone has spray painted DOES NOT WORK across the top of it.
“Martha?” I call, and again, shouting, stepping carefully forward, no gun, hands raised before me. “Martha?
To the right is an arched doorway leading to a kitchen, to the left a long hallway. I head to the hallway and trip on something—a pair of sneakers, tongues lolling out obscenely, no laces. Once, I bet, this house was littered with pizza boxes, beer cans; once the TV was always on, someone was always on the sofa getting high, people were stumbling into and out of the bathroom getting dressed for smalltime retail gigs. It’s dark now; now all these young men are gone, wandering around the world. I imagine them, one gone home to be with mom and dad, one coupled off in an asteroid marriage, one to New Orleans, off and running.
And one still here. One a kidnapper, a murderer.
I hear him just at the moment I see him, slumped on a landing at the top of the stairs, moaning.
“Hey,” he says dimly, his voice thick. “Someone there?”
Jeremy Canliss is collapsed with his back against the bannister, hovering above me on the stair landing, the outline of a man against the darkness like a ghost caught halfway to heaven. The little ponytail is undone, and his hair is greasy and lank, framing the small scared face. His eyes are twitching and sorrowful, his cheeks red and flushed, like he’s nothing but a kid with a crush, a kid with a crush on Martha Milano.
A long-barreled rifle with a mounted scope, the gun he used to shoot Brett Cavatone, lies next to him on the floor, the barrel facing the wall, the handle jammed awkwardly under his left buttock.
“It’s Detective Palace, Jeremy.” I say it strong, barreling my voice up the stairs. It feels good, just the action of raising my voice, dipping into that powerful tough-policeman register. “Stay right where you are.”
“You’re like a monster, dude,” he says, light amusement coloring his strained voice. “From a monster movie. The man who would not fucking quit.”
“I need you to stand up, please, and put your hands in the air.”
He laughs and mutters, “Cool, man,” but stays where he is, his head rolling a little on his neck. It’s like he’s the last man at the frat party, abandoned by his brothers to sleep it off on the landing, maybe tumble down the steps.
I have no authority. I have no gun. I take a step up, toward the killer.
“Where’s Martha, Jeremy?”
“I do not know.”
“Where is she?”
“I wish I knew.”
I take another step.
“Who’s N.?”
“Nobody,” he whispers, laughs. “It stands for ‘nobody.’ Funny, right?”
I’m not laughing. I take another step, getting closer. He’s still not moving.
“Why did you do it?” he asks me, petulant, childish.
“Why did I do what, Jeremy?”
“Go and get him. I told you not to do that. I told you.” He looks at me with genuine bafflement, puzzled and sorrowful. “I just wanted my chance, you know? I just wanted a chance with her. I just needed her to be alone, so I could talk to her, so I could make her understand.”
All this I already know. After he created his forgery, tore out a page from Martha’s hot-pink cinnamon-scented diary and crafted the incriminating passage, he “discovered” it and passed it on to Brett.
Jeez, man, I don’t know how to tell you this… this was just, like, lying open… in your house… I’m sorry… I’m really sorry.
Any husband would have been skeptical, would have confronted his wife, demanded an explanation, hoped for a misunderstanding. Except for Brett: the husband who wanted to go, who wanted his marriage to be over, for the contract to be abrogated so he could go off and do God’s work in the woods.
“He didn’t even love her,” Jeremy says, shaking his head, looking up at the ceiling. “You know? He didn’t even love her. I love her.”
“Where is she?” I ask him again, and he doesn’t answer.
Another step and now I’m halfway up the flight of steps, almost within lunging distance of that damn rifle. I picture the physical motions—one last quick leap upward, push the suspect to the left with the force of my body, grab the rifle from under his body with my right hand. I don’t have a right hand.
“Where is she, Jeremy?”
“I told you. I told you I don’t know.”
“That’s not true.”
I’m trying to keep my voice even, be calm, be cool, let him know that he can trust me, but inside I am exploding with anger at this foolish child and his stupid useless violent love. A year and a half ago all of this would have been a postadolescent crush, a daydream about a buddy’s wife. But in Maia’s shadow it’s blossomed like nightshade, become a crazed obsession, a murderous plot.
He licks his lips, brings a hand up and rubs his face. I’m starting to get the very strong impression that the kid is high as a satellite, that he’s drifting somewhere out of radio’s reach.
“Martha?” I shout, loud, and get no reaction—not from Jeremy and not from some distant corner of the house, not from any closet or crawl space. “Martha, it’s Henry. I need you to yell if you can hear me.”
“Shut up,” Jeremy says sharply, suddenly, anger clouding his voice. He shifts on the steps and grabs the butt of the rifle. The scruff of a beard, the sad little-boy face. “She’s not here. I wish she was here, but she’s not.”
He says the words so quiet and soft, I wish she was here, but she’s not, and I get very cold, like my insides are an underwater cavern suddenly flooded with frozen sea.
“Is she dead now? Did you kill her, Jeremy?”
“No. I just wanted to talk to her.”
“You went to get her. This morning?”
“Yes.” He nods, mouth slack and open.
“What happened, Jeremy?”
“Nothing. She was gone.” He looks at me, helpless, confused. “There was some man there, I saw him—”
“Cortez. You attacked him. On the porch.”
“No… no, he was inside. Martha was gone. I didn’t understand. I left.”
“That’s not true, Jeremy.” I shake my head, speak gently, coaxing. “What did you do to her?”
“I told you, she wasn’t there.” He twitches and yelps, rising quickly, improbably, to his feet. “I told you. I love her.”
He stumbles toward me, the gun raised, and I take a step back on the stairs, putting up my one good hand in front of my face as if I could catch a bullet, like Superman, pluck it from the air and throw it back at him. A year and a half ago, I would have been a detective, interviewing suspects—except not even. I still would have been a patrolman, looping Loudon Road, picking up shoplifters and litterbugs.
“Jeremy—”
“No more,” he says, and I say, “No, please—” and he’s waving the thing in a wide arc as he comes down the steps, now the barrel is aimed at the wall, now at the floor, and then at me, right at my face.
My heart flutters and dives. I don’t want to die—I don’t—even now, I want to keep living.
“Wait, Jeremy,” I say. “Please.”
There’s a bang at the bottom of the stairs, as loud as a firework, and Jeremy’s eyes go wide and I whip around to see what he sees. The wind carried open the splintered door, flung it aside to reveal Houdini on the porch, staring stone-faced into the house, silent and cruel, eyes unwavering and teeth bared, sides flecked with ash and mud. The dog is lit from behind by the roaring furnace of the prison. Jeremy shrieks as the dog glares up at us, yellowed and ferocious and strange, and I leap up the three steps remaining and press my left forearm into Jeremy’s throat to pin him to the wall.
“Where is she?”
“I swear—” He’s struggling to breathe. Staring goggle eyed over my shoulder at the dog. “I swear, I don’t know.”
“Not true.” I tower over the kid. I’m leaning into his throat with the blunt object of my arm, and it’s killing him and I don’t care. “You saw Cortez coming and you smashed him with a shovel.”
He gasps, squeezes out words. “I don’t know who that is.” He struggles, breathes. “I would not hurt her.”
I stare at his terror-stricken eyes and try to think. She waved me away, Cortez had said, she treated him like a Jehovah’s Witness. Why did she do that, dismiss her protector? And she had a suitcase, he said, she was waiting for someone. Not Jeremy, surely—but who? I’m thinking about the timing of this—what day was Brett shot and when did Jeremy get back from shooting him and what time this morning did Martha tell Cortez to leave her be? The world is spinning, days and events spilling over one another like loose marbles in a bag.
“I’ll die,” Jeremy gasps, and I recover myself and I let him loose.
“No, you won’t.”
“You don’t understand,” he says. “I’m already dead.”
I can see it now, in his eyes, the welling sickness, the pupils tightening. Dammit.
“Come on,” I say, crouching, pulling on his left arm with my left arm. “Let’s get to the bathroom.”
He waves me off, slumps back against the bannister.
I roll him down the stairs, drag him to the bathroom, watching the black bruise take shape across his Adam’s apple where I attacked him. I don’t know when he took the pills, I don’t know how long he was sitting there before I showed up. If I can get him to the john I can bend him over the toilet, get those pills up. Clear whatever it is from his system. I can do that. His body can’t have metabolized much of the poison, not yet, it’s too soon.
“Jeremy?”
Laboriously I settle him on his knees in front of the toilet and he wobbles, body rolling forward and back. I clap my hands in front of his face. His head lists on his neck and his torso slides forward.
“Jeremy!” I throw the taps so I can splash cold water on his face, and of course nothing comes out. The flesh of his body is getting strangely warm, like he might begin to melt like a wax candle, turn from solid to liquid and drip away from my grasp.
I try one more time: “Where’s Martha, Jeremy?”
“You’ll find her,” he says, almost gently, encouragingly, like a coach—and you can really see it, with an overdose, you can watch the light dripping out of someone’s eyes. “I bet you can find anyone.”
Houdini and I look in every corner of that house. In every corner and under every bed and mattress, in the cheap wood pantry, overrun with roaches and water bugs, in the dark spiderwebbed corners of the basement.
My arm swells and radiates heat and pain. Sweat runs down my forehead and into my eyes. We look and look.
But it’s not that big a house, and I’m not looking for misplaced keys or a wayward pair of glasses. It’s a human being. My terrified friend, bound and trembling, or her body, hollow and staring. But we keep looking. There’s no attic; the second-floor bedrooms are arched and peaked, but I get up on a chair and bang on the plaster of the ceiling to eliminate the possibility of a hidey-hole or secret room where Martha might have been shoved, duct-taped and struggling. The closets, the kitchen, the closets again, tearing everything out, kicking against the beadboard for a false back or hidden chamber.
Houdini yelps and sniffs at the floorboards. I find a claw hammer in a tool chest in the pantry, and I use the claw to pry up the floor in the living room, board by board, my back aching against the strain of it. I ignore the stabs of pain and the waves of nausea, drag up the boards one at a time like peeling open a stubborn fruit, but beneath the floor is insulation and pipes and the view of the basement.
I check it again, the basement, but she’s not there—she’s not here—she’s nowhere.
I keep looking. The noise of the guns and the screaming outside, the windows lit up with the fire across the street, I keep looking, long after even the most diligent investigator would be forced to conclude that Martha Milano is not inside this house.
I look and look and scream her name until I’m hoarse.
Jeremy’s body I leave in the bathtub. There is no other option that makes sense. I happen to know that the Willard Street Funeral Parlor is home now to a clutch of doomsday prophets, just as I happen to know that the morgue in the basement of Concord Hospital is abandoned, Dr. Fenton now upstairs doing furious triage along with whoever else is around.
There is nowhere to report this death or deliver this corpse, because suddenly the streets are on fire and ours is a savage land. I lay the man out more neatly in his claw-footed bathtub, push his eyelids shut with my forefingers, and go.
My house is gone.
When at last the dog and I get back to my address on Clinton Street, we find just the bones of a house, just the beams, leaning precariously in the summer darkness among the shadowy silver maples. It was stripped for the metal and the siding and the bricks and then burned; or possibly it burned first, and then the looters came and carried away the remains. Grim drifting heaps of ash and stray pieces of furniture. My hoard of goods, my jars of peanut butter and my gas mask and my jugs of water, these were beneath the floorboards under the sofa in the back end of the living room. The hoard is gone. The floorboards are gone. The sofa is gone. The living room is gone.
Houdini and I wander slowly through the ruins like we’re walking on the moon. The cement foundation is still in place, and I can trace the rough outlines of where the rooms used to be: the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen. Disintegrating plasterboard piles that used to be walls. Houdini noses at the wreckage and comes up with a table leg, clutched in his jaws like a shankbone. I find my copy of Farley and Leonard’s Criminal Investigation, charred, recognizable by the pattern of colors on the cover. Piano keys like teeth. A scattering of old Polaroids: my parents mugging at a holiday party, Dad in a mistletoe cap, Mom’s lips brushing his cheek.
I am aware, in an abstract way, that this is a catastrophe. The countdown has begun, and all the haphazard arrangements—the rummages and the ersatz restaurants and the bartering and the residents associations—all of the vestigial institutions are crumbling into the past, and it’s every man for himself from now on, and here I am with no house, no gun, no possessions of any kind. I’m down one arm. I’m wearing a borrowed shirt and torn suit pants.
But what I feel is nothing. Numbness and cold. I’m a house full of burned-out rooms.
I told Martha I would make every effort to find her husband and bring him home. I told her I could do it. I promised.
The man she longed for is dead. And now she, too, is dead, or somewhere dying, somewhere alone, and the only person who knows her whereabouts is yet another dead man. The world collapsing, turning into death, disappearing before my eyes.
I sat at her kitchen table, smiled to see her again after all these years, looked into her worried eyes, and made a promise.
Houdini hunts around me in a circle, nose down, lifting and then dropping bits of plaster with his sharp teeth.
There is a bright and beautiful glow in the direction of downtown, a radiant bulb, pulsing with light. I stare at it until I understand that this is the capitol dome of the statehouse of New Hampshire, and that it is on fire.
The practicalities of my situation are hard to grasp. I will need help, but from whom? Dr. Fenton? Culverson?
I sink down cross-legged in the dirt and Houdini takes a position next to me, erect and watchful, panting. I lift a photograph from the mud, Nico and me with arms wrapped around each other at her high-school graduation. My expression is adult, serious, self-congratulatory, quietly proud for having seen to it that she made it to that day. Nico for her part is grinning, ear to ear, because she was high as a satellite.
I could have stayed on that helicopter. Could be in Idaho or Illinois right now, reconning with the team. Saving the world.
The thought of Nico is suddenly devastating, and I can’t pretend to be cynical about it, not even to myself—the idea that I’m sitting here, and she is there. What have I done? What have I done? I should have stayed on that helicopter. I never should have let her go. I lie in the rutted crater that was my home and consider my choices: calling my sister a fool for pursuing a one-in-a-million chance at survival while I’m the one who’s accepted a hundred percent chance of death.
A screech of tires and the slam of a car door, ancient and familiar sounds, and I sit upright and jerk my head around and Houdini takes a stance and barks. Parked diagonally across my yard is a Chevrolet Impala, the standard Concord Police Department vehicle, a glimmer of moonlight dancing across the hood.
Footsteps, getting closer. I struggle to my feet. Houdini barks louder.
“Let’s go, Henry.”
Trish McConnell. I gape at her, and she grins like a naughty kid.
“What are you doing here?”
“Saving your life, Skinny.” Officer McConnell somehow looks more like a cop when she’s out of uniform: short and tough in blue jeans and a black T-shirt. “What happened to your arm?”
“Oh—” I wiggle the thick limb. It hurts. “It’s fine. What’s happening?”
“I’ll tell you in the car. Come on.”
I look at Trish and then toward downtown, toward the fires and the wildness. The city smells like smoke. “Shouldn’t you be on patrol?”
“No one’s on patrol. Our orders were to stand down, let this shit burn itself out. Risk no department resources. The rest of the force is at School Street, drinking beer and looking at dirty magazines.”
“So, why aren’t you there?
“I don’t like dirty magazines.” She laughs. McConnell is all fired up, that much is clear, this is her play, she’s ready to roll. “I am away without leave, Officer Palace, and I ain’t going back. I borrowed the Chevy from the Justice Department and I am taking off, right now, very quickly, and you’re coming, too.”
“Why me?”
She smiles cryptically. “Come on, you dummy.”
The vehicle is on and purring, the exhaust from some real genuine DOJ regular unleaded gasoline pouring out of the tailpipe. It’s a beautiful thing, a Chevrolet Impala, it really is, clean lines, efficient: a pure police car. Houdini is over there, peering up at its tinted windows. I’m trying to think quickly and smartly, trying to process everything. The statehouse is blazing ferociously in the distance, a Roman candle burning down in the heart of our little skyline.
“Come on, Palace,” says McConnell, standing at the driver’s side door. “The worst of the chaos is up by the reservoir, but we’re going exactly the other way.” She pounds on the hood of the car. “You ready to rock?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Let me just…” I look around. I have no suitcase. No clothes to pack. Someone took my house. I tug Culverson’s dress shirt closer around me and walk toward the car. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”
The shotgun seat is stuffed with suitcases and cardboard cartons of food and bottles of Gatorade. So I slide into the backseat next to McConnell’s children, and Houdini takes a position between us.
“Hi,” I say to Kelli and Robbie, as McConnell guns it and screeches out onto Clinton Street. Robbie has his thumb in his mouth, a ragged blue teddy bear tucked against his chin. Kelli looks solemn and scared.
“What kind of dog is that?” she asks me.
“A bichon frisé,” I say. “He’s tougher than he looks.”
“Really?” says Kelli. “He actually looks pretty tough.”
McConnell takes the Chevy down Clinton Street, away from downtown, toward the highway, and while Houdini consents for Robbie to tickle his neck scruff, I lean forward into the mesh grate and ask McConnell where we’re going.
“The mansion.”
“What mansion?
“I told you, Palace.” She laughs. “Me and some of the others, the old-timers—Michelson, Capshaw, Rodriguez—we blocked this all out months ago.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Oh right.”
“It’s in Western Mass., a little town called Furman, near the New York border. We got the place all set up. Plenty of water, plenty of food. Cooking oil. Necessary precautions.” She raises her voice, glances in the rearview mirror. “And there are even some kids there, other kids. Officer Rogers has twin boys.”
“Those guys are assholes,” says Kelli, and McConnell says, “Language, honey,” and leans on the gas, hits ninety miles an hour, sure and straight, barreling over back roads on the way out of town.
“I thought you were kidding about all that. The mansion in the country. The whole thing.”
“I never kid.”
McConnell smiles, sly, elusive, proud, the Impala whooshing along Highway 1, the Merrimack a brown ribbon to our left. Holy moly, I think, holy cow, easing back into my seat. Western Mass. Kelli asks for a bottle of water so Houdini can have a drink, and McConnell pushes two bottles through the seat-grate opening, not without a small wince of anxiety—nothing as precious as a bottle of water. I say thanks on the dog’s behalf, and McConnell says, “Sure,” says “Drink one yourself, you damn scarecrow.”
McConnell, I like—I always have.
The moon glimmers through the tinted backseat windows of the Impala as we rattle over untended roads, out across the bridge, toward the junction with 89 South, the city in flames all around us. Robbie falls asleep. We roar past a long line of people, a block and a half long, lugging backpacks and duffel bags and pulling rolling suitcases, a residents’ association heading together into exile by some prearrangement, headed out of town but God knows to where.
Despite everything, I lean back and let the exhaustion overtake me, let my eyelids drift and flutter, Houdini safe in Kelli’s lap beside me, and I start to feel that kind of dreamy magic that comes with car rides late at night.
There’s a word my mind is looking for.
I said, McConnell, what are you doing here? and she said, Saving your life, Skinny.
What’s the word I’m looking for?
I lay in the dirt patch that had been my house, and the Impala came and what did she offer me?
Tell him he has to come home, Martha said, urgent and imploring. Tell him his salvation depends on it.
My eyes shoot open.
Kelli and Houdini are both snoring gently; we’re way on the outskirts of the city by now, coming up on its limits and the westward highway.
Salvation.
All these people braving the terrible seas, getting shot or dragged out of the water in nets, casting themselves upon unfamiliar shores in search of what—the same thing my sister is chasing across the country in a stolen helicopter.
Salvation. And not in some glorious tomorrow, not in the majestic heights of heaven. Salvation here.
I’ve got no notebook. No pencil. I squeeze my eyes shut, try to do the timeline work, put it together, see if this makes sense.
Sergeant Thunder got that stupid brochure last week and bartered away his worldly goods last week, but evacuation day was today—Culverson saw him today, out on his porch, waiting and waiting, miserable and forlorn. That was today.
“McConnell?”
“Yeah, buddy.”
Cortez saw her waiting on her porch at let’s call it 8:30 this morning, waiting for someone. Jeremy got there at nine or ten, desperate and excited, ready to make his lovesick plea, but Martha was gone. Long gone.
“McConnell, I need to make just one quick stop.”
“What?”
“Or—it’s okay—you can drop me off.”
“Palace.”
“I’ll catch up with you. Leave me the address. I need to get to this pizza place.”
“A pizza place?”
“It’s called Rocky’s. Up by Steeplegate Mall.”
Officer McConnell is not slowing down.
“One quick stop, Trish.” I lean forward and plead into the mesh, like a criminal, desperate, like a sinner to his confessor. “Please. One stop.”
McConnell growls and goes full code, kicks on the lights and screamers and throws the Impala into a fishtailing U-turn, takes us a thousand miles an hour toward Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl up by the mall. She veers onto the sidewalk to get around a thick mob milling about at the intersection of Loudon Road and Herndon Street. Half of them have big flashlights, most of them have handguns, and they’re circled around a cluttered herd of shopping carts. One man in a leather jacket and motorcycle helmet is hanging from the top of a lamppost, shouting at them, instructions or warnings. I squint at the man as we race past—when I was a kid, he was our dentist.
As we slam to a stop outside Rocky’s, I can see two distinct pyres radiating up from the different wings of the Steeplegate Mall.
“Minutes,” says McConnell angrily. “This block will be on fire within five minutes.”
“I know.”
Kelli is waking, looking around, as I jump out of the car.
“I’m serious, McConnell,” I call. “Go if you have to.”
“I will,” she says, shouting after me as I run toward the pizza place. “I’m going to.”
The doors are closed and looped with chains. I’m wondering if it’s too late, but I don’t think it is. I think they’re still in there, Martha and her father, Rocky. The city is on fire and they’re huddled and waiting like Sergeant Thunder for salvation that is not coming. Huddled together in the center of that giant room, the vast space emptied of its valuables, everything turned over to the con: the wood-burning oven, the paintball guns and targets, the heavy appliances with their yards of copper and coolant and gas tanks.
I bang again, kick at the glass. Rocky and Martha in there, sitting, going crazy. They’ve been in there since this morning, since Rocky showed up to get her, today’s the day, no more waiting around for your stupid runaway husband. Bad luck for Cortez that he happened to be there when Rocky arrived, time ticking away, in no mood to discuss a damn thing with anyone. He just needed his daughter, and he needed her now. Today was the big day—not a moment to waste.
I move to the left, along the wall of the building, occasionally pounding on one of the windows with the heel of my good hand. No chance of kicking open this door; it’s thick Plexiglas. If Jeremy stopped by here after Martha’s house, and I bet he did, he would have found another dead end, another place his true love had disappeared from. No wonder he went home and ate poison.
But they’re in there. Waiting. I know they are. The world collapsing all around them and still waiting for the men who promised they would come.
“Hey?” I shout, slamming against the window. “Hey!”
I shield my eyes and try to peer through the tinted glass, but I can’t see anything, and maybe they’re not in here, maybe I’ve got it wrong. Martha’s not here to be rescued and I’m risking my life and McConnell’s and the kids’, too, for nothing. I glance back over my shoulder and I can see Trish glaring from the driver’s seat. I hope she does, I hope she goes, takes her children and my dog and abandons me for safety.
It’s hot, it’s so hot, even in the middle of the night, the black summer night tinted by the crazy oranges and yellows of the fires.
I yell their names again—Rocky! Martha!—but there must be one more code word, a shibboleth they memorized at the behest of the smooth-talking salesmen from the World Beyond, something they’re expecting to hear when the nice men from the rescue convoy roll up in their black cars and jumpsuits. I turn around. McConnell is still sitting there. I jab one finger in the air and I whirl it around, a little piece of police sign language, and in case she can’t see me or doesn’t understand, I yell it: “Lights, McConnell,” I holler. “Turn on the lights.”
McConnell turns on the lights. They spin on the top of the car, the classic cop-show colors, blue reflecting on black. It’s a cruel trick, but I need Martha out here. I need her to come out and you can’t tell a trooper car from a CPD Impala, not from inside a dark restaurant. And it works. She sees what she wants to see, just like she did in her dream. The door slams open and she races out, flies toward the car.
“Martha.”
But she doesn’t wait; she races past me to the police car, stares into the windows. I see McConnell up front and Kelli in the backseat, jerking backward, away from the desperate phantom at the window. He’s not in there and she spins around as Rocky Milano comes lumbering out to retrieve her. He’s out of his apron, in a sweat suit, his bald forehead red and dripping with sweat.
Martha runs back toward me, whipping her head one way and another, her cheeks flushed. Her pale eyes are wide with need. “Where is—where is he?”
“Martha—”
“Where is he?” cries Martha, lunging at me across the lot.
I don’t know what to say, how much of the story is worth telling. A kid was obsessed with you. He tricked your husband into leaving. Your husband went on a madman’s crusade. He was shot and he died in a field by a beach.
“Where is he?”
“Martha, get inside,” says Rocky. “It’s dangerous out here.”
“That’s right,” I say. “Time to go.”
Rocky peers at me like a stranger. Barely recognizes me. He’s focused on the next step of his life, on cashing in the promise of escape he’s been given—for himself and his daughter and for his son-in-law, too, until Brett’s mysterious disappearance. I wonder if he asked the World Beyond people for that special: “Hey can this guy get in there, too? My daughter won’t come without him.” I wonder if the hucksters hemmed and hawed and finally agreed, no skin off their backs, peddling one more nonexistent spot in their nonexistent underground compound.
“Where’s Brett, Henry?” says poor Martha, and I just tell her, I say, “He’s dead,” and she collapses to the ground on her knees, buries her face in her hands and wails, one long keening senseless syllable. That’s the end of the world right there for Martha Milano.
“Sweetheart?” Rocky is all business, heaving her up by the armpits and clasping her with his big hands. “It’s okay. We’re going to mourn him, but we’re going to move on. Come on. We’re moving on.”
He’s dragging her back toward the building, which will be on fire any minute now. McConnell honks the horn. But I can’t leave. I can’t leave her here. I can’t let her die.
“Martha,” I call. “You were right. There was no other woman. He was—he was doing God’s work.”
Martha pulls away from her father. She looks at me, and then up at the sky, at the asteroid, maybe, or at God. “He was?”
“He was.” I take a step toward Martha, but Rocky grabs her again.
“Enough,” he says roughly. “We need to get inside and wait securely until they come.”
“They’re not coming,” I say, to him, to her. “No one’s coming.”
“What? What the hell do you know?” Rocky steps toward me, veins bulging on his forehead.
But he understands—he’s got to understand—some part of him must surely understand. Whatever time they told him the convoy would arrive, that time has long since passed. Even old Sergeant Thunder let himself admit it many hours ago.
I keep my voice calm and even, authoritative, as much for Martha’s benefit as for Rocky’s. “There is no such thing as the World Beyond. You’ve fallen prey to a con artist. No one is coming.”
“Bullshit,” says Rocky, pushing his hand into my chest, rolling me back on my heels. “Bull. Shit.” He turns to Martha, grinning uneasily. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. I did everything these people asked. Everything.”
There’s a rolling crash behind us, and everybody turns: it’s the roof of the Steeplegate Mall, just across the parking lot, caving in with a series of splintering cracks. McConnell leans on the horn and I wheel around and shout, “I’m coming, here I come,” and then I reach for Martha again, hold open my hand to her.
“Martha.”
“No,” says Rocky. “They’re coming. They’re fucking coming. We have a contract.”
A contract. This is what he’s got and he’s going to stand on it. No shaking him loose. No making him see sense, because now, at this pass, this is sense. This is what’s left of sense. And the helicopter did come for Nico, that is true, that did happen, and maybe Jesus Man really went to Jesus, and maybe this convoy is different from the one that didn’t come for Sergeant Thunder: Maybe it’s just up the road, maybe it’s a con and maybe it’s not. Nothing—nothing—nothing can be counted on, nothing is certain.
“Stay,” I say to Rocky. “But let Martha go.”
He shakes his head, starts to speak, but Martha interrupts him, suddenly composed, calm, clear as daylight. “Go?” she says. “Go where?”
That I cannot answer. The woman is waiting in a burning parking lot for an imaginary line of cars, and I have no better option for her. McConnell’s country cop shop is not mine to offer. My own house was stripped from boards to beams. The world is running out of safe places.
“Thank you, Henry,” says Martha Milano, and leans forward and kisses me gently, leaving the barest trace of lip gloss on my cheek. I raise one hand to touch the spot with two fingers. She’s gone already, clutching her father’s solid arm as he leads her back inside to wait for doomsday.
“I’m so sorry, McConnell,” I say, as I dive back into the Impala. “Let’s go.”