World of Trouble

1.

I’m worried about my dog.

He’s limping now, on top of everything else, on top of the dry cough that rattles his small frame as he breathes, on top of the nasty burrs that have tangled themselves irretrievably in his matted fur. I don’t know where or how he picked it up, this deep limp in his right forepaw, but here he comes now, moving slow out of the evidence room behind me, slipping through my legs and slouching with a pronounced foot-drag down the hallway. He shuffles away, poor little guy, nosing along the baseboard, his coat smudged but still white.

I watch him with deep unease. It wasn’t fair of me to take Houdini along. A mistake I made without even thinking about it, inflicting upon my dog the rigors of a long and uncertain journey, the unhygienic drinking water and sparse food, the hikes along deserted highway shoulders and through fallow fields, the fights with other animals. I should have left him with McConnell and the others, back at the safe house in Massachusetts, left him with McConnell’s kids, all the other kids, the other dogs, a safe and comfortable environment. But I took him. I never asked him if he wanted to come, not that a dog in any case could fairly weigh the risks and rewards.

I took him, and we crossed eight hundred fifty complicated miles in five long weeks, and the wear is showing on the dog, no doubt about it.

“I’m really sorry, pal,” I whisper, and the dog coughs. I pause in the hallway, breathing in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling.

It was the same in the evidence room as in the rest of the place: thick coatings of dust on the shelves, filing cabinets turned over and emptied out. Odors of must and mildew. In Dispatch, on someone’s desk between the blank laptops and the old foot-switch RadioCOMMAND console, there was an ancient sandwich, half eaten and crawling with ants. Nothing good, nothing helpful or hopeful.

We arrived very late last night and began our search immediately, and now it’s three hours later and the sun is beginning to rise—dull pale beams filtering in through the glass-paned front door, down at the east end of the hall—and we’ve worked through most of the building and nothing. Nothing. A small police station, like the one in Concord, New Hampshire, where I used to work. Even smaller. All night I’ve gone through on my hands and knees with my magnifying glass and fat Eveready flashlight, taking the place room by room: Reception, Dispatch. Administration, Holding Cell, Evidence.

Cold certainty slowly filling me, like dirty water rising in a well: there’s nothing.

Officer McConnell knew it. She told me this was a fool’s errand. “So you have, what, the name of a town?” is what she said.

“A building,” I said. “The police station. In a town. In Ohio.”

“Ohio?” Skeptical. Arms crossed. Scowling. “Well, you won’t find her. Also, if you do? So what?”

I remember what it felt like, her being angry, justified in her anger. I just nodded. I kept packing.

Now, in the flat dawn light of the empty hallway of the empty police station, I make a fist with my right hand and raise it to a forty-five-degree angle and bring it down like the hammer of a gun, slam it backward into the wall I’m leaning against. Houdini turns around and stares at me, bright black animal eyes glinting like marbles in the dark.

“All right,” I tell him. He makes a wet noise in the back of his throat. “Okay. Let’s just keep looking.”

A few feet down the hall is a plaque honoring the service of Daniel Arnold Carver, on the occasion of his retirement from the Rotary, Ohio, Police Department at the rank of lieutenant, in the Year of Our Lord 1998. Next to that commemoration is an upside-down horseshoe of construction-paper cards from local children: stick-figure cops waving gaily in bold Crayola colors, with “Thanks for the tour!” written below in the neat handwriting of an elementary school teacher. The cards are dangling from fading twists of Scotch tape; the plaque is slightly misaligned and covered in a half inch of dust.

The next room is on the left, a few feet past the plaque and the kids’ drawings. It’s marked DETECTIVES, although the first thing I notice on entering is that there was only one detective. One desk, one swivel chair. One landline phone, with the cord cut, the receiver sitting unattached in the cradle like stage furniture. A long-dead flowering plant hangs from the ceiling: wilted stalks and clumps of brown leaves. A plastic water bottle on its side, half crushed.

I can picture the detective who once sat in this room, tilted back in the chair, finalizing the small details of a coming meth-lab bust, say, or cursing with crusty good humor at some ham-fisted directive from the know-nothings over in Admin. I sniff the air and imagine I detect the ancient stale odor of his cigars.

Her cigars, actually. Hers. There’s a thick leather log book on the desk with a name neatly stenciled across the top right corner: Detective Irma Russel. “My apologies, Detective Russel,” I tell her, wherever she may be, and toss a salute off into the air. “I should know better.”

I think of Officer McConnell again. She kissed me at last, up on her tiptoes, at the door. Then she pushed me, a good two-handed shove, to send me off on my adventure. “Go,” she said. Fondly, sadly. “Jerk.”

The watery daylight is not fully penetrating the one dust-coated window in the detectives room, so I switch back on the beam of the Eveready and hover it over Detective Russel’s log book and flip my way through. The first entry is from just seven months ago. February 14. On Valentine’s Day, Detective Russel reported in neat cursive handwriting that rolling blackouts had been ordered for all municipal buildings countywide, and henceforth all record keeping would be done with pen and paper.

The entries that follow are a record of decline. On March 10 there was a small riot at a food pantry in neighboring Brown County, which spread quickly, resulting in “general civil unrest of unanticipated levels.” It is noted on March 30 that the department’s force-readiness levels are significantly depleted, at thirty-five percent of previous year’s staffing. (“Jason quit!!!” Detective Russel notes parenthetically, the exclamation points bristling with surprise and disappointment.) On April 12, a “Bucket List rapist” was apprehended and turned out to be “Charlie, from Blake’s Feed Supply!!!”

I smile. I like this Detective Russel. I’m not wild about all the exclamation points, but I like her.

I follow the neat handwriting down the run of months. The last entry, dated June 9—sixteen weeks ago—just says “Creekbed,” and then “Heavenly Father keep a good eye on us, would ya?”

I linger for a moment, hunched over the notebook. Houdini pads into the room, and I feel his tail brush against my pant leg.

I take out my thin blue notebook from my inside pocket and write down June 9 and Creekbed and Heavenly Father keep a good eye on us, would ya?, trying to write small, keep the words clustered together. It’s the last one of these notebooks I’ve got. My father was a college professor, and when he died he left behind boxes and boxes of these exam-taker’s notebooks, but I have used up many since entering law enforcement, and many more were lost in the fire that consumed my house. Every time I write something down I have this small rustle of anxiety, like what will I do when I run out of pages?

I close Detective Russel’s desk drawers and return the log book to where it was, flipped open to the same page where I found it.

Also in my pocket, tucked in a red plastic Concord Public Library card sleeve, is a wallet-size copy of my sister’s sophomore-year yearbook picture. Nico as a defiant and hip high-school student, in a ratty black T-shirt and cheap eyeglass frames, far too cool to have combed her hair. Her lower lip is jutted out, her mouth twisted: I’ll smile when I want to, not when some mope tells me to say cheese. I wish I was carrying a more recent picture, but I lost them in the fire; the truth is, she’s only eight years out of high school, and the photograph remains current, with regard to Nico Palace’s appearance and affect. My body is itching to perform the familiar rituals, to flip the picture open to strangers—“Have you see this girl?”—to improvise a set of discerning follow-ups and follow-ups to the follow-ups.

Along with the photograph and the notebook, inside my well-worn tan sport jacket are a few other basic investigative tools: a handheld magnifying glass; a Swiss army knife; a nine-foot retracting tape measure; a second flashlight, smaller and slimmer than the Eveready; a box of .40-caliber rounds. The gun itself, the department-issue SIG Sauer P229 I’ve been carrying for three years now, is in a holster on my hip.

The door of the evidence room clicks open and closed again, and I raise the flashlight at Cortez.

“Spray paint,” he says, holding up an aerosol canister and giving it an enthusiastic shake-shake-shake. “Half full.”

“Okay,” I say. “Great.”

“Oh, but it is great, Policeman,” Cortez says, looking with childlike delight at this find, turning it over in his rough hands. “Useful for marking a trail, and easily weaponized. A candle, a paper clip, a match. Voilà: flamethrower. I’ve seen it done.” He winks. “I’ve done it.”

“Okay,” I say again.

This is how he talks, Cortez the thief, my unlikely partner: like the world will go on forever, like he with his hobbies and habits will go on forever. He sighs and shakes his head sadly at my indifference, and slides past in the darkness like a phantom, away down the hallway in search of more loot. She’s not here, whispers Officer McConnell in my ear. Not judging, not angry. Just noting the obvious. You came all this way for nothing, Detective Palace. She’s not here.

The day is advancing. Dull gold sunlight inching closer to me down here at the far end of the dark hall. The dog, somewhere I can’t see him, but close enough that I hear him coughing. The planet wobbling beneath my feet.

2.

Next to the detectives room is a door marked MUSTER, and this room too is full of familiar objects, coat hooks hung with windbreakers, a well-broken-in blue ball cap, a pair of sturdy Carhartt boots with stiffened laces. Policeman street clothes. In one corner there’s an American flag on a cheap plastic eagle-head stand. An OSHA workplace-safety information sheet is tacked to the lower corner of a billboard, the same sheet we had in Concord that Detective McGully liked to read aloud, dripping with disdain: “Oh, good, some tips on posture. We get frikkin’ shot at for a living!”

Along the back wall is a dry-erase board on wobbly wheels with an undated exhortation, all-caps and triple-underlined: “STAY SAFE, ASSHOLES.” I smile, half smile, imagining the weary young sergeant writing the message, hiding his own fear behind salty tough-cop cleverness. STAY SAFE, ASSHOLES. Keep a good eye on us, would ya? It hasn’t been an easy time for law enforcement, this last set of months, it really hasn’t.

I push through a door at the back of the muster room into an even smaller space, a kitchenette slash break room: sink, fridge, microwave, round table and black plastic chairs. I open the fridge and push it closed immediately against a wave of warmth and foul odor: soured food, spoiled food, rot.

I stand in front of the empty vending machine and peer for a moment at my funhouse reflection in the Plexiglass. There are no snacks in there, just the bare coils like empty winter branches. But the glass is not smashed, like all the world’s glass seems to be these days. No one assaulted this machine with a bat or a Carhartt boot to rob it of its treasures.

Presumably this machine was emptied out ages ago, maybe by Detective Russel or by her disappointing friend Jason on his way out—except, when I crouch down, take a knee and look closely, I find a plastic fork holding open the black horizontal door at the bottom where the food comes out. I shine my light on it, the fork dramatically bowed, the tensile strength of its hard plastic holding up precariously against the weight of the snack trap.

Holy moly, is what I’m thinking, because this could be exactly what I’m looking for, unless it isn’t.

Because theoretically, of course, a plastic fork could remain in that bowed position for a long time, for months even, but on the other hand, one of the many suspensions my sister earned during her rocky career at Concord High School was for performing the same trick: rigging open the vending machine in the teachers’ lounge and looting all the candy bars and potato chips, leaving behind just the low-fat yogurt bars and a note: You’re welcome, fatties!

When I catch my breath I gingerly remove the fork. I have a dozen sandwich bags in my pocket, and I slip the fork into one of the bags and the bag into my sport-coat pocket and move on.

The kitchenette’s two slim cupboards have been rummaged. Plates broken and disarrayed; bowls tossed onto the floor. Only two coffee mugs are still intact, one reading PROPERTY OF ROTARY POLICE DEPARTMENT, the other I’M THROUGH WITH LOVE; FORTUNATELY THERE’S STILL SEX. I smile and rub my bleary eyes. I miss cops, I really do.

Was she here? Did Nico take the candy?

The gooseneck spout of the sink is in the on position, angled up sharply to the left, as if someone came in for a glass of water, forgetting that the municipal supplies have stopped. Or perhaps the water went out right in the middle of someone using the sink. Some cop in the break room after a long and treacherous shift, filling up his cup or washing his face, her face, and suddenly, whoops, no more water for you.

The sink is full of blood. It’s a deep-walled sink with a basin made of stainless steel like the handle, and when I look down into it the sides and the bottom are covered with a rust-red explosion of blood. The drain is clotted and thick with it. I look again at the gooseneck spout, closer now, shining the light, and find the faint smudged patches: red, bloody palms clutching and jerking the handle.

STAY SAFE, ASSHOLES.

Above and behind the sink, bolted to the wall, is a horizontal rack hung with three knives. All of them are stained with blood, up and down, freckled from hilt and blade. A clot of dread and excitement forms in the base of my gut and floats like a bubble up into my throat. I swing around, moving quickly now, heartbeat thrumming, back through the muster room and out into the hallway, and now the sun is all the way up outside, casting a muted ochre glow through the glass door and I can see the floor clearly, see where the trail of blood runs down the hallway. Discrete spots, leading plain as bread crumbs from the kitchenette sink through the muster room, pass the dry-erase board and the flagpole, all the way down the hall to the front door of the station.

My mentor Detective Culverson, my mentor and my friend, he called it walking the blood. Walking the blood means walking with the escaping suspect or the fleeing victim, it means “you find the trail and see what songs it wants to sing you.” I shake my head, remembering him saying that, most of the way joking, purposefully hokey, but Detective Culverson could turn a phrase, he really could.

I walk the blood. I follow the steady line of drops, which appear on the tile at six- to eight-inch intervals all the way down the hallway and out the glass door, where the trail disappears in the thick mud just outside the building. I stand up in the gloomy daylight. It’s raining, a sputtering indecisive drizzle. It’s been raining for days. When Cortez and I got here late last night it was squalling hard enough that we were biking with our jackets tugged up over our necks and the backs of our heads, like snails, a blue tarp tied tautly over all our stuff in the Red Ryder wagon trailing behind. Wherever the bleeding person went from here, there is no trail left to sing about it.

Back at the bloody sink in the break room, I open my small blue notebook to one of its last fresh pages and draw a rough annotated illustration of the knives behind the sink. Butcher’s knife, twelve inches; cleaver, six inches with a tapered spine; paring knife, three and a half inches, with the brand initials W.G. inlaid on the handle, between the rivets. I sketch the blood pattern on the knives and in the basin of the sink. I get down on all fours and walk the blood again, and this time I note that each of these drops is oblong, less a perfect circle and more an oval with a pointy end. I go again, third time, nice and slow, running my big Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass along the trail and now I’m seeing that they alternate: an oblong droplet pointing this way, and then one pointing that way, one eastward droplet, one westward, all the way down the hall.

I was a detective for only three months, promoted out of nowhere and dismissed just as abruptly when the CPD was absorbed by the Department of Justice, and so I never received the higher-level training I would have in the normal run of a career. I am not as versed as I might wish in the finer points of crime-scene forensics, I cannot be as sure as I would like. Still, though. Nevertheless. What I’ve got here is actually not one trail but two; what the alternating droplets record are two separate instances that someone passed along this corridor either bleeding or carrying a blood-stained object. Two journeys in opposite directions.

I go back to the kitchenette and stare once more into the red mess in the sink. There is a fresh jitteriness in my gut, a new chaos in my veins. Too much coffee. Not enough sleep. New information. I don’t know if Nico’s here, if she was ever here. But something happened. Something.

It was not the impending end of the world that drove a wedge between my sister and me, it was our diverging responses to the end of the world, a bedrock disagreement regarding the basic reality of what is happening—i.e., whether it is happening or isn’t.

It is happening. I’m right and Nico is wrong. No set of facts has ever been as rigorously vetted, no set of data points so carefully analyzed and double-checked, by as many thousands of professors and scientists and government officials. All desperate for it to be wrong, all finding it nevertheless to be right. There are some uncertainties on the fine points, of course, for example regarding the composition and structure of the asteroid, whether it is made up primarily of metals or primarily of rocks, whether it is one monolithic piece or a pile of agglomerated rubble. There are, too, varying predictions as to what exactly happens, postimpact: how much volcanic activity and where; how fast the seas will rise and how high; how long it will take for the sun to be dimmed by ash and for how long it will remain shrouded. But on the core fact there is consensus: the asteroid 2011GV₁, known as Maia, measuring six and a half kilometers in diameter and traveling at a speed of between thirty-five thousand and forty thousand miles per hour, will make landfall in Indonesia, at an angle from horizontal of nineteen degrees. This will happen on October 3. A week from Wednesday, around lunchtime.

There was this computer animation that got a lot of traction early on, a lot of “likes” and reposts—this was over a year ago, midsummer of last year, when the odds were high but not yet definite; when people were still at work, still using computers. This was the last wild flowering of social networking, people looking up old friends, trading conspiracy theories, posting and approving of one another’s Bucket Lists. This cartoon, this animation, it depicted the world as a piñata, with God wielding the stick—God in his Old Testament iteration, with the big white beard, Michelangelo’s God—whacking away at the fragile globe until it burst. This was one of a million versions of the coming event that ascribed it, however cutely, to God’s will, God’s vengeance, the interstellar object as Flood 2.0.

I didn’t find the cartoon all that clever; for one thing, the piñata image is way off. The world isn’t actually going to explode, fly off into pieces like shattered pottery. It will shiver from the impact, to be sure, but then continue in its orbit. The oceans boil, the forests burn, the mountains rumble and spew lava, everybody dies. The world keeps turning.

The crux of our falling out is that Nico imagines that she is going to prevent Maia from impacting. She and some friends. The last time we spoke at length was in Durham, New Hampshire, and she filled me in on all the details about her secret underground group and their secret underground plans. She was leaning forward, talking fast and passionate, smoking her cigarettes, impatient as always with her narrow-minded older brother, stolid and disbelieving. She told me how the path of the asteroid can be diverted by a pinpoint nuclear explosion, detonated at a distance of one object-radius from the asteroid, releasing sufficient high-energy X-rays to vaporize some portion of its surface, creating “a miniature rocket effect” and changing the trajectory. This operation is called a “standoff burst.” I didn’t understand the science. Nico, it seemed clear, didn’t understand it either. But, she insisted, the maneuver has been gamed out in classified exercises by the United States Department of Defense and has a theoretical success rate of more than eighty-five percent.

She went on and on, me trying to listen with a straight face, trying not to laugh or throw my hands up or shake her by the shoulders. Of course the information about the standoff burst is being suppressed by the evil government, for purposes unknown—and of course there is this one rogue scientist who knows how it’s done, and of course he’s being held by the government in a military prison somewhere. And—of course, of course, of course—Nico and her pal Jordan and the rest of the cabal have a plan to set him free and save the world.

I told her this was delusional. I told her this was Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and she was being a fool, and then she disappeared and I let her go.

This was an error, and I see that now.

I’m still right and she’s still wrong, but I cannot just let her be gone. Whatever she thinks, whatever she’s doing, she is still my baby sister and I am the only person left with a stake in her welfare. And I can’t abide the idea of our final bitter exchange remaining the last conversation to take place between her and me, the last two members of my family who ever will exist. What I need now is to find her, see her before the end, before the earthquakes and the high water and whatever else is coming.

I need to see her so badly that it is like a low rolling heat in my stomach, like the fire in the belly of a furnace, and if I don’t find her—if I don’t manage to see her, hug her, apologize for letting her go—then it will leap up and consume me.

3.

“Knives? Really?” Cortez looks up. His eyes gleam. “Are they big and sharp?”

“Two of them are big. The third is a paring knife. I don’t know about sharp.”

“Paring knives can be surprisingly effective. You can do some serious damage with a paring knife.”

“You’ve seen it,” I say. “You’ve done it.”

He laughs, winks. I rub my eyes and look around. I’ve caught up with Cortez in the three-car garage, the last unexplored area of the station. No cars left in here, just stuff—engine parts, broken pieces of tools, other miscellaneous junk that’s been forgotten or left behind. It’s big and echoey, smelling of old spilled gasoline. The sun comes in refracted through two grungy glass-block windows along the north-facing wall.

“Knives are always useful,” says Cortez cheerfully. “Sharp, dull. Take the knives.”

He gives me a congratulatory salute and goes back to what he’s doing, which is rifling his way along the wire shelving units in the back of the room, across from the big garage doors, looking for useful objects. Cortez’s features are strangely large: large forehead, large chin, big glowing eyes. He has the jollity and the fierceness of a pirate king. The first time we met he shot me in the head with an electric staple gun, but our relationship has evolved in the subsequent months. On this long and complicated journey he has proved himself to be endlessly valuable, skilled at picking locks, siphoning fuel and reviving dead vehicles, discovering stores of resources in a resource-depleted landscape. He is not the sort of sidekick I ever would have predicted for myself, but the world has been reordered. I never used to think I’d have a dog.

“The knives are covered in blood,” I explain to Cortez. “I’m leaving them where I found them, for now.”

He glances at me over his shoulder. “Cow’s blood?”

“Maybe.”

“Pig?”

“Could be.”

He waggles his eyebrows insinuatingly. We’ve eaten what we brought, what we stumbled upon or bargained for along the way: snack-type food, jerky strips, a big thing of honey-roasted peanuts in tiny foil bags. We caught fish in the Finger Lakes in improvised nets, salted them, and ate those for five days. All we’ve been drinking is coffee, working our way through one massive sack of arabica beans. Cortez rigged up a manual pencil sharpener into a grinder; we measure out cups from the barrels of spring water we took with us from Massachusetts; we boil up the coffee in an old carafe over a camp stove, strain it through a mesh spatula into a hot/cold thermos. It takes forever. It tastes terrible.

“Can you make coffee?” I ask Cortez.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Great idea.”

Cortez stands, stretches, takes the necessary items from his golf bag and gets set up, while I think about blood. Two trails, one running out of the kitchenette and one running back.

Coffee on the boil, Cortez goes back to rummaging for treasure, working his way down the shelving system, lifting each object to the light, quickly assessing, evaluating, moving on.

“Training manual,” he says. “Porno mag. Empty shoebox. Sunglasses. Broken.” He tosses the mirrored state-trooper-style shades over his shoulder, shattering them further on the patterned-concrete floor of the garage. “Holsters. Could use these, maybe. Oh, goodness. Goodness gracious, Policeman. Binoculars.”

He holds them up, bulky and black, points them at me like a birdwatcher.

“Bad news,” he says. “You look like shit.”

He takes the binoculars. He takes a bag full of cell phone batteries. I’ve stopped asking Cortez what good it all is, all of the collecting and acquiring and sorting. It’s a game to him, a challenge: keep gathering up useful objects until the world caves in and no one has any use for anything.

I am aware of the possibility, of course, that it is Nico’s blood on the knife, in the sink, on the ground. It is too early to think about that, too early to reach that sort of conclusion.

The most likely scenario, after all, is that this blood is the blood of a stranger, and these knives are totally unrelated to my current investigation. It’s just some terrible act of violence among uncounted terrible acts of violence occurring at an accelerating rate. We saw a lot of this on our journey, met people who confessed, whether in tearful remorse or in fierce defiance, to some unconscionable deed. The old lady standing guard over her grandson in an abandoned grocery store, who whispered how she had shot a stranger for six pounds of frozen hamburger meat. The couple at the truck stop that caught someone trying to steal the Dodge pickup they’d been living in, and in the ensuing confrontation ran him over.

We called them red towns, the worst of the places, the communities that had fractured into chaos and lawlessness. We had different names for the different kinds of worlds that the world has become. Red towns: violence and grief. Green towns: pleasant, playing at make-believe. Blue towns: uneasy calm, people hiding. Maybe National Guard or regular army troops on scattered patrol. Purple towns, black towns, gray…

I cough into my fist; the claustrophobic garage smell is getting to me, the reek of ancient cigarettes and exhaust. A grimy concrete floor in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern. A thought is twitching to life. Dim and uncertain. I sniff again, drop down onto all fours, digging my knees and palms into the hard concrete floor.

“Policeman?”

I don’t answer. I take a crawling step forward, toward the middle of the room, head angled down, staring at the floor.

“Have you gone mad?” says Cortez, clutching a battered steel money box under his arm like a football. “If you’ve gone mad you’re useless, and I’ll have to eat you.”

“Can you help me?”

“Help you what?”

“Butts,” I say, peeling off my sport coat. “Please help me find cigarette butts.”

I crawl across the floor, from the back of the room out toward the garage doors, my shirt sleeves pushed up, my palms getting filthy. I use my magnifying glass, following the checkerboard pattern across the concrete: light squares, dark squares. After a moment Cortez shrugs, sets down the steel box, and we settle in, side by side like grazing cows, moving in slow patterns, staring at the floor.

There are plenty of butts, of course: the floor of the parking garage, like all such places, is littered with the stubs of dead cigarettes. We hunt through the dust and grime of the floor and gather up all we can find and then I come up to a squat and sort them into two piles, checking each one carefully, holding it up and squinting at it in the light before consigning it to its place. Possibles and not possibles. Cortez whistles while he works, occasionally murmuring “madness, madness.” Most of the cigarettes are either generic, having no marking on the filter, or home-rolled, just twists of thin white paper with crusts of tobacco leaf spilling out the side.

And then, after ten minutes—fifteen—

“There it is.”

There. I reach down and pluck up the grimy little twist of paper, the one I was looking for. I hold it up to the flat gray light. There.

“Ah,” says Cortez. “A cigarette butt. I knew we could do it.”

I don’t answer. I found it, as I knew in my secret policeman’s heart that I would. A single cigarette butt, snarled and torn, smashed to a ragged brown by the grind of a heel, shredded-leaf guts spilling out around the dirty wrinkle of the wrapper. I hold the stubbed-out butt carefully between two fingers like the broken body of an insect.

“She’s here.” I stand up. I look around the room. “She was here.”

Now it’s Cortez’s turn not to answer. He’s still staring at the floor—something else has caught his attention. My heart is heaving in my chest, swelling and receding like a tide.

The cigarette market, like all markets for addictive goods, was violently disrupted by the impending end of civilization: skyrocketing demand and vanishing supply. Most smokers, old and new, have made do with foul-tasting generics, or scrounged enough loose tobacco to roll their own. But my sister, my sister Nico, has managed somehow always to be in possession of her favorite brand.

I hold the butt up high. I sniff it. This object must be considered in combination with the plastic fork suspended in its struggle to hold open the door of the vending machine, and the conclusion to be heard from these two objects, these two small objects singing together, is that this is real. Poor addled Abigail didn’t pick the police station in Rotary, Ohio, at random from all the buildings in all the world. Nico really came here, she and her merry band of conspiracists and would-be heroes. I would almost say that she left the butt on purpose, maybe even kept smoking all these years on purpose, in defiance of my nagging, just so that she could leave this clue behind. Except I know that she kept smoking all these years because she was addicted to nicotine, and also because she enjoyed pissing me off.

“She was here,” I say again to Cortez, who is muttering to himself, feeling along the floor with a forefinger extended. I slide the butt into a baggie and carefully place it in my coat pocket. “She is here.”

“I’ll go you one better,” he says, looking up from the square of concrete he’s squatting on. “This is a trap door.”

I’ve been playing hide-and-seek with Nico for our entire lives.

The weekend after the funeral—the second funeral, our father’s, early in June of the year I turned twelve—the movers were roaming around the house, boxing up my little life, carrying out my stash of comic books and my baseball glove and my twin bed, all my worldly store lifted out to the truck in one trip. I realized with a start that I hadn’t seen my baby sister for hours. I flipped out, charged through the house in a panic, ducking past the movers, throwing open the doors of the dusty empty closets, charging down to the basement.

Out on the streets of Concord I clomped through patches of mud from the midsummer rain, up and down side streets, calling her name. I found Nico at last in White Park, giggling, hiding under the slide, getting sunburnt in a light summer dress, scratching her name in the dirt with a stick. I glowered and crossed my skinny arms. I was infuriated, already a roil of emotions from the move, the grief. Nico, age six, reached up and patted my cheek. “You thought I was gone, too, didn’t you, Hen?” Hopping up, taking my big hand between her two little ones. “You did, huh?”

And now here I am in Rotary, Ohio, less than a week to go, bent forward at the waist with my fingers twitching, pacing like a lunatic in a circle around Cortez the thief, staring at his broad back where he’s hunched over a trap door trying to figure how to lift it.

The secret door in the floor of the garage is a surprise, except it’s not a surprise. This is one of the things people are doing, people all over the world, digging holes or finding holes and climbing down inside them. The United States Army, according to rumor, has created vast networks of lead-lined bunkers for the evacuation of top brass and key executive branch officials, a reinforced underground universe extending from beneath the Pentagon all the way across Arlington. The city of West Marlborough, Texas, embarked on a three-month “all-city dig” to create a massive safe space for all city residents beneath a local high-school ball field.

The relevant experts, in general, have been politely skeptical of such enterprises—of all the governments, the neighborhoods, the millions of private citizens digging into their Cold War–style redoubts. As if one could ever dig deep enough to withstand the blast. As if you could take enough groceries down there with you to survive when the sun disappears and the animals all die.

“Son of a bitch,” mutters Cortez. He’s using my magnifying glass, peering, tapping the smooth stone floor with his big knuckles.

“What?” I say, and then erupt in a coughing fit, overcome by excitement, anxiety, exhaustion, dust. I don’t know what. My throat burns. I’m standing right behind him, peering over his shoulder, shifting on my feet. Time is passing while we stand here, minutes are rushing past like stars flying by at light speed in a science-fiction serial. I check the time on my Casio. It’s 9:45 already. Can that be right?

“Cortez,” I say. “Can you open the door or not?”

“It’s not a door,” he says, sweating, pushing his thick black hair out of his eyes. “That’s the problem.”

“What do you mean, it’s not a door?” I’m speaking too rapidly, too loudly. My words jangle back at me. I feel like I’m going crazy, just a little bit. “You said it was a door.”

“Mea culpa. A door has a handle.” He jabs his finger at the floor. “This is a lid. A cover. There is an opening in the ground here, probably for a staircase, and somebody covered it over.”

Cortez points to four places on the floor where he claims to see the ghostly remnants of post holes, the foundations of a stair rail. But even more telling, he says, are the four panels of the concrete itself: two dark and two light, laid more recently than all the others.

“That’s the lid,” he says. “Those four pieces are one piece. They had a hand mixer, they poured a slab, they stamped and stained it to match the pattern of the floor and cut the edges to fit, and then they lowered it in.” He hands me back my magnifying glass. “You see where it’s cut?”

I can’t, though. I can’t see any of this. I just see a floor. Cortez stands and cracks his back, turning all the way this way, then all the way the other. “The pattern was hand-corrected along the edges. The rest is machine-sawed. This here is done by hand. See?”

I squint at the floor; I open my eyes as wide as they can go. I’m so tired. Cortez sighs with weary amusement and then hustles over to the big garage door.

“Here,” he says, and pops the lock and flies it open. “You see that?”

And the room is suddenly alive with tiny particles, all around, millions of tiny pieces dancing in the empty air.

“Dust.”

“Yes indeedy. Concrete is just tiny stones packed very tight. Someone uses a chop saw or a walk-behind to correct the edges of a lid, for example, and it makes a lot of dust. Like this.”

“When?” I say. “When did they do it?”

“You’re going to hyperventilate, Policeman. Your head is going to fall off.”

“When was it?”

“Might have been yesterday. Might have been a week ago. Like I said—concrete makes a lot of dust.”

I squat down. I get up. I reach into my pocket, feel the photo of Nico, the fork, the cigarette butt now encased in a sandwich baggie. I squat again. My body refuses to be still. I feel coffee sluicing through me, bubbling black and nervous along my veins. The dust is stinging my eyes. I think I can see it now, the hairline fracture between the door and the floor. Nico is down there. Nico and the rest of them. She and her cadre arrived here and have built themselves some sort of ersatz headquarters, under a layer of smoothed rock in an old garage. Waiting down there for the next stage of the scheme to unfold—or have they given up, are they waiting now like ostriches, heads in the dirt below the station?

“Let’s put a handle on it,” I say to Cortez. “Lift it up.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would require strength, which we do not have.”

I look down at my body. I have always been a thin man, and now I am a thin man after a month of granola bars and coffee. Cortez’s weight loss has resolved his fighter’s frame to a coil of sinew, but he’s hardly Mr. Universe—stronger than me, in other words, but not strong.

“A handle doesn’t help,” he says. He is slowly rolling a cigarette of his own, layering in tobacco from a pouch he keeps in the golf bag.

“So what do we do?” I say, and he laughs, watching me pace.

“I’m thinking, man. I’m pondering. You keep walking in circles. Eventually you will fall over, and that will be amusing.”

I do it. He is joking, teasing me, but I do, I keep walking, I can’t stop, I circle the lid in the floor like an orbiting star. My thoughts run back to my sister’s close compatriot, the one I tried to track down in Concord: Jordan, last name unknown. Jordan was introduced to me by Nico at the University of New Hampshire, when she went there with me to help on a case; he held, she suggested, some vague but critical position in the hierarchy of her conspiracy. What struck me about Jordan was the ironic overlay in everything he said. While Nico’s relationship with their secret revolution was always so earnest—they really were going to save the world—with this kid Jordan I always got a sense that he was playacting, posing, having a grand old time. Nico didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, this attitude in him, and their relationship therefore was just one more thing to make me uneasy. The last time I saw Jordan, Nico was already gone, a helicopter had borne her away, and he gleefully hinted to me about more secrets, deeper levels, aspects of their intrigues to which Nico was not privy.

And then when I went back to find him, to demand of him where the hell she had gone, I found Abigail instead, baffled and abandoned Abigail, and from her I got here—to Ohio, to Rotary, to a door in the floor.

“We have to get down there.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” says Cortez. “It might be impossible.”

“We have to.”

Cortez blows his smoke rings and the both of us stare at the floor. Jordan is down there, I know that he is, and Nico is down there too, separated from me only by this layer of cold rock, and all we have to do is peel it up and out of the way. I breathe—I sing a line of something—I am trying to get my feverish and overextended mind to slow, stop galloping long enough to make a plan, develop a strategy, when my dog races into the room, skidding on his small heels, claws scrabbling on the concrete. There’s something wrong. He’s barking like mad, barking to wake the dead.

4.

“It’s probably a possum,” says Cortez, breathing hard as we charge like maniacs through the woods. “Stupid dog probably wants to show you a squirrel.”

It’s not a possum. It’s not a squirrel. That much I can tell from the way that Houdini is hurtling forward, all sparked up, racing and bounding despite that limp, a distinct stutter step as he careens through the undergrowth. We run after him, Cortez and I, through the dense woods that back up against the police station, crashing through the brush like the world is on fire. It’s not a possum or a squirrel.

We tumble down a westward slope, along the muddy bank of a small creek, deeper into the woods, and then at last we come out in a small clearing, a leafy mud-specked oval maybe twenty-five feet around. Cortez and I step over a line of high bushes to get in there while Houdini noses under, tearing new cuts in his hide, not caring. Cortez has a hatchet clutched tightly in one fist, and there is, I know, a sawed-off shotgun in the deep inside pocket of his long black coat. I draw my own weapon, the SIG Sauer, and hold it out ahead of me two-handed. The three of us form a semicircle at the edge of the clearing: man, dog, man, all panting, all staring at the body. It’s a girl, facedown in the dirt.

“Christ,” says Cortez. “Christ almighty.”

I don’t answer. I can’t breathe. I take a step into the clearing, steady myself. The image disappearing, reappearing, my vision clouding and unclouding. The girl is fully clothed: Denim skirt. Pale blue top. Tan sandals. Arms thrown out in front of her as if she had died swimming, or reaching for something.

“That her?” Cortez says quietly. In three strides I’m across the clearing to the body, and by the time I get there I know that it’s not—the hair is wrong, the height. My sister has never worn a jean skirt. I manage the word: “No.”

My body floods with relief—and then, immediately, guilt, crashing in like a second wave while the first is still ebbing. This girl is not my sister but she is somebody’s sister, or daughter, or friend. She is somebody’s something. She was. Facedown in the dirt in the woods, arms extended. Caught after a chase. Six days to the end.

Cortez steps up next to me, the hatchet clenched like a caveman’s club. We’re a quarter mile into the stillness of the forest and you can no longer see the one-story police station behind us, or the small town of Rotary that is down the hill on the other side of the woods. We might as well be miles deep into timberland, lost in a green-brown fairy world, surrounded by wildflowers and mud and the curled yellow leaves that have drifted down to coat the forest floor.

I kneel beside the body of the girl and roll her over, gingerly brush the dirt and wood chips off her cheeks and out of her eyes. She’s Asian. Pretty. Fragile features. Black hair, pale cheeks. Thin pink lips. Small gold stud earrings, one in each ear. She’s been in a fight; her face shows multiple lacerations and bruises, including a black eye, the right eye, swollen almost shut. And the girl’s throat is cut from end to end, one side to the other, a terrible slash beginning at a point just beneath her right ear and traveling in a curved line to a point just below her left. The sight is flatly horrific, the red vision of her throat’s insides, wet and raw, gashed out of the pale white flesh. Blood is dried in clustered drips along the length of the wound.

Cortez takes one knee in the mud beside me and murmurs: “Our Father, who art in heaven.” I glance at him questioningly and he looks up, smiling but uneasy.

“I know,” says Cortez. “I’m full of surprises.”

I’m looking at the corpse, at her neck, thinking about the rack over the kitchen sink, butcher’s knife, paring knife, cleaver, everything splattered and stained with blood, and then I am about to stand up and she breathes—a tiny but distinct movement of her chest, and then another. Rise and fall.

“Whoa—” I say, “Hey—” and Cortez says “What?” while I scramble to find her pulse point, inches below her Adam’s apple, under the horrible wound. There it is, the faint cry of a pulse, a thready gallop under my fingertips.

She has no business being alive, this kid, throat slit and lying in the woods, but there you go, here she is. I bend my head down close and listen to the shallow breaths. She’s desperately dehydrated, tongue thick and dry and lips cracked.

Very carefully, very gently, I lift the girl and arrange her weight in my arms, supporting her head in the crook of my arm like a newborn baby’s.

“It’s my fault,” I whisper, and Cortez says, “What?”

“It’s all my fault.”

We’re too late. That’s the feverish understanding that’s burning its way up my neck and my face, standing here cradling this victim: whatever happened out here has already happened and we missed it and it’s my fault. We took too long to get here from Concord, made too many stops, always my decision, always my fault. A girl, ten miles outside of Seneca Falls, she came screaming out of the woods beside the roadway: she and her brother had been trying to free the animals from the local zoo, the poor beasts were trapped and starving, and now a tiger had cornered the brother and run him up a tree. All of this one long terrified rush of words, and Cortez said it was a trap and to keep driving the cart—we were in a golf cart, we found it at a country club in Syracuse—but I said I couldn’t do that, I said we have to help her and he asked why and I said “she reminds me of my sister.” Cortez laughed, opened his door with the sawed-off trained on the girl. “Everything reminds you of your sister.”

The episode with the tiger cost us half a day, and there were more, too many more, red towns and gray towns. In Dunkirk we pulled a family from a burning apartment building in the fiery wreck of downtown but then we had nowhere to take them, no way to offer them assistance of any kind. We just left them on the firehouse steps.

It’s spitting rain, ugly and cold. Late morning. The dog is moving in anxious circles among the trees, the dirt, the clumps of yellow leaves. I hold the sleeping girl close in my arms like a honeymooner, start the walk back to the police station. Cortez goes ahead of us, swinging the hatchet, clearing brush and branches from the path. Houdini limping along behind.

5.

We called it Police House because that was the name the kids picked for it, a big isolated country house in western Massachusetts, near a dot on the map called Furman. A bunch of cops and retired cops and their kids and friends have banded together there to live out the last run of days in relative security, in the company of like-minded individuals. That’s where I was living, along with Trish McConnell and her kids, along with a handful of other old friends and new acquaintances, before I left to find my sister.

Among those in residence at Police House, on the top floor, is a tough old bird with close-cropped gray hair named Elda Burdell, known as the Night Bird, or just the Bird. Officer Burdell retired at the rank of detective sergeant two years before I joined the force; at Police House she has eased into the roles of unofficial dean and resident sage. Not the leader, but the person who sits in the attic in her armchair drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from a stack of cases she showed up with, dispensing advice and wise counsel about everything. The kids ask her which berries are safe to eat. Officer Capshaw and Officer Katz had the Bird settle a bet about what the best lures are for catching trout out of the fast-moving stream a quarter mile from the house.

Late on August 23, the day after my trip to Concord to visit Abigail, I took the long walk up the stairs to the attic to discuss a couple of matters related to my planned departure.

The Night Bird offers me a Pabst, which I decline, and we speak quickly about the necessary arrangements, and then she gazes at me with a half smile while I linger at the doorway, one foot in, one foot out.

“Something else on your mind, son?”

“Well—” I hesitate, rubbing my mustache, feeling ridiculous. “I just wanted your take on something.”

“Fire away.” She leans forward with her hands draped between her legs, and I launch in, I give it to her as briefly as I can: the rogue scientist formerly attached to Space Command, the supposed nuclear stockpile waiting somewhere in the United Kingdom, the standoff burst.

The Night Bird holds up two fingers, takes a short sip from her beer can, and says, “I’ll stop you there. You’re going to ask if a standoff burst is plausible.”

“You’ve heard of it?”

“Oh boy, oh boy, Officer. I’ve heard of all of them.” The Night Bird sets down the Pabst and reaches out a thick palm. “Hand me that, will ya? The red binder there.”

As it turns out, Officer Burdell’s made a study of all the various scenarios; she’s been collecting all the sober theories and glittery-eyed Hail Mary pitches and gauzy counterfactuals, all the off-the-wall ideas presented as possible world savers.

“The standoff burst, kid, you’re talking about a top ten fantasy. Top five, maybe. I mean, you got, what, you got your push/pull fantasies, your gravity tractor fantasies, your Enhanced Yarkovsky Effect fantasies.” She flaps open the binder to a particular page, gazes with amusement at the long columns of figures. “People do get a hard-on for that Enhanced Yarkovsky Effect. Probably the funny name. But it won’t work. They never got the numbers right on all that magnetic field shit.”

I nod, okay. All the science is boring me, I want yes or no. I want answers. “So, but the—the standoff burst?”

The Night Bird clears her throat, cocks her head at me sour for a second, not liking to be rushed.

“Yes,” she says. “Same story. It would take calibration and it would take hardware. The calibration, maybe, maybe this Space Command guy has some good numbers, maybe he’s figured out the target velocity and that, but no one’s got the hardware. Gotta have a highly specialized delivery system, built specific to this thing. To the material strength, the porosity, the velocity. Maybe there’s a chance someone builds the right launcher, does the math, if the sumbitch was a couple years out. If it was ten years out, you could nudge it enough that by the time it gets close it sails by, it’s a miss.” She angles forward in the armchair. “But you’re telling me someone thinks they’re gonna do it with a standoff burst now?” She looks at her watch, shakes her head. “What are we—a month? Month and a half?”

“Forty-two days,” I say. “So you’re saying there is no chance?”

“No. Listen. Officer. I am saying there is less than that. There is less than no chance.”

I thanked her politely for everything and went downstairs and finished packing.

“You know, I hate to say it,” says Cortez, carefully constructing a hand-rolled cigarette. “But this is a very attractive girl.”

I look at him sharply. There is nothing in either his tone of voice or his salacious expression to indicate that he does, in fact, hate to say it. He’s needling me is what he is doing, saying exactly the thing I will find most unsettling. Other people have enjoyed teasing me in the same way: my old friends, Detectives McGully and Culverson. Nico, of course. I get it. I know what I’m like.

“I’m just saying.” Cortez lights a smoke and enjoys a long, satisfied inhale, contemplating the girl’s slim body with open appreciation. I don’t say anything, not wanting to give Cortez the satisfaction of even a joking rejoinder, no mild “ha-ha” or straight-man rolling of my eyes. I scowl, waving cigarette smoke away from the unconscious young woman, and he stubs the thing out on the floor.

“Oh, dear Palace,” he says, and he yawns and stands up. “I’m going to miss you when I’m in heaven and you’re not.”

I’m sitting on the toilet, beside the girl, whom we’ve laid out on the thin bare mattress, her hands tucked at her sides. The bed is just inside the bars, inside the actual cell part of the holding cell, along with the toilet and the sink and mirror. Cortez is on the other side of the room, the good-guy side, in the thin space between the bars and the door leading out to the hallway. That’s the only place I could find a ceiling hook for the saline bag, so that’s where it’s hung: on the good-guy side of the room, the sterile fluid dripping out of the bag, looping down through its tubing, through the bars and into the girl’s arm. When we left Police House, the Night Bird assembled a first-aid kit for me: reams of gauze and boxes of aspirin and bottles of hydrogen peroxide, plus two liters of saline in two one-liter bags and an IV start kit. When I told her I had no idea how to administer it, she scoffed and said just follow the instructions on the kit. She said it practically administers itself.

Cortez follows my gaze up to the bag of fluid. “Doesn’t look like it’s coming out, does it?”

“Well, it’s dripping at the top, see?”

“Did you do it right?”

“I don’t know. But it’s dripping.”

“What happens if you did it wrong?”

I don’t respond, but the answer is that she won’t get fluid and she’ll die. I check the Casio and it’s 4:45 in the afternoon. The watch was given to me, along with a rushed hug, by Trish McConnell’s daughter Kelli. “Mom is mad at you,” she said, and I said, “I know,” and she said, “I am, too,” but nevertheless she snuck the watch into my pocket, and I’ve been wearing it. When you press the side button it glows a pleasant blue-green. I love the watch.

This girl does not appear to have been sexually assaulted. I checked—swiftly and gingerly and with the minimum possible physical contact, murmuring apologies, but I checked. Neither does she have abrasions at the wrists or elbows that would be consistent with having been bound. Just the throat, plus the contusions and lacerations to the face, along with other signs of violent struggle: bruises on her knuckles and shins, two torn fingernails. I collected tissue samples from under her nails with a tweezer and placed them carefully in one of the sandwich bags. Detective Palace’s Miniature Roving Evidence Locker. I cleaned and dressed the wound to her throat, applying Neosporin in a thin glaze along the wide obscene mouth of the cut. I ended up using too much gauze, extending the bandaging on either side well beyond the edges of the wound, reaching around to the back of her neck. It looks like her head has been cut off and reattached. The girl’s hair is perfectly black, falling away in two matted curtains from her face.

I stand up from the toilet, turn away for a minute, waver on my feet. I’m starving. Exhausted. In my hand is the sleeping girl’s bracelet. It was in her shirt-front pocket, not on her wrist. Delicate fake gold, the sort of cheap token you get at a mall chain store, the kind of thing boys buy for girls in high school. There are charms dangling from it: a music note, a pair of ballet slippers. A tiny silver cluster of flowers, delicate and lovely.

“Irises?” I murmur to myself.

“Lilies,” says Cortez.

“You think?” I feel the small weight of the chain in my palm. “Maybe they’re roses.”

“Lilies,” he says again and yawns.

I study the girl’s blank face and decide that her name is Lily. That’s why she has the bracelet. I need for her to have a name, for right now.

“My name is Henry Palace,” I whisper to Lily, who can’t hear. Cortez gazes at me with amusement. I ignore him. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

She doesn’t answer. She’s unconscious. I’m not sure what else to do. I have a weird sudden need to lie down on that mattress myself; a weird wish that it was me instead of her. I watch her breathing: shallow breath in, shallow breath out. I hold the bracelet in my palm, dull in the dirty gold light of the small gray cell.

Cortez pushes off from the wall and leans against the bars and starts talking, absently, casually.

“My mother was in a coma once. State hospital. Just two days. They brought her lunch and dinner, even though she was eating through a tube. Oversight, I guess. Or some dumb rule. Me and my brother ate it. It was good, too, compared to the food she usually provided for us.”

He laughs. I give him a half smile. I am never quite sure, when Cortez rolls out one of his long, involved stories, how true it is, how embellished, how much fabricated from whole cloth. The first time I met Cortez he was holed up in an ersatz warehouse on Garvins Falls Road, sitting on a pile of loot, which was subsequently taken from him by his erstwhile romantic and business partner, Ellen. He has told me three versions of that story, all with substantively different details: she caught him unawares and chased him out with a hatchet; she tricked him in a bargain; she had another lover, who showed up with some friends and cleaned the place out.

He’s wandered back into the cell now and he stands beside the small toilet, examining his wide, uneven face in the mirror. I ask him how his mother ended up in the coma.

“Oh.” He cracks his knuckles. “You know. I cut school one afternoon to go home and smoke some weed, and I found her and her boyfriend, and the boyfriend was choking her. His name was Kevin. He had been a marine. He was choking her with two hands, like this.” Cortez turns from the mirror and mimes the gesture, knuckles knitted together around an imaginary neck, eyes bulging.

“That’s awful.”

“He was a bad man, Kevin.”

“So she was choked, and lost consciousness?”

He makes a vague gesture. “She was on crack also. They both were.”

“Oh.” My eyes flicker back to the sleeping girl. “What about her? I’m presuming an OD.”

“Bite your tongue.” Cortez presses his hand to his chest, mock horrified. “She’s not that kind of girl. Someone slashed her. She bled out. She—I don’t know. Her organs shut down.”

“No.” I’ve been turning this over, trying to remember the medicine of it. Not my specialty. “If a person bleeds enough to lose consciousness then they keep bleeding until they die, unless someone is present to staunch the wound.”

Cortez frowns. “You sure?”

“Yes. No.” I am trying to remember. “I don’t know.”

I shake my head in self-disgust. Why don’t I know? In five years, I might get to be good at this, at being a policeman. Ten years, maybe.

Cortez turns back to the mirror. I squeeze my knuckles into my eyes, trying to resurrect lessons from basic first-responder trainings. Academy courses, professional readiness seminars. The throat is a narrow place clustered with vital structures—meaning that, whatever else has befallen this girl, she is in one respect extremely lucky: whoever sawed into her throat stopped shy of transecting the carotid artery, stopped shy of the jugular vein, the delicate piping of the trachea. A simple blood test could reveal whether some illicit substance is additionally involved here, but at this point a simple blood test is a concept from an alien universe, it’s science fiction. Mass spectrometry and immunoassays and gas-liquid chromatography, all of it belongs now to a bygone world.

And the fact is that what Cortez said actually has the ring of truth. Not that kind of girl. But neither was Peter Zell that kind of guy. Nobody is the kind of person they used to be.

I study Lily’s calm face, and then look up again at the saline bag. I think some is gone now. I think she’s beginning to rehydrate. I hope so.

“Don’t worry, Sherlock,” says Cortez. “We’ll just wait for her to wake up and we’ll ask her what happened. Oh, unless it takes more than a week. If it takes more than a week, we’re fucked.”

He laughs again and this time I give it to him, I laugh too, I roll my eyes and shake my head. Next week, we’ll all be dead. This station will be a pile of ash, and all of us inside it. Ha-ha-ha. I get it.

I leave Lily sleeping and Cortez smoking and tromp back through the woods to the crime scene.

If Detective Culverson were here, he would do a quiet, focused reenactment—walk it through, play all the parts. The girl was splayed out, facedown, pointing westward. Which means she was running from this direction, tripped here perhaps—fell forward this way. I pantomime her last desperate running steps, throw my hands forward like Superman. Imagine falling and landing, do it again, falling and landing, sensing behind me the shadowy form of my pursuer, knife in hand, bearing down.

There are plenty of distinct footprints in the thick mud of the clearing, but they’re from two hours ago, from us: the squared-off heel of my traveling Doc Martens, the wedge of Cortez’s cowboy boots. I can even see the circuitous routes of Houdini’s paw prints, dancing circles around the scene. But the ground around the girl is an indistinct mush of scuff marks, ambiguous indentations, ground-down leaves and clots of mud. Black traces in the surrounding brown. All signs of the assailant buried or washed away from the crime scene by the wet weather of the past two days.

I trudge back through the woods to the station, emerge onto the gravelly driveway that horseshoes through what was once a neat municipal lawn and is now an ugly field. Uneven beds of zinnias surrounded by overgrown grass like an advancing army. In the center of the lawn are two flagpoles, two flags rustling listlessly in the light rain: the United States of America, the state of Ohio. I search as carefully as I can through the lawn, dividing it into a grid in my mind and moving through sector by sector. I find things that might be clues and might not be: a mound of peanut shells, a tangled half-foot length of twine. In a sector just north of the Ohio state flag I find three evenly spaced divots in the mud that look to have been left by tent poles.

When I’ve completed the grid I stand for a long time under the flags with my hands on my hips, rain in my eyes like tears, rain dribbling down my nose and chin. There is a level of tiredness where your body feels tender, like a bruise. Your throat hurts; your eyes sting. The hunger intensifies it—you feel shriveled, sort of, bent, burnt, hardened. Like the crust of something, the rind.

Budgeted for today I’ve got three little bags of the honey-roasted peanuts, plus a green apple from a basket we took from a Residence Inn in Penfield. I eat one of the apples rapidly, like a horse. I almost eat one of the bags of peanuts and then I decide to save it for later.

Two overlapping trails of blood; two passages down the corridor; one going out and one coming back.

Lily is attacked inside the kitchenette. She runs, blood singing out of her neck, perpetrator chasing after, and manages to lose him in the woods. Collapses in the clearing where we found her. Assailant goes back inside, blood still dripping off his three knives. Hangs them up and disappears.

Disappears, though, what does that mean? It means he goes underground. Through the hole in the floor of the garage.

Right? Detective Palace, isn’t that right?

Right, except how does the determined and murderous perpetrator fail to track down a defenseless, hundred-pound girl, stumbling through the woods and bleeding from the neck?

Right—except why, and how, is he juggling three knives?

I stare up at the sky and clench my teeth and fight back a fresh wave of panic and guilt and desperation because I will probably never know. This mystery, along with my sister’s, will remain unsolved forever. It is the right place, the police station in Rotary, Ohio, it’s the right place but now it’s the wrong time, we’re too late, we didn’t get here in time to stop this girl from being attacked and we didn’t get here in time to stop my sister from slipping down through the earth and away. My fault. All my fault.

I rub my forehead with the heel of my hand, staring at the edge of the station lawn where it becomes the woods, seeing her, our nameless sleeping girl, racing through the darkness, hand clutched at her throat, trying to scream, unable, blood exploding from her wound.

It was not a trap after all. There really was a small-town zoo and these two well-meaning foolish teenagers really had freed the animals and the girl’s brother really was now trapped by a tiger. This was in early September, about two weeks ago, sixteen days maybe, halfway through our tortuous journey. Seneca Falls was a gray town, uneasy calm, people out in the streets, some armed, some not armed, some in groups and some alone, everybody grave and on edge. Ten miles out of town is where we spotted the girl waving her arms, and we put her in the golf cart and drove at top speed, shivering and jolting over back roads to this tiny zoo and there he was, tank top, jean shorts, barely sixteen and scared out of his head, quavering out on a top branch, his fidgeting weight bending the branch low to where the animal was snarling up at him. Mangy coat stretched thin over the rickety ribs.

“What are we going to do?” said the girl, and I said, “Well—” and Cortez brought down the animal with one shotgun blast in the center of the nearer flank. The boy yelped and dropped out of the tree into the dirt, beside the dead animal. Gore and steam rising out of its exploded orange side. Cortez jammed his gun away and looked at me and said, “Can we go now?”

“Wait, wait,” the sister said, rushing after us as we clambered into the golf cart. “What are we supposed to do now?”

“If I were you,” said Cortez, “I would eat that tiger.”

“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED… DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”

Cortez is in the dispatch room, standing mesmerized in front of the old foot-switch RadioCOMMAND, a solid black piece of dispatch-specific communications equipment, relaying the same emergency-band warning message over and over. It’s a calm voice, the kind of dull affectless tone you used to hear waiting for tech support: press one if you’re calling for help setting up your device…

“Check this baby out,” says Cortez. “Still kicking.”

“Oh, sure,” I say, feeling a rich wash of nostalgia. “These machines are indestructible. And it would have been installed with multiple battery backups.” I’m remembering the same console at Concord PD. It was rendered obsolete by the digital laptop systems that were installed a couple years before I took the oath, but somehow no one ever wheeled it out of Dispatch, and it sat there in the corner, black and shiny and immovable, a monument to traditional police work.

The message coming out of the Rotary RadioCOMMAND shifts: “FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES… FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES…” and then the lady starts to list them, good old-fashioned Norman Rockwell town names: “CONESVILLE… ZANESVILLE… DEVOLA…”

I run my finger along the dusty top of the machine. It’s a beautiful piece of police equipment, the RadioCOMMAND console, it really is.

“FIRST-AID CENTERS HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED IN THE FOLLOWING COMMUNITIES…”

We stand there side by side, Cortez and I, listening to the charmless recital of town names. It is creating this low wistful feeling in my heart, the woman’s voice, the drone of the machine, and I think it may simply be that I miss information. For most of my life the world was awash with news, with reports of things happening; and then in the last year they blipped off the radar, one by one, the Concord Monitor and the New York Times and then television, the whole concept of television, and the Internet with its ceaseless froth and churn, all of it just gone. For a while back in Concord, before my house burned down and I left, I had a ham radio tuned to someone named Dan Dan the Radio Man, and I listened to him all through the Mayfair Commission hearings. Dan Dan reported out the last round of IPSS legislation, hurriedly passed by the rump Congress, nationalizing grain silos and redesignating all national parks as camps for the internally displaced.

On the road you could get only the swirl of gossip and unconfirmed reports, the nervous trading of rumors, speculation, and fantasy. Someone says that the Hoover Dam has been dynamited by downstream Nevadans desperate for fresh water. Someone waves a paper, supposedly a copy of one signed by the president, declaring the United States to be “a sovereign and enduring nation, retaining in perpetuity its privileges over all territory currently encompassed.” Someone says that the city of Savannah has been “taken” by catastrophe immigrants from Laos, who have turned the town into a fortress and are shooting white people on sight; someone else says no way, it’s Roanoke where that happened, it’s totally Roanoke, and the CIs are from Ethiopia.

And now here we are, this is what’s left of the outside world: packaged sandwiches and Band-Aids are being handed out under a tent somewhere in Apple Grove, Ohio.

“THE ‘BUCKEYES HELPING BUCKEYES’ PROGRAM WILL CONTINUE THROUGH IMPACT AND BEYOND,” says the RadioCOMMAND. “THE ‘BUCKEYES HELPING BUCKEYES’ PROGRAM WILL CONTINUE THROUGH IMPACT AND BEYOND.”

I turn to head back outside, and a great rush of sparkles and stars paint the inside of my eyelids, and I stumble and catch the doorjamb and hold myself steady.

“You okay?” say Cortez, and I wave over my shoulder, I’m fine, here I go. But when I let go of the doorjamb and try to walk again I get another fireworks head rush, and this time I’m seeing bloody splatter patterns burned across my retinas. A girl facedown in a field. A door in the floor. A rack of red knives behind a red sink. A candy machine emptied of its candy like a gutted animal.

“Palace?”

I take a step—I’m very tired. I fall down.

6.

“Henry. Hey. Get up.”

That voice. I wake up and that’s it—mystery solved. Nico is simply present, her eyes flashing in the darkness like a cat’s. She is kneeling at my side where I’m lying on the ground, waking me up like she used to wake me up to make her breakfast, poking at my chest with two fingers, sticking her face right up close into my face. “Henry. Henry. Hen. Hen. Henry. Hey. Hen.”

She jabs a thumb over her shoulder, at Lily, the unconscious girl next to me on the thin jail-cell mattress. Cortez must have hauled me from the dispatch room and laid me down beside her in the bed.

“Who’s your friend?” says Nico.

I start to talk, to say oh, Nico, I thought you were dead but she puts one finger over her lips to hush me, and I obey, I hush, I stare at her in silence. The smell of Cortez’s cigarette lingers in the room.

“So, listen,” says Nico, and just the sound of her voice is forming the heat of tears in my eyes. “It’s happening. It’s a go.” She looks exactly as she did the day of the yearbook photo, the picture in my jacket pocket: she’s grown her hair back out and she’s wearing her glasses again, her old ones, from when she was in high school. I can’t believe she even still has them. I want to leap up and hug her. I’ll put her on the handlebars of the bike, I’ll put Houdini in the wagon to ride behind us. I’ll take her back home.

“Everything went exactly as planned,” she’s saying. “They brought him down here. That scientist, the one I told you about? We’ve got him. We’re going to England in the morning, and he and the team he knows there will initiate the standoff burst. Show that asteroid who’s boss.” I mouth the words back to her, astonished: “Show that asteroid who’s boss.” She smiles. Her teeth glow white. “It’s all going to be fine,” she says.

I have objections, I have a lot of questions, but Nico presses one flat hand over my mouth, shaking her head, flashing impatience.

“I’m telling you, Hen. I’m telling you. It’s all wrapped up like a beef burrito.” One of the dopey expressions our father used to use, one his favorites. “It’s all squared away. Nothing to worry about.”

This is incredible. Incredible! They did it. Nico did it. She saved the world.

“Listen, though. In the meantime, keep an eye on your goon. I don’t trust him.”

My goon. Cortez.

They never had the pleasure of meeting, those two. They would have liked each other. But Nico never met him. Never heard of him. A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes out into my body like deep-blue blood. It’s not real. I’m dreaming, and as soon as I know that I am dreaming, Nico fades like a Dickens ghost and is replaced by my grandfather, sallow and sunken, hollowed-out cheeks and staring eyes, sitting in his ancient leather armchair sucking on an American Spirit, muttering to himself.

“Dig a hole,” he says. “Dig a hole.”

The smoke is real. Fresh cigarette smoke, rolling down the real police station hallway through the thin cell bars and into my dream. My grandfather really did smoke American Spirits, the same as Nico. Or, rather, Nico smokes them, the same as him. He would curse after each one, say “stupid goddamn things” even as he drew the next one from the pack, fidgeting it with irritation between two old fingers. A man who did not like to enjoy things.

It’s not him smoking now; he’s been dead some years. It’s Cortez, somewhere in the building, working on another butt.

Neither was I really on the thin mattress, tucked in snugly beside our sleeping assault victim; I’m right where I fell down, on the floor in Dispatch, in the shadow of the RadioCOMMAND. I can feel it, still, the warm dream feeling of her hand pressed flat over my mouth, Nico’s hand.

I stand quickly, then buckle from the pins and needles in my legs, reach out and steady myself on the wall with a flat hand. It’s 5:21. It’s morning. How long did I sleep? I follow the curling stink of the smoke and find Cortez back in the cop-car garage, squatting in the center and examining the ground. Our portable coffee rig is erected on one of the shelves, stray grounds clinging in clusters around the mouth of the urn. There’s a thermos at Cortez’s side with steam rising around its edges, mingling with the cigarette smoke.

“Oh, good morning,” he says, without looking up.

“We have to get down there.”

“No kidding.” He grunts, slides down onto his stomach. “I’m working on it.”

“Can we get down there?”

“I’m working on it,” he says again. “Have some coffee.”

I find my steel thermos on the shelf behind me, the one with my name Sharpied on the side, and I pour myself a cup. My dream was obvious wish fulfillment, a classic: Nico’s alive, the threat of the asteroid is ended, Earth survives, I survive. But what about my grandfather, muttering from his deathbed, “Dig a hole”? His actual last words. He said that. Cortez has his face against the floor, one eye opened, one eye closed, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth while he slowly runs the claw of his hammer along the concrete, squinting at the invisible fracture between the lid and the surrounding floor.

I sip my coffee; it’s hot and bitter and black. I wait ten seconds. “So what do you think? Can we get down there?”

“You’re a very focused individual.”

“I know. So what do you think?”

He just laughs, and I stop, I wait, I demand patience of myself. Cortez wants the same thing I do, as badly as I do. I want to get into the hole because that’s where my sister is, my sister or individuals possessing information as to her whereabouts; Cortez wants to get into the hole because it is there. He wants in because he is locked out. His hair is a mess, out of its ponytail, rolling in tangled clumps down his back. I’ve never asked him, in so many words, why he came along on this fool’s journey in search of my errant sister, but I think this is the answer: to do things like this, to do what he loves with what time is left. I am a question mark pointed at a secret, Cortez is a tool aimed at the stubborn places of the world.

“So?” I say. “Can you—”

“Yes.” He heaves himself to standing and flicks his cigarette away, adding one more butt to our gathered piles.

“Yes? How? How?”

“Wait and I’ll tell you.” He smiles and then digs out tobacco for a fresh smoke, pats his pants for papers, rolls the thing slowly, torturing me. And then, at last: “It’s a wedge, not a flat lid, is my guess, which means we couldn’t lift it up even if we weren’t a couple of skeletons.”

“So?”

“So we crack it instead. First choice is a gas-powered jackhammer, which we don’t have and won’t get.”

I’m nodding, nodding like crazy, and my mind is running and gunning, ready to roll. This is what I want. Specifics. Answers. An agenda. I’ve set down my coffee, I’m ready to run out of here and go get what we need.

“Second choice?” I say.

“Second choice is a sledgehammer.” He takes a long drag on the cigarette, grins languorously while I wait in desperation. “And I know where to get one.”

“Where?”

“Why, at the store, of course.”

At last—at last—he explains. He clocked the hammer when we rummaged through a SuperTarget two days ago, the last stop we made, three highway exits before Rotary. The SuperTarget was among five other stores, massive and fortresslike, spread out across a vast parking lot: a Hobby Lobby, a Home Depot, a Kroger grocery, a Cheesecake Factory.

“It was a Wilton,” Cortez says. “Big twelve-pounder. Good grip on it.” He’s leaning against the wall, shaking his head. “And I left it behind. I remember, because I picked it up and I almost took it but then I didn’t. I thought, we won’t use it. It’ll weigh down the wagon and we just don’t need it.” He sighs and exhales wistfully, like a man dreaming of a lost lover. “But I remember it. A big lovely Wilton with a fiberglass handle. Do you remember it?”

“I—sure.” I’m not sure. I remember the SuperTarget pretty well, rows and rows of empty shelves, scented candles and bath towels scattering the smudged tile floors, plumbing fixtures smashed on the ground like broken toys. The grocery aisle ravaged as if by packs of beasts. A big sign, must have been months old, that said NO MORE AMMUNITION THANK YOU SO MUCH.

“But what if it’s gone?” I say. “What if someone else has taken it?”

“Well, then we won’t have it,” Cortez says. “Just like now.”

I chew on the end of my mustache. The point of the sarcasm is that if we go in search of the sledgehammer and don’t find it, we will have lost nothing, but in fact he is wrong, because we will have lost time. Time is what we will have lost. How long to get down there on the bike, how many hours to find the hammer, to secure it to the wagon, to bike it back?

Cortez knows exactly where it is. He remembers the aisle and the shelf: aisle 9, shelf 14. That’s how his mind operates. It’s in the rear of the store, past the gardening supplies and the plumbing section. I hear it again in his voice as he describes the route, that deep vein of regret, for having left the hammer behind, for having been caught for once in his life without the necessary tool for the job.

“You stay here,” I tell him. “You watch the hole.”

“Okay,” he says, saluting me, settling cross-legged in the center of the garage. “I’ll watch the hole.”

On my way out I stop in the holding room, gratified to see that the 1.5-liter bag of saline solution is empty, sagging and curling at the top like a flattened balloon. The area around the needlestick in Lily’s extended right arm seems just fine also, no purple radius of traumatized tissue around the entry point. Lily, or whatever her name is. Poor girl. Somebody’s something. I step into the cell with her and run my finger gently along the length of her lips; they’re dry still but not nearly so dry, not deathly dry. She’s taking fluid.

“Good job, kid,” I say to her. “Good for you.”

Except for the not inconsiderable problem that if Lily is taking fluid she should be passing it, and she is not. There’s no urine, which is warning me of something but what exactly I don’t know, because my medical training is limited and specific, first responder material, crime scene material: administering rescue breaths and patching wounds and minimizing blood loss. Piecing together bedside medical clues is uncharted territory. It’s a crossword puzzle in a language I don’t know.

I stand up on a chair and I carefully unhook the bag and switch it out, and that’s all she wrote for my saline-solution supply. Whatever else is going on with this girl, I have reached the limits of my ability to affect medical intervention. At this point her condition has become binary; she will either die or not.

“You’re going to be okay,” I tell her. “You’re going to be fine.”

And that’s it, I’m ready to go, except for a sharp jag of memory, a flash from last night’s dream: Nico, scowling and untrusting, whispering urgently, keep an eye on your goon.

Disturbed, uneasy, I look back down the hallway at the garage, where he is sitting, smoking, waiting. It’s not fair; it was a dream; Nico doesn’t even know the man. But then neither do I, exactly. He is good company, and I have taken advantage of his various competencies, but I suddenly feel how far I am from really knowing him—certainly from knowing him enough to trust him.

And meanwhile, the girl: asleep, vulnerable, alone. I picture Cortez’s crooked smile, his eyes dancing along Lily’s recumbent figure, admiring her like a bowl of fruit.

It’s an old-fashioned jailer’s key they’ve got here, hanging on an old-fashioned hook. I push closed the door of the cell area, give it a good shake to make sure it’s closed and locked. Then I take the key off the hook and toss it through the bars, where it lands and skitters to the back wall of the cell.