Countdown City tlp-2

by Ben H. Winters

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

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

  “No, thanks.”

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

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

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

  “For what, ma’am?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No. Forget it. Thank you.”

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

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

  “Good morning,” I say.

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

  * * *

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

  I check my watch. “Come on.”

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

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

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

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

  “Really?”

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

  “Sergeant who—Gonzales?”

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

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

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

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “Army guy?”

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

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got enough to eat?”

  “I’m fine. I’m working on this case.”

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

  “Missing person.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “His workplace?”

  “Pizza restaurant.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yeah. A state trooper.”

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

  “Only if—”

  “You asshole.”

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

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

  “Wilentz.”

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

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

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

  “Poorly.”

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

  “I get it.”

  “Do you? I cannot lose my job.”

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

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

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Really, I’m sorry.”

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

  “Yes?”

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

  “Sure,” I say. “Sounds good.”

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

  “Hey.”

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

  “Right.”

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

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

  “Cavatone.”

  “He was a trooper?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

  I come here every couple days. I don’t knock on the door, I don’t go inside. I stand across the street or skulk through the mud-splattered alley behind the store, leaning in toward the open windows to hear her voice, catch a glimpse of her. Today I slouch down low on a bus bench across the street from Next Time Around with a six-month-old issue of Popular Science held up in front of my eyes like a spy.

  The last time I spoke to Nico Palace it was April, and she was standing on my porch in a jean jacket, revealing with defiance and pride how she had taken advantage of her credulous policeman older brother, gulled me into using my law-enforcement connections to gain sensitive information about security at the New Hampshire National Guard facility on Pembroke Road. She had used me, not to mention her husband, Derek, who was likely executed or remanded to permanent custody as the result of her maneuvering. I was astonished and furious and I told her so, and Nico ass
ured me—breathless with self-importance—that her machinations were all in the service of a profoundly important objective. She stood on my porch, smoking one of her American Spirits, eyes glittering with conspiracy, and insisted that she and her anonymous companions were working to save us all.

  She wanted me to ask for the details, and I would not give her that satisfaction. Instead, I told her that this project, whatever it was, was the worst kind of dangerous nonsense, and we have not spoken since.

  And yet here I am, turning the pages of Popular Science, reading for the millionth time about the soil composition under the Indonesian sea, and what that means for the ejecta that will be blasted into our atmosphere at impact—here I am, waiting to assure myself that Nico is safe. Once she was gone for two days, and I was anxious enough about her absence to spend three miserable hours crouched in that filthy back alley, listening through the windows until one of the scumbags within mentioned to another that Nico was down in Durham, mingling with the utopians and self-styled revolutionaries at the Free Republic of New Hampshire.

  The details I ignored. I just needed to know, as I need to know now, today, that she’s okay.

  At last the front door opens and a fat twenty-something boy with greasy hair emerges to dump out a bucket full of some fluid—urine? cooking oil? bong water?—and I see Nico, slight and pale and smoking, just inside.

  I wish I could abandon my sister to her cronies and her idiotic plans. I wish I could stop giving a flying fig, as my father used to say, about this selfish and petulant and ignorant child. But she’s my sister. Our parents are dead and so is my father’s father, who raised us, and it’s my responsibility to ensure, for now, that she stays alive.

  2.

  “Sit anywhere, hon.”

  It’s lunchtime but Culverson and McGully aren’t here, and as I slide onto a stool at the counter I feel a roll of anxiety. Every time someone isn’t there who is supposed to be, a part of my mind defaults to the certainty that they’re dead or disappeared.