Countdown City tlp-2

by Ben H. Winters

  “Oo,” says Jordan, leaning forward. “That kind of made you look like an asshole, the way that played out.”

  I listen to the familiar hiss then click then beep of a dial-up modem making its connection. There’s a prickling sensation from deep somewhere in the nerves of my injured arm. I reach over with my left hand and squeeze the right biceps in its sling, massaging it with two fingers. Jordan clicks on the Start menu and calls up a blank screen, cursor blinking. He cracks his knuckles ostentatiously, like a maestro, while my mind buzzes and flits. I’m suddenly deep back into my casework, trying to decide what information I need most, what’s worth trying for. Jordan, however, makes no move to cede me the chair.

  “You tell me what you’re looking for, and I find it for you.”

  “No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”

  “Okay, so we move to option B, which is you fucking yourself.” He grins at me. “The way this thing works, you can’t just type in what you want. I gotta run code for every search.”

  “Fine,” I say. “Fine.”

  “And just so you know, in general the more trivial the information that you’re looking for, the less likely you’ll find it on our server. But of course, we all have different definitions of trivial, don’t we?”

  Behind us we hear a rustling and Jordan yells, “Abigail? You’re awake?”

  “Yes,” the girl calls back. “And not happy about it.”

  “Can we get started?” I say, and Jordan tells me to fire away and I fire away. “I need to search something called the NCIC.”

  “National Crime Information Center,” says Jordan, already typing.

  “How did you know that?”

  “I know everything. I thought you had that figured out?” he says, fingers still dancing across the keys. “Hey, you don’t need to access the Pentagon by any chance, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh well.”

  I give him the details: Rocky Milano. White male, age approximately fifty-five to sixty. No known aliases.

  He types. We wait. It works slowly, streams of text flutter past, the monitor flickers from gray screen to gray screen. All of the familiar soothing icons of human–machine interaction are absent: the hourglass, the whirling circles of light. Finally Jordan squints at the screen, shrugs his shoulders, and turns around.

  “Nope.”

  “Nope, what? It’s not working?”

  “It’s working. I’m in there. But there’s no listing.”

  “Is it possible you don’t have the whole thing?”

  “The whole database?

  “Yes. That this is an incomplete—what did you call it?”

  “Mirror,” he says. “An incomplete mirror of the original archives.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Is it possible?”

  “Oh, sure,” he says. “Very possible. Probable, in fact.”

  I grimace. Of course. Nothing for good. Nothing for certain. I direct Jordan to get out of the FBI database and execute a simple Web search for Rocky’s name, setting us up for a fruitless fifteen minutes of scrolling through hundreds of hits—on the real Rocky and on dozens of other Rocky Milanos.

  “Dude,” says Jordan at last. “What exactly are you looking for?”

  I don’t answer. What am I looking for? The same rap sheet I was looking for when I was ten years old and “everybody knew” that Martha’s dad was a crook—that he had knocked over a liquor store, killed a guy with his bare hands. I’m looking for anything that would confirm my indistinct and ill-formed hypothesis that Rocky Milano had the wickedness of character and/or talent at long-distance riflery to gun down his son-in-law in cold blood to prevent him from reporting Rocky on IPSS violations and leave him counting down the earth from a jail cell.

  “Okey-doke, darling,” says Jordan, spinning in the chair. “Time’s up.”

  “Give me five seconds, okay?”

  He rolls his eyes, counts: “One…”

  I pace behind Jordan in the small room, trying to gather my thoughts and move on, push past the disappointment and irritation of this—of the whole thing. There’s no way to know anything anymore, is what it feels like. It’s started early, the era of terrible ambiguity scheduled to begin when Maia smashes into the Gulf of Boni and causes something terrible to happen but nobody knows exactly what. This age of uncertain terrors is metastasizing, growing backward, destroying not just the future but the present, poisoning everything: relationships, investigations, society, making it impossible for anyone to know anything or do anything at all.

  “Hello? Nico’s brother?” Jordan is saying. “I got shit to do. Important shit.”

  “Hang on. Wait.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Nils Ryan,” I say. “A state trooper.”

  “Spells Nils.”

  “No. Wait—Canliss. Can you look up the last name Canliss?”

  Jordan sighs elaborately and then slowly turns back to the keyboard, letting me know one last time who is in charge of this operation. I spell the name for him and lean over his shoulder while he rattles the keys. First he checks the NCIC and there are no matches, which I did not think there would be, and then he executes a simple search. I lean farther forward, bent practically horizontal across his desk and watching the words flash to life, the lines of text roll up onto the screen, green on black.

  “There,” says Jordan, launching backward from the desk on his rolling office chair, banging against my legs. “Does that help?”

  I don’t answer. I’m off in the distance somewhere, I’m racing through the wilderness, I’m standing in a storm with my hands raised, reaching out for bits and flakes of ideas like falling snow. First I thought that Brett had been untrue to Martha, and then I thought that it was Martha who been untrue, but I had it wrong the whole time. All the wickedness lay somewhere else.

  I know the name Canliss from Canliss & Sons, a vendor that had contracts with the Concord Police Department. When I was fresh on the force, three months in, Sergeant Belroy had the flu and I got stuck for three shifts doing accounts-receivable paperwork, and I remember the name. Canliss & Sons was a local concern, a New England outfit that sold the CPD specialized gear: night-vision goggles, Tasers, bipods. Ghillie suits.

  Canliss & Sons of New England. I knew it. I knew that name.

  “Hello? Nico’s brother?” says Jordan, waving his hands over his head like semaphore. “Are we done?”

  “We are, yes,” I say. “We are done, and I’m going.”

  “Wow,” he says, leaning forward to click off the monitor. “It’s like you’re allergic to it.”

  “To what?”

  “To saying thank you.”

  “Thank you, Jordan,” I say, and I mean it, I do. “Thank you very much.”

  He only turned off the monitor, I notice in passing, not the hard drive, meaning that my search is still sitting there, and my search history, a fact that does not make me wild with excitement. But I don’t have any more time to mess around. I have to go—I have to go right now.

  So of course Jordan leaps up out of his office chair and stands in the doorway. He leans against the lintel; this is his default position, loafing light-heartedly in a doorway, malevolence and aggression teasing out from behind his child’s smile. As for me, I now have a clear and distinct mental image of Martha Cavatone, and she might be in Jeremy Canliss’s basement or she might be in the trunk of a car or under a patch of floorboard, and I must get to her and I must get to her now.

  “Jordan, I have to go.”

  “Yes, I know that,” he says, thumbs looped in the belt loops of his jeans, just hanging out. “You said. But I just wanted to ask. Do you believe us now?”

  “Do I believe what?”

  “Well, it’s just that Nico, you know, your sister, she was really hurt that you didn’t believe her. About everything. Our group, our plans, our future.”

  He’s speaking in a leisurely adagio, doing it on purpose, absorbing my sudden desperate impatience and feeding it back to me a
s a taunting molasses rhythm. “You probably don’t realize how much you mean to her.”

  I calculate my odds of just busting past the man and running out of here. He is small but compact, energetic, and though I am much taller I am also exhausted, I have been on my feet all day after a night in the hospital, and I have one arm that is useless to me.

  “To be honest with you, I had forgotten all about it.”

  “Oh, well,” he says, and shrugs. “I’m reminding you.”

  I switch modes, drop into rapid-fire cop talk, keeping my voice even and open and honest. “Jordan, listen to me. There is a woman whom I believe to have been abducted and I need to help her right now.”

  “Seriously?” he says, eyes bulging. “Are you serious? Gee, you better go! Are you going to stop at a phone booth on the way, Nico’s brother? Put on your cape?”

  “Jordan,” I say. I think maybe I could take him, actually. I don’t care how many arms I have. “Move.”

  “Take it easy, dude.” He blows a bubble, pops it with one finger. “All I asked is whether you believe us yet.”

  “Do I believe that because you have a helicopter and Internet access, that means you have the capability to alter the path of an asteroid? No. I don’t.”

  “Well, see, that’s your problem. Limited imagination.”

  I barrel forward and roll my shoulder into him, but he just steps out of the way, sending me stumbling wildly out of the manager’s office. I straighten up and walk quickly toward the front of the shop, Jordan laughing behind me, and I’ve got the front door open and Houdini is waiting for me as instructed on the curb.

  “It’s Nico’s problem, too, you know,” he says, and I stop with my hand on the door and turn back around. Such an innocuous comment, nothing to it at all, but something in the way he said it—or is it just that there’s something in the way he says everything?—I turn.

  “What do you mean, it’s Nico’s problem, too? What is?”

  “Nothing,” he says, and smiles wickedly, delighted, a fisherman hauling in a live one.

  Jordan’s friend Abigail comes out of the bathroom, dressed in a flowery skirt and a tank top, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Jordan, did you know the water’s out?” she says.

  “I did, actually,” he says. “I did. And I think we should probably stay in tonight.”

  He’s talking to her but his gaze is locked on mine, and all the funny ha-ha clown nonsense is drained from his eyes and suddenly he’s all low-down nasty menace. “All I was pointing out, Mr. Palace, is that your sister suffers from a similarly limited imagination. Haven’t you ever felt that?”

  I’m across the room in two long strides staring intently in his eyes and holding on to his arm with my one good hand. Abigail says “hey” but Jordan doesn’t flinch.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” he says, and the clown’s grin is back. “I’m just talking.”

  I tighten my grip on his arm. When I first heard about this elusive organization of Nico’s was when she explained to me that her husband, Derek—who had thought he was on the inside, thought he understood it all—had been unknowingly sacrificed to a greater goal that he had no idea about.

  “Where’s that helicopter going, Jordan?”

  There is, then, a massive explosion. It sounds close—loud—like the stumbling tread of a dinosaur.

  “Uh-oh,” says Jordan. “Looks like one of the rez associations is breaking out the big guns.”

  “South Pill Hill,” Abigail says.

  “You think?”

  She nods and looks at him like, duh, of course.

  “This is going to be some night,” says Jordan. “Like the Fourth.”

  “Worse,” she says, gives him the look again. I’m standing here looking back and forth between the two of them. “Way worse.”

  “What?” I ask angrily, even though I know exactly what they’re talking about: it’s what McGully said, exactly what he warned, shouting in the Somerset, just wait until the water goes out. “What do you know?”

  “I know everything, man, remember?”

  “It’ll be a kind of war,” says Abigail simply, talking softly from the doorway. “There’s one residents association that’s been hoarding Poland Spring bottles in the gym at the YMCA. Thousands of them. Another group has got a ton in the basement of the science center. Everybody’s been hearing the rumors, everyone’s got a plan to protect their own stash and go after the other stashes.”

  “Or make a go at the reservoir,” says Jordan, peeling my fingers off his arm, one by one.

  Abigail nods. “Well, yeah, the reservoir goes without saying.”

  “It’s going to be like capture the flag, except with guns,” says Jordan, and Abigail nods again. “Lots of guns.”

  As if to underscore the point there’s a second reverberating explosion, and it’s hard to say whether it was closer or farther than the first, but it definitely sounded louder. A pause, and then the chilling multilayered sound of a lot of people screaming at once, followed by the unmistakable typewriter rattle of machine-gun fire.

  I’m listening to all this, breathing heavily, my head tilted to one side. It’s the overwhelming police presence that’s been keeping the fragile peace, everybody knows that, the DOJ cruisers, a cop on every block, that’s what’s prevented the wariness and anxiety of the population from bubbling over and bursting out like underground steam. I haven’t seen a single policeman today. Not a single car.

  “Hey, Henry? You better get going. It’s going to be a busy night.”

  5.

  It’s the one asset I have left, the one piece of law-enforcement equipment that I still carry with me, my bone-deep knowledge of the streets of Concord. I biked them as a kid and drove them as an adult, and now I walk swiftly and unerringly, from Wilson Avenue back up toward Main Street.

  My house is back to the west, past Clinton Street, but I’m headed the other way. I just have to—I just have to get this done. That’s all.

  Jordan was right: It’s going to be a busy night. I can hear gunfire coming from a dozen different directions and see smoke rising from a dozen distant fires. I pass a mob of people, thirty at least, walking down the street all together in a tight quasimilitary formation, dragging a trail of shopping carts lashed together with ropes and dog leashes. A family of five hightailing it on foot down the center of the road, dad carrying two kids to his chest, mom carrying one, looking back anxiously the way they came.

  Detective McGully, glowering again in my memory, red faced and jabbing his finger: You just wait until there’s no water, you just fucking wait.

  Houdini is scouting ahead of me with his mottled-fur flanks and predator’s sneer, lips pulled back over yellow canines. I bend forward, hastening my stride to keep up with him as we pass the Water West building, pass the statehouse, pass the McDonald’s where once upon a time I found the corpse of a suicide named Peter Zell hanging in the bathroom.

  On Phenix Street, where the movie theater still stands, the marquee still advertising the final installment of Distant Pale Glimmers from two months ago, a guy wearing a baseball cap backward is rolling by on a skateboard, clutching what looks like a five-liter drum of spring water, trying to get somewhere fast. A young woman in flat black shoes and a housewife’s apron appears out of the doorway of the theater with a shotgun and shoots him in the side, and he topples off the board and into the street.

  I keep going, faster and faster. I shake it off, shake it all away—the fleeing family, the woman with the shotgun, Jordan’s leering insinuation, Nico on her helicopter, Alyssa and Micah Rose at the Quincy Street playground—everything everything everything—I keep my head down and my mind focused on the case because I’m sick of wondering why I’m doing this, why I care. This is just what I have, it’s what I do.

  I take the left off Route 1 before I get to the Hood Factory, then a sharp right into the little tangle of streets behind the prison.

  It’s dusk now. The sun is pinking
on the horizon line, getting ready to sink.

  I drifted away from my family, kind of, was what Jeremy Canliss told me—drifted away, but not before he inherited some sniper equipment from Canliss & Sons, not before he learned how to use it. Spent some time on the rifle range, not a converted bowling alley but a real range, learned to take a crack shot from three hundred yards. The murder weapon might even have been a sniper rifle from Dad’s old supply. Unless he picked it up along the way, an unexpected piece of good fortune, fate smiling on his plan. After he followed me to UNH, after he made his own way past the unevenly attentive perimeter guards—suddenly here’s Julia Stone’s miniature armory, and Jeremy helps himself to a weapon from the same stash where Brett got his.

  Because it’s clear now what happened: Jeremy wanted Brett gone, and then he followed me to make sure he stayed gone.

  I’m running now. I’m almost there.

  Canliss told me where he lives without intending to. At the other side of my kitchen table, sweating and stammering through his story, he said how he and Brett would sit on his porch, watching the thugs go in and out of the state pen, Brett saying “there but for the grace of God.” There’s only one short street that runs directly behind the New Hampshire State Prison for Men, and that’s Delaney Street, and when I get there my watch says it’s 8:45—Tuesday, I think, some-how it is still Tuesday, and darkness has drawn down along this short crooked street.

  Normally it would take me an hour to work my way down a street of nineteen homes. But nine out of the nineteen are abandoned, front doors caved in, windows smashed or papered over. At one house, number six, on the north side, the tile of the roof has peeled off like skin, revealing the bent beams of the attic. Of the remaining ten houses, two have lit torches in the windows, and I decide to start with one of those, number sixteen Delaney Street. I rush across the darkness of its weedy lawn.

  The prison is directly behind the house and it’s on fire, bright walls of flame coming up out of the building’s old western wing.

  I raise my left fist and bang on the door, shouting “Martha!” and the door is answered by an elderly couple, cowering, hands in the air, the woman in a nightgown and the man in slippers and pajama bottoms, pleading with me to leave them be. I exhale, step back from the door frame.