Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) (19 page)

I think of those dots on the horizon, the tiny ships I saw from the slitted window of the caponier, steaming closer, even now.

“Brett—” I begin, and suddenly he ducks and rolls into the mud and comes up with the other rifle, all in one swift motion, ends up on his knee facing me, the gun angled up toward me, as mine is angled down toward him.

I didn’t fire. I couldn’t. How could I?

I shake my head, trying to shake the sunlight out of my eyes, shake the sweat off my forehead.
Figure this out, Palace. Handle this
. Then I just start, I start talking:

“Does anyone know where you are and what you’re doing?”

“Julia.”

“Julia thought that someone else knew. She thought someone would try to come and stop you.”

“That was an assumption on her part. She’s wrong. No one knows.”

“Where did you get all the—the blueprints and so on? Of the various bases?”

“From Officer Nils Ryan.”

“Who—”

“A former colleague of mine from Troop F. Also a former
chief petty officer in the Coast Guard.”

“But he doesn’t know what you wanted them for?”

“No.”

I don’t need to ask why this man, this Officer Ryan, would turn over such documents: because he asked. Because he’s Brett.

“Okay,” I say. “So no one knows about this. No one knows where you are. Just me and you and Julia.”

“Yes.”

“So let’s—” I look away from his gun barrel, into his eyes. “Brett, let’s end this right now. I do not want to harm you.”

“Then don’t. Go.”

“I won’t. I can’t.”

And then we stand there, my gun pointed at him, his at me.

“Please, Officer.”

“These are human beings with no chance left but one.” Brett, with his soft rumble of a voice, slow train rolling. “Who have risked everything, traveled thousands of miles crammed and sweating in shipping containers and overstuffed holds, and maybe it’s a fool’s chance they’re taking, but that is their right, and they do not deserve to be murdered thirty yards from shore.”

“Yes, but …”
But what, Officer Palace? But what?
“We were sworn in once, you and I. Right? As officers of the law. We still have an obligation to do what’s lawful and what’s right.”

He shakes his head sadly. “Those two things you said there, friend. Those are two different things.”

I’m standing on a slight rise, looking down at him in his crouch,
feeling very tall indeed. A bird flickers past overhead, and then another, and then there’s a wind, stronger than usual, a summer wind carrying up the scent of fish and a pinch of gunpowder from the churning breakers. We can just hear the rushing of the tide, barely reaching us way up here above the cliff face.

“On the count of three,” I say, “we will lower our weapons, both together.”

“Fine,” he says.

“And then we will figure out what to do next.”

“Good.”

“On the count of three.”

“One,” says Brett, and lowers his gun a little bit off his shoulder, and I lower mine an inch or two, my muscles crying out with relief.

“Two,” we say, together now, and now both rifles are at forty-five-degree angles, pointed at the ground.

“Three,” I say, and drop my rifle, and he drops his.

We remain frozen for about a quarter of a second, and both of us start to smile, just a little, two honorable men on a green field, and then Brett is starting to get up and he’s extending his hand and saying “My friend—” and then as I raise my arm there is a sharp bang, a crack in the sky, and my arm explodes in pain, hot and savage, a roaring pain, and I whirl behind me to find the shooter, and by the time I turn back around Brett is on the ground, flattened in the dirt with arms and legs windmilled out in the grass. I leap to him, screaming his name and clutching my arm. I land beside him and lie there panting for five seconds, ten seconds, waiting for more shots. I’m trying
to summon up the protocol for victims of gunshot trauma in the field, trying to recall my training regarding rescue breaths and compressions and so on, but it doesn’t matter: The bullet caught Brett dead between the eyes and half the front of his face has been swallowed by a hole. It’s useless—there’s nothing to be done—he’s dead.

* * *

The first thing to do is tourniquet my arm. I know that—that much I remember, and besides it’s obvious, the wound is bleeding like a rushing faucet, great gouts of bright red blood exploding out of my arm, darkening my shirt and coat and puddling between my shoes in the mud and the dirt. Brett’s dead body beside me on the ground.

It’s funny because I’m watching it, this fountain of blood, and it’s happening to someone else, like this is some other man’s arm exploded arm, another man’s torn suit coat and pulsing wound. That one sharp instant of terrible pain I felt at impact has completely receded, and the wound, high on my right arm, at the biceps, is something I can see, and register as severe, but not
feel
.

This is shock. This absence of feeling is the result of the adrenaline flooding my system, rushing through my veins like seawater crashing the breached holds of a ship. I examine my arm like it’s a joint at the butcher’s counter: a gunshot trauma to the brachial artery, and I’m losing blood quickly, too quickly, precious milliliters gushing out onto the dirt field of Fort Riley. I’ve had general first aid and CPR training
and annual continuing education courses per Concord Police Department regulations, and I know what to expect here: blood loss, dizziness, coldness, clamminess, and finally a high risk of fever, high risks all the way around, gunshot wounds in general requiring immediate medical assistance—arterial gunshot wounds in particular. “High risk of loss of limb and/or death.”

I need to stabilize the wound and get to a hospital.

Brett is lying three feet away from me, sprawled out in the dirt. The horrible front-face wound, the stillness of his body.
“That contract has been abrogated.” Why did he say that? What does that mean?

Focus, Palace. Tourniquet the wound.

“Okay,” I tell myself. “Geez.”

I scrabble in the dirt and come up with a short thick piece of wood. This is not going to work, not long-term, but I need to staunch the bleeding immediately—I needed to have done it thirty seconds ago—to remain on my feet, get to the bicycle and my first aid kit. I can use my necktie to cinch the wound, for now, but I reach up and my necktie is gone. I slipped it off, just yesterday—was it yesterday?—on the quad at UNH and now it’s lying somewhere along those winding paths like a shed snakeskin in the desert. I extend my left hand, trying as hard as I can to move only that side of my body, don’t jostle the wound; I lean forward and slowly pry off one shoe and then one sock. Wincing, I take the tip of the sock between my teeth and tie it off around my arm like a heroin addict, recalling the shabby gentleman I encountered in the grub tent, the old bearded addict.
Here’s to you, sir
, I think crazily as I jam the stick between the thin
fabric and the flesh of my arm above the wound. I twist the sock tight around the stick and feel a radiating tingle as the blood starts to slow. I look down at the ragged hole in my arm and I can see the spurting of the blood begin to slow, to calm, turning into a bare trickle.

“There we go,” I say to my arm. “There we go.”

It still doesn’t hurt. The shock will wear off somewhere around a half hour from now, and then the pain will set in and intensify steadily over the following six to eight hours. I can see the words on the sea-green stapled booklet we got at EMT-First Responder training in the break room, black Helvetica lettering against the green background of the leaflet:
TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE
. Stabilize the wound rapidly and keep it stable until the victim can be moved to a hospital.

Hospital, Henry? What hospital?

The sock begins to loosen as soon as I release the grip of my teeth. It’ll last me maybe ten minutes. I stumble to my feet and limp toward the parking lot, toward my Red Rider Wagon full of supplies.

* * *

He’s Brett
, is what everybody told me,
he’s just Brett
. Now I have some understanding of what they meant. A fascinating man, a force of nature. Charismatic, thoughtful, righteous and strange.

I’ve paused for a moment to rest at about the halfway point between the field where we were shot and the spot at the entrance to the parking lot where I’ve chained up my bike.

That contract has been abrogated
, he said. What an odd word to import into the language of love:
abrogated
.

Among my regrets about what has just unfolded is that Brett never did ask me why I had come to find him, why I cared. I had my answer all figured out.
Because a promise is a promise, Officer Cavatone, and civilization is just a bunch of promises, that’s all it is. A mortgage, a wedding vow, a promise to obey the law, a pledge to enforce it. And now the world is falling apart, the whole rickety world, and every broken promise is a small rock tossed at the wooden side of its tumbling form
.

I explain all of these things to Brett as I trudge along, tugging my sock-tourniquet tighter and gasping at the first tingling promise of pain. I give him my answer even though he’s dead, and with each passing moment the odds are climbing that I’m going to die out here, too.

* * *

By the time I get to my bike, my improvised tourniquet is a dark bloody rag, and as soon as I peel it off the blood bursts forth. I fumble on the black pneumatic tourniquet from my first aid kit, cinch the cuff high on my arm, upstream of the wound, and inflate it as fast as I can, closing my eyes tightly as I squeeze and squeeze the bulb.

I pause, then. I am not dizzy yet, not yet experiencing severe pain. I can think now, for a moment I can think. From here I can see the road, the elbow bend in Route 3, and I can look up at the towering trees crowding in on the parking lot from all sides.

What hospital
,
Hank?
I ask myself, dragging the question out of
my consciousness and into the light—not meaning, which hospital will you choose? but rather, what operational hospital might be within biking distance of a fatigued man who has already suffered significant loss of blood? As much as a liter, maybe, half a liter easily. Portsmouth is the closest city, and I don’t even know if they have a functioning hospital anymore or if it’s all private duty. What about Durham? There must be a medical tent somewhere on the grounds of the Free Republic of New Hampshire, as there is a grub tent; somewhere in one of those basements some premed is boiling clamps and hypodermic needles in a lobster pot.

Will it be easier, I wonder, without the wagon? And I’m looking down at it, debating how risky or wise it might be to jettison the water and food and gauze and antiseptic to gain maybe three or four m.p.h. of travel speed. I’m crouching to look through how much water I have left anyway, and wishing it were more.

There. Now. Pain. There it is.

“Jesus.” I say the word, and then I scream it: “Jesus!” and throw my head back and scream again, louder. It hurts—it does—it hurts so much, a hot iron pressed against my biceps. I clutch the wounded arm with the other one and immediately let go and scream more.

I sink down, into a crouch, and close my eyes, and rock on my heels, and take a series of short and shallow breaths. “My God, my God.”

The pain is circling out from the impact site and burning into my shoulder, my chest, my neck, all the circuits of my upper body. More deep breaths, still down in my crouch, in the parking lot by the roadway. After several long moments the pain recedes, and I open
my eyes and see on the ground with hallucinogenic clarity a single bright-orange leaf.

But it’s not—it’s not a leaf. I stare at it. It’s a fake leaf. I pick it up with my left hand. It’s made of fabric—a synthetic fabric—a synthetic leaf.

The thought appears in my mind not word by word, but wholly formed, like someone else had the thought and placed it there:
This does not make sense
.

Because I know what this is, this artificial leaf. It’s a piece from a ghillie suit, the full-body camouflage worn by professional snipers and police shooters, a costume of shrubbery worn so that they can wait unseen for long periods, buried in the scenery. I know what a ghillie suit is, not from my police training but from my grandfather, who took me hunting exactly three times, trying to cure me of my total disinterest in that pursuit. I remember he pointed out a fellow sportsman, crouched in a blind in a suit of leaves, and scorned the man: “Those are for hunting men, not rabbits.” I remember his caustic expression, and I remember the term,
ghillie suit
; it seemed such a comical name for something designed for the purpose of killing human beings.

The pain returns like an inrushing tide and I gasp, sink down farther into the gravel of the parking lot, still clutching the strange alien leaf.
This does not make sense
.

When the pain is gone—not gone, but dampened—I look past the stone wall, up onto the rise, try to pick out the spot where the shooter waited on the woody ridge between the road and the fort. I
trace the bullet’s line in my mind, a bright red ribbon leaping from the gun muzzle and across the field. I eyeball it. I estimate. Three hundred yards. It was a sniper shot, no question about it, three hundred yards easy, through the barrier of my outstretched arm and right between Brett’s eyes. What I just witnessed was Brett’s assassination by a military sniper from the Coast Guard or the Navy. A professional killer who tracked him here and waited in his ghillie suit and fired from the woods between the road and the fort. A preemptive strike against his madman’s crusade.

So what is it? Why doesn’t it make sense?

I know the answer while I’m still formulating the question: because Brett said no. No one knew about it. He had told no one where he was. Just Julia, and Julia had told me.

How could the military have sent a sniper to take him out, before he carried out his raids, when no one knew that they were coming?

New pain. Worse. The worst. I throw my head back and howl. Nausea is rolling up in churning waves from my stomach and into my throat. The pain leaps out from the wound site in bursts. Spots buzz to life in front of my eyes and I hunch back over, count slowly to ten, dizziness seeping in around the back corners of my brain. Brett told me that nobody else knew. Brett had no reason to lie.