Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) (25 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

“Where’s that helicopter going, Jordan?”

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

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

“South Pill Hill,” Abigail says.

“You think?”

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

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

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

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

“I know everything, man, remember?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m running now. I’m almost there.

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

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

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

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

“Sorry to bother you,” I say. I take a step down the porch, then turn back before they’ve closed the door.

“I’m a policeman,” I say. “Do you have food?”

They nod.

“How much?”

“A lot,” says the woman.

“Enough,” says the man.

“Okay,” I say. Our bones are rattled by a reverberant boom from the southwest, the area of Little Pond Road and the reservoir.

“Do me a favor, folks: Don’t answer your door anymore.”

They nod, wide eyed. “You mean, tonight?”

“Just don’t answer your door anymore.”

The wind is picking up, summer breezes transforming into a panicky wind, sending leaves skittering down the street and banging garbage cans together and fanning the flames jumping up off the roof of the prison.

Houdini bounds down the porch ahead of me and we go to the other torch-lit house, number nine Delaney Street. As we cross the lawn, Houdini barks at the ground and some nocturnal creature leaps away from him, rustling a row of bushes. Even in the darkness the heat is unrelenting. My arm sweats in the sling. It’s a rickety wooden porch, cluttered with old junk. The door is unpainted and there’s a big New England Patriots beach towel strung across the front windows. This is right—it seems right—like just the sort of house where a quasi-employed twenty-year-old jack-of-all-trades would be crashing with assorted friends and acquaintances. I take the steps, two at a time, my heart beating fast for Martha.

Cortez was hit on the head this morning, he said, three hours before I got there. I got there at around 11:30. That means Martha was taken twelve hours ago. I bang on the door and call out “Jeremy—” the story alive and clear in my head.

Jeremy loved Martha. Martha loved her husband.

But canny young Jeremy had seen into the husband’s secret heart, and he knew that what Brett wanted was to leave. He knew from long talks over grocery runs and late nights at the pizza joint
that Brett’s heart was straining at the leash: Here was a strange and high-minded man who wanted to use the last months to do some furious good in the world—who felt sure, in fact, that God was calling him to do so. But he was trapped by another kind of goodness, bound by his marriage vows.

And so Jeremy’s plan, the forged diary page, the deceit, like something out of Shakespeare, something from the opera: exile the man by guile, take the woman by force.

“Jeremy?” I call again, rattle the handle.

Fresh gunfire rends the air like distant thunder, and I hear indiscriminate screaming and then, by some trick of the wind, snatches from a desperate conversation—“no, come on—no …” “shut up, you shut your mouth”—from some other crisis, some other corner of the city.

No one answers the door. The wind is rifling my hair, raising hackles on my neck. Time to get in there.

“Stay,” I tell the dog. “Stand guard.” He looks up at me, his head at a tilt, his teeth bared. “Anybody comes up the steps, bark. Anybody comes out but me, attack. Okay?”

Houdini settles on his haunches at the top of the stairs, silent and purposeful. I haul back and kick, hard, with my right foot. The thin wood splinters; my body explodes in pain. The tissue shrieks in my sewn-up arm. I scream and double over and scream again, hold my head down until the pain concludes its route along the lines of my leg into the arm and back down to the ground. Houdini stands there, eyes wide with sympathy and wonder, but keeping in position
as I have instructed.

“Good boy,” I mutter, breathing in and out, in and out. “Good boy.”

When I can move I go inside, into a dark and cluttered living room, one flickering torch burning down in a vase. A suitcase is propped against the back wall, half open, a few T-shirts spilling out like clustered snakes. An unplugged refrigerator lies on its side in the front room like a beached whale; someone has spray painted
DOES NOT WORK
across the top of it.