Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) (24 page)

I try and fail to hide the pleasure that this announcement brings me. I bite my lip, employ the dry and sarcastic voice I have learned, over many years, from Detective Culverson. “I thought you said there was no point in investigating anything.”

“Yeah,” he says, and stands, lifting the sword. “I know what I said.”

“No way,” says Nico’s awful friend Jordan, staring at me in the doorway of the vintage clothing store. “You’re
kidding
me.”

He’s wearing jean shorts, the Ray-Bans, no shirt, no shoes. His hair is a slovenly mess. A blonde is passed out in a sleeping bag on the shop floor behind him, fast asleep, cheek pressed against the one slim bare arm thrown out from the bag.

“Jordan,” I say, peering behind him into the store, the cluttered bins, big black garbage bags overflowing with wool socks and winter hats. “What are you doing here?”

“What am
I
doing here?” he says, pressing a hand into his bare chest. “
Ésta
es mi casa, señor
. What are
you
doing here?” He looks at me in Culverson’s oversized shirt. “Are you here for some clothes?”

“Nico said you were all going to the Midwest.” I can’t bring myself to say “to recon with the team.” It’s too ridiculous. “For the
next phase of your plan.”

We’re still standing on the threshold of the store, desolate Wilson Avenue behind me. “These sorts of plans are changing all the time.” Jordan lifts one foot to scratch the opposite calf. “I’ve been reassigned. This is team holding-down-the-fort.”

The blonde girl makes a sleepy mew and stretches, rolls over. Jordan sees me watching her and grins wolfishly.

“Do you need something?”

“Yes,” I say. “I do.”

I step past him, into the shop, and Jordan makes a light
tsk-tsk
.

“Hey, that’s trespassing, dude. Don’t make me call the police.”

I know this tone of voice, it’s one of Nico’s favorites, glib and self-satisfied; it was her tone at UNH when she told me what was in the duffel bag: guns, maple syrup, human skulls.

Jordan stoops to tug a ratty yellow T-shirt from one of the disheveled piles on the ground and pull it on over his head. The room smells like mildew or mold. I look around at the clustered mannequins, some dressed and some undressed, some raising hands in greeting, some staring into the room’s dusty corners. Two of them have been arranged to shake hands, like one is welcoming the other to a board meeting.

“Jordan,” I say, “Is it possible …”

“Yes?”

He stretches out the word, simpering, like an obsequious butler. The shirt Jordan has selected has Super Mario on it, mustachioed and hydrocephalic and mock heroic. If I am remembering this incorrectly,
or imagining it, what Nico told me on the helicopter, I am going to sound like a moron—I am aware of that. On the other hand, this man, of all the people in the world, already finds me ridiculous: my aesthetic, my attitude, my existence.

“Is it possible that you have an Internet connection in here?”

“Oh, sure,” he says, unhesitating, grinning, proud. “Why? You want to check your e-mail?”

“No,” I say. In my chest there is a starburst of excitement, possibilities sparkling to life like fireworks. “I need to do a search.”

* * *

We tiptoe past Sleeping Beauty to a door marked
MANAGER’S OFFICE
, where Jordan asks me to stare at the floor while he runs the numbers on a combination lock and lets us in. And there it is, in the tiny claustrophobic office space, jammed between a three-drawer filing cabinet and a small unplugged break-room refrigerator with a missing door: a desk of particleboard and glass, with a big ugly Dell computer, the tall processor tower listing alarmingly. Jordan sees my skeptical expression and brays laughter as he plops into the spinning office chair behind the desk.

“Oh, ye of little faith,” he says, leaning forward to depress the power button. “Do you think the head of the National Security Administration is offline right now? What about His Honor the President?”

“I can’t say I’ve really thought about it,” I say.

“Maybe you should,” he says, swiveling in the chair to wink at me. “You heard of sipper?”

“No.”

“No?” He spells it, S-I-P-R. “Never heard of that?”

“No.”

“What about nipper?”

“No.”

He cranes his head around, chuckles. “God. Wow. You’ve heard of Google, right? It starts with a G.”

I ignore him. I squint hopefully at the screen, feeling like I’m in the middle of some kind of elaborate practical joke. Indeed, in that long uncertain moment, waiting to see if the monitor’s black screen will come to life, I suddenly feel like maybe the whole
thing
is a practical joke, that this whole final year of human history is just a prank that’s been played on me, on gullible ol’ Hank Palace, and that all the world is going to jump out of the closet here in the manager’s office at Next Time Around and say “
Surprise!
” and all the lights will come on and all the world go back to how it was.

“Ah, come on, Scott,” says Jordan idly, interrupting my reverie. He’s staring at the still-blank screen, playing drums on his thighs.

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s this jackoff in Toledo who’s never up and running when he says he’s going to be.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s because of your limited policeman’s mind.” Again, I don’t take the bait; again, I remain impassive, waiting to get what I
need. “The Internet isn’t one big thing hovering in the sky. It’s a bunch of networks, and people can’t get to the networks anymore because the devices that got them there are powered by lots and lots of electricity. So we built new networks. I got this shitty computer and three landlines and a 12.8 modem and a gas tank’s worth of juice, and I can connect to some dudes I know in Pittsburgh with the same setup, who can connect to Toledo, and so on into the beautiful forever. It’s like a super-old-school mesh network. Do you know what a mesh network is? Wait, lemme guess.”

He blows a bubble, pops it with one dirty fingernail. It’s maddening; he’s like an obnoxious seven-year-old that someone has installed at the helm of a vast international conspiracy.

“Of course, all the sites are mirrors, so a lot of stuff is missing or corrupted or what have you. But still impressive, right?”

“I would be a lot more impressed,” I say, “if we weren’t still staring at a blank screen.”

But even as I say it, the screen glows to life with the shimmering variegated panes of the Windows 98 logo, flickering ghostly like a hieroglyph on a cave wall.

“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?”