Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) (6 page)

“And …” I pause, turn this over. “Did Brett talk about leaving? Going Bucket List, I mean?”

Jeremy looks down. His cheeks color. “Shit, man. You ask a lot of questions.”

“It’s in my nature. Did he talk about it or not?”

“No,” he says. “Not specifically. But he was ready to go. You know?”

“Did he have a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know. No.”

“You don’t know, or no?”

“Maybe he did,” says Jeremy. “I think so, maybe, yeah.”

“What girl?” I lean forward, my heart racing now, galloping. “Where?”

“I don’t know,” he says, pulling back, recoiling from my eagerness. “I don’t know.”

“Was there a girl who came in to the pizza place?”

“No. I don’t know.”

He does know, though. He knows something. But he’s not going to tell me, not now. I rub my eyes with my fingertips. There’s something else that’s been on my mind. “Brett was a solid goody-goody,
you said, religious. How did he feel about Rocky working off-ERAS?”

“What?” He looks puzzled, upset.

“I mean, sending him to the rummage, black-marketing?”

“Wait,” says Jeremy suddenly, and slaps a flat hand on the table. “Stop. Look.”

And then my anxious night visitor is talking so fast and so ardently that his mouth is like a blur in the darkness on the other side of the table. “If he
wanted
to go off and sow some wild oats or whatever, then he didn’t have to, like, get anyone’s permission.”

“Not even his wife?”

“No, not even his wife. I don’t know about you, man, but I don’t have the balls to just go off and do what I want. Whether it’s a chick, or parasailing, or I don’t know—whatever. Even now, I don’t have the courage.” Jeremy shakes his head in bitter self-recrimination, as if this is the ultimate character flaw, this lack of apocalyptic bravery. “But it looks like Brett
did
have the balls, right? And like I said, he was—he was just a solid citizen. So he should get to do what he wants, is all I’m saying. And I don’t think you or Martha or anyone should go off and try and drag him back.”

He tosses the blood-soaked paper towel on the table and pushes back his chair.

“That’s it, man. I’m sorry to bother you.”

He stands up. I stand up. “I have more questions.”

“Sorry about your neighbor’s thing, too. On the lawn. I’m really sorry.”

And that’s it, he’s out the door, and given that I am no longer vested with any powers by the city of Concord to make him stay, I just watch him go, stumbling away in the darkness, a flashlight beam bobbling unevenly through the dark shapes of the trees. I’m contemplating the force of personality that my missing man must have possessed, to inspire the intense, if peculiar, devotion I’ve just seen. This kid may feel that he lacks courage, but he took a not-insignificant cross-city walk just now, in the unprotected darkness, to argue his friend’s case. Because he admires him. Because he wishes he had gone off somewhere, too.

I go into the living room, carrying a candle on a plate like a Dickens character, and when I find a pencil and my notebook I write down what I remember, write as swiftly and carefully as I can:
a chick? parasailing? Kind of a goody-goody
. I sketch the tale of Jeremy’s childhood, write down his full name and stare at it. Such an old-fashioned term he used,
sow some wild oats
. “If he wanted to sow some wild oats or whatever …”

When I’m done writing I lay down the pencil and stare into the flickering candle flame. The big question remains the one I asked Martha, twelve hours ago or however long ago it was: What do I do if I find him? If Jeremy is right, if Brett is out there sowing oats, and if I do by some miracle manage to track down this formidable character, this former state trooper—what then? I stroll up to this adult man doing what he pleases with his remaining scraps and shards of time, and say what, exactly?

My name is Henry Palace, sir. Your wife would like you to please come
home now
.

I blow out the candle.

I tiptoe past my sleeping dog and hang my long legs over the edge of the sofa and close my eyes.

The memories well up as they always do, and I push them away.

These are the scenes that I have studiously blocked, and which I am aware that I have blocked. Not of my parents; my dead parents I have lived with for many years now, and I have integrated their absence and my grief deep into my character. But there is a more recent wound, a woman named Naomi whom I loved and who was torn from me, a loss as sudden and brutal as a gunshot in a darkened room. And I am aware that the appropriate thing to do, from a therapeutic perspective, would be to summon up the relevant memories, allow myself to face the trauma, expose it to the light and allow time to do its healing work.

But there is no time. Seventy-seven days—seventy-six now—less than three months—who’s counting? There
is
no time.

I push away the memories, roll over, and think about my case.

“Oh, sure, I know him. Serious man. Broad shoulders. Boots.”

“That’s right,” I say, holding up the photograph, my missing man and his caught fish. “His name is Brett Cavatone.”

“If you say so. I don’t think we ever got so far as to names.”

The dairyman is an old New England farmer from a storybook, John Deere cap pushed back, sunburned forehead, crags beneath his eyes like coastal cliffs. I’m in his stall in one crowded corner of the Elks rummage, him behind his rickety card table, handwritten signs, a couple of ice-packed travel coolers as big as steamer trunks.

“He was here frequently?” I ask.

“Most days, yes, I believe he was.”

“Was he here on Tuesday?”

“Tuesday?” The slightest hesitation. He tilts his head. “No.”

“I’m not asking about yesterday, you understand. Tuesday. Two
days ago.”

The old man pushes back his cap. “I know what day it is, young fella.”

I smile tightly, peek in the old man’s cooler. He’s selling glass jars of milk and rough sticks of butter wrapped in wax paper. His chalk sign lists what he’d like in exchange: “chicken feed, in quantity.” Fresh fruit and juices, “in quantity.” “Underthings,” with a list of sizes.

“I’m sorry to press, but it’s important. Are you certain this man didn’t come by on Tuesday morning?”

“Nothing is certain but the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ,” says the farmer, glancing up at the ceiling of the Elks lodge basement and past it up to heaven—and then down to glower at Houdini, who is sniffing at his butter. “But no, I didn’t see him yesterday.”

The dairyman snaps the lid closed on his cooler, and my dog and I move on, navigating through the crowded chaotic aisles of the rummage. It’s crowded in here but quiet, people picking their way alone or in small groups from table to table, stall to stall, murmuring hello, nodding, hushed. I watch a thin woman with freckles and sharp nervous eyes investigate the wares on one table: She lifts a block of soap, puts it down again, whispers something to the burly man operating the stall, who shakes his head.

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.