The Last Policeman (16 page)

“What about the bruises?”

“Below his eye? I don’t know. Showed up two weeks ago, said he had fallen down some stairs.”

“Did you believe him?”

She shrugs. “Like I said …”

“You weren’t that close.”

“Yeah.”

And here I’m feeling this strange and strong impulse to reach across the table, to take her hands in my own, to tell her it’s okay, that it’s all going to be okay. But I can’t do that, can I? It’s
not
okay. I can’t tell her it’s okay, because it’s not okay, and because I have one more question.

“Naomi,” I say, and her eyes flicker in quick teasing recognition that I’ve never used her first name before. “What were you doing there that morning?”

The spark dies in her eyes; her face tightens, pales. I wish I hadn’t asked. I wish we could just be sitting here, two people, order some dessert.

“He used to talk about it. On the phone, at night, especially around December. He was done with the drugs, I really think he was, but he was still—he was not entirely happy. On the other hand, no one is. Entirely happy. How can we be?”

“Yeah. So, but, he would talk about the McDonald’s?”

She nods. “Yeah. He’d say, you know that place? If I was going to kill myself, that would be the place to do it. Just
look
at that place.” I don’t say anything. From elsewhere in the restaurant, spoons clinking of coffee cups. Other people’s melancholy conversation. “Anyway. As soon as he didn’t show up for work, I came over to that McDonald’s. I knew it. I knew he would be over there.”

From Maurice’s radio in the kitchen come the opening chords of “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

“Hey,” says Naomi. “This is Dylan, isn’t it? You like this one?”

“No. I only like the seventies Dylan and the post-1990s Dylan.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

I shrug. We listen for a minute. The song plays. She takes a bite of tomato.

“My eyelashes, huh?”

“Yeah.”

* * *

It’s probably not true.

Almost certainly, this woman is gulling me, misdirecting me for reasons still to be discovered.

From all that I have learned, the idea of Peter Zell having experimented with hard drugs—not to mention having sought out and purchased drugs, given their current scarcity and extreme expense, and the severity of the penalties for such purchases under the post-Maia criminal codes—it all seems like a one-in-a-million chance. On the other hand, isn’t it so that even the one-in-a-million chance must be true one time, or there would be no chance at all? Everybody’s been saying that. Statisticians on television talk shows, scientists testifying before Congress, everyone trying to explain, everyone desperate for all of this to make some kind of sense. Yes, the odds were extremely unlikely. A statistical unlikelihood approaching zero. But the strong unlikelihood of a given event is moot once that event has nevertheless transpired.

Anyway, I just don’t think she was lying. I don’t know why. I close my eyes and I can picture her telling me, her big dark eyes are steady and sad, she’s casting them down at her hands, her mouth is still and set, and I think for some insane reason that she was telling it straight.

The question of Peter Zell and morphine rotates in a slow ellipse in my mind, drifting past the other new fact spinning around up there: Zell’s preoccupation with the McDonald’s as a site of suicide. So what, Detective? So he got murdered, and the murderer left him to be found, by coincidence, in the very same spot? What are the odds of
that
?

It’s a different kind of snow right now, big fat drops falling slowly, almost one at a time, each adding its weight to the drifts in the parking lot.

“You all right, Hank?” says Ruth-Ann, slipping the hundreds I’ve left on the table into her apron pocket without looking at them.

“I don’t know.” I shake my head slowly, look out the window at the parking lot, lift my cup of coffee for one final sip. “I feel like I wasn’t made for these times.”

“I don’t know, kid,” she says. “I think maybe you’re the only person who was.”

* * *

I wake up at four o’clock in the morning, wake from some abstract dream of clocks and hourglasses and gambling wheels, and I can’t fall back asleep, because suddenly I’ve got it, I’ve got one piece of it, I’ve got
something
.

I get dressed, blazer and slacks, I put on coffee, I slide my department-issued semiautomatic pistol in its holster.

The words are turning around in my head, in a long slow circle:
what are the odds?

There’s a lot to do when the day begins.

I’ve got to call Wilentz. I’ve got to get over to Hazen Drive.

I look at the moon, fat and bright and cold, and wait for daybreak.

“Excuse me? Good morning. Hi. I need you to run a sample for me.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s what we do. Gimme a second, all right.”

“I need you to run it right now.”

“Didn’t I just say, give me a second?”

This is the assistant to the assistant that Fenton warned me about, the individual now running the state lab on Hazen Drive. He’s young and disheveled and late for work, and he is looking at me like he’s never seen a policeman before in his life. He stumbles toward his desk, gestures vaguely at a row of hard plastic orange chairs, but I decline.

“I need these done right away.”

“Dude, dude.
Give
me a damn second.”

He’s clutching a bag of doughnuts, grease staining its bottom, and he looks bleary eyed and unshaven and hungover.

“Sir?”

“I just walked in the door. It’s like ten in the morning.”

“It’s ten forty-five. I’ve been waiting since nine.”

“Yeah, well, the world’s about to end.”

“Yes,” I say. “I heard.”

Tonight it will be one week since Peter Zell was killed, and at last I’ve got a bite on it. One piece. One idea. My hands tap on the toxicologist’s desk while he breathes open-mouthed and settles heavily into his rolling chair, and then I place my sample on his desk. A vial of dark red blood drawn from the heart of Peter Zell, which I removed this morning from the back of my freezer and zipped in the insulated box I use for my lunch.

“Dude, come on. This isn’t tagged.” The functionary lifts the vial to the pallid halogen light. “There’s no sticker on it, no date. This could be chocolate syrup, man.”

“It’s not.”

“Yeah, but, this isn’t
procedure
, Officer.”

“The world’s about to end,” I say, and he looks at me, sour.

“It has to have a sticker, and someone’s gotta order it. Who ordered it?”

“Fenton,” I say.

“Seriously?”

He lowers the vial, narrows his red-rimmed eyes at me. He scratches his head, and a drift of dandruff tumbles onto the desk.

“Yes, sir,” I say. “She told me that this place is a mess. That orders are getting lost all the time.”

I’m on thin ice. I am aware of that. I can’t help it. The guy is looking at me, a little fearfully, it seems like, and I realize that my fists are clenched, and my jaw is tight. I need to know if there was morphine
in this blood. I need to know if Naomi Eddes is telling me the truth. I think she was, but I need to know.

“Please, friend,” I say quietly. “Please run my blood. Just run it.”

* * *

“Brother?” calls a bespectacled middle-aged man with a beard, as I walk from the parking garage across School Street toward headquarters, turning over possibilities in my head, laying out my timeline. “Have you heard the good news?”

“Yes,” I say, smile politely. “I sure have. Thanks.”

I need to get inside, tell my colleagues what I’ve worked out, determine a plan of action. But first I’ve got to stop in Wilentz’s office, get the results of the search I called him for at 8:45 this morning. But the bearded religious man holds his ground, and when I look up I see that they’re out in force this morning, a thick flock of the religious, long black coats, smiling in all directions, wielding their tattered pamphlets.

“Be not afraid,” says a plain woman who appears before me, her eyes mildly crossed, dots of red lipstick on her smiling teeth. The others are all dressed similarly, three women and two men, all beaming rapturously, all holding thin pamphlets in gloved fingers.

“Thanks,” I say, no longer smiling. “Thanks so much.”

It’s not the Jews, the Jews have the hats. It’s not Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jehovah’s Witnesses stand there quietly holding aloft their literature. Whoever it is, I do what I always do, which is look at my feet and try to keep moving.

“Be not afraid,” says the first woman again, and the others form
behind her in a ragged semicircle, blocking me like a hockey goal. I take a step back, nearly stumble into the street.

“I’m not afraid, actually. Thanks so much, though.”

“The truth is not yours to refuse,” murmurs the woman, pressing the pamphlet into my hand. I look down at it, just to avoid her God-glazed eyes, and I scan the bold red-outlined text: IT IS SIMPLY TO PRAY, the cover says on the top, and the same along the bottom: IT IS SIMPLY TO PRAY!

“Read it,” says another of the ladies, a small, stout African American woman with a lemon-colored scarf and a silver brooch. Everywhere I turn there’s a flap of broadcloth, a heavenly smile. I flip open the pamphlet, skim the bullet points.

*
IF A MAN’S BLINDNESS CAN BE CURED BY THE PRAYERS OF A DOZEN, MANKIND’S CATASTROPHE CAN BE UNDONE BY THE PRAYERS OF A MILLION
.

I don’t really accept the premise, but I go ahead and skim it. If enough of us renounce our wickedness and kneel in the loving light of the Lord, the pamphlet insists, then the ball of fire will bend in its path and sail harmlessly over the horizon. It’s a nice thought. I just want to get into the office. I fold the pamphlet and push it back toward the first woman, the one with the batty eyes and the lipstick teeth.

“No thanks.”

“Keep it,” she insists, gentle and firm, while the chorus calls, “Read it!”

“May I ask you, sir,” says the African American woman, with the scarf. “Are you a man of faith?

“No. My parents were.”

“God bless them. And where are your parents now?

“Dead,” I say. “They were murdered. Excuse me, please.”

“Leave him alone, you jackals,” says a booming voice, and I look up: my savior, Detective McGully, an open beer bottle in one hand, a cigar clamped in his teeth. “You want to pray to someone, pray to Bruce Willis in
Armageddon
.” McGully tosses me a salute, lifts his middle finger and waves it at the true believers.

“Sneer now, sinner, but wickedness shall be punished,” says the saint with the lipstick teeth to Officer McGully, backing away, a pamphlet fluttering from her open pocketbook onto the sidewalk. “You shall face the darkness, young man.”

“Guess what, sister,” says McGully, handing me his Sam Adams and forming his hands into a megaphone. “You, too.”

* * *

“It’s a percentage.”

“What is?”

“The number,” I say. “It’s 12.375
percent
.”

I’m pacing, and I’ve got it under my arm like a football, Peter Zell’s shoebox, the one overflowing with asteroid information, all the numbers circled and double underlined. I’m laying it out for my colleagues, explaining what I’ve got, what I
think
I’ve got. McGully sits with furrowed brow, tipped back in his chair, rolling his empty morning beer bottle between his palms. Culverson is at his desk in a crisp silver suit, sipping coffee from a mug, considering. Andreas, over in his shadowy corner, head down, eyes closed, asleep. Adult Crimes.

“When Maia first showed up, when they first spotted it and
began tracking it, Peter immediately began following the story.”

“Peter is your hanger?”

“The victim, yeah.”

I take that first AP article, from April 2, the one ending with the odds of impact at one in two million one hundred twenty-eight thousand, and hand it to Culverson.

“And here’s another one, a few days later.” I pull out another scrap of dog-eared computer paper and begin reading. “ ‘Though the object appears to be massively large, with an estimated diameter upwards of six and a quarter kilometers, Spaceguard astronomers calculate its current chances of colliding with Earth as barely higher than zero—what Dr. Kathy Goldstone, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Arizona, calls only just within the realm of non-negligible probability.’ And Mr. Zell, he’s got that number—six and a quarter—that’s underlined, too.”

I take out another piece of paper, and another. Zell wasn’t just keeping track of the numbers on Maia, on its trajectory and projected density and composition. His box also has articles on all the asteroid-related societal changes: new laws, shifting economic landscape, and he’s watching those numbers, too, writing on the backs of the papers, scrawling calculations—long columns of data, exclamation points—adding it all into the matrix.

“Son of a gun,” says Culverson suddenly.

“Son of a gun what?” says McGully. “What?”

“See—so—” I start, and Culverson finishes, says it smooth and right: “The strong possibility of death by global catastrophe can be seen as mitigating the risk of death from drug-related misadventure.”

“Yes,” I say. “Right. Yes.”

“Yes,
what
?” growls McGully.

“Palace’s hanger was doing a risk assessment.”

I beam. Culverson nods at me approvingly, and I place the lid back on the box. It’s 11:30 now, shift change, and from the break room a couple doors down we can hear the frat-house rumble of the patrol officers, the young Brush Cuts with their nightsticks. They’re rattling around, shouting abuse at one another, drinking their skinny little cans of energy drink, strapping on their bulletproofing. Ready to get out there and aim their sidearms at some looters, ready to fill up the drunk tank.

“My theory is, Zell makes a decision, very early on, that if the odds of impact rise above a certain mathematically determined level, he’s going to try something dangerous and illegal, an interest that had always been too risky to indulge. Until now.”

In early June the odds rise above his threshold, and Zell heads to the house of his old friend J. T. Toussaint, who figures out how to get ahold of something, and together they get high as satellites.