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  Countdown City

  ( The Last Policeman - 2 )

  Ben H. Winters

  The Last Policeman received the 2013 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original—along with plenty of glowing reviews.

  Now Detective Hank Palace returns in Countdown City, the second volume of the Last Policeman trilogy. There are just 77 days before a deadly asteroid collides with Earth, and Detective Palace is out of a job. With the Concord police force operating under the auspices of the U.S. Justice Department, Hank’s days of solving crimes are over… until a woman from his past begs for help finding her missing husband.

  Brett Cavatone disappeared without a trace—an easy feat in a world with no phones, no cars, and no way to tell whether someone’s gone “bucket list” or just gone. With society falling to shambles, Hank pieces together what few clues he can, on a search that leads him from a college-campus-turned-anarchist-encampment to a crumbling coastal landscape where anti-immigrant militia fend off “impact zone” refugees.

  Countdown City presents another fascinating mystery set on brink of an apocalypse—and once again, Hank Palace confronts questions way beyond “whodunit.” What do we as human beings owe to one another? And what does it mean to be civilized when civilization is collapsing all around you?

  Ben H. Winters

  COUNTDOWN CITY

  The Last Policeman Book II

  For Adele and Sherman Winters

  (43 years)

  and

  Alma and Irwin Hyman

  (44 years)

  “Nahui Olin was not the first sun. According to the Aztecs and their neighbors, there have been four previous suns. Each of them presided over a world that was destroyed in a cosmic catastrophe. These catastrophes did not always result in mass extinction; the results were sometimes transformative, i.e., of humans into animals.”

  —Meteors and Comets in Ancient Mexico (Ulrich Köhler, in the Geological Society of America Special Paper 356: Catastrophic Events and Mass Extinctions)

  “Forever doesn’t mean forever anymore

  I said ‘forever’

  but it doesn’t look like I’m gonna be around much anymore.”

  —Elvis Costello, “Riot Act”

  PART ONE

  A Man with a Woman on His Mind

  1.

  “It’s just that he promised,” says Martha Milano, pale eyes flashing, cheeks flushed with anxiety. Grieving, bewildered, desperate. “We both did. We promised each other like a million times.”

  “Right,” I say. “Of course.”

  I pluck a tissue from the box on her kitchen table and Martha takes it, smiles weakly, blows her nose. “I’m sorry,” she says, and honks again, and then she gathers herself, just a little, sits up straight and takes a breath. “But so Henry, you’re a policeman.”

  “I was.”

  “Right. You were. But, I mean, is there…”

  She can’t finish, but she doesn’t need to. I understand the question and it floats there in the air between us and slowly revolves: Is there anything you can do? And of course I’m dying to help her, but frankly I’m not sure whether there is anything that I can do, and it’s hard, it’s impossible, really, to know what to say. For the last hour I’ve just been sitting here and listening, taking down the information in my slim blue exam-taker’s notebook. Martha’s missing husband is Brett Cavatone; age thirty-three; last seen at a restaurant called Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl, on Old Loudon Road, out by the Steeplegate Mall. It’s her father’s place, Martha explained, a family-friendly pizza-joint-slash-bowling-alley, still open despite everything, though with a drastically reduced menu. Brett has worked there, her father’s right-hand man, for two years. Yesterday morning, about 8:45, he left to do some errands and never came back.

  I read over these scant notes one more time in the worried silence of Martha’s neat and sunlit kitchen. Officially her name is Martha Cavatone, but to me she will always be Martha Milano, the fifteen-year-old kid who watched my sister Nico and me after school, five days a week, until my mom got home, gave her ten bucks in an envelope, and asked after her folks. It’s unmooring to see her as an adult, let alone one overturned by the emotional catastrophe of having been abandoned by her husband. How much stranger it must be for her to be turning to me, of all people, whom she last laid eyes on when I was twelve. She blows her nose again, and I give her a small gentle smile. Martha Milano with the overstuffed purple JanSport backpack, the Pearl Jam T-shirt. Cherry-pink bubblegum and cinnamon lip gloss.

  She wears no makeup now. Her hair is an unruly brown pile; her eyes are red rimmed from crying; she’s gnawing vigorously on the nail of her thumb.

  “Disgusting, right?” she says, catching me looking. “But I’ve been smoking like crazy since April, and Brett never says anything even though I know it grosses him out. I have this stupid feeling, like, if I stop now, it’ll bring him home. I’m sorry, Henry, did you—” She stands abruptly. “Do you want tea or something?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Water?”

  “No. It’s okay, Martha. Sit down.”

  She falls back into the chair, stares at the ceiling. What I want of course is coffee, but thanks to whatever byzantine chain of infra-structural disintegration is determining the relative availability of various perishable items, coffee cannot be found. I close my notebook and look Martha in the eye.

  “It’s tough,” I say slowly, “it really is. There are just a lot of reasons why a missing-persons investigation is especially challenging in the current environment.”

  “Yeah. No.” She blinks her eyes, closed and then open again. “I mean, of course. I know.”

  Dozens of reasons, really. Hundreds. There is no way to put out a description on the wires, to issue an APB or post to the FBI Kidnappings and Missing Persons List. Witnesses who might know the location of a missing individual have very little interest or incentive to divulge that information, if they haven’t gone missing themselves. There is no way to access federal or local databases. As of last Friday, in fact, southern New Hampshire appears to have no electricity whatsoever. Plus of course I’m not a policeman anymore, and even if I was, the CPD as a matter of policy is no longer pursuing such cases. All of which makes finding one particular individual a long shot, is what I tell Martha. Especially—and here I pause, load my voice with as much care and sensitivity as I can—especially since many such people left on purpose.

  “Yeah,” she says flatly. “Of course.”

  Martha knows all of this. Everybody knows. The world is on the move. Plenty still leaving in droves on their Bucket List adventures, going off to snorkel or skydive or make love to strangers in public parks. And now, more recently, whole new forms of abrupt departure, new species of madness as we approach the end. Religious sects wandering New England in robes, competing for converts: the Doomsday Mormons, the Satellites of God. The mercy cruisers, traveling the deserted highways in buses with converted engines running on wood gas or coal, seeking opportunities for Samaritanship. And of course the preppers, down in their basements, hoarding what they can, building piles for the aftermath, as if any amount of preparation will suffice.

  I stand up, close my notebook. Change the subject. “How is your block?”

  “It’s fine,” says Martha. “I guess.”

  “There’s an active residents association?”

  “Yes.” She nods blankly, not interested in the line of questioning, not ready to contemplate how things will be for her alone.

  “And let me ask, hypothetically, if there were a firearm in the home…”

  “There is,” she begins. “Brett left his—”

  I hold up one hand, cut her off. “Hypothetically. Would you know how to use it?”
r />   “Yes,” she says. “I can shoot. Yes.”

  I nod. Fine. All I needed to hear. Private ownership or sale of firearms is technically forbidden, although the brief wave of house-to-house searches ended months ago. Obviously I’m not going to bike over to School Street and report that Martha Cavatone has her husband’s service piece under the bed—get her sent away for the duration—but neither do I need to hear any details.

  Martha murmurs “excuse me” and gets up, jerks open the pantry door and reaches for a tottering pile of cigarette cartons. But then she stops herself, slams the door, and spins around to press her fingers into her eyes. It’s almost comical, it’s such a teenage set of gestures: the impetuous grab for comfort, the immediate and disgusted self-abnegation. I remember standing in our front hallway, at seven or eight years old, just after Martha went home in the evenings, trying to catch one last sniff of cinnamon and bubblegum.

  “Okay, so, Martha, what I can do is go by the restaurant,” I say—I hear myself saying—“and ask a few questions.” And as soon as the words are out she’s across the room, hugging me around the neck, grinning into my chest, like it’s a done deal, like I’ve already brought her husband home and he’s out there on the stoop, ready to come in.

  “Oh, thank you,” she says. “Thank you, Henry.”

  “Listen, wait—wait, Martha.”

  I gently pry her arms from around my neck, step back and plant her in front of me, summon the stern hardheaded spirit of my grandfather, level Martha with his severe stare. “I will do what I can to find your husband, okay?”

  “Okay,” she says, breathless. “You promise?”

  “Yes.” I nod. “I can’t promise that I will find him, and I definitely can’t promise that I will bring him home. But I’ll do what I can.”

  “Of course,” she says, “I understand,” and she’s beaming, hugging me again, my notes of caution sliding unheard off her cheeks. I can’t help it, I’m smiling, too, Martha Milano is hugging me and I’m smiling.

  “I’ll pay you, of course,” she says.

  “No, you won’t.”

  “No, I know, not with money money, but we can figure out something…”

  “Martha, no. I won’t take anything from you. Let’s have a look around, okay?”

  “Okay,” she says, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes.

  * * *

  Martha finds me a recent picture of her husband, a nice full-body snapshot from a fishing trip a couple years back. I study him, Brett Cavatone, a short man with a broad powerful frame, standing at the bank of a stream in the classic pose, holding aloft a dripping wide-mouth bass, man and fish staring into the camera with the same skeptical and somber expression. Brett has a black beard, thick and untrimmed, but the hair on his head is neat and short, a crew cut only slightly grown out.

  “Was your husband in the military, Martha?”

  “No,” she says, “he was a cop. Like you. But not Concord. The state force.”

  “A trooper?”

  “Yes.” Martha takes the picture from me, gazes at it proudly.

  “Why did he leave the force?”

  “Oh, you know. Tired of it. Ready for a change. And my dad was starting this restaurant. So, I don’t know.”

  She murmurs these fragments—tired of it, ready for a change—as if they require no further explanation, like the idea of leaving law enforcement voluntarily makes self-evident sense. I take the photograph back and slip it into my pocket, thinking of my own brief career: patrolman for fifteen months, detective on Adult Crimes for four months, forcibly retired along with my colleagues on March twenty-eighth of this year.

  We walk around the house together. I’m peering into the closets, opening Brett’s drawers, finding nothing interesting, nothing remarkable: a flashlight, some paperbacks, a dozen ounces of gold. Brett’s closet and dresser drawers are still full of clothes, which in normal circumstances would suggest foul play rather than intentional abandonment, but there is no longer any such thing as normal circumstances. At lunch yesterday, McGully told us a story he heard, where the husband and wife were out for a walk in White Park, and the woman just runs, literally runs, leaps over a hedge and disappears into the distance.

  “She said, ‘Can you hold my ice cream a sec?’” McGully said, laughing, bellowing, pounding the table. “Poor dummy standing there with two ice creams.”

  The Cavatones’ bedroom furniture is handsome and sturdy and plain. On Martha’s night table is a hot-pink journal with a small brass lock, like a child’s diary, and when I lift it I get just the lightest scent of cinnamon. Perfect. I smile. On the opposite night table, Brett’s, is a miniature chess board, pieces arranged midgame; her husband, Martha tells me with another fond smile, plays against himself. Hung above the dresser is a small tasteful painting of Christ crucified. On the wall of the bathroom, next to the mirror, is a slogan in neat all-capital block letters: IF YOU ARE WHAT YOU SHOULD BE, YOU WILL SET THE WORLD ABLAZE!

  “Saint Catherine,” says Martha, appearing beside me in the mirror, tracing the words with her forefinger. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  We go back downstairs and sit facing each other on a tidy brown sofa in the living room. There’s a column of dead bolts along the front door and rows of iron bars on the windows. I flip open my notebook and gather a few more details: what time her husband left for work yesterday, what time her father came by, said “have you seen Brett?” and they realized that he was gone.

  “This may seem like an obvious question,” I say, when I’m done writing down her answers. “But what do you think he might be doing?”

  Martha worries at the nail of her pinky. “I’ve thought about it so much, believe me. I mean, it sounds silly, but something good. He wouldn’t be off bungee jumping or shooting heroin or whatever.” My mind flashes on Peter Zell, the last poor soul I went in search of, while Martha continues. “If he really left, if he’s not…”

  I nod. If he’s not dead. Because that possibility, too, hovers over us. A lot of missing people are missing because they’re dead.

  “He’d be doing something, like, noble,” Martha concludes. “Something he thought was noble.”

  I smooth the edges of my mustache. Something noble. A powerful thing to think about one’s husband, especially one who’s just disappeared without explanation. A pink bead of blood has appeared at the edge of her fingernail.

  “And you don’t feel it’s possible—”

  “No,” says Martha. “No women. No way.” She shakes her head, adamant. “Not Brett.”

  I don’t press it; I move on. She tells me that he was getting around on a black ten-speed bicycle; she tells me no, he didn’t have any regular activities outside of work and home. I ask her if there’s anything else she needs to tell me about her husband or her marriage, and she says no: He was here, they had a plan, and then he went away.

  Now all that’s left is the million-dollar question. Because even if I do track him down—which I almost certainly will not be able to do—it remains the case that abandoning one’s spouse is not illegal and never has been, and of course I have no power at this point to compel anyone to do anything. I’m unsure exactly how to explain any of this to Martha Milano, and I suspect she knows it anyway, so I just go ahead and say it:

  “What do you want me to do if I find him?”

  She doesn’t answer at first, but leans across the sofa and stares deeply, almost romantically, into my eyes. “Tell him he has to come home. Tell him his salvation depends on it.”

  “His… salvation?”

  “Will you tell him that, Henry? His salvation.”

  I murmur something, I don’t know what, and look down at my notebook, vaguely embarrassed. The faith and fervency are new; they weren’t an aspect of Martha Milano when we were young. It’s not just that she loves this man and misses him; she believes that he has sinned by abandoning her and will suffer for it in the world to come. Which is coming, of course, a lot sooner than it used to be.
r />   I tell Martha I’ll be back soon if I have any news and where she can find me, in the meantime, if she needs to.

  As we stand up, her expression changes.

  “Jeez, I’m sorry, I’m such a—I’m sorry. Henry, how’s your sister doing?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  I’m already at the door, I’m working my way through the series of dead bolts and chains.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’ll be in touch, Martha. I’ll let you know what I can find.”

  * * *

  The current environment. That’s what I said to Martha: A missing-person investigation is especially challenging in the current environment. I sigh, now, at the pale inadequacy of the euphemism. Even now, fourteen months since the first scattered disbelieving sightings, seven months after the odds of impact rose to one hundred percent, nobody knows what to call it. “The situation,” some people say, or “what’s going on.” “This craziness.” On October third, seventy-seven days from today, the asteroid 2011GV1, 6.5 kilometers in diameter, will plow into planet Earth and destroy us all. The current environment.

  I trot briskly down the stairs of the Cavatones’ porch in the sunlight and unchain my bike from their charming cement birdbath. Their lawn is the only one mowed on the street. It’s a beautiful day today, hot but not too hot, clear blue sky, drifting white clouds. Pure uncomplicated summertime. On the street there are no cars, no sound of cars.

  I snap on my helmet and take my bike slowly down the street, right on Bradley, east toward Loudon Bridge, heading in the direction of Steeplegate Mall. A police car is parked at the end of Church with an officer in the driver’s seat, a young man sitting upright in black wraparound shades. I nod hello and he nods back, slow, impassive. There’s a second cop car at Main and Pearl, this one with a driver I slightly recognize, although his wave in return to mine is cursory at best, quick and unsmiling. He’s one of the legions of inexperienced young patrol officers who swelled the ranks of the CPD in the weeks before its abrupt reorganization under the federal Department of Justice—the same reorganization that dissolved the Adult Crimes Unit and the rest of the detective divisions. I don’t get the memos anymore, of course, but the current operating strategy appears to be one of overwhelming presence: no investigations, no neighborhood policing, just a cop on every corner, rapid response to any whiff of public disturbance, as with the recent events on Independence Day.