World of Trouble (10 page)

I wonder in passing how Trish McConnell is doing, back at Police House. Dr. Fenton, at Concord Hospital. Detective Culverson; Detective McGully, wherever he ended up. Ruth-Ann, my favorite waitress at my favorite restaurant. Everyone back somewhere in time, doing something else.

“Serious, though, man,” says Sandy, laying a hand on the small of my back. “You fuck with our chickens, and we blow your mopey face off.”

*  *  *

The chicken is delicious. I eat a polite portion, but Billy and Sandy tell me to take more so I take more and feed a bunch to Houdini, who eats with vigor, which is nice to see. I offer up three bags of honey-roasted peanuts as a side dish, which my hosts accept with delight, raising a series of enthusiastic toasts to my generosity.

They’ve been living here, “at this particular location,” for about a month, maybe six weeks, they don’t know for sure. It’s their third site, though. “Third,” says Billy, “and you gotta figure last, right?” The chickens they rustled up from their second site, a farmhouse between here and Hamlin, the next town down the highway coming up from the south. They’re snug on the hammock and I’m on the ground beneath them, sitting with my back against the vehicle while we enjoy the last of the peanuts. The chickens, Sandy says with a happy shake of her hair, were “a goddamn gift from the gods, man.”

“We got sixteen of the little emperors left, at this point,” she says. “Three chickens a day times five days equals fifteen.”

“Plus a bonus chicken,” puts in Billy.

“Oh, yeah, right, bonus chicken.” Sandy squeezes his arm.

They’re nice to listen to, these two; they’re like a little show,
a mild comedy. Their pleasure in each other combines with the twilight and the misting rain to create a kind of anesthetizing fog, and I lean my head back and exhale, just listening to them talk, finishing each other’s sentences and laughing like kids. They hang out all day, they tell me, smoke cigarettes, fool around, drink beer, eat chicken. They both grew up here, as it happens, right here in Rotary, Ohio, went to prom together at Cross-County High School, but they hadn’t resided here as adults. Billy had lived “just about everywhere,” he’d done a little time, was out on parole—“still on it, officially,” he says, and snorts. Sandy for her part had gone to a two-year college in Cincinnati, married a “world-class dingleberry,” got divorced, ended up waitressing at some diner outside Lexington.

They got back in touch in the early days of the threat, back in late spring or early summer of last year, when the odds of impact were low but rising fast; low but high enough to start looking up lost loves and missed opportunities. “We found each other,” says Billy. “Facebook and that shit.” Summer burned away into fall, the odds inching up and up and up. The world started to slip and tremble, Billy and Sandy wrote each other funny e-mails about hooking up again, seeing the world out together.

“But by the time the damn thing got to be a hundred percent, the stupid Internet was gone.” Billy tosses his hair. “And I had never gotten her damn phone number—what a bonehead, right?”

“Yep,” says Sandy. “Course, I never got his, either.”

He grins at her, and she grins back, tilts her head, drinks her
beer. He’s telling the story and she’s popping in now and then, adding detail, gently correcting, stroking his sweaty biceps. I am aware of an insistent internal voice telling me to keep moving on, stay on target, find a sledgehammer and get back to that garage—but I find I’m rooted in place, my back planted against the RV, my knees drawn up, slow-drinking that same first beer, watching the sunset color the tops of the trees. Houdini’s head a furry white teddy bear in my lap.

“So basically I said, screw it,” Billy says. “I fired up the Pirate and drove down to find her. And can I tell you something—sorry, man, what …”

“Henry,” I say. “Or—Hank.”

“Hank,” says Sandy, as if she was the one who asked. “I like that. Crazy part is, I was all packed. I was waiting for him.”

“You fucking believe it? She was waiting for me. Says she knew I’d be coming to find her.”

“I did,” she says, nods firmly, a mild drunk smile in her eyes. “I just knew.”

They shake their heads at their mutual good fortune, clink the long glass necks of their beers. I watch their small movements, Billy making a little ashtray out of tinfoil and tapping his cigarette into it, Sandy doing a modified, seated version of the Robot to some old-school beatbox hip-hop number coming from the speakers on the RV.

I close my eyes for a minute and drift in and out of a doze. On some level, of course, I am aware that my illogical insistence on certain ideas regarding my sister—in particular my dogged
belief not only that she is alive, but that I will find her and bring her home to a city that doesn’t even exist anymore—that all of this magical thinking has extended itself, grown outward like the halo of light around a candle. If Nico has managed to stay alive by clinging to her crazy idea that the asteroid crisis is avertable, that the threat can be eliminated, then maybe she’s right. Maybe the whole thing isn’t going to happen.

Nico’s fine. Everything is going to be fine.

I blink awake after a minute or two, shake a crick out of my neck, and get out my notebook and get to work.

No, Billy and Sandy have no sledgehammer. No gas-powered jackhammer or drill. What they’ve got is fuel, enough to keep the RV running another couple days, just for the tunes; they’ve got beer and they’ve got chicken and that’s about it.

Then I figure, what the heck, and I reach into my pocket and take out the yearbook picture from the plastic Concord Public Library sleeve and unfold it carefully, because it is beginning to crumble around the edges.

No, they haven’t seen her. They haven’t seen many people at all, and definitely no adult version of this high-school girl with the glasses and black T-shirt and the wry expression. No one like that around here at all.

Billy and Sandy’s little campground takes on a shabby glamour at night; they spare enough power to light the lanterns and do some close dancing under the yellow globes, weaving in and out of the cooker’s fragrant plumes. Sandy bobs her head lightly to the booming rock and roll, her long tangled red curls moving up and down, Billy’s hands wrapped around her waist like a life jacket.

I stand up and brush the dust off my pants and watch them in the starlight glimmer and think about my dead parents. Maybe it’s missing Nico, looking for Nico, maybe it’s just the intensity of these days, wondering on some level what they would have made of it all.

Every gorgeous New Hampshire September, when the leaves were in the first flush of turning and the sky woke up perfect blue, day after day, my father would say something like: “September is the queen of months. Not just here—everywhere. Everywhere in the world. September is perfect.” He’s standing out front with his glasses
pushed up on his forehead, leaning forward with his palms flattened on the wood rail of the porch, breathing in the crisp smell of someone burning leaves a couple doors down. And then my mother, shaking her head, giving him that gentle
tsk-tsk
ing smile. “You’ve never been anywhere else. You’ve lived in New England your entire life.”

“Oh, sure,” he says. “But I’m right.” Kisses her. Kisses me. “I’m right.” Kisses little Nico.

The next chicken is named Augustus and he will be served at midnight, but I’ve got to get going. I’ve got work to do. I look past the RV, out at the street, and the street looks so black.

Billy wanders back over to their ramshackle Rube Goldberg brewery to fill up his bottle, leaves Sandy swaying on the dance floor, and I find I have one more line of questioning to pursue.

“What do you know about the police?” I ask him.

“Say again, Hank?”

He gazes at me while beer foams out of the dirty tap into his bottle.

“Local law enforcement. In Rotary, I mean. Do you know anything about the police around here?”

“Oh, they’re total assholes. Like all cops.”

He clocks my expression and snorts, spraying liquid out of his nose. “Oh, no!” He laughs, swipes beer off his chin with the back of his hand. “I had a weird feeling about you, I totally—” He cuts himself off, hollers to Sandy, who is swaying, eyes closed, mumbling along with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” “Sandy, he’s a cop!”

She keeps her eyes closed, raises one hand in an absent thumbs-up, keeps on swaying.

“Listen, man, don’t bust me on the open container, all right?” He’s laughing, he can’t believe it. “It won’t happen again.”

“I’m not a cop anymore,” I say. “My position was eliminated.”

Billy pulls another big swig. “Shit, you know what? That’s what everyone should say. Whole planet, man.” He snorts. “Our position has been eliminated.”

“So,” I say. “The local cops.”

He shakes his head. “Yeah, like I said, no offense, man, but the cops around here were just your classic bully cops. They were when I was growing up, anyway, and it only gets worse, you know?”

“How long did they keep working?”

“With the big news, you mean?” Billy considers this, runs a beer-wet hand through his hair. “About two fucking seconds, most of ’em. Even the chief, Mackenzie, first-class pig that guy was.” He turns again. “Hey, Sandy, remember Dick Mackenzie?” Another eyes-closed thumbs-up from Sandy. “Pig, right?” Her thumb raises higher.

“Shit, man,” Billy says, turning back to me. “As soon as this got to be a serious thing, it was fuck it like a bucket for most of those guys.”

That’s the same story I got from Detective Irma Russel’s big leather log book—I can see it clearly, the notebook page where she wrote
Jason quit
, triple exclamation points. That’s how I ended up with my own brief employment as a detective in the Concord Police Department, Adult Crimes Unit. People quit, people died. A slot opened up unexpectedly. Silver lining.

“Guess some of ’em kept at it a while, though,” says Billy. “The good ones. Till the riot.”

“The riot?” I’m interested now. I squint to focus, shaking my head, shaking off the mild effects of my one beer. “What riot?”

“Prison riot. State pen.”

I blink. “Creekbed.”

“Right, that’s right. This was—man—Sandy, do you remember, when was Creekbed?”

“May,” she calls.

“Nah.” Billy scrunches his face. “June, I think.”

“June 9,” I tell him.

“If you say so.”

I nod. I do say so. Irma Russel’s last entry, June 9, neat handwriting,
Heavenly Father keep a good eye on us, would ya?

“This is from a buddy of mine who heard about it from a guy he knows, a meth head that was in there, who bragged about it apparently, sick fuck. Way the meth head says, everyone still walking around with a badge got sent down there to Creekbed State Penitentiary. I guess the guards had took off, left the bars locked, you know, and the inmates were getting cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs down there. Started basically thinking everyone’d forgotten about ’em, and they were gonna die in there.”

Right. Which they would have—like caged rats—like Cortez’s mom’s boyfriend Kevin, the ex-marine. All the people who’ll be caught somewhere when Wednesday comes: all the prisoners, all the elderly or incapacitated on life support, those morbidly obese people who can’t leave the house without a piano mover. Everybody, really, all of us, trapped in place, like the damsel in distress in the old movie, tied to the tracks with the train barreling down.

“So they set the damn place on fire,” says Billy.

“The cops?”

“No, man, the bad guys. My buddy’s buddy and his pals. There were like a couple hundred or more in there.” Billy’s beer is empty again; he presses the spigot to refill it. “They set their own joint on fire, just to call some attention, and whatever cops was left around here, the cops and the fire folks, the what do you call ’em—ambulance guys. All went down there. And then I guess things—uh, things got real nasty.” He looks over his shoulder at Sandy, and then leans in to continue the conversation sotto voce, as if to protect her from such conversations, from wasting a moment’s thought on this stuff. “Real nasty. As soon as a couple of ’em were rescued they were taking guns off the cops, shooting at the cops, the firemen and all. Locking folks in the fire, you know, just for …” He shrugs. “Just ’cuz.”

He looks down into his bottle. “I mean, I don’t like cops”—he laughs a little—“no offense, like I said. But this …”

He trails off, clears his throat, tries to pull the glimmer back into his smile.

“Anyway, so that was about it around here, as far as police. Since then it’s every man for himself, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Sure. I know.”

“That about the story where you came from?”

“Yeah,” I say, and I can see it, Concord on fire, the statehouse dome gleaming red with flame. “Just about.”

Red towns, blue towns, black. It’s almost over. It’s almost here.

I record the conversation about Creekbed in my little blue
notebook: the date, the sequence of events. I am considering as I write whether there might be some crossover here, some connection to Nico and Jordan’s group and their presence in Rotary, Ohio. What I know is that Nico was summoned out here as of mid-July, after this scientist with the clandestine plan was located in Gary, Indiana. Even if that much of it is true, which it probably is not, it is hard to imagine Jordan and his allies mustering the resources and strategic thinking to arrange a prison riot, a terrible fire, just to clear the few cops remaining from the Rotary, Ohio, police station.

Still, though, I write it down. The thin pages of my notebook are smudged with new question marks.

My grieving for Detective Irma Russel I condense into five seconds. Ten seconds. Not my story. Not my case. Still, though, you can picture it, the fiery prison, rescuers rushing in, gunshots, flames, people pounding on cell walls, screaming and burning behind thick glass doors.

“Oh, and Billy, what I wanted to ask: Do you know anything about the station itself?”

“Nah.”

“When it was built? Whether there’s a basement?”

“Man, I just said I don’t know anything about it.” Billy’s big tailgate-party smile wavers. Sandy wanders over to the home-brew setup, smiling vacantly. Billy is asking himself, how long am I supposed to give this guy? How many minutes out of however many minutes remain for the stranger with the notebook and the questions, who can offer nothing in return?