World of Trouble (7 page)

She jabs a thumb over her shoulder, at Lily, the unconscious girl next to me on the thin jail-cell mattress. Cortez must have hauled me from the dispatch room and laid me down beside her in the bed.

“Who’s your friend?” says Nico.

I start to talk, to say
oh, Nico, I thought you were dead
but she puts one finger over her lips to hush me, and I obey, I hush, I stare at her in silence. The smell of Cortez’s cigarette lingers in the room.

“So, listen,” says Nico, and just the sound of her voice is forming the heat of tears in my eyes. “It’s happening. It’s a go.” She looks exactly as she did the day of the yearbook photo, the picture in my jacket pocket: she’s grown her hair back out and she’s wearing her glasses again, her old ones, from when she was in high school. I can’t believe she even still has them. I want to leap up and hug her. I’ll put her on the handlebars of the bike, I’ll put Houdini in the wagon to ride behind us. I’ll take her back home.

“Everything went exactly as planned,” she’s saying. “They brought him down here. That scientist, the one I told you about? We’ve got him. We’re going to England in the morning, and he and the team he knows there will initiate the standoff burst. Show that asteroid who’s boss.” I mouth the words back to her, astonished: “Show that asteroid who’s boss.” She smiles. Her teeth glow white. “It’s all going to be
fine
,” she says.

I have objections, I have a lot of questions, but Nico presses one flat hand over my mouth, shaking her head, flashing impatience.

“I’m telling you, Hen. I’m telling you. It’s all wrapped up like a beef burrito.” One of the dopey expressions our father used to use, one his favorites. “It’s all squared away. Nothing to worry about.”

This is incredible. Incredible! They did it. Nico did it. She saved the world.

“Listen, though. In the meantime, keep an eye on your goon. I don’t trust him.”

My goon. Cortez.

They never had the pleasure of meeting, those two. They
would have liked each other. But Nico never met him. Never heard of him. A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes out into my body like deep-blue blood. It’s not real. I’m dreaming, and as soon as I know that I am dreaming, Nico fades like a Dickens ghost and is replaced by my grandfather, sallow and sunken, hollowed-out cheeks and staring eyes, sitting in his ancient leather armchair sucking on an American Spirit, muttering to himself.

“Dig a hole,” he says. “Dig a hole.”

*  *  *

The smoke is real. Fresh cigarette smoke, rolling down the real police station hallway through the thin cell bars and into my dream. My grandfather really did smoke American Spirits, the same as Nico. Or, rather, Nico smokes them, the same as him. He would curse after each one, say “stupid goddamn things” even as he drew the next one from the pack, fidgeting it with irritation between two old fingers. A man who did not like to enjoy things.

It’s not him smoking now; he’s been dead some years. It’s Cortez, somewhere in the building, working on another butt.

Neither was I really on the thin mattress, tucked in snugly beside our sleeping assault victim; I’m right where I fell down, on the floor in Dispatch, in the shadow of the RadioCOMMAND. I can feel it, still, the warm dream feeling of her hand pressed flat over my mouth, Nico’s hand.

I stand quickly, then buckle from the pins and needles in my legs, reach out and steady myself on the wall with a flat hand. It’s
5:21. It’s morning. How long did I sleep? I follow the curling stink of the smoke and find Cortez back in the cop-car garage, squatting in the center and examining the ground. Our portable coffee rig is erected on one of the shelves, stray grounds clinging in clusters around the mouth of the urn. There’s a thermos at Cortez’s side with steam rising around its edges, mingling with the cigarette smoke.

“Oh, good morning,” he says, without looking up.

“We have to get down there.”

“No kidding.” He grunts, slides down onto his stomach. “I’m working on it.”

“Can we get down there?”

“I’m working on it,” he says again. “Have some coffee.”

I find my steel thermos on the shelf behind me, the one with my name Sharpied on the side, and I pour myself a cup. My dream was obvious wish fulfillment, a classic: Nico’s alive, the threat of the asteroid is ended, Earth survives, I survive. But what about my grandfather, muttering from his deathbed, “Dig a hole”? His actual last words. He said that. Cortez has his face against the floor, one eye opened, one eye closed, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth while he slowly runs the claw of his hammer along the concrete, squinting at the invisible fracture between the lid and the surrounding floor.

I sip my coffee; it’s hot and bitter and black. I wait ten seconds. “So what do you think? Can we get down there?”

“You’re a very focused individual.”

“I know. So what do you think?”

He just laughs, and I stop, I wait, I demand patience of myself. Cortez wants the same thing I do, as badly as I do. I want to get into the hole because that’s where my sister is, my sister or individuals possessing information as to her whereabouts; Cortez wants to get into the hole because it is there. He wants in because he is locked out. His hair is a mess, out of its ponytail, rolling in tangled clumps down his back. I’ve never asked him, in so many words, why he came along on this fool’s journey in search of my errant sister, but I think this is the answer: to do things like this, to do what he loves with what time is left. I am a question mark pointed at a secret, Cortez is a tool aimed at the stubborn places of the world.

“So?” I say. “Can you—”

“Yes.” He heaves himself to standing and flicks his cigarette away, adding one more butt to our gathered piles.

“Yes? How? How?”

“Wait and I’ll tell you.” He smiles and then digs out tobacco for a fresh smoke, pats his pants for papers, rolls the thing slowly, torturing me. And then, at last: “It’s a wedge, not a flat lid, is my guess, which means we couldn’t lift it up even if we weren’t a couple of skeletons.”

“So?”

“So we crack it instead. First choice is a gas-powered jackhammer, which we don’t have and won’t get.”

I’m nodding, nodding like crazy, and my mind is running and gunning, ready to roll. This is what I want. Specifics. Answers. An agenda. I’ve set down my coffee, I’m ready to run out of here and go get what we need.

“Second choice?” I say.

“Second choice is a sledgehammer.” He takes a long drag on the cigarette, grins languorously while I wait in desperation. “And I know where to get one.”

“Where?”

“Why, at the store, of course.”

At last—at last—he explains. He clocked the hammer when we rummaged through a SuperTarget two days ago, the last stop we made, three highway exits before Rotary. The SuperTarget was among five other stores, massive and fortresslike, spread out across a vast parking lot: a Hobby Lobby, a Home Depot, a Kroger grocery, a Cheesecake Factory.

“It was a Wilton,” Cortez says. “Big twelve-pounder. Good grip on it.” He’s leaning against the wall, shaking his head. “And I left it behind. I remember, because I picked it up and I almost took it but then I didn’t. I thought, we won’t use it. It’ll weigh down the wagon and we just don’t need it.” He sighs and exhales wistfully, like a man dreaming of a lost lover. “But I remember it. A big lovely Wilton with a fiberglass handle. Do you remember it?”

“I—sure.” I’m not sure. I remember the SuperTarget pretty well, rows and rows of empty shelves, scented candles and bath towels scattering the smudged tile floors, plumbing fixtures smashed on the ground like broken toys. The grocery aisle ravaged as if by packs of beasts. A big sign, must have been months old, that said
NO MORE AMMUNITION THANK YOU SO MUCH
.

“But what if it’s gone?” I say. “What if someone else has taken it?”

“Well, then we won’t have it,” Cortez says. “Just like now.”

I chew on the end of my mustache. The point of the sarcasm is that if we go in search of the sledgehammer and don’t find it, we will have lost nothing, but in fact he is wrong, because we will have lost time. Time is what we will have lost. How long to get down there on the bike, how many hours to find the hammer, to secure it to the wagon, to bike it back?

Cortez knows exactly where it is. He remembers the aisle and the shelf: aisle 9, shelf 14. That’s how his mind operates. It’s in the rear of the store, past the gardening supplies and the plumbing section. I hear it again in his voice as he describes the route, that deep vein of regret, for having left the hammer behind, for having been caught for once in his life without the necessary tool for the job.

“You stay here,” I tell him. “You watch the hole.”

“Okay,” he says, saluting me, settling cross-legged in the center of the garage. “I’ll watch the hole.”

*  *  *

On my way out I stop in the holding room, gratified to see that the 1.5-liter bag of saline solution is empty, sagging and curling at the top like a flattened balloon. The area around the needlestick in Lily’s extended right arm seems just fine also, no purple radius of traumatized tissue around the entry point. Lily, or whatever her name is. Poor girl. Somebody’s something. I step into the cell with her and run my finger gently along the length of her lips; they’re
dry still but not nearly so dry, not deathly dry. She’s taking fluid.

“Good job, kid,” I say to her. “Good for you.”

Except for the not inconsiderable problem that if Lily is taking fluid she should be passing it, and she is not. There’s no urine, which is warning me of something but what exactly I don’t know, because my medical training is limited and specific, first responder material, crime scene material: administering rescue breaths and patching wounds and minimizing blood loss. Piecing together bedside medical clues is uncharted territory. It’s a crossword puzzle in a language I don’t know.

I stand up on a chair and I carefully unhook the bag and switch it out, and that’s all she wrote for my saline-solution supply. Whatever else is going on with this girl, I have reached the limits of my ability to affect medical intervention. At this point her condition has become binary; she will either die or not.

“You’re going to be okay,” I tell her. “You’re going to be fine.”

And that’s it, I’m ready to go, except for a sharp jag of memory, a flash from last night’s dream: Nico, scowling and untrusting, whispering urgently,
keep an eye on your goon
.

Disturbed, uneasy, I look back down the hallway at the garage, where he is sitting, smoking, waiting. It’s not fair; it was a dream; Nico doesn’t even know the man. But then neither do I, exactly. He is good company, and I have taken advantage of his various competencies, but I suddenly feel how far I am from really knowing him—certainly from knowing him enough to trust him.

And meanwhile, the girl: asleep, vulnerable, alone. I picture Cortez’s crooked smile, his eyes dancing along Lily’s recumbent
figure, admiring her like a bowl of fruit.

It’s an old-fashioned jailer’s key they’ve got here, hanging on an old-fashioned hook. I push closed the door of the cell area, give it a good shake to make sure it’s closed and locked. Then I take the key off the hook and toss it through the bars, where it lands and skitters to the back wall of the cell.

I’ve got Abigail calmed down now, I’ve got a conversation going, I’ve got lucidity flickering in and out of her eyes.

I showed her my badge and my gun, explained that I am a retired Concord police officer working on a case, not an alien trailing a veil of cosmic dust, not someone from NASA here to inject her with antimatter. We’re at a small, rickety table in the back of the store, in the same back room where I once sat behind Jordan and watched him access the Internet, access the NCIC database, subjected myself to his taunting contempt to gain his help on my case.

We’re sitting at the table and Abigail is telling me haltingly, tiredly, that Jordan is not here and she does not know where he is.

“He is supposed to be here. We were supposed to be here together. Those were our instructions.”

“Instructions from who?”

She shrugs. Her body movements are jerky, pained. “Jordan talked to them.”

“To who?”

She shrugs again. She is staring at the table, pushing a torn corner of a piece of paper around with her finger, first this way and then another, like she is moving it on an invisible game board.

“What were the instructions?”

“Stay—stay here.”

“In Concord?”

“Yeah. Here. Resolution had been found. At a base. Gary, Indiana.”

“Resolution. That’s the scientist? Hans-Michael Parry.”

“Yeah. And the others were going to find him, go to the last phase, but we were to stay.” She looks up, sticks out her bottom lip. “Me and him. But then Jordan went away. Gone, gone. I was alone. And then the dust started to float in.” She stammers. “It—it—it just floated in.”

It’s like she reminds herself of it, of her invisible torment—she starts looking this way and then that, scowling into the corners of the room, rubbing at her skin where it’s coated with the cosmic dust.