“Really, I’m sorry.”
“Hank,” she says, quieter. A different tone of voice.
“Yes?”
“One day, when the time is right, I’m going to escape to a mansion in the woods, somewhere in western Mass., and I’m taking you with me. How’s that sound?”
“Sure,” I say. “Sounds good.”
And then McConnell, very quickly, reaches up and tugs on my mustache, hard.
“Hey.”
“Sorry. Something I’ve always wanted to do. Carpe diem, right?”
“Right.”
Then the siren goes off, loud and insistent, a tornado horn blowing somewhere on the roof of the CPD. McConnell mutters “shit” as her walkie-talkie blares to life, crackling out a string of code: “Team four-zero-nine, go alpha. Team six-zero-forty, go alpha.” The CB code is unfamiliar, and I ask McConnell what it means.
“It means I’ve got thirty seconds to get across the street and get back in character.” She grits her teeth and stares at me, shaking her head. “What’s the guy’s name?”
“Cavatone.”
“He was a trooper?”
“Until a couple years ago. But Trish, seriously, forget it.”
I feel bad now. She’s right. I never should have put her in this position. I have a permanent mental picture of Trish’s kids from a couple years ago, when she couldn’t find a sitter and dragged them to someone’s retirement party: Kelli, a thoughtful child with watchful eyes in a lime-green Hello Kitty shirt, Robbie sucking his thumb.
“Western Mass., Detective,” says McConnell. “You and me.”
She winks and flips down her mask, and she’s smiling, I can see it in the lines of her brow above the Plexiglas. Then off she goes, dropping into a hustle as the eighteen-wheeler rumbles in, the driver clutching the big wheel, white-knuckled as he rattles the thing into place. The police swarm its flat metal flanks like bugs on the carcass of a forest animal.
“Trish,” I call. I can’t resist. “If there’s coffee on the truck—”
Over her shoulder she flashes me her middle finger and disappears into the pack of cops.
Nico, my sister, is living in a used-clothing store on Wilson Avenue. That’s where she is, holed up with a small rotating cast of poorly groomed, slack-jawed, paranoid-delusional chuckleheads. My sister.
I come here every couple days. I don’t knock on the door, I don’t go inside. I stand across the street or skulk through the mud-splattered alley behind the store, leaning in toward the open windows to hear her voice, catch a glimpse of her. Today I slouch down low on a bus bench across the street from Next Time Around with a six-month-old issue of Popular Science held up in front of my eyes like a spy.
The last time I spoke to Nico Palace it was April, and she was standing on my porch in a jean jacket, revealing with defiance and pride how she had taken advantage of her credulous policeman older brother, gulled me into using my law-enforcement connections to gain sensitive information about security at the New Hampshire National Guard facility on Pembroke Road. She had used me, not to mention her husband, Derek, who was likely executed or remanded to permanent custody as the result of her maneuvering. I was astonished and furious and I told her so, and Nico assured me—breathless with self-importance—that her machinations were all in the service of a profoundly important objective. She stood on my porch, smoking one of her American Spirits, eyes glittering with conspiracy, and insisted that she and her anonymous companions were working to save us all.
She wanted me to ask for the details, and I would not give her that satisfaction. Instead, I told her that this project, whatever it was, was the worst kind of dangerous nonsense, and we have not spoken since.
And yet here I am, turning the pages of Popular Science, reading for the millionth time about the soil composition under the Indonesian sea, and what that means for the ejecta that will be blasted into our atmosphere at impact—here I am, waiting to assure myself that Nico is safe. Once she was gone for two days, and I was anxious enough about her absence to spend three miserable hours crouched in that filthy back alley, listening through the windows until one of the scumbags within mentioned to another that Nico was down in Durham, mingling with the utopians and self-styled revolutionaries at the Free Republic of New Hampshire.
The details I ignored. I just needed to know, as I need to know now, today, that she’s okay.
At last the front door opens and a fat twenty-something boy with greasy hair emerges to dump out a bucket full of some fluid—urine? cooking oil? bong water?—and I see Nico, slight and pale and smoking, just inside.
I wish I could abandon my sister to her cronies and her idiotic plans. I wish I could stop giving a flying fig, as my father used to say, about this selfish and petulant and ignorant child. But she’s my sister. Our parents are dead and so is my father’s father, who raised us, and it’s my responsibility to ensure, for now, that she stays alive.
2.
“Sit anywhere, hon.”
It’s lunchtime but Culverson and McGully aren’t here, and as I slide onto a stool at the counter I feel a roll of anxiety. Every time someone isn’t there who is supposed to be, a part of my mind defaults to the certainty that they’re dead or disappeared.
“It’s early yet,” says Ruth-Ann, reading my mind, as she comes over with the carafe of hot water and a tray of teabags. “They’ll be here.”
I watch her walk back to the counter. The asteroid will come and destroy the earth and leave behind only Ruth-Ann, floating in the vast blackness of space, one hand clutched around the handle of her carafe.
On the counter is the valedictory edition of the Concord Monitor, from a Sunday four weeks ago, and though I’ve surely read it cover to cover a hundred times by now, I pick it up to read it one more time. American and European bombing campaign against nuclear, general military, and civilian targets across Pakistan. The newly formed Mayfair Commission, subpoenaing the records of the Space-guard Survey and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The massive twelve-deck cruise ship, flying the Norwegian flag, that plowed into Oakland Harbor and turned out to be carrying more than twenty thousand catastrophe immigrants from Central Asia, women and children “packed like animals” into its holds.
There’s a long feature story on the back about a young woman, a former Boston University law student, who has decided to head eastward, to Indonesia, a CI in reverse, to await the world’s destruction “in the epicenter of the event.” The article has a gently amused, “well, what do you know?” sort of tone, except for the quotes from the kid’s horrified parents.
And then, in the lower-left corner of the front page, the short, anguished mea culpa from the publisher: lacking in resources, lacking in staff, it is with great regret that we announce that effective immediately…
As Ruth-Ann centers my teacup on its saucer there’s a rush of noise from outside, someone pushing open the front door. I swivel, knock the teacup with my elbow, and it shatters on the floor. Ruth-Ann pulls out a double-barreled shotgun like a gangster from under the counter and aims it at the door.
“Stop,” she says to the trembling woman. “Who are you?”
“It’s okay,” I say, sliding off my stool, tripping over myself, rushing over. “I know her.”
“He came back, Henry,” says Martha, frantic, pleading, her face flushed and pink. “Brett came home.”
I put Martha Milano on my handlebars somehow and bike her home like we’re old-timey sweethearts. Once we’re inside, once she’s slammed the door and worked down the column of locks from top to bottom, she makes a beeline for the kitchen and pantry, the one with the cartons of smokes—then stops herself, slaps her thigh, retreats to the sofa, collapses in a heap.