“Dude,” says Jordan at last. “What exactly are you looking for?”
I don’t answer. What am I looking for? The same rap sheet I was looking for when I was ten years old and “everybody knew” that Martha’s dad was a crook—that he had knocked over a liquor store, killed a guy with his bare hands. I’m looking for anything that would confirm my indistinct and ill-formed hypothesis that Rocky Milano had the wickedness of character and/or talent at long-distance riflery to gun down his son-in-law in cold blood to prevent him from reporting Rocky on IPSS violations and leave him counting down the earth from a jail cell.
“Okey-doke, darling,” says Jordan, spinning in the chair. “Time’s up.”
“Give me five seconds, okay?”
He rolls his eyes, counts: “One…”
I pace behind Jordan in the small room, trying to gather my thoughts and move on, push past the disappointment and irritation of this—of the whole thing. There’s no way to know anything anymore, is what it feels like. It’s started early, the era of terrible ambiguity scheduled to begin when Maia smashes into the Gulf of Boni and causes something terrible to happen but nobody knows exactly what. This age of uncertain terrors is metastasizing, growing backward, destroying not just the future but the present, poisoning everything: relationships, investigations, society, making it impossible for anyone to know anything or do anything at all.
“Hello? Nico’s brother?” Jordan is saying. “I got shit to do. Important shit.”
“Hang on. Wait.”
“Can’t.”
“Nils Ryan,” I say. “A state trooper.”
“Spells Nils.”
“No. Wait—Canliss. Can you look up the last name Canliss?”
Jordan sighs elaborately and then slowly turns back to the keyboard, letting me know one last time who is in charge of this operation. I spell the name for him and lean over his shoulder while he rattles the keys. First he checks the NCIC and there are no matches, which I did not think there would be, and then he executes a simple search. I lean farther forward, bent practically horizontal across his desk and watching the words flash to life, the lines of text roll up onto the screen, green on black.
“There,” says Jordan, launching backward from the desk on his rolling office chair, banging against my legs. “Does that help?”
I don’t answer. I’m off in the distance somewhere, I’m racing through the wilderness, I’m standing in a storm with my hands raised, reaching out for bits and flakes of ideas like falling snow. First I thought that Brett had been untrue to Martha, and then I thought that it was Martha who been untrue, but I had it wrong the whole time. All the wickedness lay somewhere else.
I know the name Canliss from Canliss & Sons, a vendor that had contracts with the Concord Police Department. When I was fresh on the force, three months in, Sergeant Belroy had the flu and I got stuck for three shifts doing accounts-receivable paperwork, and I remember the name. Canliss & Sons was a local concern, a New England outfit that sold the CPD specialized gear: night-vision goggles, Tasers, bipods. Ghillie suits.
Canliss & Sons of New England. I knew it. I knew that name.
“Hello? Nico’s brother?” says Jordan, waving his hands over his head like semaphore. “Are we done?”
“We are, yes,” I say. “We are done, and I’m going.”
“Wow,” he says, leaning forward to click off the monitor. “It’s like you’re allergic to it.”
“To what?”
“To saying thank you.”
“Thank you, Jordan,” I say, and I mean it, I do. “Thank you very much.”
He only turned off the monitor, I notice in passing, not the hard drive, meaning that my search is still sitting there, and my search history, a fact that does not make me wild with excitement. But I don’t have any more time to mess around. I have to go—I have to go right now.
So of course Jordan leaps up out of his office chair and stands in the doorway. He leans against the lintel; this is his default position, loafing light-heartedly in a doorway, malevolence and aggression teasing out from behind his child’s smile. As for me, I now have a clear and distinct mental image of Martha Cavatone, and she might be in Jeremy Canliss’s basement or she might be in the trunk of a car or under a patch of floorboard, and I must get to her and I must get to her now.
“Jordan, I have to go.”
“Yes, I know that,” he says, thumbs looped in the belt loops of his jeans, just hanging out. “You said. But I just wanted to ask. Do you believe us now?”
“Do I believe what?”
“Well, it’s just that Nico, you know, your sister, she was really hurt that you didn’t believe her. About everything. Our group, our plans, our future.”
He’s speaking in a leisurely adagio, doing it on purpose, absorbing my sudden desperate impatience and feeding it back to me as a taunting molasses rhythm. “You probably don’t realize how much you mean to her.”
I calculate my odds of just busting past the man and running out of here. He is small but compact, energetic, and though I am much taller I am also exhausted, I have been on my feet all day after a night in the hospital, and I have one arm that is useless to me.
“To be honest with you, I had forgotten all about it.”
“Oh, well,” he says, and shrugs. “I’m reminding you.”
I switch modes, drop into rapid-fire cop talk, keeping my voice even and open and honest. “Jordan, listen to me. There is a woman whom I believe to have been abducted and I need to help her right now.”
“Seriously?” he says, eyes bulging. “Are you serious? Gee, you better go! Are you going to stop at a phone booth on the way, Nico’s brother? Put on your cape?”
“Jordan,” I say. I think maybe I could take him, actually. I don’t care how many arms I have. “Move.”
“Take it easy, dude.” He blows a bubble, pops it with one finger. “All I asked is whether you believe us yet.”
“Do I believe that because you have a helicopter and Internet access, that means you have the capability to alter the path of an asteroid? No. I don’t.”
“Well, see, that’s your problem. Limited imagination.”
I barrel forward and roll my shoulder into him, but he just steps out of the way, sending me stumbling wildly out of the manager’s office. I straighten up and walk quickly toward the front of the shop, Jordan laughing behind me, and I’ve got the front door open and Houdini is waiting for me as instructed on the curb.
“It’s Nico’s problem, too, you know,” he says, and I stop with my hand on the door and turn back around. Such an innocuous comment, nothing to it at all, but something in the way he said it—or is it just that there’s something in the way he says everything?—I turn.
“What do you mean, it’s Nico’s problem, too? What is?”
“Nothing,” he says, and smiles wickedly, delighted, a fisherman hauling in a live one.
Jordan’s friend Abigail comes out of the bathroom, dressed in a flowery skirt and a tank top, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. “Jordan, did you know the water’s out?” she says.
“I did, actually,” he says. “I did. And I think we should probably stay in tonight.”
He’s talking to her but his gaze is locked on mine, and all the funny ha-ha clown nonsense is drained from his eyes and suddenly he’s all low-down nasty menace. “All I was pointing out, Mr. Palace, is that your sister suffers from a similarly limited imagination. Haven’t you ever felt that?”