I’m across the room in two long strides staring intently in his eyes and holding on to his arm with my one good hand. Abigail says “hey” but Jordan doesn’t flinch.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing,” he says, and the clown’s grin is back. “I’m just talking.”
I tighten my grip on his arm. When I first heard about this elusive organization of Nico’s was when she explained to me that her husband, Derek—who had thought he was on the inside, thought he understood it all—had been unknowingly sacrificed to a greater goal that he had no idea about.
“Where’s that helicopter going, Jordan?”
There is, then, a massive explosion. It sounds close—loud—like the stumbling tread of a dinosaur.
“Uh-oh,” says Jordan. “Looks like one of the rez associations is breaking out the big guns.”
“South Pill Hill,” Abigail says.
“You think?”
She nods and looks at him like, duh, of course.
“This is going to be some night,” says Jordan. “Like the Fourth.”
“Worse,” she says, gives him the look again. I’m standing here looking back and forth between the two of them. “Way worse.”
“What?” I ask angrily, even though I know exactly what they’re talking about: it’s what McGully said, exactly what he warned, shouting in the Somerset, just wait until the water goes out. “What do you know?”
“I know everything, man, remember?”
“It’ll be a kind of war,” says Abigail simply, talking softly from the doorway. “There’s one residents association that’s been hoarding Poland Spring bottles in the gym at the YMCA. Thousands of them. Another group has got a ton in the basement of the science center. Everybody’s been hearing the rumors, everyone’s got a plan to protect their own stash and go after the other stashes.”
“Or make a go at the reservoir,” says Jordan, peeling my fingers off his arm, one by one.
Abigail nods. “Well, yeah, the reservoir goes without saying.”
“It’s going to be like capture the flag, except with guns,” says Jordan, and Abigail nods again. “Lots of guns.”
As if to underscore the point there’s a second reverberating explosion, and it’s hard to say whether it was closer or farther than the first, but it definitely sounded louder. A pause, and then the chilling multilayered sound of a lot of people screaming at once, followed by the unmistakable typewriter rattle of machine-gun fire.
I’m listening to all this, breathing heavily, my head tilted to one side. It’s the overwhelming police presence that’s been keeping the fragile peace, everybody knows that, the DOJ cruisers, a cop on every block, that’s what’s prevented the wariness and anxiety of the population from bubbling over and bursting out like underground steam. I haven’t seen a single policeman today. Not a single car.
“Hey, Henry? You better get going. It’s going to be a busy night.”
5.
It’s the one asset I have left, the one piece of law-enforcement equipment that I still carry with me, my bone-deep knowledge of the streets of Concord. I biked them as a kid and drove them as an adult, and now I walk swiftly and unerringly, from Wilson Avenue back up toward Main Street.
My house is back to the west, past Clinton Street, but I’m headed the other way. I just have to—I just have to get this done. That’s all.
Jordan was right: It’s going to be a busy night. I can hear gunfire coming from a dozen different directions and see smoke rising from a dozen distant fires. I pass a mob of people, thirty at least, walking down the street all together in a tight quasimilitary formation, dragging a trail of shopping carts lashed together with ropes and dog leashes. A family of five hightailing it on foot down the center of the road, dad carrying two kids to his chest, mom carrying one, looking back anxiously the way they came.
Detective McGully, glowering again in my memory, red faced and jabbing his finger: You just wait until there’s no water, you just fucking wait.
Houdini is scouting ahead of me with his mottled-fur flanks and predator’s sneer, lips pulled back over yellow canines. I bend forward, hastening my stride to keep up with him as we pass the Water West building, pass the statehouse, pass the McDonald’s where once upon a time I found the corpse of a suicide named Peter Zell hanging in the bathroom.
On Phenix Street, where the movie theater still stands, the marquee still advertising the final installment of Distant Pale Glimmers from two months ago, a guy wearing a baseball cap backward is rolling by on a skateboard, clutching what looks like a five-liter drum of spring water, trying to get somewhere fast. A young woman in flat black shoes and a housewife’s apron appears out of the doorway of the theater with a shotgun and shoots him in the side, and he topples off the board and into the street.
I keep going, faster and faster. I shake it off, shake it all away—the fleeing family, the woman with the shotgun, Jordan’s leering insinuation, Nico on her helicopter, Alyssa and Micah Rose at the Quincy Street playground—everything everything everything—I keep my head down and my mind focused on the case because I’m sick of wondering why I’m doing this, why I care. This is just what I have, it’s what I do.
I take the left off Route 1 before I get to the Hood Factory, then a sharp right into the little tangle of streets behind the prison.
It’s dusk now. The sun is pinking on the horizon line, getting ready to sink.
I drifted away from my family, kind of, was what Jeremy Canliss told me—drifted away, but not before he inherited some sniper equipment from Canliss & Sons, not before he learned how to use it. Spent some time on the rifle range, not a converted bowling alley but a real range, learned to take a crack shot from three hundred yards. The murder weapon might even have been a sniper rifle from Dad’s old supply. Unless he picked it up along the way, an unexpected piece of good fortune, fate smiling on his plan. After he followed me to UNH, after he made his own way past the unevenly attentive perimeter guards—suddenly here’s Julia Stone’s miniature armory, and Jeremy helps himself to a weapon from the same stash where Brett got his.
Because it’s clear now what happened: Jeremy wanted Brett gone, and then he followed me to make sure he stayed gone.
I’m running now. I’m almost there.
Canliss told me where he lives without intending to. At the other side of my kitchen table, sweating and stammering through his story, he said how he and Brett would sit on his porch, watching the thugs go in and out of the state pen, Brett saying “there but for the grace of God.” There’s only one short street that runs directly behind the New Hampshire State Prison for Men, and that’s Delaney Street, and when I get there my watch says it’s 8:45—Tuesday, I think, some-how it is still Tuesday, and darkness has drawn down along this short crooked street.
Normally it would take me an hour to work my way down a street of nineteen homes. But nine out of the nineteen are abandoned, front doors caved in, windows smashed or papered over. At one house, number six, on the north side, the tile of the roof has peeled off like skin, revealing the bent beams of the attic. Of the remaining ten houses, two have lit torches in the windows, and I decide to start with one of those, number sixteen Delaney Street. I rush across the darkness of its weedy lawn.
The prison is directly behind the house and it’s on fire, bright walls of flame coming up out of the building’s old western wing.
I raise my left fist and bang on the door, shouting “Martha!” and the door is answered by an elderly couple, cowering, hands in the air, the woman in a nightgown and the man in slippers and pajama bottoms, pleading with me to leave them be. I exhale, step back from the door frame.