I lay it back on the table. “Here,” says McGully. “Take a napkin. Dab off some of the bull hockey.”
There is, I note, no admission price listed for this marvelous “World of Tomorrow.” I ask Culverson and he says drily that from what Sergeant Thunder said, it varies from customer to customer. In other words, the price is whatever you’ve got.
“Last night I watched them come and take Sergeant Thunder’s riding lawnmower, his little wine refrigerator, and his microwave,” says Culverson. “This morning they dismantled his brick shed, knocked it apart with those big masonry hammers and carted away the bricks. They wear jumpsuits, these guys. I think jumpsuits are a nice touch, if you’re looking to swindle someone out of everything they own.”
“You didn’t try and stop them?” says McGully, and Culverson rears back, gives him an are-you-crazy?
“Yeah,” he says. “I put up my dukes. You think these guys aren’t carrying?”
I turn the brochure over in my hands. State-of-the-art medical facilities. Gourmet meals. Craps tables.
“Besides,” says Culverson. “You should have seen the smile on the Sergeant’s face.” He leans back and gives us the look, fox in a henhouse. “Grinning like a sex fiend. I’ve never seen an old man look so happy.”
McGully looks agitated. He taps ash into his teacup and says, “What’s the point?” but he already knows the point, and I do, too. Culverson gives it to us anyway. “Maybe it’s false hope you’re giving this girl, your old babysitter—but it’s hope, right? Little spark in the darkness?” McGully makes an irritated sputter, and Culverson turns to him, says, “I’m serious, man. Maybe having Palace working on her case keeps this lady from going nuts.”
“Exactly,” I say. “That’s—exactly.”
Culverson takes a hard look at me, turns back to McGully. “Hell, maybe it keeps Palace from going nuts.”
I bend back over my notebook, moving on. “If you wanted to make a pizza, where would you go for ingredients? This guy’s boss sends him out yesterday morning for basics, and I presume he means at a rummage.”
“No question,” says Culverson. “No one’s running a pizza restaurant with ERAS cheese.” He doesn’t say the letters, he pronounces it out like most people, sounds like heiress. The Emergency Resource Allocation System.
“Which rummage, though? Pirelli’s?”
“Hey, don’t ask me. I’m doing fine with my little garden and Ruth-Ann’s hospitality. But my esteemed colleague is a married man and has different needs.”
There’s a long pause then, as Culverson stubs out his cigar in the ashtray and stares pointedly at McGully, who at last throws up his hands and sighs. “Fuck’s sake,” he says. “The old Elks Lodge building. On South Street, past Corvant.”
“You sure?” I’m scrawling it in my notebook, tapping my feet on Ruth-Ann’s floor. “I was just down that way to get some eyeglasses fixed at Paulie’s. The lodge looked like it’d been looted clean.”
“Not the basement,” he says. “The guy was shopping for cheese, for canned tomatoes, olives? Elks Rummage. Dollars to donuts. Tell them I sent you.”
“Thank you, McGully,” I say, laying down my pencil, beaming.
“Don’t forget, you got to bring something.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Yeah, well. Up yours.”
“Deep down inside,” says Culverson, gazing fondly at McGully, “you’re a shining star.”
“Up yours, too.”
Ruth-Ann circles back around, swift and nimble in her orthopedic shoes. I smile at her and she winks. I’ve been coming to the Somerset since I was twelve years old. “How much do we owe you?” asks Culverson like always, and Ruth-Ann says, “A zillion trillion dollars,” like always, and bustles away.
I get home and dump everybody’s leftovers into a big plastic bowl and whistle for my dog, a puffy white bichon frisé named Houdini who used to belong to a drug dealer.
“Whoa, wait,” I tell him, as he hurls his little body across the room at the food bowl. “Sit. Stay.”
The dog ignores me; he woofs with delight and plunges his tiny happy face into the leftovers. Very briefly, when we first met, I was determined to train Houdini as a search-and-rescue dog, but I have long since abandoned that project. He has zero interest in obeying orders or instructions of any kind; he remains a pure untutored child of an animal. I settle into a wooden chair at my kitchen table to watch him eat.
I lied to Culverson and McGully, earlier, as I do every time they press me on the subject of my little sister. I know where she is and I know what she’s doing. Nico has gotten herself involved with some kind of anti-asteroid conspiracy, one of the many small networks of fantasists and fools who believe they know how to avert what’s coming, or prove that it’s a massive government frame-up, like the moon landing or the Kennedy assassination. The details of her particular operation I do not know, and nor do I want to. And I certainly have no interest in discussing any of this with my colleagues. There are other things I’d prefer to think about.
“Sorry, boy,” I tell Houdini, when he empties the bowl and turns up to me expectantly. “That’s it.”
I turn on my scanner and fiddle with the crystal till I get Dan Dan the Radio Man. He’s talking about the Mayfair Commission, the joint House–Senate hearings on the failure of NASA and various agencies within the departments of Defense and Homeland Security “to provide adequate warning or protection against the looming threat, over a period of years and even decades.” We had fun with that one, over at the Somerset, the other detectives and I, imagining old Senator Mayfair rooting out who knew what about 2011GV1, and when. “Why, it’s an outrage!” McGully declaimed in character, jabbing a senatorial forefinger in the air. “Our own scientists, conspiring with the asteroid the whole time!”
Now Dan Dan the Radio Man reports with dismay that Eleanor Tollhouse, deputy director of NASA from 1981 to 1987 and now eighty-five years old, is being held on the floor of the Senate in a cage, “for her own protection.”
I turn off the scanner. Houdini is still looking at me, sad eyed and earnest, so I sigh and pour out a quarter cup of dry kibble, exactly what I had hoped to avoid by bringing home the table scraps. There is now just a single serving left in this bag, and after this one I have sixteen bags with ten servings per bag. Houdini eats approximately two servings a day, so we should be just about okay for the seventy-seven days remaining. But who’s counting?
I stand up and stretch and fill his water bowl. That’s one of the big jokes: Who’s counting? The answer, of course, is everyone—everyone is counting.
4.
The dog barks and I open my eyes and sit upright with my heart clenched like a fist.
“What, boy?” I say. “What is it?”
Houdini is barking at the front door, just a few feet from the dilapidated living-room sofa I’ve been sleeping on since April. Houdini keeps barking, loud and shrill and insistent, very much unlike himself. I roll off the sofa and push it aside and lift the four loose floorboards beneath. My hands fumbling in the darkness, I find the safe, find the dial, roll through the combination, pull up the door, and draw out a long serrated knife and a Ruger LCP handgun.
Houdini is still yelping and pacing, a short tight wire of anxiety, jerking one way and then the other. I order him uselessly to calm. Clutching my weapons I step past the dog, moving slowly and deliberately until my shoulder is pressed against the front door.
“It’s okay, boy,” I mutter, my heart hammering now, the handle of the knife sweating in my palm. “It’s okay.”