“Okay, then.”
I sit there for a second, and then I go back to my desk and pick up the landline and initiate my search for stupid Derek Skeve. First I repeat the calls that Nico has already made: the bars and the hospitals. I reach the men’s prison and the new, auxiliary men’s prison, I reach the Merrimack County sheriff’s office, I reach admitting departments at Concord Hospital and New Hampshire Hospital and every other hospital I know of in three counties. But no one’s got him, no one matching that description.
Outside, there’s a thick clutch of God people clustered in the plaza, thrusting their pamphlets at passersby, hollering in gospel cadences about how prayer is all we’ve got left, prayer is our only salvation. I nod noncommittally and I keep on moving.
And now I’m lying in my bed and I’m not sleeping because it’s Wednesday night, and it was Tuesday morning that I first looked into the dead eyes of Peter Zell, which means he was killed sometime on Monday night, and so maybe it’s almost forty-eight hours since he got killed, or maybe the forty-eight hours have already passed. Either way, my window is sliding closed and I am nowhere near identifying and apprehending his murderer.
So I’m lying in my bed and I’m staring at the ceiling with my fists clenching and unclenching at my sides, and then I get up and open the blinds, and I look out the window, into the cloud-fogged blackness, past the handful of visible stars.
“You know what you can do?” I say softly, raising one finger and pointing it at the sky. “You can go fuck yourself.”
PART TWO
Non-Negligible Probabilities
1.
“Wake up, sweetheart. Wakey-wakey-wakey.”
“Hello?”
Last night, before going to bed, I unplugged the phone from the wall but left my cell phone on and set to vibrate, so tonight’s pleasant dream of Alison Koechner has been interrupted not by the alarm-bell clamor of the landline, Maia shrieking into the windows and setting the world on fire, but by a gentle shivering rattle on the night table, a sensation that has inserted itself into my dream as the purr of a cat at ease in Alison’s gentle lap.
And now Victor France is cooing at me. “Open your eyes, sweetheart. Crack open those big moody peepers, Mustache McGee.”
I crack open my big moody peepers. Outside is darkness. France’s voice is whispery and grotesque and insistent. I blink awake and catch one final sidewise glimpse of Alison, radiant in the auburn front room of our wooden house on Casco Bay.
“I’m so sorry to wake you, Palace. Oh, wait, I’m not sorry at all.” France’s voice dissolves into a queer little giggle. He’s high on something, that’s for sure; maybe marijuana, maybe something else. High as a satellite, my father used to say. “No, definitely not sorry.”
I yawn again, crack my neck, and check the clock: 3:47 a.m.
“I don’t know how you’ve been sleeping, Detective, but I have not been sleeping too well, me, personally. Every time I’m about to crash out I think to myself, now, Vic, baby, that’s just dead hours. That’s just golden hours right down the tubes.” I’m sitting upright, feeling around on my night table for the light switch, grabbing my blue book and my pen, thinking, he’s got something for me. He wouldn’t be calling except that he’s got something for me. “I’m keeping track, at my house, can you believe that? I’ve got this big poster with every day that’s left, and every day I check one off.”
Behind France’s ragged monologue is the rapid-fire thump and robotic piano of electronic music, a large crowd hooting and chanting. Victor is partying in a warehouse somewhere, probably out on Sheep Davis Road, way east of the city proper.
“It’s like an Advent calendar, you know what I mean, my man?” He slips into a horror-movie narrator’s basso profondo. “An Advent calendar… of doom.”
He cackles, coughs, cackles again. It’s definitely not marijuana. Ecstasy is what I’m now thinking, though I shudder to think how France would have funded a purchase of Ecstasy, the prices for synthetics being as high as they are.
“Do you have information for me, Victor?”
“Ha! Palace!” Cackle, cough. “That’s one of the things I like about you. You do not mess around.”
“So do you have something for me?”
“Oh, my goodness gracious.” He laughs, pauses, and I can picture him, twitching, skinny arms tensing, the teasing grin. In the silence the bass-and-drum behind him pipes through, tinny and distant. “Yeah,” he says finally. “I do. I found it, about your pickup truck. I actually got it yesterday, but I waited. I waited until I was sure it would wake you up, and do you know why?”
“Because you hate me.”
“Yes!” he hollers and cackles. “I hate you! You got a pen, beautiful?”
The red pickup truck with the flag on the side was converted to a waste-oil engine, according to Victor France, by a Croatian mechanic named Djemic, who runs a small shop near the burned-out Nissan dealership on Manchester Street. I don’t know the place he’s talking about, but it will be easy to find.
“Thank you, sir.” I’m wide awake now, writing quickly, this is great, holy moly, and I’m feeling a surge of excitement and a wild rush of kindness toward Victor France. “Thanks, man,” I say. “This is great. Thank you so much. Go back to your party.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Now, you listen to me.”
“Yes?” My heart is shivering in my chest; I can see the outlines of the next phase of my investigation, each piece of information properly following forward from the last. “What?”
“I just wanna say… I wanna say something.” Victor’s voice has lost its ragged overlay of addled giddiness, he’s drawn down very quiet. I can see him, clear as though he’s standing before me, hunched forward over the warehouse pay phone, jabbing a finger in the air. “I just wanna say, this is it, man.”
“Okay,” I say. “This is it.” I mean it, too. He’s given me what I asked for, and more, and I’m ready to cut him loose. Let him dance in his warehouse till the world burns down.
“Do you—” His voice catches, thick with suppressed tears, and now the tough guy is gone, he’s a little boy pleading his way out of punishment. “Do you promise?”
“I do, Victor,” I say. “I promise.”
“Okay,” he says. “’Cause also, I know whose truck it is.”
I know what the dream is about, by the way. I’m not an idiot. There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.
The dream that I’ve been having, about my high-school sweetheart, is not really about my high-school sweetheart, when you get right down to it. It’s not a dream about Alison Koechner and our lost love and the precious little three-bedroom house in Maine we might have built together, had things gone a different way. I am not dreaming of white picket fences and Sunday crosswords and warm tea.
There’s no asteroid in the dream. In the dream, life continues. Simple life, happy and white-picket lined or otherwise. Mere life. Goes on.
When I’m dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I’m dreaming of is not dying.
Okay? See? I get it.
“I just wanted to go over a few things with you, Mr. Dotseth, just to let you know—this case, this hanger, it’s got legs. It really does.”
“Mom? Is that you?”
“What? No—it’s Detective Palace.”
A pause, a low chuckle. “I know who it is, son. I’m having a little fun.”
“Oh. Of course.”
I hear newspaper pages flipping, I can practically smell the bitter steam rising off of Denny Dotseth’s cup of coffee. “Hey, did you hear about what’s happening in Jerusalem?”