“What is your department, anyway?”
She doesn’t answer; I knew she wouldn’t. We’ve always stayed in touch, the occasional e-mail, phone numbers exchanged every couple of years. I know that she is based in New England, and I know that she works for a federal agency, operating at a level of law enforcement that is orders of magnitude beyond mine. Before we dated, she had wanted to go to veterinary school.
“Any more questions, Palace?”
“No.” I glance at the river, then back at her. “Wait. Yes. A friend of mine asked why we won’t let the Pakistanis try and nuke the asteroid, if they want to.”
Alison laughs once, mirthlessly, and begins tearing the papers into strips. “Tell your friend,” she says, tearing the strips into smaller strips, then those into still smaller ones, “that if they hit it—which they won’t—but if they do instead of one asteroid, we’ll have thousands of smaller but still devastating asteroids. Thousands and thousands of irradiated asteroids.”
I don’t say anything. With her small efficient fingers, Alison feeds the tiny bits of paper into the Charles, and then she turns to me and smiles.
“Anyway, Detective Palace,” she says. “Whatcha working on?”
“Nothing,” I say, turn my face away. “Nothing, really.”
But I tell her about the Zell case anyway, I can’t help it. We’re walking up John F. Kennedy from Memorial Drive to Harvard Square, and I give her the whole story, top to bottom, and then I ask her, from a professional standpoint, what she makes of the case. We’ve arrived at a kiosk in what used to be a newsstand, now strung with Christmas lights, a squat portable generator humming outside, grumbling and hissing like a miniature tank. The glass of the newsstand is blacked out, and someone has taped two big pieces of cardboard across the front doors, written THE COFFEE DOCTOR on them in big black letters with a Sharpie.
“Well,” she says slowly, as I hold open the door for her. “Not having examined the evidence firsthand, it certainly sounds like you reached the correct conclusion. Ninety-five percent chance, this guy was just another hanger.”
“Yep,” I say.
It’s dark inside the converted news kiosk, a couple of bare bulbs and another string of Christmas lights, an old-fashioned cash register and an espresso machine, squat and gleaming, parked like a tank on the black countertop.
“Greetings, humans,” says the proprietor, an Asian kid, maybe nineteen, with a porkpie hat and horn-rimmed glasses and a wispy beard. He gives Alison a cheerful salute. “Pleasure, as always.”
“Thanks, Coffee Doctor,” she says. “Who’s in the lead?”
“Let’s see.”
I look where he’s looking, seven paper coffee cups lined up on the far end of the counter, each cup with the name of a continent scrawled on it. He tilts a couple, rattles them, eyeballs the number of beans that have been tossed in each.
“Antarctica. No contest.”
“Wishful thinking,” says Alison.
“No shit, sister.”
“Couple of the usual.”
“Your wish, my command,” he says, and works fast, lining up two dainty ceramic demitasses, dunking a steamer wand in a stainless-steel jug of milk and flicking it on.
“Best coffee in the world,” notes Alison.
“What’s the five percent chance?” I ask, as the espresso machine rattles and hisses.
Alison smiles faintly. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“I’m just wondering.”
“Henry,” says Alison, as the kid presents us with our two short cups of coffee. “Can I tell you something? You can follow this case forever, and you can discover all its secrets, you can build this man’s timeline all the way back to his birth, and the birth of his father and his father’s father. The world is still going to end.”
“Yep. Yeah, I know.” We’ve settled in a corner of the ersatz coffee shop now, huddled at an old plastic card table the Coffee Doctor has set up. “But what’s the five percent chance, though, in your analysis?”
She sighs, gives it to me again, that small gentle sarcastic eye roll.
“The five percent is this: for this man Toussaint to attack you with the ashtray like that, to try and run for it? With three armed detectives in the room. That’s a Hail Mary. That’s a desperation play.”
“McGully threatened to have him executed.”
“In jest.”
“He’s scared. He doesn’t know that.”
“Sure, sure.” She tilts her head this way and that, considering. “But you’re threatening, at the same moment, to arrest him on a minor violation.”
“For two weeks. Engine fraud. A token bid.”
“Yes,” she says. “But even for a token bid, you’re going to search the house, right?”
Alison pauses to sip her espresso. I leave mine alone, for now, staring at her. Oh, Palace, I’m thinking. Oh, Palace. Holy moly. Someone else comes into the cafe, a college-age girl; the Coffee Doctor says, “Greetings, human,” fires up his machine, and the girl tosses a bean into the cup marked EUROPE.
“Still, five percent chance,” says Alison. “But you know what they say about odds.”
“Yep.” I sip my espresso, which is, in fact, delicious. “Yep, yep, yep.”
I’m buzzing. I’m feeling it. The coffee, the morning. Five percent chance.
Ninety-three north, fifty-five miles an hour, eight o’clock in the morning, no other cars on the road.
Somewhere between Lowell and Lawrence my phone picks up three bars, and I call Nico, I wake her up, I give her the bad news: Derek got involved with something foolish, and he’s not getting out. I go easy on the details. I don’t use the word terrorist. I don’t tell her about the secret organization, I don’t tell her about the Moon. I just tell her what Alison said about the military-justice system right now: he’s got a label that means he’s not going anywhere.
I’m sympathetic but clear: this is the way it is, and there’s nothing else to be done, and then I brace myself for her tearful or spiteful or furious rebuttal.
Instead she is silent, and I lift the phone, making sure my bars haven’t disappeared. “Nico?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“So—do you understand?”
I’m rolling north, steadily north, over the state line. Welcome to New Hampshire. Live Free or Die.
“Yeah,” says Nico, a pause for the slow exhale of cigarette smoke. “I understand.”
“Derek will mostly likely spend the rest of the time in that facility.”
“Okay, Henry,” she says, like maybe now I’m rubbing it in. “I get it. How was it, seeing Alison?”
“What?”
“How does she look?”
“Uh, good,” I say. “She looks really good.”
And then somehow the conversation slips into a different key, and she’s telling me how much she always liked Alison, and we’re trading stories from old times: growing up, our first days at Grandfather’s, then later, sneaking around with dates in the basement. I’m rolling past the scenery, and for a while we’re talking like we used to talk, two kids, brother and sister, the real world.
By the time Nico and I get off the phone, I’m almost home, I’m rolling into the southern part of the Concord metro area, and my cellphone signal is still strong, so I go ahead and put through one more call.
“Mr. Dotseth?”
“Hey, kid. I heard about Detective Andreas. Christ.”
“I know. I know. Listen, I’m going to take another peek around.”