“Young man,” says Lieutenant Paul sharply, and holds up her hand. “I think you misunderstand the situation.”
“Ma’am?”
“You’re not being fired, Palace. You’re being promoted.”
Chief Ordler steps forward into a slant of sunlight from the small window. “We think that, given the circumstances and your particular talents, you’d be better off in a seat upstairs.”
I gape at him. I scramble for and then recover the power of speech. “But department regulation says that an officer must put in two years and six months on patrol before becoming eligible for service in the detective unit.”
“We’re going to waive that requirement,” Paul explains, folding up the incident report and dropping it in the trash. “I think we’ll also not bother with reclassifying your 401(k), just for the time being.”
This is a joke, but I don’t laugh; it’s all I can do to stay upright. I’m trying to get oriented, trying to form words, thinking new times and thinking a seat upstairs and thinking this is not how it happens, in the dream.
“Okay, Henry,” says Chief Ordler mildly. “That’s the end of the meeting.”
I learn later on that it’s Detective Harvey Telson whose spot I’m filling, Telson having taken an early retirement, gone “Bucket List” like many others were doing by this point, by December, heading off to do the things they’ve always wanted to do: speed around in race cars, experiment with long-suppressed romantic or sexual inclinations, track down the old bully and punch him in the face. Detective Telson, as it turns out, always wanted to race yachts. America’s Cup kind of stuff. A lucky break for me.
Twenty-six days after the meeting in her office, two days after the asteroid emerged from conjunction with the Sun, Lieutenant Paul quit the force and moved to Las Vegas to be with her grown children.
I don’t have the dream anymore, the one where Ordler lays my hand on the Bible and makes me a detective. There’s another dream that I’ve been having a lot instead.
Like Dotseth says, the cellular phones are getting dicey. You dial, you wait, sometimes you get through and sometimes not. A lot of people are convinced that Maia is bending Earth’s gravitational field, our magnets or ions, or something, but of course the asteroid, still 450 million kilometers away, is having no more effect on cellphone service than on the weather. Officer Wilentz, our tech guy, he explained it to me once: cellular service is chopped up into sectors—cells—and basically the sectors are dropping out, the cells are dying, one by one. The telecom companies are losing service people because they can’t pay them, because no one is paying their bill; they’re losing their executives to the Bucket List; they’re losing telephone poles to unrepaired storm damage, and they’re losing long stretches of wire to vandals and thieves. So the cells are dying. As for all the other stuff, the smartphone stuff, the apps and the gizmos, forget it.
One of the five major carriers announced last week that it’s begun winding down its business, describing this fact in a newspaper advertisement as an act of generosity, a “gift of time” to the company’s 355,000 employees and their families, and warning customers to expect total suspension of service within the next two months. Three days ago, Culverson’s New York Times had the Department of Commerce predicting total collapse of telephony by late spring, with the administration supposedly crafting a plan to nationalize the industry.
“Meaning,” McGully noted, chortling, “total collapse by early spring.”
Sometimes, when I notice that I have a strong signal, I’ll make a call real quick, so as not to waste it.
“Oh, man. Man oh man, what in hell do you want?”
“Good afternoon, Mr. France. This is Detective Henry Palace, from the Concord Police Department.”
“I know who it is, okay? I know who it is.”
Victor France sounds riled, agitated; he always sounds like that. I’m sitting in the Impala outside Rollins Park now, a couple blocks from where Peter Zell used to live.
“Come on, Mr. France. Take it easy, now.”
“I don’t want to take it easy, okay? I hate your guts. I hate it when you call me, okay?” I hold the phone an inch or two away from my ear as France’s scattershot snarl pours from the earpiece. “I’m trying to live my life here, man. Is that such an awful and terrible thing, just to live my life?”
I can picture him, the thug resplendent: loops of chain drooping from black jeans, skull-and-crossbones pinky ring, scrawny wrists and forearms crawling with several species of tattoo snakes. The rat-eyed face twisted with melodramatic outrage, having to answer the phone, take orders from a stuck-up egghead policeman like myself. But look, I mean, that’s what you get for being a drug dealer, and moreover for getting caught, at this juncture in American history. Victor may not know by heart the full text of the Impact Preparation Security and Stabilization Act, but he’s got the gist.
“I don’t need much help today, Mr. France. A little research project, is all.”
France blows out one last exasperated “oh man oh man,” and then he comes around, just like I knew he would. “All right, okay. All right, what is it?”
“You know a little bit about cars, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Sure. I mean, what, Detective, what, you calling me to fill your tires?”
“No, thank you. The last few weeks, people have started converting their cars to vegetable-oil engines.”
“No shit. You seen gas prices lately?” He clears his throat noisily, spits.
“I’m trying to find out who did one such conversion. It’s a midsize red pickup, a Ford. American flag painted on the side. You think you can handle that?”
“Maybe. And what if I can’t?”
I don’t answer. I don’t have to. France knows the answer.
One of the most striking effects of the asteroid, from a law-enforcement perspective, has been the resulting spike in drug use and drug-related crime, with skyrocketing demand for every category of narcotic, for opiates, for Ecstasy, for methamphetamine, for cocaine in all its varieties. In small towns, in docile suburbs, farming communities, everywhere—even midsize cities like Concord, which had never experienced serious narcotics crime in the past. The federal government, after some tacking back and forth in the summer and fall, late last year resolved on a firm and uncompromising law-and-order stance. The IPSS Act incorporated provisions stripping the right of habeas corpus and other due-process protections from anyone accused of importing, processing, growing, or distributing controlled substances of all kinds.
These measures were deemed necessary “in the interest of controlling violence, promoting stability, and encouraging productive economic activity in the time remaining before impact.”
Personally, I do know the full text of the legislation.
The car is off and the wipers are still, and I’m watching as gray blobs of snow build up in uneven slopes on the windshield.
“All right, man, all right,” he says. “I’ll figure out who juiced the truck. Give me a week.”
“I wish I could, Victor. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” He heaves an extravagant sigh. “Asshole.”
The irony is, pot is the one exception. The use of marijuana has been decriminalized, in a so-far-unsuccessful effort to dampen demand for the harder and more societally destabilizing drugs. And the amount of marijuana I found on Victor France’s person was five grams, small enough that it could easily have been for his personal use, except that the way I discovered it was that he tried to sell it to me as I was walking home from the Somerset Diner on a Saturday afternoon. Whether to make an arrest, under those ambiguous circumstances, is at the discretion of the officer, and I have decided in France’s case not to exercise that discretion—conditionally.