“Everything went exactly as planned,” she’s saying. “They brought him down here. That scientist, the one I told you about? We’ve got him. We’re going to England in the morning, and he and the team he knows there will initiate the standoff burst. Show that asteroid who’s boss.” I mouth the words back to her, astonished: “Show that asteroid who’s boss.” She smiles. Her teeth glow white. “It’s all going to be fine,” she says.
I have objections, I have a lot of questions, but Nico presses one flat hand over my mouth, shaking her head, flashing impatience.
“I’m telling you, Hen. I’m telling you. It’s all wrapped up like a beef burrito.” One of the dopey expressions our father used to use, one his favorites. “It’s all squared away. Nothing to worry about.”
This is incredible. Incredible! They did it. Nico did it. She saved the world.
“Listen, though. In the meantime, keep an eye on your goon. I don’t trust him.”
My goon. Cortez.
They never had the pleasure of meeting, those two. They would have liked each other. But Nico never met him. Never heard of him. A pool of melancholy blooms in my chest and rushes out into my body like deep-blue blood. It’s not real. I’m dreaming, and as soon as I know that I am dreaming, Nico fades like a Dickens ghost and is replaced by my grandfather, sallow and sunken, hollowed-out cheeks and staring eyes, sitting in his ancient leather armchair sucking on an American Spirit, muttering to himself.
“Dig a hole,” he says. “Dig a hole.”
The smoke is real. Fresh cigarette smoke, rolling down the real police station hallway through the thin cell bars and into my dream. My grandfather really did smoke American Spirits, the same as Nico. Or, rather, Nico smokes them, the same as him. He would curse after each one, say “stupid goddamn things” even as he drew the next one from the pack, fidgeting it with irritation between two old fingers. A man who did not like to enjoy things.
It’s not him smoking now; he’s been dead some years. It’s Cortez, somewhere in the building, working on another butt.
Neither was I really on the thin mattress, tucked in snugly beside our sleeping assault victim; I’m right where I fell down, on the floor in Dispatch, in the shadow of the RadioCOMMAND. I can feel it, still, the warm dream feeling of her hand pressed flat over my mouth, Nico’s hand.
I stand quickly, then buckle from the pins and needles in my legs, reach out and steady myself on the wall with a flat hand. It’s 5:21. It’s morning. How long did I sleep? I follow the curling stink of the smoke and find Cortez back in the cop-car garage, squatting in the center and examining the ground. Our portable coffee rig is erected on one of the shelves, stray grounds clinging in clusters around the mouth of the urn. There’s a thermos at Cortez’s side with steam rising around its edges, mingling with the cigarette smoke.
“Oh, good morning,” he says, without looking up.
“We have to get down there.”
“No kidding.” He grunts, slides down onto his stomach. “I’m working on it.”
“Can we get down there?”
“I’m working on it,” he says again. “Have some coffee.”
I find my steel thermos on the shelf behind me, the one with my name Sharpied on the side, and I pour myself a cup. My dream was obvious wish fulfillment, a classic: Nico’s alive, the threat of the asteroid is ended, Earth survives, I survive. But what about my grandfather, muttering from his deathbed, “Dig a hole”? His actual last words. He said that. Cortez has his face against the floor, one eye opened, one eye closed, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth while he slowly runs the claw of his hammer along the concrete, squinting at the invisible fracture between the lid and the surrounding floor.
I sip my coffee; it’s hot and bitter and black. I wait ten seconds. “So what do you think? Can we get down there?”
“You’re a very focused individual.”
“I know. So what do you think?”
He just laughs, and I stop, I wait, I demand patience of myself. Cortez wants the same thing I do, as badly as I do. I want to get into the hole because that’s where my sister is, my sister or individuals possessing information as to her whereabouts; Cortez wants to get into the hole because it is there. He wants in because he is locked out. His hair is a mess, out of its ponytail, rolling in tangled clumps down his back. I’ve never asked him, in so many words, why he came along on this fool’s journey in search of my errant sister, but I think this is the answer: to do things like this, to do what he loves with what time is left. I am a question mark pointed at a secret, Cortez is a tool aimed at the stubborn places of the world.
“So?” I say. “Can you—”
“Yes.” He heaves himself to standing and flicks his cigarette away, adding one more butt to our gathered piles.
“Yes? How? How?”
“Wait and I’ll tell you.” He smiles and then digs out tobacco for a fresh smoke, pats his pants for papers, rolls the thing slowly, torturing me. And then, at last: “It’s a wedge, not a flat lid, is my guess, which means we couldn’t lift it up even if we weren’t a couple of skeletons.”
“So?”
“So we crack it instead. First choice is a gas-powered jackhammer, which we don’t have and won’t get.”
I’m nodding, nodding like crazy, and my mind is running and gunning, ready to roll. This is what I want. Specifics. Answers. An agenda. I’ve set down my coffee, I’m ready to run out of here and go get what we need.
“Second choice?” I say.
“Second choice is a sledgehammer.” He takes a long drag on the cigarette, grins languorously while I wait in desperation. “And I know where to get one.”
“Where?”
“Why, at the store, of course.”
At last—at last—he explains. He clocked the hammer when we rummaged through a SuperTarget two days ago, the last stop we made, three highway exits before Rotary. The SuperTarget was among five other stores, massive and fortresslike, spread out across a vast parking lot: a Hobby Lobby, a Home Depot, a Kroger grocery, a Cheesecake Factory.
“It was a Wilton,” Cortez says. “Big twelve-pounder. Good grip on it.” He’s leaning against the wall, shaking his head. “And I left it behind. I remember, because I picked it up and I almost took it but then I didn’t. I thought, we won’t use it. It’ll weigh down the wagon and we just don’t need it.” He sighs and exhales wistfully, like a man dreaming of a lost lover. “But I remember it. A big lovely Wilton with a fiberglass handle. Do you remember it?”
“I—sure.” I’m not sure. I remember the SuperTarget pretty well, rows and rows of empty shelves, scented candles and bath towels scattering the smudged tile floors, plumbing fixtures smashed on the ground like broken toys. The grocery aisle ravaged as if by packs of beasts. A big sign, must have been months old, that said NO MORE AMMUNITION THANK YOU SO MUCH.
“But what if it’s gone?” I say. “What if someone else has taken it?”
“Well, then we won’t have it,” Cortez says. “Just like now.”
I chew on the end of my mustache. The point of the sarcasm is that if we go in search of the sledgehammer and don’t find it, we will have lost nothing, but in fact he is wrong, because we will have lost time. Time is what we will have lost. How long to get down there on the bike, how many hours to find the hammer, to secure it to the wagon, to bike it back?
Cortez knows exactly where it is. He remembers the aisle and the shelf: aisle 9, shelf 14. That’s how his mind operates. It’s in the rear of the store, past the gardening supplies and the plumbing section. I hear it again in his voice as he describes the route, that deep vein of regret, for having left the hammer behind, for having been caught for once in his life without the necessary tool for the job.