“Can you make coffee?” I ask Cortez.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “Great idea.”
Cortez stands, stretches, takes the necessary items from his golf bag and gets set up, while I think about blood. Two trails, one running out of the kitchenette and one running back.
Coffee on the boil, Cortez goes back to rummaging for treasure, working his way down the shelving system, lifting each object to the light, quickly assessing, evaluating, moving on.
“Training manual,” he says. “Porno mag. Empty shoebox. Sunglasses. Broken.” He tosses the mirrored state-trooper-style shades over his shoulder, shattering them further on the patterned-concrete floor of the garage. “Holsters. Could use these, maybe. Oh, goodness. Goodness gracious, Policeman. Binoculars.”
He holds them up, bulky and black, points them at me like a birdwatcher.
“Bad news,” he says. “You look like shit.”
He takes the binoculars. He takes a bag full of cell phone batteries. I’ve stopped asking Cortez what good it all is, all of the collecting and acquiring and sorting. It’s a game to him, a challenge: keep gathering up useful objects until the world caves in and no one has any use for anything.
I am aware of the possibility, of course, that it is Nico’s blood on the knife, in the sink, on the ground. It is too early to think about that, too early to reach that sort of conclusion.
The most likely scenario, after all, is that this blood is the blood of a stranger, and these knives are totally unrelated to my current investigation. It’s just some terrible act of violence among uncounted terrible acts of violence occurring at an accelerating rate. We saw a lot of this on our journey, met people who confessed, whether in tearful remorse or in fierce defiance, to some unconscionable deed. The old lady standing guard over her grandson in an abandoned grocery store, who whispered how she had shot a stranger for six pounds of frozen hamburger meat. The couple at the truck stop that caught someone trying to steal the Dodge pickup they’d been living in, and in the ensuing confrontation ran him over.
We called them red towns, the worst of the places, the communities that had fractured into chaos and lawlessness. We had different names for the different kinds of worlds that the world has become. Red towns: violence and grief. Green towns: pleasant, playing at make-believe. Blue towns: uneasy calm, people hiding. Maybe National Guard or regular army troops on scattered patrol. Purple towns, black towns, gray…
I cough into my fist; the claustrophobic garage smell is getting to me, the reek of ancient cigarettes and exhaust. A grimy concrete floor in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern. A thought is twitching to life. Dim and uncertain. I sniff again, drop down onto all fours, digging my knees and palms into the hard concrete floor.
“Policeman?”
I don’t answer. I take a crawling step forward, toward the middle of the room, head angled down, staring at the floor.
“Have you gone mad?” says Cortez, clutching a battered steel money box under his arm like a football. “If you’ve gone mad you’re useless, and I’ll have to eat you.”
“Can you help me?”
“Help you what?”
“Butts,” I say, peeling off my sport coat. “Please help me find cigarette butts.”
I crawl across the floor, from the back of the room out toward the garage doors, my shirt sleeves pushed up, my palms getting filthy. I use my magnifying glass, following the checkerboard pattern across the concrete: light squares, dark squares. After a moment Cortez shrugs, sets down the steel box, and we settle in, side by side like grazing cows, moving in slow patterns, staring at the floor.
There are plenty of butts, of course: the floor of the parking garage, like all such places, is littered with the stubs of dead cigarettes. We hunt through the dust and grime of the floor and gather up all we can find and then I come up to a squat and sort them into two piles, checking each one carefully, holding it up and squinting at it in the light before consigning it to its place. Possibles and not possibles. Cortez whistles while he works, occasionally murmuring “madness, madness.” Most of the cigarettes are either generic, having no marking on the filter, or home-rolled, just twists of thin white paper with crusts of tobacco leaf spilling out the side.
And then, after ten minutes—fifteen—
“There it is.”
There. I reach down and pluck up the grimy little twist of paper, the one I was looking for. I hold it up to the flat gray light. There.
“Ah,” says Cortez. “A cigarette butt. I knew we could do it.”
I don’t answer. I found it, as I knew in my secret policeman’s heart that I would. A single cigarette butt, snarled and torn, smashed to a ragged brown by the grind of a heel, shredded-leaf guts spilling out around the dirty wrinkle of the wrapper. I hold the stubbed-out butt carefully between two fingers like the broken body of an insect.
“She’s here.” I stand up. I look around the room. “She was here.”
Now it’s Cortez’s turn not to answer. He’s still staring at the floor—something else has caught his attention. My heart is heaving in my chest, swelling and receding like a tide.
The cigarette market, like all markets for addictive goods, was violently disrupted by the impending end of civilization: skyrocketing demand and vanishing supply. Most smokers, old and new, have made do with foul-tasting generics, or scrounged enough loose tobacco to roll their own. But my sister, my sister Nico, has managed somehow always to be in possession of her favorite brand.
I hold the butt up high. I sniff it. This object must be considered in combination with the plastic fork suspended in its struggle to hold open the door of the vending machine, and the conclusion to be heard from these two objects, these two small objects singing together, is that this is real. Poor addled Abigail didn’t pick the police station in Rotary, Ohio, at random from all the buildings in all the world. Nico really came here, she and her merry band of conspiracists and would-be heroes. I would almost say that she left the butt on purpose, maybe even kept smoking all these years on purpose, in defiance of my nagging, just so that she could leave this clue behind. Except I know that she kept smoking all these years because she was addicted to nicotine, and also because she enjoyed pissing me off.
“She was here,” I say again to Cortez, who is muttering to himself, feeling along the floor with a forefinger extended. I slide the butt into a baggie and carefully place it in my coat pocket. “She is here.”
“I’ll go you one better,” he says, looking up from the square of concrete he’s squatting on. “This is a trap door.”
I’ve been playing hide-and-seek with Nico for our entire lives.
The weekend after the funeral—the second funeral, our father’s, early in June of the year I turned twelve—the movers were roaming around the house, boxing up my little life, carrying out my stash of comic books and my baseball glove and my twin bed, all my worldly store lifted out to the truck in one trip. I realized with a start that I hadn’t seen my baby sister for hours. I flipped out, charged through the house in a panic, ducking past the movers, throwing open the doors of the dusty empty closets, charging down to the basement.
Out on the streets of Concord I clomped through patches of mud from the midsummer rain, up and down side streets, calling her name. I found Nico at last in White Park, giggling, hiding under the slide, getting sunburnt in a light summer dress, scratching her name in the dirt with a stick. I glowered and crossed my skinny arms. I was infuriated, already a roil of emotions from the move, the grief. Nico, age six, reached up and patted my cheek. “You thought I was gone, too, didn’t you, Hen?” Hopping up, taking my big hand between her two little ones. “You did, huh?”