World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(2)

“Abigail.”

Her eyes soften, widen slightly.

“Abigail,” I say. “Can I help you? Can we help each other?”

She gapes at me. Heavy silence. Moments flying past, time burning away.

“Abigail, please.”





1.


I’m worried about my dog.

He’s limping now, on top of everything else, on top of the dry cough that rattles his small frame as he breathes, on top of the nasty burrs that have tangled themselves irretrievably in his matted fur. I don’t know where or how he picked it up, this deep limp in his right forepaw, but here he comes now, moving slow out of the evidence room behind me, slipping through my legs and slouching with a pronounced foot-drag down the hallway. He shuffles away, poor little guy, nosing along the baseboard, his coat smudged but still white.

I watch him with deep unease. It wasn’t fair of me to take Houdini along. A mistake I made without even thinking about it, inflicting upon my dog the rigors of a long and uncertain journey, the unhygienic drinking water and sparse food, the hikes along deserted highway shoulders and through fallow fields, the fights with other animals. I should have left him with McConnell and the others, back at the safe house in Massachusetts, left him with McConnell’s kids, all the other kids, the other dogs, a safe and comfortable environment. But I took him. I never asked him if he wanted to come, not that a dog in any case could fairly weigh the risks and rewards.

I took him, and we crossed eight hundred fifty complicated miles in five long weeks, and the wear is showing on the dog, no doubt about it.

“I’m really sorry, pal,” I whisper, and the dog coughs. I pause in the hallway, breathing in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling.

It was the same in the evidence room as in the rest of the place: thick coatings of dust on the shelves, filing cabinets turned over and emptied out. Odors of must and mildew. In Dispatch, on someone’s desk between the blank laptops and the old foot-switch RadioCOMMAND console, there was an ancient sandwich, half eaten and crawling with ants. Nothing good, nothing helpful or hopeful.

We arrived very late last night and began our search immediately, and now it’s three hours later and the sun is beginning to rise—dull pale beams filtering in through the glass-paned front door, down at the east end of the hall—and we’ve worked through most of the building and nothing. Nothing. A small police station, like the one in Concord, New Hampshire, where I used to work. Even smaller. All night I’ve gone through on my hands and knees with my magnifying glass and fat Eveready flashlight, taking the place room by room: Reception, Dispatch. Administration, Holding Cell, Evidence.

Cold certainty slowly filling me, like dirty water rising in a well: there’s nothing.

Officer McConnell knew it. She told me this was a fool’s errand. “So you have, what, the name of a town?” is what she said.

“A building,” I said. “The police station. In a town. In Ohio.”

“Ohio?” Skeptical. Arms crossed. Scowling. “Well, you won’t find her. Also, if you do? So what?”

I remember what it felt like, her being angry, justified in her anger. I just nodded. I kept packing.

Now, in the flat dawn light of the empty hallway of the empty police station, I make a fist with my right hand and raise it to a forty-five-degree angle and bring it down like the hammer of a gun, slam it backward into the wall I’m leaning against. Houdini turns around and stares at me, bright black animal eyes glinting like marbles in the dark.

“All right,” I tell him. He makes a wet noise in the back of his throat. “Okay. Let’s just keep looking.”


*

A few feet down the hall is a plaque honoring the service of Daniel Arnold Carver, on the occasion of his retirement from the Rotary, Ohio, Police Department at the rank of lieutenant, in the Year of Our Lord 1998. Next to that commemoration is an upside-down horseshoe of construction-paper cards from local children: stick-figure cops waving gaily in bold Crayola colors, with “Thanks for the tour!” written below in the neat handwriting of an elementary school teacher. The cards are dangling from fading twists of Scotch tape; the plaque is slightly misaligned and covered in a half inch of dust.

The next room is on the left, a few feet past the plaque and the kids’ drawings. It’s marked DETECTIVES, although the first thing I notice on entering is that there was only one detective. One desk, one swivel chair. One landline phone, with the cord cut, the receiver sitting unattached in the cradle like stage furniture. A long-dead flowering plant hangs from the ceiling: wilted stalks and clumps of brown leaves. A plastic water bottle on its side, half crushed.

I can picture the detective who once sat in this room, tilted back in the chair, finalizing the small details of a coming meth-lab bust, say, or cursing with crusty good humor at some ham-fisted directive from the know-nothings over in Admin. I sniff the air and imagine I detect the ancient stale odor of his cigars.

Her cigars, actually. Hers. There’s a thick leather log book on the desk with a name neatly stenciled across the top right corner: Detective Irma Russel. “My apologies, Detective Russel,” I tell her, wherever she may be, and toss a salute off into the air. “I should know better.”

I think of Officer McConnell again. She kissed me at last, up on her tiptoes, at the door. Then she pushed me, a good two-handed shove, to send me off on my adventure. “Go,” she said. Fondly, sadly. “Jerk.”