World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(38)

So Atlee goes to ask Astronaut how much longer and finds him, in a hallway outside the garage, talking to a girl.

“It was her,” he tells me, pointing to the picture. “Your girl.”

They were speaking, Nico and Astronaut, in hushed voices, at the end of the long hallway that cuts through the police station. Both of them were smoking cigarettes and they were arguing.

“Wait,” I manage. “Arguing about what?”

“I do not know.”

“How do you know it was an argument?”

Atlee smiles slightly. “We are a gentle people. But I do know what an argument sounds like.”

“What were they arguing about?” I can barely hear my own words, my heart is beating so loud; blood is rushing into my head like cold water in a cavern. I feel like I am there—coming upon them, huddled together in conversation in that narrow corridor. Was it already stained with blood, with two overlapping trails leading into and out of the kitchenette?

“I cannot say what their subject was, but I could tell that the girl was the angrier of the two. Shaking her head. Poking the man in the chest, like this, with one finger. The man Astronaut, he says that the situation is what the situation is. The girl says, I disagree.”

I let out a gasp of laughter. Atlee looks at me, perplexed. Of course she said that. That’s my sister, that’s Nico, stubbornly rejecting the most uncontroversial statement of plain truth—The situation is what the situation is. I disagree.—that’s Nico, up and down and all around the town. I can see her saying that. I can hear her. I’m so close to her right now. I feel so close.

“And—okay. Okay, what else did they say?”

Nothing, says Atlee, and shakes his head. “I cleared my throat so they would see me standing there. I had been told half an hour, and now had been waiting three times as long. The man apologized. He was very polite. Very soft in his manner. He asked if I could come back at five thirty. He assured me that by that time they would have completed their move down below, and the concrete piece would be waiting for me to shift into place.”

“And that’s what happened?”

“Yes. I went and searched that barn as I had intended, and returned at the appointed time.”

“At half past five.”

“Yes.”

“And they were all gone and the concrete floor piece was waiting?”

“Yes. Along with the food I had been promised. What you called them.”

“MREs,” I say absently, and chew for a moment on my lip.

“You didn’t pour the concrete?”

“No,” he says. “It was built when I got there.”

I don’t write any of this down, I have run out of paper, but I think I will remember. The timelines, the details. I’ll remember. “And so by five thirty all of them were gone?”

“Yes.”

“They had gone under?”

“Well. I don’t know. But they were gone.”

And that’s it, end of story, end of the day of September 26. Atlee and I stand together in thoughtful silence, leaning on a fence in the darkness at the far edge of Joy Farms.

After a last moment of standing side by side, Atlee turns away from the fence and wordlessly hands me the one thing that was missing from my pockets, my department-issue pistol. He has no more information to give me, but there is one thing I still need. I describe my request and he readily accedes—tells me where I have to go and whom to talk to. He takes my notebook and writes on the back of it. I bend my head gratefully. I feel genuine sadness for this old man, the mantle he has laid on himself, the Herculean task of making believe that the world is still more or less what it has been. He has acted like a Secret Service agent leaping in slow motion, hurling himself in the path of the information.

As I step at last off the fence and begin to say goodbye, Atlee Miller cuts me off, holds up his pitchfork at shoulder level.

“You said, I think, that this girl is your sister.”

“Yes.”

He looks me over again, seeming to decide something. “The man, Astronaut. Mild, as I said. Polite. But on his belt, a workingman’s belt, he wore a long-barrel pistol, and a sawtooth buck knife, and a claw hammer.”

Atlee’s expression is set and somber. A chill drifts down over me like snow.

“He never took off the belt, never used it. But there it was. This is what I noticed about him, this man, the leader of this group,” he says. “A quiet man, but with one hand always on this belt.”


*

I see Houdini on my way out, still in that muddy spot he picked out behind the shed. Wallowing, practically inert, head tilted, asleep. A couple of the Amish kids are nearby, playing jacks on a patch of hard dirt. Houdini will like that, when he wakes up, he’ll like to hear them laughing. It happens the same way Atlee described it, in the crack of a moment—I don’t call to the dog. I don’t even get close enough to wake him. I move quietly past with my head down, looking back once and then moving on.

It isn’t easy, because he’s a good dog and he has been good to me and I love him, but I leave him behind in this big green place that smells like animals and grass, among these people who will take care of him into a good old age, at least as far as either party knows.


*

“Wait, please.”