World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(51)

This is last Wednesday, sometime after four thirty p.m., probably closer to five. Me and my dog and my goon rolled in about three o’clock on Thursday morning. Hours. A margin of hours. I can’t forget that. I won’t.

It’s Astronaut, or it’s Jordan and he’s using Astronaut’s knife.

Or it’s Tick, or it’s Valentine. Or it’s none of the above.

Nine times out of ten, in the usual run of things, a person is murdered not by a stranger but by a friend or family member, a husband or wife. There are exceptions—my mother was one—and neither is this the normal run of things. We live now in a world of wolves, blue towns, red towns, people roaming the countryside in search of safety or love or cheap thrills. Nico and Jean may well have emerged from their society of rogues unharmed, only to be set upon by some monster roaming the landscape, someone who had always wanted to slash the throats of two girls and took his opportunity before disappearing, laughing, into the woods. Plenty of people wear sunglasses. Plenty of people carry serrated knives.

“Ready, Policeman?”

“Yeah,” I say to Cortez. “I am.”

We are standing beside each other, hands on our hips, staring down the metal stairwell that descends, as predicted, from the middle of the police station garage. The infamous wedge of concrete that had hidden it has been reduced to a pile of rubble, which Cortez has arranged on a tarp beside the resulting hole, a pyramid of uneven stones. He’s sweating like crazy from his exertions, his T-shirt is soaked, his ponytail unkempt and sweat-matted, rolling down his back. Peering down into the darkness, licking his lips.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, okay, okay. We get down there, first challenge will be getting through the blast door.”

“Blast door?”

“People build bunkers, this is what they do: they put in a toilet, a generator, and a blast door.” He’s fitting on a Rayovac headlamp, tightening the straps. “Plus, of course, I’ve been up here jackhammering for the better part of an hour.”

“And nobody came up.”

“Because they didn’t hear.”

“Through the blast door.”

“Gold star for you, Policeman.”

He hands me a second headlamp, and I loop the straps over my ears and across my scalp, wincing as the Velcro of the fastener brushes the gash on my forehead. “You can’t shoot through a blast door unless you’ve got a shoulder-mounted nuclear bomb, but you sure can pick the locks.” His headlamp winks on. “Well. I can.”

Cortez is talking fast, grinning like the devil, eyes flashing with excitement, ready to rock. There is a new intensity about the man, a thrill of having cracked the floor and a twitchy excitement about heading downstairs—almost as if this is his case and I’m the one tagging along to lend him a hand. He can’t wait to see what’s down there, what comes next. I’m feeling what he’s feeling, too, I need to know, I have to, and when I stare down into the darkness of the stairwell, beyond the edge of my headlamp’s halo I see Nico’s face, eyes closed, the dark red savaged mess of her throat.

Cortez steps down first, heavy boot heel clanging on the top metal step, me coming one step behind. The narrow metal stairwell shivers under our heels.

“Hi.”

A timid voice, from back the way we came. Jean is standing in the doorway that leads out of the garage back into the hallway. Cortez and I both stop at the same time and turn our heads, and our headlamps crisscross like prison-break spotlights on her small worried face.

“You’re going down?”

“Yes,” I say. “We are.”

“You must be Jean,” says Cortez. “It’s so nice to meet you.”

She shifts from one foot to the other in the doorway, shivering, holding herself tightly. She is wearing black pants and a red T-shirt I gave her out of Nico’s abandoned backpack, and over that one of my extra jackets, which hangs on her like a monk’s robe. She hovers there, uneasy, like she wants to leave but can’t. As if she is a ghost, captured in the gloomy corner of the garage, tethered by her curse to a given radius.

“Can I come?” she says.

“Why?”

“I just—I want to.”

I step back up, out of the hole. “Do you remember something, Jean? Something you can tell us?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “No. I don’t.” She crosses her arms, sniffs the thick gray air of the garage. “I just want to come.”

“Well,” I start, but at the same time Cortez says: “No.” I look at him, and he shakes his head. “No way.” Before I can marshal an argument, which I am not sure I have, Cortez is talking fast, stage-whispering his objections: “A, this girl is, tops, a hundred pounds; B, she’s unarmed; and C, she’s clearly not in a healthy place. If you gather my meaning. We don’t need her.”

“She’s been down there. She can guide us.”

“It’s a hole in the ground,” says Cortez. “I think we’ll figure it out.”

I look at Jean, who looks back at me pleadingly, wavering on her feet. She doesn’t want to be alone, that’s all. She’s so pale standing there in the dim light that she is virtually transparent, like I might look away and look back and she’ll be gone, she’ll just slip out of existence.