World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(56)

But Cortez isn’t laughing. He’s looking back and forth between me and the boxes of junk food, as if waiting for me to drop and scream hallelujah.

“We found it,” he says at last, smile widening, eyes practically pinwheeling.

“We found what?”

“A stash. A horde. We found stuff, Policeman. Weapons, too: Tasers and helmets and walkie-talkies. Stuff. And this here,” he says, turning to kick another of the crates, “is full of satellite phones. All charged up. I knew these people had stuff down here.”

I stare at him, baffled. This is his own mania, Cortez’s very own brand of undiagnosed asteroid psychosis. Tasers? Helmets? Like we can sit underground with our helmets on and weather the collapse of civilization like a thunderstorm. Who does he think we’re going to talk to on our satellite phones? But he goes on, wrenching the lid off a crate of bottled water and shouting “Ta-da!” like he’s discovered King Tut.

“Five-gallon jugs,” he says, yanking one out by the thin plastic handle. “There are twenty-four in this crate, and five of the crates so far are just water, just so far. A person ideally has three gallons a day, but it’s really one and a half, just to live.” His eyes reflecting the headlamp are buzzing and flickering like a computer, crunching the numbers. “Let’s make it two gallons.”

“Cortez.”

He’s not listening. He’s done—he’s gone off to wherever he is, he’s jumped the rails. “Now, if we’re these jokers, if there are fourteen of us—you said fourteen?”

“There were,” I say. “They’re dead.”

“I know,” he says, offhandedly, and goes back to his calculations, “if there are fourteen people that’s a month, maybe. But for the two of us, Skinny Minny, for just the two of us …”

“How do you know they’re dead?”

“Wait, wait,” he says, dragging a cardboard box away from the wall and digging in, so keyed up he nearly pitches forward into it. “Look, water filtration tablets, at least a gross, so even once the jugs run out, we can unseal ourselves, get up to that creek, remember the creek?”

I do. I remember splashing through it, following Jean, desperate to get where she was leading me, not knowing yet but somehow knowing that it was Nico’s body we were running to find. I am staring at Cortez, my confusion melting over into anger, because I don’t care how many jugs of water are down here—I don’t care about the other stuff, either, all the piles of boxes and bulging black trash bags.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says suddenly, stopping in his frantic motion to take one big step closer to me and shine his headlamp bright into my eyes. “I know you. You can’t see it because you don’t know how to look, but I look around in this room and I see a room full of days. Days of life. And I don’t know what it’s going to be like out there, afterwards, but if days are invested wisely they can be turned into months, and months into years.”

“Cortez, wait,” I say, trying to focus, blocking his light with my hand. “How did you know they’re dead?”

“Who?”

“The—the people, Cortez, the—”

“Oh, right, right. I found one in that room with the cock and balls on it. In a Barcalounger holding a cup of something. Slumped over with his feet up and eyes aced out.” He does a quick pantomime of the vic, crossing his eyes and rolling out his tongue.

“Wait—”

“And when I heard you puking your guts down the hall, I figured you’d found the rest.”

“Cortez, wait—the man you found—”

“Can opener!” he says, diving his hand into a bag and yanking it back out. His voice is getting louder and louder, buzzing and jumping. “Jackpot! That’s really all you need, friend policeman, in our difficult modern times, is a good can opener.” He tosses it toward me, and without thinking I open my hands to catch it. “This is what we came for.”

“No.” I seek his eyes in the darkness, desperate now to make him calm down, to make him hear me. “We came to find my sister.”

“She’s dead. Yes?”

“Yes, but she was—she’s—we’re not done. I mean, we came here to help her.”

“You did.”

I drop the can opener.

“What?”

“Oh, Policeman,” he says. “Dear child.”

Cortez—my goon—he snaps a match and lights a cigarette in the darkness. “I knew I wasn’t going to spend the afterlife with a bunch of cops in the wilds of western Mass., no sir, that was not going to be a comfortable environment for a man like me when the going got rough. But I knew that there was a place like this at the end of your rainbow. As soon as you said that your sister rescued you in a helicopter, I said, well, gee, these people are loaded up. They have a safe place somewhere, full of stuff. Full of days. This down here, it isn’t as good as I hoped, but it’s not bad for the end-times. Not bad for the end-times at all.”

He laughs like, what can you do? Laughs and spreads his palms as if revealing himself, Cortez the thief, as he is and always was, the person I always knew was there but never wanted to see. I am surprised, but why am I surprised? I decided at some point that he had made my road his road, given over to me the last two months of preimpact existence, because I was on my cockamamie hero’s quest and required an able and agile sidekick—I reached that conclusion without thinking about it much and put the question aside. But everybody does everything for a reason. That’s lesson number one of police work; it’s lesson number one of life.