World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(57)

You would think I would have figured it out by now, that a person’s outward presentation is just a trap waiting to be sprung.

“I’m so sorry about your kid sister,” he says, and he means it, I can tell, but then he keeps going. “But Henry, the world is about to die. That’s the one part of this that isn’t a mystery. We solved it. The asteroid did it. And these people here have chosen to skip the part that comes next, so we’re moving in. We’re taking over the lease.”

This conversation is killing me. I have to get out of here. I have to get back to those bodies, I have to see that other victim, I have to get back to work.

“Cortez, the other man you saw, what did he look like?”

He steps forward, cigarette dangling, but he doesn’t answer.

“Cortez? What did he look like?”

He gathers up the front of my shirt and bounces me hard into the concrete wall. “Here is what is going to happen. We’re going to seal ourselves in this room.”

“No. No, Cortez, we can’t do that.”

He’s whispering to me, cooing almost. “We seal ourselves in, and we don’t pop the cork for six months. After that we make runs for water if and when we absolutely have to, but otherwise we relax in our new paradise until the spaghetti sauce runs dry.”

“We won’t survive the impact.”

“We might.”

“We won’t.”

“Somebody will.”

“But I don’t—I don’t want to do that. I can’t.”

This is a solvable case. It’s a crackable case. I have to crack it.

“Yes, you can. It’s a room full of days, Henry. Share the days with me. Do you want the days or not?”

“Cortez, please,” I say, “there are these bodies,” I say, “and I can pull prints with Scotch tape and gunpowder”—and his expression softens into sadness, and I see at the very last minute that he’s got one of the Tasers, he put one in his back pocket, and he jerks his arm toward me and the hot kiss of it shoots into me and I jerk and jolt and tumble to the ground.





1.


“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”

Oh—

“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”

Oh no—

“DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.”

Oh God, oh no.

Cortez, please don’t do this. Please don’t have done this. I know so much—but not enough. I’ve almost got it but I don’t have it yet.

But he did, he did it, it’s done. I’m in the holding cell, I’m on the bad-guy side, behind the bars, on Lily’s thin mattress. The sturdy Rotary Police Department RadioCOMMAND console is a few feet away, droning its endless warning about the Muskingum and its stupid toxic watershed. Cortez must have done it while I was still rolling in and out of consciousness, my head still buzzing, considerately dragged the RadioCOMMAND down the hall for me, and left me food, too, a pile of those MREs, along with four of the big jugs of water. I can see them when I turn my head, my neat pile of refreshments, squared off against the rear wall of the cell.

I bend forward on the thin cot and roll over onto my stomach and heave myself up to all fours. This is going to be fine. It is unquestionably a setback, yes, no question, but there has to be a solution, there has to be a way out, there must be and I am going to find it and be fine.

The radio squawks and hisses. “DO NOT DRINK THE WATER IN THE MUSKINGUM RIVER WATERSHED.” The rest of the recording, the part about the safe harbors, the first-aid stations, the drop-off/pick-up sites and the Buckeyes helping Buckeyes, has been edited out of the broadcast. Now it’s just the warning about the water, on and on into infinity.

There is sunlight in the room, which means that it is daytime. The Casio says 12:45, so it’s 12:45 in the afternoon but on what day?

I grind my fingertips into my eyes and grit my teeth. I don’t know if I was ever actually unconscious, but I don’t think so. I might have been. I experienced the shock and pain of the Taser, half an amp lighting up my abdomen, and then my arms and legs locked and shook and I was on the floor and my assailant, my friend, he bundled up my body in a tarp, and I was only flickeringly aware, my brain temporarily made into hash. I might have even struggled, might have even tried to lodge some sort of groaning protest—but at some point the struggle became impossible and I felt him drag me up the stairs and over the lip of the basement, and my mind slipped out from under me.

I breathe the dust of the small gray cell. I’m going to get out of here, of course. I’m locked in here at present but I obviously will not die in here. This bad situation, like all bad situations, will find its resolution.

I check the Casio again and it still says 12:45. It’s broken. I don’t know what time it is. Maia is out there streaking closer, and I’m locked in place. A hot bubble of panic rolls up from my lungs and I swallow it with difficulty, breathe and breathe. New spiderwebs have been knitted between the legs of the bed and the corners of the floor, to replace the ones we scraped away when first we made the room ready for Jean. For Lily, that was her name at the time. Lily—Tapestry—the sleeping girl.

She’s not here. I don’t know where Jean is. Cortez is down there. I’m up here. The ladies’ room is full of corpses, the men’s room has just one. Nico is gone. The dog’s on the farm. I don’t know what time it is—what day—