World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(7)

“Can you help me?”

“Help you what?”

“Butts,” I say, peeling off my sport coat. “Please help me find cigarette butts.”

I crawl across the floor, from the back of the room out toward the garage doors, my shirt sleeves pushed up, my palms getting filthy. I use my magnifying glass, following the checkerboard pattern across the concrete: light squares, dark squares. After a moment Cortez shrugs, sets down the steel box, and we settle in, side by side like grazing cows, moving in slow patterns, staring at the floor.

There are plenty of butts, of course: the floor of the parking garage, like all such places, is littered with the stubs of dead cigarettes. We hunt through the dust and grime of the floor and gather up all we can find and then I come up to a squat and sort them into two piles, checking each one carefully, holding it up and squinting at it in the light before consigning it to its place. Possibles and not possibles. Cortez whistles while he works, occasionally murmuring “madness, madness.” Most of the cigarettes are either generic, having no marking on the filter, or home-rolled, just twists of thin white paper with crusts of tobacco leaf spilling out the side.

And then, after ten minutes—fifteen—

“There it is.”

There. I reach down and pluck up the grimy little twist of paper, the one I was looking for. I hold it up to the flat gray light. There.

“Ah,” says Cortez. “A cigarette butt. I knew we could do it.”

I don’t answer. I found it, as I knew in my secret policeman’s heart that I would. A single cigarette butt, snarled and torn, smashed to a ragged brown by the grind of a heel, shredded-leaf guts spilling out around the dirty wrinkle of the wrapper. I hold the stubbed-out butt carefully between two fingers like the broken body of an insect.

“She’s here.” I stand up. I look around the room. “She was here.”

Now it’s Cortez’s turn not to answer. He’s still staring at the floor—something else has caught his attention. My heart is heaving in my chest, swelling and receding like a tide.

The cigarette market, like all markets for addictive goods, was violently disrupted by the impending end of civilization: skyrocketing demand and vanishing supply. Most smokers, old and new, have made do with foul-tasting generics, or scrounged enough loose tobacco to roll their own. But my sister, my sister Nico, has managed somehow always to be in possession of her favorite brand.

I hold the butt up high. I sniff it. This object must be considered in combination with the plastic fork suspended in its struggle to hold open the door of the vending machine, and the conclusion to be heard from these two objects, these two small objects singing together, is that this is real. Poor addled Abigail didn’t pick the police station in Rotary, Ohio, at random from all the buildings in all the world. Nico really came here, she and her merry band of conspiracists and would-be heroes. I would almost say that she left the butt on purpose, maybe even kept smoking all these years on purpose, in defiance of my nagging, just so that she could leave this clue behind. Except I know that she kept smoking all these years because she was addicted to nicotine, and also because she enjoyed pissing me off.

“She was here,” I say again to Cortez, who is muttering to himself, feeling along the floor with a forefinger extended. I slide the butt into a baggie and carefully place it in my coat pocket. “She is here.”

“I’ll go you one better,” he says, looking up from the square of concrete he’s squatting on. “This is a trap door.”


*

I’ve been playing hide-and-seek with Nico for our entire lives.

The weekend after the funeral—the second funeral, our father’s, early in June of the year I turned twelve—the movers were roaming around the house, boxing up my little life, carrying out my stash of comic books and my baseball glove and my twin bed, all my worldly store lifted out to the truck in one trip. I realized with a start that I hadn’t seen my baby sister for hours. I flipped out, charged through the house in a panic, ducking past the movers, throwing open the doors of the dusty empty closets, charging down to the basement.

Out on the streets of Concord I clomped through patches of mud from the midsummer rain, up and down side streets, calling her name. I found Nico at last in White Park, giggling, hiding under the slide, getting sunburnt in a light summer dress, scratching her name in the dirt with a stick. I glowered and crossed my skinny arms. I was infuriated, already a roil of emotions from the move, the grief. Nico, age six, reached up and patted my cheek. “You thought I was gone, too, didn’t you, Hen?” Hopping up, taking my big hand between her two little ones. “You did, huh?”

And now here I am in Rotary, Ohio, less than a week to go, bent forward at the waist with my fingers twitching, pacing like a lunatic in a circle around Cortez the thief, staring at his broad back where he’s hunched over a trap door trying to figure how to lift it.

The secret door in the floor of the garage is a surprise, except it’s not a surprise. This is one of the things people are doing, people all over the world, digging holes or finding holes and climbing down inside them. The United States Army, according to rumor, has created vast networks of lead-lined bunkers for the evacuation of top brass and key executive branch officials, a reinforced underground universe extending from beneath the Pentagon all the way across Arlington. The city of West Marlborough, Texas, embarked on a three-month “all-city dig” to create a massive safe space for all city residents beneath a local high-school ball field.