Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) (3 page)

“It just sucks,” says Micah emphatically. “It sucks.”

“I know that.”

I flip past the details on Brett Cavatone to the back of my notebook, where I’ve got certain small tasks laid out for myself. I cross out
A’s glasses
and pencil in
samurai sword
with a couple of question marks beside it. As I straighten awkwardly out of my squat, Andy Blackstone bounces the medicine ball my way, and I turn just in time for it to sproing up off the pavement and hit my outstretched palms with a satisfying, stinging
whap
.

“Hey, Palace,” hollers Blackstone. “Play some kickball?”

“Rain check,” I say, winking at Alyssa and clipping my helmet back on. “I’ve got a case I’m working on.”

Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl turns out to be a great big brick building with black-glass windows and a hokey sign above the door—musical notes and a smiling cartoon family munching on pizza. Rocky’s sits just past the abandoned husk of Steeplegate Mall, and to get there you’ve got to go through the vast mall parking lot, through a small obstacle course of garbage cans, overturned and spilling out, and abandoned vehicles, their hoods popped by thieves to dig out the engines. In front of the doors of the restaurant, sitting atop an empty newspaper box like statuary, is a young guy, twenty maybe, twenty-one, a stubbly uneven teenager’s beard and a short ponytail, who calls out “how you doin’?” as I approach.

“Just fine,” I say, mopping my sweaty brow with a handkerchief. The kid hops down from the newspaper box and sidles up to meet me, nice and easy, his hands jammed in the pockets of his light jacket.
A criminal’s trick—you don’t know if he’s got a gun or not.

“Nice suit, man,” he says. “Help you find something?”

“I’m looking for the pizza place,” I say, pointing behind him.

“Sure. Sorry, what’s your name?”

“Henry,” I say. “Palace.”

“How’d you hear about us?”

Lots of questions, rat-a-tat, not to get the answers but to get a read:
How nervous is this guy? What does he want?
But he’s nervous himself, eyes slipping warily side to side, and I talk slow and calm, keep my hands where he can see them.

“I know the owner’s daughter.”

“Oh, no kidding?” he says. “And what’s her name again?”

“Martha.”

“Martha,” he says, like he’d forgotten it and needed reminding. “Totally.”

Satisfied, the kid takes an exaggerated step backward to push open the door. “Heya, Rocky,” he calls. A blast of music and warm smells from the darkness within. “A friend of Martha’s.” And then, to me, as I walk past, “Sorry about the hassle. Can’t be too cautious these days, know what I’m saying?”

I nod politely, wondering what he’s got hidden up in the jacket, what means are tucked away to welcome a visitor without the right answers: a switchblade, a crowbar, a snub-nose pistol.
Can’t be too cautious these days
.

The music playing inside is early rock and roll, tinny but loud; there must be a battery-operated boom box tucked away somewhere,
turned up to ten. Rocky’s is just one big room, wide as an airplane hangar, high ceilinged and noisy and echoey. At one end is an open kitchen with a massive wood-burning pizza oven, a couple of cooks back there with rolled-up sleeves and aprons, drinking beers, bustling around, laughing. The dining area has the classic cheap red-and-white checked tablecloths, fat little barrels of red pepper flakes, vinyl records and cardboard cutout guitars displayed along the upper moldings. There’s a sign shaped like a Wurlitzer jukebox advertising specials, all named after girls from classic-rock songs: the Layla, the Hazel, the Sally Simpson, the Julia.

A big man in a stained white apron shambles over from the kitchen, raising a bear paw of a hand in friendly greeting.

“How you doin’?” he says, just like the kid outside, same practiced geniality. Old Saint Nick belly, fading anchor tattoos on his forearms, sauce stains down his front like cartoon blood. “You wanna shoot, or you wanna eat?”

“Shoot?”

He points. Behind me are six bowling alleys that have been repurposed as firing ranges, with rifle stands at one end and paper human targets at the other. As I watch, a young woman in noise-canceling headphones narrows her eyes and squeezes off a round from a paintball gun, blasting a yellow splotch onto the upper arm of the target. She shouts happily and her husband, boyfriend maybe, claps and says “nice.” At the next alley over, a hunched and white-haired man, one of a cluster of seniors, is hobbling slowly up to the rifle stand to take his turn.

I turn back to the big man. “You’re Mr. Milano?”

“Rocky,” he says, the easy relaxed smile freezing and hardening. “Can I help you with something?”

“I hope so.”

He crosses his thick arms, narrows his eyes, and waits. It’s “Ooby Dooby”—the song playing from the boom box—vintage Roy Orbison. Love this song.

“My name is Henry Palace,” I say. “We’ve met, actually.”

“Oh, yeah?” He smiles, pleasant but disinterested: a restaurateur, a man who meets a lot of people.

“I was a kid. I’ve had a growth spurt.”

“Oh, okay.” He looks me up and down. “Looks like you’ve had a couple of those.”

I smile. “Martha has asked me to try and locate your son-in-law.”

“Whoa, whoa,” says Rocky, eyes suddenly sharpening, taking me in more carefully. “What, you’re a cop? She called the
cops
?”

“No, sir,” I say. “I’m not a policeman. I used to be. Not anymore.”

“Well, whatever you are, let me save you some time,” he says. “That asshole said he’d be with my daughter till boomsday, and then he changed his mind and made a run for it.” He grunts, refolds his arms across his chest. “Any questions?”

“A couple,” I say. Behind us the dull dead thud of the paintball rounds smashing into their targets. This sort of thing is going on all over the city, to varying degrees, people getting “aftermath ready” in
various ways. Learning to shoot, learning karate, building water-conservation devices. Last month there was a free class at the public library called “Eat Less and Live.”

Rocky Milano leads me through the restaurant to a small cluttered alcove off the kitchen. There were always rumors about Martha’s dad, silly little-kid rumors, discussed in confidential tones by those of us she babysat for: he was “connected,” he had “done time,” he had a rap sheet a mile long. Once I think I asked my mother, who worked at the police station, if she could run his file for me, a request she treated as dismissively as is appropriate for any such request coming from a ten-year-old.

Now here’s Rocky, apologizing with a good-natured grin as he pushes a pile of paper plates off a chair for me, settling himself behind a battered metal desk. He essentially confirms everything that Martha said. Brett Cavatone married his daughter about six years ago, when still an active-duty state trooper. They didn’t have a ton in common, Brett and Rocky, but they got along just fine. The older man respected his new son-in-law and liked the way he treated his daughter: “Like a princess—like an absolute princess.” When Rocky decided to open this place, Brett left the force to work for him, to be the right-hand man.

“Okay,” I say, nodding, writing it all down. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why come work here?”

“Oh, what? You wouldn’t want to come work for me?”

I look up sharply but Rocky’s easy smile is still in place. “I
meant, why would he leave the force?”

“Yeah, I know what you meant,” he says, and now the smile widens—broadens, more like, taking up more real estate on his round face. “You’ll have to ask him.”

He’s joking, of course, goofing on me, but I don’t mind. The truth is I’m enjoying the company of Martha’s father. I’m impressed by his ramshackle restaurant and his defiant insistence on keeping it open, providing some measure of normalcy and comfort until “boomsday.”

“Thing about Brett,” says Rocky, comfortable now, leaning back with his hands laced behind his head, “is that the guy was terrific. Hardworking. An ox. He was here more than I was. He built the chair you’re sitting on. He named the house specials, for Pete’s sake.” Rocky chuckles, points absently out at the dining room, where the husband and wife from the target range sit at one of the tables now, sharing a pizza. “That’s a plain they’re enjoying, by the way. This week’s special is called Good Luck Finding Any Fucking Meat.”

He chortles, coughs.

“Anyway, the plan was, we’d get the place going together, then when I died or went soft in the head, he’d take over. Obviously that isn’t happening, thank you very much Mr. Goddamn Asteroid, but when I said I’m staying open till October, Brett said ‘sure thing.’ No sweat. He’s in.”

I nod, okay, I’m writing all of this down:
hardworking—built the chairs—open till October
. Filling a fresh page of the blue book.

“He promised,” Milano says acidly. “But the kid made a lot of
promises. As you’ve heard.”

I lower my pencil, unsure what to ask next, abruptly seized by the absurdity of my mission. As if any amount of information will prepare me to go out in the vast chaotic wilderness that the world has become and bring Martha Milano’s husband back to his promises. In the kitchen, the small cluster of cooks crack up riotously about something and slap each other five. Taped up behind Rocky in the cluttered office is one of the target forms from the bowling alleys, a silhouetted human figure, blue paint splattered all over the face: bull’s-eye.

“What about friends? Did Brett have a lot of friends?”

“Ah, not really,” says Milano. He sniffs, scratches his cheek. “Not that I know of.”

“Hobbies?”

He shrugs. I’m grasping at straws. The real question is not whether he had hobbies but vices, or maybe a new vice he wanted to take for a test drive, now that the world has slipped into countdown mode. A girlfriend, maybe? But these are not the sorts of things a father-in-law is likely to know. The boom box is playing Buddy Holly, “A Man with a Woman on His Mind.” Another great one. I’m not listening to enough music these days—no car radio, no iPod, no stereo. At home I listen to ham radio on a police scanner, jockeying between the federal emergency band and an energetic rumormonger who calls himself Dan Dan the Radio Man.

“Can you give me an idea, sir, of where your son-in-law was supposed to be going when he left here yesterday morning?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Just running errands. Milk, cheese, flour. Toilet paper. Canned tomatoes if anybody has ’em. Most days, he’d come in and open up with me, then go out first thing on the ten-speed, find what he could find, come back for lunch.”

“And where would he have gone to find those things?”

Rocky laughs. “Next question.”

“Right,” I say. “Sure.”

I turn the page of my notebook. It was worth a shot. Wherever Brett was headed yesterday morning to shop, it probably wasn’t an establishment operating within the rigorous strictures on food markets as spelled out in IPSS-3, the revised titles of the impact-preparation law governing resource allocation: rationing, barter limits, water-usage restrictions. Rocky Milano isn’t about to tell all the details to an inquisitive visitor, particularly one with ties to the police force. I wonder in passing how Brett Cavatone felt about these small negotiations of current law: a former policeman, a man with a painting of Jesus on the wall above his bed.

“Can I just ask you, sir, whether there was anything unusual in yesterday’s list? Anything out of the ordinary?”

“Ah, let’s see,” he says, and he closes his eyes for a second, checking some internal log. “Yeah. Actually. Yesterday he was supposed to go down to Suncook.”

“Why Suncook?”

“Place called Butler’s Warehouse down there, a furniture place. A gal came in for dinner over the weekend, said this place was still piled with old wood tables. We thought we’d scoop ’em up, see if we
could use ’em.”

“Okay,” I say, then pause. “He was on a bicycle, you said?”

“Yup,” says Milano, after a brief pause of his own. “We got a trailer hitch on the thing. Like I said, the kid’s an ox.”

He looks at me evenly, eyebrows slightly raised, and I can’t help but read a cheerful defiance in that expression: Am I supposed to believe it? I picture the short powerful man with the wooly beard from Martha’s photograph, picture him on a ten-speed bike with a trailer hitch on a hot July morning, leaning forward, muscles straining, muling a stack of round wooden tables all the way back from Suncook.

Rocky stands abruptly and I look behind me, following his gaze. It’s the kid from outside, the one with the stubbly adolescent beard and the ponytail.

“Heya, Jeremy,” says Rocky, offers the kid a mock salute. “How’s the world outside?”

“Not bad. Mr. Norman is here.”

“No kidding?” says Milano, standing up. “Already?”

“Should I—”

“No, I’m coming.” My host stretches like a bear and reties his apron. “Hey, our friend here wants to know about Brett,” he says to Jeremy. “You got anything to say about Brett?”

Jeremy smiles, blushes almost. He’s wiry, this kid, small, with delicate features and thoughtful eyes. “Brett’s awesome.”

“Yeah,” says Rocky Milano, striding out of the alcove and into the kitchen proper, on to the next order of business. “He used to be.”

* * *

Outside Rocky’s Rock ’n’ Bowl a mangy tabby has insinuated itself under the back wheel of my bike, mewling in terror at the shrill insistent alarm sounding off one of the abandoned cars at Steeplegate Mall. A low-altitude fighter jet whooshes past overhead, fast and loud, leaving a bright white contrail against the gleaming blue of the sky.
He’s pretty far inland
, I think, extricating the cat and depositing her in a warm patch of sidewalk. Most of the Air Force sorties are closer to the coast, where they’ve been providing support to the Coast Guard cutters tasked with intercepting the catastrophe immigrants. There are more and more of these every day, at least according to Dan Dan the Radio Man: big cargo ships and rickety rafts, pleasure boats and stolen naval vessels, an unceasing tide of refugees from all over the Eastern Hemisphere, desperate to make their way to the part of the earth not in Maia’s direct path, where there is some slim chance of surviving, at least for a little while. The government’s policy is interdiction and containment, meaning the cutters turn back those ships that can safely be turned back, intercept the rest and shepherd them to shore. There the immigrants are processed en masse, moved to one of the secure facilities that have been constructed, or are being constructed, up and down the seaboard.