World of Trouble (The Last Policeman Book, #3)

by Ben H. Winters

I stand up in the gloomy daylight. It’s raining, a sputtering indecisive drizzle. It’s been raining for days. When Cortez and I got here late last night it was squalling hard enough that we were biking with our jackets tugged up over our necks and the backs of our heads, like snails, a blue tarp tied tautly over all our stuff in the Red Ryder wagon trailing behind.

He has the jollity and the fierceness of a pirate king.

“If you’ve gone mad you’re useless, and I’ll have to eat you.”

Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man’s planet, for the whole scope of our history, coming regardless of what we did or didn’t do.

It’s not just a person’s present that dies when they die, when they are murdered or drowned or a giant rock falls on their head. It’s the past, too, all the memories that belonged only to them, the things they thought and never said. And all those possible futures, all the ways that life might have turned out. Past and future and present all burn up together like a bundle of sticks.

It’s an uncomfortable relationship you develop with sleep, at a time like this, it feels like every time you close your eyes you could wake up on the last day of the world.

Because of course a pandemic would be an absolute calamity, some deadly virus stalking the land, and you would huddle up with your family and shut out the world until it ended, but then it would—it would have an ending. A pandemic runs its course and then the world recovers.

The feeling I have inside is of having been exploded—like all of the things that for so long have defined me, all of my habits and memories and idiosyncrasies, everything that I have built up around whatever core there is of me, all of it has turned out to be plaster, and now it has been blown up and I am watching the powder drift in the atmosphere and settle slowly on the ground.

my mother, a couple of years before she was murdered, she said this beautiful thing to me about how your life was a house that God had built for you, and He knew what was in each room but you didn’t—and behind every door there was a discovery to be made, and some rooms were full of treasure and some with trash but all the rooms were of God’s design

Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we’re waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there’s no glittering ore hidden under the dirt.

I turn and gesture for him to be silent, and he scowls and gestures for me to be silent—a pair of bedraggled law-enforcement professionals pulling rank on each other in a darkroom dumbshow.

Solving a murder is not about serving the victim, because the victim is, after all, dead. Solving a murder serves society by restoring the moral order that has been upset by the gunshot or knife strike or poisoning, and it serves to preserve that moral order by warning others that certain acts cannot be committed with impunity.

I don’t want vengeance. Vengeance is the cheapest of motivations, it’s a tin star on a shabby coat. I want answers is all that I want.

Because I can’t solve the crime unless I know everything and the world can’t end with the crime unsolved, that’s all there is to it,

There’s a memory I love. It’s me and Naomi Eddes, it’s six months ago, give or take. The last Tuesday in March. “Well, I have to tell you,” she says, looking across the table at me with a tiny tree of broccoli poised at the end of her chopsticks. “I am quite taken with you.” We’re eating at Mr. Chow’s. Our first and last date. She’s wearing a red dress with black buttons down the front. “Taken, huh?” I say, playing at bemusement, teasing her for the outmoded turn of phrase, which I actually find poetic and charming, so much so, in fact, that I am falling in love with her, across the smudged table, under the blinking neon sign that says Chow! Chow! “And why do you think you’re taken with me?” “Oh, you know. You’re very tall, so you see everything from weird angles. Also—and I’m serious—your life has a purpose. You know what I mean?” “I guess,” I say. “I guess I do.” She’s referring to a topic of conversation from earlier in the evening, about my parents, how my mother was murdered in a supermarket parking lot and my father hanged himself in his office six months later. And how my subsequent career, she suggested jokingly, has been like Batman’s, how I’ve turned my grief into a lifelong sense of mission. But it makes me uneasy, I tell her, that version of events, that way of seeing. “I don’t like to think that they died for a reason, because that makes it sound like it’s okay. As if it’s good that it happened, because it ordered my life. It wasn’t good. It was bad.” “I know,...