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

by Ben H. Winters

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,...