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

by Ben H. Winters

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.

I am a question mark pointed at a secret, Cortez is a tool aimed at the stubborn places of the world.

He clocks my expression and snorts, spraying liquid out of his nose. “Oh, no!” He laughs, swipes beer off his chin with the back of his hand. “I had a weird feeling about you, I totally—” He cuts himself off, hollers to Sandy, who is swaying, eyes closed, mumbling along with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” “Sandy, he’s a cop!” She keeps her eyes closed, raises one hand in an absent thumbs-up, keeps on swaying. “Listen, man, don’t bust me on the open container, all right?” He’s laughing, he can’t believe it. “It won’t happen again.”

“Thank you, Billy,” I say, and close my notebook. “You’ve been very helpful.” “No sweat, brother,” he says, walking away. “I gotta go and kill Augustus.”

My assailant, the Amish man in the black hat, is saying “easy, girl, easy” to his horse, and then he slides down off the saddle and his boots land in front of my eyes in the dirt. I am staring at his boots. Feeling new tenderness in my side. A broken rib. Maybe a number of them. “You must leave,” says the man, crouching down, his face filling my vision. Big eyes, thick black chinstrap beard streaked with gray. “I just need to ask you a couple of questions,” I say—try to say—I don’t know if I say it or not. I gurgle.

You never really think of Amish people as being people, they’re this weird otherworldly category and you lump them all together in your mind, like penguins. And now here they are, these specific human people with their specific human faces.

They don’t know and you can see it on their peaceful Amish faces, that bloom of happiness you just don’t see anymore. 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. These people in this room don’t know that the world will not be recovering, and I can see it, as they finish their lunch and say more prayers and rise, laughing, to clear the plates. I can feel it, a feeling I never had occasion to notice until it disappeared, the odorless colorless presence of the future.

I feel genuine sadness for this old man, the mantle he has laid on himself, the Herculean task of making believe that the world is still more or less what it has been. He has acted like a Secret Service agent leaping in slow motion, hurling himself in the path of the information.

Hide-and-seek. Cutting through the woods. It’s raining. My heart is galloping in my chest, leaping out ahead of me. This is fine, I think crazily, this long moment of just running. The part before we get there, wherever we’re going. My pulse is an ocean roar in my ears. The sun is a pale yellow circle through a thickness of rain clouds. Let’s just run forever. Because I can feel it, oh man I can feel it—I know what’s coming.

I look up at the sky, up at the wavering gray sun and then past it, imagining I can see 2011GV1 in its current location. It’s close now, a couple million miles now, our nearest neighbor. They say that for the last couple of nights you’ll be able to see it with the naked eye, a new star, a gold pin in the black heavens. They say that just before impact the sky will brighten ferociously, like the sun has burst from its own skin, and then we will feel it, even on the far side of the Earth we will feel it, the whole world will quaver from the blow. They say that sufficient debris will be ejected from the impact site to fill Earth’s atmosphere in a matter of hours.

Entrances and exits, murmurs Culverson. Finish the scene. He’s right, except with a shock of clarity I am aware that it’s not he who is right, it’s me, I’m the one who is recalling that it’s a rookie move to clear a crime scene without giving a thought to entrances and exits. It’s him I’m hearing, but it’s really me—

and what I find instead, lying there innocuously beside a shrub on the far end of the clearing, is a backpack with the Batman logo on it.

I think it is perhaps even likely, that she chose the code name because she knew at some point, somehow, I would find out about it. That she left it behind not as a marker, a follow-me bread crumb like the bent fork in the vending machine or the butt of the American Spirit, but rather as a kind of a gift. Or else she did it just because it made her laugh, because various aspects of my personality make her laugh, and that, also, at this point, is a kind of a gift.

Cortez is talking fast, grinning like the devil, eyes flashing with excitement, ready to rock. There is a new intensity about the man, a thrill of having cracked the floor and a twitchy excitement about heading downstairs—almost as if this is his case and I’m the one tagging along to lend him a hand.

I’m close to this thing, I’ve almost got it, facts are crowding in around me and they just need to be sorted, sifted, thought through, pieced together. Stars in a distant sky, glimmering in and out of focus, almost in a constellation but not quite taking shape.

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.

rolling. 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.

dead of a gunshot wound in a room full of people who drank poison. It’s like he was invited to the wrong party. It’s funny. Cortez would find it funny.

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.

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, so I tighten my grip on her shoulders and demand that she remember.

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.