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

by Ben H. Winters

All we’ve been drinking is coffee, working our way through one massive sack of arabica beans. Cortez rigged up a manual pencil sharpener into a grinder; we measure out cups from the barrels of spring water we took with us from Massachusetts; we boil up the coffee in an old carafe over a camp stove, strain it through a mesh spatula into a hot/cold thermos. It takes forever. It tastes terrible. “Can you make coffee?” I ask Cortez. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Great idea.”

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

“September is the queen of months. Not just here—everywhere. Everywhere in the world. September is perfect.”

I climb down the ladder and scoop Houdini up under my arm, carry the poor sick dog uncomplaining, struggle him up to the loft and lay him down. I kick out one of the small windows easily, one fake karate-chop kick with the strong side of my body. Before I can think about it too much I toss the dog out the window, and he barks as he falls end over end, his body catching as I had planned it on the bank of shrubs below. He scrabbles on the uneven surface of the hedgerow, tumbles forward and lands with a whomp in a patch of mud. Looks up at me, confused. I toss a salute down to the dog, light another match from the matchbook, and set the hay on fire.

I’m lying here sputtering and wondering in what year of my theoretical future police career I would develop the skill to occasionally be the one who surprises the guy, instead of being the guy who gets surprised.

she was at peace when she was laughing at something clever someone said,

I raise my gun up to chest height, like a real old-fashioned policeman, and kick open the door marked LADIES. It flies open and cracks against the wall, ricochets back against my shoulder and cracks into the wall a second time, and my light looks in on a room full of corpses.

Kessler stumbles on something, sending pebbles scuttling and 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.

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.

Vengeance is the cheapest of motivations, it’s a tin star on a shabby coat. I want answers is all that I want.

I hear the dog before I see him, three fine bright barks devolving into a growly canine coughing fit, cough/bark, cough/bark, then just cough, cough, cough as Houdini limps with determination from behind that shed out to see me. “Here, boy,” I say, and my heart swells just looking at him, loping and shuffling along toward me across the slight roll of the farmland.