I take out my notebook, click open a pen. "What did it look like?"
"It was a performance Ford, an old model. Eighteen-inch Goodyears, no chains. Smoke billowing out the back, you know, that nasty vegetable-oil smoke."
"Right. You get a license plate?
"I did not."
"And did you get a look at the driver?"
"Nope. Didn"t know I"d have a reason to." The old man blinks, bemused, I think, by my enthusiasm. "He was a big fella, though. Pretty sure of that. Heavyset, like."
I"m nodding, writing quickly. "And you"re sure it was a red pickup?"
"It was. A red, medium-body pickup truck with a standard bed. And there was a big flag airbrushed on the driver"s side wall."
"What flag?"
"What flag? United States," he says diffidently, as if unwilling to acknowledge the existence of any other kind.
I write quietly for a minute, faster and faster, the pen scratching in the silence of the lobby, the old man looking abstractedly at me, head tilted, eyes distant, like I"m something in a museum case. Then I thank him and put away my blue book and my pen and step out onto the sidewalk, the snow falling on the red brick and sandstone of downtown, and I"m standing there for a second watching it all in my head, like a movie: the shy, awkward man in the rumpled brown suit, climbing up into the shotgun seat of a shiny red pickup running a converted engine, driving off into the last hours of his life.
There"s a dream I used to have, pretty consistently once or twice a week, going back to when I was right around twelve years old.
The dream featured the imposing figure of Ryan J. Ordler, the long-serving chief of the Concord Police Department, long-serving even back then, whom in real life I would see every summer at the Family and Friends Picnic Potluck, where he would awkwardly tousle my hair and flip me a buffalo-head nickel, like he did for all the children present. In the dream, Ordler stands at attention in full uniform, holding a Bible, on which I place my right hand, palm down, and I"m repeating after him, pledging to enforce and uphold the law, and then he"s solemnly presenting me with my gun, my badge, and I salute him and he salutes me back and the music swells-there is music in the dream-and I am made detective.
In real life, one brutally cold morning late last year, I returned to the station at 9:30 a.m., after a long night spent patrolling Sector 1, to find a handwritten note in my locker instructing me to report to the office of the DCA. I stopped in the break room, splashed water on my face, and took the stairs two at a time. The Deputy Chief of Administration at that time was Lieutenant Irina Paul, who had held the post a little more than six weeks, after the abrupt departure of Lieutenant Irvin Moss.
"Good morning, ma"am," I say. "Did you need something?"
"Yeah," Lieutenant Paul says, looks up and then back down at what"s in front of her, a thick black binder with the words U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE stenciled on the side. "Gimme one sec, Officer."
"Sure," I say, looking around, and then there"s another voice, deep and rumbling, from the far end of the office: "Son."
It"s Chief Ordler, in uniform but no tie, collar open, shrouded in semidarkness at the small office"s only window, arms crossed, a st.u.r.dy oak tree of a human being. A wave of trepidation washes over me, my spine straightens, and I say, "Morning, sir."
"Okay, young man," says Lieutenant Paul, and the chief nods minutely, gently, t.i.tling his head toward the DCA, letting me know to pay attention. "Now. You were involved in an incident two nights ago, in the bas.e.m.e.nt."
"What-oh."
My face flushes, and I begin to explain: "One of the new people-newer, I should say-" I"ve only been on the force for sixteen months myself, "-one of the newer people brought in a suspect for preventive detention under t.i.tle XVI. A vagrant. A homeless individual, that is."
"Right," says Paul, and I see that she"s got an incident report in front of her, and I"m not liking this at all. I"m sweating now, literally sweating in the cold office.
"And he was, the officer I mean, he was being verbally abusive to the suspect, in a way I felt was inappropriate and contrary to department guidelines."
"And you took it open yourself to intervene. To, let"s see," and she looks down at her desk again, flips over the onion-skin pink paper of the report, "to recite the relevant statute in an aggressive and threatening manner."
"I"m not sure that I would characterize it that way." I glance at the chief, but he"s looking at Lieutenant Paul, her show.
"It"s just, I happened to know the gentleman-sorry, the, I should say, the suspect. Duane Shepherd, Caucasian male, age fifty-five." Paul"s gaze, unwavering but distant, disinterested, is fl.u.s.tering me, as is the quiet presence of the chief. "Mr. Shepherd was my scout leader when I was a kid. And he used to work as an electric-crew foreman, in Penacook, but I gather he"s had a hard time. With the recession."
"Officially," says Paul quietly, "I believe it is a depression."
"Yes, ma"am."
Lieutenant Paul looks down at the incident report again. She looks exhausted.
This conversation is taking place in early December, deep in the cold months of uncertainty. On September 17 the asteroid went into conjunction, got too close to the Sun to be observed, too close for new readings to be taken. So the odds, which had been inching steadily upward since April-three percent chance of impact, ten percent chance, fifteen-were stalled, late fall and early winter, at fifty-three percent. The world economy went from bad to worse, much worse. On October 12 the president saw fit to sign the first round of IPSS legislation, authorizing an influx of federal money to state and local law-enforcement agencies. In Concord, this meant all these young kids, younger than me, some recent high-school dropouts, all of them rushed through a sort of quasi-police-academy boot camp. Privately, McConnell and I call them the Brush Cuts, because they all seemed to have that same haircut, the same baby faces and cold eyes and swagger.
The thing with Mr. Shepherd was not, in truth, my first run-in with my new colleagues.
The chief clears his throat, and Paul leans back, happy to let him take over. "Son, listen. There is not a person in this building who does not want you here. We were proud to welcome you to the patrol division, and were it not for the present unusual circ.u.mstances-"
"Sir, I was first in my cla.s.s at the academy," I say, aware that I am talking loudly and that I have interrupted Chief Ordler, but I can"t stop, I keep going. "I have a perfect attendance record, zero violations, zero citizen complaints pre- and post-Maia."
"Henry," says the chief gently.
"I am trusted implicitly, I believe, by Watch Command."
"Young man," says Lieutenant Paul sharply, and holds up her hand. "I think you misunderstand the situation."
"Ma"am?"
"You"re not being fired, Palace. You"re being promoted."
Chief Ordler steps forward into a slant of sunlight from the small window. "We think that, given the circ.u.mstances and your particular talents, you"d be better off in a seat upstairs."
I gape at him. I scramble for and then recover the power of speech. "But department regulation says that an officer must put in two years and six months on patrol before becoming eligible for service in the detective unit."
"We"re going to waive that requirement," Paul explains, folding up the incident report and dropping it in the trash. "I think we"ll also not bother with recla.s.sifying your 401(k), just for the time being."
This is a joke, but I don"t laugh; it"s all I can do to stay upright. I"m trying to get oriented, trying to form words, thinking new times and thinking a seat upstairs and thinking this is not how it happens, in the dream.
"Okay, Henry," says Chief Ordler mildly. "That"s the end of the meeting."
I learn later on that it"s Detective Harvey Telson whose spot I"m filling, Telson having taken an early retirement, gone "Bucket List" like many others were doing by this point, by December, heading off to do the things they"ve always wanted to do: speed around in race cars, experiment with long-suppressed romantic or s.e.xual inclinations, track down the old bully and punch him in the face. Detective Telson, as it turns out, always wanted to race yachts. America"s Cup kind of stuff. A lucky break for me.
Twenty-six days after the meeting in her office, two days after the asteroid emerged from conjunction with the Sun, Lieutenant Paul quit the force and moved to Las Vegas to be with her grown children.
I don"t have the dream anymore, the one where Ordler lays my hand on the Bible and makes me a detective. There"s another dream that I"ve been having a lot instead.
Like Dotseth says, the cellular phones are getting dicey. You dial, you wait, sometimes you get through and sometimes not. A lot of people are convinced that Maia is bending Earth"s gravitational field, our magnets or ions, or something, but of course the asteroid, still 450 million kilometers away, is having no more effect on cellphone service than on the weather. Officer Wilentz, our tech guy, he explained it to me once: cellular service is chopped up into sectors-cells-and basically the sectors are dropping out, the cells are dying, one by one. The telecom companies are losing service people because they can"t pay them, because no one is paying their bill; they"re losing their executives to the Bucket List; they"re losing telephone poles to unrepaired storm damage, and they"re losing long stretches of wire to vandals and thieves. So the cells are dying. As for all the other stuff, the smartphone stuff, the apps and the gizmos, forget it.
One of the five major carriers announced last week that it"s begun winding down its business, describing this fact in a newspaper advertis.e.m.e.nt as an act of generosity, a "gift of time" to the company"s 355,000 employees and their families, and warning customers to expect total suspension of service within the next two months. Three days ago, Culverson"s New York Times had the Department of Commerce predicting total collapse of telephony by late spring, with the administration supposedly crafting a plan to nationalize the industry.
"Meaning," McGully noted, chortling, "total collapse by early spring."
Sometimes, when I notice that I have a strong signal, I"ll make a call real quick, so as not to waste it.
"Oh, man. Man oh man, what in h.e.l.l do you want?"
"Good afternoon, Mr. France. This is Detective Henry Palace, from the Concord Police Department."
"I know who it is, okay? I know who it is."
Victor France sounds riled, agitated; he always sounds like that. I"m sitting in the Impala outside Rollins Park now, a couple blocks from where Peter Zell used to live.
"Come on, Mr. France. Take it easy, now."
"I don"t want to take it easy, okay? I hate your guts. I hate it when you call me, okay?" I hold the phone an inch or two away from my ear as France"s scattershot snarl pours from the earpiece. "I"m trying to live my life here, man. Is that such an awful and terrible thing, just to live my life?"
I can picture him, the thug resplendent: loops of chain drooping from black jeans, skull-and-crossbones pinky ring, scrawny wrists and forearms crawling with several species of tattoo snakes. The rat-eyed face twisted with melodramatic outrage, having to answer the phone, take orders from a stuck-up egghead policeman like myself. But look, I mean, that"s what you get for being a drug dealer, and moreover for getting caught, at this juncture in American history. Victor may not know by heart the full text of the Impact Preparation Security and Stabilization Act, but he"s got the gist.
"I don"t need much help today, Mr. France. A little research project, is all."
France blows out one last exasperated "oh man oh man," and then he comes around, just like I knew he would. "All right, okay. All right, what is it?"
"You know a little bit about cars, don"t you?"
"Yeah. Sure. I mean, what, Detective, what, you calling me to fill your tires?"
"No, thank you. The last few weeks, people have started converting their cars to vegetable-oil engines."
"No s.h.i.t. You seen gas prices lately?" He clears his throat noisily, spits.
"I"m trying to find out who did one such conversion. It"s a midsize red pickup, a Ford. American flag painted on the side. You think you can handle that?"
"Maybe. And what if I can"t?"
I don"t answer. I don"t have to. France knows the answer.
One of the most striking effects of the asteroid, from a law-enforcement perspective, has been the resulting spike in drug use and drug-related crime, with skyrocketing demand for every category of narcotic, for opiates, for Ecstasy, for methamphetamine, for cocaine in all its varieties. In small towns, in docile suburbs, farming communities, everywhere-even midsize cities like Concord, which had never experienced serious narcotics crime in the past. The federal government, after some tacking back and forth in the summer and fall, late last year resolved on a firm and uncompromising law-and-order stance. The IPSS Act incorporated provisions stripping the right of habeas corpus and other due-process protections from anyone accused of importing, processing, growing, or distributing controlled substances of all kinds.
These measures were deemed necessary "in the interest of controlling violence, promoting stability, and encouraging productive economic activity in the time remaining before impact."
Personally, I do know the full text of the legislation.
The car is off and the wipers are still, and I"m watching as gray blobs of snow build up in uneven slopes on the windshield.
"All right, man, all right," he says. "I"ll figure out who juiced the truck. Give me a week."
"I wish I could, Victor. I"ll call you tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?" He heaves an extravagant sigh. "a.s.shole."
The irony is, pot is the one exception. The use of marijuana has been decriminalized, in a so-far-unsuccessful effort to dampen demand for the harder and more societally destabilizing drugs. And the amount of marijuana I found on Victor France"s person was five grams, small enough that it could easily have been for his personal use, except that the way I discovered it was that he tried to sell it to me as I was walking home from the Somerset Diner on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Whether to make an arrest, under those ambiguous circ.u.mstances, is at the discretion of the officer, and I have decided in France"s case not to exercise that discretion-conditionally.
I could lock Victor France up for six months on t.i.tle VI, and he knows it, and so at last he emits a long, agitated noise, a sigh filled with gravel.
Six months is hard time, when it"s all the time you"ve got left.
"You know, a lot of cops are quitting," says France. "Moving to Jamaica and so forth. Did you ever think about that, Palace?"
"I"ll talk to you tomorrow."
I hang up and put the phone in the glove box and start the car.
No one is really sure-even those of us who have read the eight-hundred-page law from beginning to end, scored it and underlined it, done our best to keep current with the various amendments and codicils-not a hundred percent sure what the "Preparation" parts of IPSS are supposed to be, exactly. McGully likes to say that sometime around late September they"ll start handing out umbrellas.
"Yeah?"
"Oh-I"m sorry. Is this-is this Belknap and Rose?"
"Yeah."
"I have a request for you."
"Don"t get your hopes up. Not a lot left in here. We been looted twice, and our wholesalers are basically AWOL. Want to come in and see what"s left, I"m here most days."
"No, excuse me, my name is Detective Henry Palace, with the Concord Police Department. Do you have copies of your register receipts from the last three months?"
"What?"
"If you do, I wonder if I could come down there and see them. I"m looking for the purchaser of one house-label belt, in black, size XXL."
"Is this a joke?
"No, sir."
"I mean, are you joking?"
"No, sir."
"All right, buddy."