Ben Winters - The Last Policeman

“What?” she asks.

“I just—” my gun still leveled on Littlejohn. “I’d like to hear the story first.”

“I am sorry, Detective,” he says, “but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I release the safety. I think that if he keeps lying, I might kill him. I might just do it.

But he does, he talks. Slowly, softly, his voice dead and toneless, staring not at me but into the barrel of my firearm, he tells the story. The story that I already know, that I already figured out.

After October, when Sophia discovered that her brother had stolen her prescription pad and was using it to score pain pills—after she confronted him and cut him off—after Peter slipped into the brief painful period of withdrawal, and Sophia thought the whole thing was at an end—after all of that, Erik Littlejohn went to J. T. Toussaint and made him a proposition.

At that time, with Maia in conjunction and the odds of impact hovering at an agonizing fifty percent, the hospital was working at half staff: pharmacists and pharmacists’ assistants were quitting in droves, and new people were being hired, glad for a salary backed by government money. Security was, and remains, all over the map. Some days, armed guards with machine guns; other days, the doors to locked wards propped open with folded-over magazines. Pyxis, the state-of-the-art mechanized pill dispensary, stopped working in September, and the technician assigned by the manufacturer to Concord Hospital could not be located.

The director of Spiritual Services, in this time of desperation and wildness, has remained at his post, a trusted and constant figure, a rock. And he was, as of November, stealing vast quantities of medicine from the hospital pharmacy, from the nurses’ stations, from patients’ bedsides. MS Contin, Oxycontin, oxytocin, Dilaudid, half-empty bags of liquid morphine.

Through all of this, my gun does not waver, pointed at his face: his golden eyes half closed, the mouth set, expressionless.

“I promised Toussaint that I would keep him supplied,” he says. “I told him I would take the risk of procuring the pills, if he would take the risk of selling them. We split the risk, and we split the profit.”

Money, I’m thinking, just stupid money. So small, so squalid, so dull. Two murders, two bodies in the ground, all those people suffering, doing with half doses of their pills, with the world about to end? I gape at the murderer, looking him up and down. Is this a man who does all that for gain? For a gold watch and a new leather jacket?

“But Peter found out,” I say.

“Yes,” Littlejohn whispers, “he did,” and he lowers his head and shakes it slowly, sadly, back and forth, as if remembering some regrettable act of God. Someone had a stroke, someone fell down the stairs. “He—it was last Saturday night—he showed up at J. T.’s house. It was late. I only went there very late.”

I exhale, grit my teeth. No escaping the fact that if Peter was at J. T.’s very late on a Saturday night—a meeting J. T. had not mentioned to me—then he was there for a fix. He had his nightly call with Naomi, his support system who was herself secretly using morphine; he told her he was doing fine, holding up, and then he went to J. T.’s to get high as a satellite; and then his brother-in-law of all people shows up, his brother-in-law who, unbeknownst to him, is delivering a fresh supply.

Everybody with secrets, squirreled away.

“He sees me, I’m holding a duffel bag for God’s sake, and I just said, ‘please, please, please don’t tell your sister.’ But I knew—I knew he—” He stops himself, brings a hand to his mouth.

“You knew you had to kill him.”

He moves his head very slightly up and down.

He was right: Peter would have told Sophia. In fact, he had called her for that purpose the next day, Sunday, March 18, and again on Monday, but she didn’t answer. He sat down to write her a letter, but couldn’t find the words.

So, on Monday night, Erik Littlejohn went to see Distant Pale Glimmers at the Red River, where he knew he would find his brother-in-law, the quiet insurance man. And there he is with their mutual friend J. T. Toussaint, and after the movie Peter tells J. T. to take off, he wants to walk home—Littlejohn caught a break on that one—because now Peter is alone. And what do you know, here’s Erik, and Erik says, let’s have a beer, let’s catch up—let’s make amends before everything happens.

And they’re drinking their beers, and from his pocket he takes a small vial, and when Peter has passed out he drags him from the theater, nobody notices, nobody cares, he takes him to the McDonald’s to hang him in the bathroom.

McConnell puts the suspect in the handcuffs and I guide him by the bicep to the elevator, Fenton trailing behind us, and we ascend in silence: coroner, murderer, cop, cop.

“Holy crap,” says Fenton, and McConnell says, “I know.”

I don’t say anything. Littlejohn doesn’t say anything.

The elevator stops and the doors open onto the lobby and it’s crowded and among the crowd is a preadolescent boy, waiting there on one of the sofas, and Littlejohn’s whole body goes tense, and mine does, too.

He had told Fenton that he could come down to the morgue to help with a body at 9:30, but he had a visitor coming at 10.

Kyle looks up, stands up, stares, wide-eyed and baffled, his father in handcuffs, and Littlejohn can’t take it, he hurls his body out of the elevator, and I’m holding fast to his arm, and the force of his body in motion pulls me forward, too, both of us together. We land on the floor and go into a roll.

McConnell and Fenton spill out of the elevator, the lobby is full of people, doctors and volunteers, dodging out of the way and hollering as Littlejohn and I go end over end. Littlejohn bangs his forehead up and slams it into mine just as I’m drawing for my sidearm, and the force of the impact sends an explosion of pain into my wounded eye, throws a sky full of stars up in front of the other one. I slump down on top of him, he’s wriggling underneath me, McConnell is shouting, “Freeze!” and then someone is yelling, too, a small scared voice saying, “Stop, stop.” I look up, my vision is wavering back into place, and I say, “Okay.” He’s got my sidearm, the kid has got it, the service-issue SIG 229, pointed right at my face.

“Son,” says McConnell, and she’s got her gun out, but she doesn’t know what to do with it. She aims it, uncertainly, at Kyle, then at Littlejohn and me, slumped together on the floor, and then back at the boy.

“Let him—” Kyle sniffs, whimpers, and I’m seeing myself, I can’t help it, of course, I was eleven once. “Let him go.”

God .

God, Palace .

You dunce .

The motive was staring me in the face the whole time, not just money but what you can get for it. What you can get for money, even now. Especially now. And here’s this funny-looking kid, the wide smile, a princeling, the boy I first saw the second day of my investigation, tromping across a lawn of unbroken snow.

I saw it in Littlejohn’s eyes when he was hollering affectionately up the stairs, telling his boy to go ahead and get ready, boasting quietly about what a whiz he is out there on the ice.

Let’s say, in our present unfortunate circumstances, I was the father of a child; what would I not do to shield that child, to whatever degree I could, from the coming calamity? Depending on where that thing comes down, the world is either ending or descending into darkness, and here is a man who would do anything—who has done awful things—to prolong and protect the life of his child should the latter eventuality arise. To mitigate the hazards of October and after.