Ben Winters - Countdown City

“What I told him is, if you’re gonna leave this, you gotta take it apart,” says Cortez. “I’ll get more on it, piece by piece, don’t you think?”

I don’t hazard a guess. I lift a gritty metal pole the length of my arm.

“Steering column.” Cortez titters, angles out his chin.

I wander among the pieces of the van, identifying the pedals, the seat belt straps, the slanting beveled iron of the loading ramp. The fractured shapes of something as ordinary as a U-Haul truck, it’s like a vision from distant memory, like I’m inspecting the butchered carcass of a mastodon. The two tire rims are stacked, one atop the other, the fat black rubber wheels beside them.

I straighten up and I look at Cortez, the Jesus-style hair, the mischievous smile. “Why would he trust you?” I ask. “To honor a bargain?”

He splays a hand across his breastbone, offended. I wait. “We’ve known each other, going back, that cop and I. He knows what I am.” He smiles like a magical cat. “I’m a thief, but I’m an honorable thief. He’s seen me get arrested, seen me get out and build right back. Because I’m dependable. A man of business has to be relied upon, that’s all.”

I pull the wad of gauze away from the side of my head—it’s soaked in blood—I put it back in place. Rocky Milano has not closed his restaurant, even though we’re in countdown land: he’s doubled down, intensified his commitment to his operation and his self-identity. So, too, with Cortez the thief.

“Plus, he said that if I went back on him, if I let anything befall his wife, he’d come back and murder me,” adds Cortez, almost offhandedly. “I’ve known people who say that and don’t mean it. It was my strong impression that this was a man who meant it.”

“And he gave you no indication of where he was going?’

“Nope.” Cortez pauses, smirks. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. Wherever he was going, he was in a goddamn hurry to get there. I teased the man about it. I said, for someone who is here to cut up a working vehicle and leave it behind, you sure want to get going. He didn’t laugh, though. Not one little bit.”

No, I think. I bet he didn’t. If Brett was as much of a straight shooter as I am sensing he was, if he was the decent and honorable character that emerges from everybody’s recollections, then he hated coming here. I can picture him, on the way to Garvins Falls Road, in this stolen van—tasting the bitterness of the measure he was taking, of putting his trust in this weaselly and self-regarding man. Brett Cavatone disassembling a U-Haul van, working swiftly under Cortez’s glittering gaze, not looking at his watch, just doing the job carefully and well until it was done.

My missing person was a man dying to leave, in a fever to leave, but who knew that leaving was wrong. He made a compromise with himself, struck a moral balance, did what he had to, to make arrangements for the woman he’d be leaving behind.

I say “thank you” to Cortez. He says “you’re very welcome” and bows. I go up to collect Martha.

On Garvins Falls Road, outside, the late-day sunlight a perfect golden gleam along the rutted sidewalks, I look back up at the building and Martha looks down at the street. It’s hotter than yesterday but still not uncomfortable. There’s a pair of perfect clouds teasing each other across the bright blue sky. Martha seems calm and composed, surprisingly so, considering what she has learned.

“I told you,” she says, very softly, and I say, “Excuse me?”

“I told you, he’s like a rock, that man. That’s how he is. He thinks of things. He’s so thoughtful. Even—” She smiles, turns her face up to the sun. “Even leaving me, he was considerate about it.”

“Yes,” I say. “Sure.”

In the distance, all the way back in downtown Concord, the deafening holler of the tornado siren. I can picture the truck rumbling into its dock, McConnell and the rest of the cops hurrying into place, forming their perimeter, preparing to unload.

“So, just to be absolutely clear, Martha,” I say, as gently as I can. “You no longer want me to find your husband?”

“Oh, no,” she says, startled. “Now I want you to find him more than ever.”

People talk about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, like it just happened one day. All the dinosaurs were hanging out, all together in an open field, and the asteroid slammed down and destroyed them, killed them all and all at once.

Not so, of course. Some died on the day, no doubt about it, and probably a lot—but the whole business took years. Generations, maybe. They can’t say for sure. They know that a ten-kilometer asteroid exploded into the crust of the earth in the Yucatan Peninsula 65.6 million years ago, tearing a great gash from the planet and darkening the sky, and some of the dinosaurs drowned and some burned and some starved when the plants stopped growing, and some stumbled on through the new cold world. They ate what they could find and fought for scraps and forgot there had been an asteroid. Brains like walnuts, creatures of need, they knew only their hunger. A lot of species died. A lot of species didn’t.

This time, too, it’ll go both ways: Most people will die in October and in the brutal cataclysms that follow, and then many more will die later. The sudden death versus the lingering; the instant and certain versus the drawn-out and unpredictable. My parents both died suddenly, a finger-snap, a crack in time: One day my mother was here, and then she was buried, and then soon after that my father, bang, gone. With Grandfather, it was the long way: diagnosis, treatment, remission, relapse, new diagnosis, the wayward course of illness. There was one afternoon when we huddled at his bedside, Nico and I and a handful of his friends, said our goodbyes, and then he got better and lived for another six months, pale and thin and irritable.

Naomi Eddes, the woman I loved, she went the other way, the first way: bang and gone.

The best available scientific evidence suggests that on the day itself, the earth’s atmosphere will be riven by flame, as if by a prodigious nuclear detonation: over most of the planet, a broiling heat, the sky on fire. Tsunamis as tall as skyscrapers slam into coasts and drown everyone within hundreds of miles from impact, while around the globe volcanic eruptions and earthquakes convulse the landscape, splintering the crust of the world at all its hidden junctions. And then photosynthesis, the magic trick undergirding the entire food chain, is snuffed out by a blanket of darkness drawn down across the sun.

But no one knows. No one really knows. They have computer models, based on the Yucatan event, based on Siberia. But it all depends on final velocity, on angle of approach, on the precise makeup of the object and the soil below the impact spot. Probably not everyone will die. But probably most people will. It will definitely be terrible, but it’s impossible to say exactly how. Anyone making promises for afterward is a liar and a thief.

When I get home there’s a thick manila envelope jammed between the screen door and the front door, so that when I pull open the door the package falls out and lands on the porch with a thump. I crouch down and tear open the envelope with one finger and slide out a single manila file folder, thickly packed, stamped NEW HAMPSHIRE STATE POLICE FILE: BRETT ALAN CAVATONE (RET.).

“Thanks, Trish,” I murmur, and turn eastward toward School Street to toss her a salute, soft and sweet as blowing a kiss.

Stepping inside I close the front door carefully, not wanting a sharp slam to wake Houdini, who is snoring lightly on the sofa, curled with his face smushed into his own warm side. In the kitchen I light three candles and make tea. The police file is written in the clipped language of all such reports: a short story written in brief static bursts of institutional prose. The subject is referred to throughout as O. Cavatone. “O.” for officer. O. Cavatone graduated the police academy on such-and-such a date. On such-and-such a date he was assigned to Troop D of the Division of State Police with the rank of Trooper I; transferred north, then, to Troop F; recognized with a commendation and a small ceremony for saving the life of a traffic accident victim; promoted to Trooper II. Taken together, the pages speak to an admirable, steadfast career: no citations, no warnings, no blemishes on the record.