“When?” I say. “When did they do it?”
“You’re going to hyperventilate, Policeman. Your head is going to fall off.”
“When was it?”
“Might have been yesterday. Might have been a week ago. Like I said—concrete makes a lot of dust.”
I squat down. I get up. I reach into my pocket, feel the photo of Nico, the fork, the cigarette butt now encased in a sandwich baggie. I squat again. My body refuses to be still. I feel coffee sluicing through me, bubbling black and nervous along my veins. The dust is stinging my eyes. I think I can see it now, the hairline fracture between the door and the floor. Nico is down there. Nico and the rest of them. She and her cadre arrived here and have built themselves some sort of ersatz headquarters, under a layer of smoothed rock in an old garage. Waiting down there for the next stage of the scheme to unfold—or have they given up, are they waiting now like ostriches, heads in the dirt below the station?
“Let’s put a handle on it,” I say to Cortez. “Lift it up.”
“We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because it would require strength, which we do not have.”
I look down at my body. I have always been a thin man, and now I am a thin man after a month of granola bars and coffee. Cortez’s weight loss has resolved his fighter’s frame to a coil of sinew, but he’s hardly Mr. Universe—stronger than me, in other words, but not strong.
“A handle doesn’t help,” he says. He is slowly rolling a cigarette of his own, layering in tobacco from a pouch he keeps in the golf bag.
“So what do we do?” I say, and he laughs, watching me pace.
“I’m thinking, man. I’m pondering. You keep walking in circles. Eventually you will fall over, and that will be amusing.”
I do it. He is joking, teasing me, but I do, I keep walking, I can’t stop, I circle the lid in the floor like an orbiting star. My thoughts run back to my sister’s close compatriot, the one I tried to track down in Concord: Jordan, last name unknown. Jordan was introduced to me by Nico at the University of New Hampshire, when she went there with me to help on a case; he held, she suggested, some vague but critical position in the hierarchy of her conspiracy. What struck me about Jordan was the ironic overlay in everything he said. While Nico’s relationship with their secret revolution was always so earnest—they really were going to save the world—with this kid Jordan I always got a sense that he was playacting, posing, having a grand old time. Nico didn’t see, or didn’t want to see, this attitude in him, and their relationship therefore was just one more thing to make me uneasy. The last time I saw Jordan, Nico was already gone, a helicopter had borne her away, and he gleefully hinted to me about more secrets, deeper levels, aspects of their intrigues to which Nico was not privy.
And then when I went back to find him, to demand of him where the hell she had gone, I found Abigail instead, baffled and abandoned Abigail, and from her I got here—to Ohio, to Rotary, to a door in the floor.
“We have to get down there.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” says Cortez. “It might be impossible.”
“We have to.”
Cortez blows his smoke rings and the both of us stare at the floor. Jordan is down there, I know that he is, and Nico is down there too, separated from me only by this layer of cold rock, and all we have to do is peel it up and out of the way. I breathe—I sing a line of something—I am trying to get my feverish and overextended mind to slow, stop galloping long enough to make a plan, develop a strategy, when my dog races into the room, skidding on his small heels, claws scrabbling on the concrete. There’s something wrong. He’s barking like mad, barking to wake the dead.
4.
“It’s probably a possum,” says Cortez, breathing hard as we charge like maniacs through the woods. “Stupid dog probably wants to show you a squirrel.”
It’s not a possum. It’s not a squirrel. That much I can tell from the way that Houdini is hurtling forward, all sparked up, racing and bounding despite that limp, a distinct stutter step as he careens through the undergrowth. We run after him, Cortez and I, through the dense woods that back up against the police station, crashing through the brush like the world is on fire. It’s not a possum or a squirrel.