The episode with the tiger cost us half a day, and there were more, too many more, red towns and gray towns. In Dunkirk we pulled a family from a burning apartment building in the fiery wreck of downtown but then we had nowhere to take them, no way to offer them assistance of any kind. We just left them on the firehouse steps.
It’s spitting rain, ugly and cold. Late morning. The dog is moving in anxious circles among the trees, the dirt, the clumps of yellow leaves. I hold the sleeping girl close in my arms like a honeymooner, start the walk back to the police station. Cortez goes ahead of us, swinging the hatchet, clearing brush and branches from the path. Houdini limping along behind.
5.
We called it Police House because that was the name the kids picked for it, a big isolated country house in western Massachusetts, near a dot on the map called Furman. A bunch of cops and retired cops and their kids and friends have banded together there to live out the last run of days in relative security, in the company of like-minded individuals. That’s where I was living, along with Trish McConnell and her kids, along with a handful of other old friends and new acquaintances, before I left to find my sister.
Among those in residence at Police House, on the top floor, is a tough old bird with close-cropped gray hair named Elda Burdell, known as the Night Bird, or just the Bird. Officer Burdell retired at the rank of detective sergeant two years before I joined the force; at Police House she has eased into the roles of unofficial dean and resident sage. Not the leader, but the person who sits in the attic in her armchair drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from a stack of cases she showed up with, dispensing advice and wise counsel about everything. The kids ask her which berries are safe to eat. Officer Capshaw and Officer Katz had the Bird settle a bet about what the best lures are for catching trout out of the fast-moving stream a quarter mile from the house.
Late on August 23, the day after my trip to Concord to visit Abigail, I took the long walk up the stairs to the attic to discuss a couple of matters related to my planned departure.
The Night Bird offers me a Pabst, which I decline, and we speak quickly about the necessary arrangements, and then she gazes at me with a half smile while I linger at the doorway, one foot in, one foot out.
“Something else on your mind, son?”
“Well—” I hesitate, rubbing my mustache, feeling ridiculous. “I just wanted your take on something.”
“Fire away.” She leans forward with her hands draped between her legs, and I launch in, I give it to her as briefly as I can: the rogue scientist formerly attached to Space Command, the supposed nuclear stockpile waiting somewhere in the United Kingdom, the standoff burst.
The Night Bird holds up two fingers, takes a short sip from her beer can, and says, “I’ll stop you there. You’re going to ask if a standoff burst is plausible.”
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Oh boy, oh boy, Officer. I’ve heard of all of them.” The Night Bird sets down the Pabst and reaches out a thick palm. “Hand me that, will ya? The red binder there.”
As it turns out, Officer Burdell’s made a study of all the various scenarios; she’s been collecting all the sober theories and glittery-eyed Hail Mary pitches and gauzy counterfactuals, all the off-the-wall ideas presented as possible world savers.
“The standoff burst, kid, you’re talking about a top ten fantasy. Top five, maybe. I mean, you got, what, you got your push/pull fantasies, your gravity tractor fantasies, your Enhanced Yarkovsky Effect fantasies.” She flaps open the binder to a particular page, gazes with amusement at the long columns of figures. “People do get a hard-on for that Enhanced Yarkovsky Effect. Probably the funny name. But it won’t work. They never got the numbers right on all that magnetic field shit.”
I nod, okay. All the science is boring me, I want yes or no. I want answers. “So, but the—the standoff burst?”
The Night Bird clears her throat, cocks her head at me sour for a second, not liking to be rushed.
“Yes,” she says. “Same story. It would take calibration and it would take hardware. The calibration, maybe, maybe this Space Command guy has some good numbers, maybe he’s figured out the target velocity and that, but no one’s got the hardware. Gotta have a highly specialized delivery system, built specific to this thing. To the material strength, the porosity, the velocity. Maybe there’s a chance someone builds the right launcher, does the math, if the sumbitch was a couple years out. If it was ten years out, you could nudge it enough that by the time it gets close it sails by, it’s a miss.” She angles forward in the armchair. “But you’re telling me someone thinks they’re gonna do it with a standoff burst now?” She looks at her watch, shakes her head. “What are we—a month? Month and a half?”
“Forty-two days,” I say. “So you’re saying there is no chance?”
“No. Listen. Officer. I am saying there is less than that. There is less than no chance.”
I thanked her politely for everything and went downstairs and finished packing.
*