Author: Ben H. Winters
Category: Humorous
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/ben-h-winters/page,20,176942-world_of_trouble.html
When we are back at the police station Kessler stops in Dispatch to examine Nico’s body while I go back to the garage and walk slowly around the cratered wreck at the center of the floor. It looks like Cortez took the time to fill up the stairwell with as much rock as he could—all the stones that resulted from smashing out the wedge, plus more big chunks he jackhammered out from all over the garage floor. It’s rutted and cratered in here, like the surface of the moon. At the edge of the pit is a loose end of rope, snaking out from the pile of rubble. I can picture my erstwhile sidekick after he left me in the jail cell: loading up the tarp with stones, pulling it down in his wake, collapsing the tunnel mouth behind him like the Red Sea crashing down behind Moses.
Cortez, putting up a KEEP OUT sign; Cortez, taking over the lease.
“No way on the suicide,” says Kessler abruptly, coming into the room.
“What?”
He clears his throat. “The rest of them, sure. For the rest of them, I like it. They give up on Parry, maybe they realize they got punked. Maybe they even realize DeCarlo is a psycho. Life postimpact is going to be brutish and short. Bunker or no bunker. Poison becomes the good option.”
Kessler’s manner on all this is staccato, clipped, just the facts. He’s doing exactly what I did after looking at what he was just looking at: Nico’s frozen face, the red and black wreck of her throat. He’s wrapping up the pain of that in CAUTION tape, drowning it out in crime-stopper rhythms. I like it. I find it soothing.
“But Astronaut? No,” he continues, shaking his head. “No way.”
“You said he was a maniac,” I say. “You told me: capable of anything.”
“Right. But not that. Capable of talking other people into suicide, yes, but not himself. He’s a world-class narcissist. Delusions of grandeur on an astronomical scale. Suicide doesn’t fit the profile.”
“It’s a different world.”
“Not that different.”
“But I—” I glance down into the rubble pile. “I saw him. A middle-aged man with bushy black hair, horn-rim glasses, dark brown eyes.”
Kessler scowls. “Where did you get that description?”
“Miller.”
“Who?”
“This Amish guy. My witness. Was there another man in the group who might have matched that description?”
“Not likely,” says Kessler. “Possible. We did our best to keep track, but people drifted in and drifted out. All I know is, in no scenario is Anthony DeCarlo a suicide.”
I turn back to the rubble-choked stairhead. The idea of this, of my having made a wrong ID down there, of the man who killed my sister still being alive—it flickers in me like a pilot light. I bend down without thinking about it and roll an oblong stone from the top of the pile, and then another one.
“So you think he’s down there?” I say to Kessler.
“Oh, I certainly hope so.” He comes over and gets down on a knee to help me, grunting and lifting a stone. “Because I would very much like to kill him.”
* * *
While Agent Kessler and I dig out the rubble from the stairhead, while we pull out boulders one by one and the muscle ache gathers in my shoulders and in my back, my mind flies out from my body and circles the globe, zooming over distant landscapes like a ghost in a fairy tale, wandering the world. Everywhere there are people praying, people reading to their children, people raising toasts or making love, desperately seeking pleasure or satisfaction in the last tissue-thin hours of existence. And here I am, here’s Palace, knee-deep in a pit of stone beside a stranger, digging and digging, tunneling forward blindly like a mole into the next thing that comes.
When the path is clear we go down, the narrow metal stairwell shaking under us as it did before, me first and then Agent Kessler.
In the basement corridor I flick on the Eveready and shine it into the corners and everything is as it was: darkness and silence and cold. Concrete floor, concrete walls, weird chemical stink.
Kessler stumbles on something, sending pebbles scuttling and rolling. I turn and gesture for him to be silent, and he scowls and gestures for me to be silent—a pair of bedraggled law-enforcement professionals pulling rank on each other in a darkroom dumbshow.
I sniff the air. It’s the same, everything is the same down here, but it’s not the same; it feels different. The air has been unsettled somehow. The same darkness, with new shadows in it.
We move past the tiny furnace room and shine our flashlights over the three doors: ladies’ room, general store, and then the door with the graffiti.
“The bodies?” says Agent Kessler. “Palace?”
“One sec,” I murmur, my eyes fixed on the door of the general store, which is open, open at an angle of about twenty-five degrees. It’s propped open, as a matter of fact, held in place by an empty box of macaroni and cheese, folded over into a wedge. I step toward the door, my gun raised. Cortez told me his intentions in no uncertain terms: to stay in that room for six months after boomsday before creeping out to assay the outside world. And yet there’s the door, held purposefully ajar. The question is why, the question is always why.
“Cortez?” I say, letting my voice travel down toward the door. I step toward it. “Hey, Cortez?”
Kessler mouths something in the darkness. I lean closer and squint and he holds up his light and mouths it again, exaggerated: “Fuck him.”
Right. He’s right. Fuck him. I shine my light at the door marked LADIES, I nod to Kessler and he nods back and pushes in. I look back again at the general store, experiencing dark waves of anxiety, and then I walk in after Kessler.
“God,” says Kessler, full voice. “For God’s sake.”
I walk past him, into the grim waxwork tableau. I breathe slowly, not letting it get to me, the rotting air and the corpses like mannequins, slumped against each other like melting candles. Valentine and Tick with their hands linked, Delighted in his sparkling cape. Sailor/Alice under the table, legs daintily crossed. All of them with hooded eyes, their cheeks frozen and pale, their mouths falling open as if wanting more to drink. Jordan moves through the room as I did before, getting fractured pieces of the whole horrible vision, muttering “Jesus Christ” to himself and shaking his head uneasily. A technical services trainee. A kid.
He shakes it off, though—quickly, quicker than me. Kessler starts ID’ing bodies as he finds them, calling out the code names I already know—Delighted and Tick and Valentine and Sailor under the table—and adding some I hadn’t yet heard. “This is Athena,” he says of the round-cheeked girl with her back half turned away from Delighted. “A veterinary assistant. From Buffalo. Delighted’s name is Seymour Williams, by the way. He’s a paralegal from Evanston. His father owned a clothing store.”
The built blond guy with the scar on his face is Kingfisher. The other women are Atlantis, Permanent, and Firefly. The big man is Little Man, as I suspected.
“No Astronaut,” says Kessler, and I say, “he’s back over here,” and I move in the darkness to find him and I find Cortez instead. He’s rolled halfway over, his body hidden by the open door, his right arm awkwardly thrown over his torso, like he was rolled in here and dumped like an old carpet.
And his face—I shine the light—he’s been shot in the face.
“Palace?”
I find my feet as conclusions tumble into my mind, quickly, a rush of realizations, like keys turning in a series of locks: Cortez was killed recently, in the past twenty-four hours, that’s the first thing I think, so this is a new murder, so the killer is still alive—and Cortez blocked the stairs behind him so the killer is down here with us, the killer is close.
“Palace?”
I have my hand on Cortez’s neck to make sure that he’s dead, but he’s definitely dead because of his face: he has been shot in the face with some sort of expanding projectile, a hollow round, causing an explosive blast wound, cratering his mouth and nose. Poor Cortez with his face blown off, dead of a gunshot wound in a room full of people who dr
ank poison. It’s like he was invited to the wrong party. It’s funny. Cortez would find it funny.
“Palace, goddamnit,” says Kessler, and I look up, startled.
“Kessler—”
“It’s not him.”
“What?”
“This. Here.” He’s a few feet away, in a squat like me, shining his light on a body, like me, the corpse of the man with the thick hair and the glasses. “This is the body you thought was Astronaut, is that correct?”
“It’s not him?”
“No.”
More realizations, tumbling into place. I pivot and look where Kessler is looking, where his light makes an eerie halo around the face.
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve seen the man,” says Kessler. “I’ve talked to him.”
“That’s not him? Dark brown eyes—”
“Those eyes aren’t dark brown.”
“Of course they’re not now, he’s dead—”
“They’re hazel.”
“Well, they’re not hazel.”
“Palace, it’s not him.”
We are whispering, intensely, and then a gunshot explodes somewhere in the silence of the basement, and then somebody is screaming—maybe more than one person—and we race toward the door, the two of us, trap ourselves briefly in a Three Stooges moment, two abreast in the entranceway, and then we burst free and scramble, me first and then Kessler, across the wide empty furnace room toward the origin of the noise.
It’s the men’s room, the one with the graffiti, except now that door has been shot open and there are lights in here, and I can see them both as soon as I get in there, frozen in place across from each other in the tiny space. Jean with a handgun clenched between two hands, held out directly in front of her small body and aimed at his stomach: Astronaut, a.k.a. Anthony Wayne DeCarlo, a.k.a. Big Pharma, in a flapping-open terry-cloth bathrobe and nothing else, unconcerned about his paunchy nakedness, unconcerned about the woman with the gun, seemingly unconcerned about anything.
The room is the size of an apartment kitchen, lit up like a barroom with neon lights, crammed with paraphernalia for cooking drugs: empty vials, long twists of tubing, one Bunsen burner active and bubbling with something foul, another burner shut off.
In one of the raised hands he’s got a gun of his own, the gun that killed Cortez—a big antique long-barrelled pistol that must be loaded with some sort of nasty homemade semijacketed rounds. The belt, I notice, is still on his pants, a pair of filthy Levi’s crumpled in the corner. Only the clawhammer is still on the belt.
I say, “Everyone lower your weapons.” Nobody lowers their weapons. I’m one step into the room, and Kessler is just behind me, breathing hard, holding his gun, trying to see around me into the room. Astronaut yawns, a long lazy lizard’s yawn. Jean’s body is twitching, shifting, oscillating. It’s like her atomic structure has been unsettled, like she’s a jet traveling too fast, breaking some sort of barrier, and we are watching her shake apart.
“Drop the guns.” I try it again. “Drop them.”
Jean keeps her eyes on Astronaut but responds to me, a murmured shush like we’re at the library and I’m talking too loud. Astronaut laughs and winks at me, quick and reptilian. For someone who has been holed up smoking crack or meth or whatever he’s cooking behind him on that elaborate works, he is cool as a cucumber, steady as she blows, hands still half raised as if by choice: I submit to your firearm’s implied threat but I’m not going to make a big fucking deal about it.
The room reeks: hydrochlorides, ammonia, burnt salt. There is a background noise, a low chug-chug of the gas generator keeping the room alive with neon: beer-brand signs, a gaudy colored-glass Captain Morgan figurine, strings of Christmas lights. The armchair that Cortez saw, plus a piece of a sectional sofa and an ugly lamp, all crammed in here. It’s like the man has re-created his natural habitat below the world, a scumbag terrarium.
I am jerking my head back and forth between the two of them, doing rapid calculations, understanding things in reverse order as they happened, unspooling the film backward. Cortez peeked in this room yesterday and saw a man with his eyes aced out and his legs kicked up and assumed that he was dead. But Astronaut wasn’t dead, he was just riding the waves of whatever substance or combination of substances he’s been riding the waves of for the past week. Cooking and consuming, steeping himself in fumes, happy as a clam in this one-room infuser of hot chemical smoke. At some point, though, he came back to life, took a turn around his subterranean dominions and found Cortez squatting among his mac and cheese and shot him in the face.
I have to keep my eyes in the present—the story is proceeding in front of me—the parts are still moving—Jean is stepping forward with her gun leveled, ready to kill DeCarlo—just as she wanted to do yesterday when she asked if she could come with us.
“You monster,” she whispers, and he ignores her, replies cheerily: “You did it!” Like he’s proud of her. Like she just bowled a perfect game. “You’re back! I’m so proud of you, baby.”
“No, you’re not,” she says to him.
“Sure I am, little sister.”
“Stop.”
“Okay, I’ll stop,” he says, and he smiles at her and licks his lips. “I’m stopping. But I’m so proud of you.”
“You’re a liar.”
I look at him, smirking and naked. A liar is the very least of what he is. He killed them all. Not just Cortez, and not just Nico. There was no suicide pact—he poisoned the lot of them. It was his plan B. Just his.
Jean can’t shoot him—she’s working on it—she’s gathering the nerve. DeCarlo moves his non-gun hand down casually to scratch his ass. Comfortable, easy in his skin, high out of his mind. I’m trying to get the details right, thinking as fast as I can. What is he proud of her for? It’s a lie, she is calling him a liar, but what is the nature of the lie?
She’s getting ready, charming monster or not, she’s going to shoot him. He tried to kill her, and now she’s going to shoot him and the rest of the answers will be dead.
“Jean,” I say, but she doesn’t even hear me.
“Look at me,” Jean says to Astronaut, running her finger across the line of her scar, like I saw her do over and over during her interrogation. “Look.”
“You look beautiful, little sister,” he says. “You look amazing.”
“Look what you made me.”
I glance behind me at Agent Kessler and I can tell that he’s as confused as I am by this dialog, but I can also tell that he doesn’t care, the details don’t matter to him anymore. All he knows is that Astronaut killed Nico, whom he loved, and now he is bringing up his own weapon, trying to get around me to get his shot, even as I say “Jean,” sharply, loudly, to draw her attention and keep her from pulling the trigger.
Everybody needs to hold on—everybody needs to just hold on. Because nothing yet has explained Nico. I have no explanation for why he chased down my sister and cut her throat and left her gasping, breathing blood, to die alone in the mud.
“Mr. DeCarlo,” I say. “Why did you kill Nico Palace?”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Why did you kill the girl you called Isis?”
“Sorry, man, it’s not ringing a bell.”
He snorts laughter, and Jean’s eyes sharpen with anger, and I feel Kessler’s wrathful breath behind me. Astronaut grins at the girl tauntingly, radiating wickedness, standing in his louche bathrobe in a tiny room full of people who want to kill him. I feel the gun in my hand, the knife in my belt, I feel the Earth itself screaming for the death of this man, poisoner and conman and thief, but I need nobody to die right now. I need stasis, I need time to stop until I can claw the last pieces of truth out of this acrid little room.
“Nico told you she disagreed with the decision to go underground, Mr. DeCarlo,” I say. “She left. She posed no further threat to you, she was going to take no share of your space or your water or narcotics.”
“Or past
a sauce,” he says, giggling. “Don’t forget about my pasta sauce.”
“Mr. DeCarlo, why did you kill her?”
“Shit, man, it’s a question for the philosophers,” he says.
“Why does anyone kill anyone, right? Isn’t that right, little sister?”
Jean’s hand goes back to her scar, and there is some slippery truth in Astronaut’s malevolent leer, in the terror on Jean’s small face, and I am trying to knit it all together when Kessler behind me says “Enough” and pushes past me into the room, and Astronaut’s eyes sharpen with recognition.
“Hey—” he says. “Jordan?”
“It’s Agent Kessler, actually, you prick.”
“Agent? Huh,” and he moves to one knee and fires his pistol straight into Kessler’s chest, and Kessler’s whole body flies back into the wall, and I shout “damn it” and then “no” because Jean has opened fire, she jerks the trigger of her handgun and misses Astronaut by a mile—but a spark flies off the wall and catches the flammable atmosphere and explodes.
* * *
For a long minute the world is just fire. The sound of exploding bottles and the smell of burning, and the air is on fire and Kessler is and I am, blue and yellow fire is all around us, and I am batting at our bodies, slapping down the flames, while across the tiny room Astronaut’s whole chemical-smoked body catches and bursts, and before he can react or move he becomes a pillar of fire, spiraling and falling. I get Kessler out of there with a few big heaves, cover his body with my body until we’re both extinguished.
It’s mostly our clothes, after all, Kessler’s clothing is badly burned, as mine is—the real problem is the hole in his chest, a golf-ball-sized gunshot entrance wound geysering blood, and so with the heat still pouring out of the small room, the stench of burn and death, I am hunched over Kessler panting in the hallway, covering his chest with two flat hands, blood from his heart and chest flooding out around my fingers.