Read Online Countdown City: The Last Policeman Book II (Last Policeman Trilogy) by Ben H. Winters - Free Book Online

Robbie, I think, is five. Their father took off four years ago, before the asteroid, before any of this. “Barry went Bucket List,” Trish said to me once, “before Bucket List was cool.”
    “I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have thought.”
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    “Really, I’m sorry.”
    “Hank,” she says, quieter. A different tone of voice.
    “Yes?”
    “One day, when the time is right, I’m going to escape to a mansion in the woods, somewhere in western Mass., and I’m taking you with me. How’s that sound?”
    “Sure,” I say. “Sounds good.”
    And then McConnell, very quickly, reaches up and tugs on my mustache, hard.
    “Hey.”
    “Sorry. Something I’ve always wanted to do. Carpe diem, right?”
    “Right.”
    Then the siren goes off, loud and insistent, a tornado horn blowing somewhere on the roof of the CPD. McConnell mutters “shit” as her walkie-talkie blares to life, crackling out a string of code: “Team four-zero-nine, go alpha. Team six-zero-forty, go alpha.” The CB code is unfamiliar, and I ask McConnell what it means.
    “It means I’ve got thirty seconds to get across the street and get back in character.” She grits her teeth and stares at me, shaking her head. “What’s the guy’s name?”
    “Cavatone.”
    “He was a trooper?”
    “Until a couple years ago. But Trish, seriously, forget it.”
    I feel bad now. She’s right. I never should have put her in this position. I have a permanent mental picture of Trish’s kids from a couple years ago, when she couldn’t find a sitter and dragged them to someone’s retirement party: Kelli, a thoughtful child with watchful eyes in a lime-green Hello Kitty shirt, Robbie sucking his thumb.
    “Western Mass., Detective,” says McConnell. “You and me.”
    She winks and flips down her mask, and she’s smiling, I can see it in the lines of her brow above the Plexiglas. Then off she goes, dropping into a hustle as the eighteen-wheeler rumbles in, the driver clutching the big wheel, white-knuckled as he rattles the thing into place. The police swarm its flat metal flanks like bugs on the carcassof a forest animal.
    “Trish,” I call. I can’t resist. “If there’s coffee on the truck—”
    Over her shoulder she flashes me her middle finger and disappears into the pack of cops.
    * * *
    Nico, my sister, is living in a used-clothing store on Wilson Avenue. That’s where she is, holed up with a small rotating cast of poorly groomed, slack-jawed, paranoid-delusional chuckleheads. My sister.
    I come here every couple days. I don’t knock on the door, I don’t go inside. I stand across the street or skulk through the mud-splattered alley behind the store, leaning in toward the open windows to hear her voice, catch a glimpse of her. Today I slouch down low on a bus bench across the street from Next Time Around with a six-month-old issue of
Popular Science
held up in front of my eyes like a spy.
    The last time I spoke to Nico Palace it was April, and she was standing on my porch in a jean jacket, revealing with defiance and pride how she had taken advantage of her credulous policeman older brother, gulled me into using my law-enforcement connections to gain sensitive information about security at the New Hampshire National Guard facility on Pembroke Road. She had used me, not to mention her husband, Derek, who was likely executed or remanded to permanent custody as the result of her maneuvering. I was astonished and furious and I told her so, and Nico assured me—breathless with self-importance—that her machinations were all in the serviceof a profoundly important objective. She stood on my porch, smoking one of her American Spirits, eyes glittering with conspiracy, and insisted that she and her anonymous companions were working to save us all.
    She wanted me to ask for the details, and I would not give her that satisfaction. Instead, I told her that this project, whatever it was, was the worst kind of dangerous