The Last Policeman Read Online Free PDF

I doing? I go there all the time.”
    “To the McDonald’s on Main Street?”
    “Almost every morning. Sure. For coffee.”
    “There’s a lot of places closer to here, for coffee.”
    “They have good coffee.”
    “Then why didn’t you come in?”
    “Because—because I realized at the last minute that I had forgotten my wallet.”
    I fold my arms and draw myself up to full height. “Is that true, Ms. Eddes?”
    She folds her own arms, mirrors my stance, looks up to meetmy eyes. “Is it true that this is a routine investigation?”
    And then I’m watching her walk away.
    * * *
    “It’s the short fella you’re asking about, is that correct?”
    “Pardon me?”
    The old security officer is exactly where I left him, his chair still swiveled to face the elevator bank, as if he’s been frozen in this position, waiting, the whole time I was working upstairs.
    “The fella who died. You said you were on a murder, up at Merrimack Life.”
    “I said I was investigating a suspicious death.”
    “That’s fine. But it’s the short fella? Little squirrelly? Spectacles?”
    “Yes. His name was Peter Zell. Did you know him?”
    “Nope. Except I knew everybody who worked in the building, to say hello to. You’re a cop, you said?”
    “A detective.”
    The old man’s leathery face contorts itself for a split second into the distant sad cousin of a smile. “I was in the Air Force. Vietnam. For a while, when I got home, I used to want to be a cop.”
    “Hey,” I say, offering up by rote the meaningless thing my father always used to say, when confronted with any kind of pessimism or resignation. “It’s never too late.”
    “Well.” The security officer coughs hoarsely, adjusts his battered cap. “It is, though.”
    A moment passes in the dreary lobby, and then the guard says, “So last night, the skinny guy, he got picked up after work by someonein a big red pickup truck.”
    “A pickup truck? Running gas?”
    No one has gas, no one but cops and army. OPEC stopped exporting oil in early November, the Canadians followed suit a couple of weeks later, and that was it. The Department of Energy opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on January 15, along with strictly enforced price controls, and everybody had gas for about nine days, and then they didn’t anymore.
    “Not gas,” says the guard. “Cooking oil, by the smell of it.”
    I nod, excited, take a step forward, smooth my mustache with the heel of one hand. “Did Mr. Zell get in the truck willingly or unwillingly?”
    “Well, no one pushed him in there, if that’s what you mean. And I didn’t see any gun or anything.”
    I take out my notebook, click open a pen. “What did it look like?”
    “It was a performance Ford, an old model. Eighteen-inch Goodyears, no chains. Smoke billowing out the back, you know, that nasty vegetable-oil smoke.”
    “Right. You get a license plate?
    “I did not.”
    “And did you get a look at the driver?”
    “Nope. Didn’t know I’d have a reason to.” The old man blinks, bemused, I think, by my enthusiasm. “He was a big fella, though. Pretty sure of that. Heavyset, like.”
    I’m nodding, writing quickly. “And you’re sure it was a red pickup?”
    “It was. A red, medium-body pickup truck with a standard bed.And there was a big flag airbrushed on the driver’s side wall.”
    “What flag?”
    “What flag? United States,” he says diffidently, as if unwilling to acknowledge the existence of any other kind.
    I write quietly for a minute, faster and faster, the pen scratching in the silence of the lobby, the old man looking abstractedly at me, head tilted, eyes distant, like I’m something in a museum case. Then I thank him and put away my blue book and my pen and step out onto the sidewalk, the snow falling on the red brick and sandstone of downtown, and I’m standing there for a second watching it all in my head, like a movie: the shy, awkward man in the rumpled brown suit, climbing up into the