Supervolcano: All Fall Down

XXI

Louise Ferguson hadn’t heard from her eldest son more than a handful of times since the supervolcano erupted. He seemed content to stay up there in Maine. That struck her as somewhere along the range between masochism and madness, but it was his life.

The postcard she found in her mailbox today bore a picture of the business end of a mosquito silhouetted against the sun. Beneath it was the legend THE STATE BIRD OF MAINE. She grunted laughter. That was the kind of thing he’d send, all right. She would have recognized the style even if she hadn’t recognized the spiky script on the back.

By the time you read this, I’ll be a married man, he wrote. Her name is Lindsey Kincaid. She teaches at the high school in town. So maybe one of these days you’ll have grandkids running around under the snow here. Say hello to anyone you happen to run into.-Rob.

From the postmark, the card had taken almost three weeks to cross the country. The USPS was one more outfit that had been in big trouble even before the supervolcano erupted. Trying to cope with all the insanity since the eruption hadn’t made it run better, or more efficiently. What could you do? The postcard had eventually got here.

She wished some of her bills would come so slowly, and that the bastards who sent them out would take the Post Office sucks as an excuse when her own payments ran late. The longer she stayed out of work, the later some of them got, too.

She would have been out in the street with her worldly goods piled on the curb if so many other people didn’t have the same problems for the same reasons. They weren’t too big to fail-the classic phrase from the recession before the eruption (a recession that now looked like pretty goddamn good times). But they were too numerous to evict, even if they had failed. Pay what you can when you can was rapidly ousting e pluribus unum as the national motto. Louise expected she’d start seeing it on coins and bills any day now.

If she wanted to keep collecting her divorced single mom’s mite from the California EDD, she had to keep looking for work. When she could, she did it on the Net and with her phone. When she couldn’t, she gritted her teeth, forked over some of her unemployment check to Marshall, and climbed aboard the bus for new adventures in Jobseekersland.

She had no enormous hope. Hope was not one of Jobseekersland’s natural resources-certainly not since Yellowstone blew up. But you had to go through the motions, and to be able to document that you were going through the motions, or your EDD checks would dry up. Going out to look for work was a pain in the ass. Losing the unemployment checks would be a supervolcano eruption in your own life.

And so, glumly, Louise walked into Van Slyke Pharmacy, at the corner of Van Slyke and Reynoso Drive. It was a mom-and-pop place, not part of a chain. Along with the usual patent medicines and shampoos and school supplies and whatnot, it sold brightly painted pottery artifacts that might be decorative if you were tasteless enough, stuffed animals that looked sort of but not quite like famous cartoon characters, and a bunch of secondhand books.

The pharmacist’s bad haircut and funky glasses frames warned that he might actually enjoy the ceramic tumors he was trying to unload. The badge he wore on his pastel polyester shirt said his name was Jared. Louise wanted to giggle. To her, Jared was a singing smiley on her computer that butchered ballads in Spanish, complete with wretched guitar accompaniment.

“Help you?” he asked. His lenses made his eyes seem enormous.

“Well, I’m looking for work,” she said resignedly. One more humiliation, then on to the next.

But instead of going Sorry or Not today or We don’t need anybody, Jared said, “I was going to post on Craigslist when the power comes back on. If it ever does. What was your last job?”

“I was an administrative assistant at the ramen company’s headquarters on Braxton Bragg,” Louise answered in astonishment.

“Why did you leave?”

“I didn’t have much choice. They closed down their American operation.”

“That’s right-they did. I remember hearing about that.” The pharmacist nodded. “You can answer the phone? You can type? You can handle an inventory spreadsheet when there is power?”

Louise managed a dazed nod. “I can do all that. I’m not exactly an Excel whiz, but I can cope if it’s not too complicated.”

“I’ll give you a try, then,” Jared said briskly. “I had to let someone go last week. I feel bad about it, but she just couldn’t do the work. If you can’t, I won’t keep you, either. But if you can, I’ll be glad to have you. I can’t do all that stuff and run the place, too, not if I want to sleep, I can’t.”

Louise could hardly believe her ears. “What kind of money are we talking about?”

He told her. It was less than the ramen works had paid, but it whaled the tar out of unemployment. “Medical after six months,” he added. “It’s not a terrific plan, but it’s better than nothing.”

“When do I start?” she asked. If she couldn’t stand it, she’d start looking for something else, something better. The best time to look for work was when you already had some.

“Monday morning, ten o’clock sharp,” he said. “I’ll have paperwork for you to fill out then. Can’t do anything without the paperwork.”

“Better yours than the EDD’s,” Louise said from the bottom of her heart.

“That’s a good way to look at things,” Jared said. “Tell me your name, why don’t you? Me, I’m Jared Watt.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Watt.” Louise gave her own name. “You’ve got no idea how pleased I am to meet you.”

“Oh, I just might, Mrs. Ferguson.”

“It’s Miz,” Louise said.

“Okay. Ms. Ferguson.” Jared Watt repeated it, perhaps to help himself remember. “Like I say, I just might. You aren’t the only one who’s had a tough time the past three, four years.”

“I feel great now.” Louise meant every word of it. An indifferent job in a business that didn’t look to be thriving with a boss who definitely seemed peculiar? Hey, it was work! No wonder she meant every word. “If I never see that Torrance unemployment office again, it’ll be too soon.”

“Well, all right,” the pharmacist said. “If I can’t drive you loopy, I don’t expect anyone can.”

“I’m not even worried about it.” Louise meant that, too. Whether she’d mean it by closing time a week from Friday might be another story altogether. It’ll be a week with a paycheck, anyhow, she thought. They don’t make weeks any better than those.

* * *

Colin Ferguson looked at his watch. It was only twenty-five past two. He would have bet it was four o’clock. Time flies when you’re having fun, he thought, and then Yeah, as if! He hadn’t been this nervous since, well, the last time he was this nervous. And that was. . probably when he’d asked Kelly to marry him. A while ago, in other words.

He looked at his watch again. It was 2:26. He made himself not look at it, or at the clock on the cop-shop wall. The bust would go off the way it was supposed to. Or it wouldn’t. Whichever, he’d pick up the pieces and go on. What else could you do?

At 2:39 by the clock on the wall, his cell phone rang. He hauled it out of his jacket pocket. “Ferguson.”

“We have ourselves a bust, Lieutenant-best damn bust since Beyonce.” Rodney sounded happy as a sheep in clover. And well he might have; he went on, “Weed. Meth. Coke. H. Possession with intent to sell. Oh, and a.45 automatic, which he had sense enough not to pull when we dropped on him. We grabbed his laptop, too-see what kind of good shit he’s got on the hard drive, and where that leads us.”

“Okay. That all sounds good.” Colin couldn’t decide whether to be delighted or mournful. He went both ways at once, and felt torn to pieces on account of it. Tim had known what he was talking about after all. There was never any guarantee of that, not even when you asked him something as basic as his name. “Lucky for him he didn’t go for the.45,” Colin went on, bringing himself back to the matter directly at hand.

“Yeah, that would’ve been the last dumb thing he ever tried,” Rodney agreed. “This way, he’ll get some more chances whenever they finally decide to turn him loose. Wanted to let you know everything went smooth. We’re gonna bring him in now.”

“Good job, man. Thanks. ’Bye.” Colin stowed the phone. Nobody involved in taking Darren Pitcavage down had put anything into the San Atanasio PD’s computer system. Nobody’d said anything over the department’s radio net. What Chief Pitcavage didn’t see or hear, he couldn’t warn his son about.

Well, they didn’t have to worry about that any more. Mike Pitcavage would hear now. Colin couldn’t imagine that that would do him-or Darren-any good, though. Would he try to bargain this bust down to a misdemeanor, too? Good luck, Colin thought. If the DA went along with a deal like that, he deserved to be out on the street and sleeping in a park five minutes later. For that matter, the chief would deserve to be out there sleeping alongside him if he had the gall to propose something like that, didn’t he? So it seemed to Colin, anyway.

He had no trouble picking up just when people not in the know at the station found out what had happened. The buzz of conversation in the big open office suddenly picked up volume and changed tone. Yes, that was what amazement sounded like, sure as hell.

Gabe Sanchez also picked up on it right away. He, of course, wasn’t a person not in the know. He caught Colin’s eye and looked a question at him. Colin nodded back. Gabe grinned and gave him a thumbs-up.

The next interesting question was how long Mike Pitcavage would take to start blowing gaskets. In a way, there should have been a pool on that. Colin knew he would have put down some money. When he got into the Super Bowl pool every year, no way he could stay out of this one. But a pool would have turned people not in the know into people in the know too damn soon. Besides, the chief would’ve wanted to get into it, which would have been. . awkward. Pitcavage always joined the Super Bowl pool, too.

By the clock on the wall, the chief left his exalted private office and burst into the big central one exactly four minutes and forty seconds after Rodney called. For once, Pitcavage’s Armani suit flapped on him like an ordinary cop’s threadbare threads from Sears or Men’s Wearhouse. For once, he didn’t look like the CEO of a successful medium-sized corporation. He looked like any poor bastard who’d just found out his one and only son was arrested on serious drug charges. He looked like hell, in other words.

His blindly staring eyes caught and held Colin’s. “Ferguson!” he croaked. “I need to talk to you.” How much did he know? How much did he suspect? Or was Colin just the first spar he saw and grabbed after his yacht ripped its belly out on the rocks?

Colin heaved himself to his feet. “What’s up?” He wouldn’t be able to hide knowing for very long. Nor did he intend to. But he didn’t want to do a sack dance over Pitcavage’s fallen frame, either.

The chief gestured: follow me. Colin did, out of the big office, up the hall, and outside. One glimpse of Mike Pitcavage’s ravaged face was plenty to scare away a couple of curious smokers.

“They’ve arrested Darren,” Pitcavage said. He had the dazed look of a man who’d just staggered free of a bad car crash and didn’t quite realize yet he had only a few cuts and bruises himself. “Arrested. Drug possession. Drug dealing. Felony. Oh my God!”

“I’m sorry, Mike,” Colin said. That had the advantage of being nothing but the truth.

Truth or not, he might as well have saved his breath. Locked in some personal hell, the chief went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “A felony rap! Hard time! They’ll take DNA samples! Jesus wept!”

He isn’t running on all cylinders-nowhere near, Colin thought with rough sympathy. Hard time was, well, hard time. It wasn’t designed to be fun for anybody. It might end up even harder for a police chief’s kid, because they’d have to segregate him from most of the rest of the prisoners to keep him safe. But a swab on the inside of his cheek was the least, the absolute very least, of Darren Pitcavage’s worries.

Mike Pitcavage seized Colin’s arm and squeezed, hard. He might be stuck behind a desk, but he was still one hell of a strong man. “I’ve got to talk to the arresting officer, talk to the DA, get it down to something possible, something reasonable,” Pitcavage said, squeezing, squeezing. If he kept that up, pretty soon Colin wouldn’t have any circulation in his left hand. “Drug dealing? A felony? No way! I’ll fix it up.”

No, he didn’t have all his oars in the pond. “Mike,” Colin said, as gently as he could, “I don’t think that will do you any good, or Darren, either. Think it through. You’re liable to make things worse, not better. What if the reporters get hold of it? Can’t you see the headlines, man? ‘Chief scores cushy plea deal for his son! Film at eleven!’” He did his best to imitate a pompous TV talking head.

“He’s my kid, Colin. I’ve got to try. DNA samples? My God, this will kill Caroline.” Pitcavage might even have been right about that.

Whether he was or he wasn’t, though, had nothing to do with the price of lemonade. “You won’t help him, Mike,” Colin said, doing his best to get through to the other man. “You’ll make things worse. The DA won’t listen to you. He can’t. And if you piss him off, he’ll probably find some new counts to throw at Darren.”

“They can’t charge him with a felony. They can’t!” Pitcavage wouldn’t listen.

In Colin’s experience, saying what they could or couldn’t do was usually a bad plan. Telling them to their faces that they couldn’t do this, that, or the other thing was even worse. As soon as you told them, they’d go ahead and do it anyhow, just to show you a thing or three.

He tried his best to spell that out for the chief. “You’re against me, too! I might have known!” Pitcavage yelled, loud enough to make the smokers spin toward him to see what was going on.

Chief Pitcavage stormed back into the station, shoulders hunched, head pushed forward, hands thrust into trouser pockets. Colin stared after him. He’d known it would be bad. He hadn’t imagined it would be as bad as this.

“What’s eating him?” one of the smokers asked the other, or Colin, or possibly God. He’d been out here polluting his lungs when the news broke. One more reason not to smoke, Colin thought, and didn’t enlighten the guy. He’d find out soon enough. The whole department would know before the sun went down.

* * *

Vanessa surveyed her new apartment with something less than delight. It was a standard SoCal pattern for a small one-bedroom. Front room going back to dinette, with cramped kitchen to one side of the eating area. Bedroom through a door in the front-room wall opposite the couch. Bathroom behind the bedroom and next to the kitchen, so the builder could save money by running the pipes for both off the same main line.

The rug was one small step up from outdoor carpeting. The linoleum in the kitchen and the bathroom had seen better decades. The furniture was old and ratty. Coffee table, end table, dinette table, and nightstand and dresser in the bedroom all had identical tops of very fake wood. She didn’t want to think about how many people had fucked on the mattress before she moved in.

Her own furniture was back in Denver. Scavengers wouldn’t have got there yet. One of these years. By then, ash and rain probably would have made the roof cave in. Gone. Well, the whole Midwest was gone.

Her old room in her father’s place had been more comfortable than this. Well, the physical arrangements had. But everybody there took everything she said the wrong way. And there was her new half-sister screeching at odd hours. That drove Vanessa straight up the wall. Did it ever! You couldn’t ignore a crying baby, no matter how much you wanted to. Evolution had designed those noises to stab your head like an ice pick. You had to do something about them so the little monster would shut up.

Vanessa knew what she wanted to do. But punting an infant got you talked about in this effete age. Moving out seemed the better choice.

Or it would have, if she hadn’t been all but run out by Kelly. She was Colin Ferguson’s daughter, goddammit. Just because this chunky stranger was hauling her old man’s ashes, did that give the bitch the right to put on airs and boss her around?

Kelly sure seemed to think so. So did Vanessa’s dad. Marshall. . Marshall shut himself in the room with the stupid police tape on the door and clattered away on that horrible antique of a typewriter. It was almost as annoying as Deborah. And he turned out silly, saccharine stories, full of erratic grammar and punctuation. She’d told him so when he asked her to read one. She hadn’t seen any more after that.

Of course, his prose looked like Edward Gibbon’s when you compared it to the subliterate garbage Nick Gorczany cranked out. Vanessa had forgotten how very delightful life at the widget works was before she headed for Colorado.

Maybe Gorczany had forgotten, too. When she set a memo on his desk heavily edited in red, he’d looked from it to her and back. “So good to have you on the job again, Vanessa,” he’d murmured.

“So good to be back,” she’d answered, and walked out of his office with her head held high. If he was going to get snide, she’d get snide right back. Yes, she needed work. But she needed her self-respect even more.

The one thing wrong with self-respect was, it wouldn’t buy groceries or pay the rent. The job would. . more or less. Nick Gorczany hadn’t got himself that big old house in Palos Verdes Estates by overpaying his employees. If you didn’t like what he gave you, you could always go out and find yourself better-paying work.

“Ha,” Vanessa said, chopping cabbage in the crowded kitchen of the small one-bedroom in San Atanasio: about as far from the boss’ Palos Verdes Estates estate as you could get and still stay in the South Bay. “Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha.”

It didn’t get any funnier, even if she made more laughy noises. Laughy? She nodded to herself. It bore the same relation to laugh as truthy did to truth. It wouldn’t go into the OED any time soon, but it filled a need. It did for her, anyhow.

She counted herself lucky Nick Gorczany had remembered she knew what she was doing when it came to translating bureaucratic horseshit into English. Her father and Kelly might have given her the bum’s rush even if she hadn’t snagged a job.

“They have expelled you from what is yours by right,” Bronislav said the first time he saw her apartment. His big hands folded into fists. “If it were not your father, I would make him pay for dispossessing you. We Serbs, we know too much about being wrongly dispossessed.”

“Don’t do anything like that! Don’t, you hear me?” Vanessa exclaimed. Bronislav was ready to turn a family squabble into an international incident. Vanessa had started learning what she could about ex-Yugoslavia. She didn’t want him to call her American any more, not the way he had in front of the Croat eatery in San Pedro. From everything she could see, Serbs did that kind of thing a lot. She was sure Gavrilo Princip would have agreed. So would Archduke Franz Ferdinand, these days the namesake of a band almost as quirky as the one her brother played in.

And Rob was married, up there in the glacial wilderness of Maine. He hadn’t bothered to let Vanessa know, not firsthand, but he’d sent cards to Dad and Mom, who’d both told her. Vanessa had trouble imagining a woman rash enough to want to tie the knot with her big brother, but there you were.

Here she was, all right. “Don’t!” she said one more time. She didn’t want Bronislav turning Dad’s car into an IED or anything like that. She wasn’t sure he knew how to do such things, but he was liable to. He was liable to want to show off for her, too. That was how he would think of it, anyhow.

“All right,” he said now. Did he sound sulky, like a kid deprived of his favorite toy? Damn straight he did.

So she found something else for him to do. And he did, with the same kind of enthusiasm he’d probably shown for guerrilla warfare while Yugoslavia was falling apart. But bedroom explosions had aftermaths much more enjoyable than those involving plastique.

Some of the things he did. . “Where did you learn that?” she asked, her heart still thumping.

“I am a Serb. It is in my blood,” Bronislav replied with dignity. And maybe that was true, and maybe he’d picked it up from a jowly hooker in Barstow or Phoenix or Las Cruces or one of the other towns on the route that fed Los Angeles. How could you know for sure?

Simple. You couldn’t. But Vanessa chose to believe him. Choosing to believe was part of what love was all about. So was forgetting you even had a choice. Vanessa tried her best to do that, too.

* * *

When the phone rings at 3:25 a.m., it’s never good news. If you’ve won the Nobel Prize or $150,000,000 in the lottery, they’re always considerate enough to let you sleep in before they tell you. When the phone goes off in the wee smalls like a grenade on your nightstand, they’re calling to let you know something is wrecked or somebody’s hurt or somebody’s dead-if you’re really lucky, all of the above.

Colin knew it was 3:25 because the glowing hands on the windup clock by the phone told him so. When power started erratically going in and out, the San Atanasio PD issued one to every cop on the force. The bean counters hadn’t squawked about that; you didn’t want people (especially people who worked the evening and night shifts) not showing up because their electric clocks crapped out on them.

The power was out now. Without the glowing hands, it would have been absolutely dark in the bedroom, not just almost absolutely dark. Colin fumbled for the phone. He snagged it in the middle of the third ring-and in the middle of Kelly’s groggy “What the fuck?”

“Ferguson,” he said, sounding at least something like his ordinary self.

“Lieutenant, this is Neil Schneider at the station.” All right: it was a police emergency, not a family disaster. That was better. Or maybe it was-the sergeant didn’t sound even remotely ordinary. He might have been trying to get back up on his feet after taking a sucker punch in a bar fight. And what he said next explained why he sounded that way: “Chief Pitcavage is dead, Lieutenant.”

“Oh, sweet Jesus!” Colin blurted. Ice and fire chased each other along his nerves. He wasn’t sleepy any more. He both was and wasn’t astonished. “What happened?” he managed after a moment.

He ate his gun was what he expected. Mike Pitcavage had definitely freaked at Darren’s arrest. Colin had known that would be bad. He’d had no idea it would be as bad as it was.

“Caroline just found him-they’ve got separate bedrooms, you know,” Sergeant Schneider said.

Like an idiot, Colin found himself nodding there in the dark, as if Schneider-or anyone else-could see him do it. He did know the chief and his wife slept apart. Mike was liable to get called out at odd hours, and he didn’t want to bother Caroline any more than he had to.

The cop at the station went on, “She went in there with a flashlight. Dunno why. Maybe she thought she heard a noise and wanted to get him. Whatever. She found him on the bed with a bottle of pills next to him and a plastic bag over his head and fastened tight around his neck. He’d been gone for a while-he was getting cold.”

“Jesus!” Colin said again. So Mike hadn’t shot himself. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to leave a mess behind for Caroline to have to clean up. Well, when you killed yourself you left a mess behind whether you wanted to or not. Colin found the next obvious question: “Was there a note?”

“If there was, I don’t know anything about it. I don’t think Caroline said anything about one, but I can’t tell you for sure. I didn’t catch the call,” Sergeant Schneider replied.

“Okay,” Colin said. It wasn’t-nowhere close-but he was starting to see what the picture looked like.

“Uh, Lieutenant, is there any way you could come in for a while?” Schneider asked hesitantly. “I mean. .” His voice trailed away.

“Be there fast as I can.” The plea didn’t surprise Colin, much as he wished it did. With Captain Miyoshi on the shelf after stomach-cancer surgery, he was the most senior man available. And people would know he’d orchestrated Darren Pitcavage’s arrest. Without a note from Mike, they wouldn’t be able to prove that was why he’d done himself in, but it sure looked like the way to bet.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Neil Schneider said. “Thanks very much.”

“Yeah.” Colin hung up. He pulled the nightstand drawer open and groped for the flashlight that lived in there. He imagined Caroline doing the same thing a couple of miles away. No one could see his grimace, but he felt it.

“What happened?” Kelly asked just as his fingers closed around it. “Somebody committed suicide. Who? Why?”

“Mike Pitcavage. Don’t know why yet, but it’s gonna be a hell of a mess.” Colin had already flicked on the light and was squinting against the beam when he realized he’d cussed in front of his wife. Well, too goddamn bad. This was already a mess. It called for cussing or praying, one. It probably called for both, but Colin had not even a nodding acquaintance with prayer.

“My God!” Kelly said. She jumped to the same conclusion people at the cop shop had to be reaching: “Is it because you busted his worthless kid?”

“Don’t know,” Colin repeated, as stolidly as he could. “If it is. .” He didn’t take that any further.

If the chief had killed himself because of Darren’s arrest, Colin was anything but sure he could go on at the San Atanasio Police Department. How many people there would blame him for Mike’s suicide? Enough to make him persona bigtime non grata? He had the bad feeling the answer to that one couldn’t be anything but yes. He was a long way from sure he didn’t blame himself, when you got right down to it.

“That would be awful, Colin!” Kelly exclaimed, so she could see it, too. Well, it wasn’t anything complicated, worse luck.

By the flashlight’s white glare, he put on jeans, a sweatshirt, and his beat-up old denim jacket. The middle of the night wasn’t the time to worry about suit and tie. He looked a lot like the way he had when he first met Kelly at the late, ever so lamented Yellowstone. “I’ll be back when I can,” he told her, brushing his lips across hers. “Try and grab some more z’s.”

“Any other time, I’d tell you you were out of your mind,” she said. “The way Deborah runs me ragged, I may have a chance of doing it.”

He hurried downstairs. He started to roll his bike out of the foyer and onto the porch, but shook his head, went outside on foot, and got into the Taurus instead. Sometimes speed mattered. To his relief, the car started.

The streets were eerily empty. He drove past two people showing bike lights and one moron who wasn’t. Crunching the fool would have been just what he needed now, but he swerved and missed. Having the guy appear out of nowhere in his headlights startled him so much he didn’t even honk.

When he pulled into the lot, he had no trouble finding a space. Most of them went begging most of the time-who drove to work these days? He hurried inside. The lights were on: the station had its own generator, and for the moment the generator had fuel.

“Here he is!” somebody said as he came through the doors. That wasn’t relief. It sounded more like a heads-up to alert people who hadn’t seen him yet. The looks the cops and clerical staff gave him had that same feeling.

Neil Schneider came up to him. “Sorry to roust you, Lieutenant, but. .” The droopy, graying blond mustache the sergeant wore gave him a mournful aspect even when he was happy. When he had something to be unhappy about, as now. .

“I’m here, all right,” Colin said. “Has anybody told Darren yet?”

By the way the rest of the cops looked at one another, he knew nobody had. “We thought you ought to be here,” Schneider said. We thought you ought to do it, he meant.

Colin sighed. “Okay. Get him out of his cell. Bring him to interrogation room two. I’ll handle it in there.” If he was top dog for the moment, they could damn well follow his lead.

He didn’t have to wait long in the interrogation room-the jail was right next to the station. Two policemen led in Darren Pitcavage. He wore a bright blue jumpsuit with SAN ATANASIO CITY JAIL stenciled on the chest and back in white; his hands were cuffed behind him.

“What’s going on?” he demanded when he saw Colin. He was bigger than his father, and looked a lot like him, but with little of the older man’s polished hardness. Scowling, he went on, “My pop’ll eat you without salt when he hears you hauled me outa my cell in the middle of the night for the third degree.”

“We didn’t bring you out for anything of the kind,” Colin said wearily. He wished he were home in bed, or anywhere else at all but here. “And your father. . Your father won’t do anything like that, either, I’m afraid.”

“Huh? The fuck he won’t, man.” Darren spoke with the certainty of someone who’d rarely heard no in his life. “You guys try and screw me over, you think Dad’ll let you get away with that shit?”

Mike Pitcavage alive wouldn’t have let them do anything to his son, not if he could help it. Colin wondered if he wasn’t alive for no better reason than the humiliation he felt at not being able to help it. He took a deep, miserable breath. “Darren, your father won’t do anything to stop us. Your father can’t do anything to stop us.”

“What are you talkin’ about?” Darren said. “Of course he can. He’s, y’know, the chief.”

“No, he can’t. No, he isn’t,” Colin said. “Your father is dead, Darren. He killed himself earlier tonight, or that’s what it looks like. That’s what we took you out of jail to tell you. I’m sorry, if it means anything to you.”

Darren Pitcavage gaped at him. “No. No fuckin’ way.” He shook his head. “Dad’d never do anything like that. You’re bullshitting me, trying to soften me up or something.”

“I wish to God I were,” Colin replied, which was the exact and literal truth. “If you don’t believe me, ask some of the other people here. It’s not like you don’t know most of ’em.” He hadn’t known all of them, or he wouldn’t be wearing that jumpsuit now-and his father probably wouldn’t be dead. Colin made himself go on: “I know you know Neil Schneider. Ask Neil. He’s the one who phoned me with the news.”

“I don’t need to ask anybody. I know you assholes are all in it together.” But Darren didn’t sound so sure any more. He was starting to get that poleaxed look, the look anybody gets on hearing a loved one has unexpectedly died. He blinked a couple of times-blinked back tears, Colin guessed from the way his eyes brightened under the fluorescents. When he spoke again, the bluster had drained from his voice: “What-what happened, man?”

Briefly and baldly, Colin told him, finishing, “That’s just the way I got it from Sergeant Schneider. Now you know as much as I do. I am sorry. I wish like anything I didn’t have to give you news like this.”

“Dad. Oh, my God. Dad.” Darren believed him now, all right. Tears ran down his face. “What’s Mom gonna do now? What am I gonna do now?”

Colin had no idea what Caroline Pitcavage would do. Darren Pitcavage would probably do seven to ten, with time off for good behavior and prison overcrowding. That, he didn’t say. Darren would have to find out for himself.