Supervolcano: Eruption

XXII

The Piscataquis chuckled through Guilford. In the western part of the little town, it powered the mill. Farther east, its northern bank turned into a park that would no doubt be pretty when the grass was green and the trees had leaves on them. Eyeing the bare branches of those trees and the snow that was burying the river-view benches, Rob Ferguson wondered whether Guilford would ever see days like that again.

A monument, also splotched with snow, listed Guilford’s war dead from a history longer than towns on the other coast knew. The letters on one of those names were still bright and shiny and new. Sooner or later, they would mellow to match the others. By then, though, chances were newer names would have gone up on the monument.

Rob was getting used to wearing too many clothes all the time, and to being cold anyway. What heat there was in the Trebor Mansion Inn rose to his little tower room-where it leaked out through the walls and windows. The glass in the windows was double, with an insulating air space between the panes. They routinely did such things here. Heat leaked out all the same.

Kids in the park slid down slopes toward the river on sleds. They flung snowballs at one another. They thought a winter with all this snow in it was fun. Rob might have felt the same way if he hadn’t wondered when-or whether-the weather would let up.

One of the books in his tower room was a sort of informal history of Maine. It told him more about the Year without a Summer after Mt. Tambora erupted than he’d found out online. Quebec City had got a foot of snow in June 1816. Ice stayed on the lakes and rivers th long as far south as Pennsylvania. Crops were ruined in North America and Europe: ruined to the point of widespread hunger. The haze was so thick, you could look at the sun with your naked eye and see sunspots. And Mt. Tambora was just one of these kids banging on a toy drum next to Charlie’s fancy amplified kit when you compared it to the Yellowstone supervolcano.

Shaking his head at such gloomy reflections, Rob trudged up Library Street toward the Trebor Mansion Inn. The library was another historic building. Books in there would no doubt have even more to say about that summer that wasn’t. He didn’t stop in to go look for those books. Why bother reading about it when he’d be living through it-and then some-before long?

Both SUVs from the band remained in front of the inn, along with the Barber family’s cars. Nobody was going anywhere. The Shell station still hadn’t got more gas. All the stations in Dover-Foxcroft were dry, too. Tankers weren’t even trying to come up here any more. North and west of the Interstate, Maine was on its own: the big part of the state, if not the populous part.

But something new had been added. Out there next to the nearly useless motor vehicles stood a one-horse open sleigh straight out of “Jingle Bells.” In lieu of a hitching post or rail, the horse-a well-curried bay-was tied to a doorknob. It munched contentedly from a feed bag.

When Rob went inside, he took off his hat and his overshoes, and that was about it. With even firewood in short supply, the place stayed cold. Dick Barber greeted him with, “Come into the parlor, why don’t you? Someone here I’d like you to meet.”

“Whoever’s in charge of the sleigh there?” Rob asked.

“That’s right. Your cohorts have already made his acquaintance.” Barber sometimes had an old-fashioned turn of phrase. He could use it or not, as he chose, which made Rob classify it as a special effect.

He wasn’t inclined to be fussy. A fire burned in the parlor hearth, perhaps in honor of the newcomer. The man stood with his back to Rob, savoring the warmth. He was talking to Justin and Charlie, who listened in what was plainly fascination.

Hearing Rob and Barber come up behind him, the fellow broke off and turned toward them. He was in his late sixties, and looked like.. Rob needed a moment to realize who he looked like. If you took John Madden down to about five feet eight, that would do for a first approximation. He was ruddy and fleshy and had a sharp nose, bushy eyebrows, and silver hair.

He didn’t dress like John Madden, though. John Madden looked like an unmade bed, even in a suit. This guy could have been a 1930s dandy. A lot of his hair was hidden under a broad-brimmed black fedora. His overcoat boasted fur trim. When he shrugged it off, he was wearing a double-breasted, pinstriped wool suit underneath, with lapels sharp and upthrusting enough to cut yourself on.

“Jim, this is Rob Ferguson, also of Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles,” Barber said. “Rob, here before you stands Jim Farrell, recent unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress in the Second District-most of Maine, even if it’s not the part with most of the people in it. The ones who do live their chose, in their wisdom, the usual blow-dried airhead over someone who actually had some idea of what he was talking about.”

“Glad to meet you, Rob,” Farrell said in a resonant baritone. “Dick helped run my campaign, such as it was. He tends to forget that it’s over, and that we got trounced. Ancient history now, like any failed campaign.

“Speaking of ancient history, Jim taught it for years at SUNY Albany,” Barber said. “Then he retired and came home-claimed the good weather in Albany was wearing him down.”

Albany and good weather didn’t strike Rob as a likely mix. Farrell raised those extravagant eyebrows. “I’ve got over that,” he rumbled. “The way things are these days, so has Albany.”

Barber went on as if the older man hadn’t spoken: “He picked up a fair amount of fame-”

“Notoriety,” Farrell broke in, not without pride. “It was definitely notoriety.”

“-for his newsletters called To the Small-Endians. They skewered PC academics the way they deserve. Skewered ’em, hell-screwed ’em to the wall.”

Charlie jerked on the couch where he was sitting. He startled a cat sleeping beside him. “Oh, my God! Those things!” he said. “My older brother picked up a couple of them at an sf convention. I think he’s still got ’em. I’ve read ’em. They’re wicked!” He eyed Farrell with newfound regard.

Farrell doffed the fedora, showing off a hairline that hadn’t surrendered even half an inch. “I finally quit doing them. I gave up, in short. The real academic world proved madder and sadder than anything I could invent.”

“And he’s known for his comparative study of the campaigns of Alexander and Julius Caesar,” Barber added. “I can’t speak as a professor-I never even played one on TV. But as a career military man, it impressed the bejesus out of me.”

Rob, Justin, and Charlie eyed one another. Sometimes you got a song cue when you least expected one. Charlie started beating out a rhythm on his thighs and on the coffee table in front of the couch. That was a long way from his usual industrial-strength noisemakers, but it would do. It was plenty to make the cat, which had tentatively settled down again, head for the hills with a tail bristling in indignation.

And Justin and Rob launched into “Came Along Too Late.” Not every band had a song about Alexander the Great-one that even mentioned Julius Caesar, too-but Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles wasn’t every band. Not even close. The words were mostly Charlie’s, with some tweaks from Marshall back when he’d got into ancient history. They’d done it before larger audiences, but never before a more knowing one:

“Dozing before the idiot box

When hoofbeats awakened me-

History Channel, three a.m.:

So-called documentary.

Swords and sandals

Maps and blood

Watching the conquests spread and spread

Darius’ name was mud.

“Came along too late to see Alex the Great

Mopping up the Persian cavalry.

Came along too late to see Alex the Great

Found his Hellenistic monarchy!

“Now some will stand out from the mass

In good times or in rage

For King Philip’s son by Olympias

Greece was too small a stage.

Had to spread out ’cross the world-

Couldn’t help himself, I think.

Everywhere his flags unfurled;

He won fantastic ink.

“Came along too late to see Alex the Great

Mopping up thery.

Came along too late to see Alex the Great

Found his Hellenistic monarchy!

“I know I live in the here-and-now.

It can’t be helped-that’s true.

But thinking of long-vanished days… Oh, wow!

All the things he got to do!

Lift a bottle with Aristotle,

Start Alexandrias all over the place.

One got a library

Founded by his longtime friend,

Good old Ptolemy!

“Came along too late to see Alex the Great

Mopping up the Persian cavalry.

Came along too late to see Alex the Great

Outdoing Julius Caesar’s infantry.

Came along too late to see Alex the Great

Found his Hellenistic monarchy!”

“Came Along Too Late” was supposed to end on a wild flourish of cymbals. You couldn’t do those on your person or a tabletop. Justin solved the problem by using a doo-wop shout-“Woo-hoo!”-instead.

Jim Farrell looked from one member of the band to the next. (Biff was probably down at Calvin’s Kitchen. He’d fallen for a brunette who waitressed there. Whether she’d fallen for him was a different question, but he was in there pitching, anyhow.) “These are men of parts,” Farrell said at last, to Dick Barber. “I suspect some of the parts stand in desperate need of repair, but he that is without sin, let him first cast an aspersion at them.”

“Ouch!” Rob said, a noise with more admiration in it than pain. Farrell gave him a tip of the fedora if not a doff. But Rob quickly turned serious again. Here was a real, if unorthodox, politico in front of him. He hadn’t expected to have a chance like that. Since he did, he asked, “What do we do-what can anybody do-about everything the supervolcano’s doing to us?”

“Well, I can’t say I’m completely sorry the government seems to have forgotten about this part of the country. Sometimes being forgotten by the government is the best thing that can happen to you,” Farrell answered.

Rob wasn’t so sure he bought that. He was a liberal more often than not and in most ways. But he turned libertarian, if not reactionary, four times a year: when his estimated-tax payments came due. The band made raw money, with not a dime withheld. Rendering what Uncle Sam and the state demanded hurt more than it would have were he working a nine-to-five like most people.

Farrell hadn’t finished: “But it also seems as though everybody on the far side of the Interstate has forgotten about us. I think-I hope-we can get through one winter like that. When things warm up, if they ever do, we’ll have to see about stocking up for another long, hard, cold stretch next winter. If we can stock up. If there’s anything left to stock up on. It’s not just a Guilford, Maine, problem, you know. It’s worldwide.”

“It’s not so bad in a lot of other places,” Rob said.

“True enough. But it’s worse in some,” Farrell said. “How would you like to be in Salt Lake City or Denver right now?”

“My sister was in Denver. She’s one of the lucky ones-she got out quick. I guess she was lucky. Now she’s stuck in one of those camps in the middle of nowhere,” Rob said. “She can’t stand it, but she’s alive, anyway.”

Vanessa Ferguson commonly acted on the principle that the squeaky wheel got the grease. She didn’t believe in depriving herself of the pleasure ocomplaining. The only trouble was, there were a hell of a lot of squeaky wheels in Camp Constitution. The miserable place had to have a couple of hundred thousand people in it by now, and it was awful. A saint would have hated it. Ordinary people? Vanessa had heard the suicide rate at the camp was ridiculously high, and she believed it. It was much too easy to decide that staying here was a fate worse than death.

The people who ran Camp Constitution were from the government, and they were there to help you… provided you did exactly what they told you to do. If you didn’t, or if you were otherwise unhappy, well, they had Procedures for that.

To get your problem settled, or even noticed, you lined up at the Camp Constitution Administration Building. That only roused further resentment. As far as Vanessa knew, it was the only building in the whole enormous goddamn camp. It was flimsy and rickety and had been run up in a tearing hurry, but still… Federal bureaucrats deserved no less. That was what they and their paymasters in Washington thought, anyhow. Tents and FEMA trailers were for the rabble stuck in the camp 24/7.

You lined up regardless of what it was doing outside. Raining? You lined up. Snowing? Same deal. They did, in their mercy and wisdom, put up an awning that gave some modest protection from the elements. But that was all it gave: some modest protection. The ground under your feet still got gloppy. The weather still got beastly cold. People said it was the worst winter in these parts in they couldn’t remember how long. Everybody blamed it on the supervolcano. Everybody was likely to be right, not that that did anybody any good.

If you didn’t feel like shivering in the muck for however long you needed to see the people with the power to do something about your complaint (if they happened to feel like it), you could turn around and trudge back to your tent through even more of that same muck. The bureaucrats inside the administration building wouldn’t mind. Not one bit, they wouldn’t.

There weren’t nearly enough of them to handle all the people in the camp with problems. That made the line start well before the awning did. It inched forward with glacial slowness. Considering the weather, the comparison struck Vanessa as much too apt. She had a hooded, quilted anorak with a pink-and-purple nylon shell that was at least three sizes too big for her: charity, of a sort. She had long johns, too. More charity. She was cold anyhow.

She was also itchy. There were bedbugs in her tent. There were bedbugs all over Camp Constitution. Somebody’d brought them in, and they’d thrived like mad bastards. Several eradicating campaigns had failed to eradicate. The same was true for head lice, though she didn’t have those-yet. There was talk in Washington of making DDT to fight the vermin at the refugee camps. So far, it was nothing but talk. Vanessa had always thought of herself as a pretty green person, but she would cheerfully have shot a spotted owl to rid herself of her six-legged companions.

A heavyset, bearded man wearing a coat even uglier than hers-and they said the age of miracles had passed! — gave up and stumped away. He muttered a stream of obscenities as he went. Maybe they were what made his breath smoke. More likely, it was just the cold.

The queue moved up to fill the space he’d occupied. “One more we don’t got to wait for,” said the black woman behind Vanessa.

“One more the yahoos up ahead won’t have to deal with,” Vanessa said, pointing to the still far too distant building ahead. “I hate lines, you know?”

“Jez, honey, who don’t?” the black woman answered. “But what you gonna do?”

Vanessa still carried the. 38 in her purse. A few people at the camp had gone postal. One guy gunned down seven of his tent-mates before somebody brained him from behind with a baseball bat. For a nasty instant, Vanessa savored the brief, scarlet joy of flipping out like that. If the alternative was worming forward an inch at a time till you got to talk to some dumb fuck who couldn’t have cared less.. Sighing, she wormed forward another inch. Maturity and sanity sucked sometimes. They really did.

Half an hour later, she scraped the mud off the bottom of her Nikes on the sharp edges of the aluminum steps leading up to the administration building. Those edges already had a lot of mud on them, from others who’d done the same thing before her. The instinct not to track dirt inside remained strong, even when there was next to no inside and what seemed like all the dirt in the world.

A sign on the glass doors said PLEASE KEEP CLOSED. The administration building had a real heating system, not a half-assed propane heater in the middle of a tent. Nothing too good for the folks helping our refugees. The building had power, too, and computers and phones and broadband Internet and everything else Vanessa was missing except when she got in the line even longer than this one to go to the charging station to give her cell more juice.

In due course, she reached a counter behind which sat a thir-tyish dweeb with glasses and a broken front tooth. Before she could get down to brass tacks, he asked for her name, her Social Security number (only he called it her “Social,” which she wouldn’t have understood if she hadn’t already heard it from other pen-pushers), and her tent number. “And the nature of your difficulty is…?”

“It’s not just mine,” Vanessa said. “It’s everybody’s except for this one woman named Loretta. She has three horrible brats. They’re going stir-crazy, they’ve got no video games to play or TV to watch, and they drive everybody nuts. You can’t even sleep at night, ’cause they scream and fight for the fun of it. If you don’t do something about it, somebody’s going to pinch their little heads off.”

He fiddled with a computer. “That would be Loretta Baker, it seems. What do you want me to do?”

“Move her and the monsters out of there,” Vanessa said at once. “If you can’t do that, get me the hell out.”

“You realize conditions may be no better in the tent to which you are reassigned?” he said. Her heart sank. He wouldn’t move Loretta and the snotnoses, which was what she really wanted.

Sighing, she said, “I’ll take my chances.”

“It might not be so easy to make the adjustment.” He eyed her over the tops of his specs. “An attitude of cooperation would be expected.”

“What does that mean?” Vanessa figured she knew what it meant. Make nice for Mr. Federal Functionary and he’ll help you out, too. Don’t make nice and stay stuck where you are.

“Why, what it says, of course,” he answered primly. The son of a bitch had practice at this. He wouldn’t come out and tell her Fuck me or get lost. That might land him in trouble. But if you were that kind of bastard, you had to have opportunities galore in a place like this. Chances were he got laid a lot.

Vanessa got up from her uncomfortable folding chair. “Forget about it,” she snarled, thinking again of the revolver in her handbag.

The guy with the broken tooth only shrugged. “The choice is always yours, Ms. Ferguson. If you change your mind, consult with me again. I promise you excellent service if you do.”

And how did he mean that? Just the way it sounded, no doubt. Vanessa stormed out of the administration building. What really worried her was, those little assholes of Loretta’s were so very appalling, she feared she might come back and come across if somebody didn’t murder them first. She’d worried about this kind of thing before. Now, if push came to shove… She swore louder than the bearded guy had when he gave up on the line.

“It’s so wonderful!” Miriam Birnbaum gushed, and reached out to straighten a lock of Kelly’s hair that didn’t need straightening.

“Mom!” Kelly pulled away. She wished more and more she’d just gone through a simple civil ceremony with Colin. Her folks had almost given up on the idea that she’d ever get married. Now that they had the chance, they were trying to turn the wedding into a production number.

Well, they were footing the bill. That gave them a certain right to have things their way. Only to a point, though. It wasn’t their wedding, even if they were paying. It was hers and Colin’s.

“I’m happier than I know how to tell you,” her mother said, and either proved that or gave it the lie by crying.

“Don’t do that!” Kelly exclaimed. “You’ll mess up your makeup!” She dabbed at Mom’s cheek with a Kleenex. It repaired most of the damage, anyhow. Her father-one of the best dentists in the South Bay, if he said so himself (and he did)-put an arm around her mother.

“It’s okay, Miriam,” Leonard Birnbaum said. “Colin’s a good guy.”

“I wouldn’t be crying if he wasn’t,” Mom said, which might have made sense to her but left Kelly mystified.

She was also gobsmacked that the lecturer’s slot at Cal State Dominguez Hills fell into her lap right after her parents hired the hall here. Whether she was obsolete or not, they wanted her. She would have had second thoughts about taking the job most of the time. If the University of California system was hurting, the California State University system was on the critical list. But CSUDH wasn’t more than fifteen minutes away from San Atanasio. As long as any gas at all got into the L.A. area-and as long as any money at all got into the Cal State system-she could go teach.

She wondered if Geoff Rheinburg knew the gal who ran the Dominguez Hills Geology Department. That would explain a lot. It would also be odds-on the best wedding present she got.

One side of the hall was packed with her relatives and friends. The other side was mostly cops: square, solid men in suits that had been stylish a while ago or maybe never. How many of them had shoulder holsters under their jackets? Marshall was there, of course. I’m a stepmother, Kelly thought in bemusement as she went up the aisle on her father’s arm. She hoped Colin’s other two kids were doing all right.

Next to Marshall in the front row sat Colin’s sister, Norma. Kelly’d never set eyes on her before. She and her husband, Earl, both worked nights, though, and didn’t show themselves when most people did. Kelly didn’t think there were any hard feelings between her and Colin, but they weren’t exactly close, either.

Colin waited under the chuppah with a Reform rabbi, Wes Jones, and Kely’s first cousin, Loreen Samuels. Damned if Wes didn’t wink at her as she came near. There’d be never a dull moment living across the street from him. He wore a yarmulke with as much ease as the rabbi did. Colin’s kind of stuck up on his head. He’d agreed to a Jewish ceremony with good grace, but nothing would ever make him look Jewish.

Some chanted Hebrew prayers, some marriage advice that was sensible but perfectly ordinary, Colin’s shoe coming down on a cloth-wrapped glass to remember the fall of the Temple, a ring, a kiss

… It was official. She’d have to start getting used to her new last name. Well, she wouldn’t have to, not these days, but she intended to. Kelly Ferguson? For once, it sounded as if her first and last names went together.

After champagne toasts at the reception, Colin said, “I saw a study that showed guys who marry younger wives live longer and are happier.”

“Oh, yeah? Wonder how come that is,” Gabe Sanchez said. Everybody laughed. Gabe struck Kelly as a slightly rougher, Hispanic version of the guy she’d just married. He went on, “Congratulations, man. Looks like you got a real good one. Gives us all hope, y’know?” His heavy-featured face clouded. Kelly remembered Colin saying Gabe had gone through a divorce even uglier than his own. Evidently he hadn’t found anyone new since.

They ate. They drank some more. They danced. Colin moved as gracefully as anyone with two left feet. “Man, I know white folks got no sense of rhythm, but can’t you at least try?” a black cop said, softening the dart with a grin.

“This ain’t the ’hood, Rodney. You got to do the dozens on me at my wedding?” Colin said.

“Any time at all,” Rodney answered. He was strutting his stuff with a Latino woman-his wife, Kelly decided after checking for rings. She still hadn’t got used to rings on her own finger. She expected she would.

At last, they changed back into street clothes. A limo laid on by Kelly’s folks waited under an awning outside the hall. A good thing the awning was there. A nasty, chilly rain came down; it couldn’t have been far above freezing. “It wouldn’t be this cold if it wasn’t for your dumb old supervolcano,” Kelly’s mother said. She was right, but she made it sound as if the supervolcano wouldn’t have erupted if Kelly hadn’t studied it.

The driver-a Samoan big enough to have played pro football-whisked them up the Harbor Freeway to the Bonaventure Hotel downtown. Colin slipped him fifty bucks. “Thanks a lot, man,” the guy said, touching a blunt forefinger to the brim of his cap. “Happy wedding, y’know?”

Their room was high up in one of the hotel’s round, glassy towers. Colin lifted a squeaking Kelly over the threshold. A bottle of champagne with a card waited in an ice bucket in the room. Colin opened the card. He grinned. “From Gabe,” he said.

“He’s sweet.” Kelly was looking at the city lights and at cars streaming by on the freeway just to the west. In spite of gas shortages, there were still lots of them. She wondered if things would pick up or just keep going downhill.

“Yeah. He is,” Colin agreed from behind her. “And he’d clout us one if we said so to his face.” A muffled pop announced he’d opened the bottle: carefully and neatly, so as not to waste any. On the nightstand stood two glass flutes, not plastic like those at the reception. He poured for them both and handed her one. Then he raised the other. “Here’s to us, babe. I love you.”

“I love youtoo.” She clinked flutes. “To us.” After they drank, she said, “If I do too much more of this, I’ll fall asleep on you. Some wedding night that’d be.”

He mimed a leer. “I’d just have my way with your unconscious body-mwahaha!”

Kelly snorted. “It’s better when both people in the game want to play.”

“I won’t argue.” Colin shut the drapes. “So-do you want to play?”

“Right this minute, there’s nothing I want more in the whole wide world.” Kelly stepped into his arms. Things went on from there. Some considerable and very happy time later, she said, “Don’t you ever let that Rodney sass you about your sense of rhythm again, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered from a distance of about three inches. Then he patted at his hair. Kelly made a questioning noise. “I was wondering if you took the top of my head off there,” he explained.

“You!” she said fondly.

“Me,” he agreed. “Is there anything left in that champagne bottle?”

“If there isn’t, we can always call room service,” she answered.

There wasn’t, and she did. “Spending my money already,” Colin said.

“No way,” Kelly told him. “Dominguez will pay me… a little something, anyway.”

They eventually went to sleep. When Kelly woke, wan gray light was leaking past the drapes. She put on sweats and a T-shirt and went to look outside. She must have made a noise-probably a startled grunt-because from behind her her new husband asked, “What is it, babe?”

“Come see,” was all she said.

He needed a moment to get decent, too. Then he joined her at the window. He let out a low whistle of astonishment. Snowflakes danced in the air. It was white down below, white in the middle of downtown L.A. The Harbor Freeway was white, too, white and empty: ghostly, even. Any snow at all would screw traffic here from A to whatever came after Z.

No sooner had that crossed her mind than a car on the surface street down below skidded sideways into a pickup truck. Neither, luckily, was going very fast. Both drivers got out and glumly eyed the damage.

Colin turned on the TV. A chipper local weatherman said, “Be careful out there, folks. The last time we had snow all over the L.A. basin was in January of 1949. I have to say, we aren’t really equipped for it. If you can possibly stay home, you’d sure be smart to do it.”

Kelly and Colin exchanged stricken looks. Marshall had been planning to pick them up and take them back to the house. From there, they would have gone to the Hotel Coronado in San Diego: a honeymoon on a tank of gas. Now… Kelly had no idea what they’d do now.

Colin did: “Call room service again. Tell ’em to send up coffee and some breakfast. And after that-hey, we’ll just go on from there.” By the way his gaze roamed her, she didn’t need to have bothered dressing.

“Sounds good to me,” she said, and padded over to the phone. Outside, the snow kept coming down.

Along with Gabe Sanchez, Colin spooned up ramen-fancy ramen, not the packaged stuff college kids ate and Louise dealt with-in a little place on Reynoso Drive. It was in the mostly Japanese shopping center that also held the Carrows where he’d had that lacerating lunch with his ex. If he looked out the window, he could see the other place. As long as he kept slurping up soup and noodles and chopped pork, he didn’t have to look out the window.

“So you and Kelly were stuck there, huh?” Gabe said. “That’s funny, man!”

“Worse places to be than snowed in with your brand-new wife,” Colin answered. In the two and a half days before enough snow melted to let traffic start moving again, he’d done more than he’d figured a man his age could do. And he’d managed all right once they finally got to San Diego, too.

“Yeah, I guess.” Gabe didn’t sound completely convinced. No, he hadn’t had much luck with his love life since his marriage hit a mine and exploded. “It’s good to have you back in the saddle, though.”

“Good to be back,” Colin allowed. No matter what kind of carnal excesses he’d managed at the Bonaventure and the Coronado, a man his age couldn’t do that all the time, not unless he wanted to roll up like a window shade, thwup, thwup, thwup!

“You figure we’ll ever drop on the goddamn Strangler?” Gabe asked. It wasn’t out of the blue. There’d been a fresh killing over in Manhattan Beach while Colin and Kelly were on their abbreviated visit to San Diego. Colin hadn’t heard about it till he came home. Watching the news hadn’t been his biggest worry while he was there. As long as no more snow came down, he hadn’t cared what happened in the outside world.

Now he did. Now he had to. And now he said what cops all over the South Bay had been saying all along: “He’s bound to goof sooner or later. Trip over something in the dark and break his ankle, maybe. Something.” Some bad guys got away with things for a long time, either through fool luck or because they were the uncommon smart people who turned to crime. Very few went to their graves uncaught. Colin was sure of it. He had to be, if he wanted to keep thinking he was doing something that mattered.

“This one’s not in our jurisdiction, same as the last one wasn’t,” Gabe said. “Let the guys in Manhattan Beach take the heat. See how they like news vans lined up outside the department all the time and the clowns with the expensive haircuts asking dumbass questions.”

“I’m sure they enjoy it as much as we do,” Colin said. Gabe laughed harshly. Colin went on, “What I want to be is, I want to be the one who busts the son of a bitch. I don’t know if I can be that lucky twice, but I sure want to.”

“Twice?” Now Gabe sounded puzzled. Colin had been a solid, steady, capable cop for a hell of a long time now. He’d caught a lot of perps, some smart ones and even more of the jerks and losers who went wrong. But he’d never pulled a coup that even came close to what arresting the South Bay Strangler would mean.

He wasn’t thinking of policework, though. “Lucky. Uh-huh,” he said. “Only reason I ever went to Yellowstone was to get away from everything after Louise walked out on me.”

“Me, I went to Vegas when things hit the fan,” Sanchez said. “I bet you got away cheaper-I’ll tell you that.”

“I bet you’re right,” Colin agreed. “So there I was, walking around in this cold, miserable drizzle, still kind of hungover, looking at the hot pools in the West Thumb Basin, and I reamed out this gal for going off the boardwalk.”

Gabe chuckled. “Once a cop, always a cop.”

“Tell me about it. So Kelly showed me she had every right to be where she was ’cause she was doing her research, and I felt two inches tall and covered in dogshit. But then I got lucky one more time. This earthquake hit, and it gave us something to talk about besides what a moron I was. I ended up getting her e-mail, and I gave her mine, and we just went on from there. Fool luck all the way, nothing else but.”

Instead of answering right away, Gabe concentrated on getting to the bottom of his bowl. Then he said, “If you tell me the same thing ten, fifteen years from now, I’ll be more impressed.”

“Mm, I know what you mean,” Colin admitted. People went into first marriages sure theirs was a passion for the ages, and just as sure love would last forever. They went into second marriages hoping things worked out. Even that might have been the triumph of hope over experience. But it also might have been a more realistic attitude.

“Sometimes even ten, fifteen years aren’t enough. Look at us. Our first ones both lasted longer’n that, but when they died, they fuckin’ died, man,” Gabe said.

“I know. Sometimes you grow together, sometimes you grow apart,” Colin said. He worked at his own ramen. The broth was salty and porky and delicious. His doctor would probably scream that it was a sodium bomb-and a fat bomb to boot-but sometimes he just didn’t care.

“You know what I’m really jealous about?” Gabe asked.

“What?” Colin worked to keep his voice neutral. How could his buddy help being jealous of his happiness? Gabe didn’t have a hell of a lot of his own these days.

But the sergeant’s answer blindsided him: “I’m jealous you got to see Yellowstone. See it while it was still there to see, I mean. Nobody’s ever gonna be able to do that again, but you did.”

“You’re right,” Colin said in surprise. “Kelly goes on about so much stuff being gone, but I hadn’t thought about it that way. Hell of a lot of stuff nobody’ll see again.”

“You were there.” Gabe paused. “Wasn’t that the name of a TV show a million years ago?”

“I think it was. Something like that, anyway.” Colin finished his lunch. Before the eruption, this place had served its ramen in big old styrofoam cups. You could wash bowls and use them over and over. The only time you needed a new one was when you dropped an old one. Once these people ran out of styrofoam, they fell back on Plan B.

Plan B… Plan C… A lot of the time these days, it seemed as if the country was on about Plan Q. Nobody had any good ideas to pull it out of its mess. Or, more likely, the mess was simply too goddamn big for anything so trivial as some human’s good idea to make much difference.

And, as Kelly kept pointing out, this was only the beginning. The eruption was over, but the aftereffects lingered on. How long would it be before the Midwest was the world’s breadbasket again, not buried under ash and dust? How many people would go hungry on account of that? Would the Midwest be the world’s breadbasket again, with the weather getting so much colder? How long would the chill last? Years? Decades? Centuries? Nobody knew for sure, but everybody was going to find out.

Things probably wouldn’t be anywhere close to the same for the rest of his life. What were you supposed to do?

Gabe put money on the table. “Here, Mister Just Back from His Honeymoon, this one’s on me.”?Thanks.” Colin stood up.

So did Gabe. As they walked out to their car, he asked, “So… You got your ducks in a row to testify at the Ellis trial?”

The kid from the projects was up for three counts of armed robbery and one of first-degree murder. The case looked open-and-shut to Colin, but nothing was open-and-shut if you messed it up. “I’m getting there,” he answered. “Still reviewing the videotapes and the reports and all. How about you?”

“Pretty much the same,” Gabe said. “If they don’t stick a needle in his arm, they need to make damn sure he doesn’t get out again.”

“Yup.” Colin nodded. Maybe this was what you were supposed to do: what you’d always done, as well as you could for as long as you could. What else could any one person do?

He unlocked the car and slid into the driver’s seat. Gabe got in on the other side. They drove back to the cop shop under a sundogged sun in an ague-cheeked sky.