Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

V

Vanessa wondered if getting back her old job at Nick Gorczany’s wonderful widget works was the best idea she’d ever had. True, it let her get out of the house. She would have done almost anything this side of hustling tricks on street corners to achieve that. (Her mouth twitched, there at her window-side desk. She knew too well that the flesh could be made to pay, and that the biggest price was your own disgust every time you got near a mirror. I did that? you would wonder. But she had, and she knew it too well.) That she couldn’t stand Kelly, and that it was mutual, hadn’t helped, either.

Gorczany, the high honcho, did seem glad to have her back. He’d given her a fancy new title, senior technical editor, and a raise that at least made the wage living. Even a manufacturer of high-tech widgets sometimes needed somebody who could translate between techy and bureaucratese on the one hand and no-shit English on the other. Doing without somebody like that for a while must have rubbed his nose in the lack.

Whether she was glad to be back was a more complicated question all kinds of ways. Sure, a steady, nearly adequate paycheck was a Good Thing. Absolutely. No bout adoubt it. But did earning one require her to suffer fools gladly?

She’d never been the world’s best team player. She knew that. She was proud of it. She knew when she was right, and she wasn’t shy about saying so. Or about sticking to her guns when some subliterate tried to tell her she wasn’t.

Being a team player at all came hard for her now. She’d spent way too much time on her own after the eruption. She’d escaped from Denver alone, one of the few who’d bailed soon enough to make it out. She’d been alone among tens of thousands of refugees in Camp Constitution, one of the many refugee centers that still blighted the fringes of the ashfall zone and probably would for years to come.

And she’d been alone, very much alone, on the team of scavengers that went into the devastated areas to get what could be got before it wasn’t worth getting any more. She hadn’t got along with anyone else on the team, and little by little she’d quit trying. She’d been glad to leave, and they’d been glad to have her gone.

She’d come back to L.A. on her own, too. Till she met Bronislav in that New Mexico truck stop, she’d figured she would stay alone pretty much permanently. That hadn’t happened, and somebody to keep you warm at night was just as much a Good Thing as a paycheck.

Still, hanging out with somebody who kept you warm at night didn’t take the same kind of talents as coping with the idiots who clogged your work day.

Speak of the devil, she thought sourly. Walker Ellis was an engineer who could do brilliant things with transistors and integrated circuits (odds were there hadn’t been a segregated circuit since Brown v. Board of Education became the law of the land). But when he tried to write… Well, it was better when he didn’t.

Which had to be why he was bearing down on her now, an edited progress report on his latest project clutched in his fist. Vanessa edited in red. She could see her marks at long range, like zits on a clueless teenager’s face.

He looked at her over the tops of his wire-rims, which meant he was really and truly pissed off. His mustache was a little lopsided. If he provoked her enough, she’d call him on it. For now she waited, wondering whether he’d provoke her that much.

“Was all this truly necessary, Ms. Ferguson?” he demanded, waving the offending—and offensive—pages in the air.

“I’m afraid so,” she answered, and then waited some more. Often the worst thing you could do to them was make them come at you.

Ellis dragged a chair from across the desk around to one of the short sides so he could sit closer to her. He thumped the pages down on the wood-grain plastic desktop. “You’re going to have to show me, and I’m not even from Missouri,” he said.

Well, he’d asked for it. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s take the opening. ‘It will be demonstrated that Gorczany Microsystems is in the process of becoming a bell weather for the industry.’” She quoted with savage relish.

He didn’t notice. Away from his widgets, he was kind of dim. “What’s wrong with any of that?” he said. “I see you’ve marked it up, but I don’t see why.”

“That’s why Mr. Gorczany hired me,” Vanessa said. “From the top, then. ‘It will be demonstrated…’ By whom? By what? God, maybe?”

“By the report,” he said indignantly.

“‘This report will show…’ On to the next. How is ‘in the process of becoming’ different from ‘becoming’?”

“Umm—” Ellis scratched the left, or shorter, wing of his mustache.

Since he didn’t answer, Vanessa went on, “Now this ‘bell weather’—”

“What’s wrong with that? It’s spelled okay. I did that part on the computer, and the spellchecker didn’t hiccup. You can see for yourself.”

Vanessa sighed, more in anger than in sorrow. “Just because the spellchecker passed it doesn’t make it right. ‘Bell’ and ‘weather’ are both words, sure. But the word is ‘bellwether’—w-e-t-h-e-r. It’s got nothing to do with the rain outside. Do you know what a w-e-t-h-e-r is, Dr. Ellis?” He got pissy if you didn’t use his title, so she loaded it with poisonous sweetness.

He blinked. “I never thought about it.”

Why am I not surprised? But she didn’t say that. She was being—relatively—good. “A wether is a castrated ram, the way an ox is a castrated bull. A bellwether was—still is, for all I know—a castrated ram with a bell around its neck. It leads the sheep where the shepherd wants them to go, and the bell tells him where they are if anything goes wrong. So that’s why the word means getting out in front.”

“Oh,” he muttered. That he could grow the lopsided mustache proved he had balls of his own, but he didn’t like hearing a woman talk about animals without theirs.

“Shall we go on?” Vanessa said. “I think you’ll see I had good reason for the changes I made.”

He considered. The next big flock of red marks perched two sentences farther down. There was another one in the next paragraph. “Never mind,” he said, not looking at her. “I’ll put the goddamn things in when I rewrite.”

“Thank you, Dr. Ellis,” she said demurely. Fuck you, Dr. Ellis, she thought as he retreated. And he wasn’t the only one, and he wasn’t the worst (though he was in the running).

She tried to think of herself as a plastic surgeon, making flabby prose look better with strategic nips and tucks. More often, she felt like a middle-school English teacher—only too many of them didn’t know squat about grammar, either. She had to look at all the ugly stuff before it got improved, too, and came out not real gorgeous even after she’d done her best with it.

Once Walker Ellis decided he’d had enough, Vanessa went round and round with the company’s HTML wizard. “A bunch of the apostrophes in the new post are upside down,” she said. “You need to fix them.”

“That’s how Microsoft Word outputs them,” he said with a shrug: a geek’s version of No tengo la culpa. His name was Bruce McRaa, which he pronounced as if it were spelled McRae.

“That’s how Word outputs them if you let it be stupid,” she answered. If you’re stupid yourself were the words behind the words. She’d gone round this barn with other alleged computer whizzes. She told him how to make Word behave. With a carnivorous smile, she added, “You don’t even need a Mac to do it.”

“Messing with special characters is a pain, though,” he said. “Just typing is an awful lot easier and faster.”

“Getting things wrong is a pain,” Vanessa snapped. “Being lazy is a pain. Having people who look at the site think we don’t care about what we put there is a big pain.”

The HTML wizard—the evil enchanter, as far as she was concerned—threw his hands in the air. “Okay! Okay! When the power’s up, I’ll fix it.” Behind McRaa’s words lay a no-doubt heartfelt Now fuck off! Since she’d got her way, she left.

Standing in the rain waiting for the bus was a major pain. Watching Nick Gorczany head down to the Palos Verdes Peninsula in his BMW was a bigger one yet. No matter how obscenely expensive gas had got, he could still afford to drive whenever and wherever he pleased. The peons he deigned to employ? It was to laugh. Come the revolution… , she thought darkly.

Naturally, the bus showed up late. She stepped in a puddle walking to her apartment building and soaked her foot in spite of galoshes. The mail consisted of three bills and an ad. By the time she walked into her place, she was steaming.

Cooking odors greeted her. She got ready to scream and run, or to fight like hell. But Bronislav’s voice greeted her from the kitchen: “They turn me around early, so I get into town and come up here.”

“Oh. Uh, great!” Vanessa’s rage evaporated. She’d given him a key, which was a mark of how much she cared for him. She threw down the crap from the mailbox and hurried into the kitchen for a kiss. Then she said, “What are you making? It smells… interesting.”

“Even now, Americans think too much is not worth eating. In Serbia, we know better,” he answered. “This is chopped beef liver with hard-boiled eggs, with onions and peppers and spices.”

“Oh,” Vanessa said again, on a different note this time. Bryce’s mother had made her chopped liver—once. Once was twice too often. She’d tasted, then washed out her mouth with Manischewitz (which was also no thrill). Vile hepatic paste…

“You will like it,” Bronislav said. “I make it properly, not like horrible stuff they do in delis.”

She’d had to work to put up with Bryce’s mom even when she’d still liked him (that they’d loved each other for a while was something she tried hard to forget). She loved Bronislav now. That got her to keep her mouth shut about what she was thinking. It got her to taste some of the stuff he’d worked hard to make.

Nothing on God’s green earth, not even love, could make her like it or eat more than a forkful. “Sorry, dear,” she said. “More for you, that’s all.” Too many aggressive flavors in her mouth all at once weren’t her idea of a treat.

He looked wounded. With those sorrowful eyes, he did it better than anyone else she’d ever known. Then he brightened—a little. “If I serve it in restaurant, people who come there will know to expect food with strong Serbian soul.”

“Sure they will,” Vanessa greed. She started to tease him about Serbian chitlins and collard greens, but didn’t. There probably were such things, or their close equivalents. Poor people, peasants, all over the world ate whatever the folks with more money didn’t want to bother with. There was the root of Bronislav’s crack about American tastes.

He’d also done something with potatoes and sharp cheese that she could say happy things about without making herself a liar. And he was here when she hadn’t expected him to be. When you were in love, that even made up for things like chopped liver.

Once upon a time, going fifty or a hundred miles to see something was no big deal. Like anyone who’d grown up in Southern California, Bryce Miller had taken it for granted. He’d known plenty of people who’d commuted that far to college or to work every day. Oh, they’d bitched about how much driving they had to do and what a drag it was, but life wouldn’t be life without something to bitch about.

Going fifty or a hundred miles through rural Nebraska, even after summer cleared snow from the roads and made a trip at least theoretically possible, was a whole different story. You not only had to go, you had to come back as well. That, of course, doubled the distance involved. It also doubled the expense for gas, even if his car happened to feel like running. Since he hardly ever used it in Wayne, he had some serious doubts about how trustworthy it would be on any kind of major journey.

Long-haul buses were few and far between, too. They weren’t cheap, either. If you lived in or near a city, buses still ran. In this state, that meant Omaha and Lincoln. The rest of Nebraska was the terminal—or rather, terminalless—boonies, as far as the bus lines were concerned. Bryce was damn glad the state had found the money to keep the bus line out to the college going.

For longer jaunts through what had been rich farmland and was now ash-dappled and heading toward tundra, choices ranged from bad to much worse. You could ride a horse—if you could find a horse to ride. Horses in the Midwest had suffered from ash-induced HDP as much as other livestock. They’d suffered much worse than people had, because they couldn’t wear masks to filter out the crud. You could also ride a horse if you could ride a horse. Neither Bryce nor Susan knew how.

You could ride in a horse-drawn wagon. There were some. Again, as with so many things in these post-eruption days, there weren’t enough to go around. They cost less than driving would have, but they were also much slower.

Speaking of slow, you could walk. That didn’t cost anything to speak of, but you needed to be seriously motivated to walk fifty or a hundred miles to see something and then to walk back again. Bryce wanted to see Ashfall State Park, but he didn’t want to see it bad enough to get shin splints in the process. Neither did his beloved, which was putting it mildly.

That pretty much left bicycles as the last surviving possibility. Bryce and Susan had both brought bikes from SoCal to the trackless wilds of northeastern Nebraska. Bryce hadn’t ridden one a whole lot till after the eruption. As natural catastrophe and war in the Mideast teamed up to send gas prices past Mars and heading straight out toward Jupiter, though, he’d gone from four fat tires to two skinny ones like millions of other people.

Places like Denmark and Holland had taken bikes for granted since before the turn of the twentieth century. Two-wheelers had briefly swarmed in the States before the internal-combustion engine culled their herds. Without cheap gas, though, internal- turned into infernal-.

So bicycles were back, bigtime. Bryce rode his to campus whenever the weather let him—and, the longer he stayed in Wayne, the less fussy about the weather he got. “Hey,” he said do Susan, “if we don’t make the trip this summer, when will we do it?”

“Never?” she suggested hopefully. But when Bryce kept right on getting ready to try a bicycle tour, she got ready along with him. The martyred sighs she let out were only background noise. Bryce hoped like hell they were, anyhow.

The two of them pedaled north up State Route 15 for not quite twenty miles. They took the left fork when the road branched just south of Logan Creek. It was two lanes of bumpy, potholed asphalt; no one seemed to have done any work on it since the supervolcano erupted, or, for all Bryce knew, for quite a while before that.

When he said as much to Susan, she just looked at him. “That’s not what I’m worried about,” she said. “I’m worried about riding north. I keep expecting to see polar bears every time we come over the top of the next little rise.”

“It’s not that bad,” Bryce said. “As long as it stays sunny, it’s not.” It was in the fifties. After you’d been going for a while, you could work up a sweat. Being warm felt good no matter how you did it.

No polar bears were in the neighborhood. A hawk circled in the air high above them. Jays and crows and little brown birds Bryce couldn’t name perched on barbed-wire fences and occasional light and power poles. Robins hopped in the fields. So did rabbits, which probably accounted for the circling hawk. Bryce supposed it would have taken more than a supervolcano to clear the countryside of rabbits. The end of the world probably wouldn’t have done it.

Just past the tiny town of Laurel—not deserted, because wood smoke curled up from a few chimneys—the state road ran into US 20. That was also a two-lane blacktop road, but a wider one. It had more traffic than State Route 15, which had felt eerily empty. Bicycles, wagons, people on horseback… The 405 at rush hour before the eruption it wasn’t, but Bryce no longer feared he and Susan were the last two people left alive this side of Wayne.

They heard the approaching ambulance long before they saw it. Everyone did, and had plenty of time to get off the road and make way for the leftover from a different era. The ambulance screamed past them and turned down the little road they’d just left. It headed south, toward Wayne.

“Hospital,” Susan said.

Bryce nodded. The hospital in Wayne wouldn’t make anyone forget Cedars-Sinai or the UCLA Medical Center any time soon. But it was at least there, and boasted equipment a country doctor couldn’t pull out of his ear. “I hope whoever’s in there comes through okay,” Bryce said, and then, “Boy, it sure was loud, wasn’t it?”

Now Susan’s head bobbed up and down. “I don’t remember them being that loud in the old days.” Her laugh sounded shaky. “Of course, we were usually in cars back then, with the windows closed and the radio or an iPod on and the AC going. And all the other cars and trucks and things made so much background noise, even a siren was just part of it. Not like that any more.”

When the sun neared the horizon ahead of them, they camped by the side of the road. They fumbled putting up their little nylon tent, but managed. They ate MREs, which were uninspiring but did putty over any accidental empty space you had inside.

They pedaled through a succession of small towns strung out along US 20: Belden, Randolph, Osmond, Plainview, Brunswick, Royal. All of them looked to have been forgotten by everyone except the people who lived in them long before the eruption. They were even more forgotten now. The fall of ash had probably killed some of the locals and made others pull up stakes. Only the stubbornest still held their ground. In every little town, there were some.

Not far past Royal, a sign pointed Bryce and Susan north again, along a straight and narrow road towards Ashfall State Park. Susan said, “What do we do if they’ve decided to shut down the park because they don’t have any money to keep it open?”

Bryce winced. California had done things like that even before the supervolcano hammered its tax base. But he answered, “We ride back, that’s what, and we try and be happy for all the nice exercise we’ve got.”

“Oh, boy!” Susan said in distinctly hollow tones.

“As of the day before we set out, the park’s Web site said it was up and running,” Bryce pointed out. Wayne did have power most of the time. You might wonder about polar bears there, too, but if they came at night you could at least turn on the light and spot them before they got you.

The park was open. Not a single car stood in the lot, but a few bicycles did rest in a steel rack that looked newish. Before the eruption, chances were that not a whole hell of a lot of people had biked out here to nowhereland.

A sign that also must have gone up after the eruption said LIFE IMITATES PARK! Bryce tried to decide whether that was funny or tasteless. He finally settled on both at once.

If the Web site mentioned that admission had gone up to fifty smackers a pop, Bryce didn’t remember seeing it. Chances were it did somewhere, in pale lavender six-point type. Once you got way the hell out here, what were you gonna do? Turn around on your bike and go back to wherever you came from without seeing what you’d come for? Or pay the nice man? Bryce paid the man—he really did seem nice—and muttered under his breath. Inflation had kicked the whole country in the teeth since the eruption, not just Ashfall State Park.

Most of the park had been prairie. Here and there, ash still lay on the ground. More new signs said THIS HAPPENED 12,000,000 YEARS AGO, TOO. There was a visitors’ center—how could you have a state park without a visitors’ center? And then there was a trail down to what the people at the center called the rhinoceros barn: a structure with open sides and a corrugated-iron roof. It showed the fossils that had accumulated at a waterhole when the supervolcano blew all those millions of years ago.

“They moved some of these to the university’s museum in Lincoln,” Bryce said quietly. “I saw them there.”

Susan nodded. “Yes, you’ve said so.”

Bryce turned to a man in khakis, a work shirt, and a drill sergeant’s hat: a park employee. “Will somebody twelve million years from now make a park around a waterhole all crowded with cattle and sheep?”

The man blinked. He smiled a slow smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Wouldn’t surprise me one bit, sir,” he said after a moment’s thought. Yes, he was an employee, all right; otherwise, he never would have called anyone a good fifteen years younger than he was sir.

One of the skeletons of a female rhino had within it the tiny skeleton of an unborn baby. Looking at the splendidly preserved bones, Bryce wondered whether some far-future archaeologist would make a similarly amazing find. Then he wondered what the far-future archaeologist would look like. Not like a man, chances were.

He and Susan slowly walked the path in the barn. It was only sixty or seventy feet, but there were a lot of bones and plaques explaining what kinds of bones they were. At the end, Susan asked, “Now what?”

“Now we start back to Wayne,” Bryce answered.

She sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She sighed again. “Well, what else can we do?”

Colin Ferguson set his bike in the rack outside the San Atanasio station, then chained and locked it. This should have been, and was, one of the safer places in town to stash a bicycle. All the same, more than one here had walked with Jesus—or with Jesús, or with Eric, or with Terrell—in the past few months.

A reporter from the South Bay Daily Breeze waylaid him just inside the door. The desk sergeant sent a silent apology with his eyebrows. Colin raised one back, as if to reply What can you do? The reporter said, “Congratulations on your promotion, Captain Ferguson.”

“Thanks—I guess,” Colin answered. “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk.”

The guy chuckled, so he knew what Colin was talking about, which surprised Colin a little. Then the man asked, “How do you feel now that they’ve finally appointed a new chief for the San Atanasio PD?”

“Glad. Relieved,” Colin said sincerely. “It will be good to get back to normal, if we can.”

The reporter made him regret the last three words, asking, “How likely do you think that is? With the cloud of Chief Pitcavage hanging over the department, and with all the lawsuits springing from it—”

“You have to ask the lawyers about that.” Colin did his best to head the eager young man off at the pass. “Me, I’m just a cop. I want to do cop things. Today, paying a call on Chief Williams is number one on the list.”

“Do you think you can ever be ‘just a cop’ again, Captain Ferguson? Won’t people always think of you as ‘the man who caught the South Bay Strangler’?”

That was a disconcertingly clever question. Colin didn’t like reporters who asked such questions; they made it harder for him to think of the whole breed as twits. “I guess people will look at me that way,” he answered. “But it’s not how I look at myself, and it had better not be, or I’ll have a tough time with my job. Now you’ve got to excuse me, ’cause I really do have to meet with Chief Williams in about five minutes, and he’ll probably throw me off the force if I show up late.”

The reporter’s thumbs danced on his iPhone as he texted his story to the Breeze. It was a Web-only paper these days, and had been since not long after the eruption. With power so erratic in the L.A. area, a Web-only paper was a lot like one of Schrödinger’s kitties: you couldn’t tell whether it was alive or dead on any given day till you looked.

Colin escaped down the hallway. He nodded to a couple of cops and a clerk who walked past. They all nodded back, which he appreciated; he’d had a rugged time here after Chief Pitcavage killed himself and before Lucy Chen found that the late chief was the Strangler.

No spiderwebs hung from the door to the chief’s office, but not many people had gone in there since the days right after Pitcavage swallowed his pills and fastened the bag over his head. Colin wondered whether the new chief had hired an exorcist before moving in. Well, that was Williams’ worry, not his. He hadn’t taken the job even when they tried to hand it to him on a silver platter. Along with getting Kelly to marry him, he figured that was one of the smarter things he’d done lately.

He knocked on the door. It was thick and soundproofed, but he heard the “Come in” from the other side all the same. He turned the knob.

“Chief Williams?” he said when he walked in. The door shut behind him with a click.

“That’s me.” Malik Williams stood up behind his desk and held out his hand to Colin. The chief was an African-American man of about fifty. His shaven head shone under the fluorescents in the ceiling. He wore a thin salt-and-pepper mustache. He was big, six-two or so, and in solid shape; when he was a kid, he might have played linebacker at a Division II school.

As Colin shook hands with him, he also noted the desk. It was a new one—or rather, an old one: an ordinary cop’s desk, brought out of storage. It replaced the special oversized one Chief Pitcavage had used. Sitting behind that humongous flight deck, Pitcavage had had an easy time intimidating anybody who came in. Maybe Malik Williams didn’t want to. That would be nice. Or maybe he hoped to be seen as not wanting to. That also wouldn’t be so bad. From everything Colin had heard, the new chief was no dope.

“Have a seat.” Williams waved to the chair on Colin’s side of the desk. It was also an ordinary job. Well, so was the one in which the new chief sat down. It wasn’t a leather-upholstered throne like the one in which Pitcavage had ensconced himself. More symbolism.

“I’m damn glad to have you here,” Colin said. The chair creaked under him as he shifted his weight. So did the one on the other side of the desk. Chief Pitcavage’s expensive model would never have dared to make such uncouth noises.

“I’m damn glad to hear you say that,” Williams answered. His voice was a resonant baritone, with only a vanishing trace of accent to show his origins. He went on, “I don’t think I could do this job if you didn’t have my back.”

“That’s nice of you, but I don’t believe it for a minute,” Colin said. “Sitting in your seat, you’ve got the weight of the department behind you. Anybody dumb enough to bump up against you would find out how much weight that was, and in a hurry, too.”

Chief Williams smiled. His teeth were white and perfect enough to belong to a TV anchorman; either he was very lucky or he’d had them fixed. “Anybody’d think you’ve been a cop for a while,” he remarked.

“Guilty,” Colin admitted. “Can I throw myself on the mercy of the court?”

“Maybe this once. After that, things go back to business as usual.”

“Good,” Colin said, which made one of the new chief’s eyebrows rise toward the hairline he didn’t have. Colin explained: “Like I was saying to the Breeze reporter out front a few minutes ago, nothing would make me happier than getting back to normal.” If I ever can. He kept that to himself, not that Williams wouldn’t get it whether he said it or not.

“If we look at the way things were before the supervolcano blew as normal, we’re never going to get back there,” Malik Williams said. “Not in your lifetime, not in mine, and probably not in our kids’ lifetimes, either. And it’s about time we started getting used to the idea.”

“I’m going to like working for you, man,” Colin blurted.

“Oh, yeah?” Williams looked and sounded dubious. “Most people I say that to, they look at me like I’m talking—what’s that word from the Catholic Church? Like I’m talking heresy, and they don’t want thing one to do with me.”

“Chief, I’m married to a geologist who was studying Yellowstone before it blew. I met her in Yellowstone before it blew, matter of fact. Kelly was telling me then how bad an eruption would be. I didn’t want to believe her, but she knew what she was talking about.” Colin let out a small, wry chuckle. “She usually does.”

The new chief grinned that ever-so-shiny grin at him again. “My Janice is the same way. Nice to know somebody else appreciates that in a woman.” The grin faded. “How do we tie being different to police work, though?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been thinking about it ever since the shortages started to bite,” Colin said.

Williams’ eyebrow climbed once more. “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that you didn’t want to sit on my side of this desk.”

“I did, before Pitcavage got it,” Colin answered. “But I don’t put up with fools real well—not at all, if I can help it. Kissing up to the mayor and the city council and all would drive me to a coronary or a stroke. If you can do it and stay sane, more power to you.”

“You don’t beat around the bush, do you?” Williams said.

“Who, me?” Colin said, less innocently than he might have. After a beat, he added, “I try not to.”

“Okay,” Williams said. If Colin remembered straight, he’d run a department in a little Sacramento suburb before winning this job. The new chief went on, “So what have you been thinking about the way things work now?”

“That most of the tricks we’ve picked up over the past hundred years have gone up in smoke—and dust, and ash,” Colin replied. “We can’t count on phones or electricity 24/7/365. We can’t count on surveillance video or Internet databases. Sometimes we can manage all that stuff, but we can’t count on it any more, and God only knows when we’ll be able to. Back before the First World War, the cops with the big old walrus mustaches and the tall hats that made ’em look like London bobbies did without those things—hell, they’d never heard of most of them. Most of the time, they managed anyhow. We’ve got to be able to do that, too.” He paused, embarrassed at himself. “Sorry. I made a speech.”

“Yeah, you did,” Williams agreed, “but it was a pretty good speech. Mostly. One of the ways the guys with the walrus mustaches managed was by pinning any cases they were having trouble with on the nearest guy my color.”

“I bet they did,” Colin said. “I don’t want us to copy all their moves. But they had to solve cases and catch perps without the tools we still want to take for granted. We can learn from that. We’d better, or we’re screwed.”

“Tell you what. Work up a report for me, with ideas about how we can do a better job of what we need to do with some of the tricks the old-timers had. Not your top priority, but make sure you do it,” the new chief said. “And before you finish it, talk to some of the oldest retired cops you can find. They won’t go back to the days before phones and squad cars, but they’d type their reports with two fingers ’cause nobody ever taught ’em how to do it with ten. Those guys, the ones who half of ’em still don’t have computers.”

Now Colin looked at the man on the other side of the desk with genuine admiration. “I’ve been doing that. Some of the fellows who were retiring when I came to the department are still around, even if they’re old as the hills now. A couple of ’em started back in the Fifties.”

“A long time ago,” Malik Williams said. Colin nodded. The chief went on, “And I’m not surprised you came up with the same scheme that crossed my mind. Like they say, GMTA, right?”

“Oh, at least,” Colin said, so dryly as to make Williams laugh out loud—or LOL, if you’d already started thinking with initials.

When Colin went back to his desk, the first thing Josefina Linares asked him was, “Well? What do you think?” Naturally, his secretary knew where he’d been. And if he didn’t fancy Malik Williams, her fierce loyalty would make her ready—eager, even—to spit in the new chief’s eye.

Quickly, Colin answered, “He’ll do fine, Josie. I’m sure of it.” He would have said the same thing had he thought Williams would prove a disaster—his loyalty was to the department, and to the chain of command. But he meant it. If the new man could get along with the people set over him, Colin figured he wouldn’t have any trouble bossing the people he was supposed to lead.

Mike Pitcavage hadn’t had any trouble bossing the department, either. No, Pitcavage’s problems lay far deeper, somewhere in the twisted roots that made him do what he’d done. He’d been dead most of a year now, and Colin still brooded about him every day. He sighed. Even with the new broom of Malik Williams, this department wouldn’t get swept clean any time soon.

All you could do was all you could do. Williams, Colin figured, would do that. He sighed again and started doing some of what he needed to do.