Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

VII

Vanessa Ferguson swore in Serbo-Croatian—in Serbian, Bronislav would have said. She certainly imitated his accent, not the one a Croat would have used. As far as she could tell, the difference between the two was about as big as the difference between Brooklyn and Alabama.

She’d heard people say you couldn’t get any satisfaction cussing in a language not your own. She wasn’t so sure of that. Serbo-Croatian’s gutturals and heavy rolled R’s—she had a decent ear, and could do them pretty well—seemed made for telling other people where to go and how to get there.

Best of all, as long as she didn’t scream out the foreign profanity, she could use it at Nick Gorczany’s widget works. Even muttering you stupid son of a motherfucking bitch would get you talked about—possibly fired, if the stupid SOB in question was the boss, as it all too often was. But the Serbo-Croatian equivalent hardly got noticed.

She despised her job with the hopeless hatred of someone who knew how unlikely she was to find anything better. Fixing other people’s dreadful prose all day was not the kind of work that inspired you towards admiration of your fellow man—or woman. Someone had once said that people were the missing link between apes and human beings. Whoever that was, Vanessa was convinced he’d been an optimist. As far as she was concerned, her coworkers still walked on their knuckles, picked fleas from their friends’ armpits, and used sticks to hunt termites for a snack.

The widget works was trying to land a Federal contract that would make sure it stayed in business a few years longer. With fiendish gusto, Vanessa tore the first draft of the proposal to bloody bits. She did her best to translate it into something related to English. Her red marks didn’t outnumber the black ones on the pages, but they came close. She tossed the bloodied document on Mr. Gorczany’s desk.

Did he thank he for her diligence? Not a chance. He called her in on the carpet (the stuff in his office was softer and thicker than the industrial-strength junk the peons had to walk on). Patting the wounded proposal, he asked, “Did you have to be quite so thorough?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gorczany,” she said, which would have been fine had she left it there. But then she added, “Which dumb parts do you wish I’d left in?”

He had a blunt, bulbous nose. If it had been a little bigger, it would have given him the look of a blond Elmer Fudd. Elmer Fudd couldn’t flare his nostrils, though, and Nick Gorczany could. “The engineers and I worked hard on that,” he said.

The and I told her she was in trouble. Nobody got off on having his own deathless words edited (Vanessa didn’t herself, but chose not to remember that). More cautiously, she answered, “I do think I’ve made it better. I cut out a lot of repetition.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll need to put some of that back in,” Gorczany said. “When you deal with the Feds, first you tell ’em what you’re going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you’ve told them. Otherwise, they don’t get it.”

Vanessa’s lips moved, not quite soundlessly: “Jeben te u glavu bluntavu.” The curse meant something like Fuck you in your stupid head. Bronislav thought it was funny that she wanted to learn obscenities in his language. A proper Serb woman, he made it plain, wouldn’t come out with such things. Vanessa wasn’t a Serb and wasn’t proper, so she didn’t care.

She wasn’t soundless enough, either. “What did you say?” Nick Gorczany asked.

“Nothing,” she replied sweetly. “I was just trying to figure out what to uncut, if you know what I mean.”

“Huh,” he said. He might be illiterate, he might bring out that stupid cliché about telling things three times as if he’d just made it up, but he knew an insubordinate employee when he saw one. But Vanessa hadn’t been very loud, and she also hadn’t spoken English. He suspected, but he couldn’t prove, so he went on, “Never mind, then. Fix it up, uh-huh, but not like this.”

“Repetitively repetitious,” Vanessa said.

She was pushing things, but she got away with it. Her boss nodded. “That’s right,” he said. His sarcasm detector hadn’t gone off. Maybe it needed a new battery or something.

She made the second revision of the proposal dumber than the first one. If she wanted to go on getting paid, she had to keep Gorczany… not too unhappy. The really scary thing was, he might have been right when he claimed the Feds needed everything spelled out more than once.

All the same, the rewrite was the dictionary illustration for the term soul-deadening. Vanessa was swearing in English when she walked out of the widget works. She swore some more as she popped open her umbrella and trudged toward the bus stop. Nick Gorczany’s Beemer sat in lonely splendor in the company parking lot. He could still afford to drive in. Why not? He belonged to the one percent, not to the ninety-nine. Vanessa fought down the temptation to key the car. It would be just her luck to have a working surveillance camera catch her.

The supper she fixed herself was almost as crappy as an MRE. She couldn’t imagine anything worse to say about it. That she was choking on her own bile sure didn’t improve the flavor.

“There’s got to be a better way to make a living,” she said again and again as she washed several days’ worth of accumulated dishes. “There’s got to be.”

Her dumb little brother sold his stupid stories. He didn’t exactly make a living with them, but he did sell. Vanessa was sure she could outwrite Marshall in her sleep. She could… if only she found the time.

Here she was, all by herself in this crappy little apartment she could barely afford. If she couldn’t find the time now, when she loathed what she did every day, when would she ever?

For the moment, her place had power. She plugged in the secondhand laptop she’d got after she came back to L.A. and waited impatiently for it to boot up. She ran the battery as little as she could, because sometimes she had to wait a long time to charge up again.

On came Microsoft Word, as familiar to her as the shape of her own hands. She frowned, nodded to herself, and started to type. Beneath the bloated, leprous moon, Clotilda killed her lover. Ignoring the squiggly red line that appeared under Clotilda—Word was a fussbudget—she plunged ahead.

She kept plunging for a little more than a page. That was as far as she got on inspiration alone. Then she had to stop and think and work out what ought to happen next, and why it ought to, and how it should look when it did. Fussing and cussing under her breath (in English now—this was serious), she fought her way forward for another page. She felt as if she were hacking and slashing through thick jungle with a rusty machete.

When she glanced at the time, she discovered in amazement that she’d been hacking and slashing for two and a half hours. The first page had flown from her fingers to the screen. On the second one, she’d kept going round and round, putting words in, taking them out, fiddling with commas and semicolons. Everything had to be perfect. Then, a minute later, she’d decide it wasn’t perfect after all and change it some more.

“Later,” she told herself. She saved the story to the hard disk and to a couple of flash drives. She was conscientious—hell, she was fanatical—about backing up.

She meant to get back to the piece when she came home the next day, but she was too damn tired. The same thing happened the day after that. Then the weekend arrived, and she had to run around and do all the shit she couldn’t do during the week because she was stuck at the stinking widget works.

Monday, Mr. Gorczany was particularly fuckheaded. Vanessa swore in English. She swore in Serbo-Croatian. She swore in the half-remembered bits of Armenian she’d got from her rug-merchant ex-boyfriend. She would have sworn in Swahili had she known any. Her face must have been a sight—nobody on the bus wanted to sit next to her.

After she choked down another uninspired supper, she turned on the laptop again. “There’s got to be a better way to make a living,” she said once more, grimly. “I mean, there’s fucking got to be.” She was talking to herself, but that was all right. She was the one she needed to fire up.

She opened the story and read what she’d written before. She made a face. It was melodramatic. The prose felt purple. She’d have to clean it up before she went any further. An hour later, it didn’t seem that different. She wanted to make some progress on the night, so she wrote a couple of new paragraphs. Then she stopped and tried to neaten them up.

“Hell with it,” she said at last. She saved the document and went to bed.

Bronislav was in town the next weekend, so she couldn’t very well write then. She could grumble about how the story was—or rather, wasn’t—going, could and did. He listened with grave attention. That was one of the things she liked about him. When she finally ran down, he said, “Will you let me see this story, please?”

Vanessa hesitated. Some ways, that request was more personal, more intimate, than a lot of what they did in the bedroom. Yes, she wanted people to read what she’d written… after she got it just the way she wanted it. If she ever did. If she ever could. Till then, showing it off was like walking down the street not only naked but without any makeup. Who wanted to show off the zits on her ass?

If Vanessa had zits on her ass, Bronislav had seen them. She sighed. “Okay,” she said—reluctantly, but she did. She started the computer and opened the filled she’d named Story1.docx. “Here.”

While he read, his face showed nothing of what he thought. He would have made a dangerous poker player. He probably did, at truck stops along I-10. He scrolled through the piece, then said, “You should finish. Is good.”

She would have put more faith in that if English were his first language. How many subtleties flew over his head? Still, she knew she would have been horrified—to say nothing of furious—if he’d told her it was lousy. That he could see the same thing, and that he could see which side his bread was buttered on, never crossed her mind. What surer sign she was in love?

“I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it,” she said. Up till now, she hadn’t admitted that to herself, much less to anyone else. Love, indeed.

“You will find way to do it.” When Bronislav said something like that, he sounded as certain as a judge passing sentence. When he said it, he sounded certain enough to make Vanessa believe it, too. Whether she’d keep on believing it once he had to go back on the road… Well, she’d find out after he did.

When the computer worked, Marshall Ferguson lurked on several boards for writers and wannabes. Some of them were just sad—the blind leading the deaf, so to speak. Others, though, offered what seemed like good advice. One bit that struck him as sensible was to start at the top when you were trying to sell something, to aim for the highest-paying, most prestigious markets. If they said no, you could set your sights lower. But if you started with the bottom feeders, you’d never find out for sure how good you could be.

So Marshall first submitted his stories to either The New Yorker or Playboy, depending on what they were like. This latest one, called “Almost Sunset,” went to Playboy, because it had a guy and a girl in it and they were fooling around while a spectacular post-eruption sunset painted the walls of the guy’s place. Marshall wondered what had happened to Jenny, the girl at UCSB he’d fooled around with at a time like that. He couldn’t remember her last name, which meant he couldn’t find her on Facebook—and, if she’d got married since then, she might have a different last name anyhow… and might not want to be found by people like him.

He didn’t think that much of Playboy. It might have been cool when his dad was his age… or it might already have jumped the shark by then. But he totally admired the kind of money the magazine paid. Some postage and a wait till the story came back were a reasonable investment. It was like buying a lottery ticket, only with somewhat better odds.

Since he’d moved back in with his father and Kelly and now Deborah, he was almost always the one who went to get the mail. In Animal Farm, which he’d read for Western Civ, the “liberated” farm beasts had learned to bleat Four legs good, two legs bad! His bleat when he opened the mailbox was Little envelopes good, manila envelopes bad! A manila envelope was his story coming back rejected. A little envelope might be an acceptance letter or a contract or a check. It usually wasn’t, but it might be.

He didn’t think anything special was up when he grabbed the mail on a day that was trying to be springlike but didn’t quite remember how. A couple of bills, a couple of catalogues, a Netflix DVD for Kelly to watch while she was up in the middle of the night with Deborah (if there happened to be power), and an envelope from Chicago he didn’t even notice as he carried the stuff to the house.

Deborah pointed at him when he went inside. “Masha!” she announced. She came closer to his real name every day. Dad said little kids weren’t human till they got potty-trained, but she was gaining on it.

He pointed back at her. “Vacuum cleaner,” he said.

She shook her head. “No! Deb’ah!” She giggled. She knew who she was. She also knew part of her big half-brother’s job was trying to mess up her mind.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Pork rinds.”

“No! Deb’ah!”

“You’re bizarre, Marshall,” Kelly said, more affectionately than not. “So what did the Post Awful inflict on us today?”

“You’ve got the latest Hornblower from your Netflix queue,” he answered, which made her squee—she thought the actor who played him was majorly hot. Marshall went on, “Some people trying to sell us stuff, some people who want money, and… whatever this is. Oh, it’s for me.” He opened the envelope from Chicago.

He’d forgotten Playboy’s editorial offices lived there. The rabbit logo on the letterhead reminded him in a hurry. He read the letter. The farther he went, the more his jaw dropped.

“You okay?” Kelly sounded anxious. “You look kinda green around the gills.”

“They’re… They’re…” Marshall had to try three times before he could get it out. “Playboy’s gonna buy ‘Almost Sunset.’ Holy crap! I mean, holy crap!”

“That’s awesome! Freaking awesome!” Kelly hurried over and hugged him. “What are they giving you? Playboy pays good, doesn’t it?”

“They’re…” Again, Marshall had to try more than once before he could talk straight. “It says they’re gonna pay me ten thousand bucks. That’s their standard rate for a short story, they say.”

This time, Kelly didn’t squee. She let out a war whoop instead. Marshall felt grateful. She was acting out what he felt. He was too stunned to take care of it for himself. Even in these times of galloping inflation, ten grand was real money.

She hugged him one more time. Then she poked him in the ribs, which made him jump. “Who knows?” she said, mischief in her voice. “Maybe the centerfold for the issue your story runs in will be cute, too. Like a cherry on top of your sundae—only she probably lost her cherry a long time ago.”

“Meow,” Marshall said.

Kelly stuck out her tongue at him. Then she said, “Call your dad. You’ll make the buttons pop off his shirt, and he could use some of that right now.”

“Things at the cop shop are better than they used to be,” Marshall said. “Half the force doesn’t hate him for making Pitcavage snuff himself any more, and Pitcavage isn’t sneaking around killing old ladies, either.”

“I know, and I’m glad,” Kelly answered. “But it’s still a slog, and he’s not as happy there as he was before things hit the fan. Trust me—he’ll be glad to get good news from home.”

“Okay.” Marshall hadn’t noticed Dad any glummer than usual, but he just lived with him—he wasn’t married to him. Noticing stuff like that was what wives were for. Husbands, too, Marshall supposed vaguely.

He took out his cell phone and smiled to discover he had bars. If he did, his father would, too, so he called Dad’s cell. “What’s going on, Marshall?” Colin Ferguson asked without preamble. Dad always hated beating around the bush.

Well, this time Marshall could be equally brusque: “I just sold a story to Playboy.”

“Hey!” Dad did sound pleased, more pleased than Marshall had expected him to. Then, predictably, he asked how much they paid. When Marshall told him, he let out a low whistle. “Even with the dollar as messed up as it is, that comes pretty close to eating money, doesn’t it?”

“Sure feels like it to me,” Marshall agreed.

“And you know what else is cool about that?” Dad asked.

“What?” Marshall said, perhaps incautiously.

His father’s chuckle wasn’t quite a mwahaha, but it came close. “A good-sized chunk of that check’ll be mine, to make up for the lean times.”

“Oh,” Marshall said, and then, “Right.” He sounded as unenthusiastic as he was.

Dad laughed again, more wholesomely this time. “Believe me, the thing I hope for most is that you make enough to move out on your own and quit paying me rent. I’ve told you that before. I don’t mind having you around—don’t get me wrong. But if you do well enough to move out, you’re really making it.”

“Uh-huh.” Marshall nodded, which his father couldn’t see. Up until he opened that letter from Chicago, making enough to snag a place of his own had been no more than something he wished for when he got good and baked. Now… Now it suddenly felt possible, if not too likely.

“Way to go, son. I’m going to spend the rest of the day bragging on you,” Dad said. “It’s a lot more fun than grilling a wife-beater and an armed-robbery suspect—you’d better believe it is.”

Marshall did believe it. He said his good-byes and powered down the phone. He didn’t leave it on all the time, the way he had before the eruption. When you weren’t sure when or if you could charge it again, you stretched the battery as far as it would go. You stretched everything as far as it would go, and then a little further besides.

One of these days, Marshall knew, he would make like an old fart—no, he’d be an old fart—and go on about the days before the supervolcano blew, and how there’d been so much of everything and it never snowed in L.A. And all the people under forty-five, the ones who’d grown up after the eruption—his half-sister and half-brother, for instance—would wish he’d shut the fuck up.

“Was he happy?” Kelly asked. Sure enough, she worried about Dad in ways that just never crossed Marshall’s mind. Wifey ways, whatever those were.

“Y’know, I think he was,” Marshall said. Had his own mother worried about his father in wifey ways? Much as he didn’t want to—he was still furious at Mom for walking out—he supposed she had. She’d been ready to bite nails in half when Mike Pitcavage got named chief instead of Dad. Yeah, and look how that turned out, Marshall thought.

“Cool!” Kelly sounded happy herself, happy because Dad was happy. That was pretty cool in and of itself. Then she found another question, a sly one: “What will your buds think when they find out you sold Playboy something?”

“It’s a ginormous check—I mean, it will be,” Marshall said. “They’ll like that. So will I.” And if anybody paid quick, it was likely to be the rabbit magazine. A lot of publishers seemed to like—or to need—to play catch-me-if-you-can before they finally coughed up cash. He went on, “Otherwise… I dunno. I mean, I don’t think any of ’em read it or anything. It’s not, like, the latest thing.”

“No, I guess not.” Kelly’s voice was dry. You could find much nastier babes in other magazines. And, when the power worked, online you could find anything anyone was weird or horny enough to imagine.

But hey, it was still a big market even if it wasn’t the latest thing. The best writers from all over the world—well, the English-speaking world—busted their balls to get into it. They were all after those juicy checks. Writers could be as greedy as anybody else when they got the chance, and Playboy was one of the few places that gave it to them.

Now one of those checks had fallen into Marshall’s lap. He shook his head. That wasn’t right. I earned that one, he thought. I wrote a story good enough so they pulled it out of the slush pile and bought it.

“Wow!” he said as that slowly sank in. “Maybe I really am gonna be a writer after all.”

“Maybe you are,” Kelly said. “What would be so funny about that?”

“Only everything,” Marshall answered. “I was just using creative writing for a major to keep from graduating as long as I could. I never would’ve submitted anything if Professor What’s-his-name—Bolger, that’s who he was—hadn’t made everybody in his dumb class do it. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather the first time somebody bought something.”

“Okay, you fell into it by accident,” Kelly said. “But once you found out you were good at it, why shouldn’t you take it as far as you can?”

“No reason… I guess. But if somebody’d told me Bolger would make us send our stuff out to an editor, I never would’ve signed up for his class.” Marshall shook his head again, this time in wonder. A slow smile spread across his face. How totally green would Vanessa turn when she found out?

Colin Ferguson and Gabe Sanchez pedaled toward the scene of the crime. Gabe puffed away while he did it. Other riders and people on the sidewalk stared at a guy smoking a cigarette while he rode a bike, as if Gabe cared what other people did.

“You know what we need on these goddamn things?” Sanchez said, shifting the cigarette to the side of his mouth, tough-guy style, so he wouldn’t have to lift a hand from the handlebars to take it out.

“Slaves to do the pedaling would be nice. I’m getting old.” Colin was joking, and then again he wasn’t. Gas shortages and astronomical prices had made pedicabs a popular way to get around for people who didn’t feel like hauling themselves from where they were to where they needed to be.

He startled a laugh out of Gabe, who said, “Now that you mention it, so am I. But that’s not what I was thinking of. Naw—what we need on these fuckers is a light bar and a siren so people will know we’re cops.”

“You don’t figure maybe they suspect?” Colin said dryly, and Gabe laughed again. Many, many bicycles were on the streets. Except during commuters’ hours, hardly any of them were ridden by middle-aged men in suits. If you looked closely at Gabe, you could see the bulge under his left shoulder. If you look at me, you’ll see the same goddamn thing, Colin thought. Designers had talked about the invisible shoulder holster for more than a hundred years. The next guy who actually made one would be the first.

They both turned right from Hesperus onto Reynoso Drive. That was San Atanasio’s most important street for businesses and shops. In the early days of the city, San Atanasio Boulevard, farther south, had filled that niche—which was why the city hall and the police station and the library were all either on or near San Atanasio Boulevard.

“If it wasn’t for all the work I’m doing, though, I wouldn’t mind this so much, you know?” Sanchez said. “You see the town better on a bike than you do from a car.”

“You see it slower, that’s for sure,” Colin said. People on the sidewalk weren’t just blurs. You noticed faces, clothes, attitudes. But you did take longer to get where you were going. With cell phones so unreliable, Colin and Gabe also carried little two-way radios in an inside jacket pocket. If they needed backup, they could call the station.

The bicycles were straight out of 1910. The radios were twenty-first-century gadgets. The mix, and using the one to make the other more effective, was a small part of the report Colin had done for Malik Williams. The new chief liked the report, or said he did. How much he’d use… Colin didn’t worry about too much. Some of it struck him as plain, obvious common sense. Some was his own more left-handed thinking.

What Williams would make of that, Colin didn’t worry about too much, either. The absolute worst thing the new chief could do was drive him into retirement. Colin didn’t want that to happen, but it wouldn’t be nearly so bad as if he’d had to quit because Mike Pitcavage killed himself. He’d go home, he’d enjoy his wife and his tiny daughter, and he’d cultivate his garden. You could do worse.

Meanwhile, he pedaled past the big B of A near Sword Beach. The gas stations at the corner of Sword Beach and Reynoso all flew the red flags that meant they had no fuel. Those flags were ragged and faded—they flew most of the time.

Past Sword Beach to the east was a shopping center a bit spiffier than a strip mall. The anchor store, such as it was, was a Vons supermarket that had been there since dirt. Colin and Louise and now Kelly all got their groceries there. The Vons was the place that had been knocked over. The armed robber had blown a plate-glass window to hell and gone; sparkling shards littered the concrete walk out front. A middle-aged woman who could only be the manager waited there for the cops to show up.

She gave her name as Rudabeh Barazani—Iranian, Colin guessed. One more ingredient in the SoCal ethnic stew. Her English had a ghost of an accent, no more. “Anybody get hurt?” Colin asked.

“No, thank heaven,” she said.

“Okay, that’s good,” he said, both because it was true and to calm her down—although she didn’t seem too flustered. “Tell me what happened, then.”

“A man filled one of our hand-carry baskets with cans of hash and chicken and tuna. He filled it as full as he could. When he got to a checker, he did not take the items out. He tried to set the basket in front of her instead. When she asked him to take the cans out so she could see how many there were, he pulled a gun instead and told her to put all the money in the register into a bag. Since we have no bags any more, she just handed it to him. He left with the money and the canned goods, and fired a shot through the window to make sure no one would try to chase him.”

“You have a description, ma’am?” Gabe Sanchez asked.

“A white man, or maybe Hispanic, in his fifties,” Ms. Barazani said. “Medium-sized. Gray hair, getting thin here and here”—she sketched hair drawing back at the temples on her own forehead—“and a gray mustache and chin beard.”

“Clothes?” Colin asked.

“Denim jacket. Khakis. Nikes.”

Colin sighed to himself. You couldn’t get more ordinary than that. He said, “I wouldn’t want to lug a basket full of cans real far, not on foot I wouldn’t. What kind of getaway vehicle did he use?”

“He had a tricycle with a wire basket big enough to hold our plastic one,” the store manager replied. “A woman said she saw him turn from Reynoso north onto Sword Beach. I didn’t see that. I was trying to take care of poor Carmela. She was the checker, and she was very upset.”

“Somebody sticks a gun in your face, you usually are,” Colin agreed. “We’ll need to talk to her, though, and to the woman who saw which way the robber went. Gabe, radio the station and let ’em know what we have. I’ll interview the witnesses.”

“You got it.” Sanchez drew the walkie-talkie out of his jacket pocket.

The checker had pulled herself together. Her story wasn’t much different from the one Rudabeh Barazani had told. Colin discovered he couldn’t talk to the gal who’d watched the getaway—she’d already gone home. But she was a regular at that Vons. The manager gave him her name and address. It wasn’t far. He wondered whether he ought to go over there after he and Gabe finished up here.

Virtue triumphed over laziness. He was heading toward the witness’ house, with Gabe puffing along beside him in more than one sense of the word, when his inside-pocket, not-quite-wrist radio squawked for attention. He took it out. “Ferguson,” he said as he eased to a stop. “What’s going on?”

“We just nabbed your armed-robbery suspect,” answered the dispatcher back at the station.

“Oh, yeah? That’s what I call service,” Colin said. “How’d it happen?”

“A patrolman on a bicycle on Hesperus north of Braxton Bragg spotted an individual matching the description we sent out on a trike with canned goods in a basket in back. He made the arrest after a short pursuit.”

“I bet it was short.” Colin wouldn’t have wanted to try to outspeed a bike on a trike, especially when the trike was weighted down with loot. “Any trouble with the suspect? I know he was armed.”

“No, Captain, no trouble,” the dispatcher replied. “Our man had the drop on the perp. The guy didn’t try anything stupid.”

“Roger that. Good,” Colin said. “Okay, Gabe and I will come back to the station to question him. The witness I was going to talk to can wait. Out.”

“We turn around?” Gabe said.

“We turn around.” Colin nodded.

“Well, shit.” Gabe ground out his cigarette under the sole of his shoe. “If we’d headed straight back from Vons, we’d be a lot closer than we are now.”

“Piss and moan, piss and moan,” Colin said. They grinned at each other. Then they rode back to the police station.

The suspect was already there. The dispatcher had sent out a black-and-white to bring him—and the canned goods, and the cash—in. His name was Victor Jennings. He was fifty-nine years old. He lived only a couple of blocks from where he’d been caught. Another five minutes, and he would have made a clean getaway. He had no previous criminal record.

In the interrogation room, he looked angry and embarrassed and hopeless, all at the same time. Colin had seen variations of those expressions on too many faces in that room. After Jennings waived his Miranda rights, Colin asked him, “Why’d you do it, Mr. Jennings?”

“Why d’you think?” Jennings sounded hopeless, too. “I was hungry. I was broke. Haven’t hardly worked since that goddamn thing blew up. Had to get me food some kind of way. So I figured, what the hell, and I went and did it.”

If he’d just stolen food, they might well have turned him loose. They might even have let him keep the canned meat. Even in cases like his, where the hungry thief pulled a gun to get what he wanted, juries often didn’t care to convict. Too many jurors were either in the same boat themselves or had friends and relatives who were. But… “Why did you have the checker empty out the register, too?”

Jennings shrugged. “Like I said before, what the hell? I was already a robber. After I ate what I took, I could buy some more food with the money.” His mouth twisted. “You guys’ll be feeding me now, won’t you?”

Colin and Gabe looked at each other. The way things were these days, nobody at any level of government wanted more than the barest number of prisoners locked up. Feeding and guarding prisoners cost money, and money had been as hard to come by as work since the eruption. After a longish pause, Gabe answered, “That’s not up to us. That’s up to the DA.”

Although Colin didn’t blame him for passing the buck, he did add, “We’ll have to hold you till the DA makes up his mind—a few days, anyhow.”

Victor Jennings brightened. “A few days my belly won’t be scraping my backbone, anyway. I know it won’t be fancy food, but there oughta be enough of it.” He went off to his cell a happy man.

“What does it say about us when somebody wants to get locked up so he can eat?” Colin asked when he was gone.

“Says we’re fucked, man,” Gabe told him, and he couldn’t very well argue.