Gabe drove with a splendid disregard for what little traffic there was. “Who’s gonna write me a ticket, huh?” he demanded.
“Not me, dude,” Colin said.
At the border between San Atanasio and Hawthorne, one of the latter town’s finest asked him, “You get any trouble from LAPD?” By the way one eyebrow quirked, he already knew the answer. Well, he would. Every LAPD radio frequency would have been sulfurous. And the Hawthorne cops would have monitored the scanners just so they could stay informed, of course. Yeah, of course.
Colin shrugged and jerked a thumb at the Door-Knocker. “They didn’t want to see whether we really would have shot them up and knocked them out of the way.”
The guy from Hawthorne studied him. “I think they worked out the answer on their own.”
“Maybe.” Colin shrugged again. “The trucks are your babies now. Take good care of ’em. Tell the El Segundo guys the same thing when you make the handoff.”
“Will do,” the Hawthorne officer promised. Like Colin, he wore a suit not too new and not too stylish. If you became a cop to get rich and look cool, you were more than a few boulders short of a rock pile.
Or maybe you were Mike Pitcavage. Colin reported back to the elegant chief of the San Atanasio PD after the Hawthorne cops took charge of the fuel trucks. On the other side of his flight-deck desk, Pitcavage nodded. “Yeah, that pretty much matches the complaint I got from LAPD,” he said, and then stood up and stuck out his hand. “Good job, Colin.”
He was manicured, too. Colin noted as much as he shook with the chief. Just as you’d expect, Pitcavage had a smooth, firm grip. “Sometimes us small-town boys can surprise the city slickers,” Colin said, putting on a cornpone drawl.
“There you go. They want to draw you and quarter you and put your pieces at the city gates to warn off anybody else who gets ideas like that,” Pitcavage said.
“What did you tell ’em?” Colin wondered if he’d get thrown to the wolves, a sacrifice to the great god Petroleum.
But Pitcavage answered, “I said, if they wanted to try it, they’d have to do me first.”
“Thanks.” Colin sounded less dry than usual. Yes, he’d wondered whether Pitcavage would grab the chance to hang him out to dry. He’d been a rival for the leather swivel chair the chief sat in now. He didn’t want it any more, but Pitcavage didn’t know that, and probably wouldn’t believe it if he found out. Ambitious himself, he’d always figure everybody else was, too. But here he’d done everything a subordinate could want from his CO. After a momentary pause, Colin asked, “What did they say when you told ’em that?”
“They told me to fuck myself in the ass. They said they’d drive spikes through a telephone pole, and I could use that.” Pitcavage grinned. “They were righteously pissed off.”
“I guess,” Colin agreed. “If they’re that up in arms, are they really so low on gas themselves? They’re L.A., for crying out loud. They always get what they want.”
“Not this time. This time they get hind tit. They aren’t used to it, and they don’t like it for beans.” Pitcavage stuck out his hand again. As Colin took it, the chief went on, “I won’t forget the number you did on them, either. Way to go.”
That was dismissal. Even Colin, who didn’t always notice hints, got this one and took it. Leaving the chief’s inner sanctum, he liked Pitcavage better than he had for years. If Mike had a prick for a son, it could happen to anybody. Colin knew that only too well. Rob and Marshall weren’t perfect. Neither was Vanessa.
And neither am I, Colin thought. And neither is anybody else.
* * *
Kelly looked up bemusedly at the ceiling of the Benson Hotel’s lobby. It was a pretty fancy place, all dark, mellow wood. And she had to look a long way up at the molded and gilded plaster on the ceiling. The Benson dated from 1912, when splendor, by God, was splendor. Across the street stood the colonnaded magnificence of the First National Bank building, which might almost have come to Portland from the acropolis of Athens.
She shivered, not because she mourned the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome but because she was bloody cold. They’d scheduled the American geologists’ conclave for December in northern Oregon before the supervolcano erupted. It must have seemed a good idea at the time. Now. .
People kept saying Los Angeles was the new Seattle. Kelly didn’t think that was true, but people kept saying it no matter what she thought. Going with it for the sake of argument, that made Portland the new. . well, what?
Seattle lay about 1,100 miles north of L.A. What was 1,100 miles north of Portland? The end of the world was the first thing that occurred to Kelly, but she’d actually checked on a map before she came up here. On that same crappy scale of analogies, Portland was the new Skagway, Alaska.
And it felt like it. Snow swirled through the air and drifted on the sidewalks. Heat was in short supply. By law, the only places where you could set your thermostat higher than fifty were schools and hospitals. She wore the same clothes she would have taken to Yellowstone in winter, and she was glad to have them. Ice was forming on the Willamette and even on the broad, swift-flowing Columbia.
When the assembled geologists weren’t giving papers or listening to them, they did the same thing as every other group of conventioneers ever hatched: they headed for the bar. It was just off the lobby, to the right of the glass-and-bronze revolving door that let you in.
Booze didn’t really warm you up, but it made you feel as if it did, which was often good enough. And Oregon was microbrew heaven. Even the new, abbreviated growing season around here seemed to be enough to let barley mature. Behind the bar stood a rack of Oregon reds and whites from before the eruption. When those were gone, they’d be gone for good. Oregon wasn’t wine country any more, and wouldn’t be for nobody knew how many years to come.
And booze lubricated social gatherings. Kelly was halfway down a hoppy IPA when a friend of hers walked in. She waved. Daniel Olson nodded back. He picked his way through the chattering crowd. They hugged. They’d both been plucked from Yellowstone by helicopters just ahead of the supervolcano eruption. Along with two other rescued geologists, Kelly had crashed in his apartment in Missoula till Colin finagled a way out for her.
Daniel ordered himself a pale ale, too, and clinked bottles with her. “Did I hear you got married?” he said. She spread the fingers on her left hand to show off the ring. He nodded. “Sweet. And a job, too? At-what is it? Dominguez State?”
“Cal State Dominguez, yeah,” Kelly agreed. People said San Francisco State and Long Beach State, but Cal State Northridge and Cal State Dominguez or Cal State Dominguez Hills. Why they did that, she had no idea, but they did. She asked, “How’s Missoula these days? Do I want to know?”
“Well, it’s still there and still kind of in business, which is more than you can say for most of Montana,” Daniel answered. “But everything that comes in comes from the west. We’ve got electricity, but no natural gas.”
Kelly nodded. “I remember when it went out.” The big pipe that fed Missoula came to it across the rest of Montana. Or rather, it had come across Montana. Now it lay squashed under God only knew how many feet of ash and dust and rock.
“Not much gasoline, either,” Daniel went on. “We chopped down a hell of a lot of trees to get through last winter, and we’ll chop down more this time around. We’ll regret it one of these days, but people are too worried about not freezing now to give a damn about later.”
“Welcome to America,” Kelly said, and the other geologist spread his hands in resigned agreement. When this quarter’s balance sheet decided whether you got promoted, you wouldn’t care what happened a few years down the line. And when it really was a choice between fuel in the fireplace and a Missoula winter on steroids, you’d chop down the pines now and let the bare hillsides take care of themselves in the sweet bye and bye.