“Well, we’ll see,” he said.
“Puhleeze!” Three of them squealed it at the same time.
Hearing them, he realized how starved for entertainment they were. They’d grown up with TV and the Net and PlayStations and Wiis and Xboxes. All of that stuff took electricity, though. Guilford had power for three or four hours a day during the summer. During the winter. . Well, people tried-you had to give them that. But it was mostly no go, and no juice.
If they wanted to listen to a band they’d surely never heard of before it washed up on their frozen shore-and wanted to badly enough to beg for music-they really had it bad. If Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles could tour the local towns, towns that hadn’t had an almost-rock band get stuck in them, it might clean up. It might clean up as much as anybody in this part of Maine could right now, anyhow.
“We’ll see,” Rob repeated, but in a different tone of voice this time. Biff wouldn’t mind that kind of tour. Rob wouldn’t mind it himself. It might work. It was definitely worth talking about.
The kids caught the difference. “Yeah!” they said, or rather, “Ayuh!” It was Maine, all right. One of them waved for another to go out on a pass pattern. The ball spiraled after him. The boys raced away.
But when Rob looked out the windows of his tower garret in the Trebor Mansion Inn the next morning, the sky had gone gray and gloomy and dark. Snow swirled through the air. It wasn’t a blizzard, but it also wasn’t the kind of weather that would let the band draw a crowd, even from the hardy folk who’d stayed in Guilford. He still intended to talk about playing, but this wasn’t the day for it.
* * *
Colin Ferguson looked wistfully at the Taurus in his driveway. It still ran. He fired it up every now and then and took it around the block to keep the battery alive and to make sure the tires stayed round. He’d drive it if he went out to dinner with Kelly, especially when it was raining. And these days it rained more often in the L.A. basin than he’d ever dreamt it could.
But he didn’t go to work in the Taurus every day any more, even though it wasn’t far. Gas was too hard to come by, and too expensive for anyone on a civil-service salary to use very much. A San Atanasio police lieutenant made a pretty good civil-service salary. What Kelly brought in from Cal State Dominguez didn’t hurt, either. All the same. .
All the same, he put his briefcase in his bike’s cargo basket, climbed aboard, and pedaled away. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle very often between the time when he was fifteen or sixteen and the day the supervolcano erupted. They said you never forgot how. Like a lot of things they said, that had holes that would have sunk it if it were a boat. He’d wobbled all over the place when he started riding again. He’d had a good fall, too. Luckily, he’d blown the knees out of an old pair of sweats, not the pants from any of his suits. Even more luckily, though he’d pedaled home scraped up and bruised, he hadn’t broken anything.
It did come back in a hurry. The mysterious they were right about that much. Colin had got to the point where he enjoyed the wind in his face as he rode. (The rain was a different story. He’d quickly bought a plastic slicker that covered him from head to foot, and a broad-brimmed hat to keep most of the raindrops off his bifocals. Bicycling with an umbrella, he’d rapidly discovered, was an invitation to suicide.)
He wasn’t the only two-wheeled commuter. Oh, no-not even close. Bikes, and especially bikes with adults in business attire on them, had been uncommon sights on L.A.-area streets before the eruption. No more. As gas prices zoomed up like a Trident missile, more and more people said to hell with their cars and started doing without infernal combustion.
Colin had dropped five pounds since he started biking more than he drove. His wind was better than it had been. That was the good news. The bad news was the San Atanasio PD’s Robbery Division was trying to deal with an explosion of bicycle thefts. So was every other police department in Southern California-and in a lot of other places, too.
A car whizzed by. It didn’t come particularly close, but he sent it a resentful stare even so. Now that he rode the bicycle, he looked at automobiles in a whole new way. The goddamn things were dangerous. If you tangled with one, you lost. It was as simple as that. And so many people drove with their heads up their asses. Bike? What bike? they might have been saying.
He’d probably driven that way himself. As a matter of fact, he was sure he had. How many times had he almost creamed some green ecofreako with delusions of Lance Armstrong? Plenty-he knew as much. And he’d blamed the skinny morons on the bikes every single time.
He stopped at a light, then turned right onto Hesperus. That was a bigger street. It had more cars on it. Not a whole lot more, though. Even L.A. and its auto-based suburbs could do without the sacred conveyance if they had to. They sure were trying to make like they could, anyhow.
“Pothole coming,” he muttered, reminding himself. It was right in front of a tropical-fish place run by a Japanese couple who, he happened to know, also owned about a quarter of the real estate down in Torrance-a bigger, richer burb than working-class San Atanasio. But they just plain liked tropical fish, so they went on selling them.
The pothole was a doozy. He would have felt it in the Taurus. On the bike, it might have sent him ass over teakettle. Not for the first time, he told himself to call Street Maintenance and give them hell. One of these days. In his copious spare time.
He had to get out into the middle of the street to turn left into the police station parking lot. The bike rack there was new since the eruption. Colin chained his mount to a hitching post. The bike was secondhand, and had seen better times. The chain was new, and industrial-strength. Marshall had had a bike disappear from a UCSB rack on account of an el-cheapo chain. Colin made his share of mistakes, but usually not the ones he could see coming six miles down the road.
Gabe Sanchez was standing outside the door poisoning his lungs. Colin nodded to the sergeant. “What do you know?” he called.
“I know I’d rather do this inside,” Gabe answered. “It’s cold out here, dammit.”
Colin didn’t feel cold. “You must have driven this morning,” he said. No, he didn’t feel cold at all. Antiperspirant was still getting into SoCal. The world would turn less pleasant if that supply ever failed.
“Way to go, Sherlock,” Sanchez said. “Anybody would guess you were a cop or something.”
“You think maybe?” Colin said. He looked like a cop. He dressed like a cop. He talked like a cop. He thought like a cop. So what was he gonna be? A tropical-fish merchant? An auctioneer? Like Popeye, he was what he was, and that was all that he was.
Well, almost all. If he hadn’t been a post-divorce tourist, he wouldn’t also be a middle-aged guy trying to start a second family. Rob, Vanessa, and Marshall might end up with a new half-brother or half-sister. Another new half-brother or half-sister, that is. And one with exactly zero biological relationship to their last new half-brother.
“Life gets fucking weird sometimes, you know?” Colin said: no great originality there, but plenty of feeling.
Feeling or not, Gabe shook his head. “Unh-unh, man. That’s a negative. Every once in a while, life stops being fucking weird. That’s when you think it starts making sense. And when you do, it drops the hammer on you but good. Because the rest of the time. .” He shook his head again, and crushed the coffin nail under his heel. Then he looked mournful. “I want another one, dammit.”
“I’d go easy, if I were you.” Colin left it there. Like antiperspirant, tobacco reached L.A. from points east. Like antiperspirant and everything else coming in from points east, it reached L.A. in limited amounts, with prices inflated to match. Or maybe to more than match. People who had the cigarette jones had it bad.