“Say what all the time?”
“Humongous. It’s what you guys call the top end of eruptions. A real technical term, like perpetrator or something.”
“You’ve been reading books again.” Kelly sounded amused and accusing at the same time.
“Guilty. I didn’t know it wasn’t in the rules.” Colin raised his glass. The pale ale was several shades darker than Bud, which was, now that he thought about it, the color of piss. This brew had real ingredients in it. “Here’s to us.” They solemnly clinked, then drank. The pale ale had real flavor in it, too. A damn shame it cost as if it did.
“To us.” Kelly glanced around the kitchen, which was as clean and tidy as the rest of the house. “I still get nervous saying that.”
“How come?” Alarm bells jangled in Colin’s mind. He was pretty sure he’d found a good one, a keeper. Was she having doubts she’d found one? If she was… idn’t know what he’d do if she was.
“Because people who go through divorces are usually crazy for a couple of years afterwards,” she answered seriously. “God knows I’ve watched enough grad-school marriages explode.”
God knew Colin had watched enough cops’ marriages explode, including Gabe Sanchez’s and his own. If you were crazy, did you know you were crazy? If you knew you were crazy, did that mean you weren’t really crazy after all or only that you couldn’t do anything about it? A DA would argue one way, a defense attorney the other.
He’d seen people do some pretty nutso things after their marriages crashed and burned-no two ways about that. He’d seen guys date women and women hook up with guys they never would have looked at twice if they were in their right minds. Most of them regretted it soon enough. One or two made it work. He’d also seen one guy smash his truck and end up in a wheelchair with gazillions in medical and legal bills because he hopped in while he was drowning his sorrows. And one pretty good cop had got buried in a closed coffin because not even a mortician could make him presentable after he ate his gun.
Suicide scared cops shitless, not least because it sometimes seemed contagious. If one guy did himself in, it could happen that a couple of weeks later someone else, someone nobody’d thought had any big troubles, also took the long road out. Spooky.
Colin didn’t want to feel spooky right now, which was putting it mildly. Kelly hadn’t flown down from the East Bay to make him feel spooky. He hoped like hell she hadn’t, anyhow. He put his hand on her shoulder again. She smiled and moved closer to him, the way she had before. That eased his mind.
“So how’s the supervolcano doing?” he asked casually.
Her smile winked out like a blown candle flame. Maybe he’d spooked her. “My chairman doesn’t like what it’s doing,” she said, the way Colin might have said The chief wouldn’t like that. She went on, “And I really don’t like what it’s doing.”
“I’ve seen stuff in the papers,” he said, nodding. “More quakes over 5.0, the geysers’ schedules all fouled up…”
“Yeah, the tourists get upset when Old Faithful doesn’t go off right on time.” Kelly didn’t bother hiding her scorn. “But that’s only part of what I mean-the part that makes the papers and sometimes even the TV news. The worst things don’t. They only show up in surveyors’ records and satellite radar readings.”
“How do you mean?” Colin asked.
“The magma domes are bulging. Pushing up. Especially the new one, the one under Coffee Pot Springs,” Kelly said. “Moving up by feet where they moved by inches even just a couple of years ago.”
That led to the obvious question, so Colin came out with it: “Is it getting ready to blow, then?”
“Nobody knows. We’ve never observed a supervolcano eruption before, so how can we tell for sure what we’ve got?” The way Kelly knocked back a big gulp of beer said she sure didn’t like what they had. “Something’s going to happen, though. Maybe it’ll go back down again. It could. Maybe there’ll be ordinary volcanic eruptions. We haven’t had any for seventy thousand years, give or take, and they might relieve the pressure. Or maybe you can drop Rhode Island half a mile straight down.”
“Your chairman will know people-people in the government, I meanolin said slowly. “So will the other scientists who study this thing. Are they jumping up and down, trying to make the Feds pay attention in case Yellowstone does go kaboom? There ought to be… contingency plans, they call ’em in the service.”
“I know the geologists are talking to people in the Interior Department,” Kelly answered. “And I know they’re having trouble getting anybody to listen to them. It’s a-” She broke off, groping for the word. “A question of scale, I guess you’d say.”
She paused again, plainly wondering if she’d have to explain. She didn’t. “The South Bay Strangler’s murdered fifteen little old ladies now. That’s a story. People understand it. It gets splashed all over CNN Headline News,” Colin said, his voice thick with disgust. “But what Hitler did, and Stalin, and Mao-you can’t take in numbers like that and what they mean. A good thing, too. Anybody who could feel all those millions of murders would have to go nuts, wouldn’t he?”
“You’d hope so,” Kelly said.
“Uh-huh. You would,” Colin agreed. “So the Interior Department guys can’t wrap their heads around the supervolcano?”
“Not even close,” Kelly said. “They see the studies, and they go, ‘It can’t be this bad.’ And what our people give them is always cautious and careful and conservative. Even that’s enough to make them not take it in. Or they say, ‘If it really does what you say it’ll do, what’s the point of planning for it? It’s too big.’ ”
“Bend over and kiss your behind good-bye.” Colin wasn’t quite old enough to remember drop-and-cover drills in school, but he knew plenty of people who were.
“Yeah. Like that. Except the supervolcano is so much bigger than an H-bomb, it’s not even funny,” Kelly said.
“It isn’t radioactive,” Colin pointed out. “No fallout.”
“Well, no,” she allowed. “Not like you mean. But it would put so much ash in the air…” She laughed, shakily. “We sure have cheerful things to talk about, don’t we? Stranglers and supervolcanoes. Oh, my!”
“They’re what we do. And it’s better than not talking,” Colin said. After the kids got out of the house, he and Louise had hardly said anything to each other for days at a time. She didn’t care about policework. She’d cared that he hadn’t been chosen chief, but that was because she’d lost face through his failure. And he hadn’t worried about how she got through her days. With any brains in his head, he would have noticed that that was a bad sign. Aerobics class? Hey, why not?
Kelly held up her empty glass. “I think I could use a refill.”
Colin’s glass was empty, too. He didn’t recall finishing the beer, but if he hadn’t a drunk pixie was hiding in one of the cabinets. “Motion seconded and passed by acclamation,” he said, and opened the fridge.
She gave him a quizzical look. “You talk funny sometimes, you know?”
“Too many City Council meetings. They’d make a penguin go jogging in the Mojave, honest to God they would.”
Kelly snorted. “You do talk funny.”
He’d heard that before from his fellow cops. He’d also got dressed down by his superiors for writing reports in English rather than police jargon. Jesus! No wonder I never made chief, he thought. If anybody ever came out and just d what goes on in a cop shop, they’d ride him out of town on a rail. They’d have to.
Some of his bitterness at getting passed over went away. The administrative part of the job would have been a piece of cake. Knowing which asses to kiss and when, on the other hand… Even if he’d tried, he would have made a hash of it. A police chief had to be a pol, too, and that just wasn’t part of his makeup.
The second beers vanished faster than the first ones had. “What do you want to do now?” Colin asked.
“Could I take a shower?” Kelly said. “You go through the airport and you sit on a plane, you feel all grubby even if the flight only lasts an hour. And after that, well, who knows?” She grinned at him.