“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.