So, instead of climbing the stairs, she sat down on a concrete ledge near the doorway to the building. Anybody who needed to talk with her would likely spot her there. Anybody who needed to talk with her so much that he or she had sprinted on ahead would, she hoped, take a hint from the locked door and the gloomy hallway, come downstairs and back outside, and then spot her there. Chances were good that even students not rich enough or bright enough to win admission to one of the UC campuses could figure that out.
Sure as hell, another Asian kid buttonholed her. Rex wasn’t doing nearly so well as George Chun. Kelly had a good idea why he wasn’t, too: he was baked all the time. She recognized the signs from Marshall. But Marshall held the joint—he got loaded a lot, but he still functioned. Kelly thought the joint was holding Rex.
He had trouble remembering what he wanted to ask her, which couldn’t be a good sign. Finally, a couple of his fried synapses clicked together and made a spark: “Oh, yeah! Plate, like, tec… waddayacallit.”
“Tectonics,” Kelly said patiently. Stoners could do it. They just couldn’t do it very fast. “What do you need to know?”
Again, he had to grope for an answer. He reminded Kelly of that ancient Cosby routine where the dudes with the munchies went to Burger King and forgot why they were there before they could order. When one of them got asked what he wanted, he mumbled Hey, lemme talk to the king. Rex was too much like that.
At last, he managed, “Um, how’s that work, you know?”
With a small sigh, Kelly explained how it worked. It was an abridged version of what she’d said during the lecture, but it was all new to Rex, even though he’d been there.
“Wow,” he said, and she had to fight back giggles. She hadn’t heard such a wasted noise, even from Marshall, for a long time. Rex went on, “That’s pretty amazing. How’d they psych out it does that?”
Kelly fed him another slice of the lecture. Maybe it would stay down this time. She could hope so.
Another student, a Hispanic woman whose name Kelly couldn’t find in her head, came up when she was halfway through her little talk on subduction and seafloor spreading. Kelly backed and filled so the newcomer wouldn’t think she was speaking Urdu. The woman actually seemed to have some idea of what was going on. Kelly wouldn’t have said the same thing about Rex.
She did feel virtuous that she’d stationed herself out here and drawn some students even though her office wasn’t usable. When her office hours were done, she turned in a journal at the library, collected a handwritten receipt, and trudged off to the bus stop for the trip back to San Atanasio.
It would have been twenty minutes by car. The way things worked these days, it took one transfer and over an hour to get back to her stop on Braxton Bragg Boulevard. From there, she had to walk another ten or fifteen minutes before she was actually home.
As it did so often since the eruption, sunset looked like a pousse-café, with all sorts of gaudy, gorgeous colors piled one atop another and changing every time she looked at them. She didn’t look at them as much as their beauty should have demanded. She’d seen too many sunsets not just like this one, maybe, but every bit as gorgeous.
When her key turned first the dead bolt and then the lock to the front door, she heard high, shrill squeals from inside. As soon as she walked through the front door, a small, friendly hurricane did its goddamnedest to kneecap her. “Mommymommymommymommmy!” the hurricane yelled, all one word.
Kelly let her backpack slide from her shoulders to the floor. She picked up Deborah and squeezed her and kissed her. “Hello, kiddo. I missed you,” she said. “Have you been a good girl?”
“No,” Deborah said proudly.
“Marshall?” Kelly asked, a certain apprehension in her voice.
“Not too bad,” Marshall said. “She was gonna see if a coffee mug bounced like a rubber ball, but I got it away from her before she could make like Isaac Newton and experiment.”
“Good for you,” Kelly said, and then, to her daughter, “Don’t throw cups, please.”
“Why?” Deborah asked, which gave Kelly a sinking feeling.
Hoping against hope, Kelly answered, “Because they can break.”
But she was doomed after all. “Why?” Deborah asked again.
“Because they’re made of china.”
“Why?” Deborah was ready to ask it all night long. And why not? Mommy was home, and the world was wonderful again.
With no great enthusiasm, Colin Ferguson dialed a number in Mobile, Alabama. His opinion of Mobile wasn’t high. His destroyer had put in there for a few days while he was in the Navy. The weather’d been every bit as horrendously hot and sticky as New Orleans’. Unlike New Orleans, though, Mobile seemed to have been settled by people who had no idea how to have fun.
Nowadays, Mobile’s weather was probably better than it had been before the supervolcano eruption. It would be one of the few places in the world able to say that.
But he hadn’t called Mobile to talk about the weather. In due course, a voice on the other end of the line said, “This is Lieutenant Randall Atkins, Theft and Fraud Unit.” Lieutenant Atkins had a deep voice, and a drawl thick enough to slice.
“Morning, Lieutenant. I’m Captain Colin Ferguson, of the San Atanasio PD out in California.”
“Ferguson… San Atanasio…” Colin could just about watch the pieces going round and round in the Mobile cop’s mind like the wheels on a slot machine. Pretty soon, Atkins hit the jackpot. “Jesus! Aren’t you the guy who—?”
“Yeah, I’m the guy who, all right,” Colin agreed heavily. He knew too well he’d be getting that the rest of his career. “This hasn’t got anything to do with that, though.”
“Okay.” Atkins seemed to pull himself together and act professional. “What does it have to do with, then, Captain?”
“There’s a new restaurant in your town, a place called Unity,” Colin said, remembering that Bronislav’s tat with the cross and the two forward C’s and the two backward ones stood for Only unity will save the Serbs. “One of the people behind it is a fellow named Bronislav Nedic.”
“Named what? You want to spell that for me, Captain? Spell it nice and slow, if you’d be so kind.” Colin did—the request was more than reasonable. When he finished, Randall Atkins said, “All right. I’ve got it. You don’t mind my asking though, how come a cop way the devil out in California cares about a guy with a funny name in the restaurant racket here?”
“I don’t mind,” Colin answered. “We’ve got a warrant out on Nedic. Charge is grand theft. He hacked into his girlfriend’s bank account, swiped almost ten grand, and used it to get a piece of this Unity place.” The restaurant already had half a dozen online reviews, all of them good, a couple of them raves. After a brief pause, Colin went on, “I’d go after him any which way—believe me on that one, Lieutenant. But it just so happens that his girlfriend is my daughter.”
“Ouch!” Atkins said. “Boy, what a dumb son of a bitch, ripping off a cop’s kid.”
“That did cross my mind,” Colin said. “But he knew she had it, and he figured out how to get his hands on it, and he was talking about opening a place to eat for as long as he dated Vanessa—a couple-three years. Looks like he could resist everything but temptation.”
“Heh,” Lieutenant Atkins said. He paused for longer than Colin had before continuing, “Well, send us the particulars and we’ll look into it.” He didn’t say they would bust Bronislav Nedic and send him back to California in leg irons. He didn’t say anything of the sort—not even close.