“That is cool,” Bryce said now. “Or it will be, if you can do it.”
“Always if,” Susan agreed. “But it’ll keep me busy for a while, anyway. And when I publish it, maybe it’ll make somebody notice me and go, like, We need her in this department. I can hope, right?”
“Sure, babe.” Bryce nodded. You could always hope. A lot of the time, you had to hope. You could even live on hope for a while. Why not? What else was the whole country doing?
“Darn!” Colin said as he combed his hair.
Kelly knew that would have been something a lot stronger if she weren’t around. “How’s it doing?” she asked.
He looked down at his left shoulder as if it had betrayed him. Well, it had, but you couldn’t blame it after a bullet smashed up its workings. “Y’know,” he said, “I think the rehab’s gone about as far as it’s gonna go.”
She’d been thinking the same thing for the past couple of weeks. She hadn’t wanted to say so, because she kept hoping she might be wrong. All she said now was, “Are you sure? They say time—”
“—wounds all heels,” he finished for her. She winced. While she was wincing, he went on, “It may get a little better. I may be able to move it a little more without feeling like somebody’s driving nails in there. But I won’t go back to being a real, no-kidding, two-armed human being again. I wish I would, but I won’t.”
“Which means what?” Kelly feared she knew the answer, but she didn’t want the words of ill omen coming out of her mouth. If they were going to get said, he needed to say them himself.
He came over and sat down on the bed next to her. “Which means the San Atanasio PD will just have to do without a certain captain of police. I know that’ll be rough on them, but there you are.”
“Are you sure?” she said.
He nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure. You think you and Deborah will be able to stand having me rattling around the house 24/7?”
“Oh, I’m sure Deborah will hate it,” Kelly said. Their daughter loved having Daddy home all the time. She was even learning she had to be careful around his bad side.
“Yeah, well, she’s still too little to know which end is up,” Colin said. “How about you?”
“I like having you around,” Kelly answered truthfully. “The real question is, will you be able to walk away from the office and into retirement? Or will you go batshit?” Just because he wouldn’t swear around her didn’t mean she couldn’t swear around him.
“You never know ahead of time, but I don’t think I will,” Colin answered. “I’ve got enough here to keep me interested all kinds of ways.” He set a hand on her leg, above her knee. “Only you’ll have to get on top more often.”
“I don’t mind,” she said, which was also true. “But you can’t do that all the time.”
“Ain’t it a shame?” he said.
“If you say so,” she answered. “What will you do when you’re not lying on your back?”
“Riding herd on the kid will do for a start.”
“For a while, sure. But she won’t be a toddler forever, you know. Day after tomorrow—not really, but close enough—she starts school. She’ll be gone for big chunks of time. What will you do then, here by yourself?” She hoped the anxiety in her voice didn’t show. Cops’ spouses too often had reason to worry about the people they loved.
How many interrogations had Colin done? However many it was, he heard the words behind the words she said. “Don’t worry about that kind of stuff. I’m not gonna do anything stupid,” he said. “I intend to get shot by an outraged husband at the age of a hundred and three.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” Kelly said. “Well, I’ll tell you what. If you’re still around at a hundred and three and I’m still around to know, I give you permission to wander off the reservation—once. Just once. Till then, fuhgeddaboutit, Mister. After that, you can forget about it, too.”
“If I’m still around at a hundred and three, I probably will forget about it right after that,” Colin said. “My folks were pretty good about keeping their marbles, but none of ’em lived that long.”
“Neither did mine,” Kelly answered. “I had a great-grandmother, I think it was, who almost got to a hundred, but she didn’t quite.”
“Hon, what do you think about me hanging it up?” Colin asked.
“I won’t be sorry,” she said. “I’d get nervous every time you went out on a case from now on. I mean, I always knew bad things could happen to you, but nothing ever had, so I didn’t worry about it much. Now… They say, anything that can happen can happen to you. Now I know in my gut that that’s true, not just in my head. I don’t want to get the jitters whenever you stick your nose outside the station.”
He nodded. “About what I thought you’d say. Well, I’d be lying if I told you I wouldn’t be hinky myself. After you get shot once, I don’t see how you can help having the next time in the back of your mind.”
“We’re on the same page there, especially when your arm reminds you you got hit every time you move it,” Kelly said.
“There is that,” Colin agreed. “If I’d just got grazed, the way Rob did a few years ago, I might be able to not think about it. But from what he wrote, that really was a dumb accident. The guy who shot me, he did what he was trying to do. The next jerk who pulled a gun, he’d mean it, too.”
“Uh-huh. He sure would,” Kelly said. “So I’m happy you’re going to retire, as long as you think you won’t literally get bored to death once you stop going to the cop shop.”
“Nope. Not me,” Colin said. “The only thing that gripes me about it is that I’ve got to hang ’em up. I’m not doing it because I want to. It’s kind of like the so-and-so with the AK won.”
“Like hell it is!” Kelly exclaimed. “He’s dead. He’s pushing up the daisies. He’s pining for the fjords, for Christ’s sake. This is an ex–armed robber.” She did a lousy British accent, but she gave it her best shot.
And she pried a laugh out of her husband. “Thank you, Monty,” he said.
“Any time,” she told him.
He put his good arm around her. “The company will be better here than it would be at the station—I’ll tell you that. Prettier, too.”
“Flattery will get you—somewhere, probably.”
“I was hoping it would.”
“Maybe not right now, though,” she said when he got grabby.
“You’re no fun,” he grumbled. If he’d kept grabbing, Kelly might have gone along with it. Now that Marshall was back in the house, he was keeping an eye on Deborah right this minute. But Colin didn’t push it. He was pretty good about not making a nuisance of himself too often. From what Kelly knew of men, that was as much as a woman married to one of the creatures could reasonably hope for. He did say, “If I’m home all the time, I’ll drag you down in the bushes whenever I get the chance.”
“Promises, promises,” she said. They both laughed. That they could both laugh about it, she figured, spoke well for the state of their marriage.
XXII
Spring came to Guilford on little cat feet, like the fog in the poem. On the calendar, it arrived at the end of the third week in March. Except on the calendar, that meant diddly-squat. From what longtime locals told Rob, the vernal equinox hadn’t meant much in Guilford even before the supervolcano erupted. You could get snow into April, once in a while even into May.