“Colin thought the same thing,” Kelly answered. “Don’t ever tell him I said this, but for a while I was worried about what he might do.”
“Urk.” Marshall hadn’t thought about that. If there was a rock of stability in his life, it was his father. You didn’t want to imagine that the rock could crack. Cops did kill themselves, even without reasons as good as Mike Pitcavage’s. And somebody’d said that anything that could happen could happen to you. All the same…
Kelly nodded. “Urk is right. I couldn’t say anything, I couldn’t do anything. If he decided to, I couldn’t even stop him. Too many chances away from me, too many ways for a cop to go, and to go quick. That was a bad time.”
“Uh-huh.” Marshall sent her an admiring glance. “You didn’t let on that anything was bugging you.”
“I was scared to,” she said. “What would that do? Just make things worse. That was how it looked to me.” Deborah made a small noise. One corner of Kelly’s mouth turned down. “And it looks like this baby’s never going to fall asleep.”
“That’s what babies are for, right? Driving grownups crazy, I mean.” Marshall stopped in surprise, listening to himself. He’d just included himself among grownups, because Deborah sure could drive him crazy.
When he was a teenager, he’d desperately wanted to get older faster so he could be a grownup himself. Once he slid past twenty, though, he’d tried to put off the evil day as long as he could. He’d stretched his time at UC Santa Barbara as far as the university would let him, and then another twenty minutes besides. But they’d finally shoved the sheepskin into his sweaty hand no matter how little he wanted it.
And here he was, out in the world. Yes, he was living in his dad’s house. No, he didn’t have steady work. Even before the supervolcano blew, though, he’d shared that boat with plenty of others his age. He shared it with many more now. He figured he was a grownup anyhow—at least, if you compared him to a baby who didn’t want to go to sleep.
III
Vanessa Ferguson was happy. Oh, not perfectly happy. That would have been too much to expect from anybody, and much too much to expect from her. Mr. Gorczany, the guy who ran the company she worked for, was a goose twit, and too big a goose twit to realize what a goose twit he was. The job was beneath her talents, and didn’t pay her anywhere near what she thought she was worth.
But it did pay her enough to let her escape from the house where she’d grown up, the house she’d moved back to when she returned to SoCal. Escaping was nothing but a relief. She and her father’s second wife hadn’t hit it off, which was putting things mildly. And her kid brother seemed perfectly content to grow moss there. Marshall might still be living at home when he hit middle age. It would serve him right if he was, too.
Her own apartment wouldn’t have been enough to bring her happiness, not by itself. It wasn’t big. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t cheap. Too right it wasn’t cheap! If Mr. Gorczany had paid her what she was worth to his miserable outfit, she wouldn’t have worried about that so much. But he paid her what he paid her, and worry she did.
When she was in the ratty old expensive apartment with Bronislav, though, she didn’t care about any of that stuff. She didn’t even care that she thought Dad’s second wife was a first-class bitch. All she cared about was Bronislav. He was what made her happy.
Oh, she’d felt that way the first few months with Bryce Miller, too, before she woke up to what a loser he really was. Back when she was still in high school, before she met Bryce, she’d been head over heels over a guy named Peter. She’d lost her cherry to Peter’s peter, as a matter of fact. She’d been sure she would bear his children… till she lived with him for a little while. That cured her. She’d been glad—eager!—to jump to Bryce once Peter wore thin.
After Bryce, there was Hagop. Vanessa violently shook her head, the way she always did when she thought of Hagop. It wasn’t just that the miserable rug merchant had been a year or two older than her own old man. She’d moved to Denver on account of him, dammit. That put her squarely in the line of fire when the supervolcano blew. All kinds of horrible things had happened to her on account of that.
Odds were Hagop was dead, of course. Almost all the people who’d lived in Denver were. Only a few had got out—the ones who’d fled first and fastest. She was one of them.
She didn’t care about Hagop, not any more. Being dead was about what he deserved. Lousy schmuck. Lousy schmuck with his lousy schmuck…
Bronislav, now, Bronislav was different. Vanessa’s sharp features softened as much as they ever did. Bronislav was the Real Thing. She was sure of it. (She’d also been sure of it with Peter, and with Bryce. And she’d done her best to be sure of it with Hagop as well, though even she’d suspected then she was trying to talk herself into it. She remembered none of her earlier certainties now.)
Bronislav Nedic was different all kinds of ways. Immigrant from what had been Yugoslavia. Looks somewhere between Nicolas Cage and an Orthodox icon. Big, dark, sad eyes. Beard thick as a pelt—the beard was the first thing she’d noticed about him, there in that New Mexico truck-stop coffee shop.
He had a musical Serbian accent. God help you, though, if you called it a Serbo-Croatian accent. To Bronislav, anything that had to do with Croats came from the dark side of the Force. He’d been a freedom fighter when Yugoslavia came unglued. He had some scary scars to prove it. He also had a tat on the back of his right hand—a cross with four C’s, two forward and two backward, in the right angles. In Serbian’s Cyrillic alphabet, those C’s were S’s, and they stood for Only unity will save the Serbs.
What had been Yugoslavia was now half a dozen little countries. Serbs dominated two and a third of them. So much for unity. And Bronislav, instead of plying his trade with Kalashnikov and RPG, was a long-haul trucker in America, going back and forth along I-10 to bring Los Angeles little pieces of the Everything it so desperately needed.
He was back in town now. He’d sent her a postcard and an e-mail and a text letting her know he was on the way. With the power grid so erratic, snailmail had advantages over its electronic rivals. It might not get there right away, but it would get there.
Vanessa kept telling herself she needed to buy a satellite phone. Then she wouldn’t need to worry about whether the local plastic pseudotrees had power. But satellite phones dropped calls, too: the demand on the satellites was much worse than anyone had dreamt it could be before the eruption. And satellite plans didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Like everything else these days, they cost an arm and both legs.
Bronislav usually brought stuff into San Pedro. That and Long Beach were the L.A. area’s two main ports. Lots of warehouses and major distribution centers were there. And it worked out well for him another way—San Pedro had a sizable Serbian community.
It also had a sizable Croatian community. So far as Vanessa knew, they didn’t go around firebombing each other or blowing up each other’s churches. They limited their ancient feud to sneers and barroom brawls. Wasn’t America a wonderful place?
Now that Bronislav had a lady friend in San Atanasio, getting in to San Pedro wasn’t so convenient for him. He had to ride the bus up or Vanessa had to come down. He almost always came north. Her apartment might be cramped, but most of the hotels in San Pedro were only a short step up from flophouses (some of them were flophouses). They catered to sailors and truckers and hookers, not to producers or Silicon Valley gazillionaires.