Settling in a rocking chair, Marshall went forward and back for a while. His half-brother’s eyes sagged shut. He rocked for a few minutes longer to make sure the kid was good and out. Then he rose and carried James Henry back to the crib.
Down the baby went, on his back. Marshall and his older brother and sister had gone into their cribs on their stomachs. That was what the experts back then had said you should do. Now they said this. By the time James Henry was raising his own kids, they might change their minds again.
Getting him into the crib was always the tricky part. If he woke up and started to scream . . .
But he didn’t. Marshall breathed a sigh of relief. Now he had his own life back till James Henry woke up again. The first thing he did was make himself a sandwich. He thought Blondie was one of the lamest comics in the paper, a relic from the days when Hearsts and Pulitzers and other dinosaurs roamed the earth. No matter what he thought, the monster he concocted out of leftovers, lunch meat, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, jalapeños, and anything else in the fridge that looked interesting would have turned Dagwood Bumstead green with envy.
He attacked his creation like an anaconda engulfing a half-grown tapir. For a few anxious seconds, he wondered if his first bite would go down. It did, and he used a little more restraint with the ones that followed.
After the sandwich disappeared, he wondered if he should fix another one. He contented himself with potato chips, and washed them down with about a liter of Coke. He’d talked Mom into getting some of the real stuff for him. She might worry about her weight, but he stayed skinny without effort.
Once he stopped feeling peckish, he fired up his laptop and started noodling on a story. He didn’t know how much he could do before his half-brother woke up again, but anything was better than nothing. He’d already saved in the middle of a sentence more than once.
When he started trying to write stories, he’d counted on red-hot inspiration to sweep him along to the end. Inspiration was great. You needed it to get ideas to begin with. It could sweep you along—for a while. But you had to keep going even after it ran out. Otherwise, you wouldn’t finish very much.
And you had to polish what did come out of the mill. It wasn’t just about art. It was about craft, too. They talked less about craft in creative-writing classes than they should have. It was like cooking, except you had to figure out all the recipes for yourself.
He worked till he got tired of staring at the words on the monitor. Then he worked another twenty minutes on top of that so the Colin Ferguson he carried inside his head couldn’t growl Quitter! at him. His actual flesh-and-blood father was a good deal more easygoing than the virtual one who ordered him around. Maybe his construct was tougher than the genuine article. Maybe Dad had been harder on him when he was younger. Or maybe marrying Kelly had mellowed his father out. Who the hell knew?
Whatever the answer was, Marshall would have worked longer yet if James Henry hadn’t started crying again. Marshall checked him. He was wet but not poopy. Into the pail went the Huggy. Marshall got the new one on him and closed up before he could ruin it.
After that, Marshall went back to the rocker and held him for a while. His half-brother wasn’t smiling yet. He just stared up at Marshall. He looked confused, the way he did a lot of the time. Who could blame him, either? Babies didn’t have to figure out anything so comparatively simple as how to be a writer. They needed to work out how they were supposed to turn into human beings. Even if there were manuals explaining it all, they couldn’t have read them.
“If you start squawking again, I’m gonna feed you early,” Marshall said. Mom would get bent out of shape at him for screwing up James Henry’s schedule. Marshall didn’t care. A wailing baby drove him battier than fingers on a chalkboard. If Mom didn’t like it, she could damn well hire somebody else.
But James Henry didn’t squawk. He kept looking at Marshall. Nobody’d ever thought Marshall was that interesting before. The baby made little squeaky noises.
Marshall didn’t even notice the door open. There stood Mom, looking tired but smiling. “Aww,” she said.
That broke the spell. James Henry might be able to charm Marshall. His mother didn’t stand a chance. “He hasn’t had dinner yet,” Marshall said, all business now. “He’ll probably want it pretty soon, though. He did okay with lunch. I changed him whenever he needed it.”
“Thank you,” Mom said. “Do you want to stay for dinner? I’ve got enough ground round to make us both hamburgers.”
“That’s okay. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” Marshall got out of there as soon as he politely could, or else a little sooner. He’d take Mom’s money and help her out of a tight spot. Past that, though, he didn’t want anything to do with her.
The sun was setting in the usual Technicolor splendor when he walked out to his car. The wet-dust smell of rain filled the air, as it did so often these days. He was getting used to both the gorgeous sunsets and sunrises and the crappy weather. Eventually, he supposed, he’d forget things had ever been any other way. So would everyone else his age. And people like James Henry wouldn’t even know things had changed.
* * *
Louise Ferguson didn’t mind too much when James Henry woke up once in the night. She could even deal with twice. She was tired enough, going back to sleep was no big deal.
But three or four times . . . That wore you down. That had worn her down even when she was half her current age. She remembered. And it was more than doubly tough now that she’d reached her present state of decrepitude. Caffeine helped, but only so much. She didn’t know what she would have done if coffee hadn’t started tasting good to her again. Cocaine and crank were uppers, too, but she’d stayed married to Colin too long to look at anything illegal.
When the baby left her really exhausted, she thought that was a goddamn shame.
Mr. Nobashi gave her a fishy stare when she sat down at her desk in Ramen Central. “You good, Mrs. Ferguson?” he asked. What he did to her last name was a caution. It sounded like Fugu-san, as if she were an honorable puffer fish.
“Ichi-ban, Mr. Nobashi,” she answered. He giggled, so her Japanese was probably even lousier than his English. Well, too bad. She was also lying through her teeth—she was a long way from being A number one.
Ichi-ban or not, she could do the job. Riding herd on noodles and flavoring packets was a hell of a lot easier than taking care of a baby, as a matter of fact. She hadn’t exactly missed it while she was having the kid, but she didn’t mind coming back to it.
She also didn’t mind when Mr. Nobashi started yelling for coffee and sweet rolls, just as if she’d never left. If he was dead set on jitters and Type 2 diabetes, she’d lend a helping hand.
Patty came by and asked, “Everything okay?” in her harsh Midwestern tones.
“Could be worse,” Louise answered.
“I bet,” the other woman said. “So, who’s taking care of Junior now that you’re back here?”
“One of my sons. He needs money, and I need a babysitter. It works out.”
Patty nodded. “That’s handy, anyways. You prolly don’t gotta pay him as much as you would if you hired somebody from an agency or somewheres, either.”
“I wish!” Louise exclaimed. “It’s cash on the barrelhead with Marshall.”
“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child, the Good Book says,” Patty clucked. “It knows what it’s talking about, too. It mostly does.”
“I guess,” Louise said uncomfortably. She’d ditched her family’s stern Presbyterian faith a long time ago. Despite endless New Age experiments, though, she’d never found anything that really filled the gap. Her kids seemed to get along fine with Nothing, but she couldn’t. She wanted Answers, dammit. As the old TV show said, the truth was out there.
Somewhere. She was sure of it. Where was a different question,
and one of the Answers she hadn’t found. Yet.
To her relief, Patty didn’t push it. Louise couldn’t stand people who liked their religion so much they tried to sell you on it, too. There she agreed with her ex, and with her children. She couldn’t think of many other places where they were all in accord.
What had felt strangest about coming back was how normal it seemed. She knew the inventories she needed to ride herd on. She hadn’t seen the latest and greatest numbers since she went on maternity leave, but they were in ranges and patterns she found familiar.
The more it changes, the more it stays the same. There was a reason clichés got endlessly repeated. They were the ramen of thought: quick, easy, and filling, but without much real nourishment.
She remembered how to ride herd on Mr. Nobashi, too. He’d changed even less than the inventories. He still spent a lot of the time on the phone, spewing impassioned Japanese laced with English profanity. Louise presumed he was talking to the home office in Hiroshima, but for all she could prove he might have been getting bets down with his bookie. She knew a few Japanese words and phrases—anybody who’d lived in San Atanasio for a while picked them up, the same way Southern Californians generally had fragments of Spanish even if their folks came from Denmark—but she didn’t speak the language.
Mr. Nobashi was just hanging up when she brought him coffee a few minutes before quitting time. “Thank you,” he said, which, along with his bad language, proved he was getting Americanized. A boss in Japan, from everything Louise had heard, would take getting waited on for granted.
“You’re welcome,” Louise said to encourage him.
He gulped sugary caffeine and smacked his thin lips. “I talk with Hiroshima,” he said. “Very bad weather, Hiroshima. Cold like nobody remember.”
“Here, too,” Louise agreed. “Snow!” Like any good Angeleno, she said it as if it were a word for people in other, less lucky, parts of the world. And so it had been, till the supervolcano went off. “Not just snow, either. Rain all year long! It’s ridiculous!”
“Snow in Hiroshima, too,” Mr. Nobashi said. “Snow now. Crops in Japan very bad this year.”
“Crops everywhere are bad this year,” Louise said. In most of the American Midwest, there were no crops. Dust and ash buried much of what had been the world’s breadbasket. Even where it didn’t, the horrible weather the supervolcano had caused screwed up crops and shortened growing seasons.
“Hai,” Mr. Nobashi said. “Not much wheat—and cost so much! Oh, Jesus Christ! Company have trouble afford.”
It sounded as if the price of ramen would go up. The price of everything had gone up as if inflated with helium. College students would particularly mourn this bump, though.
Mr. Nobashi eyed the clock on his wall. “You go home,” he told Louise, even if it was early. “You got to be tired.”
“Thank you, Mr. Nobashi!” She bailed out before he had the chance to change his mind.
Marshall was changing James Henry’s diaper when Louise walked into the condo. “Good job,” she said, to encourage him. “You’re doing super with him. No diaper rash or anything.”
“Yeah, well, when he’s wet or stinky I deal with it,” he answered, and she could hear the shrug in his voice. He washed his hands, grabbed his laptop, and headed for the door. “See you in the morning.”
“Marshall—” Louise began. He paused, but his face didn’t open. She swallowed a sigh. “Never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Out he went, not quite slamming the door behind him. No, he hadn’t forgiven her for leaving Colin. Odds were he never would. She’d tried to explain how stifled she’d felt while she was married to his father. She’d tried, and heard herself failing. He didn’t understand, or want to.
Louise sighed. Yes, she’d lost the children, and she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. She’d hoped Vanessa would get it, but Vanessa’s own troubles were the only ones that were real to her. James Henry made a baby noise, halfway between a gurgle and a burp. Louise picked him up and cuddled him. He couldn’t even smile yet, but she didn’t care. He’d love her no matter what.
For a while, anyhow.
V
“I’ve got a job for you, Colin,” Mike Pitcavage said. He didn’t look like a police chief. He looked like a national news anchor, or maybe a Senator who was thinking about running for President. He was tall and fit and tan, with a full head of iron-gray hair. He wore custom-made Italian suits, not the off-the-rack stuff most cops—Colin included—put on every day.
Colin didn’t even particularly resent him for winning the chief’s job, though he’d put in for it himself. Pitcavage could make nice, a talent Colin knew he lacked. You could get by as a lieutenant if people saw what you really thought of them. When you had to deal with the mayor and the city council all the damn time, that didn’t fly any more.
“What’s up?” he asked, looking across the desk at Pitcavage.
The desk was about the size of an aircraft-carrier flight deck. It was almost entirely bare. The only things on it were two framed photographs, one of Pitcavage’s wife, the other of his son. Caroline was a nice gal. She wasn’t a trophy wife or anything; they’d been married a long time. Colin’s opinion of Darren Pitcavage was rather lower. If he weren’t a prominent cop’s kid . . .
But he was, so the drunk-driving charge quietly got reduced to speeding. That fight in the bar? People said the other guy threw the first punch. There’d been something that had to do with vandalism, too, but that also didn’t stick. Darren was even better-looking than his old man, but his eyes didn’t seem to want to meet the camera.
Mike Pitcavage opened a desk drawer, took out a piece of paper, and slid it across the desk at Colin. “We’ve got a big oil tanker coming into San Pedro next week,” he said. “The crude will go to the refineries in El Segundo. All the impacted departments will participate in security arrangements. I want you to take leadership in San Atanasio.”
Before Colin said anything, he took a long look at the paper. Then he clicked his tongue between his teeth. “So this oil is for South Bay police departments? How’d we manage that?”
“We managed, with some help from the politicians. Trust me—you don’t want to know the gory details,” Pitcavage answered.
Colin believed him. The world seemed to get dog-eat-doggier every day. With more and more people grabbing for less and less, where was the surprise in that? “San Pedro’s part of Los Angeles. I don’t see the LAPD mentioned here anywhere.”
“No, and you won’t, either.” The San Atanasio police chief looked sly.
“Huh,” Colin said. A narrow strip of territory—part of it ran just east of San Atanasio—connected San Pedro to the rest of L.A. The port helped make Los Angeles a great city; it had for more than a hundred years. “So, are we going to have to protect this crude from the L.A. cops, then?”
“They aren’t supposed to know about the tanker,” Pitcavage said.
“And then you wake up!” Colin exclaimed. The chief looked blank. Colin put it in words of one syllable: “What are the odds of that?”
“We’ve made the necessary arrangements,” Pitcavage insisted. How many bureaucrats had been persuaded to look the other way and keep their mouths shut? How much had it cost?
“If LAPD does find out, we’re liable to have a war on our hands.” Colin meant it literally. The To protect and to serve boys were as hard up for gasoline as anybody else. If they found out this big shipment was coming into their port, under their noses, and all earmarked for other people, there’d be stereophonic hell to pay.
“Well, that’s one of the reasons I want you in charge of our part of the security,” Chief Pitcavage answered. “You’ve got the military experience we need.”
To Colin’s way of thinking, a hitch in the Navy didn’t exactly equate him to General Patton (although one might work wo
nders for Darren Pitcavage). He could see that saying so would do him less than no good, though. Swallowing a sigh, he asked, “This takes priority over . . . ?”
“Everything,” Pitcavage said flatly.
“Including the Strangler case?”
“Everything includes everything,” the chief said. “If we don’t get our hands on this gas, pretty soon we’ll we chasing the damn Strangler on skateboards and scooters.”
It wasn’t that bad. Colin knew it, and Pitcavage had to know it, too. Civilians could still buy—some—gas. But the price went up every day. The supervolcano had wrecked refineries and pipelines. The spasmodic nuclear war in the Middle East had knocked production over the head. If the South Bay towns had to pay anything close to retail for the fuel their cops used, they wouldn’t be able to do much else. Thus—Colin supposed—this skulduggery.
“Well, I’ll do it,” he said: the only possible reply. “And I’ll make damn sure I’ve got Gabe Sanchez right beside me.”
“However you want it.” Something in Pitcavage’s voice told Colin he’d just lost points with the chief. Gabe was too . . . too unpolished, that was the polite word, to stand high on Mike Pitcavage’s gold-star list. Gabe didn’t worry about it; he loved his capo di tutti capi, too. Colin didn’t worry about it, either. If Pitcavage needed him so bad, he’d have to live with Gabe. And he evidently did.
Something else occurred to Colin: “Whatever we’ve bought the SWAT team in the way of heavy weapons, I want that, too.”
The chief frowned, plainly trying to remember. “I know we’ve got some military rifles that’ll fire full auto. We may have a real machine gun. If we do, nobody’s taken it out of storage except maybe to clean it for a hell of a long time.”
Colin nodded; he also couldn’t remember the San Atanasio PD hauling out a machine gun. God, the paperwork that would have taken! But, as the man said, the times, they were a-changin’. No, they’d a-changed.
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