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 cliches 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 wonders 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.
“Let me have the Door-Knocker, too,” he said. “I’ll lead the parade with it.”
“There you go!” He actually made Pitcavage grin. “You got it.” The Door-Knocker was a Ford Explorer armored against small-arms fire, with a ram sticking out from the front of the hood and with vision slits and firing slits for the cops inside. A do-it-yourself armored car, in other words. It was ugly as sin, but terrific for smashing down barricaded entryways to crack houses, meth labs, and lots of other places where the bad guys really didn’t want company.
“Okay,” Colin said, anything but sure if it was. “Let me get my people together, and I’ll see what kind of toys we have in the playroom. When does this tanker get in?”
“Next Tuesday,” the chief answered. “Our convoy of trucks will exit the 110 at Braxton Bragg Boulevard. You’ll meet them at the exit ramp and escort them west through the city before handing off to the Hawthorne PD.”
“Right.” Colin had to hope it would be. His opinion of the neighboring department was not high. Hawthorne was full of gangbangers, and its cops were chronically underfunded. “I’m worrying about the LAPD, but they’ll have to make sure the Crips don’t hijack our crude.”
“Lord knows the Crips get into all kinds of shit, but I don’t think they have a rogue refinery.” Pitcavage grinned to show he’d made a joke.
He thought he had, anyhow. The Crips wouldn’t have to turn the crude into gas and motor oil to get value for it. All they’d have to do was steal it and threaten to light a match. How big a ransom could they squeeze out of people if they did that? Big. Big, big, big. Colin could see as much. Could Mike Pitcavage? It didn’t seem so. He might be able to make nice, but he had all the imagination of a cherrystone clam.
Well, when he wore a uniform instead of Giorgio Armani, he had the row of stars on either side of his collar. He knew where to find a guy with imagination, and knew how to give him orders. Which he’d gone and done.
“I’ll get on it,” Colin said.
The first thing he did, of course, was tell Gabe Sanchez. The sergeant pursed his lips and blew out through them. It might have been a whistle without sound or an exhalation without a cigarette. “We’ve got the fix in good, huh?” he said when Colin finished.
“Sure sounds that way.” After a meditative moment, Colin added, “We’d damn well better.”
“Boy, you can sing that in church!” Gabe agreed. “The LAPD doesn’t know thing one about it, huh?”
“Not Thing One, and not Thing Two, either.” How many times had Colin read his kids The Cat in the Hat? A zillion, at least. “That’s what the heap big boss says, anyway.”
“Could get interesting if he’s wrong,” Sanchez observed.
“That also crossed my mind, as a matter of fact. I have the feeling it crossed Mike’s mind, too. Which is why we meet the tanker trucks loaded for bear.”
“Yeah!” Gabe sounded enthusiastic. He might have rough edges, but he didn’t know how to back up. “Wonder what an LAPD squad car’d look like after it ran into the Door-Knocker.” By the way he said it, he couldn’t wait to find out.
“Mm, the idea is for the Door-Knocker to run into stuff, not the other way around,” Colin reminded him.
“Details, details.” Gabe waved that aside. “Can’t wait to see the L.A. cops’ faces when they find out we’ve got the goods and they don’t.”
“If everything works right, they won’t find out,” Colin said. Gabe shrugged, as if to note that everything never worked right.
Tuesday dawned chilly and rainy, as too many days in San Atanasio had since the eruption. If this was what Seattle had been like before the supervolcano went off, all the Californicators who’d moved to the Northwest got what they deserved. Only now SoCal was getting it, too.
Rain or no rain, Colin and his armed party took their stations on the Braxton Bragg Boulevard overpass to the Harbor Freeway, waiting for the precious petroleum convoy to come up from the south. Gabe Sanchez stood by the rail, the hood to his plastic poncho shielding his face well enough to let him smoke. Colin had his own share of bad habits and then som
e. He didn’t know how he’d missed tobacco, but he had.
Watching Gabe crush one cigarette under his shoe and then light another, he wondered what would have happened if people had discovered the filthy weed about 1950 instead of way the hell back when. He didn’t need to wonder long. He was convinced governments all over the world would have outlawed it as a dangerous, addictive drug. And, no doubt, bad guys would be growing it on secret farms right this minute and making stacks of illegal cash off it. There’d be books and earnest, concerned TV movies and obscene hip-hop records glorifying the cigar dealer. .
He shook his head. Gabe saw the motion. “What’s up?” he asked, breathing out smoke.
“Nothing.” Colin’s speculation left him faintly embarrassed. Gabe would only guffaw. “Just woolgathering.”
Before Gabe could come up with any more blush-worthy questions, a uniformed cop called, “Won’t be long now. They’re moving past the Goodyear Blimp’s mooring mast. Five, ten minutes.”
“Gotcha, Jimmy,” Colin said. “Tell ’em we’re ready and waiting as soon as they get off the freeway.” He walked over to another black-and-white and asked the man inside, “Anything interesting going on on the LAPD frequencies?” Monitoring the enemy was always a good idea when you were at war.
The San Atanasio policeman wore headphones to help him monitor the radio without interference from the freeway’s unending whoosh and roar. Colin had to repeat his question, louder the second time. Then the fellow answered, “Everything seems pretty quiet. Maybe the fix really is in.”
“Here’s hoping.” Colin still had trouble believing it. He turned east, toward the offramp the fuel trucks would use. A couple of minutes later, a Torrance police car-part of the advance guard, no doubt-pulled off. The cops inside waved when they saw the waiting San Atanasio police officers. Colin waved back.
“Uh-oh!” exclaimed the cop monitoring LAPD radio traffic. “Cars on the way to Braxton Bragg Boulevard and the 110.”
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