Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2

by Harry Turtledove

  Tim giggled. Giggling was a hazard with what they’d just smoked, but Marshall wanted to know. It wasn’t urgent-nothing was urgent, or would be for a while-but he did want to. When he asked again, Tim giggled some more.

  “C’mon, man,” Marshall said. “Dope like this is hard to come by these days.” The supervolcano had done the same number on weed as it had on so many other cash crops. Climates that had been just right were suddenly too cold, and production in areas that went from too hot to just right hadn’t ramped up yet. So good dope was indeed hard to come by.

  But that turned out not to be why Tim was giggling-or not the only reason, anyhow. He also wasn’t giggling just because he was stoned out of his tree, although he was. “You sure you want to know? You really, truly sure? Really-o, truly-o sure?”

  “Talk, already.” Marshall would have got mad if it didn’t seem like too much trouble. “I don’t want the trailer. I want the fuckin’ movie.”

  He set everybody laughing, Tim included. “Okay, okay,” Tim said. “Just remember, you asked for it. You wanna know where I got the shit? I got it from Darren Shitcabbage, man. How funny is that?”

  Most of the erstwhile would-be masters of early twentieth-century Europe thought it was the funniest thing they’d heard in their entire lives, or at least since they got baked. Lucas damn near wet his pants, he thought it was so hysterical. “The chief’s kid, dealing dope?” he said. “Oh, wow! That is too much, I mean way too much.” He nudged Marshall. “How come you don’t do that?”

  Marshall smoked dope. Marshall bought dope. It wasn’t as if he didn’t support his local dealers. But he’d never had the slightest urge to move into the supply end of the business. You started getting into heavy shit when you did that, and dealing with some highly unpleasant people. From what he knew about Chief Pitcavage’s son, Darren had himself a head start on that.

  His old man wished he would have drawn his line closer to truth, justice, and the Drugs Are Wicked American Way. Marshall didn’t draw it there, no matter what his father wished. But he did draw a line. Darren Pitcavage didn’t seem to.

  Marshall fired himself another fatty. If he got wasted enough, maybe he wouldn’t remember any of this tomorrow. If he didn’t remember it, he wouldn’t have to figure out what to do about it, or whether to do anything at all about it.

  He did remember. He’d known he would, no matter how much he smoked. You lost things for a while with weed-sometimes, anyway. But they mostly came back. He’d never been into drugs that bit chunks out of your life and swallowed them for good.

  If he’d liked Darren Pitcavage better. . If his father had liked Chief Pitcavage better. . He still needed a couple more days to work up his nerve to go, “Dad?”

  “What?” His father sounded distracted, and was-he was changing Deborah’s diaper.

  “Um-you know I went to Lucas’ place over the weekend to play Diplomacy, right?”

  “Yeah. How’d it go?” Dad had learned the game. He and Marshall sometimes played a cutthroat two-man version with a much newer copy of the game than the one Lucas’ dad had resurrected. Each of them controlled three countries, with weak sister Italy vacant. No real diplomacy in that variant, but it was great for testing board maneuvers.

  “We, mm, kind of got sidetracked after a while. Tim-” Marshall had to stop while Dad snorted and snickered. Dad never had been able to take Tim seriously, not even for a minute. Licking his lips, Marshall made himself go on, “Tim brought out some weed, some fine weed, and-”

  “Now tell me something I didn’t know,” his father broke in. “Your clothes smelled like a hemp farm outside of Veracruz.”

  How Dad knew what a hemp farm outside of Veracruz smelled like. . was a question for another day. And he hadn’t even squeaked about the way Marshall’s clothes smelled till Marshall raised the subject. Discretion, from my old man? Marshall wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. But there it was.

  “Dad. .” There was something in Shakespeare that Marshall couldn’t quite recall about doing it quickly if you were gonna do it. He brought the words out in a rush: “Dad, he bought the shit off Darren Pitcavage.”

  Marshall’s father held Deborah in the crook of his elbow. Even so, all at once it wasn’t Dad standing there any more. It was Lieutenant Colin Ferguson, in full cop mode. “Tell me that again. I want to make sure I heard it straight.” Most unhappily, Marshall repeated himself. His father took a few seconds to work things through, his face as expressionless as a computer monitor while the CPU crunched numbers on a big spreadsheet. Then he asked, “How much dope are we talking about here?”

  “Tim had, like, I dunno, a few ounces,” Marshall answered. “Like, enough to get us loaded but not enough to go into business for himself.”

  “Okay,” his father said. To Marshall’s amazement and relief, it did seem okay; Dad wasn’t going to give him the sermon out of Reefer Madness. Instead, his father went on, “Did Tim say whether Darren Pitcavage was in business for himself? Or was this one friend selling some to another friend?”

  Marshall had to think back. “Um, Tim didn’t say one way or the other. But I know for a fact he’s not tight with Darren or anything. He was, like, cracking up on account of he was buying dope from the police chief’s kid.”

  “Uh-huh,” his father said.

  The grim finality in that almost-word made alarms blare in Marshall’s head. “Dad,” he said urgently, “for God’s sake don’t drop on him. If you do, he’ll know I talked to you, and-” He didn’t-he couldn’t-go on.

  For a wonder, he didn’t have to draw his father a picture. “Nobody loves a snitch,” Dad said. Marshall managed a nod. Dad continued, “But when somebody knows something important and he keeps quiet about it, a lot of the time that’s worse.” He waited. Marshall nodded again-not with any great enthusiasm, but he did. Dad set a hand on his shoulder, and Dad was anything but a touchy-feely guy. “This may be that kind of important. I don’t know for sure that it is, but I think I’d better find out.”

  “Try not to drag Tim’s name into it,” Marshall said again. “And-” He stopped short once more.

  “Try not to drag yours in, too?” his father finished for him.

  “Yeah.” Marshall hated the dull embarrassment in his own voice.

  “Darren Pitcavage is a nasty piece of work, no matter what his father does for a living,” Dad said. “If it weren’t for his father, I think we would’ve taken him off the streets a while ago. Well, maybe better late than never.”

  “If you say so.” Marshall wasn’t sure of that, or of anything else.

  XX

  Colin Ferguson contemplated ways and means of busting his boss’ son without making it look like a coup d’etat inside the San Atanasio Police Department. The more he contemplated, the gloomier he got. The case would have to be dead-bang, one hundred percent airtight. And it would have to get made without Mike Pitcavage’s finding out it was even cooking.

  Because if the chief did find out, something else would cook instead. Colin knew what, too: his own goose.

  If, of course, there was a case. If Darren had sold Tim a few ounces and that was the only time he’d ever seen that side of the business, that was one thing. But if he’d sold a few ounces to a good many Tims, Dicks, and Harrys, that was something else again. That was a serious felony, was what it was.

  If. Marshall didn’t know for certain. Maybe Tim didn’t know for certain. (Colin suspected Tim didn’t know anything for certain, the alphabet very possibly included.) But the vibe was that Darren Pitcavage was doing some real dealing.

  Do I want to put my neck on the block because of the vibe? Yes, that was the question, much more than To be or not to be? Or Colin thought it was at first. Then he realized they were one and the same, only his version wasn’t in iambic pentameter.

  It was well before noon when he walked over to Gabe Sanchez’s desk and said, “Let’s go Code Seven.”

  Gabe blinked. “Early,” he remarked,
but then he patted his midsection. “Hey, I can always eat. Where you wanna go?”

  “How about the Verona?” Colin suggested.

  “Kind of a ways,” Gabe said. And it was-the old-fashioned Italian place was closer to Colin’s house than to the station. That was why he wanted to go there: he didn’t want other cops overhearing him. He couldn’t very well say that here. A clenched jaw and a raised eyebrow got some kind of message across-Gabe stood up with no more argument. “Well, I’m game. What’s it doing outside?”

  “We’ll both find out.”

  It was chilly and cloudy, but not raining. Gabe lit a cigarette. They climbed onto their bicycles and pedaled off. Colin did a good deal of talking on the way. No one except Gabe could hear him then.

  He finished just before they got to the Verona. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Holy shit,” Gabe said.

  Colin chuckled-not in any happy way. “Yeah, I figured that out for myself, matter of fact.”

  “I bet you did!” Gabe exclaimed. “You better watch who you talk to, too. Word gets back and you’re walking around without your nuts.”

  “That also crossed my mind,” Colin said. They went inside. The Verona was a refugee from the 1950s, with red-checked tablecloths, candles stuck in Chianti bottles (often useful now, not just for show), and posters of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Colosseum on the walls. They made spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna, ravioli-stuff like that. And they had a wood-fired pizza oven, so they stayed open even when the power went out.

  Colin and Gabe decided to split a medium sausage pizza. The dough would be odd by pre-eruption standards. So would the cheese. The sausage would be pork or maybe chicken. By now, Colin made such adjustments almost automatically. Almost.

  “I’ll tell you who to go to,” Gabe said when the pizza got there. “Talk to Rodney, man. He hates dealers with a passion, and he won’t screw you.”

  “Even if it turns out to be nothing?” Colin said.

  “Even then.” Gabe took a bite from a slice of pizza. He chewed thoughtfully. “Could be worse. Could be better, too.”

  “Sure could,” Colin agreed after a bite of his own. But he ate with more enthusiasm than he’d expected. The black detective had been on the mental list he was making, too-and, by the nature of things, that list wasn’t very long.

  He paid the tab. The cops unlocked their bikes from the little curbside trees to which they’d been chained. Gabe smoked another cigarette on the way back to the station. It started drizzling just as they got there. They hurried inside. Chief Pitcavage was gabbing with the uniformed officer at the front desk. He nodded amiably to Colin and Gabe. “Hey, guys. Wet outside?”

  “Just a little, like it doesn’t know whether to piss or get off the pot,” Gabe answered. Colin was glad to let him do the talking. Dammit, he didn’t have anything against Mike Pitcavage-except for raising a worthless kid and letting him decide he would get away with anything because his father was a bigwig in this town.

  Pitcavage wouldn’t think like that, of course. He’d think it was because he got the chief’s badge and Colin didn’t. Were things reversed between them, it would have been, too. Colin was positive of that.

  He quietly checked which cases Rodney Ellis was working on, then ambled over to his desk. “Want to talk with you about the witnesses to the robbery at that check-cashing place last Saturday,” he said, as casually as he could.

  “Well, okay,” Rodney answered. That wasn’t Colin’s usual style, but it wasn’t too far out of line, either. “Drag up a rock.” He pointed to the beat-up chair by his desk.

  “Let’s do it in one of the interrogation rooms,” Colin said. “Coupla things I want to bounce off you.”

  “However you want.” Rodney got to his feet. He was solidly built, but moved as smoothly as the point guard he’d been in high school. They walked into one of the rooms. Colin closed the door behind them and glanced up at the camera near the ceiling to make sure the red light under the lens was off. He hadn’t even sat down when the African-American detective asked, “What’s really going on, man?”

  “I’ve got a problem,” Colin said. “Maybe you can give me a hand with it.”

  “I’m listening.” Ellis showed no cards. Well, neither had Colin.

  But he had to now. He had to if he was going to go anywhere with this, anyhow. He told Rodney what he’d heard from Marshall-what Marshall had heard from Tim, in other words. He named no names, though he was glumly aware Rodney would work out at least one of them without a hell of a lot of trouble.

  When he finished, Rodney didn’t say anything for close to a minute. Then, very softly, the other cop went, “Aw, shit, man.”

  Colin nodded. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  “It wasn’t your kid who bought from Pitcavage Junior?” Sure as anything, Ellis could walk barefoot through the obvious.

  “No, a friend of his. I’ve known, uh, him”-Colin almost said Tim-“since they were in high school. They kinda stopped handing out brains before the guy got to the front of the line, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t make up something like that for the fun of it. The way Marshall tells it, his buddy thought it was a big old joke.”

  “A joke. Uh-huh.” Rodney didn’t sound like somebody who was going to ROFL. “You believe this happened because your boy’s friend says it did. You believe darling Darren’s dealing.” Those weren’t questions, not the way he came out with them.

  “’Fraid so.” Colin nodded again. He would rather have gone to Kelly’s dentist father for a root canal without Novocaine, but he did. “Would I be talking about it with you if I didn’t believe it?”

  “Not fuckin’ likely,” Ellis answered, which was also the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He eyed Colin. “What do you want to do about it?”

  That was the $64,000 question, all right. Colin had been thinking of little else since his son gave him the unwelcome news. Sighing, he said, “Seems to me we’ve got to find out how deep Darren’s in. If this was a onetime thing, if he scored more than he could use for a while and was selling some, then I guess we shine it on. But if he’s dealing dealing, if you know what I mean. .”

  “Then we got to drop on him.” Rodney didn’t ask that, either-he said it. Colin made his head go up and down one more time. Rodney went on, “And whatever we do, we got to do it so Chief Mike doesn’t know we’re doin’ it.”

  “Probably a good plan,” Colin agreed, so dryly the other cop guffawed.

  “I trot over to the chief’s office now, man, you’re fucked,” the African-American detective said.

  “Yeah, I know.” Colin left it right there.

  Ellis stared up at the acoustic tiles on the ceiling. He let out a sigh of his own. “And if I don’t go to Pitcavage, if I start working this like it’s a case, and he finds out, I’m fucked, too.”

  “I’m sorry. Shit, I’m sorry all kinds of ways,” Colin said. “If you want to make like this entire conversation never happened, hey, I can see why you would. Long as you don’t rat me out, I won’t hold it against you.”

  “Wanna know something weird, Colin? I believe you,” Rodney said. “Anybody else in the whole wide world’d be blowin’ smoke up my ass. Pitcavage sure would, Lord knows. But you, I believe. Doesn’t matter any which way, though, on account of I’m in. If Darren’s dealing, he’s got to pay the price, same as anybody else. Wasn’t for his daddy, he woulda paid some prices a while ago by now. ’Bout time he finds out the rules don’t have except for you in ’em anywhere.”

  “Looks that way to me, too,” Colin said. He hadn’t been so relieved since. . since when? Since Kelly’d said she’d marry him-that was the only answer that crossed his mind. “Thanks, man,” he added a moment later. He’d never been one for big shows of gratitude.

  “It’s cool, Colin.” Yes, Rodney’d known him long enough to have a notion of how he ticked. “Anybody who deals, he ain’t no friend of mine.” He peered up at the ceiling again, as
if trying to extract wisdom from the random patterns of holes in the tiles. “Talk about friends, though. . We end up busting the chief’s kid, this whole goddamn department’ll go off like a grenade.”

  “That did occur to me, yeah,” Colin said. “Be careful while you’re working on it. Be careful who you pick to help you, too. You know the old line-three guys can keep a secret as long as two of ’em are dead.”

  “I didn’t, but I like it.” Thoughtfully, Ellis continued, “Not the only reason to be careful. Darren, he’ll make a lot of cops. A couple of the brothers who haven’t been here since dirt, maybe not. Let’s hope he’s one of the white guys who figure all black folks look alike.”

  “That’s a bunch of bull, too,” Colin said. “You don’t look one damn bit like Halle Berry.”

  Rodney laughed. “Well, you got that right, anyway. Long as we’re here, you wanna really talk about the robbery?”

  “Sure. Let’s do it,” Colin said, so they did.

  * * *

  Deborah started to nurse. Kelly felt her milk let down. That was a sensation she’d never known-never even imagined-till she had the baby. Well, so was labor, but this was a lot more pleasant than that.

  Deborah sucked and gulped, sucked and gulped. Then she tried to gulp when she should have been sucking or something, because she choked and swallowed wrong. The first time that happened, it had horrified Kelly. Now she got that it wouldn’t kill her firstborn daughter. She pulled Deborah off the breast and hauled her up onto her own shoulder, patting her on the back till she could breathe easily again. It didn’t take long. Then the baby went back to supper.

  Kelly’d just switched her to the other side when her eyelids started to sag. Up on the shoulder she went once more. Kelly wanted to get a burp out of her before she crashed. She also checked the baby’s diaper. Deborah was dry. That was good.

  “Okay, kid, you can sack out now,” Kelly said, rocking in the recliner. With luck, Deborah would stay sleep long enough for Kelly to make dinner, perhaps even long enough to let her eat it. That was bound to be against the babies’ union regulations, but the local hadn’t come down on Deborah yet.