Supervolcano :Eruption

by Harry Turtledove

  One of the girls behind the desk, a blonde who’d be porky in another five or ten years, had not a clue concealed anywhere about her person. The other, a skinny brunette, not only knew about the band’s reservations but whistled the start of “Impossible Things Before Breakfast,” one of the tracks from the new album.

  Michael Jackson or Mariah Carey would have committed seppuku if an album sold the way Out of the Pond was doing. Well, Michael Jackson was already dead, but you get the picture. For a band like Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, numbers that would have been disastrous for a big act looked terrific instead. They were making more money on sales from iTunes and the physical CD than they were from live shows, which had never happened before. They’d be able to afford to take some extra time getting their next release just right.

  So maybe it wasn’t an enormous surprise that the registration clerk knew one tune or another from Out of the Pond. Nice, yeah. Egoboo, for sure. But maybe not an enormous surprise. “Impossible Things Before Breakfast” wasn’t a single, though. Never had been, never would be. If you knew that one, you not only had the album but you really liked it.

  “Are you going to the show tomorrow night?” Rob asked her.

  She shook her head. “Can’t afford it,” she said regretfully.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tina Morton.”

  He wrote it down. “Show up at will-call. They’ll have a seat for you.”

  “Thanks!” She beamed at him. That might turn into something promising later on, or it might not. He wouldn’t worry about it now. Tickets were only twenty-five dollars, but he wasn’t far from the days when twenty-five dollars weren’t only himself. And if the next album tanked instead of taking off from what Out of the Pond was doing, he’d go right back there again.

  The rooms, next door to each other, were, well, rooms. Rob had been in a lot of different rooms in a lot of different places. He’d had some that were better than these, more re worse. These were on the ground floor, as the band had requested. They wouldn’t have to shlep stuff up and down stairs.

  After everything was out of the cars, Justin stretched and grimaced, miming an unhappy back. “We’re gonna be too old for all this hauling one of these days. One of these days soon,” he amended, so maybe he wasn’t faking the sore back. “What do we do then?”

  “It’s not what we do then. It’s what we do in the meantime. We’ve gotta make ourselves a big enough deal so we can pay roadies to take care of all the heavy, sweaty shit for us,” Rob said. “What I want to know is, where do you go for dinner when you’re in Missoula, Montana?”

  “Go ask Tina at the desk,” Justin answered. “Or I will if you don’t want to. She’s not half bad.”

  “My old man always tells me Never volunteer, but I’ll do it. Not half bad is right,” Rob said. “And she knows ‘Impossible Things Before Breakfast’! How impossible is that?”

  “Pretty much so, most places, but every once in a while they do let the brain-damaged ones out of the Home for the Terminally Inane,” Justin said. Rob shot him the bird and went back to the front desk to chat up Tina. When he came back, Justin gave him a sardonic hand. “Twenty minutes, man. What were you doing?”

  “Like, talking.”

  “Like, right! I’ve never heard anybody call it that before. That long, you probably did it twice.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” Rob replied with dignity. “Some people don’t blow their load too quick the first time. Anyway, about dinner-”

  “You mean you remembered dinner, too?”

  Rob took no notice. It wasn’t easy, but he managed. “Back toward the Interstate half a block is something called the Stone of Accord. ‘Where the Gaelic meets the garlic,’ it says on the menu-she showed me one.”

  “Corned beef and linguini! Cabbage pizza! Oh, boy!”

  “Menu looked pretty good. And they’ve got Moose Drool on tap. Maybe a block and a half the other way is the Montana Club. If you haven’t lost all your money gambling, you can eat dinner there.” Rob knew about poker clubs that doubled as restaurants; San Atanasio had several. When he was little, they’d paid the town a lot in tax revenue. Now, thanks to the big Indian casinos, they’d fallen on hard times. And, without that tax loot, so had San Atanasio.

  “Which is better?”

  “Stone of Accord is a couple of bucks cheaper. Tina says the food’s better, too.”

  “Okay. We’ll blame her if it turns out to be crappy.” Justin set a hand on Rob’s shoulder. “But don’t worry. We’ll blame you, too. If it’s good, though, she gets all the credit.”

  “Have you been talking with my father?” Rob asked, not altogether in jest. The band walked up to the Stone of Accord. The food proved pretty good. The other three guys drank toasts to Tina. Draft Moose Drool stout was as good as anything this side of Guinness. And if you wanted Guinness instead, all you had to do was ask for it.

  The waitress recognized them. “You look just like you do online!” she exclaimed, as if that were some kind of surprise.

  “Not me,” Rob said gravely. “I wouldn’t let ’em photograph my tail.”

  “We made him climb out of the formaldehyde bottle, too,” Justin said. The girl just kinda looked at him, which meant she didn’t know what the hell formaldehyde was. Fancier than in-formaldehyde, Rob supposed. He also got his low taste in puns from his old man.

  “You guys are playing at the Civic Stadium, right?” she asked.

  “No, over at the Golden Sluice, near the university campus,” Rob said.

  “I’ve been there. No way it’s big enough!” she said. “People will be jammed in there. Lined up around the block, like. You guys are the hottest band to come to town in a long time.”

  God help Missoula, in that case, Rob thought. Aloud, he said, “I like the way she talks.”

  “Me, too,” Biff Thorvald agreed loudly. He sounded as if he liked it a lot. He got her name, and promised her a ticket. If they were gonna sell out the place, why the hell not? Rob liked Tina better-she got the jokes-but the waitress was a long way from terrible. No guarantees, but sometimes life on the road could be a lot of fun.

  V

  “Oh, Christ. Another one,” Colin Ferguson said mournfully. Not all the little old ladies who died in San Atanasio went on the South Bay Strangler’s page in the ledger. Not even all the little old ladies who got murdered in town did. Just the week before, a punk ransacking a house for shit to steal so he could feed his habit put three slugs into seventy-four-year-old Lupe Sandoval when she got back from Safeway sooner than she might have. One of them blew out the back of her head. The punk sat in a cell, awaiting arraignment. Colin had questioned him; he still had no clue he’d done anything wrong. It made you wonder why you bothered sometimes. Meanwhile, the widow Sandoval’s family was scrambling for the cash they’d need to bury her.

  Maria Peterfalvy, though… She’d got out of Hungary in 1956, one jump ahead of Russian tanks. A framed black-and-white photo on her dresser showed her not long afterwards. She’d been a beauty; no other word for it.

  She wasn’t beautiful now, lying there on the bedroom floor in the cramped little tract house where she’d lived for upwards of forty years. First with her husband and kids; then, after he died and they got on with their own lives, by herself.

  She wasn’t living now, either. Gabe Sanchez looked out through the window. Filmy curtains kept people on the outside from seeing in, but not the reverse. Sanchez said, “Here’s the first news van.”

  “Happy fucking day,” Colin answered. Mrs. Peterfalvy wouldn’t mind his language, not any more she wouldn’t. He patted his hair with his hand, though he couldn’t imitate a newsie’s perfect coif. He held his fist-an imaginary mike-under Sanchez’s nose. “Tell me, Sergeant, why haven’t you been able to catch this Strangler son of a bitch when he’s knocked off-what is it? nineteen? — little old ladies now.”

  “Nineteen is correct, yes,” Sanchez replied, as if he were really being interviewed. “And
we haven’t caught him because he doesn’t leave fingerprints anywhere and his goddamn DNA isn’t in any of our databases.” He eyed Colin as if his boss truly were a brain-damaged reporter. “So why don’t you fuck off and die and let me try and do my job?”

  “But don’t you realize you aren’t protecting the public the way the public deserves to be protected?” Colin persisted, his eyes wide with inncent indignation (or possibly raw ignorance).

  Gabe Sanchez started to say something, then stopped and shook his head. “Man, that’s scary. You sound just like one of the shitheads. How d’you do it?”

  “The more you repeat yourself, the better the imitation you do,” Colin said. “I mean, if you only say something once, it can’t be important, right? It can’t have any real significance, either.”

  “That, too,” Sanchez agreed. “And here comes another van.”

  “Where’s the coroner?” Colin asked morosely. “He’s the guy who needs to answer questions. Him and the DNA analysts, I mean.”

  “But you’re the officer in charge of the investigation. That means you’re the guy with all the answers,” Gabe said. “You know you are, Lieutenant. It says so right here on the box.”

  Colin told him where to put the box, and how to fold it before he did. Sergeant Sanchez laughed. He could afford to; he wasn’t the officer in charge of the investigation. Neither was Colin Ferguson, or not exactly. Even counting Mrs. Peterfalvy, only seven of the South Bay Strangler’s victims lived in San Atanasio. Other poor harried cops were looking for him all over the region.

  But Colin was the man on the spot right now. He walked out to face the wolves. He wished they were wolves. He might have thrown them raw meat. He might have shot them. If all else failed, he might have reasoned with them. Reporters were immune to reason, and there wasn’t enough raw meat in the world to make them happy. Opening fire would have got him talked about.

  He strode out onto Mrs. Peterfalvy’s neatly kept front lawn. Sure as hell, the newsies bore down on him like the slavering beasts they were. The TV and radio reporters thrust microphones in his face. He disliked them more than the ones who worked for newspapers. The latter actually had to be able to write. TV people just had to know how to read, and they didn’t even need to be especially good at that.

  Video cameramen aimed the tools of their trade at him like so many bazookas. Unlike bazookas, though, video cameras could blow up an unwary man’s reputation. The cameramen watched what they filmed with a certain ironic detachment. Unlike the pretty people they abetted, they actually had to know what they were doing.

  Reporters’ manners came straight out of preschool. Four shouted questions at the same time. They didn’t go Me!.. No, me!.. NO, ME! but they might as well have.

  Like a playground monitor, Colin held up a hand. “If you all talk at once, I can’t hear any of you,” he said. That made them yell louder. But they started waving their hands, too. Colin pointed to a porky Hispanic guy from what he thought of as Eye-witless News. “Yes, Victor?”

  “Is that the South Bay Strangler in there?” Victor asked, neatening his hair with the hand that wasn’t holding the mike.

  “No, sir,” Colin answered, his face expressionless. “The victim is Maria Peterfalvy, age seventy-nine.” He spelled the last name. Some of the reporters, as he had reason to know, couldn’t spell their own right more than two times out of three.

  Victor stamped his foot on the sidewalk. He pooched out his lower lip like a three-year-old working up to a tantrum. But he did manage to say, “No! What I mean is, did the South Bay Strangler strangle her?”

  Then why don’t you say what ean? In Colin’s experience, people who didn’t speak clearly also didn’t think clearly. Then again, if you expected a TV reporter to think clearly, you were much too naive to make a good cop. “We don’t have anything back from the lab, of course,” Colin said. “As a matter of fact, the lab techs aren’t even here. So we can’t be sure yet.”

  “But you do think so?” The redhead in the dark green suit couldn’t have finished lower than third runner-up in the Miss California pageant six or eight years earlier. Had they hired her for her reporting skills or for the way she filled out that suit? Colin couldn’t be sure about that, either, but he knew how he’d guess.

  He also knew that, if he said no, most of the newsies would leave in a huff. The South Bay Strangler was sexy, especially during a sweeps month. Who cared about some dumb, ordinary murder, though? Poor Lupe Sandoval hadn’t so much as made the news, even though she was just as dead as Mrs. Peterfalvy.

  “Everything we see is consistent with what the Strangler does,” the detective said reluctantly. “It could be a copycat case, of course, but that doesn’t seem likely.” Certain details about the Strangler’s M.O. hadn’t reached the media yet. (If they had, one TV station or another would have shouted them to the skies, with a big EXCLUSIVE! label pasted on.)

  “How long will you let the Strangler continue his terrorization of women throughout this broad area of Los Angeles County?” another TV reporter demanded, as if it were all Colin’s fault. Colin had been positive that kind of question would come from somebody. It was one of the reasons he’d so looked forward to meeting the press.

  “We’re doing everything we can to catch this guy, Dave,” he said. “If you can suggest anything we’ve missed, we’ll listen. Believe me, we will.”

  “That’s not my place!” Dave sounded indignant. And well he might-the next idea he had would be his first. He went on, “What you’ve done hasn’t helped Mrs., uh, Peterfalk much, either, has it?”

  Colin might have known-hell, had known-he would get the name wrong, and probably wrong like that. “Peterfalvy,” he corrected with cold politeness, and spelled it again. Useless, of course. The only time reporters were shown to be morons was when they came on with nothing to read-during a car chase, for instance. Otherwise, scripts from smarter people disguised their vapidity and foolishness.

  “Any sign the Strangler’s slipped up here?” asked Mort Greenbaum, who’d covered the crime beat on the Breeze for about as long as Colin had been a San Atanasio cop. Not quite long enough to have started out in a snap-brim fedora, in other words, but long enough to give the impression that he had.

  “Well, like I said before, the lab hasn’t turned the house upside down and inside out yet, so I can’t say for sure,” Colin replied. “Offhand, though, doesn’t look that way.”

  “Gotcha.” Mort had a recorder, but he took notes, too, probably to organize his own thoughts. Looking up from the scribbles, he went on, “He’s bound to sooner or later, isn’t he?”

  “Lord knows I hope so,” Colin said.

  “Or maybe he’ll pick on a little old lady who sleeps with a. 45 under the pillow.”

  “Maybe he will,” Colin agreed. “I’m still hoping we catch him, though. We don’t want to have to rely on civilians for do-it-yourself justice.”

  “Woudn’t you have a better chance if the San Atanasio Police Department-if all the police departments in the impacted area-weren’t so incompetent?” Dave had finally figured out that Colin had mocked him for screwing up Mrs. Peterfalvy’s name. Cops weren’t supposed to do that to TV personalities: the natural order of things was the other way around. Now, stung, the handsome man in the Hugo Boss suit was trying to get his own back.

  The TV news would be a hell of a lot better if you clowns weren’t brain-dead, too. Colin didn’t-quite-come out with it. You couldn’t let them know what you thought of them. And the chief would ream him out if he got into another slanging match with a reporter. Life was too short. A damn shame, but it was.

  “I already told you, we’re doing everything we know how to do to go after him. State personnel and the FBI have given us a hand, too,” Colin said. “We expect to succeed.”

  “How many more innocent victims will perish before you do?” Dave asked dramatically. He never knew how close he came to becoming one of them.

  The coroner and the lab technicians pulled
up then. Some of the reporters descended on Dr. Ishikawa for pearls of wisdom. He and the techs hadn’t done anything or viewed the crime scene yet, but that didn’t trouble the Fourth Estate. Other newshounds went after the neighbors for quotes about the late Mrs. Peterfalvy. If the neighbors didn’t tell them she was a nice old lady who never bothered anybody, Colin would learn something new about human nature.

  Sergeant Sanchez came up behind Colin. “Boy, that musta been fun,” he said in a low voice.

  “Always is,” Colin agreed. “I want a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke. I want a drink, too.”

  “I notice you aren’t saying you don’t drink.”

  “Good for you, Sherlock! But I don’t. On duty I don’t. Unless I really and truly need one. Or more than one.”

  “I’ll never tell,” Sanchez said.

  “Somebody will. Or a surveillance camera will catch it. Or something else will go wrong. I don’t need one that bad. Wouldn’t mind writing a ticket for that cocksucker from Channel 2, though.”

  “Think their van’s close enough to the hydrant there to write them up?”

  Colin eyed it. “No,” he said regretfully. “Besides, they’d have a cow if one of us did it. They’d say it was on account of they were asking questions we didn’t like.” And they’d be right. But he didn’t say that.

  “I didn’t mean you or me. That’s why God made the guys in the blue suits.” Sanchez hadn’t been out of a uniform so very long himself. By the way he talked, he’d never worn one.

  Well, Colin had been that way himself. Most cops were. “Let it go,” he said. “It’s not like the dickhead would pay the ticket himself. TV stations, they’ve got money falling out of their assholes.”

  “Wish I did,” Gabe Sanchez said morosely. “The bills my kids run up, they think I’m made of the stuff so I really can crap it.” He eyed Colin. “Yours are pretty much grown. Do they ever stop scrounging offa you?”