Supervolcano: All Fall Down

XIV

Colin sat in an interrogation room with Gabe Sanchez, waiting to grill an armed-robbery suspect named Cedric Curtis. “I was here when the uniformed guys brought him in,” Gabe said. “We got him out of his regular clothes and into the jail suit, y’know?”

“Oh, sure,” Colin answered. Inmates in the San Atanasio City Jail wore orange jumpsuits that made them look like animated carrots.

Sanchez wrinkled his nose. “Dude had the stinkiest feet in the world, man, that’s what. We made him put his shoes back on.”

A uniformed cop brought in Cedric Curtis. He was twenty-two now, and looked as if he might have been a linebacker in high school. His head was shaved. He wore a goatee, and had a nasty scar on one cheek. He hadn’t bothered with a mask when he knocked over the Circle K, which was a big reason he was here now.

“We are filming this interview.” Colin pointed up to a surveillance camera in one corner of the interrogation room. “Do you understand that, Mr. Curtis?”

“I hear ya,” the suspect answered indifferently.

“Do you understand?” Gabe growled. He was playing bad cop today. “You gotta answer yes or no. Not like you don’t know that. Not like you’ve never been here before. So, do you?”

Curtis looked as if he was thinking about a smartass comeback. Whatever he saw in Gabe’s face, and in Colin’s, made him change his mind. “I understand,” he admitted in grudging tones.

“Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.” Colin went through the Miranda warnings against self-incrimination. He could have been shaken awake at three in the morning and delivered them perfectly, the way a priest treated so rudely would have come out with a flawless Hail Mary and Our Father. “Do you understand that, too?”

Cedric Curtis nodded. “Yeah.”

“Okay,” Colin said. “Do you want to talk with us? Do you want an attorney present before you do?”

“I’ll talk with you. Why not? Fuck, you got me, don’t you?” Curtis said.

Maybe it’ll be easy for a change. That’d be nice, Colin thought. Aloud, he said, “Are you confessing you robbed the convenience store and threatened Mr. Leghari with a pistol?”

“The raghead guy in there? Yeah, I done that.” Curtis nodded. “Weren’t no bullets in the gun, though.”

Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t. If it was, the kid had a few loose screws, or more than a few. An awful lot of convenience-store clerks packed heat of their own, commonly in a drawer under the register. Either Cedric had got the drop on Ahmed Leghari or he was one lucky fellow. Well, either way this did look like an easy one. “Would you care to tell us why you knocked over the Circle K, Mr. Curtis?” Colin asked.

By the way Curtis looked at him, he was the dummy. “On account of I didn’t have no money,” he said.

Thank you, Willie Sutton ran through Colin’s mind. He didn’t bring it out. Cedric Curtis wouldn’t know Willie Sutton from a hole in the ground. He did say, “Plenty of ways to get money where you don’t end up talking with us.”

“Like what?” Curtis was openly scornful.

“They call them jobs,” Gabe Sanchez said dryly. Colin shot him a warning glance. Even that might be skating close to the edge. You never could tell what a gung-ho defense attorney could build from a crack like that. Look at the racist cop disrespecting my client! he’d thunder.

But Curtis wasn’t offended. He threw back his head and guffawed. “Jobs? For me? You gotta be jivin’, man. Ain’t no jobs for me. Ain’t no jobs for nobody like me. Weren’t no jobs for nobody like me even before that fuckin’ thing blew up. Only got worse since. So I can deal rock-an’ you’ll bust me. Or I can do this shit-an’ you’ll bust me.”

“You don’t look like you’ve missed a lot of meals,” Gabe said, which was true enough.

“I got two kids to feed. I got an old lady, too,” Curtis replied. Whether she was his children’s mother, he didn’t say. “Like I told you, gotta get Benjamins some kinda way, law or no law.”

A gung-ho lawyer could make something out of that, too, especially with things the way they were nowadays. Plenty of potential jurors might be out of work themselves. Even ones who weren’t would have cousins or brothers-in-law who were. In tough times, they might not want to come down hard on a guy who stuck a gun-an unloaded gun, the lawyer would insist-in a scared clerk’s face so he could feed his little children.

Well, that wasn’t Colin’s worry, or not very much of it. He had the arrest. Now he had a confession to go with it. The DA would carry the ball from here.

In the meantime, he nailed things down as tight as he could. He asked Cedric Curtis to describe the crime. Curtis did, with almost as much detail as the Circle K surveillance camera showed. Whatever a defense lawyer did, he wouldn’t be able to claim his client hadn’t done it.

When Curtis finished, Gabe said, “Odds are you’ll do some time. That’ll keep you fed, anyway, even if prison rations aren’t anything to write home about.”

“I know about jail food,” Curtis said. “There’s enough of it, no matter how shitty it is.” No, he hadn’t worried about getting caught.

“Okay,” Gabe said. “So you’ll have three squares and a cot for a while. But what about your kids? What about your girlfriend? Who’s gonna take care of them while you’re in the pokey?”

Cedric Curtis looked astonished, as if that had never occurred to him. Probably never did, Colin thought sadly. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen reactions like that way too many times before. One of the things that made criminals what they were was an inability to look ahead. Everything that happened after they did what they did came as a complete surprise to them. Even after they got busted, did time, got out, and pulled another one, they were amazed all over again when they quickly turned into two-time losers.

“Aw, fuck,” Curtis said softly. Maybe he could learn after all. But what lesson would he draw from this? Don’t knock over convenience stores? Or Don’t get caught after you knock over a convenience store? Colin couldn’t be sure. He knew what how he’d guess, and didn’t like it.

Well, Cedric wouldn’t be his problem for a while. The uniformed cop came back and took the robber away. “Nothing left of this one but the paperwork,” Gabe said.

“Yeah.” Colin wished he sounded-and were-happier.

“Lighten up,” Gabe told him. “He will do time. If he’d lifted canned goods, unh-unh. But no jury’s gonna buy that he stuck a gun in a guy’s face just so he could buy groceries for his brats. I mean, juries are dumb, but not that dumb.”

“You hope. We hope,” Colin said.

“Honest to God, they aren’t,” Gabe insisted. “Me, I’m going outside to celebrate with a cigarette.” He grinned wryly. “Way to party down, huh?”

“If you say so.” Colin went back to his desk. He stolidly started working on Cedric Curtis’ file. The more you did now, the less you had to do later. But he hadn’t got far when his phone rang. He picked it up. “Ferguson. . Say what?. . Are you sure?. . Aw-fudge. . Okay, what’s the address?. . Right. I’ll get there soon as I can. ’Bye.” He slammed the phone down.

Gabe Sanchez was just coming back from his nicotine fix when Colin stood up. His face must have been all over thunderclouds, because Gabe blurted, “Jesus! What hit the fan now? Your family okay?”

“Huh? Yeah, they’re fine,” Colin answered. “But there’s a little old lady dead over on 139th Street, and the cop who found her says it sure looks like the Strangler got her. I’m on my way there now. Wanna ride along?”

“Shit, I’m dying to,” Gabe answered. But he walked out to the parking lot with Colin. Colin had known he would. They wasted a couple of minutes filling out the required forms for getting a car: like a lot of Southern California towns, San Atanasio had really tightened up as gas got scarce and expensive. But no one would say boo to this trip, not when Colin scribbled South Bay Strangler on the line labeled Reason for utilization of automotive vehicle.

The sun shone as brightly as it ever did since the eruption. The sky tried to be blue, but didn’t quite seem to remember how. It was somewhere in the high sixties. Seattle summer? It could have been worse. It had been last week, and no doubt it would be again before too long.

North on Hesperus to Braxton Bragg. East on Braxton Bragg to Sword Beach. Left onto Sword Beach, then a right at the next light and onto 139th. The corner there had a liquor store and a seafood restaurant that charged too much for some of the most mediocre dinners Colin had ever regretted ordering.

Once you turned the corner and headed up 139th, you fell back in time. Most of the houses on the little street had gone up not long after the war to give the kids of the Baby Boom bedrooms of their own. Some were even older: they looked like adobe even if they were stucco, and had roofs of Spanish (well, Spanish-style) tiles. They’d been moved here when the Harbor Freeway pushed through to San Pedro at the start of the Sixties.

Back then, San Atanasio had been white and Japanese. Oh, a few Mexican-Americans, but from families that had been in the States for generations. (Colin’s secretary, Josie Linares, came from a family like that.) Now there were whites and blacks and Mexicans and Salvadorans (the Cubans in San Atanasio mostly lived farther south and east) and Koreans and Vietnamese (the Japanese had moved south to Torrance and Palos Verdes when the blacks started coming in) and. . everything under the sun.

What there wasn’t was a lot of money. Not in this part of town. The cars that sat in driveways and on the street-and, here and there, on lawns-looked as if they’d been sitting a long time even before the supervolcano did its number on gas prices. A couple of them were up on blocks. The rust they showed argued they’d been on blocks quite a while, too.

A black-and-white with its light bar flashing was parked in front of 1214 West 139th. A heavyset black woman and a skinnier Hispanic woman, both getting close to middle age, descended on Colin as he got out. “Did that lousy son of a bitch do for old Mrs. Mandelbaum?” the black woman demanded fiercely.

“I don’t know yet, ma’am,” Colin said. “I got here from the station as fast as I could when the call came in. That was ten minutes ago, fifteen tops.”

“They ever catch that bastard, they oughta hang him up by the nuts,” the Hispanic woman said.

Privately, Colin agreed with her. He wouldn’t say so publicly. Gabe Sanchez would: “That sounds goddamn good to me.”

“How come you ain’t caught him?” the African-American woman asked. “You shoulda done it a long time ago, you wanna know what I think.”

Colin agreed with her there, too. All he could say, though, was “We’re doing our best, believe me. And now I need to see what we’ve got here.”

He started up the driveway to the house. The lawn was green. That meant less than it would have before the supervolcano blew. No more brown, neglected lawns in L.A. these days, not with all the rain that came down. But it was also neatly mowed and edged. Well kept-up: that was the phrase.

Just about all the South Bay Strangler’s victims who lived in houses had kept them up well. For a split second, Colin wondered if that meant anything. Then he saw a guy in a blue sweatshirt-a Filipino, was his first guess-standing on the front porch, and forgot about that. “Who are you? What are you doing there?” he barked.

“My name is Oscar Flores, sir.” Filipino, sure enough: name, looks, and accent all told the same story. “I had not seen Mrs. Mandelbaum for several days, so I flagged down the police car when it came by. The officers, they had to break down the front door”-which stood open behind him-“and they told me not to go in after them. But I am afraid there is no good news inside the house.”

Colin was afraid of the same thing. The sick-sweet odor welling out through the door might have been stronger, but there was no mistaking it. Something in there had died a while ago, and he could make a good guess about what it was.

“Maybe it’s natural causes.” Gabe Sanchez grabbed for whatever straws he could find.

“Nah.” Grimly, Colin shook his head. “They wouldn’t’ve called for us if it was natural. They just would’ve sent for the meat wagon, and that would’ve been that.” Gabe’s heavy-featured face fell. Colin had got one step ahead of him.

Into the house, with another warning to Mr. Flores not to follow. Colin didn’t know what he expected. Overstuffed Victorian furniture, probably. That was the kind of stuff you figured a little old lady would have.

What he saw instead was Fifties or Sixties modern: almost as outdated, but in a very different way. Sharp angles. Plastic. A low chair that looked as if no little old lady who wasn’t also a gymnast would ever be able to escape it. An abstract clock on the wall.

“Meet George Jetson,” Gabe muttered, which wasn’t far wrong. Colin was reminded of the spidery building in the middle of LAX that had been planned as the control tower but ended up as a restaurant that didn’t do much business because it was so hard to get to. That pieces of concrete started falling off it a few years before the eruption didn’t help, either.

One of the uniformed cops came back into the living room. She looked green around the gills. Who would blame her? That smell was stronger in here. And she’d just been with what caused it. She managed a nod. “Lieutenant. Sergeant. She’s. . back here.” A gulp punctuated the short sentence.

“Thanks, Jodie,” Colin said, as gently as he could.

The hallway between the living room and the bedroom had dozens of pictures on the wall: Mrs. Mandelbaum and her children and grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren. There were even a couple of old black-and-whites showing somebody who’d likely been Mr. Mandelbaum.

In the bedroom lay the old woman’s earthly remains. Near them stood the other officer from the black-and-white, a strapping ex-Marine named Albert. Strapping ex-Marine or not, he looked greener than Jodie had. He managed the pale ghost of a smile, almost as if he were the sun outside. “Sorry to bring you out for another one, Lieutenant. If it is, I mean.”

“Oh, it is,” Colin said. “Or else it’s a copycat, which would be about as bad-or a little worse, depending on how you look at things.” His hands folded into fists. “Maybe he slipped up this time. Maybe we catch a break.”

How often had he said something like that? As often as the Strangler murdered someone in San Atanasio, plus a few more times when he was talking about dead old ladies in other South Bay towns. How many times had he been right? The next would be the first.

Out in the living room, Jodie started talking to somebody. Colin spun on his heel and hurried up that icon-filled hallway. If Oscar Flores had got snoopy, tearing him a new asshole would make Colin feel a little better. It was the one thing he could think of that might.

Only it wasn’t the neighbor who’d worried about poor Mrs. Mandelbaum. It was Dr. Ishikawa and Mike Pitcavage, with a DNA technician trailing the coroner. Nodding towards Ishikawa, Pitcavage said, “I hitched a ride on the ambulance. When I heard it might be another Strangler case, I wanted to see it for myself as soon as I could.”

“Okay,” Colin said: more an acknowledgment than anything resembling thanks. That the police chief rode in the ambulance and not in his own car spoke unhappy volumes about what the supervolcano eruption had done to fuel supplies and San Atanasio’s sorry economy.

Pointing back to the hallway, Jodie said, “This woman had a lot of family. They’ll be screaming when they find out.”

Chief Pitcavage’s mouth twisted. “Why didn’t they call her and notice she didn’t call back, then? How much do they care?”

“We’ll find out when we get in touch with them,” Colin said. “Chances are, we’ll find out in stereo.” Notifying next of kin might have been the part of the job he disliked most.

“Let’s have a look at the body and see if we can determine whether it is a Strangler case,” Dr. Ishikawa said. “The media will be most interested in learning about that. Of course, Lucy is the one who will make absolutely certain.”

Lucy Chen, the DNA tech, reminded Colin of a Chinese version of his wife. They were about the same age, and they both had the same air of unhurried competence. But Lucy was an expert on the double helix, not on the behavior and misbehavior of magma.

“Happy day,” Colin said. Lucy’s presence, and Jodie’s, kept him from adding some stronger opinions. As far as he was concerned, the one good thing about the eternal-seeming power and gas shortages was that the blow-dried dimbulbs with the expensive clothes took longer to get to a crime scene. If they wouldn’t have shown up at all, that would have pleased him even more. Some things, though, were too much to hope for.

“It’ll be back here, I bet. I’ll follow my nose,” Mike Pitcavage said. He found Mrs. Mandelbaum’s bedroom with no trouble at all. He was younger than Colin, but he’d been a cop even longer because he hadn’t gone into the service before putting on the blue uniform. How many tract homes had he walked through? Enough so, dozens of different floor plans seemed as familiar as the house he lived in, no doubt.

The coroner squatted by the corpse. His nose wrinkled; the smell in the bedroom was pretty bad, all right. “What do you think?” Colin asked, keeping his voice as neutral as he could. He knew what he thought, but that wasn’t what he was trying to find out.

“If the DNA does not show this to be a Strangler case, I will be very much surprised,” Ishikawa replied. Lucy Chen nodded. After a pause for breath (and after his face announced how much he wished he didn’t need to breathe in there), the coroner added, “Most of the victims are discovered in a less advanced state of putrefaction.”

“You got that right, Doc,” Pitcavage said. “I just hope the stink comes out of my suit.” Colin hadn’t worried about that. Like most people, he wore more wool than he had before the eruption. It was warmer than the synthetics. But the chief, also in wool, remembered that it also trapped odors better.

Albert stuck his head into the bedroom. “Sorry to bother you, sir,” he said, addressing his words to Chief Pitcavage, “but the first news truck just pulled up.”

Oh, well. The vultures hadn’t taken much longer than usual to start spiraling down to a story. Colin wasn’t sorry the chief had come. Otherwise, he would have had the dubious privilege of enlightening the men and women of the Fourth Estate.

Then Pitcavage said, “I think I’ll duck out the back door. Colin, you can handle the ghouls today.” Colin’s face might have been something-all the cops, Lucy, and even the staid Dr. Ishikawa started laughing. The chief thumped him on the shoulder. “I’m kidding. I really am.”

“You’d better be.” By the way Colin said it, everybody else thought the joke was a hell of a lot funnier than he did. He said it that way because that was how he felt.

“I am. I’m here. I’m stuck with it. I’ll deal with them.” Pitcavage walked out to face the reporters. Christians might have gone to face lions with that same exalted determination. But dealing with the media was more like getting trampled by a herd with mad cow disease. Colin thought so, anyhow. Suddenly, calling the next of kin didn’t seem half bad.

* * *

Oklahoma City reminded Vanessa Ferguson of Schrodinger’s cat. Even the locals seemed unsure about whether their town was dead or alive.

Denver, now, Denver was definitively deceased. Same with Salt Lake City. But both those places were only a few hundred miles from what had been Yellowstone National Park in happier times and was currently the world’s biggest red-hot hole in the ground.

There were something like 1,200 miles between the supervolcano caldera and Oklahoma City. That didn’t mean ashfall hadn’t reached the city. Oh, no. Oklahoma City, in fact, had taken a bigger hit than places like Los Angeles, if not so bad as the towns and farms up in Kansas where Vanessa had been excavating. As with the Kansas prairies, prevailing winds had dumped lots of ash and dust on Oklahoma City’s head.

The eruption had been a while ago. To Vanessa’s way of thinking, Oklahoma City should have picked itself up, dusted itself off-literally and metaphorically-and got on with its life. Maybe it should have, but it hadn’t. Little by little, she started to see why. The countryside was in worse shape than the town.

None of that was her worry, though. She’d made it to Oklahoma City. She’d escaped from the grave-robbing crew that was picking through the mortal remains of Kansas. She’s had as much of that as she could take, and more besides. She wasn’t supposed to be in Oklahoma City right now. She was supposed to be back with the crew. Had she been in the Army, they would have called it going AWOL. She wasn’t in the Army, no matter how hard they tried to make her feel as if she were. As far as she was concerned, she’d informally resigned.

She had cash in the pockets of her jeans, too. Some of it came from what they’d paid her to make like a ghoul. That was a startling wad, at least by pre-eruption standards. It wasn’t as if she’d had anything to spend it on while she was scavenging. Too damn bad the galloping inflation made it worth so much less than it would have been before things hit the fan.

The same sadly held true for the greenbacks she’d come by in unofficial ways. She felt guilty about that private grave-robbing, but not very guilty. It wasn’t as if she were the only one. Oh, no-not even close. Some of the card games the scavengers got into. . That much cash wouldn’t have paid off the national debt, but it sure would have made some Vegas blackjack dealers raise an eyebrow.

So here she was. She could eat for a while. She could stay at a Super 8 motel that seemed pathetically eager to get her business. And she could shop for a clunker at used-car lots whose salesmen made the Super 8 desk clerks seemed stoic by comparison.

“Yes, ma’am, I would be dee-lighted to sell you a vee — hick-le,” said one fellow whose plaid jacket was plainly made from the skin of a particularly gaudy 1970s sofa. And he explained why he would be so dee-lighted, too: “Business ain’t been what you’d call brisk lately.”

“I believe that.” Vanessa tried to sound as cutting as she could-which was saying a good deal. She assumed any and all used-car salesmen were there to shaft her. She waved at the lot. “Your cars are sitting there gathering dust.”

That was the exact truth. Red cars, blue cars, green cars, black cars, white cars? No-they were all grayish brown cars. Some of them showed hints of their original color. None showed more than hints.

“You know how it is, ma’am.” The salesman spread his hands in resigned embarrassment. “We clean ’em off, an’ then we get more wind outa the north or the west. Still an awful lot of that horrible dust.”

He wasn’t wrong. Having spent so long closer to the eruption site than this, Vanessa knew as much. She was damned if she’d admit it, though. Give a salesman an inch and he’d take your wallet. Her mouth twisted into a sneer. “Chances are you don’t clean them because this way you can hide a lot of what’s wrong with them.”

He clasped both hands over his heart, as if he’d just taken a mortal wound. “Now, ma’am, that just ain’t fair. Not even slightly, it ain’t. Let me show you this here Ford. Honest to Pete, it’s as good as the day it was made, or even better.”

“How many recalls has that model been through?” Vanessa retorted, and the salesman looked wounded again.

He tried for a comeback: “That particular vee-hick-le, I happen to know, has been supervolcano-ized.”

Vanessa had never quite made up her mind whether she hated the language of hucksterism worse than the language of bureaucracy or the other way round. She withered the man in the bad jacket with a glance. “Oh, cut the crap, why don’t you? If it’s got a heavy-duty air filter, just say so, for Christ’s sake.”

“I don’t speak of our Lord and Savior that way,” he said stiffly.

“I told you to cut the crap,” Vanessa said. “You need me worse than I need you, but you won’t get me.” She walked off that lot.

Two days later, she found a Toyota a few years newer than the one that had perished in her escape from Denver. The salesman there didn’t speak of Jesus at all. He wore a corduroy coat that hadn’t been stylish for a long time but wasn’t aggressively ugly. The Toyota was more expensive than she liked, but not impossibly so.

“I think we’ve got a deal,” he said at last. “I’ll need to see some ID before we finish the formalities.”

“Here you go.” She showed him her license from Colorado.

He looked at it. “Miz Ferguson, this expired three months ago.”

“Well, so what?” Vanessa said. “If you expect me to go back to Denver and renew it, you’re out of luck.” She didn’t say shit out of luck, and patted herself on the back for her restraint.

He sighed. He might have been showing restraint, too. “I can’t sell a car to anybody with an expired license. The second you drive it onto the street, you’re in violation of the law.” He spread his hands. “You see my problem?”

“I see it, all right. What the hell am I supposed to do about it?” Vanessa’s tone took on a certain edge. She’d traded favors for favors before. She hated herself every time she did it-how could you not? But she wanted wheels. She needed wheels. If she had to do it one more time, maybe she could turn off her mind and not think about it while it was going on. She’d sure tried to do that with Micah Husak. Afterwards? She could worry about that, well, afterwards.

Instead of pulling down the Venetian blinds in his miserable little office, the salesman said, “You wait right here. I’ve got to go talk to my manager.”

Vanessa sat there and fumed. If he thinks I’ll take care of them both, he’s got another think coming, she told herself. No way I do gang bangs, God damn men and their horny souls to hell.

But the salesman’s manager turned out to be a woman. She was about fifty. She didn’t try to hide it. She was short-haired and looked tough. Her pinched mouth said she was used to beating men in their own ballpark. It also said she didn’t especially enjoy winning-or anything else.

“Carl tells me you don’t have a current license,” she said.

“That’s right,” Vanessa answered. “I got to Camp Constitution with the clothes on my back. I’ve been there or in a scavenging detail since right after the eruption. I wasn’t really worried about renewing the damn thing, you know? There’s got to be some kind of way you can sell me a car. It’s not like this outfit doesn’t need my money.”

By the way Carl’s eyebrows lifted, she’d nailed that one. The manager’s face never changed. Vanessa wouldn’t have wanted to play poker against her, even for nickels. “You could get a license from the Oklahoma Department of Motor Vehicles,” the gal said. “You might be able to, anyhow. It would take some time. I don’t know if they’d want to issue you one with only that to show for ID.”

“Or?” Vanessa said. “C’mon. There’s got to be an or. It’s not like I don’t have this year’s license because I’m a fuckup. I don’t have this year’s license ’cause there’s nothing left of Colorado.”

“I understand that. It’s not like we don’t know about the supervolcano here, either.” The manager clicked a fingernail against the arm of her chair, considering. “How would this be? We’ll charge you an additional out-of-state identity-confirmation fee of, say, a thousand dollars. In exchange for that, we will overlook your lack of documentation and we will try to contact Colorado authorities to make sure you are the person your expired license says you are.”

Chances were those Colorado authorities were dead, dead and buried under volcanic ash. The knowing gleam in the woman’s hard gray eyes said she knew as much. She’s making this up, Vanessa realized. It’s an excuse to screw an extra grand out of me, that’s all. Even with inflation making the dollar leak value the way a blown-out tire leaked air, a grand was still a fair chunk of change.

“How about making your fee five hundred?” Vanessa said.

The manager smiled. No one would ever accuse her of owning a sweet smile. No, it was more like a piranha’s. “A thousand,” she said flatly. Vanessa realized something else: this wasn’t the first time she’d played this game. More like the eleventy-first, or the hundred and eleventy-first. Sure as hell, the woman went on, “You can take it down the street if you want to. You won’t get off cheaper anywhere else, and you’ll end up with a crappier car than that Toyota.”

“At least fill the gas tank all the way to the top,” Vanessa said, throwing in the sponge.

“I think we can do that much,” Carl said. The manager sent him a flinty stare: Vanessa’d won back something over ten percent of the bribe, anyhow. She got the strong, strong feeling not many people did so well against this gal. Would the cost of the fill-up all come from Carl’s share? Vanessa wouldn’t have been a bit surprised.

That was Carl’s problem, though, not hers. The mountain of forms you had to fill out to buy a car in Oklahoma was every bit as tall as the one California made you climb. Vanessa signed on a great many dotted lines. Carl drove the Toyota off the lot and came back a few minutes later with a pained expression and, presumably, a full tank.

Vanessa laid out the cash, including the thousand-dollar fee (nowhere, she’d noticed, was it mentioned in all that paperwork: one more surprise-not!). She got into the car and headed south. She hadn’t been behind a wheel for years, but she still knew how. And she was on her way at last!