Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

XXI

When Louise fell for Colin, it was girl-meets-boy, the kind of thing that happens to almost everybody. As with an awful lot of people, it was also the kind of thing that got more and more boring as year crawled after year. When she fell for Teo all those years later, it was her Grand Passion, and she went head over heels. It never got boring, not even a little bit. It blew up in her face instead. That was worse. It hurt harder, anyhow—maybe not more, but harder.

When she fell for Jared Watt, she hardly noticed she was doing it. She couldn’t very well help noticing the outward trappings. He took her to soccer matches and to musicals—and, to be fair, to movies and to restaurants, too. They went to bed together. She always made sure they took precautions. This long after James Henry came along, she didn’t think she could still catch. But she hadn’t thought she could when she got pregnant with him, either. So: precautions. Every single time.

The games and the shows and the dinners were only outward trappings, though. For quite a while, even the sex was only an outward trapping. An enjoyable trapping, certainly. Jared always worked hard to please her. That made her want to please him as well. But, for a long time, she thought of the two of them as what her grown kids would have called friends with benefits.

That he was still her boss also complicated things. He went out of his way to assure her she didn’t have to do anything with him. She believed him. If she hadn’t, she would have said no at some point early on to see what his word was worth and whether it was worth anything. All the same, dating somebody who could fire you was interesting in ways she could have done without.

Firing her didn’t seem the first thing on his mind, though. “I sure am glad the power wasn’t working the day you walked in,” he told her one morning. “I’ve said that before, haven’t I?”

“Yes, but I still like to hear it. So am I—for all kinds of reasons,” she answered. Why not? They were the only ones in the drugstore. Business on a cold, rainy winter morning wasn’t going to be brisk.

The power was working now. It let Louise see Jared blush. “Aside from that—” he began.

“Yes?”

“Aside from that,” he repeated firmly, and she let him go on, so he did: “Aside from that, if I had posted my want ad, I would’ve needed to sort through four dozen losers to find three or four possibles, and none of them would have been a quarter as good as you.”

“How do you mean that?” she asked. “And how would you have tested them? Or don’t I want to know?”

“I was talking about their job performance,” Jared said primly. “Other things just happen. Or, more often, they don’t.”

“I’m glad they did this time.” Louise meant it. Having someone interested in you that way was a sign you were still alive. It was a sign you hadn’t disappeared, the way so many women over fifty seemed to. America often acted as if it wanted to push the disappearing age down to somewhere between thirty and thirty-five. That was insane, which didn’t keep it from happening.

“Now that you mention it, so am I.” Jared suddenly stiffened. “A customer!” He said it just the way Mrs. Lovett did in Sweeney Todd. That Louise knew he was doing Mrs. Lovett only showed she’d been hanging out with him for a while. People you hung out with rubbed off on you. You rubbed off on them, too. Louise sometimes heard bits of her own speech come back at her out of Jared’s mouth.

The bell over the door chimed when the customer came in. She was a woman near the age of disappearing Louise had been worrying about a moment before. Her face had seen some hard times. So had her raincoat, which must have been ancient long before the supervolcano eruption made her need it more. She closed her umbrella and stuck it in the bucket Jared had put by the door for days like this.

“Horrible out there!” she said. “Horrible!”

“It is, yes,” Jared replied. “Can we help you with anything?”

“Well, I hope you won’t get mad, but I just came in to get out of the rain for a little while,” the woman replied. Louise nodded to herself. If the gal had done business here, even once five years ago, Jared would have had a name to go with her harsh face. Louise didn’t know how he did it, but he did.

“Glad to be your oasis,” he said now. “Look around. If you want to spend a little money here while you dry out, we won’t mind.”

“No, huh?” the woman said.

“No. But we won’t mind—too much—if you don’t, either.”

“Okay.” She went over to the shelves of used books. She picked up a mystery, which didn’t surprise Louise, and a book about the Battle of Gettysburg, which did. And she picked up one of the gaudy ceramic whatsits that Jared kept selling and Louise couldn’t stand. Finally, almost as an afterthought, she got a bottle of aspirin.

Louise rang her up, took her money, and made change. She put everything in a plastic bag. “Keep the books dry,” she said.

“Uh-huh.” The woman nodded. “Wouldn’t be much left of ’em by the time I got home if you didn’t.” She managed a smile that didn’t quite reach her colorless gray eyes. “Now that I’ve made you both rich, I guess I can go back out in it.”

“Try to stay dry,” Louise said. “The two of us, we’ll head for Tahiti on what you just spent.”

“Don’t you wish! Don’t we all wish!” The woman took her umbrella out of the bucket, opened the door, unfurled the umbrella, and walked away. She hadn’t gone far before the swirling curtains of rain hid her.

“Tahiti? I do wish,” Jared said.

“Me, too. Who doesn’t?” Louise answered. “The really scary thing is, L.A. still has good weather, at least as far as the United States goes. In spite of that, it does.” She waved at the downpour outside.

“The good news is, you’re right. That’s only rain. It isn’t snow. We don’t get snow very often. We never get snow in July or anything like that. If there weren’t so many people living here, this would be wonderful farm country. It wouldn’t even need irrigation, the way it did before it filled up.” The pharmacist paused for effect. “And the bad news is, you’re right.”

“Yeah.” Louise sighed. “For anybody who remembers the way we used to be, this is pretty miserable. I feel sorry for James Henry and all the people who won’t grow up remembering what it was like before the eruption.”

“It’ll be water to a duck for them,” Jared answered. “Before too long, they’ll get old enough to call us a bunch of nostalgic fools. You always need to find some reason or other to think your parents are fools. That helps remind you how wonderful you are yourself.”

“Tell me about it!” Louise exclaimed. “I went through that with my kids by Colin. Now I get to look forward to a rerun when James Henry turns sixteen. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“Sooner or later, they’ll end up doing a musical about it,” Jared said.

“Sooner or later, they end up doing a musical about everything.” Louise could tease him about it, as long as she didn’t get mean.

“You’re right,” he said cheerfully. “But so what? That’s part of what makes them fun to begin with. I wonder if I’ll live long enough to see it.”

I wonder if I’ll live long enough to was a notion Louise hadn’t had till she passed fifty. Before then, time seemed to stretch like a rubber band. Of course she was going to last forever, to live happily ever after. Only she wasn’t. She wouldn’t. Nobody did, no matter how much everybody expected to or wanted to. She might have thirty or forty years left. She might not have thirty or forty minutes. If she fell over from a heart attack, if the next person who walked into the drugstore was a strung-out crackhead with a Glock…

You never knew, that was all. Colin had dodged his brush with the Grim Reaper this past summer, but why? Only by luck, as far as she could tell.

Jared started reciting poetry:

“‘Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime…

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.’”

Was he following his own train of thought or guessing hers from her expression? She remembered the poem from high school. The poet wanted to get laid, but his girlfriend wouldn’t give it up. More meaning behind it, though, than she’d imagined when she was seventeen. Tears stung her eyes.

You couldn’t live with men. Vanessa had proved that to herself to her full satisfaction—or dissatisfaction, depending on how you looked at things. When she was in high school, she’d been sure she would have Peter’s babies. As soon as she met Bryce, though, old Peter didn’t seem like so much of a much.

Bryce seemed okay… for a while. He was clumsy in bed, though—not that Peter’d been any too wonderful along those lines himself. And Bryce was horny all the damn time. When he wasn’t horny, he didn’t want to do anything except read or get into arguments on the Greek-history message boards (there were such things, no matter how perverse the notion seemed to Vanessa). He didn’t want to shop. He didn’t want to dance. She decided she was better off without him.

Which led to Hagop. He wasn’t horny all the time. One of the things that had interested her in him was that he was twice her age. Hagop certainly knew things about screwing that Bryce wouldn’t find out in a month of Sundays. But he was a self-centered bastard. He wanted her on his arm to show his fellow rug merchants what a stud he was.

If she hadn’t followed him to Denver like a fool, she wouldn’t have nearly died when the supervolcano blew. That Hagop almost certainly did die was some consolation—some, but not enough. Because getting out of Denver meant getting stuck in Camp Constitution.

You couldn’t live without men, but Vanessa could have lived forever without Micah Husak. In exchange for services rendered, he’d got her better quarters and less obnoxious tentmates. In exchange for services rendered, and for her self-respect. Millions of people remained stuck in resettlement camps all these years after the eruption, New Homestead Act or no New Homestead Act. Vanessa would have bet anything she had that Micah and other FEMA flunkies still had more than their share of women who did what they wanted.

She’d managed to get away from that. It hadn’t even cost her a zipless fuck—only a zipless blowjob to a National Guardsman whose name she never found out. You couldn’t get much more zipless than that, could you? Erica Jong would have been proud… or appalled, depending.

After that, Bronislav. She’d been sure Bronislav was the real thing. Well, she’d been sure with Hagop, too (or as sure as she could make herself with him), and with Bryce, and even with Peter way back when. Being sure was part of what made her tick. She’d dumped Bronislav’s forerunners. Getting dumped herself—and getting ripped off in the process—was a new, and nasty, variation on the theme.

So, while you couldn’t live without them, you also couldn’t live with them. Every so often, one of the guys at Nick Gorczany’s widget works would try his luck with her. With monotonous regularity, she turned them down and shot them down. She’d always got as much mileage as she could out of being pretty. Now she wondered if it wasn’t more trouble than it was worth.

Some of the engineers and programmers must have decided that, because they kept striking out with Vanessa, she had to be a lesbian. They must have gossiped about it, too, because a short-haired female programmer came on to her. She wasn’t as blatant as the guys were, but she also struck out. Vanessa was straight. Choosing the right guy was the problem. So was wondering whether she could find him, and wondering where to look. Aside from not at the widget works, she didn’t know.

Oh, she had an electronic profile or two out there. Who didn’t, as long as the power stayed on? But, after meeting a couple of men that way, she decided those profiles weren’t worth the paper they weren’t printed on. The fellow who said he was five-eleven turned out to be five-five. Since he hadn’t lied about his weight, he was also a good deal wider than advertised. The one who gave his age as forty had to be fifty-five. The pale band on the first joint of his ring finger said he was probably married, too. She made an excuse about needing to road-test her hamster and left as soon as she could.

She discovered that her high-school achievement-test scores qualified her for membership in Mensa. She sent in her forms, paid a year’s dues, and got a membership card. She went to one, count it, one, meeting. The people there were smart. Very few had anything else going for them. They talked about how they’d be on Easy Street if only this, that, or the other thing hadn’t happened to them.

Vanessa had plenty of complaints of her own along those lines. She didn’t feel like listening to anyone else’s. She wanted a winner. Winners plainly didn’t go to Mensa meetings. After that first one, neither did she.

She was eating a dinner that made her long for MREs (and they said it couldn’t be done!) when her phone rang. The displayed number and name seemed vaguely familiar, so she said, “Hello?”

“Hello, Ms. Ferguson. This is Agent Gideon Sneed, from the FBI,” the man said. That was why she knew the name. He’d told her he wasn’t interested in going after Bronislav.

“Yes?” she said. Her opinion of the FBI hadn’t been high even before they didn’t want to throw her thief of an ex in the slammer. In that, she took after her father. He respected the Feds’ courage and diligence, but didn’t think they were long on brains. Because they had jurisdiction over a relatively small range of crimes, they didn’t need to be—not if you listened to him, anyhow. Vanessa had, for years, at the dinner table and in the car and while she was watching TV. His attitude sank in, and became hers without her ever noticing.

“I wanted to tell you that we may possibly be opening an investigation of Mr., uh, Bronislav, uh, Nedic”—Sneed made a horrible hash of both names, the way most people would reading them cold off a sheet of paper—“over issues that are unrelated to yours. If we do, we may append your charges as well, to increase our chances of winning a conviction on one count or another.”

“Well, all right!” Vanessa said. “That’s the best news I’ve had in I don’t know how long. What’s the asshole gone and done now?”

“You understand, at the moment these are only unsubstantiated allegations,” Sneed told her. And only somebody like an FBI man could say unsubstantiated allegations often enough to bring it out as if it belonged to the English language.

For once, Vanessa had no trouble stifling the urge to copyedit. “Yeah, yeah, fine,” she said. “Cut to the chase. What’s he unsubstantiatedly alleged to have done?” If you couldn’t beat ’em, join ’em.

Sneed didn’t think her repetition was funny—he sure didn’t laugh, anyhow. For all she could tell over the phone, he didn’t even notice. Cops got so used to cop jargon, they took it for granted. “There is a certain level of tension between the Serbian and Croatian communities in Mobile,” the FBI man said carefully. “It is possible that Mr. Nedic has participated in activities which would escalate that level of tension.”

From what Vanessa knew of Bronislav, he didn’t participate in activities. He shot people or blew them up. If those people were Croats, he got drunk on slivovitz and sang songs and danced afterwards, too. “That sounds like him, all right,” she said. “But how big are the Serbian and Croatian communities in Mobile goddamn Alabama? Seventeen Serbs and nineteen Croats?”

“Larger than that,” Sneed said. “Large enough that an incident between them could be a significant incident. If Mr. Nedic is trying to create such an incident, we need to prevent him from being successful.”

“And stop him, too,” Vanessa murmured. She couldn’t help herself, or stop herself.

“I beg your pardon?” Sneed said.

“Never mind,” Vanessa said. “So if you bust him on the terrorism rap, you’ll toss in stealing my bank account and taking it across state lines like a cherry on top of the sundae?” God, when was the last time I had a sundae? Much too long ago—probably before the eruption. Have to do something about that.

“Yes, that’s about right,” Sneed said. “You have an interesting way of talking, you know?”

“I’ve heard people say so,” Vanessa replied, which was true. Sometimes they meant it for a compliment. The FBI man seemed to.

“You do,” he said now. “I noticed it when we met in person. I was very sorry that our prioritization process prevented me from implementing proceedings against Mr. Nedic at that point in time.”

“So was I,” Vanessa said: growled, really.

“That makes me especially glad to be able to bring you this information now,” Sneed said.

“Okay,” Vanessa said.

“In fact,” the FBI man went on, “I wondered if it might be possible for the two of us to meet some time in a social setting.”

“You mean, like, a date?”

“Yes.”

She almost hung up on him right there. She wondered if the whole call was a setup. FBI guy finds a bulge in his pants, comes out with some bullshit about dropping on Bronislav so he’ll look cool to the woman who can’t stand the dude, then tries to get into her knickers. He hadn’t said they were actually doing anything about the damn Serb, just that they were looking at it. If they didn’t, he had all kinds of built-in excuses: Bronislav got cold feet, or there wasn’t enough evidence, or some judge wouldn’t issue a warrant, or yaddayaddayadda.

On the other hand… That he’d gone to the trouble of cooking up the scheme (if he was) said he was interested. And he was a cop of sorts. Vanessa knew how cops worked. She knew it the way a fish knew water: she’d grown up with it. That might turn out to be a plus, and maybe not such a small one.

“Ms. Ferguson? You there?”

“Yes, I’m here. Maybe we can try it,” she answered.

“Good!” He sounded happy and surprised, which was about the way he should have sounded. Amazingly lifelike, she thought.

They settled on dinner and a movie Saturday after next: the opening of the great American mating dance for as long as there’d been movies. Vanessa went back to her current, interrupted supper. Getting cold hadn’t made it much worse, because it hadn’t been that good to begin with. When she finished, she added her dishes to the pile in the sink.

You couldn’t win if you didn’t bet. You also couldn’t lose, but she chose not to dwell on that side of things. She hadn’t told him to fuck off. Not this time. Not yet. Maybe I’ll get lucky this time. Maybe I really will. If you told yourself something often enough, you could make yourself believe it. Maybe—just maybe—you could even make it true.

Across the street from the buildings and parking lots at Wayne State lay tennis courts, a soccer field (a pitch, if you were feeling like a Brit), a baseball field, a softball field, and a golf course: lots and lots of wide-open spaces punctuated by chain-link fences, a few rows of trees, and some bleachers. Snow held sway over them all, like the Red Death in the Poe story.

It drifted against the trees and the fencing. It turned the bleachers into mounds of white. The ground was white. Everything for miles around was white—white as snow, Bryce thought, and sneered at himself for perpetrating a cliché, even if he did it only inside his own head. Here and there, roads shoveled clear scribed asphalt-dark lines through the whiteness. He stood by one of them, waiting for the bus to town. It wasn’t snowing right this minute—no more than a few scattered flakes, anyhow—so he could see the campus buildings, which were also unwhite, or at most dappled. When he pulled back his mental horizon, they didn’t seem like much.

They didn’t seem like much because they damn well weren’t. Snow covered the whole damn continent north of the Rio Grande, with minor polychrome enclaves in SoCal, Arizona, and Florida. It lay thicker in some places, thinner in others, but it was everywhere. Europe was no better off. Most of Europe was worse off, because the settled parts there sat farther north than they did in North America.

Asia… Northern China had always had hard winters. Now it had worse ones. Southern China had been subtropical. It wasn’t any more. People in Afghanistan were saying the winters they’d been getting (and the summers they hadn’t been) were God’s judgment upon them. God’s judgment for what? For their sins, of course. And, in arguments over what those sins might be and just who’d committed them, several different ethnic groups were shooting at one another. As far as Bryce could tell, several different ethnic groups there had been shooting at one another since at least the days of the Persian Empire. Only the weapons and the excuses changed through the centuries.

“Hi, Professor Miller!” a coed called. She waved a mittened hand his way.

“Hi, Peggy!” Bryce waved back. She was cute. She wasn’t dumb. The combo made her a pleasure to have in his class. Were he single, he might have tried to get her phone number once she wasn’t in his class any more.

Not being single didn’t stop everybody. The anthropology department had recently had a small scandal about a married prof carrying on with an ex-student. That the prof was female and the student a forward on the men’s basketball team added variety to the spice but didn’t change its essential nature.

A crow perched on the BUS STOP sign. People gathering close by didn’t bother it. People who gathered at the bus stop often ate things while they waited. They didn’t always throw what they couldn’t finish into the trash. Knowing such things was one of the ways college crows made their living.

“C’mon, you stupid bus! I’m cold,” said a guy who’d been standing at the stop longer than Bryce had. Several heads, Bryce’s among them, bobbed in agreement. He’d spent more time than he wanted the past few years standing on one corner or another with his mittens jammed into the pockets of whatever overcoat or anorak he happened to be wearing. He’d been cold just about all that time. His nose, not the smallest peak in the range, felt as if it wanted to fall off.

He’d read somewhere that Asians might have evolved their flattish features during the last Ice Age, as a response to extreme cold. He didn’t know if that was true. The anthro prof who’d frolicked with the basketball player might have had a better idea. It did strike him as reasonable, though.

Here came the bus at last. People climbed aboard with sighs of relief. It wasn’t much warmer inside than out-. They’d escaped the wind blowing down from the North Pole, though. And they weren’t just standing there. They were on their way into Wayne. We’re going somewhere, man, Bryce thought.

A few hardy souls on bikes were also pedaling between college and town, and a few more coming the other way. Bryce wouldn’t have wanted—hadn’t wanted—to do that in weather like this, but no accounting for taste. College kids were a hardy bunch. They were also often a crazy bunch.

The bus shuddered and wheezed when it stopped in the center of town. The small local bus fleet had been old and rickety when Bryce came to Wayne. It was older and more rickety now, and smaller, too. A couple of the buses that had finally crapped out were being harvested for spare parts to keep the others going. There was no money to buy new ones. Bryce wasn’t sure anyone in the United States was making new buses these days. Demand had fallen into the Yellowstone caldera.

He got off. The bus chugged away, leaving a trail of diesel exhaust in its wake. Global warming wasn’t the big worry any more. Al Gore probably burned trash in his back yard nowadays.

A team of six or eight glum-looking men and a couple of glum-looking young women were shoveling snow off the sidewalk. Bryce remembered a New Yorker cartoon about synchronized snow shovelers. Then he noticed the bored cop keeping an eye on the team. His perspective shifted. Suddenly, the scene looked more like a frozen outtake from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

In Wayne, people didn’t get jail time for misdemeanors any more. As the town couldn’t afford new buses, so it also couldn’t afford to house petty criminals and feed them while they sat on their unproductive asses. It put them to work instead. About half the shovelers looked like college kids. Bryce recognized one unshaven older town guy who fought the cold by constantly keeping a high level of antifreeze in his blood. And he would have bet that the others were New Homesteaders. He wondered what they’d done, or whether they’d done anything. No, the town and the people who’d come here to get out of the refugee camps didn’t always get on so smoothly as they might have.

The cleared sidewalks helped him get back to his apartment building more easily than he would have otherwise. Susan seemed happy when he walked in. That made him happy. He still wondered whether he would have to move back to SoCal when the spring semester ended. If the choice was between job and marriage, job would have to bend.

“How’s it going?” he asked after he kissed her.

“Not bad. I got an idea for an article. Now I have to see if I can make it work,” she answered. No wonder she was in a good mood.

“Cool,” Bryce said. “What is it?”

“I want to see if I can connect Frederick’s ideas about falconry with his foreign policy,” Susan said. The renegade Holy Roman Emperor had written an enormous tome about hunting with hawks. Where he’d found the time, Bryce had no idea, but Frederick II was the kind of guy who made time when he felt like doing something. As for his foreign policy… The way it looked to Bryce, Frederick had flown himself against the whole damn world. He’d made it work for most of his reign, too.

“That is cool,” Bryce said now. “Or it will be, if you can do it.”

“Always if,” Susan agreed. “But it’ll keep me busy for a while, anyway. And when I publish it, maybe it’ll make somebody notice me and go, like, We need her in this department. I can hope, right?”

“Sure, babe.” Bryce nodded. You could always hope. A lot of the time, you had to hope. You could even live on hope for a while. Why not? What else was the whole country doing?

“Darn!” Colin said as he combed his hair.

Kelly knew that would have been something a lot stronger if she weren’t around. “How’s it doing?” she asked.

He looked down at his left shoulder as if it had betrayed him. Well, it had, but you couldn’t blame it after a bullet smashed up its workings. “Y’know,” he said, “I think the rehab’s gone about as far as it’s gonna go.”

She’d been thinking the same thing for the past couple of weeks. She hadn’t wanted to say so, because she kept hoping she might be wrong. All she said now was, “Are you sure? They say time—”

“—wounds all heels,” he finished for her. She winced. While she was wincing, he went on, “It may get a little better. I may be able to move it a little more without feeling like somebody’s driving nails in there. But I won’t go back to being a real, no-kidding, two-armed human being again. I wish I would, but I won’t.”

“Which means what?” Kelly feared she knew the answer, but she didn’t want the words of ill omen coming out of her mouth. If they were going to get said, he needed to say them himself.

He came over and sat down on the bed next to her. “Which means the San Atanasio PD will just have to do without a certain captain of police. I know that’ll be rough on them, but there you are.”

“Are you sure?” she said.

He nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure. You think you and Deborah will be able to stand having me rattling around the house 24/7?”

“Oh, I’m sure Deborah will hate it,” Kelly said. Their daughter loved having Daddy home all the time. She was even learning she had to be careful around his bad side.

“Yeah, well, she’s still too little to know which end is up,” Colin said. “How about you?”

“I like having you around,” Kelly answered truthfully. “The real question is, will you be able to walk away from the office and into retirement? Or will you go batshit?” Just because he wouldn’t swear around her didn’t mean she couldn’t swear around him.

“You never know ahead of time, but I don’t think I will,” Colin answered. “I’ve got enough here to keep me interested all kinds of ways.” He set a hand on her leg, above her knee. “Only you’ll have to get on top more often.”

“I don’t mind,” she said, which was also true. “But you can’t do that all the time.”

“Ain’t it a shame?” he said.

“If you say so,” she answered. “What will you do when you’re not lying on your back?”

“Riding herd on the kid will do for a start.”

“For a while, sure. But she won’t be a toddler forever, you know. Day after tomorrow—not really, but close enough—she starts school. She’ll be gone for big chunks of time. What will you do then, here by yourself?” She hoped the anxiety in her voice didn’t show. Cops’ spouses too often had reason to worry about the people they loved.

How many interrogations had Colin done? However many it was, he heard the words behind the words she said. “Don’t worry about that kind of stuff. I’m not gonna do anything stupid,” he said. “I intend to get shot by an outraged husband at the age of a hundred and three.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” Kelly said. “Well, I’ll tell you what. If you’re still around at a hundred and three and I’m still around to know, I give you permission to wander off the reservation—once. Just once. Till then, fuhgeddaboutit, Mister. After that, you can forget about it, too.”

“If I’m still around at a hundred and three, I probably will forget about it right after that,” Colin said. “My folks were pretty good about keeping their marbles, but none of ’em lived that long.”

“Neither did mine,” Kelly answered. “I had a great-grandmother, I think it was, who almost got to a hundred, but she didn’t quite.”

“Hon, what do you think about me hanging it up?” Colin asked.

“I won’t be sorry,” she said. “I’d get nervous every time you went out on a case from now on. I mean, I always knew bad things could happen to you, but nothing ever had, so I didn’t worry about it much. Now… They say, anything that can happen can happen to you. Now I know in my gut that that’s true, not just in my head. I don’t want to get the jitters whenever you stick your nose outside the station.”

He nodded. “About what I thought you’d say. Well, I’d be lying if I told you I wouldn’t be hinky myself. After you get shot once, I don’t see how you can help having the next time in the back of your mind.”

“We’re on the same page there, especially when your arm reminds you you got hit every time you move it,” Kelly said.

“There is that,” Colin agreed. “If I’d just got grazed, the way Rob did a few years ago, I might be able to not think about it. But from what he wrote, that really was a dumb accident. The guy who shot me, he did what he was trying to do. The next jerk who pulled a gun, he’d mean it, too.”

“Uh-huh. He sure would,” Kelly said. “So I’m happy you’re going to retire, as long as you think you won’t literally get bored to death once you stop going to the cop shop.”

“Nope. Not me,” Colin said. “The only thing that gripes me about it is that I’ve got to hang ’em up. I’m not doing it because I want to. It’s kind of like the so-and-so with the AK won.”

“Like hell it is!” Kelly exclaimed. “He’s dead. He’s pushing up the daisies. He’s pining for the fjords, for Christ’s sake. This is an ex–armed robber.” She did a lousy British accent, but she gave it her best shot.

And she pried a laugh out of her husband. “Thank you, Monty,” he said.

“Any time,” she told him.

He put his good arm around her. “The company will be better here than it would be at the station—I’ll tell you that. Prettier, too.”

“Flattery will get you—somewhere, probably.”

“I was hoping it would.”

“Maybe not right now, though,” she said when he got grabby.

“You’re no fun,” he grumbled. If he’d kept grabbing, Kelly might have gone along with it. Now that Marshall was back in the house, he was keeping an eye on Deborah right this minute. But Colin didn’t push it. He was pretty good about not making a nuisance of himself too often. From what Kelly knew of men, that was as much as a woman married to one of the creatures could reasonably hope for. He did say, “If I’m home all the time, I’ll drag you down in the bushes whenever I get the chance.”

“Promises, promises,” she said. They both laughed. That they could both laugh about it, she figured, spoke well for the state of their marriage.