Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart

XXII

Spring came to Guilford on little cat feet, like the fog in the poem. On the calendar, it arrived at the end of the third week in March. Except on the calendar, that meant diddly-squat. From what longtime locals told Rob, the vernal equinox hadn’t meant much in Guilford even before the supervolcano erupted. You could get snow into April, once in a while even into May.

These days, you could get snow into July, even into August. Snow—it’s not just for winter any more! Rob thought it made a terrific advertising slogan. For some reason or other—he couldn’t fathom why—it never caught on the way he wanted.

But, around half past May, the weather slowly began to gain on the calendar’s claims. It could still snow any old time. But it mostly didn’t snow all the goddamn time, as it did in the no-shit winter months. Daytime temps crawled above freezing. Sometimes, instead of snowing, it rained. The drifts that had covered the ground for so long started to melt. That happened first on south-facing slopes that got whatever sunshine sneaked past the clouds. Shadowed stretches stayed snowy longer.

Before the supervolcano blew, Maine had been a birders’ paradise. All kinds of feathered critters came here to raise families and gorge on the bazillions of bugs that hatched out as ponds and swamps unfroze. The unfreezing took longer and was less certain now. There were fewer bugs. Anyone who’d ever had Maine mosquitoes turn his face to steak tartare didn’t miss them a bit. The birds did, though. Only the hardier kinds came here for the abbreviated summer now. They found the times cold and hungry.

Well, Rob found the times cold and hungry, too. He was down to about 165 pounds. On a six-one frame, that wasn’t much. Jeans that had fit him fine once upon a time hung loose these days. He was about twenty pounds under what he’d weighed when he came to Guilford. He used holes in his belt he’d never thought about in the old days.

By pre-eruption standards, almost everybody north and west of the Interstate was skinny. People worked harder. If you had to go somewhere, you walked or skied or snowshoed. If you needed firewood, you chopped it. You didn’t—you couldn’t—hop in the car to go three blocks to the drugstore and another block to the Subway for a meatball sub with marinara.

Rob wondered when he’d last seen a tomato. Some canned ones had come in since the eruption—he was sure of that. Fresh tomatoes? Not even all of Jim Farrell’s magic with greenhouses would persuade them to grow in what passed for a climate around here these days.

Plenty of things wouldn’t grow. But some would. Some had: turnips and other roots, some of the extra-cold-weather potatoes for which they also had Jim to thank, onions, and, in the greenhouses, things like lettuce and garlic. Along with game and pigs and chickens, they meant the people in these parts might be skinny, but few were in any real danger of starving.

Rob ambled east past the Shell station. That wasn’t one of the many businesses that had gone belly-up since the eruption. Mort Willard, the fellow who’d run it as a gas station, was a skilled repairman, mechanic, and handyman. He could fix damn near anything, and did, often using the tools that had once performed surgery on automobiles.

Ralph O’Brian no longer worked for Mort. He made what living he made by chopping wood and shoveling snow and doing other things that needed a strong back but not a whole lot of brains. Rob felt a certain amount of Schadenfreude about that. He knew Ralph hadn’t shot him on purpose. Ralph had been aiming for the moose. He’d got a musician only by accident. Then again, Rob would carry that scar on his calf for the rest of his life. A couple of inches to one side and he might have lost that leg below the knee. So he hadn’t lost any love for good old Ralph.

Of course, if you sported no worse than a scar and no more than a mild dislike for one of your fellow human beings after he shot you, you were doing fine. It didn’t sound as if Dad had been so lucky. You always knew something like that could happen to a cop. But when it didn’t and it didn’t and it didn’t, when you moved the width of a continent away, you stopped worrying about it. And when you stopped worrying about it, naturally, that was when it happened.

Guilford petered out fast when you walked along Highway 6. Freezes and thaws had pitted the asphalt. Some of it still lay under snow; some peeked out. If any cars or trucks did come this way, they would have a tooth-rattling time of it. Rob wasn’t holding his breath. In the distance, somebody hammered nails into a board. That was the loudest noise he heard. No motor vehicles within earshot.

Off to the south lay the Piscataquis. The ice on the river was starting to break up, but not nearly done. Some pines and broad-leafed trees still grew along the riverbank, though others had been cut down for fuel. The pines looked like, well, pines. The maples and whatever else kept them company thrust bare branches into the sky. They would get leaves for a little while, but they hadn’t done it yet.

Rob stopped and looked around. Somewhere right about here, that Hummer had smashed head-on into the eighteen-wheeler. The resulting mess blocked the narrow road and made damn sure that Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles wouldn’t make it up to their scheduled gig in Greenville. They’d ended up in Guilford instead.

If their two Ford Explorers had come by half an hour earlier… My whole life would be different, Rob thought. All our lives would be different if we’d driven through Guilford without stopping. Several local women would have different husbands, or no husbands at all. Several children wouldn’t have been born. Others who might have come along had the band reached Greenville now never would.

And what was the difference? Just a little timing. There wasn’t a person in the world who didn’t have a story like that. If you’d been a little late or a little early, if you hadn’t had that fender-bender back in the days when you could bend fenders, if that woman in the store with you had bought the secondhand book that changed your life when you read it, if this, if that, if the other thing, your whole life would be totally changed.

It made you wonder. It really did. Ordinary lives were so easy to jerk around that way. What about the lives of nations? Could all that If the South Had Won the Civil War, The Man in the High Castle stuff be true? If your destiny could twist like a contortionist slipping on a banana peel, what about your country’s?

“Yeah—what about it?” Rob said aloud. His breath smoked. Suppose the supervolcano hadn’t decided to go off for another hundred years? Or another ten thousand years? What would I be doing now in that case? Whatever it was, Rob was sure he wouldn’t be doing it in Guilford, Maine, right this minute.

Little Colin Ferguson wouldn’t have been born. Millions of people in the middle of the country wouldn’t have been buried in volcanic mud and ash or died of HPO and other horrible lung diseases or got stuck in the refugee camps that, from the reports trickling up into this forgotten backwater, lay somewhere between Indian reservations and the Gulag Archipelago on the sorry scale of man’s indifference to man.

But the world had what it had, not what it wished it had or what it might have had. Rob crouched in the middle of a snowless patch of ground off to the side of the road. It wasn’t all bare, black, lifeless mud: primordial ooze. Here and there lay a green fur of moss. A small, corpse-pale mushroom stuck up phallically. That looked pretty primordial, all right, but lifeless it wasn’t.

And, here and there, blades of grass were sprouting. Their green was different from the moss’. It was paler and brighter at the same time. It made you think summer barbecues were right around the corner. It did till you looked at the lingering snow a couple of feet away, anyhow.

If the winters stayed harsh, one of these years the grass might not be able to come up at all. Even if that happened, though, by then whatever did come up in Labrador in the springtime might have found a new home here outside Guilford. One way or another, life went on.

“Ob-la-di, ob-la-da,” Rob muttered. The Beatles had turned into golden oldies long before he was born. So what? Hemingway was a golden oldie, too. So was Mark Twain. Dickens. Shakespeare. Euripides, for God’s sake. People were still reading them all. People were still riffing off what they’d done.

That was immortality, or as much of it as human beings were likely to get. So it seemed to the wise, perceptive philosopher and sage known as Rob Ferguson, anyhow. The philosopher and sage’s knees clicked when he stood up straight. He needed to take a leak. That wasn’t immortality. It was mortality, reminding him it was around. He strode over to the closest pine and took care of business.

His stomach grumbled. Last he’d heard, the Chinese place in Dover-Foxcroft was still a going concern. As he’d seen when transportation was easier, it had always been as much about what you could get in small-town Maine as it was about what you could do with that stuff if you were a Chinese cook. Had soy sauce come north in trucks? Did the gal who ran the restaurant raise her own soybeans under glass and ferment them?

It was probably an academic question, unless a bunch of locals decided to go to Dover-Foxcroft in a wagon or something. He supposed he could ride over on a bike if he wanted to badly enough, and if Lindsey did. They could plop little Colin into a seat behind one of them and make an outing of it. Dover-Foxcroft was only seven miles or so from Guilford.

“Only,” Rob said. “Yeah, right.” Seven miles wasn’t impossible on a bicycle—nowhere near. But seven miles each way wasn’t something you did with a casual case of the munchies, either. As far as time went, it was like a forty-mile commute each way through downtown L.A. back in the long-lost days of cheap gas and clogged freeways. You needed a serious jones for Maine-inflected Cantonese before you’d start pedaling. Otherwise, you’d walk over to Caleb’s Kitchen and eat pork sausage and turnips or chicken stew or something like that.

He turned around and headed back to Guilford. He wasn’t going to walk to Dover-Foxcroft today: that was for damn sure. There was such a thing as working up an appetite before you ate, but that took it too far. He didn’t think he’d end up at Caleb’s Kitchen now, but you never knew. If his stomach growled again while he was anywhere close, he might stick his head in and see if whatever Caleb was cooking smelled good.

Yes, grass and maybe even some things with flowers were coming up. Yes, the snow was melting faster than it was falling. Yes, that really was an optimistic rose-breasted grosbeak chirping as it flew by. Yes, the temp was edging up toward fifty, and might not drop far below forty tonight. Back in those long-lost times, this had been about as cold and miserable a day as Los Angeles ever got. For a post-eruption spring morning in Guilford, it was a corker.

Somebody coming Rob’s way waved. He waved back—it was Justin. His bandmate wore a denim jacket over a ratty flannel shirt, and probably a T-shirt under that. He was dressed much like Rob, in other words. Justin’s hair was still curly, but not permed any more. Like Rob’s, Justin’s beard showed the first traces of gray. Beards were warmer than bare chins. You didn’t have to worry about blades, either, or learn to shave with a straight razor.

“What’s going on?” Justin called.

“Not much,” Rob answered. “It’s just another perfect day—”

“I love L.A.!” Justin finished for him. They grinned at each other. After a beat, Justin went on, “I don’t love it enough to want to live there any more, though. How weird is that?”

“Oh, pretty much,” Rob said. “But I’m so the same way. When Lindsey wanted to head south after Colin was born, I was the one who talked her out of it. And she, like, grew up here. How weird is that?”

“Plus royal que le roi,” Justin said in what would pass for French if no Quebecer happened to hear him. “I like it here, though, more than I ever did anywhere else. We’re out from under, know what I mean?”

“I just might,” Rob replied. “Yeah, I just might. Before the eruption, our taxes were making the accountant’s eyes cross.”

“Duh! How many states did we have income from the last year before the supervolcano blew?” Justin said.

“Lemme see. There was despair, lethargy, doped-outedness, rage, lust… .”

“Not quite what I meant, but close enough,” Justin agreed. “He said our mileage was liable to get us audited all by itself.”

“How come none of the IRS weenies ever went out on the road with a working band?” Rob asked.

“Because they’re IRS weenies?” Justin suggested. “Because they wouldn’t know picking a guitar from picking their noses? But any which way, we don’t have to worry about any of that shit for a long time. We’ve fallen over the edge of the world. Here Be Dragons, the atlas says when it talks about places like this. We’re off the map, off the chart, off the goddamn Internet. I don’t miss it a bit. I don’t miss my belly a bit, either.” He slapped his stomach. He still carried more weight than Rob did, but he sure wasn’t pudgy any more.

“I don’t, either—now,” Rob said slowly. “One of these years, though, I’m gonna have trouble with a heart valve or my prostate’ll start trying to kill me or something else will go wrong. Then I’ll wish I was part of the big club, not the little one.”

“Hey, life is full of tradeoffs. If you have more fun while you’re living but maybe you don’t live as long—guys make that deal every time they light a cigarette or eat a pound and a half of prime rib. Do you really live longer or does it just seem longer ’cause it’s all a bore?”

“Right now, I’m with you. I told you that,” Rob answered. “Have to admit, though, I’m not sure I’ll say the same thing in my sixties.”

“Farrell does,” Justin said, which was true, even if Jim was bound to be past his sixties and into his seventies now. Justin went on, “Besides, if you do get sick I bet you can game the system. Show up in Bangor with a Social Security card and what will the hospital there do? Throw you out so you freeze in the snow? I don’t think so!”

Rob wasn’t sure his friend had it straight. The eruption had made everybody a lot more hardnosed. When there wasn’t enough to go around, people had to be. All the same… “And from what we hear, who knows whether things will be better anywhere else thirty years from now?” Rob said.

Justin nodded. “There’s that, too. So lay back and enjoy it. Maybe this summer some dope’ll make it this far north again, or some seeds so we can try our luck with homegrown. Even if it doesn’t, hey, there’s still rhubarb vodka.”

“Now I’ve got a reason to move south!” Rob exclaimed.

They both laughed. The local moonshine wasn’t as dreadful as it had been when amateur distillers first tried their luck after the eruption. It still wasn’t anything you’d drink if you had a lot of choices, though. Some of the homebrew beer, by contrast, tasted pretty damn good.

“We’re in another country. We’re in another time,” Rob said.

“The natives are friendly,” Justin observed. “Which is bound to be another reason we’re still here.”

“Still here…” Rob tasted the words. They rang a faint bell in the back of his mind. “Broadway song about that, isn’t there?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Justin screwed up his face, trying to dredge it up and plainly not having much luck. “By… by… Cole Porter or one of those old-time guys. Whoever wrote it, he’s right. We are still here.”

“Yup. Here in Guilford, by God, Maine. Who woulda figured that?” Rub stuck out his hand. “Here’s to us, here’s to being here, and here’s to being here in Guilford, by God, Maine.” Solemnly, Justin shook with him.

There was a last time for everything. With a little technical assistance from Kelly, Colin put on his uniform for the last time. Because he’d lost weight after the supervolcano like so many other people, the navy wool tunic and trousers were on the loose side. The uniform smelled of mothballs. Colin didn’t much care.

Kelly wore a pale blue suit herself. You didn’t get a retirement bash at City Hall every day. Colin kissed her. “You look great, babe,” he said. “But hey, you always look great to me.” Except in the line of duty, he made a lousy liar. Fortunately, he meant that.

Kelly’s smile showed she knew it. “Well, if you’re gonna rattle around the house from now on, you may as well rattle around in a pleasant tone of voice. You all ready?”

He set the cap with the patent-leather bill on his head. “Now I am. I oughta wear this darn thing backwards like a gangbanger, y’know? What could they do about it? Fire me?”

“Come on. Be nice. You want your report card to say ‘Plays well with others,’ don’t you?” Kelly kept smiling, but now she let her patience show.

Colin didn’t give a damn what his report card said. But the idea felt funnier to talk about than to do. He went down the stairs with his wife.

Marshall was reading Deborah a Commander Toad book. He’d been bummed when Janine didn’t feel like letting him darken her towels any more, but he wasn’t crying into his sausage and sauerkraut every night or anything. He’d had a fling, it hadn’t been Happily Ever After, so here he was again, not a lot sadder and probably not a lot wiser, either.

“You look like a policeman, Daddy!” Deborah said.

“Funny how that works,” Colin answered. He hadn’t put on the uniform more than a couple of times since she was born; she might not even remember it. He blew her a kiss and nodded to Marshall. “We’ll be back when the gruesome orgy’s over with.”

“Right, Dad.” Marshall was resigned to his lines. “You came down just when we were getting to the exciting part. They’re about to go into hopperspace.” He went back to reading to his half-sister.

Once Colin walked outside, he was glad for the wool. It was cool out there, somewhere in the low fifties. It had drizzled before, but it wasn’t raining now. The sun ducked in and out of the clouds. Not the kind of day you would have looked for in L.A. in early June before the eruption. In fact… “Kind of reminds me of the weather in Yellowstone the day we met,” he remarked.

“Maybe some. If we were by a lake here, though, it wouldn’t still be frozen over,” Kelly said.

“Well, no,” he allowed.

They got into the Taurus. Colin sat on the passenger side. He had to do up the seat belt with his right hand, which was awkward. But his left arm still snarled at him outside of a narrow range of motion.

Kelly started the engine. “They’d better not pull me over,” she said. “I’ve got a current ID, but my license has been dead for I don’t know how long.”

“Yeah, like you’re the only one,” Colin said, and then, “I never fixed a ticket in my life, but I think I just might be able to get you off the hook for that.”

“Do you, now?” she said as she backed out of the driveway. “So you’re getting corrupt on your last day?”

“If you’re gonna do it, that’s the best time,” he answered, more seriously than he’d thought he would.

“Yeah, I guess it would be,” Kelly said. “I’ve driven to the station before, but I don’t think I’ve ever gone to the city hall. Do I park in the same lot?”

“You can if you want to,” Colin told her. “Not a long walk or anything. But City Hall has a separate parking lot you get into off of San Atanasio Boulevard instead of Hesperus.”

“Okay, I’ll try that, then,” she said. “If they haven’t reserved a space for you, I’ll damn well turn around and go home, too, and they can throw the party by themselves.”

She didn’t need to worry about that. Colin hadn’t thought she would. No doubt she hadn’t, either. The parking space nearest the entrance usually belonged to the mayor. Today, a paper sign was taped over the metal one: FOR CAPTAIN COLIN FERGUSON. Balloons and crepe streamer adorned the sign. “I ought to retire more often,” Colin said.

“You don’t think it would lose some effect after a while?” Kelly asked.

“Nah. Why should it?” Colin said. “They’d always be glad to get rid of me.” There’d been too many times in his career when he wouldn’t have been kidding about that. He pointed to the balloons. “When we go, we should snag one of those for Playboy.”

A uniformed cop stood outside the glass doors that let you into City Hall. He waved as Colin got out of the car, then ducked through them. “What’s he doing?” Kelly wondered out loud.

“Warning people. What else?” Colin answered, not without pride.

He and Kelly went through the doors a moment later. He held one open for her—he could do that with his good arm. The mayor’s administrative assistant bustled up to them. She was a gray-haired, highly competent woman named Lois Tsuye. “If you’ll just come with me, Captain Ferguson, Mrs. Ferguson…” she said.

Come with her they did. She led them through the city council chamber—which would have been superdupermodern fifty years earlier, right down to the city seal with the crossed freeways on the wall—and into a reception room off to one side. Blue tape that wouldn’t hurt the paint held a big banner with Colin’s name on it to the wall.

The crowd was split between cops and city dignitaries. There were also a reporter and a photographer from the Daily Breeze. The Times didn’t think the retirement was a big enough deal to cover. That bothered Colin not in the least. If not for the honor of the farewell, he wouldn’t have minded skipping it.

Malik Williams came over and shook his hand. The chief’s head gleamed under the ceiling lights. “I’ll miss you, Colin,” he said. “When your phone rings, every so often it’ll be me, calling to pick your brain. I’ve enjoyed working with you. You did this force a lot of good.”

“Thanks,” Colin said. “I appreciate that, believe me.”

“Hey, I mean it,” Williams said. “You could’ve undercut me eight ways from Sunday. I was new, and you’d been here a long time. You knew everybody. And—” Williams flicked a couple of fingers across the back of his other hand. Colin had seen that gesture from African-Americans before. It meant I’m this color, after all. The chief continued, “But you didn’t. You didn’t even try. You backed my play, and I’m grateful.”

“I told you I didn’t want the job, and I meant it,” Colin said stolidly.

Malik Williams smiled a cop’s knowing smile. “People tell me all kinds of things every day. And some of it’s true, and some of it… ain’t.” The pause before the bad grammar reminded you he really knew better. He set a hand on Colin’s good shoulder—he also knew better than to touch him on the wounded one. Then he nodded and walked over to the coffee urn.

“That was nice,” Kelly said. “That’s what you came for.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Colin said. “But Malik’s okay. I thought so as soon as I met him, and it looks like I was right.”

He started toward the coffee urn himself. Rodney Ellis intercepted him. “Dude, you dance like you’ve got two left feet and a broken leg, but you’re the best cop I ever worked with, and it’s not even close,” the black detective said.

“You need to keep better company, is what you need,” Colin answered, trying to hide how pleased he was.

“No way, man.” Ellis shook his head. “You always went where the evidence took you. You didn’t care if the perp was black or white or green. You didn’t care if he was a big wheel’s kid, either. You just went after him. That’s how it’s supposed to work, and too damn often it doesn’t even come close.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not too shabby yourself,” Colin said. “I couldn’t’ve done it without you, you know, not when it mattered most.” Ellis had led the team that arrested Darren Pitcavage for dealing drugs, setting up (though they didn’t know it) Mike Pitcavage’s suicide—and unmasking.

“You were the one who got the lead,” Rodney said. He squeezed Colin’s hand and let him go.

This time, Colin actually managed to get to the coffee, and to drink one sip from his cup. Then Gabe Sanchez waylaid him. “Had to wait till the brothers got through with you,” Gabe said in mock-indignant tones.

“I just figured a wetback like you was too lazy to come over first,” Colin said. Cops woofed on cops as automatically, and often as thoughtlessly, as they breathed.

“Didn’t see any paddies ahead of me in line,” Gabe shot back. “Man, it won’t be the same without you, and that’s a fact.”

“You’ll have to do the grumpy-old-man number for me from now on,” Colin said.

“Who’s old?” Sanchez pulled a hair from his mustache. It was white. He let it fall to the industrial carpeting. “Oh. Guess I am.”

Colin patted his own gray top cover where it stuck out from under the cap. “Happens to most people. All you’ve got to do is live long enough.”

“Uh-huh. I—” Gabe broke off. If he could have done double takes that good on cue, he would have wasted his time at police work. “Holy crap! Is that Caroline Pitcavage who just walked in?”

“Yup.” Colin’s voice went thoroughly grim. “Haven’t seen her since… since we busted Darren.” She had apologized to him after it came out that she’d spent her whole adult life married to the South Bay Strangler. Hardly anyone had seen her since then. Colin couldn’t very well blame her for that.

Since she’d come here now, though, he had to go over and say something to her. How’ve you been since your husband snuffed himself instead of a little old lady? popped into his head. That might not do, no matter what the capering devil inside him thought.

He managed a nod as he walked over to her. “Thanks for coming, Caroline,” he said. “I’m glad to see you.”

“I heard about this, and I thought I ought to,” she replied. She was closer to his age than to Kelly’s, but still had the trim look of someone who’d been a high-school cheerleader. Her eyes, though, her eyes told of the hard times she’d seen lately. After a moment, she went on, “I’m sorry you got hurt. I’m sorry… I’m sorry about all kinds of things. These lemons make crappy lemonade, if you know what I mean.”

“I guess.” Colin figured that for the giant economy-size understatement. “Do you ever, uh, hear from Darren?”

“Once in a while a phone call. Once in a while a card.” She sighed. Her son had got eight years. If he kept his nose clean, he’d likely serve about half of it. “I hope he gets his shit together when he comes out. I hope he doesn’t go institutional and decide life in there is easier than it is on the outside.”

“Me, too. I think he’s got a decent chance.” Colin meant that. As a police chief’s son, Darren would be kept away from the general run of inmates for his own safety. He’d stay isolated most of the time. No prison camaraderie for him. You’d have to be a nutcase to want to go back to that. Colin had long thought Darren Pitcavage was a nasty prick. A nutcase? No, or not that kind, anyhow.

“Like I said, I hope. That’s about what I can do these days.” Caroline sounded bleak. Well, she had her reasons. “Enjoy your retirement, Colin. Enjoy your life. It’s nice somebody gets to.”

People stared as she went over to pick up a Danish and get some coffee. She seemed to move in a bubble of wide eyes and quiet. Then Malik Williams walked up and made small talk with her. Colin admired the chief for that. It took moral courage. He wasn’t sure he could have done it if he were in Williams’ shoes and not his own.

A city councilman came up and pumped his hand. Charlie Yamada had run the Honda dealership at the corner of Hesperus and Reynoso Drive till the supervolcano killed that business. He still sold Hondas these days: Honda motor scooters. He also sold Segways and bikes and trikes. IF IT’S GOT WHEELS, WE’LL DEAL! was his current slogan.

“You did the city a great service, Captain,” he said. “You deserve to be proud of yourself for it.”

“Thanks.” Colin left it right there. Yamada was a friendly blowhard, but he was a blowhard all the same. A service? Colin hadn’t known Mike Pitcavage was the South Bay Strangler when he set up Darren’s arrest. If he’d had even a small suspicion, he would have gone after the chief years earlier. Anyone would have.

Kelly was talking with Lucy Chen. Not for the first time, Colin thought the two of them might have been sisters, even if one was fair and Jewish, the other almond-eyed and black-haired. Regardless of looks, they shared the same straight-ahead style and drive to get to the bottom of things. If Kelly had told him to take a flying leap that morning in Yellowstone all these years ago now, he wondered if he would have been smart enough to ask Lucy out. He could have done worse—he was sure of that. Whether she would have been dumb enough to say yes was a different question altogether. Luckily for him, it wasn’t one he had to worry about any more.

“Excuse me,” he told Councilman Yamada—any excuse to get away seemed a good one. He refilled his own coffee cup, then went over to his wife and the DNA technician. Raising the cup in salute, he said, “Here’s to the two women who saved my bacon.”

“Phooey,” Kelly said.

“You did what you were supposed to do, and the truth came out because of that.” Lucy might think she didn’t know him well enough to throw Phooey in his face, but what she did say amounted to the same thing.

“Thanks to you,” he said—he wasn’t going to let her get away with that.

He might have gone on, but Eugene Cervus chose that moment to stride confidently to the lectern. The mayor of San Atanasio wore a suit elegant enough that even Mike Pitcavage might not have disdained it. He tapped at the mike to see if it was live. When he found it was, he leaned forward and said, “Ladies and gentlemen…” That got people’s attention. After a moment, Mayor Cervus went on, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re here today to celebrate the career of Captain Colin Ferguson, who’s done his best for the city of San Atanasio since well before the turn of the millennium.”

The assembled cops and dignitaries clapped. Colin thought the mayor should have stuck with turn of the century. The other made you think when you should have been just listening. Cervus continued, “Captain Ferguson saved his finest work for last. His investigations led to the end of the South Bay Strangler’s reign of terror over this whole region. And, after that, he labored valiantly to restore the unity and the pride of the San Atanasio Police Department.” More applause, this time mostly from the cops. That made Colin feel good. The mayor finished, “Here to speak more on that is Malik Williams, chief of the San Atanasio PD. Chief Williams!”

Colin joined in the hand the chief got as he replaced the mayor behind the lectern. Williams deserved it, as far as he was concerned. “When I got here, they told me Colin Ferguson was a cop’s cop. They were right,” Malik Williams said. People clapped some more. He continued, “They didn’t tell me he was a smart cop, but I found that out pretty darn quick. I’ve been finding out how smart he is ever since. We’ll be using his ideas about how to go low-tech when we have to, and how to mix low tech and high, for years to come. So will police departments up and down California. I’m sorrier than I know how to tell you that his injury is making him retire earlier than he would have, because he’s a good man—a terrific man—at your back. And here he is. Give it up for Captain… Colin… Ferguson!”

Beside Colin, Kelly blistered her palms applauding. Lucy Chen clapped hard, too. He lumbered to the lectern as the crowd gave him an ovation. He would rather have run in the other direction. But you did what you had to do, not always what you wanted to do. His left shoulder barked while he took his place there. Yes, you did what you had to do, all right.

“Thanks very much, folks,” he said after the noise died down. “I’m glad you think I did a decent job while I was here. We’ve had some hard times, what with the real-estate collapse and the Strangler and everything that’s come after the supervolcano. But we’re still in there pitching, doing the best we can for our families and our friends and our town. We keep going. We have to. The town will get along fine without me, and so will the department. I’m going to watch my little girl grow up, maybe raise a few chickens while I’m doing it. And I’m going to smell the roses—the weather may be rotten these days, but it’s not too rotten for them to grow. I’m sorry to be leaving a little sooner than I expected, but every other way I can think of I’m a heck of a lucky man. Thanks again.”

They gave him another hand when he stepped away from the lectern, probably not least because he’d kept it short. Kelly kissed him. Everybody else in the room shook his hand again—it sure seemed that way to him, anyhow. He drank more coffee. He ate a sweet roll or two. He stood around listening to people who mattered to him—and to quite a few who didn’t—tell him what a wonderful fellow he was. If you believed a quarter of that stuff, your hat size would swell more and quicker than Barry Bonds’.

At last, he asked a question of Kelly with one eyebrow. She nodded. Colin broke out in a broad grin. He’d spent long enough here. Now he could retire from his retirement party. A last few handshakes, and he made his getaway.

It had started raining again. “Never used to do that this time of year,” Colin grumbled, glowering at Kelly as if the supervolcano erupted because she’d studied it.

“Well, it’s doing it now,” she said, and pulled an umbrella from her purse.

They walked out to the Taurus close together, so the umbrella could keep them both dry. Colin remembered to grab a balloon off the sign in front of the car so he could make the cat’s day.

After he got in, Kelly helped him fasten his belt. She backed out of the parking space and started home. They might not see another car on the road all the way there. Colin had no idea when he’d get into this one again, either. That was as much the supervolcano’s fault as the revised weather was. But what could you do? See what Deborah’d been up to while you were gone, was what. It made a good starter, anyhow.