he was dead set on jitters and Type 2 diabetes, she’d lend a helping hand.
Patty came by and asked, “Everything okay?” in her harsh Midwestern tones.
“Could be worse,” Louise answered.
“I bet,” the other woman said. “So, who’s taking care of Junior now that you’re back here?”
“One of my sons. He needs money, and I need a babysitter. It works out.”
Patty nodded. “That’s handy, anyways. You prolly don’t gotta pay him as much as you would if you hired somebody from an agency or somewheres, either.”
“I wish!” Louise exclaimed. “It’s cash on the barrelhead with Marshall.”
“Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child, the Good Book says,” Patty clucked. “It knows what it’s talking about, too. It mostly does.”
“I guess,” Louise said uncomfortably. She’d ditched her family’s stern Presbyterian faith a long time ago. Despite endless New Age experiments, though, she’d never found anything that really filled the gap. Her kids seemed to get along fine with Nothing, but she couldn’t. She wanted Answers, dammit. As the old TV show said, the truth was out there.
Somewhere. She was sure of it. Where was a different question, and one of the Answers she hadn’t found. Yet.
To her relief, Patty didn’t push it. Louise couldn’t stand people who liked their religion so much they tried to sell you on it, too. There she agreed with her ex, and with her children. She couldn’t think of many other places where they were all in accord.
What had felt strangest about coming back was how normal it seemed. She knew the inventories she needed to ride herd on. She hadn’t seen the latest and greatest numbers since she went on maternity leave, but they were in ranges and patterns she found familiar.
She remembered how to ride herd on Mr. Nobashi, too. He’d changed even less than the inventories. He still spent a lot of the time on the phone, spewing impassioned Japanese laced with English profanity. Louise presumed he was talking to the home office in Hiroshima, but for all she could prove he might have been getting bets down with his bookie. She knew a few Japanese words and phrases-anybody who’d lived in San Atanasio for a while picked them up, the same way Southern Californians generally had fragments of Spanish even if their folks came from Denmark-but she didn’t speak the language.
Mr. Nobashi was just hanging up when she brought him coffee a few minutes before quitting time. “Thank you,” he said, which, along with his bad language, proved he was getting Americanized. A boss in Japan, from everything Louise had heard, would take getting waited on for granted.
“You’re welcome,” Louise said to encourage him.
He gulped sugary caffeine and smacked his thin lips. “I talk with Hiroshima,” he said. “Very bad weather, Hiroshima. Cold like nobody remember.”
“Here, too,” Louise agreed. “Snow!” Like any good Angeleno, she said it as if it were a word for people in other, less lucky, parts of the world. And so it had been, till the supervolcano went off. “Not just snow, either. Rain all year long! It’s ridiculous!”
“Snow in Hiroshima, too,” Mr. Nobashi said. “Snow now. Crops in Japan very bad this year.”
“Crops everywhere are bad this year,” Louise said. In most of the American Midwest, there were no crops. Dust and ash buried much of what had been the world’s breadbasket. Even where it didn’t, the horrible weather the supervolcano had caused screwed up crops and shortened growing seasons.
It sounded as if the price of ramen would go up. The price of everything had gone up as if inflated with helium. College students would particularly mourn this bump, though.
Mr. Nobashi eyed the clock on his wall. “You go home,” he told Louise, even if it was early. “You got to be tired.”
“Thank you, Mr. Nobashi!” She bailed out before he had the chance to change his mind.
Marshall was changing James Henry’s diaper when Louise walked into the condo. “Good job,” she said, to encourage him. “You’re doing super with him. No diaper rash or anything.”
“Yeah, well, when he’s wet or stinky I deal with it,” he answered, and she could hear the shrug in his voice. He washed his hands, grabbed his laptop, and headed for the door. “See you in the morning.”
“Marshall-” Louise began. He paused, but his face didn’t open. She swallowed a sigh. “Never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Out he went, not quite slamming the door behind him. No, he hadn’t forgiven her for leaving Colin. Odds were he never would. She’d tried to explain how stifled she’d felt while she was married to his father. She’d tried, and heard herself failing. He didn’t understand, or want to.
Louise sighed. Yes, she’d lost the children, and she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. She’d hoped Vanessa would get it, but Vanessa’s own troubles were the only ones that were real to her. James Henry made a baby noise, halfway between a gurgle and a burp. Louise picked him up and cuddled him. He couldn’t even smile yet, but she didn’t care. He’d love her no matter what.
For a while, anyhow.
V
“I’ve got a job for you, Colin,” Mike Pitcavage said. He didn’t look like a police chief. He looked like a national news anchor, or maybe a Senator who was thinking about running for President. He was tall and fit and tan, with a full head of iron-gray hair. He wore custom-made Italian suits, not the off-the-rack stuff most cops-Colin included- put on every day.
Colin didn’t even particularly resent him for winning the chief’s job, though he’d put in for it himself. Pitcavage could make nice, a talent Colin knew he lacked. You could get by as a lieutenant if people saw what you really thought of them. When you had to deal with the mayor and the city council all the damn time, that didn’t fly any more.
“What’s up?” he asked, looking across the desk at Pitcavage.
The desk was about the size of an aircraft-carrier flight deck. It was almost entirely bare. The only things on it were two framed photographs, one of Pitcavage’s wife, the other of his son. Caroline was a nice gal. She wasn’t a trophy wife or anything; they’d been married a long time. Colin’s opinion of Darren Pitcavage was rather lower. If he weren’t a prominent cop’s kid. .
But he was, so the drunk-driving charge quietly got reduced to speeding. That fight in the bar? People said the other guy threw the first punch. There’d been something that had to do with vandalism, too, but that also didn’t stick. Darren was even better-looking than his old man, but his eyes didn’t seem to want to meet the camera.
Mike Pitcavage opened a desk drawer, took out a piece of paper, and slid it across the desk at Colin. “We’ve got a big oil tanker coming into San Pedro next week,” he said. “The crude will go to the refineries in El Segundo. All the impacted departments will participate in security arrangements. I want you to take leadership in San Atanasio.”
Before Colin said anything, he took a long look at the paper. Then he clicked his tongue between his teeth. “So this oil is for South Bay police departments? How’d we manage that?”
“We managed, with some help from the politicians. Trust me-you don’t want to know the gory details,” Pitcavage answered.
Colin believed him. The world seemed to get dog-eat-doggier every day. With more and more people grabbing for less and less, where was the surprise in that? “San Pedro’s part of Los Angeles. I don’t see the LAPD mentioned here anywhere.”
“No, and you won’t, either.” The San Atanasio police chief looked sly.
“Huh,” Colin said. A narrow strip of territory-part of it ran just east of San Atanasio-connected San Pedro to
