stuck out his hand again. As Colin took it, the chief went on, “I won’t forget the number you did on them, either. Way to go.”
That was dismissal. Even Colin, who didn’t always notice hints, got this one and took it. Leaving the chief’s inner sanctum, he liked Pitcavage better than he had for years. If Mike had a prick for a son, it could happen to anybody. Colin knew that only too well. Rob and Marshall weren’t perfect. Neither was Vanessa.
* * *
Kelly looked up bemusedly at the ceiling of the Benson Hotel’s lobby. It was a pretty fancy place, all dark, mellow wood. And she had to look a long way up at the molded and gilded plaster on the ceiling. The Benson dated from 1912, when splendor, by God, was splendor. Across the street stood the colonnaded magnificence of the First National Bank building, which might almost have come to Portland from the acropolis of Athens.
She shivered, not because she mourned the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome but because she was bloody cold. They’d scheduled the American geologists’ conclave for December in northern Oregon before the supervolcano erupted. It must have seemed a good idea at the time. Now. .
People kept saying Los Angeles was the new Seattle. Kelly didn’t think that was true, but people kept saying it no matter what she thought. Going with it for the sake of argument, that made Portland the new. . well, what?
Seattle lay about 1,100 miles north of L.A. What was 1,100 miles north of Portland?
And it felt like it. Snow swirled through the air and drifted on the sidewalks. Heat was in short supply. By law, the only places where you could set your thermostat higher than fifty were schools and hospitals. She wore the same clothes she would have taken to Yellowstone in winter, and she was glad to have them. Ice was forming on the Willamette and even on the broad, swift-flowing Columbia.
When the assembled geologists weren’t giving papers or listening to them, they did the same thing as every other group of conventioneers ever hatched: they headed for the bar. It was just off the lobby, to the right of the glass-and-bronze revolving door that let you in.
Booze didn’t really warm you up, but it made you feel as if it did, which was often good enough. And Oregon was microbrew heaven. Even the new, abbreviated growing season around here seemed to be enough to let barley mature. Behind the bar stood a rack of Oregon reds and whites from before the eruption. When those were gone, they’d be gone for good. Oregon wasn’t wine country any more, and wouldn’t be for nobody knew how many years to come.
And booze lubricated social gatherings. Kelly was halfway down a hoppy IPA when a friend of hers walked in. She waved. Daniel Olson nodded back. He picked his way through the chattering crowd. They hugged. They’d both been plucked from Yellowstone by helicopters just ahead of the supervolcano eruption. Along with two other rescued geologists, Kelly had crashed in his apartment in Missoula till Colin finagled a way out for her.
Daniel ordered himself a pale ale, too, and clinked bottles with her. “Did I hear you got married?” he said. She spread the fingers on her left hand to show off the ring. He nodded. “Sweet. And a job, too? At-what is it? Dominguez State?”
“Cal State Dominguez, yeah,” Kelly agreed. People said
“Well, it’s still there and still kind of in business, which is more than you can say for most of Montana,” Daniel answered. “But everything that comes in comes from the west. We’ve got electricity, but no natural gas.”
Kelly nodded. “I remember when it went out.” The big pipe that fed Missoula came to it across the rest of Montana. Or rather, it had come across Montana. Now it lay squashed under God only knew how many feet of ash and dust and rock.
“Not much gasoline, either,” Daniel went on. “We chopped down a hell of a lot of trees to get through last winter, and we’ll chop down more this time around. We’ll regret it one of these days, but people are too worried about not freezing now to give a damn about later.”
“Welcome to America,” Kelly said, and the other geologist spread his hands in resigned agreement. When this quarter’s balance sheet decided whether you got promoted, you wouldn’t care what happened a few years down the line. And when it really was a choice between fuel in the fireplace and a Missoula winter on steroids, you’d chop down the pines now and let the bare hillsides take care of themselves in the sweet bye and bye.
“So, when are you presenting your paper?” Daniel asked.
“Morning session tomorrow,” Kelly answered. She was one of the world’s leading experts on everything that led up to the supervolcano blast. Passing on what she knew. .
“I’ll be there,” Daniel promised.
Kelly gulped a little; Daniel knew as much about the Yellowstone supervolcano as she did. At least partly to soften him up, she said, “You want to have breakfast tomorrow?”
“Sure. And when we talk shop in the restaurant downstairs, everybody can look at us like we’re nuts.” Daniel clucked and caught himself. “Nah. Most of the people in there’ll be nuts the same way we are. Say, half past eight?”
“Sounds good. I’m scheduled for ten thirty. That’ll give us plenty of time to eat, and then I can be nervous afterwards.” Kelly knew she was kidding on the square. She’d critiqued other people’s papers before, but this was her first big presentation on her own. The room would be packed, too. There wasn’t anything more urgent in the field, and there wouldn’t be for years, maybe centuries, to come.
“Okay. I know that song.” Daniel grinned crookedly. He’d snagged a tenure-track job at Montana State while she was still in grad school. Had she been jealous? Oh, just a little, especially since he was younger than she was. Now he went on, “Let’s meet in the lobby. That way, whoever gets here first can gawp at the ceiling till the other one shows.”
“You do that, too? Oh, good! I wondered if I was the only one. Isn’t it over the top?” Kelly said.
As it happened, neither one of them beat the other; they rode down in the same elevator. A couple of people were eating breakfast in the hotel restaurant, but only a couple. A sharp-faced, officious middle-aged woman in a fuzzy orange sweater waved away other would-be customers. “We can’t serve you now,” she said. “We’re setting up for Sunday brunch.”
“We don’t want brunch. We just want breakfast,” Kelly protested.
“There are people in there,” Daniel added.
“We can’t take you now,” the woman in the orange sweater repeated, and she would not be moved.
Dejected, decaffeinated, and pissed off, Kelly and Daniel walked up the stairs to the ornate lobby. “Where can we get something to eat in this miserable town?” Kelly growled at a desk clerk. “Your restaurant seems to be under a curse.”
“A curse in an orange sweater,” Daniel agreed.
The clerk blinked, but she said, “There’s the Original, a block up Sixth.”
“Let’s go,” Kelly said grimly. Out the revolving door they strode. Kelly was wearing long johns, and damn glad she’d put them on. The wind had knives in it. Snow crunched under her shoes. It drifted here and there. Not many cars were on the street. Chains made the ones that were rattle as they slowly went by. It was more like a scene from Duluth than anything anyone would have looked for in Portland before the eruption.
Decor in the Original lived up to its name. The paintings on the walls were of clowns and mayonnaise jars- together, not separately. Contemplating what use the swarms of Bozoids might have for all that Best Foods made Kelly queasy. Coffee and ham and eggs and hash browns worked wonders, though. Daniel had sausage and eggs instead.
When they were finishing up, he took his iPhone out of his pocket to check the time. Kelly looked a question at him. “Nine forty,” he said. “Unless the grizzlies carry us off between here and the Benson, you’re golden.”
“Okay. Thanks. For a while there, I was too mad at that orange bitch to worry about what I’m going to say,
