Supervolcano: All Fall Down

soaking wet from midthigh down. Bumbershoots helped only so much. “I wonder how late the goddamn bus is gonna be,” the Hispanic gal said.

“Late.” Louise heard the doleful certainty in her own voice. If some modern Mussolini promised to make the buses run on time, he’d get elected in a landslide. And then he’d break his promise, sure as hell. Money was scarce. Fuel was scarcer. Spare parts were damn near extinct, and nobody seemed to be making or buying more.

“You got that right.” The other woman took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, extracted a cigarette from the pack, and lit it, all without getting wetter than she was already. Louise admired the dexterity as much as she wished she weren’t getting the secondhand smoke.

The cigarette did do one thing, though: it made the bus come. The Hispanic woman had to drop it, only half done, on the sidewalk to board. Serious fines backed up the rules against smoking on public transportation.

Far more bicycles than cars used the streets. Some pedalers wore raincoats that reached down to their ankles. Some-the dumb ones, as far as Louise was concerned-tried to manage umbrellas. Some just said the devil with it and got wet. The bus had to go slowly to keep from mashing them.

Every so often, the driver honked his horn to remind the people on bikes that he was there-and to make them clear out in front of him. He didn’t have much luck with that. The pedalers not only didn’t clear out; they slowed down to piss him off. Some of them flipped the bus the bird.

If Louise had sat behind the big steering wheel, she knew she would have wanted to run over two or three of them to encourage the others to get some sense. The driver clutched the wheel tight enough to make his knuckles whiten, so maybe he was fighting the same temptation.

People got on. People got off. Before the eruption, only the poor rode the bus in L.A. If you could afford a car, you drove one. Who could afford a car now? Hardly anyone, which meant the bus attracted a higher class of passenger than it had once upon a time. I’m on it, for instance, Louise thought, quite without irony.

She got off at the stop closest to her condo. The walk back got her wetter and did nothing to improve her temper. She checked her mailbox. The mail wasn’t there yet. She’d have to come down through the rain again to get it. And what would it be? Bills and ads. What else came these days?

“Mommy!” James Henry squealed when she walked through the door. He ran to her. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him: that was what that run said.

“Was he good?” she asked Marshall.

“Good enough,” James Henry’s half-brother answered. “Listen, Mom, I’ve got to go now that you’re finally back.”

“Not my fault the trip took so long,” Louise said. “The bus was impossible. And those selfish idiots on bikes only made things worse.”

Marshall’s eyes glinted. He’d ridden his bike over here to babysit. Was he one of the people who diddled buses for the fun of it? If he was, Louise didn’t want to hear about it. He did say, “It’ll cost you an extra twenty bucks.” His voice was almost as hard and flat as Colin’s.

“Twenty!” Louise spluttered indignantly.

“You’re late. Late, late, late. And you’re lucky I’m not saying fifty.”

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth. . ran through Louise’s head. But she paid him. Somebody who wasn’t related to her by blood would have squeezed an extra fifty out of her. She couldn’t afford it, but she didn’t want to take James Henry to the unemployment office in the rain, either. You couldn’t win. You couldn’t even come close.

That twenty, of course, came on top of what she’d to pay him to watch James Henry for as long as she’d thought she would be gone. She’d just spent a fair part of her unemployment check. Did Marshall care? Yeah, right!

Out the door and into the rain he went. Louise sighed. She knew she’d call him the next time she had to go to the EDD office. If she could call him. If her phone had power. If the cell towers had powers. Sometimes, these days, even old-fashioned landlines didn’t work, not that she had one.

“Mommy!” James Henry said again. We’re together again at last, he meant.

“Hi, kid,” Louise answered. Her own voice sounded hard and flat in her ears, too.

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.