The casket was closed, so he didn’t have to go through the macabre ritual of filing past the body. From what he’d heard, the poor bastard in there had stopped a charge of double-aught buck with his face. The undertakers couldn’t make him look even half-way presentable.
And so Colin sat on the uncomfortable wooden pew while the minister told the audience and the TV cameras from several local stations what a fine fellow the late Office McClintock had been. McClintock left behind a wife and two boys who were too little to understand what was going on. Their mother did; she sobbed quietly through the eulogy.
Of course the minister did his best to dance around the question of why God had let Officer McClintock stop a shotgun blast with his face if he was such a fine fellow. What could you do but dance around that question? It had no answer, or none Colin could see.
But if it had no answer, what was the point of the church? Maybe the ceremony made the widow feel a little better. Maybe it just made her remember more and hurt worse. He had no answers to that one, either.
He listened to the pious phrases and kept his trap shut. More often than not, that was the best thing you could do. He wasn’t here to argue religious questions. He was here to show the San Atanasio Police Department’s flag, or he would have been if only the San Atanasio PD had a flag.
After the eulogy ended, he did have to go up and murmur words of condolence to Mrs. McClintock. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorrier than I know how to tell you.”
She nodded jerkily. Behind a black veil, her face was paper-white. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered. Her boys stared up at her. The older one might have been three. He knew something wasn’t right. What it was hadn’t sunk in yet.
Not for him it hadn’t, anyway. He didn’t know how lucky he was to be so little.
The cops milled around, talking to people they knew in other departments. It was a bad scene. They all knew they might have drawn the short straw the same way. Police work wasn’t soldiering, but it came as close as anything inside the USA.
A lean LAPD sergeant came up to Colin and said, “You’re that Ferguson guy, right? From San Atanasio?”
Colin nodded. “Guilty. Um, do I know you?” The other guy’s face didn’t look familiar.
But the sergeant answered, “Oh, we’ve met, all right. You bet your sweet ass we have.” He did lower his voice to make sure the widow couldn’t hear that.
“Tell me where?” Colin said. He was usually good at placing people. This time, though, he drew a blank.
With a sour chuckle, the guy from LAPD said, “At the Braxton Bragg offramp to the 110. You were gonna have your troops machine-gun me if I didn’t get the fuck out of the way.”
“Oh.” Colin chuckled, too, in mild-but only mild-embarrassment. “We really needed that oil.”
“I guess!” the LAPD sergeant exclaimed. “I promised myself I’d punch you in the nose if I ever ran into you again.”
“Well, you can try.” Colin unobtrusively shifted his weight. He hadn’t been in a fistfight since his patrol-car days, but if this guy wanted to work out his grudge. .
He didn’t, or not enough to start something here. “Nah,” he said. “You were doing what you thought you had to do. I’ll tell you, though-it rubbed me the wrong way when you made me back down.”
“You’re LAPD. You’re used to telling the little departments what to do,” Colin said. “Gotta feel funny when the shoe’s on your foot and not the other fellow’s.”
“It’d look that way to you, wouldn’t it?” the LAPD sergeant said. “I’m not talking about how the San Atanasio PD made my department back down. I don’t want to slug the San Atanasio PD.
“Mm.” Colin would rather it were department to department, not man to man. “I don’t know your name,” he said. Knowing it-and remembering it-might prove worthwhile.
“I’m Jack Winters.”
“Good to meet you, Jack. For whatever it’s worth to you, it wasn’t personal.” Colin held out his hand. After a moment, Winters took it. He squeezed with brief, controlled strength, then let go. Colin decided he might have been lucky the LAPD man didn’t feel like brawling.
“Take care,” Winters said, and walked away. Before long, he was lost in the throng of dark blue uniforms.
His duty and the department’s done, Colin drove back to the station. He had to go slowly, because bicyclists made up almost all of the traffic. They gave him curious looks as he went past them-not, he judged, because he was in uniform in an unmarked car, but because he had a working automobile. He saw only a couple of others on the twenty-minute trip. There were many more people on skateboards on the sidewalk than drivers.
Nobody was buying new cars, either. Not only was nobody buying them; hardly anyone was making them. GM had declared bankruptcy again. Ford had tossed in the sponge. Toyota and Hyundai were shuttering American plants. The massive layoffs in the auto business after the eruption only planted another lily on the economy’s chest.
When Colin got back, he walked into Mike Pitcavage’s office. “How was it?” the chief asked.
“About as gruesome as you’d expect,” Colin answered. Both men grimaced, almost identically. Colin went on, “The widow’s. . stunned. That’s the only word that fits. Never gonna be the same for her and those kids.”
“They nailed the son of a bitch who shot McClintock, anyhow,” Pitcavage said. “That’s over. She won’t have to wait for them to try him and convict him and then wait another twenty years till they stick a needle in his arm.” He made a disgusted noise, down deep in his throat.
“Yeah.” Colin nodded. He felt the same way. Any cop would-justice deferred was justice denied. An awful lot of justice was being denied in California these days. He didn’t want to dwell on that, so he told the chief about his encounter with Jack Winters.
“Heh,” Pitcavage said. “He should’ve swung on you. That would’ve given everybody something to talk about besides the sermon.”
“It wasn’t worth talking about,” Colin replied. “And the gossip would’ve been about my busted snoot.”
Pitcavage waved that aside. Sure-why wouldn’t he? It wouldn’t have been his ox getting gored or his nose getting punched. And his department would have scored the publicity. LAPD would have got egg on its face. If Colin had got blood on his. .
When you were a chief, maybe you didn’t worry about such minor details.
You had to look at the whole picture, right? That was what it took to run a department, even a small one like San Atanasio’s, right? Mike Pitcavage sure seemed convinced it was. Colin? Colin had one more reason to count his blessings for not winning the chair Mike was sitting in now.
* * *
Whenever Bronislav drove into the L.A. area, he stayed down in San Pedro. That was partly because he hoped to pick up more hauling work at the port, partly because a good-sized Serbian community had settled there. He could hear his own language, and speak it. He could eat familiar food. He could drink familiar booze. It wasn’t the old country, but it was as reasonable a facsimile as he was likely to find on the shores of the Pacific.
He could introduce Vanessa to all those things, too, and show her off to his friends. She rode the bus down there every chance she got. When she landed a job, she told herself, she would drive. In the meantime, she had better things than gasoline to spend her money on.
She’d fallen in love with a guy she knew in high school-in love enough for him to pop her cherry, anyhow. She’d been living with him when she met Bryce. And then, in short order, she’d fallen in love with Bryce and was living with him. She really had thought that would last. For a while, she had. For a while, it had, too. She remembered telling him
But she couldn’t make it with him. How on earth could you get excited about, or even interested in, poetry written a million years ago in a dead language? When he did make brief forays into the real world, all he wanted to do was screw. He didn’t want to go out to dinner, he didn’t want to go shopping at the mall, he didn’t care about movies, he didn’t dance.
He did go to the occasional baseball game. He approached baseball the same way he approached his ancient poetry: as an archaeological problem. Vanessa’s interest in sports was almost as great as her interest in spiders.
So-Hagop. She hadn’t fallen in love with him, no matter how much she’d tried to tell herself she had. He was
