Yellowstone does go kaboom? There ought to be… contingency plans, they call ’em in the service.”
“I know the geologists are talking to people in the Interior Department,” Kelly answered. “And I know they’re having trouble getting anybody to listen to them. It’s a-” She broke off, groping for the word. “A question of scale, I guess you’d say.”
She paused again, plainly wondering if she’d have to explain. She didn’t. “The South Bay Strangler’s murdered fifteen little old ladies now. That’s a story. People understand it. It gets splashed all over CNN Headline News,” Colin said, his voice thick with disgust. “But what Hitler did, and Stalin, and Mao-you can’t take in numbers like that and what they mean. A good thing, too. Anybody who could feel all those millions of murders would have to go nuts, wouldn’t he?”
“You’d hope so,” Kelly said.
“Uh-huh. You would,” Colin agreed. “So the Interior Department guys can’t wrap their heads around the supervolcano?”
“Not even close,” Kelly said. “They see the studies, and they go, ‘It can’t be this bad.’ And what our people give them is always cautious and careful and conservative. Even that’s enough to make them not take it in. Or they say, ‘If it really does what you say it’ll do, what’s the point of planning for it? It’s too big.’ ”
“Bend over and kiss your behind good-bye.” Colin wasn’t quite old enough to remember drop-and-cover drills in school, but he knew plenty of people who were.
“Yeah. Like that. Except the supervolcano is so much bigger than an H-bomb, it’s not even funny,” Kelly said.
“It isn’t radioactive,” Colin pointed out. “No fallout.”
“Well, no,” she allowed. “Not like you mean. But it would put so much ash in the air…” She laughed, shakily. “We sure have cheerful things to talk about, don’t we? Stranglers and supervolcanoes. Oh, my!”
“They’re what we do. And it’s better than not talking,” Colin said. After the kids got out of the house, he and Louise had hardly said anything to each other for days at a time. She didn’t care about policework. She’d cared that he hadn’t been chosen chief, but that was because she’d lost face through his failure. And he hadn’t worried about how she got through her days. With any brains in his head, he would have noticed that that was a bad sign. Aerobics class? Hey, why not?
Kelly held up her empty glass. “I think I could use a refill.”
Colin’s glass was empty, too. He didn’t recall finishing the beer, but if he hadn’t a drunk pixie was hiding in one of the cabinets. “Motion seconded and passed by acclamation,” he said, and opened the fridge.
She gave him a quizzical look. “You talk funny sometimes, you know?”
“Too many City Council meetings. They’d make a penguin go jogging in the Mojave, honest to God they would.”
Kelly snorted. “You do talk funny.”
He’d heard that before from his fellow cops. He’d also got dressed down by his superiors for writing reports in English rather than police jargon. Jesus! No wonder I never made chief, he thought. If anybody ever came out and just d what goes on in a cop shop, they’d ride him out of town on a rail. They’d have to.
Some of his bitterness at getting passed over went away. The administrative part of the job would have been a piece of cake. Knowing which asses to kiss and when, on the other hand… Even if he’d tried, he would have made a hash of it. A police chief had to be a pol, too, and that just wasn’t part of his makeup.
The second beers vanished faster than the first ones had. “What do you want to do now?” Colin asked.
“Could I take a shower?” Kelly said. “You go through the airport and you sit on a plane, you feel all grubby even if the flight only lasts an hour. And after that, well, who knows?” She grinned at him.
“Sounds better than anything else I can think of,” Colin said.
She came out of the bathroom off the master bedroom naked. Colin lay on the bed waiting for her. She grinned again. “Oh, good,” she said. “You turned up the heat.”
“We aren’t wearing clothes. No insulation,” he said gravely. And he knew damn well that any woman ever born would shiver at temperatures he thought fine. He had no idea why things worked like that, but they did.
She got down beside him. It felt a little strange, a little awkward-the more so for him because it was their first time here, in this bedroom full of memories. He’d gone up to Berkeley a few times before, but they were still learning what floated whose boat. With Louise, after all those years, he’d known.
Or he’d thought so. If he were as smart as that, how come she’d bailed on him? If people generally were as smart as they thought they were, they’d be a hell of a lot smarter than they really were. Cops learned that fast. Most crooks-not all, but most-were crooks because they were dopes.
All of which went through his head in odd moments when he wasn’t otherwise distracted. Before long, he stopped having moments like that. Much too soon, or so it seemed, he lay on his back, holding an imaginary cigarette between his first two fingers and blowing an imaginary plume of smoke up toward the cottage-cheese ceiling.
She laughed. The rain tapped softly at the roof. Then, suddenly, there was a much bigger noise up there- something alive running from one side of the house to the other. “What the devil was that?” Kelly said.
“Squirrel,” Colin answered. “Just a rat with a pretty tail. You can hear crows up there too sometimes. Wildlife.” He made a face. “Not like Yellowstone, even if we do get coons and coyotes and skunks every once in a while. Possums, too.”
“Yeah, we have possums in Berkeley,” Kelly said. “A guy I dated a few times-grad student in biology-called ’em junk mammals.”
“Pretty good name,” Colin said, and let it go right there. Of course she’d gone with guys before him. He didn’t want to know all the gory details. He snooped for a living. He didn’t care to do it on his own time. The way she relaxed beside him, just a little, showed he’d passed one more test.
Was he going to stay crazy for another year and then some? If he was, present company seemed pretty good. He started to tell her so. Before the words came out, he noticed her eyelids had slid shut. He lay there quietly. In a few minutes, her breathing said she’d fallen asleep. He sometimes thought sleeping-really sleeping- with someone was more intimate, more trusting, than merely going to bed.
And he could tease her for doing what everyone said guys always did. Or he could have, if he hadn’t started softly snoring himself about ninety seconds later.
If I jump, God, will You catch me? Louise Ferguson remembered wondering about that a few days before she finally nerved herself to walk out on the emptiness that had been her marriage. Which was pretty funny, when you got right down to it, because most of the time religion meant Easter eggs or Christmas presents or a wedding or a funeral. Except for those last two, she couldn’t remember when she’d set foot in a church.
But you needed to think of something outside yourself-didn’t you? — when you turned your life upside down and inside out. Back in the day, she would have been a scandal. Prominent police officer’s wife runs away with younger man! People would have cut her dead on the street-except for the ones who wished they had the nerve to bail out of their dead marriages, too.
She rather missed being a scandal. One of Colin’s unen-dearing endearments for her was drama queen. These days, though, anybody who couldn’t stand living with somebody else another second went ahead and quit, and no one got up in arms about it.
She might even have been a role model for Vanessa, who’d dumped her live-in boyfriend (even having one, much less dumping him, would have been another scandal back in the day) not long after the breakup with Colin. Louise sighed. Now she had a companion fifteen years younger than her daughter’s.
Louise wasn’t inclined to judge. I’m not a judgmental person, she often told herself. It was an odd way of asserting autonomy, but it worked for her. Colin not only was judgmental, he was proud of it, too. She’d never known a cop who wasn’t, and she’d known a lot of cops.
Vanessa was also judgmental, and competitive, and several other things her father was. When she set her chin and looked stubborn, she might have been Colin reborn. She’d always had that air, even when she was only three years old.
Louise’s cell phone rang. Actually, it started playing “Addicted to Love.” The old word stuck, though, even if the noise the phone made had nothing to do with a landline’s boring, squawky ring. She fished the phone out of her purse, which sat on the severely modern couch in Teo’s condo.
“Hello?”
