together.
After champagne toasts at the reception, Colin said, “I saw a study that showed guys who marry younger wives live longer and are happier.”
“Oh, yeah? Wonder how come that is,” Gabe Sanchez said. Everybody laughed. Gabe struck Kelly as a slightly rougher, Hispanic version of the guy she’d just married. He went on, “Congratulations, man. Looks like you got a real good one. Gives us all hope, y’know?” His heavy-featured face clouded. Kelly remembered Colin saying Gabe had gone through a divorce even uglier than his own. Evidently he hadn’t found anyone new since.
They ate. They drank some more. They danced. Colin moved as gracefully as anyone with two left feet. “Man, I know white folks got no sense of rhythm, but can’t you at least try?” a black cop said, softening the dart with a grin.
“This ain’t the ’hood, Rodney. You got to do the dozens on me at my wedding?” Colin said.
“Any time at all,” Rodney answered. He was strutting his stuff with a Latino woman-his wife, Kelly decided after checking for rings. She still hadn’t got used to rings on her own finger. She expected she would.
At last, they changed back into street clothes. A limo laid on by Kelly’s folks waited under an awning outside the hall. A good thing the awning was there. A nasty, chilly rain came down; it couldn’t have been far above freezing. “It wouldn’t be this cold if it wasn’t for your dumb old supervolcano,” Kelly’s mother said. She was right, but she made it sound as if the supervolcano wouldn’t have erupted if Kelly hadn’t studied it.
The driver-a Samoan big enough to have played pro football-whisked them up the Harbor Freeway to the Bonaventure Hotel downtown. Colin slipped him fifty bucks. “Thanks a lot, man,” the guy said, touching a blunt forefinger to the brim of his cap. “Happy wedding, y’know?”
Their room was high up in one of the hotel’s round, glassy towers. Colin lifted a squeaking Kelly over the threshold. A bottle of champagne with a card waited in an ice bucket in the room. Colin opened the card. He grinned. “From Gabe,” he said.
“He’s sweet.” Kelly was looking at the city lights and at cars streaming by on the freeway just to the west. In spite of gas shortages, there were still lots of them. She wondered if things would pick up or just keep going downhill.
“Yeah. He is,” Colin agreed from behind her. “And he’d clout us one if we said so to his face.” A muffled pop announced he’d opened the bottle: carefully and neatly, so as not to waste any. On the nightstand stood two glass flutes, not plastic like those at the reception. He poured for them both and handed her one. Then he raised the other. “Here’s to us, babe. I love you.”
“I love youtoo.” She clinked flutes. “To us.” After they drank, she said, “If I do too much more of this, I’ll fall asleep on you. Some wedding night that’d be.”
He mimed a leer. “I’d just have my way with your unconscious body-mwahaha!”
Kelly snorted. “It’s better when both people in the game want to play.”
“I won’t argue.” Colin shut the drapes. “So-do you want to play?”
“Right this minute, there’s nothing I want more in the whole wide world.” Kelly stepped into his arms. Things went on from there. Some considerable and very happy time later, she said, “Don’t you ever let that Rodney sass you about your sense of rhythm again, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered from a distance of about three inches. Then he patted at his hair. Kelly made a questioning noise. “I was wondering if you took the top of my head off there,” he explained.
“You!” she said fondly.
“Me,” he agreed. “Is there anything left in that champagne bottle?”
“If there isn’t, we can always call room service,” she answered.
There wasn’t, and she did. “Spending my money already,” Colin said.
“No way,” Kelly told him. “Dominguez will pay me… a little something, anyway.”
They eventually went to sleep. When Kelly woke, wan gray light was leaking past the drapes. She put on sweats and a T-shirt and went to look outside. She must have made a noise-probably a startled grunt-because from behind her her new husband asked, “What is it, babe?”
“Come see,” was all she said.
He needed a moment to get decent, too. Then he joined her at the window. He let out a low whistle of astonishment. Snowflakes danced in the air. It was white down below, white in the middle of downtown L.A. The Harbor Freeway was white, too, white and empty: ghostly, even. Any snow at all would screw traffic here from A to whatever came after Z.
No sooner had that crossed her mind than a car on the surface street down below skidded sideways into a pickup truck. Neither, luckily, was going very fast. Both drivers got out and glumly eyed the damage.
Colin turned on the TV. A chipper local weatherman said, “Be careful out there, folks. The last time we had snow all over the L.A. basin was in January of 1949. I have to say, we aren’t really equipped for it. If you can possibly stay home, you’d sure be smart to do it.”
Kelly and Colin exchanged stricken looks. Marshall had been planning to pick them up and take them back to the house. From there, they would have gone to the Hotel Coronado in San Diego: a honeymoon on a tank of gas. Now… Kelly had no idea what they’d do now.
Colin did: “Call room service again. Tell ’em to send up coffee and some breakfast. And after that-hey, we’ll just go on from there.” By the way his gaze roamed her, she didn’t need to have bothered dressing.
“Sounds good to me,” she said, and padded over to the phone. Outside, the snow kept coming down.
Along with Gabe Sanchez, Colin spooned up ramen-fancy ramen, not the packaged stuff college kids ate and Louise dealt with-in a little place on Reynoso Drive. It was in the mostly Japanese shopping center that also held the Carrows where he’d had that lacerating lunch with his ex. If he looked out the window, he could see the other place. As long as he kept slurping up soup and noodles and chopped pork, he didn’t have to look out the window.
“So you and Kelly were stuck there, huh?” Gabe said. “That’s funny, man!”
“Worse places to be than snowed in with your brand-new wife,” Colin answered. In the two and a half days before enough snow melted to let traffic start moving again, he’d done more than he’d figured a man his age could do. And he’d managed all right once they finally got to San Diego, too.
“Yeah, I guess.” Gabe didn’t sound completely convinced. No, he hadn’t had much luck with his love life since his marriage hit a mine and exploded. “It’s good to have you back in the saddle, though.”
“Good to be back,” Colin allowed. No matter what kind of carnal excesses he’d managed at the Bonaventure and the Coronado, a man his age couldn’t do that all the time, not unless he wanted to roll up like a window shade, thwup, thwup, thwup!
“You figure we’ll ever drop on the goddamn Strangler?” Gabe asked. It wasn’t out of the blue. There’d been a fresh killing over in Manhattan Beach while Colin and Kelly were on their abbreviated visit to San Diego. Colin hadn’t heard about it till he came home. Watching the news hadn’t been his biggest worry while he was there. As long as no more snow came down, he hadn’t cared what happened in the outside world.
Now he did. Now he had to. And now he said what cops all over the South Bay had been saying all along: “He’s bound to goof sooner or later. Trip over something in the dark and break his ankle, maybe. Something.” Some bad guys got away with things for a long time, either through fool luck or because they were the uncommon smart people who turned to crime. Very few went to their graves uncaught. Colin was sure of it. He had to be, if he wanted to keep thinking he was doing something that mattered.
“This one’s not in our jurisdiction, same as the last one wasn’t,” Gabe said. “Let the guys in Manhattan Beach take the heat. See how they like news vans lined up outside the department all the time and the clowns with the expensive haircuts asking dumbass questions.”
“I’m sure they enjoy it as much as we do,” Colin said. Gabe laughed harshly. Colin went on, “What I want to be is, I want to be the one who busts the son of a bitch. I don’t know if I can be that lucky twice, but I sure want to.”
“Twice?” Now Gabe sounded puzzled. Colin had been a solid, steady, capable cop for a hell of a long time now. He’d caught a lot of perps, some smart ones and even more of the jerks and losers who went wrong. But he’d never pulled a coup that even came close to what arresting the South Bay Strangler would mean.
He wasn’t thinking of policework, though. “Lucky. Uh-huh,” he said. “Only reason I ever went to Yellowstone was to get away from everything after Louise walked out on me.”
