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Authors: Harry Turtledove

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He was still hanging out with that geographer or geologist or whatever she was. That vaguely irked Louise, who hadn’t expected him to make anything last. After all, if she couldn’t put up with him anymore, what halfway-sane woman would be able to? Well, from what she’d heard, her ex’s squeeze was a lot younger. Odds were she didn’t have standards of comparison.
Louise did. She knew just how lucky she was. Teo’d barely had to lift a finger to sweep her off her feet.
“How was
your
day?” she asked him as she spooned food onto a paper plate. If she wasn’t going to worry about cooking tonight, she wasn’t going to worry about doing dishes, either.
“No sweat,” he answered. It made her laugh, the way it always did. For Teo, sweating—and making other people sweat—was making a living. It was also what made him look so good. Colin was like a brick with soft corners. She’d forgotten what a man ought to be like till she signed up for the aerobics class. She knew now, by God, and she’d never forget again.
“How many girls want your special program?” she teased. She knew she hadn’t been the first one he’d attracted. She just hoped—and kept hoping—to stay interested enough to keep ahead of the competition.
He grinned at her. He knew what she was thinking. Sometimes he sassed her about it. Always gently, though—a younger man didn’t want to set an older woman worrying. A younger man with a heart didn’t, anyhow. “Nobody you’ve got to worry about. Believe me,” he said now.
And Louise did believe him. She brought the paper plate over to the table and sat down beside him. No police scanner farted out calls. The TV wasn’t on, tuned to the news. Nothing but the two of them and dinner. Who needed more?
Sitting by Teo, she had no trouble forgetting Mr. Nobashi, either, or her anxieties about Excel. And if that wasn’t magic, what would be?
VIII
 
C
olin Ferguson tried to carry around in his head a map of everything the San Atanasio Police Department was doing at any given moment. The city grid was easy enough. He knew the routes the patrol cars took, and when each car would be where.
He also knew where the detectives were working, and about the meth buy the drug squad was trying to arrange. Before long, though, something always screwed up his perfect picture. There’d be a big accident, or a knifing outside a strip club on Hesperus, or a shooting in one of the Cuban bars at the north end of San Atanasio Boulevard. Like splashes in a calm pool, the ripples from something like that would distort the picture for a while.
He didn’t need to do any of that. He’d been passed over for chief, the one slot where such an encyclopedic grasp of what was going on really mattred. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure of making captain, even. He’d annoyed enough people that simply passing the exam might not do the trick. He carried around the mental map anyway. He’d started making one back in the days when he still rode a patrol car himself. He could no more stop now than he could stop breathing.
The telephone rang. “Ferguson,” he said into the mouthpiece.
“Stu Ayers, down in Palos Verdes,” said the voice on the other end of the line. Ayers was also a lieutenant, and a pretty good guy. Like Colin, he was chasing the South Bay Strangler.
“What can I do to you today, Stu?” Colin asked.
“To me, huh?” Ayers plainly didn’t miss many tricks. Chuckling, he went on, “Could you shoot me the lab reports from your latest Strangler case?”
“Will do. What’s your e-mail?”
Instead of giving one connected to the city of Palos Verdes, Ayers offered Colin a
gmail.com
account. Half apologetically, he explained, “My captain thinks I’m spending too much time on this. Let’s keep it private, huh?”
“Sure,” Colin said. After he hung up, though, he thoughtfully rubbed his chin. He called up the fat folder of documents, but didn’t e-mail it right away. He looked up the Palos Verdes Police Department’s phone number, called it, and asked to be connected to Lieutenant Ayers.
“Who’s calling, please?” Whoever the gal handling the PVPD’s calls was, she owned one hell of a sexy voice.
“This is Lieutenant Ferguson, from San Atanasio.”
“Please hold, Lieutenant. I’ll put your call through.”
The music Palos Verdes played while you were on hold was different from what San Atanasio used, but no more interesting. Fortunately, Colin didn’t have to listen to it for long. “Stu Ayers here. What’s cooking, Colin?”
“Did you just call me a minute ago and ask for the electronic file on the latest South Bay Strangler killing?”
“Not guilty,” Ayers responded answered at once. No, it wasn’t the same voice as before. Not too different, but definitely not the same. The authentic Lieutenant Ayers went on, “Somebody just did, huh?”
“Yup. Dunno if he’s a snoopy ordinary civilian or a reporter or what, but he wanted that file.”
“You didn’t give it to him?”
“Nope. I’m not always as dumb as I look—only sometimes,” Colin said. Ayers laughed. Colin went on, “My bet’s on a reporter. He knew to use your name and everything. So he could have taken some wild-ass guesses for the
Times
or the
Breeze
or whoever’s paying him.”
“Like those cocksuckers don’t do enough of that anyway,” Ayers said.
“Tell me about it. Well, thanks. I’m glad I thought to stop and check.” Colin exchanged good-byes with his opposite number, then got off the phone. He eyed the folder front and center on his monitor, the one he’d almost e-mailed. A nasty smile crossed his face. He created another folder with an almost identical name. He filled that one with subfolders and subsubfolders, and on down for several levels. All of them bore titles that had to do with the case. All of them led nowhere—except to other interestingly named folders nested within.
Well, all but one. If Mr. Snoop out there was persistent enough, he would eventually find a deeply buried folder called
Evaluation of Case
. That one did have a document in it, one with Colin’s three-word assessment of the situation.
Nice try, asshole
, he typed. He sent the spurious folder to the no doubt equally spurious
gmail.com
address.
That done, he deleted the folder from his own hard drive and leaned back in his chair till it creaked. He felt he’d accomplished more than he did on some days when he cracked a case. The SOB on the other end, whoever he was, would have to open all those folders one by one. With all that horseshit around, he was bound to find a pony in there somewhere . . . wasn’t he?
Now that you mentioned it, no.
For the rest of the afternoon, Colin was actually interested every time his phone rang. Would it be the fellow he’d thwarted, calling to tell him where to head in? Or would the so-and-so come up with some new scheme to seduce information out of him? No and no, respectively, but anticipation did keep Colin in the game.
He knocked off at five on the dot. That didn’t happen every day—or every week, either. He put on his jacket and drove home. The L.A. basin was sweltering through a late-summer heat wave. Weathermen bleated that it might hit 110 in the Valley. Newsmen said the brushfire danger was extreme.
All of which meant jack diddly in the South Bay, which reliably got the sea breeze. It had topped out in the mid-eighties at San Atanasio City Hall, across the street from the cop shop. By now, it was at least ten degrees cooler than that. Whatever fires the Santa Anas blew up wouldn’t come within miles.
As usual, the first thing Colin did when he got home was pull the mail out of the mailbox. A pile of catalogues—retailers could smell Christmas from months away—a cable bill, a bill from the pool guy, a statement from his lawyer . . . and a postcard from Rob. It showed a big apple, with a good-sized worm, iridescent green, sticking out his head and neck. The worm wore a toothy grin and a Yankees cap.
Colin snorted. That was his older son’s style, all right. Glued to the back of the card was the little
New Yorker
notice about Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles’ local appearance. The commentary below was in Rob’s spiky script:
Still not famous, but we may make it in spite of ourselves. Love from your kid
.
That anyone could want to be famous still mystified Colin. As TV had trained him to do, he associated the word with divorces and court appearances and rehab and jail time. He knew more than he wanted about all of those except rehab, and that was the one famous people blew off anyway.
He went inside. He had a little steak waiting in the fridge. He’d broil that while he nuked a package of frozen mixed veggies. As usual, not exciting cooking, but functional. A hell of a lot better for him than the fat-and-sodium bombs that masqueraded as frozen dinners. He’d eat the rest of the vegetables tomorrow with whatever meat he defrosted then.
He thought about a beer. Not without regret, he shook his head. It wasn’t that he never drank alone. But he didn’t do it very often. A drink had a way of turning into a few drinks. A few drinks had a way of turning into a drunk. He’d done too many drunks for a while right after Louise left. He remembered waking up hungover in that Motel 6 in Jackson goddamn Wyoming.
He’d met Kelly that day. If he’d scored with the waitress the night before . . . He didn’t think he’d be as happy as he was now. The way thingshad worked out, he counted himself pretty lucky. If Kelly’d been here now, he would have had a beer with her. But she was off in Yellowstone, keeping track of the new volcano.
Colin dusted the steak with ground pepper and garlic powder and put it in the broiler. The microwave buzzed as the vegetables spun round and round inside. In lieu of that beer, he poured himself water from a pitcher with a Brita filter in the refrigerator.
He turned on CNN to keep him company while he cooked. Indonesian pirates were saying they’d kill the crew of a Russian freighter if they didn’t get a ransom big enough to suit them. Colin was sorry for the scared-looking sailors, whose images went up one by one. France or Germany might have come through with the cash. The Russians mostly didn’t make payoffs like that.
A Congresswoman had been caught with her hand in the Federal cookie jar. She was loudly denying she’d done anything wrong, and claimed it was a sexist plot because the investigating committee happened to be all male. “Yeah, right,” Colin said. In a way, it was reassuring to see that corruption crossed gender lines, too.
A radio commentator was in hot water for making slurs about GLBT people. Colin was a cop, so of course he’d never heard—or told—a fag joke in all his born days. Of course.
Commercials came next. He hit the MUTE button. The dough-faced brunette shilling for an insurance company was annoying even when he couldn’t hear her, but she wasn’t
as
annoying. But why did ad men seem convinced the American public had a collective IQ of 9—maybe 11 with a tail wind? Colin grunted as soon as the question formed itself. Like any other cop, he’d seen enough aggressive stupidity in his time to understand exactly why admen thought that way.
The news finally returned. The young woman reading it was another beauty contest runner-up, or maybe winner. That she was drop-dead gorgeous had nothing to do with her getting the job, of course. Again, of course.
“Mother Nature is showing off her power again,” she said. “Take a look at this video from an already-beleaguered Yellowstone National Park.” She must have been a college graduate: she didn’t make a hash of
beleaguered
when it came up on the teleprompter.
He waited for her to explain how the eruption by Ranger Lake was screwing up air traffic over the Rockies this time. More to the point, he waited for her to explain how the eruption was impacting, or even being impactful of, air traffic. To his way of thinking, the only way the eruption could impact air traffic was by pitching a volcanic rock through an Airbus’ windshield. But reporters loved the bullshit jargon even more than cops did, which was saying something.
She threw him a curve, though, and not one of hers. As he took the steak out of the oven, she continued, “
Another
new volcano has started blowing its stack in Yellowstone. This one is a good many miles away from the Ranger Lake eruption. It’s located not far northeast of a set of geysers called Coffee Pot Springs.”
“Oh, shit,” Colin said softly. The video was taken from a helicopter. It showed the kinds of things he’d seen before: black smoke and ash and dust rising high into the sky while lava set lodgepole pines afire on the ground. After fifteen or twenty seconds, a map replaced the view of the new eruption
Most people, even people who regularly went to Yellowstone, didn’t have the faintest idea where the hell Coffee Pot Springs were, so the map came in handy. Guidebooks didn’t talk about them, because they were sofar from the roads through the park and you had to hike across bear country to get to them. Colin, anything but a Yellowstone regular, would never even have heard of them if not for Kelly. But he had. Oh, my—had he ever.
The pretty newsie reappeared on the screen. She said, “Coffee Pot Springs recently showed a dramatic increase in activity. Hot springs turned into frothing geysers and blew boiling water more than a hundred feet in the air. A geologist CNN talked to this afternoon said this was probably related to the new volcanic outbreak.”

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