Supervolcano All Fall Down(115)

“And I’m supposed to notice this on account of . . . ?” Gabe asked.

“Who said you were supposed to notice it?” Colin returned.

Gabe let out another snort. Then he found a question Colin had been asking himself a good deal lately, too: “What’s it like having your daughter home again?”

“It’s—interesting, anyway.” Colin wished he’d ordered a beer with lunch, even if department regs frowned on such things and even if barley shortages made beer almost as expensive as gasoline. He almost left the answer short and unresponsive. But Gabe had been his buddy as long as they’d both been on the San Atanasio PD. If he could vent to anybody, Gabe was the guy. Sighing, he went on, “I wish to Christ Vanessa and Kelly’d hit it off better.”

“That’s not good,” Gabe said.

Colin clapped silently, applauding the understatement without making everybody in the place stare at him. “It wouldn’t be good even if Kelly wasn’t expecting. Since she is, it’s doubleplus ungood.”

“It’s what?” But then Gabe’s heavy features cleared. “Oh. From that book. 1984.” He chuckled self-consciously. “Dunno if I’ve even looked at it since 1984. Sometime in high school—I’m pretty sure of that.”

Colin had read it more recently—quite a bit more. The politics were out of date. Nobody could deny that. The politics had been out of date well before the Cold War went bye-bye. But the thoughts on the way corrupt and narrow politics produced a corrupt and narrow language seemed more important than ever in this age of pious bullshit. They did to him, at any rate. Most people, by all appearances, didn’t give a rat’s ass.

If he was going to vent, he was going to vent. Not much point to doing things halfway, was there? With another sigh, he said, “And she’s got herself a new boyfriend.”

“A punk? A gangbanger?” Gabe’s older daughter was in high school. Those were the kinds of boyfriends that gave him nightmares.

But Colin shook his head. “Well, no.”

“Oh,” Gabe said again. As he had with 1984, he remembered slowly, but remember he did. “Please, Jesus, not another guy older than you are.”

“Not that, either,” Colin admitted. “This one’s, I dunno, maybe forty.”

“Not too bad, not for the age she is now,” Gabe said. Colin nodded this time; that was true. Gabe asked the next logical question: “So what don’t you like about him?”

“It’s not even that I don’t like him,” Colin said, which was also true . . . to a point.

“Huh,” Gabe said, as if a perp gave him an unexpected reply in the interrogation room. “He got a record?”

“Not any place I can find,” Colin answered. He wasn’t surprised Gabe would assume he’d checked. He had, as soon as he’d got Bronislav Nedic’s name. Did that mean he didn’t trust his darling daughter’s taste in men? Now that you mentioned it, yes.

“Huh,” Gabe said again. “What is it, then?”

“You wanna know what? I’ll tell you what—he scares the crap out of me, that’s what.” There. Colin had said it. He sure hadn’t said it to Vanessa, or even to Kelly. That was one he’d kept bottled up ever since he’d met Bronislav. He hoped like hell the big Serb hadn’t noticed it, too.

He succeeded in surprising Gabe, anyhow. Sanchez’s graying eyebrows leaped toward his hairline. “Scares you?” By the way Gabe repeated it, he could hardly believe his own ears. “How come?”

“I did my hitch in the Navy—you know that.” Colin waited for his friend to nod before continuing, “I never saw combat. But I knew some guys—Navy and Marines—who’d been nasty places and done nasty things. Heap big nasty things, if you know what I mean.”

“Uh-huh.” Gabe nodded again. “This dude is like that?”

“In spades, doubled and redoubled.” Colin tried to put what he felt into words: “Those guys, whatever they were up to, they were doing it ’cause they had orders to do it, whatever it was. And maybe things got hairy, but they got hairy because that kind of stuff was what they did. You with me so far?”

“Yeah. Or I think so.”

“Okay. This fella, he did that kinda stuff, too. He’s got an ugly old scar to prove it, but you don’t need the scar to know. You just need to see the eyes. Only I don’t think he did whatever he did because those were his orders. He did it ’cause he went looking for it and he found it.”

After another pause for thought, Gabe said, “Not a German shepherd. Not a police dog. A wolf.”