Supervolcano All Fall Down(31)

“Next Tuesday,” the chief answered. “Our convoy of trucks will exit the 110 at Braxton Bragg Boulevard. You’ll meet them at the exit ramp and escort them west through the city before handing off to the Hawthorne PD.”

“Right.” Colin had to hope it would be. His opinion of the neighboring department was not high. Hawthorne was full of gangbangers, and its cops were chronically underfunded. “I’m worrying about the LAPD, but they’ll have to make sure the Crips don’t hijack our crude.”

“Lord knows the Crips get into all kinds of shit, but I don’t think they have a rogue refinery.” Pitcavage grinned to show he’d made a joke.

He thought he had, anyhow. The Crips wouldn’t have to turn the crude into gas and motor oil to get value for it. All they’d have to do was steal it and threaten to light a match. How big a ransom could they squeeze out of people if they did that? Big. Big, big, big. Colin could see as much. Could Mike Pitcavage? It didn’t seem so. He might be able to make nice, but he had all the imagination of a cherrystone clam.

Well, when he wore a uniform instead of Giorgio Armani, he had the row of stars on either side of his collar. He knew where to find a guy with imagination, and knew how to give him orders. Which he’d gone and done.

“I’ll get on it,” Colin said.

The first thing he did, of course, was tell Gabe Sanchez. The sergeant pursed his lips and blew out through them. It might have been a whistle without sound or an exhalation without a cigarette. “We’ve got the fix in good, huh?” he said when Colin finished.

“Sure sounds that way.” After a meditative moment, Colin added, “We’d damn well better.”

“Boy, you can sing that in church!” Gabe agreed. “The LAPD doesn’t know thing one about it, huh?”

“Not Thing One, and not Thing Two, either.” How many times had Colin read his kids The Cat in the Hat? A zillion, at least. “That’s what the heap big boss says, anyway.”

“Could get interesting if he’s wrong,” Sanchez observed.

“That also crossed my mind, as a matter of fact. I have the feeling it crossed Mike’s mind, too. Which is why we meet the tanker trucks loaded for bear.”

“Yeah!” Gabe sounded enthusiastic. He might have rough edges, but he didn’t know how to back up. “Wonder what an LAPD squad car’d look like after it ran into the Door-Knocker.” By the way he said it, he couldn’t wait to find out.

“Mm, the idea is for the Door-Knocker to run into stuff, not the other way around,” Colin reminded him.

“Details, details.” Gabe waved that aside. “Can’t wait to see the L.A. cops’ faces when they find out we’ve got the goods and they don’t.”

“If everything works right, they won’t find out,” Colin said. Gabe shrugged, as if to note that everything never worked right.

Tuesday dawned chilly and rainy, as too many days in San Atanasio had since the eruption. If this was what Seattle had been like before the supervolcano went off, all the Californicators who’d moved to the Northwest got what they deserved. Only now SoCal was getting it, too.

Rain or no rain, Colin and his armed party took their stations on the Braxton Bragg Boulevard overpass to the Harbor Freeway, waiting for the precious petroleum convoy to come up from the south. Gabe Sanchez stood by the rail, the hood to his plastic poncho shielding his face well enough to let him smoke. Colin had his own share of bad habits and then some. He didn’t know how he’d missed tobacco, but he had.

Watching Gabe crush one cigarette under his shoe and then light another, he wondered what would have happened if people had discovered the filthy weed about 1950 instead of way the hell back when. He didn’t need to wonder long. He was convinced governments all over the world would have outlawed it as a dangerous, addictive drug. And, no doubt, bad guys would be growing it on secret farms right this minute and making stacks of illegal cash off it. There’d be books and earnest, concerned TV movies and obscene hip-hop records glorifying the cigar dealer. . . .

He shook his head. Gabe saw the motion. “What’s up?” he asked, breathing out smoke.

“Nothing.” Colin’s speculation left him faintly embarrassed. Gabe would only guffaw. “Just woolgathering.”

Before Gabe could come up with any more blush-worthy questions, a uniformed cop called, “Won’t be long now. They’re moving past the Goodyear Blimp’s mooring mast. Five, ten minutes.”

“Gotcha, Jimmy,” Colin said. “Tell ’em we’re ready and waiting as soon as they get off the freeway.” He walked over to another black-and-white and asked the man inside, “Anything interesting going on on the LAPD frequencies?” Monitoring the enemy was always a good idea when you were at war.