Supervolcano All Fall Down(33)

Gabe scratched his thick, bushy mustache. “L.A. cops’ll call it a piece of something else,” he said with unusual delicacy.

“Too bad,” Colin answered. “C’mon. Let’s go. I want to be leading the parade again when we hand off to the Hawthorne guys.”

They got into their unmarked Ford. Colin waved sweetly to the guys from the LAPD as they went by. At least three Los Angeles policemen flipped him off in reply. He smiled even wider—he gave them a shit-eating grin, if the truth be known—and went right on waving. As long as they didn’t open fire on him, everything was jake.

Gabe drove with a splendid disregard for what little traffic there was. “Who’s gonna write me a ticket, huh?” he demanded.

“Not me, dude,” Colin said.

At the border between San Atanasio and Hawthorne, one of the latter town’s finest asked him, “You get any trouble from LAPD?” By the way one eyebrow quirked, he already knew the answer. Well, he would. Every LAPD radio frequency would have been sulfurous. And the Hawthorne cops would have monitored the scanners just so they could stay informed, of course. Yeah, of course.

Colin shrugged and jerked a thumb at the Door-Knocker. “They didn’t want to see whether we really would have shot them up and knocked them out of the way.”

The guy from Hawthorne studied him. “I think they worked out the answer on their own.”

“Maybe.” Colin shrugged again. “The trucks are your babies now. Take good care of ’em. Tell the El Segundo guys the same thing when you make the handoff.”

“Will do,” the Hawthorne officer promised. Like Colin, he wore a suit not too new and not too stylish. If you became a cop to get rich and look cool, you were more than a few boulders short of a rock pile.

Or maybe you were Mike Pitcavage. Colin reported back to the elegant chief of the San Atanasio PD after the Hawthorne cops took charge of the fuel trucks. On the other side of his flight-deck desk, Pitcavage nodded. “Yeah, that pretty much matches the complaint I got from LAPD,” he said, and then stood up and stuck out his hand. “Good job, Colin.”

He was manicured, too. Colin noted as much as he shook with the chief. Just as you’d expect, Pitcavage had a smooth, firm grip. “Sometimes us small-town boys can surprise the city slickers,” Colin said, putting on a cornpone drawl.

“There you go. They want to draw you and quarter you and put your pieces at the city gates to warn off anybody else who gets ideas like that,” Pitcavage said.

“What did you tell ’em?” Colin wondered if he’d get thrown to the wolves, a sacrifice to the great god Petroleum.

But Pitcavage answered, “I said, if they wanted to try it, they’d have to do me first.”

“Thanks.” Colin sounded less dry than usual. Yes, he’d wondered whether Pitcavage would grab the chance to hang him out to dry. He’d been a rival for the leather swivel chair the chief sat in now. He didn’t want it any more, but Pitcavage didn’t know that, and probably wouldn’t believe it if he found out. Ambitious himself, he’d always figure everybody else was, too. But here he’d done everything a subordinate could want from his CO. After a momentary pause, Colin asked, “What did they say when you told ’em that?”

“They told me to fuck myself in the ass. They said they’d drive spikes through a telephone pole, and I could use that.” Pitcavage grinned. “They were righteously pissed off.”

“I guess,” Colin agreed. “If they’re that up in arms, are they really so low on gas themselves? They’re L.A., for crying out loud. They always get what they want.”

“Not this time. This time they get hind tit. They aren’t used to it, and they don’t like it for beans.” Pitcavage stuck out his hand again. As Colin took it, the chief went on, “I won’t forget the number you did on them, either. Way to go.”

That was dismissal. Even Colin, who didn’t always notice hints, got this one and took it. Leaving the chief’s inner sanctum, he liked Pitcavage better than he had for years. If Mike had a prick for a son, it could happen to anybody. Colin knew that only too well. Rob and Marshall weren’t perfect. Neither was Vanessa.

And neither am I, Colin thought. And neither is anybody else.

* * *

Kelly looked up bemusedly at the ceiling of the Benson Hotel’s lobby. It was a pretty fancy place, all dark, mellow wood. And she had to look a long way up at the molded and gilded plaster on the ceiling. The Benson dated from 1912, when splendor, by God, was splendor. Across the street stood the colonnaded magnificence of the First National Bank building, which might almost have come to Portland from the acropolis of Athens.