“Before I start driving, I need to know that you’re calmed down. Do I need to put you in the backseat?”
“It wasn’t a fit,” Molly said. “I was defending myself. He wanted a piece of me.” She lifted her head and turned to Theo, but her hair still covered her face.
“Are you taking your drugs?”
“Meds, they call them meds.”
“Sorry,” Theo said. “Are you taking your meds?”
She nodded.
“Wipe your hair out of your face, Molly, I can barely understand you.”
“Handcuffs, whiz kid.”
Theo almost slapped his forehead: idiot! He really needed to stop getting stoned on the job. He reached up and carefully brushed her hair away from her face. The expression he found there was one of bemusement.
“You don’t have to be so careful. I don’t bite.”
Theo smiled. “Well, actually…”
“Oh fuck you. You going to take me to County?”
“Should I?”
“I’ll just be back in seventy-two and the milk in my refrigerator will be spoiled.”
“Then I’d better take you home.”
He started the car and circled the block to head back to the Fly Rod Trailer Court. He would have taken a back way if he could, to save Molly some embarrassment, but the Fly Rod was right off Cypress, Pine Cove’s main street. As they passed the bank, people getting out of their cars turned to stare. Molly made faces at them out the window.
“That doesn’t help, Molly.”
“Fuck ‘em. Fans just want a piece of me. I can give ’em that. I’ve got my soul.”
“Mighty generous of you.”
“If you weren’t a fan, I wouldn’t let you do this.”
“Well, I am. Huge fan.” Actually, he’d never heard of her until the first time he was called to take her away from H.P.‘s Cafe, where she had attacked the espresso machine because it wouldn’t quit staring at her.
“No one understands. Everyone takes a piece of you, then there’s nothing left for you. Even the meds take a piece of you. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about here?”
Theo looked at her. “I have such a mind-numbing fear of the future that the only way I can function at all is with equal amounts of denial and drugs.”
“Jeez, Theo, you’re really fucked up.”
“Thanks.”
“You can’t go around saying crazy shit like that.”
“I don’t normally. It’s been a tough day so far.”
He turned into the Fly Rod Trailer Court: twenty run-down trailers perched on the bank of Santa Rosa Creek, which carried only a trickle of water after the long, dry summer. A grove of cypress trees hid the trailer park from the main street and the view of passing tourists. The chamber of commerce had made the owner of the park take down the sign at the entrance. The Fly Rod was a dirty little secret for Pine Cove, and they kept it well.
Theo stopped in front of Molly’s trailer, a vintage fifties single-wide with small louvered windows and streaks of rust running from the roof. He got Molly out of the car and took off the handcuffs.
Theo said, “I’m going to see Val Riordan. You want me to have her call something in to the pharmacy for you?”
“No, I’ve got my meds. I don’t like ‘em, but I got ’em.” She rubbed her wrists. “Why you going to see Val? You going nuts?”
“Probably, but this is business. You going to be okay now?”
“I have to study my lines.”
“Right.” Theo started to go, then turned. “Molly, what were you doing at the Slug at eight in the morning?”
“How should I know?”
“If the guy at the Slug had been a local, I’d be taking you to County right now, you know that?”
“I wasn’t having a fit. He wanted a piece of me.”
“Stay out of the Slug for a while. Stay home. Just groceries, okay?”
“You won’t talk to the tabloids?”
He handed her a business card. “Next time someone tries to take a piece of you, call me. I always have the cell phone with me.”
She pulled up her sweater and tucked the card into the waistband of her tights, then, still holding up her sweater, she turned and walked to her trailer with a slow sway. Thirty or fifty, under the sweater she still had a figure. Theo watched her walk, forgetting for a minute who she was. Without looking back, she said, “What if it’s you, Theo? Who do I call then?”
Theo shook his head like a dog trying to clear water from its ears, then crawled into the Volvo and drove away. I’ve been alone too long, he thought.
Two
The Sea Beast
The cooling pipes at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant were all fashioned from the finest stainless steel. Before they were installed, they were x-rayed, ultrasounded, and pressure-tested to be sure that they could never break, and after being welded into place, the welds were also x-rayed and tested. The radioactive steam from the core left its heat in the pipes, which leached it off into a seawater cooling pond, where it was safely vented to the Pacific. But Diablo had been built on a breakneck schedule during the energy scare of the seventies. The welders worked double and triple shifts, driven by greed and cocaine, and the inspectors who ran the X-ray machines were on the same schedule. And they missed one. Not a major mistake. Just a tiny leak. Barely noticeable. A minuscule stream of harmless, low-level radiation wafted out with the tide and drifted over the continental shelf, dissipating as it went, until even the most sensitive instruments would have missed it. Yet the leak didn’t go totally undetected.
In the deep trench off California, near a submerged volcano where the waters ran to seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit and black smokers spewed clouds of mineral soup, a creature was roused from a long slumber. Eyes the size of dinner platters winked out the sediment and sleep of years. It was instinct, sense, and memory: the Sea Beast’s brain. It remembered eating the remains of a sunken Russian nuclear submarine: beefy little sailors tenderized by the pressure of the depths and spiced with piquant radioactive marinade. Memory woke the beast, and like a child lured from under the covers on a snowy morning by the smell of bacon frying, it flicked its great tail, broke free from the ocean floor, and began a slow ascent into the current of tasty treats. A current that ran along the shore of Pine Cove.
Mavis
Mavis tossed back a shot of Bushmills to take the edge off her frustration at not being able to whack anyone with her baseball bat. She wasn’t really angry that Molly had bitten a customer. After all, he was a tourist and rated above the mice in the walls only because he carried cash. Maybe the fact that something had actually happened in the Slug would bring in a little business. People would come in to hear the story, and Mavis could stretch, speculate, and dramatize most stories into at least three drinks a tell.
Business had been slowing over the last couple of years. People didn’t seem to want to bring their problems into a bar. Time was, on any given afternoon, you’d have three or four guys at the bar, pouring down beers as they poured out their hearts, so filled with self-loathing that they’d snap a vertebra to avoid catching their own reflection in the big mirror behind the bar. On a given evening, the stools would be full of people who whined and growled and bitched all night long, pausing only long enough to stagger to the bathroom or to sacrifice a quarter to the jukebox’s extensive self-pity selection. Sadness sold a lot of alcohol, and it had been in short supply these last few years. Mavis blamed the booming economy, Val Riordan, and vegetables in the diet for the sadness shortage, and she fought the insidious invaders by running two-for-one happy hours with fatty meat snacks (The whole point of happy hour was to purge happiness, wasn’t it?), but all her efforts only served to cut her profits in half. If Pine Cove could no longer produce sadness, she would import some, so she advertised for a Blues singer.
The old Black man wore sunglasses, a leather fedora, a tattered black wool suit that was too heavy for the weather, red suspenders over a Hawaiian shirt that sported topless hula girls, and creaky black-on-white wing tips. He set his guitar case on the bar and climbed onto a stool.
Mavis eyed him suspiciously and lit a Tarryton 100. She’d been taught as a girl not to trust Black people.
“Name your poison,” she said.
He took off his fedora, revealing a gleaming brown baldness that shone like polished walnut. “You gots some wine?”
“Cheap-shit red or cheap-shit white?” Mavis cocked a hip, gears and machinery clicked.
“Them cheap-shit boys done expanded. Used to be jus’ one flavor.”
“Red or white?”
“Whatever sweetest, sweetness.”
Mavis slammed a tumbler onto the bar and filled it with yellow liquid from an icy jug in the well. “That’ll be three bucks.”
The Black man reached out—thick sharp nails skating the bar surface, long fingers waving like tentacles, searching, the hand like a sea creature caught in a tidal wash—and missed the glass by four inches.
Mavis pushed the glass into his hand. “You blind?”
“No, it be dark in here.”
“Take off your sunglasses, idjit.”
“I can’t do that, ma’am. Shades go with the trade.”