Supervolcano :Eruption Page 4

  “Yeah, yeah.” Rob wasn’t about to be sidetracked, in which he also took after Colin the cop without noticing it. “The other thing I was going to say is, I don’t think there is any place between Al Stewart and Zappa.”

  “Sure there is,” Charlie said. “They both write interesting, off-the-wall lyrics. Only Zappa stopped caring about whether he sounded like a rock-and-roller after a while, but Al Stewart still does. Well, as much like a rock-and-roller as you can sound with just a couple of acoustic guitars.”

  Rob pondered that. It wasn’t one of Charlie’s usual comebacks. Biff bailed him out before he had to respond to it, saying, “C’mon, you guys. Give it a rest, okay? Let’s do the sound check and hit the greasy spoon next door. We dick around much longer, my belly’ll growl louder’n my axe.” He brandished his guitar.

  The so-called greasy spoon next door was an outstanding Vietnamese place. Rob remembered it fondly from the last time they were in Spokane. You couldn’t get better pho in Santa Ana’s Little Saigon. And the only place you could get better Vietnamese food than you could in Santa Ana was Ho Chi Minh City (which had been Saigon, and was likely to be Saigon again one of these years).

  An idea tickled the back of his mind. “Maybe we could do something with places that’ve had more than one name. Tsaritsyn, Stalingrad, Volgograd. St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, back to St. Petersburg.”

  “We’ve done songs about Russia,” Justin said.

  “Not just Russia. Saigon’s Ho Chi Minh City-I was just thinking about that-and Constantinople is Istanbul nowadays. And is it Strassburg or Strasbourg?” Rob tried to make one of those last two Germanic and guttural, the other nasally French.

  Justin’s frown warned him he wasn’t the most cunning linguist running around loose. But the lead guitarist said, “Well, write it and we’ll see what it looks like.” Most bands came up with tunes and found lyrics that went with them. Not Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles. With them, words usually came first. That had to be one more reason they wouldn’t hit the jackpot any time soon.

  “Al Stewart already did a song about Constantinople,” Charlie pointed out. “And They Might Be Giants did ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople).’ Does the world really need three?”

  “It wouldn’t be the same kind of song as those,” Rob said. “Give me a break, man. Doctor Seuss used Constantinople, too.”

  “See? Everybody does.” Charlie could be relentless.

  “Enough, you guys.” Biff sounded more forceful this time. He struck a ringing chord to emphasize the suggestion.

  They tuned up. They’d played in Pasco two nights before, and in Portland two nights before that. They’d been on the road together since forever-it sure seemed that way, anyhow. They didn’t need long to get ready for what they would be doing later that night. Then it was off to the place next door. “Fee, fie, pho, fum,” Rob said happily. Not even Charlie called him on that one.

  Pho had to be the best comfort food in the world, even better than chicken soup. You could put almost anything into it. Rob’s favorite was beef tendon. Before he started eating pho, he wouldn’t have imagined you could boil beef tendon long enough to make it meltingly tender. He wouldn’t have imagined it turned so delicious when you did, either.

  The waiter and the cook and the proprietor were all the same little guy. He had a wispy mustache and iron-gray hair. His English was good, but no one would ever mistake it for his native tongue. Had he got out of Saigon just before it turned into Ho Chi Minh City? Rob wouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Not many Americans like that one,” he said. “Round-eyed Americans, I mean. They see it on the menu, they make a face.” When he made a face, he showed more wrinkles than he did with his features in repose.

  “They’ve never tasted it, then,” Rob said. He left a big tip, although the place was so cheap it was a big tip on a small bill.

  They went back to the dressing room and passed joints around. Rob couldn’t prove using weed made him play better, but he sure thought so. Time slowed down when he was loaded. There seemed to be more of it between the notes, so he had as much as he needed to nail them one by one. And he could hear-he could almost see-how they fit together ever so much better than he could straight. Everything sounded better stoned, too.

  Justin stepped into the corridor and checked the house. A few shouts out there said people spotted him doing it. He came back with a grin on his round face. “We’ll make enough to go on to the next gig,” he reported. They’d been doing that for a few years now. As far as Rob was concerned, it beat the hell out of a day job.

  A local band played a short set before they went on. The locals got the kind of hand an opening act could expect. Rob remembered getting that kind of hand himself, and remembered being pumped about it. Now… A guy with a booming baritone shouted, “Here they are-the band you’ve been waiting for! Let’s give a big Spokane hello to… Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles!”

  And damned if they didn’t. Applause was a drug, too. Anybody who didn’t think so had never tasted that particular high. It was one of the reasons Rob came out here and waved to the people beyond the house lights. The other two were oldies but goodies: to piss off his old man (he’d sure done that) and to get laid till he couldn’t even stand up (not so easy when you were on the withdrawn side, but Rob had no complaints).

  They started out with “Pleasures,” not least to bring along people who were hearing them for the first time. Always a few newbies in the crowd. Why not let ’em think they were listening to regular rock ’n’ roll, at least for a little while? “I would bed you,

  I would head you,

  I’d do anything that’s right

  For your body’s sweet delight.”

  Justin sang. Rob strummed and found chords without conscious thought. A good thing, too, right this minute. Yes, he seemed to have all the time in the world. He knew he didn’t, but he seemed to, and that was all that counted.

  After the song ended, they got another hand. Somebody in the front row squirted Justin with one of their namesakes: a piece of made-in-China plastic madness from Archie McPhee. Somebody else called out, “I don’t believe in evolution!”

  “Well, if you find a band called Squirt Frog and the Created Tadpoles, maybe you should latch on to them,” Justin answered easily. He was fast on his verbal feet. He got a laugh. It was still fading when he went on, “If you didn’t like that last song, you really won’t be able to stand this next one.”

  They swung into “Punctuated Equilibrium.” Not everybody could make a song out of Stephen Jay Gould’s attack on classical Darwinism, but Justin Nachman wasn’t everybody. He was wasting a master’s in biology even more thoroughly than Rob was squandering his engineering degree. Well, they were having fun… weren’t they?

  They were tonight. They got called back for two encores. Afterwards, they sold CDs and signed them for the people who thought autographs proved reality. They plugged the new single on their Web site. They did all the other necessary things that separated music-as-business from music-as-fun.

  Then they went back to the motel, not completely alone. A little sleep, or something, would be good. They’d play in Missoula, Montana, tomorrow night. Another long haul, another university campus. With luck, another crowd. Another paycheck. Sometimes this gig looked an awful lot like work. But only sometimes.

  Colin Ferguson took notes on the things he read. He found that helped him remember them better. He often kept the scribbles to himself. When they held nothing earthshaking, he didn’t bother.

  Cops are no less nosy than other people. Cops, in fact, are nosier than most other people; if they weren’t, they’d make lousy cops. And so Colin wasn’t particularly surprised when Sergeant Gabriel Sanchez pointed to a sheet of paper on his desk and asked, “Who the hell is Huckleberry Tuff?”

  “Not who, Gabe. What,” Colin said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Sanchez said. He had a bushy black mustache just beginning to get gray flecks and sideburns a
good half an inch longer than the San Atanasio Police Department’s dress code allowed anyone not on undercover drug duty. He reached for the pack of Camels in his breast pocket.

  “Naughty, naughty,” Colin said. The San Atanasio PD had gone smokefree the year before. Colin’s father had died of lung cancer, one bad inch at a time. He had his share of bad habits and then some, but cigarettes weren’t one of them.

  “Ah, fuck,” Sanchez said without heat. “I’ll go outside when I’m done bugging you, then. Okay, what’s Huckleberry Tuff? Sounds like a gangbanger who’s read Mark Twain.”

  Colin chuckled. “Kinda does, doesn’t it? But it’s this layer of rock the supervolcano under Yellowstone Park laid down when it went kablooie two million years ago and change. There’s lots of it-I mean lots-in Wyoming and Montana and Idaho.”

  “O-kay.” Whatever Sergeant Sanchez had expected, that wasn’t it. “And how come you give a rat’s ass about this super-watchamacallit?”

  Normally, that would have been an altogether reasonable question. As things stood, though, Colin had a reasonable answer: “ ’Cause this gal I’ve got interested in is studying the supervolcano. Geologist, I guess you’d call her.”

  “Oh. I gotcha.” The medium-brown skin on Sanchez’s hands had a lighter streak on his ring finger that testified to his own recently deceased wedded bliss. Caution-police work may be hazardous to your marriage. They didn’t issue warning labels like that, but they should have. The sergeant leered and laughed a dirty laugh. “Geologist, huh? Long as she gets your rocks off…”

  “Har-de-har-har.” Colin had heard that one before, from almost every cop who knew what a geologist was. Before he could say so, his telephone rang. He picked it up. “Ferguson.” He listened for a moment, then seemed to sag in his seat. “Shit,” he said heavily. “Are they sure? What’s the location?” He wrote down an address on the sheet that held the words Huckleberry Tuff, then slammed the handset into the cradle.

  Gabe Sanchez might not make original jokes, but he could sure read between the lines. “Another one from the Strangler?” he asked.

  “Looks that way. Mildred Szymanski, seventy-seven, found dead in her place. Nobody saw her, she didn’t answer her door for three days, and the neighbors finally called us. Bedroom’s a mess-looks like she put up a fight. She’s naked from the waist down.”

  “Jesus.” Sanchez reached for his smokes again. If he had lit up, Colin wouldn’t have said a word. But he jerked his hand away instead. “Mildred. Nobody’s named Mildred any more. Who the fuck gets his jollies raping little old ladies?”

  “This guy does,” Colin answered. “It’s in one of the apartment buildings near San Atanasio Boulevard and Sword Beach Avenue. Wanna come with me?”

  “Sure. We can damn near walk,” Sanchez said. Colin nodded. The scene of the crime was only a few blocks from the cop shop.

  As soon as they got outside, Sanchez did light a Camel. He smoked in quick, furious puffs, and stamped on the half-smoked cigarette when they got into one of the department’s unmarked cars: a Plymouth that had seen better years. It wheezed to life when Colin turned the key.

  The Sunbreeze Apartments had seen better years, too. They’d probably been a cool place to live when they went up in some 1970s real-estate boom. Now they looked more like the Sun-bleached Apartments. Lots of serious armor, added on as things went downhill, secured the entrance and the gateway to the underground parking garage. Two black-and-whites were parked in the no-parking zone out front, their red and blue lights flashing.

  Colin pulled in behind one of the cop cars. A uniformed officer started to wave the Plymouth away, then recognized him. The guy grinned sheepishly. “Sorry about that, Lieutenant.”

  “No sweat, Malcolm,” Colin said as he and Gabe Sanchez got out.

  When reporters talked about San Atanasio these days, they called it “working class.” That meant most of the chatter Colin heard from looky-loos was in Spanish. Some was in Tagalog, some in Korean. And some was in English. The people who used English as their native tongue were up near the late Mildred Szymanski’s age. They’d liveere a long time, and hadn’t let all the changes to their town push them to places like Torrance and Redondo Beach.

  An ambulance arrived, with the coroner’s car right behind it. Dr. Ishikawa and a photographer climbed out of the car. The guys in the ambulance sat tight. They wouldn’t be able to take the body away till the police and the coroner finished their jobs. Ishikawa waved to Colin. “Another one?” he called in a harsh, grating voice.

  “Haven’t been inside yet,” the lieutenant answered. “I just got here, too. But that’s what the call sounds like.”

  A tall, skinny bald man with tufts of white hair sticking out of his ears stumped up to Colin. “You catch the son of a bitch who done this, you hear?” he said.

  “Sir, I’ll do my best,” Colin told him. What else could he say? A TV news van started sniffing for a parking space. “Keep those clowns outside,” Colin growled to Malcolm. He hurried into the apartment building, Gabe Sanchez at his heels. He hated scenes of violent death. But he hated dealing with the blow-dried vultures who gorged on them even more. And he was given to telling the truth as he saw it, which endeared him to neither reporters nor his superiors.

  A glance at the mailboxes told him Mildred Szymanski had lived in apartment 251. A glance at the body on the bedroom floor in the apartment told him the South Bay Strangler likely had struck again. Sooner or later-probably sooner-he’d have to talk to the newshounds after all.

  III

  “Well, we’re here,” Colin said as he pulled into the driveway. San Atanasio was only a few minutes away from LAX. Colin despised the airport. Who in his right mind didn’t? But the trip back and forth was easy enough.

  Rain drummed on the roof of his middle-aged Taurus and splashed off the windshield. In the passenger seat, Kelly Birnbaum grinned a crooked grin. “Why don’t we ever meet when it’s sunny?”

  “Hey, it’s February. Even L.A. gets rain in February. Sometimes, anyhow,” Colin said.

  “I know,” she admitted. “It was coming down even harder in Norcal, I’ll tell you that.”

  He thumbed the trunk button. “Head for the porch. I’ll grab your bag.”

  “Such a gentleman.” Her eyes twinkled.

  Several raindrops nailed his bifocals before he could get under cover himself. He wasn’t wearing a cap now, the way he had in Yellowstone. He wiped off most of the water with a hankie and undid the dead bolt and the regular lock. Then-a gentleman-he held the door open for Kelly. “Go on in.”

  She did. “It’s so big,” she marveled.

  “It’s just a house.”

  “When you’ve lived in dorms and grad-student apartments and tents as much as I have, a house looks humongous. I freak out when I visit my parents down here, and their place is smaller than this. You’ve got it all to yourself, too.”

  “Yeah,” Colin said tightly. “Marshall visits sometimes. His room still has his junk in it. The rest… It’s mine, all right, such as it is.”

  Kelly caught the edge in his voice. “Sorry. I’ve got foot-in-mouth disease.”

  “Don’t worry about it. If I didn’t have this place all to myself, I wouldn’t have pried your phone number out of you when we started talking there by the lake, and I’m darn glad I did.” He set a hand on her shoulder.

  She moved closer to him. “Me, too.” She looked around some more. “Everything is so neat. Books, DVDs, CDs-they’re all where they belong. I have to paw through piles of trash to find anything.”

  “Navy hangover,” he said with a shrug. “Want something wet?”

  “A beer, I think. But give me the tour first.”

  “Okay. You’ve got to remember, most of the stuff on the tables and the shelves and all is Louise’s taste.” That taste ran to sad-faced icons, enamelware boxes, and figurines that nested one inside another. Colin didn’t know why his ex had wanted to make the place look like a cheap imitation of the Hermitage,
but she had. Thinking back on it, some of the pieces hadn’t been so cheap. Way too late to worry about it now.

  “Well, Russian art is something different, anyway,” Kelly said diplomatically.

  One upstairs bedroom had a closed door with yellow tape reading POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS! running from the top left corner to the bottom right. “Marshall’s,” Colin said dryly.

  “Duh!” Kelly winked at him.

  Colin’s study was next door, with his computer and more bookshelves. It looked out on the backyard. Some wet sparrows and mourning doves pecked seed from a tray feeder.

  “I like this,” Kelly said. “It feels like you.”

  “No saints on the wall here,” Colin replied, which might have been agreement. He also had a work niche in the master bedroom, the next stop. He’d been using it more since he didn’t need to worry about waking up Louise by turning on a light at odd hours. Kelly didn’t seem to care about that. She was looking at the bed. Colin needed no grad school to work out why. “If it bothers you, there’s still a bed in what used to be Vanessa’s room. All the bedclothes are new since-well, since. Same old mattress, though.”

  She thought about it for a few seconds. Then she said, “That should be okay. Now what about that beer?”

  They went downstairs. The kitchen was also humongous, at least if you listened to Kelly. As Colin poured a couple of Sierra Nevada Pale Ales (he’d drunk Bud, but going with Kelly had opened his eyes to the notion of good beer), he said, “I know why you say that all the time.”

  “Say what all the time?”

  “Humongous. It’s what you guys call the top end of eruptions. A real technical term, like perpetrator or something.”

  “You’ve been reading books again.” Kelly sounded amused and accusing at the same time.

  “Guilty. I didn’t know it wasn’t in the rules.” Colin raised his glass. The pale ale was several shades darker than Bud, which was, now that he thought about it, the color of piss. This brew had real ingredients in it. “Here’s to us.” They solemnly clinked, then drank. The pale ale had real flavor in it, too. A damn shame it cost as if it did.