Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano - All Fall Down

“I’m sorry, Mike,” Colin said. That had the advantage of being nothing but the truth.

Truth or not, he might as well have saved his breath. Locked in some personal hell, the chief went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “A felony rap! Hard time! They’ll take DNA samples! Jesus wept!”

He isn’t running on all cylinders-nowhere near, Colin thought with rough sympathy. Hard time was, well, hard time. It wasn’t designed to be fun for anybody. It might end up even harder for a police chief’s kid, because they’d have to segregate him from most of the rest of the prisoners to keep him safe. But a swab on the inside of his cheek was the least, the absolute very least, of Darren Pitcavage’s worries.

Mike Pitcavage seized Colin’s arm and squeezed, hard. He might be stuck behind a desk, but he was still one hell of a strong man. “I’ve got to talk to the arresting officer, talk to the DA, get it down to something possible, something reasonable,” Pitcavage said, squeezing, squeezing. If he kept that up, pretty soon Colin wouldn’t have any circulation in his left hand. “Drug dealing? A felony? No way! I’ll fix it up.”

No, he didn’t have all his oars in the pond. “Mike,” Colin said, as gently as he could, “I don’t think that will do you any good, or Darren, either. Think it through. You’re liable to make things worse, not better. What if the reporters get hold of it? Can’t you see the headlines, man? ‘Chief scores cushy plea deal for his son! Film at eleven!’” He did his best to imitate a pompous TV talking head.

“He’s my kid, Colin. I’ve got to try. DNA samples? My God, this will kill Caroline.” Pitcavage might even have been right about that.

Whether he was or he wasn’t, though, had nothing to do with the price of lemonade. “You won’t help him, Mike,” Colin said, doing his best to get through to the other man. “You’ll make things worse. The DA won’t listen to you. He can’t. And if you piss him off, he’ll probably find some new counts to throw at Darren.”

“They can’t charge him with a felony. They can’t !” Pitcavage wouldn’t listen.

In Colin’s experience, saying what they could or couldn’t do was usually a bad plan. Telling them to their faces that they couldn’t do this, that, or the other thing was even worse. As soon as you told them, they’d go ahead and do it anyhow, just to show you a thing or three.

He tried his best to spell that out for the chief. “You’re against me, too! I might have known!” Pitcavage yelled, loud enough to make the smokers spin toward him to see what was going on.

Chief Pitcavage stormed back into the station, shoulders hunched, head pushed forward, hands thrust into trouser pockets. Colin stared after him. He’d known it would be bad. He hadn’t imagined it would be as bad as this.

“What’s eating him?” one of the smokers asked the other, or Colin, or possibly God. He’d been out here polluting his lungs when the news broke. One more reason not to smoke, Colin thought, and didn’t enlighten the guy. He’d find out soon enough. The whole department would know before the sun went down.

* * *

Vanessa surveyed her new apartment with something less than delight. It was a standard SoCal pattern for a small one-bedroom. Front room going back to dinette, with cramped kitchen to one side of the eating area. Bedroom through a door in the front-room wall opposite the couch. Bathroom behind the bedroom and next to the kitchen, so the builder could save money by running the pipes for both off the same main line.

The rug was one small step up from outdoor carpeting. The linoleum in the kitchen and the bathroom had seen better decades. The furniture was old and ratty. Coffee table, end table, dinette table, and nightstand and dresser in the bedroom all had identical tops of very fake wood. She didn’t want to think about how many people had fucked on the mattress before she moved in.

Her own furniture was back in Denver. Scavengers wouldn’t have got there yet. One of these years. By then, ash and rain probably would have made the roof cave in. Gone. Well, the whole Midwest was gone.

Her old room in her father’s place had been more comfortable than this. Well, the physical arrangements had. But everybody there took everything she said the wrong way. And there was her new half-sister screeching at odd hours. That drove Vanessa straight up the wall. Did it ever! You couldn’t ignore a crying baby, no matter how much you wanted to. Evolution had designed those noises to stab your head like an ice pick. You had to do something about them so the little monster would shut up.

Vanessa knew what she wanted to do. But punting an infant got you talked about in this effete age. Moving out seemed the better choice.

Or it would have, if she hadn’t been all but run out by Kelly. She was Colin Ferguson’s daughter , goddammit. Just because this chunky stranger was hauling her old man’s ashes, did that give the bitch the right to put on airs and boss her around?

Kelly sure seemed to think so. So did Vanessa’s dad. Marshall. . Marshall shut himself in the room with the stupid police tape on the door and clattered away on that horrible antique of a typewriter. It was almost as annoying as Deborah. And he turned out silly, saccharine stories, full of erratic grammar and punctuation. She’d told him so when he asked her to read one. She hadn’t seen any more after that.

Of course, his prose looked like Edward Gibbon’s when you compared it to the subliterate garbage Nick Gorczany cranked out. Vanessa had forgotten how very delightful life at the widget works was before she headed for Colorado.

Maybe Gorczany had forgotten, too. When she set a memo on his desk heavily edited in red, he’d looked from it to her and back. “ So good to have you on the job again, Vanessa,” he’d murmured.

“ So good to be back,” she’d answered, and walked out of his office with her head held high. If he was going to get snide, she’d get snide right back. Yes, she needed work. But she needed her self-respect even more.

The one thing wrong with self-respect was, it wouldn’t buy groceries or pay the rent. The job would. . more or less. Nick Gorczany hadn’t got himself that big old house in Palos Verdes Estates by overpaying his employees. If you didn’t like what he gave you, you could always go out and find yourself better-paying work.

“Ha,” Vanessa said, chopping cabbage in the crowded kitchen of the small one-bedroom in San Atanasio: about as far from the boss’ Palos Verdes Estates estate as you could get and still stay in the South Bay. “Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha.”

It didn’t get any funnier, even if she made more laughy noises. Laughy? She nodded to herself. It bore the same relation to laugh as truthy did to truth . It wouldn’t go into the OED any time soon, but it filled a need. It did for her, anyhow.

She counted herself lucky Nick Gorczany had remembered she knew what she was doing when it came to translating bureaucratic horseshit into English. Her father and Kelly might have given her the bum’s rush even if she hadn’t snagged a job.

“They have expelled you from what is yours by right,” Bronislav said the first time he saw her apartment. His big hands folded into fists. “If it were not your father, I would make him pay for dispossessing you. We Serbs, we know too much about being wrongly dispossessed.”

“Don’t do anything like that! Don’t, you hear me?” Vanessa exclaimed. Bronislav was ready to turn a family squabble into an international incident. Vanessa had started learning what she could about ex-Yugoslavia. She didn’t want him to call her American any more, not the way he had in front of the Croat eatery in San Pedro. From everything she could see, Serbs did that kind of thing a lot. She was sure Gavrilo Princip would have agreed. So would Archduke Franz Ferdinand, these days the namesake of a band almost as quirky as the one her brother played in.