Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

“Which is better?”

“Stone of Accord is a couple of bucks cheaper. Tina says the food’s better, too.”

“Okay. We’ll blame her if it turns out to be crappy.” Justin set a hand on Rob’s shoulder. “But don’t worry. We’ll blame you, too. If it’s good, though, she gets all the credit.”

“Have you been talking with my father?” Rob asked, not altogether in jest. The band walked up to the Stone of Accord. The food proved pretty good. The other three guys drank toasts to Tina. Draft Moose Drool stout was as good as anything this side of Guinness. And if you wanted Guinness instead, all you had to do was ask for it.

The waitress recognized them. “You look just like you do online!” she exclaimed, as if that were some kind of surprise.

“Not me,” Rob said gravely. “I wouldn’t let ’em photograph my tail.”

“We made him climb out of the formaldehyde bottle, too,” Justin said. The girl just kinda looked at him, which meant she didn’t know what the hell formaldehyde was. Fancier than in-formaldehyde, Rob supposed. He also got his low taste in puns from his old man.

“You guys are playing at the Civic Stadium, right?” she asked.

“No, over at the Golden Sluice, near the university campus,” Rob said.

“I’ve been there. No way it’s big enough!” she said. “People will be jammed in there. Lined up around the block, like. You guys are the hottest band to come to town in a long time.”

God help Missoula, in that case, Rob thought. Aloud, he said, “I like the way she talks.”

“Me, too,” Biff Thorvald agreed loudly. He sounded as if he liked it a lot. He got her name, and promised her a ticket. If they were gonna sell out the place, why the hell not? Rob liked Tina better-she got the jokes-but the waitress was a long way from terrible. No guarantees, but sometimes life on the road could be a lot of fun.

“Oh, Christ. Another one,” Colin Ferguson said mournfully. Not all the little old ladies who died in San Atanasio went on the South Bay Strangler’s page in the ledger. Not even all the little old ladies who got murdered in town did. Just the week before, a punk ransacking a house for shit to steal so he could feed his habit put three slugs into seventy-four-year-old Lupe Sandoval when she got back from Safeway sooner than she might have. One of them blew out the back of her head. The punk sat in a cell, awaiting arraignment. Colin had questioned him; he still had no clue he’d done anything wrong. It made you wonder why you bothered sometimes. Meanwhile, the widow Sandoval’s family was scrambling for the cash they’d need to bury her.

Maria Peterfalvy, though… She’d got out of Hungary in 1956, one jump ahead of Russian tanks. A framed black-and-white photo on her dresser showed her not long afterwards. She’d been a beauty; no other word for it.

She wasn’t beautiful now, lying there on the bedroom floor in the cramped little tract house where she’d lived for upwards of forty years. First with her husband and kids; then, after he died and they got on with their own lives, by herself.

She wasn’t living now, either. Gabe Sanchez looked out through the window. Filmy curtains kept people on the outside from seeing in, but not the reverse. Sanchez said, “Here’s the first news van.”

“Happy fucking day,” Colin answered. Mrs. Peterfalvy wouldn’t mind his language, not any more she wouldn’t. He patted his hair with his hand, though he couldn’t imitate a newsie’s perfect coif. He held his fist-an imaginary mike-under Sanchez’s nose. “Tell me, Sergeant, why haven’t you been able to catch this Strangler son of a bitch when he’s knocked off-what is it? nineteen? — little old ladies now.”

“Nineteen is correct, yes,” Sanchez replied, as if he were really being interviewed. “And we haven’t caught him because he doesn’t leave fingerprints anywhere and his goddamn DNA isn’t in any of our databases.” He eyed Colin as if his boss truly were a brain-damaged reporter. “So why don’t you fuck off and die and let me try and do my job?”

“But don’t you realize you aren’t protecting the public the way the public deserves to be protected?” Colin persisted, his eyes wide with inncent indignation (or possibly raw ignorance).

Gabe Sanchez started to say something, then stopped and shook his head. “Man, that’s scary. You sound just like one of the shitheads. How d’you do it?”

“The more you repeat yourself, the better the imitation you do,” Colin said. “I mean, if you only say something once, it can’t be important, right? It can’t have any real significance, either.”

“That, too,” Sanchez agreed. “And here comes another van.”

“Where’s the coroner?” Colin asked morosely. “He’s the guy who needs to answer questions. Him and the DNA analysts, I mean.”

“But you’re the officer in charge of the investigation. That means you’re the guy with all the answers,” Gabe said. “You know you are, Lieutenant. It says so right here on the box.”

Colin told him where to put the box, and how to fold it before he did. Sergeant Sanchez laughed. He could afford to; he wasn’t the officer in charge of the investigation. Neither was Colin Ferguson, or not exactly. Even counting Mrs. Peterfalvy, only seven of the South Bay Strangler’s victims lived in San Atanasio. Other poor harried cops were looking for him all over the region.

But Colin was the man on the spot right now. He walked out to face the wolves. He wished they were wolves. He might have thrown them raw meat. He might have shot them. If all else failed, he might have reasoned with them. Reporters were immune to reason, and there wasn’t enough raw meat in the world to make them happy. Opening fire would have got him talked about.

He strode out onto Mrs. Peterfalvy’s neatly kept front lawn. Sure as hell, the newsies bore down on him like the slavering beasts they were. The TV and radio reporters thrust microphones in his face. He disliked them more than the ones who worked for newspapers. The latter actually had to be able to write. TV people just had to know how to read, and they didn’t even need to be especially good at that.

Video cameramen aimed the tools of their trade at him like so many bazookas. Unlike bazookas, though, video cameras could blow up an unwary man’s reputation. The cameramen watched what they filmed with a certain ironic detachment. Unlike the pretty people they abetted, they actually had to know what they were doing.

Reporters’ manners came straight out of preschool. Four shouted questions at the same time. They didn’t go Me!.. No, me!.. NO, ME! but they might as well have.

Like a playground monitor, Colin held up a hand. “If you all talk at once, I can’t hear any of you,” he said. That made them yell louder. But they started waving their hands, too. Colin pointed to a porky Hispanic guy from what he thought of as Eye-witless News. “Yes, Victor?”

“Is that the South Bay Strangler in there?” Victor asked, neatening his hair with the hand that wasn’t holding the mike.

“No, sir,” Colin answered, his face expressionless. “The victim is Maria Peterfalvy, age seventy-nine.” He spelled the last name. Some of the reporters, as he had reason to know, couldn’t spell their own right more than two times out of three.

Victor stamped his foot on the sidewalk. He pooched out his lower lip like a three-year-old working up to a tantrum. But he did manage to say, “No! What I mean is, did the South Bay Strangler strangle her?”

Then why don’t you say what ean? In Colin’s experience, people who didn’t speak clearly also didn’t think clearly. Then again, if you expected a TV reporter to think clearly, you were much too naive to make a good cop. “We don’t have anything back from the lab, of course,” Colin said. “As a matter of fact, the lab techs aren’t even here. So we can’t be sure yet.”