Harry Turtledove - Supervolcano :Eruption

Gabe Sanchez felt the same way, though he pissed and moaned more than Colin did. “Man, you figure the Honolulu PD’s got any openings for an experienced cop?” he asked as he and Colin drove through chilly rain to a liquor store that had just been held up by a shotgun-toting robber.

“You can always hit Craigslist,” Colin answered. “You want to get out of town, though, I bet there’s less competition in Fairbanks.”

“Fairbanks?” Gabe made a cross with his two forefingers, as if repelling a vampire. “Funny, man-funny like a colostomy bag. That fuckin’ town was in the fuckin’ deep freeze before this stupid superwaddayacallit blew its stack. What’s it gonna be like year after fuckin’ next? The July ice-cube harvest’ll be terrific, that’s what.”

Maybe you didn’t need to fall in love with a geologist to know how screwed up things were, and how screwed up they were liable to get. Maybe you only needed your normal complement of working brain cells. Colin flicked on his turn signal and pulled into the cramped liquor-store parking lot. A black-and-white was already there, red and blue and yellow lights flashing in the overhead bar.

He grabbed his umbrella and got out. “One thing,” he said as he and Gabe squelched toward the entrance. “Rain’s washed away most of the ash.”

“Oh, boy,” Gabe said. “Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the goddamn play?” Colin shut up.

The clerk inside the liquor store was a short, plump Filipina. She looked pissed when Colin asked for her story. “I already tell it,” she said, pointing to the two uniformed policemen in there with her.

“Well, tl it again, please,” Colin said. “Maybe you’ll remember something new.”

“I don’t think so,” the woman said. Colin looked at her. It was the kind of look that got the message across. She changed her mind: “Okay, I tell. This motherfucker come into the store. He point big old gun at me. ‘Give me your money or I blow your ass away!’ motherfucker say. I open cash drawer. I put money on counter. Motherfucker grab it and run. I call police.”

English as she is spoke, Colin thought. The Filipina used the twelve-letter endearment as if it meant guy. For all he knew, she thought it did. One of these years, maybe it would. He’d heard plenty of other people use it the same way.

“Do you have surveillance video?” he asked her.

“What you say?” she returned: English as it wasn’t spoke.

Colin tried again. “A camera,” he said patiently. “A TV camera.” Was there anybody in the world who didn’t savvy TV? Maybe a few luckless natives stuck in the bad reception of the Papua New Guinea mountains. Everyone else bowed down before the great god of the modern age and his holy name.

“Oh. TV!” Yes, the Filipina got that. She pointed up and behind her, to a brushed-aluminum box with a lens at the business end. “Right there.”

“We’ll check that out, ma’am,” Gabe said. “Was the robber wearing a mask?” He had to do a show-and-tell to get across what a mask was. When the clerk understood, she shook her head.

“Something, anyway,” Colin remarked. “Have to find out what the footage looks like. If it shows the perp’s face, and if he’s nasty with that shotgun, maybe we can get one of the TV stations to run it. That’ll help if somebody makes him.” He might-he did-despise TV news, but he wasn’t too proud to use it.

“There you go,” Gabe said. “Maybe it’s the same jerk who blasted that other clerk a while ago.”

“Maybe it is,” Colin agreed. “That’d be good. Well, we’ll see.”

“That motherfucker shoot somebody?” The clerk’s voice rose in understandable horror.

“We’re not sure if it’s the same guy yet,” Colin said.

“You catch him! You put him in jail! You keep him in jail!” she said shrilly. “This not first time we get robbed. Nobody never get caught. What kind stupid motherfuckers work for police, huh?”

Colin would have got pissed off if he hadn’t already figured out she didn’t mean much by the word. Sighing, he answered, “Ma’am, there are smart cops and dumb cops, same as there are at any other kind of work.”

She eyed him. “You smart cop or dumb cop?”

“Probably,” he said. Let her make whatever she wanted of that. Back to business: “Let’s see what the camera picked up.”

After some fiddling with the controls, they played it back and watched it on the monitor next to the now-gutted cash register. It was in color and highly detailed. Colin remembered the black-and-white blurs you got from early-model surveillance cameras. No more. This was plenty good enough to ID the perp-and his shotgun-in court.

He was about eighteen, African American, in a cheap knit watchcap, a hoodie, and jeans. He had earrings and a tattoo on the left side of his neck, just below his ear.

“Damned if I don’t think that’s the same guy,” Gabe said.

“It’s been a while,” Colin answered, but he suspected the sergeant was right.

Whoever he was, the way the robber yelled and waved the shotgun around ought to be plenty to rouse a TV anchorman’s righteous indignation. Colin knew the numbers to call.

Channel 7 sent a gal out to look at the video. “Oh, yes, we can use this,” she said, beaming at Colin and showing off teeth undoubtedly capped. “Do you have a hotline number where people can call if they know something?”

“Sure do.” He wrote it down on the back of one of his cards. Under it, he printed SAN ATANASIO PD HOTLINE. She might not think to turn the card over and remind herself where she’d got it. She didn’t especially look like a dummy, but you never could tell.

“Thanks.” She stuck it in her purse. “Now, what was the name of the liquor store? Where exactly is it? When did the robbery take place? The clerk was a woman?” She could see that on the video, but he didn’t mind if she made sure. By the time she left, they were both pretty well pleased with themselves.

The only trouble was, the footage didn’t run. The big headline on the evening news was that the governor had ordered mandatory statewide rolling blackouts. “We have to conserve energy because less is reaching us due to the impactful nature of the supervolcano eruption,” he declared earnestly.

Just because he’d ordered blackouts and power cutoffs didn’t mean he’d get them right away. Half a dozen different groups-right, left, and center-converged on his mansion, waving picket signs and demanding that he change his mind this instant, if not sooner. A judge way the hell up in Siskiyou County had already issued a preliminary injunction against the blackouts. Colin felt a certain amount of sympathy for him. Siskiyou County was cold and mountainous. Without electricity for several hours a day, it would be colder yet.

And there was a car chase on the Long Beach Freeway. The station had to cover that live-or thought it did, anyway. So the people out there in TVland never got a glimpse of the robber with that shotgun and the tat.

It turned out not to matter. One of the San Atanasio cops took a look at the video and said, “Fuck me if I don’t know that asshole. That’s JerWilliam Ellis. I busted his sorry butt for armed robbery year before last. I didn’t know he was outa juvie.”

“JerWilliam?” Colin said.

“That’s his name. One word, capital J, capital W,” the cop said. “Don’t ask me why. I just work here. Ask his mama.”

“O-kay.” Colin shrugged. It wasn’t his business. He’d seen plenty of names stranger than that. “Know where he lives?”

“Last I heard, in the projects on Imperial.”

That was north and east of San Atanasio. The big housing projects there had gone up after the 1965 Watts riots, a monument to LBJ’s Great Society. They’d been breeding gangbangers ever since. As projects went, there were plenty of grimmer examples back East. That didn’t make the Imperial Gardens a garden spot.