“Think their van’s close enough to the hydrant there to write them up?”
Colin eyed it. “No,” he said regretfully. “Besides, they’d have a cow if one of us did it. They’d say it was on account of they were asking questions we didn’t like.” And they’d be right. But he didn’t say that.
“I didn’t mean you or me. That’s why God made the guys in the blue suits.” Sanchez hadn’t been out of a uniform so very long himself. By the way he talked, he’d never worn one.
Well, Colin had been that way himself. Most cops were. “Let it go,” he said. “It’s not like the dickhead would pay the ticket himself. TV stations, they’ve got money falling out of their assholes.”
“Wish I did,” Gabe Sanchez said morosely. “The bills my kids run up, they think I’m made of the stuff so I really can crap it.” He eyed Colin. “Yours are pretty much grown. Do they ever stop scrounging offa you?”
“Eventually. Pretty much. The one who’s still in college goes a long way toward making up for the other two, though. And there are the lawyers’ bills, too, but you know about those,” Colin said.
“Fuck, do I ever!” Sanchez winced. “Those mothers send their kids to Harvard, and it’s, like, petty cash for them. No wonder they run the country.”
“No wonder at all.” Colin nodded. Gabe had that one straight, all right. Did he ever! Colin consoled himself by remembering that even lawyers’ brats at Harvard fell foul of booze and dope. And some of them would decide they were more interested in discovering themselves than in getting a diploma. Some would figure they already knew it all, and again leave without the sheepskin. Some would graduate, and then try to make it as rock’n’ rollers instead of sensibly imitating Dad and Mom.
He knew all the verses to all those songs. Maybe, in the end, things evened out. Maybe. He wouldn’t bet anything he couldn’t afford to lose.
Dr. Ishikawa came out of Mrs. Peterfalvy’s neat little house. “We won’t be sure till the DNA results come in, but it sure looks like another one.”
“Yeah, I figured the same thing,” Colin said. “Will this guy ever fuck up?” He’d put on an optimistic face for the TV morons. Among his own kind, he could say what he really thought. Cops were like family. They didn’t-usually-hold the truth against you.
Not that that did you a hell of a lot of good. But there it was, and Colin took what small advantage of it he could.
The Rockies. There they were, right out the apartment window. Vanessa liked that. On clear days, you could see mountains in Los Angeles, too, but they sat lower on the horizon, and they sure didn’t march from north to south in one magnificent straight line. When it got smoggy, they disappeared.
Then again, the Rockies also disappeared when it got smoggy. Till Vanessa moved here, she hadn’t thought Denver could get smoggy. Surprise! Too many cars in not enough space could do that almost anywhere. Denver had so many cars, and so many people who’d moved here in the past twenty-five years to escape the crowding and pollution in wherever the hell they were from, that its freeway system was hopelessly overstretched. Morning and afternoon traffic crawls made Vanessa miss L.A.’s commutes. Before she moved, she wouldn’t have imagined anything could.
Pickles was not a big Denver booster. He’d spent the first couple of days after he got here pissing and shitting on the apartment rug. She’d gone through a bottle of that Nature’s Miracle enzyme junk, but the place still smelled of cat. Part of that was marking his new territory, of course. And part was expressing his opinion of anybody who could coop him up in a carrier for as long as it took to get from California to Colorado. He couldn’t write angry e-mails, but he got the message across.
Vanessa’s new job didn’t pay as well as the one she’d left. But the apartment was bigger, newer, and cheaper than the one she’d had before. People in Denver bitched about the high cost of housing. Vanessa wasn’t impressed. Even after a couple of market meltdowns, L.A. still cost more.
She didn’t particularly like her new job. Amalgamated Humanoids made everything from crash-test dummies to fancy audio-animatronic robots. They competed for a lot of government grants, so they needed someone to write and edit proposals. Reading RFPs from the Feds proved that Washington did believe in capital punishment, at least by boredom. Reading what allegedly bright Amalgamated Humanoids engineers fondly imagined to be English proved some people grew up without a native language. That was the kindest explanation Vanessa could find, anyhow.
She hadn’t likeeli job she’d quit so she could move to Denver, either. And she hadn’t liked the one before that. She really hadn’t liked the classes she was taking at Long Beach State, which was why she’d got a job instead.
She wasn’t happy unless she disliked something, not that she’d ever put it like that. Bryce had, not long before she told him to hit the road. Cause and effect? She would have denied on a stack of Bibles that the crack had anything to do with the breakup. She would have said the same thing about the poem he’d had accepted. It was, when you got right down to it, a pretty goddamn stupid poem.
One thing she didn’t love about Amalgamated Humanoids-she was starting a collection, the way she always did-was the wild up-and-down workload. Proposals had iron deadlines. If they had to go out by 3:27 p.m. Tuesday precisely, you made sure they did. If that meant pulling sixteen-hour days Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, you pulled them.
And if, after that, you spent the rest of the week counting paper clips and rubber bands and goofing around online, the boss didn’t care. You stored up energy for the next crazy time.
Not everything in Denver was perfect, then. But it was no worse than L.A. As soon as Vanessa turned in her California license plates for ones stamped out by Colorado convicts, she felt more or less at home.
The one down spot-the place where she was unhappy without wanting to be unhappy, in a manner of speaking-was her love life. When she was in the throes of writing, or of translating into English someone else’s godawful attempt at writing a proposal, she didn’t have time for Hagop. And she soon started to wonder if Hagop ever had time for her.
“I am too busy,” he would say when she called him. Not all the time, but often enough to be annoying. More than often enough: Vanessa had a low annoyance threshold.
He wasn’t always too busy. Oh, no. When he woke up with a bulge in his pants, he was charming and attentive and sweet… till she put out. Then the carpet business consumed him again.
Bryce had been horny all the damn time. He’d sulk and get pissy when she said no. And if she said no two or three days running, he’d play with himself instead. It made her feel she was just a convenience for him, maybe a little more enjoyable than a hand but not absolutely necessary. She’d told herself things would be different with an older man. He wouldn’t keep bugging her the way Bryce did. And he’d be grateful when she gave herself to him.
Well, yes and no. Hagop wasn’t horny all the damn time. Biology wouldn’t let him be. But, when he was, he bugged her just as much as somebody half his age would have. Once he got what he wanted, he ignored her till the next time he started feeling the pressure again.
Vanessa had never been one to suffer in silence. As soon as she got irked enough-which didn’t take long-she called him on it. “The only reason you want me around is so you can fuck me,” she said one evening, after he’d done just that. The blunt language would have made her father flinch, so she hoped it would have the same effect on any man his age.
No such luck. Hagop leaned up on one elbow and looked at her, his heavy-featured face expressionless. He liked a light on in the bedroom; seeing what they were up to helped him get where he was going. After a moment, he said, “And this surprises you because…?”