you're really fucked up."
"Thanks."
"You can't go around saying crazy shit like that."
"I don't normally. It's been a tough day so far." He turned into theFly Rod Trailer Court: twenty run-down trailers perched on the bank of Santa Rosa Creek, which carried only a trickle of water after the long, dry summer. A grove of cypress trees hid the trailer park from the main street and the view of passing tourists. The chamber of commerce had made the owner of the park take down the sign at the entrance. The Fly Rod was a dirty little secret for Pine Cove, and they kept it well.
Theo stopped in front of Molly's trailer, a vintage fifties single-wide with small louvered windows and streaks of rust running from the roof. He got Molly out of the car and took off the handcuffs.
Theo said, "I'm going to see Val Riordan. You want me to have her call something in to the pharmacy for you?"
"No, I've got my meds. I don't like 'em, but I got 'em." She rubbed her wrists."Why you going to see Val?You going nuts?"
"Probably, but this is business.You going to be okay now?"
"I have to study my lines."
"Right."Theo started to go,then turned. "Molly, what were you doing at the Slug at eight in the morning?"
"How should I know?"
"If the guy at the Slug had been a local, I'd be taking you to County right now, you know that?"
"I wasn't having a fit. He wanted a piece of me."
"Stay out of the Slug for a while. Stay home.Just groceries, okay?"
"You won't talk to the tabloids?"
He handed her a business card. "Next time someone tries to take a piece of you, call me. I always have the cell phone with me."
She pulled up her sweater and tucked the card into the waistband of her tights, then, still holding up her sweater, she turned and walked to her trailer with a slow sway. Thirty or fifty, under the sweater she still had a figure. Theo watched her walk, forgetting for a minutewho she was. Without looking back, she said, "What if it's you, Theo? Who do I call then?"
Theo shook his head like a dog trying to clear water from its ears, then crawled into the Volvo and drove away. I've been alone too long, he thought. two The Sea Beast The cooling pipes at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant were all fashioned from the finest stainless steel. Before they were installed, they were x-rayed, ultrasounded, and pressure-tested to be sure that they could never break, and after being welded into place, the welds were also x-rayed and tested. The radioactive steam from the core left its heat in the pipes, which leached it off into a seawater cooling pond, where it was safely vented to the Pacific. But Diablo had been built on a breakneck schedule during the energy scare of the seventies. The welders worked double and triple shifts, driven by greed and cocaine, and the inspectors who ran the X-ray machines were on the same schedule. And they missed one. Not a major mistake.Just a tiny leak.Barely noticeable. A minuscule stream of harmless, low-level radiation wafted out with the tide and drifted over the continental shelf, dissipating as it went, until even the most sensitive instruments would have missed it. Yet the leak did not go totally undetected.
In the deep trench offCalifornia, near a submerged volcano where the waters ran to seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit and black smokers spewed clouds of mineral soup, a creature was roused from a long slumber. Eyes the size of dinner platters winked out the sediment and sleep of years. It was instinct, sense, and memory: the Sea Beast's brain. It remembered eating the remains of a sunken Russian nuclear submarine: beefy little sailors tenderized by the pressure of the depths and spiced with piquant radioactive marinade. Memory woke the beast and like a child lured from under the covers on a snowy morning by the smell of bacon frying, it flicked its great tail, broke free from the ocean floor, and began a slow ascent into the current of tasty treats.A current that ran along theshoreofPine Cove.
Mavis Mavis