J is for Judgement

dozen."
    "That'd be great." 7 I HAD A quick bowl of soup with Henry and then downed half a pot of coffee, managing in the process to offset my lethargy and kick into high gear again. It was " time to make contact with some of the principals in the cast. At 7:00 I drove south along the coastline toward Perdido/Olvidado. It wouldn't be dark for another hour yet, but the light was fading, the air saturated with an ashen wash of twilight. Billows of fog blowing in from the ocean concealed all but the most obvious aspects of the land. Steep hills, pleated with erosion, rose up on my left, while to the right, the heaving gray Pacific was pounding against the shore. The quarter moon was becoming visible in the thick haze of the sky, a pale crescent of light barely discernible in the mist. Along the horizon, the offshore oil platforms lay at anchor like a twinkling armada. The island of St. Michael, and two that are known as the Rose and the Cross, are threaded like beads along the Cross Islands Fault, the entire east-west structural zone undercut by parallel cracks. The Santa Ynez Fault, the North Channel Slope Fault, Pitas Point, Oak Ridge, the San Cayetano, and the San Jacinto faults branch off like tributaries from the granddaddy of them all-the great San Andreas Fault, which cuts obliquely across the Transverse Range. From the air, the San Andreas Fault forms an ominous ridge, running for miles, like the track left by a giant mole tunneling underground.
    There was a time, long before the earth's folding caused the mountains to buckle upward, when the Perdido basin was a hundred miles long and much of California was a lowland covered by vast Eocene seas. Back then this whole region was under water as far as the Arizona border. The petroleum deposits were actually derived from marine organisms, the sediment, in places, nearly thirteen thousand feet thick. There are times when I feel the hairs rising up along my arms at the vision of a world so wildly different from ours. I imagine the changes, millions of years speeded up like time-lapse photography, in which the land heaves and snaps, thrusting, plunging, and shifting in a thunderous convulsion.
    I glanced out at the horizon. Twenty-four of the thirty-two platforms along the California coast are near Santa Teresa and Perdido counties, nine of them within three miles of shore. I'd heard the dispute about whether those old platforms could withstand a big 7.0-magnitude trembler. The experts were divided. On one side of the debate were the geologists and representatives of the state Seismic Safety Commission, who kept pointing out that the oldest off-shore oil platforms were built between 1958 and 1969 before the petroleum industry adopted uniform design codes. Reassuring us of our comfort and security were spokesmen for the oil companies who owned the rigs. Gosh, it was baffling. I tried to picture the effect: all those rigs collapsing, oil spewing into the ocean in a gathering storm of black. I thought about the current contamination of beaches, raw sewage spilling into oceans and streams, the hole in the ozone, forests being stripped, the toxic-waste dumps, the merry plunder of mankind added to the drought and the famine that nature dishes up annually as a matter of course. It's hard to know what's actually going to get us first. Sometimes I think we should just blow the whole planet and get it over with. It's the suspense that's killing me.
    I passed a stretch of state beach and rounded the point, sliding into the town of Perdido from its western-most edge. I took the first Perdido off ramp, cruising through the downtown business district while I got my bearings. The wide main street was edged with diagonal head-in parking-lots of pickup trucks and recreational vehicles in evidence. A convertible proceeded slowly down the street behind me with its car radio booming. The combination of brass instruments and thunderous bass reminded me of the thumping passage of a Fourth of July parade. The windows on every other business seemed to be decked with handsome canvas awnings, and I wondered if the mayor had a brother-in-law in the business.
    The housing tract where Dana Jaffe now lived was probably developed in the seventies when Perdido enjoyed a brief real estate boom. The house itself was a story and a half, charcoal-gray stucco with white wood trim. Most of the homes in the neighborhood had three and four vehicles parked in the driveways, suggesting a population more dense