Dangerous Games

by John Shannon

  “You’re kidding,” Gloria said.

  “I’m kidding. But I have information that your Luisa might have stayed here, even might be here now.”

  “I see.”

  “Dad’s on the case,” Maeve said. “Was that the whole reason for this trip?”

  “Of course not, hon. But you know how I like to double up my errands.” He actually did. It gave him a primitive kind of satisfaction, this temporal economy. “I knew you wouldn’t mind. You guys wait in the car in case some zealous traffic cop shows up to give us a ticket. I’ll just pop in and see what’s up.”

  A wooden staircase led down from the shoulder of the road right next to the address that Chris Johnson had unearthed for him. He walked past the house door and continued down to a deck that was still well above the sand. It was chest high, but he boosted himself up and climbed the railing to wait in a corner of the deck against the cedar clapboard wall of the house. Nobody bothered closing curtains here, and there was a young man in a bathrobe sitting cross-legged in the living room talking into a cordless phone. He looked unhappy and kept pressing his hand against his crotch as if easing a pain.

  The wind whistled and moaned around the house and down the staircase, but he could still make out the louder moments of the phone conversation.

  “… You think I can’t imagine it? Somebody kicks sand in your face and you go home and karate the mirror for days … I will come there and use the damn blade if you don’t get my money. Today.”

  The young man stabbed the off button hard. Then he cut a line of coke on a big white ceramic tile beside him and snorted it up with a thin red straw. Jack Liffey saw no evidence of Luisa, but she could have been in back or downstairs.

  He slid off the deck and went up the steps to the main door and rang the bell. He heard an awful rendition of the opening bars of Here Comes the Sun. He waited a reasonable time and then rapped pretty hard.

  “Gas company!” Why not? he thought. “We show a methane buildup here. There’s a danger of explosion!”

  As far as he knew, there was no methane problem around here, but who in L.A. could afford to ignore a warning like that? A whole row of shops across from Farmer’s Market, not far from the big CBS studio, had gone up in an awesome fireball in 1985—putting an abrupt end to plans to continue the main subway line down Wilshire Boulevard to the west. He’d just read that the entire expensive Playa Vista development had been built over a giant rubber membrane pierced by tall vent pipes to exhaust the gas buildup. But, methane or not, the young man was ignoring him. He heard a door close somewhere in the house, then a grinding noise, and he started to head back to the deck for a peek.

  “Jack!”

  It was Gloria, sounding urgent. He hurried up the stairs to see the house’s swing-up garage door wedged partially open against the RAV-4. Maeve was still in the car, her eyes the size of saucers. Gloria pointed toward Santa Monica, but there was nothing much to see.

  “A young man in sweats and a big revolver rolled out underneath and took off running down the road. I didn’t think I had reason to shoot him.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “He looked like the hounds of hell were after him. He actually got up enough speed to jump in the back of a gardener’s pickup truck, a white Toyota. He rapped with the pistol on the window of the cab and that seemed to keep the driver going. I could only get the initial 4J off the plate. There can’t be more than a hundred thousand Latino gardeners with Toyota pickups.”

  “Jesus. It’s like when you turn on the light switch and the same second an earthquake levels the house. That’s one spooked kid.”

  “What did you do down there?”

  “Nothing to cause that. I’m going inside for a look around. If that offends your official sensibility, you can wait here.”

  “Since the garage is open, it’s not technically a 459. Just trespass, and even that wouldn’t stick if you don’t do any damage.”

  “I’ll tread softly.”

  But she did follow him in, ducking under the springs at the side of the door. Some kind of big square SUV was under a tarp; beside it was a little red Miata with the top down. The door into the house was shut but not locked, and he called a couple of times, and then Gloria obliged him by yelling out “L.A.P.D.!” They entered a stainless steel and granite kitchen like something out of a design magazine, but cluttered with old pizza boxes and KFC buckets. There was also a baggie of white powder that he saw Gloria eyeing, though there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it since she wasn’t in the house legally.

  “This is a drugged-up kid camping out in somebody else’s house,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  The living room had a lot of white leather furniture and a few bad paintings. He made his way down a hallway to a bedroom with a mattress on the floor. There was a cardboard box with what looked like women’s underwear and jeans and blouses. A copy of Wuthering Heights was tented open on the floor, with a stack of Harlequin romances beside it.

  “I know one thing,” Jack Liffey said. “Our guy wasn’t reading this.” Then he noticed a small rounded stone in the corner and pocketed it. It strengthened his belief that Luisa Wilson had indeed been here.

  “Now it’s a felony,” she said.

  “I thought it had to be over $5,000 to be a felony.”

  “Grand theft is down to $400 now, but if you take anything at all you qualify for a 459, burglary.”

  “Door was open.”

  “Let’s not be lawyers.”

  “Oh, let’s not—not being a lawyer is my life’s ambition. I think this is Luisa’s stuff. I’ll come back some other time.”

  “It must be nice not to have to follow the law.”

  “I’ll tell the guys in Rampart that,” he said. Rampart had been the worst police scandal to hit L.A. since the 1930s—from planting evidence right up to shooting inconvenient witnesses—and you only had to whisper the name of the division to make any L.A. cop wince.

  “Okay, okay.”

  * * *

  There are different things in Mexico from here in the United States like language and food that are not the same and houses. There was trouble in Texas and US wanted to grab a big part of land. California to. Mexicans fought hard and kill at the Alamo. Then Mr. Santa Anna got butt-kick. And Rio Grande is the border. Here Tijuana is the border. Texas is the home of President Bush.

  The page was illuminated like a parody of a medieval manuscript, the text surrounded by colored pencil drawings of cacti and eagles carrying snakes in their beaks and a couple Virgins of Guadalupe with their golden radiance.

  Jack Liffey read the paragraph a second time while Thumb Estrada guzzled a Pepsi across the kitchen table. The essay was bad, but not as bad as he’d feared. There were actual sentences, and even some facts, or near facts, hidden in the garble.

  “I don’t know why you think you can’t write. You can put a perfectly good sentence together. It needs work, but that’s not the end of the world.”

  The boy studiously avoided his eyes. Jack Liffey wrote a big 1 in the corner of the essay and circled it. He intended to take his reluctant pupil through as many drafts as the boy would tolerate.

  “Read your first sentence,” Jack Liffey said, and slid the paper across. “Just to refresh your memory.”

  Thumb deigned to look down after a rebellious glare. Moving his lips slightly, he read the sentence to himself.

  “I’ve got two questions for you. What does it have to do with the Mexican-American War? And who do you know in this whole wide world who doesn’t know what your saying? You don’t really need to say things that everybody knows. In Mexico, they speak Spanish. Mexico has different customs. Mexicans eat tacos. Mexican towns are colorful. Ay que!”

  The boy looked up at him, with a flat puzzled expression.

  “Now look at the second sentence you’ve got. It’s not perfect, but it’s where the essay really starts. I want you to take this first try home and rewrite it tonight. Throw out the f
irst sentence. Start with the second. And this time I want you to include at least two dates, two names, and two battles. And I like your art, but you might want to leave it off since you’re going to rewrite this over and over until you get it right. Okay?”

  The boy frowned but folded the paper and put it into his pocket. “You liked the pictures?”

  “I think you’ve got real talent, but even at art school you’re going to have to know how to write.”

  “Tomorrow, I gotta meet Beto for my GED study.”

  “Okay, come Tuesday. Is that enough time for you?”

  He thought about it but finally nodded and finished off his Pepsi. Jack Liffey asked about his family, but Thumb was still all too aware that the man sitting there was the gabacho whose daughter he’d shot. He answered in monosyllables.

  “Okay, see you then.” Jack Liffey followed him out to the front yard where his bicycle was lashed to the ash tree with a fat chain that would have stopped the Queen Mary in its tracks. Thumb Estrada looked at the old VW Bug parked on the street.

  “You got a kill switch in that, man?”

  “Who would steal a 1962 Beetle?”

  “Man, lots a guys want them vee-dubs, make sand bugs and shit. Even a ruca can hot-wire that thing.”

  “What’s a ruca?

  “A girl. I get you a kill switch.” This was a good sign, Jack Liffey thought. Like a cat offering its kill at the back door, but then he felt a bit patronizing for the thought. Until he remembered that Thumb had shot his daughter.

  “Thanks. I’ll pay you to install it, if you can.”

  “Course I can, man.”

  “Carne asada under the stars, good buddy” Levine said. He was stoking up a stone barbecue built into a rock extension of the deck, squirting on masses of lighter fuel in a perfect example of the fire-lighting technique Luisa’s relatives had called Paleface Napalm. “Gourmet hog heaven, that’s what we got.”

  “Amens,” Terror Pennycooke finally said. “You i-sire some fine ganja?” He held another of those giant dirigible-shaped cigarettes out toward Luisa, who shook her head. One small hit of that stuff was more than enough. She turned her attention to the hilly coastal chaparral, different from the inland chaparral that she knew so well. It was lit now by discreet floodlights surrounding the house. Out away from the house, she had already seen a coyote, two jackrabbits, several snakes and lizards, a family of quail, and a young deer. Neither of the men had noticed any of the wildlife, so far as she knew.

  The taller and wispier plants were bobbing oceanward in the irregular warm wind, and it was definitely a Santa Ana, warming the air and letting them stay outside after dark in shirtsleeves in the early winter. She was a little worried about sparks from the barbecue, since there was far too much dry brush near the patio, but the fire seemed to be well contained.

  “Dat man deah is a saps,” Terror Pennycooke said softly, as he took a lingering hit on his joint. “No pay him no mind.”

  “How come you’re in L.A.?” Luisa asked. “It must be a long way from home.”

  “Tings dred inna J now,” he said. “No money, no life. Ai man, I-an-I a-forward hier. Is a good lan’ to prize de livin’ god for a time. Some ob de Rastas say dis hier is Babylon, for true, just like Englun, but dey is no ting of slavery left hier if you stan’ tall. Make any church you wan’, prize you own god.”

  “You’re lucky your people still have a god,” she said. “My people’s gods were all killed or something. A long time ago.”

  “Haile Selasie, him live forever. Him say, love the fist open,” he said, and he rested his hand gently on her shoulder for a moment. “The people of color in de world got to be of one blackheart, you no seeit?”

  “My people were slaves, too,” Luisa said proudly. “In Owens, they made them work on white farms and if they ran away to the mountains, they sent the sheriffs and the army to bring them back in chains. I was told the only real way they had to fight back was burning down barns in the middle of the night. That happened a lot.”

  Terror Pennycooke chuckled. “Blood fire fe dem, dawta. De weapon ob de weak is dred. De likkle kitty sneak behind and bite you arse when you no seeit.”

  “Who wants pork and who wants beef?” Levine called.

  Terror Pennycooke’s face took on a savage scorn. “Pork no be ital. Dat ting! Pigs is scavengers ob de land.”

  “All the more for me, Ter. I put on a couple of yams for you, see how much I think of you.”

  “Ah, cool runnings, man.”

  “Can I try the yam?” Luisa asked.

  He grinned and dangled an arm loosely across her shoulder. “You bonafide, dawta.”

  “We’re losing momentum, man. I can feel it. It’s getting like the same old stuff we had in Games I. Mailbox baseball, guys jumping off roofs, guys eating snails and lizards—we’ll never beat out the old one like that. We need some ideas—we gotta be stone outrageous.”

  Rod Whipple nodded. His partner was right, but Kenyon Styles’ definition of outrage included real injury and risk of worse. They’d wind up with manslaughter charges before they were done. They’d already had to edit out a couple of serious injuries, and the current one gave him the willies.

  Encouraged by an early heavy snowfall over the Sierras, they had bundled up in parkas and shifted production to the pro snowboard slope at Mammoth, right in front of a red sign that said cryptically Wall Hits Not. He wasn’t even sure which was the verb or what the Teutonic syntax was proposing, but it made for a nice hint of mystery.

  Kenyon pointed to a medium-sized limber pine far down the hill and off to one side, standing out like a glowing skeleton in the moonlight. “Make your way down there. They ought to be going into overdrive by then.” He’d talked a couple of snowboarders into braving the expert slope on big uncontrollable plastic trash barrel lids.

  The mountain held about eighteen inches of powder, half of it manufactured just to jumpstart the season, plus a thin crust from the daytime melt. Rod could still manage to high-step his way down with care, crunching through the crust in tall waterproof boots. He stayed off to the north edge of the slope where it wasn’t quite so steep, but he didn’t have a clue how anyone could ski down this run without trending off line a few yards to the other side—which would take you over an escarpment and almost straight down. There was a red flag out, signaling treacherous snow; thus, no one was visible on the slope.

  The way the wind was blowing, he couldn’t hear anything from the top, but when he got to the tree he braced himself to look back at Kenyon’s upraised arm. The daredevils seemed all set to go. The arm swung down.

  One of them spun backwards immediately, digging with his palm like an oar trying to straighten himself out. The other caught the rim and tumbled once before somehow righting his craft again.

  They were probably fifty feet down the run, still gathering uncontrollable speed, when Rod saw his partner toss something into the snow behind them. In a moment, quite a lot of snow heaved up into the air; a few seconds later the blast caught him like a punch in the chest.

  Panic overtook him. He felt suddenly ill. Kenyon had given him no warnings about explosives. A big apron of fresh snow tore loose along a perfect break near the top of the run and puffed up instantly into a wall of white smoke that headed downhill toward him. He dropped the camera on its lanyard around his neck and scrambled up the young pine, bough to bough. He got up maybe twenty feet, then unbuckled his belt to lash himself to the skinny tree.

  Only when he felt he was secure did he pick up the still-running camera, and aim it up at the barrel-lid riders. They were close, riding the forward edge of the avalanche like surfers with a look of tidal-wave terror on their faces. He felt the rumble up through the tree which suddenly seemed much too frail. The powder wave crested well above where he clung.

  “You didn’t tell Maeve who you’re tutoring, did you?” Gloria asked him.

  He glanced up from his book. He was in the living room to be sociable, trying to reread an early R
obert Stone, but the cop show she was watching was already intruding. She liked to watch them to make fun of the mistakes, both small and large, over police procedure, or so she said. But he could tell that what she really liked, at least as much, was the flattering portrait of lawmen doing their best to maintain a sense of honor in all the gray zones. There were few bad cops on TV, no racists, no brutal misfits, or bribe-demanders, at least none that survived more than an episode. If America had fetishized anything by the early twenty-first century, it was law enforcement.

  “Not yet.”

  The show started up again, and Jack Liffey started to watch a black cop arguing with somebody in a suit outside a courtroom. He could understand the popularity of TV cops. Everybody deep down wanted to be part of a team of like-minded people working together toward a decent goal. It was the same impulse that had finally made Star Trek a hit. He wondered if the cop show passion hadn’t subtly replaced religion for a lot of the viewers. Or maybe it rechanneled their impulses to social activism or civil rights—at several removes. He was drawn to the cop shows, himself, for exactly the same reasons. Yet he resisted out of his perverse loyalty to the need for some disorder in the world. Cop shows were always about keeping things in line.

  “So, what happens when she finds out?”

  “Hey. Maybe Thumb will be a better kid by then. Doesn’t your universe brook any forgiveness?”

  “Jack, Jack. Don’t be so gullible. He’s a banger. He’ll die a banger, probably violently, in a year or two.”

  “What were you at seventeen? Gandhi? I was a mess. Everybody I knew was a mess. Hormones get us, if nothing else does.”

  “Were you into turf wars and drive-bys?”

  “Those things weren’t big in my neighborhood. God knows, I might have been. When I was thirteen, my friends and I got into a stupid rock fight with a group of kids from the next block over. We started lobbing things over a house at each other. We weren’t even that pissed off, just bored. I ran out of rocks and grabbed up a piece of a broken bottle. It was as stupid and thoughtless as it gets, but there it is. A few seconds later I saw a little girl come screaming around the house with a bad cut on her forehead. I don’t know if I did it, I don’t know if it left a permanent scar that changed her life forever—but …”