by John Shannon
He had no idea what she meant, but it sounded interesting, and he wondered if she wasn’t gradually getting smarter than her old man. He’d always resisted having her IQ tested, on the presumption that if it was even a little low, or just average, she’d be devastated, and if it was really high, she’d get smug and full of herself. He liked her best not knowing, a little off balance and having to work at life. Just the way we should all feel about ourselves, he thought.
She looked up at him innocently. “How’d you pick him out?”
And there it was, he thought, the big ethical question staring him in the face once again. To lie or not to lie? The convenient omission, the shaded truth, the polite fabrication that would save someone else’s pain. “His name is Thumb,” he said. “His nickname, that is. He’s got a double-jointed thumb, like mine.” He showed her the bend. “His real name is Tino Estrada, and he’s trying hard to get his GED so he can go to art school. He’s a pretty fair graffiti artist.”
He paused there, watching her, overcome with love for her innate kindness and her so-vulnerable beauty, all her genetic him-ness, too, traits that she would never escape. He wondered if anyone, anywhere, ever, got to embark on the life of perfect integrity you always planned for yourself.
A troop of schoolkids walked past outside the house, full of slurred jokes and laughter, roughhousing, sounding quite natural in their gossip and chatter and challenge. Thinking about them, Jack Liffey no longer knew where to draw the line.
“About a week ago I went to his hideout—a garage behind his house—to kill him.”
That got her attention, and he could see her figure it all out in a flash. “Oh, Dad. You’re still making yourself my protector and avenger, aren’t you, like one of our ape ancestors?”
“It’s what I do, hon,” he said. “I’m a father. What do you expect? Gloria’s none too happy with me, either, since it makes complications with the cops who’re looking for this kid. You tell me. I went to shoot him, but I lost my resolve. What should I do with him? You tell me, and I’ll do it.”
She buried her face against his shoulder. “Dad, you’re not being fair. You’ve got to let me be angry at you for a little while. At least thirty seconds.”
He chuckled softly, but couldn’t find much relief in it. “Hit me a bit if it helps. Mention your sainted mom.”
“I’m not even sure I have a right to an opinion. You are the dad, and you do it pretty well. You know, deep down I have this terrible feeling that you can see inside me, that you know everything—past, present, and future, and all my feelings. I’m in awe sometimes. Despite all that, I really don’t want you fighting my battles for me. It robs me of something I need.”
“I’ll give you the .45 and you can kill him.”
“Be serious,” she scolded. “Can I meet him?”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“What does that mean?”
“Roughly it means, Oh Jesus. I don’t think it’s a good idea right now, hon.”
“We’re connected by tragedy. Who has more of a claim to check out this guy than me?”
“I don’t think being shot by accident by a guy, or even half-accident, gives you any claims over his person. He’s just a kid with a big chip on his shoulder, crappy friends, a lousy family, and damn little future, plus a tiny bit of artistic talent. You’re a very bright girl from the other side of the tracks with the gold spoon and everything else.”
“Oh, right.”
“What’s it going to prove if you meet Thumb?”
“Maybe he’ll be able to tell me something he can’t tell you.”
* * *
“James Dressier, banker—my ass. It’s Jack, isn’t it?”
“Best I could do on short notice. Nice to talk to you, too, Art. You know a guy named Levine who only uses the one name?”
“Does he pitch for the Dodgers?”
“I sincerely doubt it. But he hangs out with that Jamaican charmer Terror Pennycooke.”
It had taken him two tries to get through. Art Castro’s receptionists had orders to obstruct and, possibly for good measure, annoy Jack Liffey in any way possible. This time, Jack Liffey had insisted on an urgent callback about a bounced check at Westside Bank.
“Matter of fact, I know Levine. Big guy, bald. I don’t know where the hell the name came from. He looks about as Jewish as the emperor of the Manchus.”
“People don’t look Jewish, Art, or at least a lot of them don’t.”
“Yeah, yeah, Paul Newman in Exodus. It’s okay, Jack, I look Latino. Glor looks Latino. You look wasted and tired.”
“You can’t see me. I’m tanned and terrific.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“So, would you know how I could get in touch with Levine? It’s important to me.”
“I happen to know he’s in Cedars-Sinai. Somebody jammed his accelerator cable with a fishing weight, but whether it was a friend or enemy, you’ve got me.”
“Thanks, Art. You keep saying I owe you a favor, but you never call.”
“I’ll make you come see arena football with me.”
“What is it?”
“They shrank it, put it in a hockey rink—made it sort of a pinball game.”
“People actually pay to watch that?”
He heard a laugh at the other end. “Watch out with the hard boys, Jack.”
Kenyon Styles lay on his single bed, spasm-coughing sputum and a little blood into doubled-up wads of Kleenex that Rod Whipple kept handing him, one after another. Rod felt a bit guilty because he’d been wishing Ken ill ever since the avalanche incident. Then, like a genie out of his subconscious, the big Jamaican had materialized to impose his bizarre torment. In the end, they had shown the Jamaican their rough cut, still in progress, in the makeshift edit bay, and all had agreed that Trevor Pennycooke was now the line producer of Dangerous Games II, and some unspecified girlfriend would be cut in as narrator and host.
“We’re not really going to give this guy a share, are we?”
Kenyon tried to answer but could emit only a croaking, which set off another paroxysm of coughing. Several empty ginger beer bottles were still scattered in the corner. He’d probably never be able to look at one again. Rod even decided he might never again eat anything flavored with ginger, though it had taken only half of one of the bottles to subdue him. The Jamaican had found out quickly that Kenyon was the one to focus on.
Kenyon tried again to answer but settled for rolling his head back and forth in a broad no. “Rather … burn … tape … not give … him … anything.”
Kenyon started coughing again. He had stubbornly held out through two bottles, and now was paying the price.
Rod’s real worry was that Kenyon Styles—despite his present protestations of defiance—had bought into the Jamaican’s proposal for a grand climax to the show. Never one to turn down any repellently outrageous new idea, Kenyon was too reckless to be trusted. History had already demonstrated this. Both the snowboarders had ended up in the hospital and, as far as he knew, were still there.
Rod retreated deep inside himself to calculate his chances. He knew he was in way over his head. They both knew this whole production had been Kenyon’s idea from the first, and it worried him now that Kenyon, too, seemed to be in over his head.
The cough syrup he had fetched for Kenyon appeared to sooth his throat, and now he calmed gradually and closed his eyes, like a junkie finally sailing on a fresh shot.
“We’re not really going to start a Malibu wildfire, are we?”
It wasn’t hard to guess where Terror had got the idea: The fire scare had been all over the news for a week, ever since the Santa Anas had arrived. Six years of drought had already desiccated the hillside brush down to its lowest moisture content ever. There had already been a handful of small roadside fires, but just one spark in the wrong place, one prankster, one malicious arsonist—the local news anchors bleated on and on.
On one news special, they had brought up graphic overlays, one aft
er another, to map the dozen Malibu wildfires of the last twenty years. These showed that fire had, little-by-little, completed a paint-by-numbers map of the entire coast, pretty much burning every square inch of land at one time or another. Almost always, it began inland at the 101 freeway ten miles across the Santa Monica Mountains, from there burning up and over to roar down the Malibu flank right to the Pacific Coast Highway and often through the beachfront homes themselves.
“It’s high concept. But if that island nigger is stupid enough to let us film him starting the fire, his black ass is ours.”
Cedars-Sinai had been founded as two much smaller clinics, both, in fact, in Boyle Heights not far from Jack Liffey’s new home. This had been early in the twentieth century, when that upland area east of downtown had been the Jewish center of L.A. But, by the fifties, both hospitals had moved west—like the Jewish community itself. Then in the 1970s they merged into one gigantic new edifice on the near edge of Beverly Hills, specializing in heart care, cancer, and chronic diseases of the rich.
It wasn’t visiting hours when he got there, but Jack Liffey never cared much about details like that. He kept a nondescript smock and a clipboard in his trunk, and he’d found you could go just about anywhere with those as props. He got right up to the patient area on the seventh floor with “insurance examiner” and “just a few questions.” The floor nurse indicated the room and strutted away.
Obviously, Levine had money because it was a private room. It was shaped like a trapezoid for some reason, with the narrow end terminating in a slatted window to the world outside. He tried to find a name on the door or some chart left lying around, just to confirm he had the right place, but hospitals were becoming careful about things like that because of federal privacy regulations.
Levine was indeed a big man and bald as a stone, now half asleep. Both his legs were encased in casts and held aloft by a counter-weighted apparatus. A TV depended from the ceiling but the sound was off.
“Levine.”
The big man fluttered his eyes.
“It’s your mom.”
The head rolled toward Jack Liffey, and then the eyes narrowed. “Just kidding. My name is Jack Liffey. I’m looking for a girl named Luisa Wilson. Straight dark hair, about eighteen.”
It was a long time coming: “Look all you want. Fuckhead.”
Levine’s voice reminded him of wrestlers you heard trying to sound bored with their opponents but not being very good at it. “She’s with Terror. I know you hang with him.”
Levine worked his mouth for a while, as if having to chew the words before emitting them. “Understand my position, Annoying Person.”
“I do. Supine. And in traction. I could probably make you a lot more uncomfortable before a nurse got here.”
“You’re very funny.”
“If I know Terror, he hasn’t bothered sending you any roses. You don’t owe him anything.”
“You know Terror?” That had his attention at last.
“I’m the guy who got him sent back home a few years ago, if he ever talks about that. I struck a deal with G. Dan so we could all get over. It was a ticklish situation.”
“So you were powerful once. You look pretty fucking useless now,” Levine said, and he took his eyes back to the silent TV.
Coming from a man in double traction, that counted as tough. Jack Liffey wondered if his anxieties were showing. He couldn’t just go on being this feckless and disorderly person and get his work done properly, he noted. He had to do better. “I just want to talk to the girl and make sure she’s okay. It’s what I do in life, I help kids. I’m not a cop.”
“If I tell you where he is, doesn’t it put me in a funny position, I mean concerning my loyalty?”
“That would depend on your sense of humor.”
Levine smiled coolly. “What do I get out of it if I tell you where to find him?”
“You get me out of your life for good. You probably get Terror out of your life, if you want it that way.”
He laughed once, like a predator about to eat something much smaller. “The guy’s such a goofball. Point him in a direction and he walks. Kingston, Jamaica, must be the world fucking capital of the terminally dense. I sat through an action movie with the guy one day, and I had to explain every goddam scene. But he has his good points, too. I’m not sure if I don’t miss him.”
In Terror’s favor, Jack Liffey thought, maybe it was hard to sort things out when you were living on your wits, completely outside your own world. But there was no percentage in arguing any of this. Whether he’d been planning to or not, Levine suddenly turned his head and told Jack Liffey the address.
“Thanks.” It was a pleasant surprise. He’d been planning some way to steal the medical chart.
“Well, as long as I’m not around, old Trev needs someone to keep him on his toes. It might as well be you.”
Exhausted after a day of driving—fighting the wind in the screaming VW to and from Palm Springs and then over to Cedars-Sinai—Jack Liffey, once back at home, got himself horizontal on the sofa. Intending only to doze for a minute, he went out like a light. When he woke, he had no idea what time it was, but it was dark, and Gloria was banging around in the kitchen. He sat up immediately, all his nerve ends firing.
“Glor, I meant to cook. I’m sorry. Let me do it.”
There was no immediate answer, and that worried him, so he got up and peered around the opening.
“Bad day?”
She stood at the stove. Silence.
“Please don’t shut me out.”
“I had a 1.81. That’s a public complaint lodged against me.” She told him this in a weary voice.
“I’m sorry. What was it about?”
Silence.
He’d bought the fixings for a curried lamb, and now she was just chopping and tossing everything that might possibly result in a passable lamb stew into a big pot. He came into the kitchen and tried to hug her from behind as she worked, but she stiffened and shook him off.
“Now you know why marriages to cops don’t last,” she said, almost triumphantly.
“Isn’t that being a little cynical? We’re both doing our best.”
“Am I? Hooray for me.”
“Will you please tell me about it? Do you want a beer?”
“I already had a beer at the cop bar. In fact, I had several. I broke my own rule and went out for a drink with the boys so they could all tell me their war stories about the 1.81s they’ve survived—supposedly to make me feel better. Blacks they’d beat up so it wouldn’t show. Latinos they’d dragged along the sidewalk on their face. Winos dumped in trash cans. Gosh, how could I not feel a lot better?”
“You’re not like that.” He tried to hug her again and got a few moments of reasonable tolerance this time before being shrugged off. “Please tell me.”
She was motionless for a bit, then she turned to face him and crossed her arms defensively. “It was in the Rancho, you know, the federal housing down at the port.”
“I know the Rancho. I grew up in San Pedro.”
“Mostly it’s black and a little Latino, but there are some Samoans living there, too. This afternoon, the Samoans were having a barbecue out in the grass between the buildings. I don’t know how many there were but you can double the number just for the general impression these people give. The smallest adult there was the size of a tuna boat.”
She frowned. “I don’t mean to be unkind, but they really are big. It was a black woman who lives there that called me. I respect her, she watches over the place and keeps kids out of trouble, and she said on the phone that a woman at the barbecue looked pretty drunk. She also said that a kid this woman was holding was screaming, and it sounded like pain.
“The station’s only a minute away, so I rolled down there with Rodolfo Robles as my partner, and we had no trouble spotting the uproar. This woman in a blue muu-muu was standing in the middle of things clinging to a little girl and weeping and every once in a while throwing her
head back and bellowing something, while a bunch of other Samoans were trying to calm her down.
“‘Que bárbaridad,’ Robles says to me. ‘Thank the lord Jesus it’s a woman, so it’s your problem. Allá tú.’ So he hangs back, and I have to go up and deal with it. Now a few of these Samoans already have an attitude about cops, I know that, but I don’t want to call for backup and get some tear gas lobbed on their party, so I decided to try to deal with it diplomatically. I talk to the nearest coherent human being, and I learn that this woman is named Siitu something and her boyfriend has gone off somewhere for good and it looks like she’s ingested angel dust on top of whatever else. I get closer and maybe it is dust because her eyes are glassy and she’s babbling and weeping, and the poor little girl is going bug-eyed out of asphyxia, she’s being squeezed so hard. The woman probably just wanted to show affection for her kid, but she was way past any sense of her own strength.
“The little girl sees me come up and reaches out toward me with these tiny arms, and, unfortunately, when I try to talk to Siitu, the kid wriggles free a little and gets her arms around my neck. All I can do is try to ask her to let me hold the girl for a moment. I was as soothing as I could be; I even think I set a world record for calm in the midst of bedlam—but the woman’s holding on like mad to the girl’s legs as if I’m Social Services come to take her away, and my neck is starting to hurt with the kid’s death-grip. We might have got over still if some asshole cop-hater, with perfect timing, hadn’t pushed through the crowd, a guy the size of Catalina, and he starts shouting at me to stop abusing the little girl.
“‘Po-lice brutality! Leave that little girl alone! Why you trying to rip her from her own momma!’ That stuff. Just then Robles sees me in trouble and comes running up with his nightstick already out and threatening everybody. The woman starts to scream some mantra over and over, something like O le poto … who knows? Turns out later it’s from home, it means that I’m just a minor chief that doesn’t have to be obeyed.”
Gloria offered a half smile. He wanted to touch her, but her arms were still crossed fiercely and he held back.
