by John Shannon
“Uh, okay.”
So they set out across the charred rolling land, directly past the dead house, heading diagonally down toward the part of the long fire line that she guessed would be immediately below the house where her father’s car had been. It was the only thing she could think to do, and she prayed she didn’t come upon a charred body. Her nose wrinkled up as they hiked down through the charred land. The smell off the burn was abhorrent, acrid and choking, and she could actually feel warmth from the earth through her shoes.
Jack Liffey felt himself poisoned by both fatigue and fear, but the wind had backed off a little, and they had finally gained a lead on the fire. He knew his batteries were running dangerously low, near the point where the machinery of his body would just quit on him unexpectedly, but he still hurried Pennycooke along, carrying Luisa. Jack Liffey wasn’t sure what had knocked her out, maybe just exhaustion or a combination of the shock and pain and smoke. He knew they couldn’t be too far from the Pacific; the hot wind was fighting some colder air near the ground so the smoke was beginning to lift upward. It grew thin enough that he could actually see flames, maybe fifty yards back, fingers of red billowing up into the smoke. They could see better ahead of them, too, a series of transverse benches between them and the ocean which was just discernible as an abrupt gray texture. He tried to guess how far and could not.
“The wind’s letting up a little,” Jack Liffey gasped.
“Hole it down so de debbil no hear.”
They were nearing the edge of the first bench where the land dropped away, but they couldn’t see yet how steeply. They might have to do some serious shinnying and sliding. It was the kind of slick-weed hillside that in his youth he and his friends had recklessly tobogganed down on opened cardboard boxes. He wished he had some now.
He’d been hoping to blunder into an expensive hillside home. One of those rich-man’s enclaves in the fire zone where the fire department, however reluctantly, always set up a perimeter with fire hoses awash and backhoes tearing out the shrubbery to make a stand. But there were no houses, only wild coastal chaparral. As luck would have it, they had chosen a pure wilderness descent from the hills, and he guessed they were blundering across one of the Santa Monica Conservancy’s land purchases. The environmentalists had been buying what they could for years, trying to save a patchwork of wild coastal land.
His heart skipped a beat when a speckled sagehen burst from cover just ahead of them and ran first laterally and then back toward the fire. At least there was no tiny brood of chicks following her toward sure death.
With the wind letting up, he began to think they might just make it out, despite their fatigue. Pennycooke reached the lip of the bench first and sat hard, gasping for air. He set the girl across his lap; her eyes looked glassy. The Jamaican pressed one hand gently under her head to support it. Jack Liffey stopped to breath heavily with his hands on his knees, but he dare not sit because if he did he doubted he would ever get up again.
The dropoff was steeper than he’d thought: it would be a dangerous slide but probably just manageable and it gave them a sense of momentary safety against the crackling fireline approaching behind. At any moment, they could go over the lip and quickly outpace it.
“I’m near done,” the Jamaican said.
Jack Liffey sat, despite himself, and got a good look at Trevor’s face, and every blood vessel in his eyeballs had burst so they were bright red, giving him a demonic look. Jack Liffey reached over and squeezed his shoulder in affection.
“How’s she doing?”
“She wid us in body. De spirit weak.” In his voice there seemed a remarkable sensitivity, like something retained from his own childhood. “She only a child.”
“Remember when you were little,” Jack Liffey said, a memory appearing out of the whirl of his thoughts. “And the barber put a booster seat across the arms of the barber chair? Did they do that in Jamaica?”
A smile flickered and died away. “Sure, mon. Wid a leather pad on one side. De first t’ing to being a mon was when day turn de pad downside and you sit on wood.”
“And then they moved it down to the chair as a booster …”
Jack Liffey would never work out where he had been going with the reminiscence—he was sure there had been some point to it all. All of a sudden Trevor Pennycooke arched his back hard with a startled look and a bright red orchid bloomed from his chest. Was this all a dream? Trevor opened his mouth to say something but no sound would come. A crack from behind, louder than the fire, echoed and echoed over the hills and Jack Liffey looked back through the shimmer of the flames but couldn’t make out a thing.
Trevor Pennycooke slumped to one side, the exit wound of a rifle shot in his chest unmistakable now, pumping arterial blood.
Jack Liffey immediately pushed the Jamaican and the girl together over the edge of the escarpment, but they were dead weight and stalled only a few yards down. He slid down and got on his back between them, his head pointed downslope. Grabbing each unconscious weight by a shirt, he began kicking off against the land to propel his little convoy into a slide. Pennycooke’s silk shirt was wet with blood, a little hump of it pumping out of his chest, which there was no opportunity to try to staunch. Once the land tilted steeper and they got up a little speed, they broke friction on the weeds and he had no trouble keeping up the slide. He had to hold up his head to avoid small rocks slamming past. The dry grass flailed at his ears and neck and he went on autopilot, his emotions frozen by everything that had happened, kicking and kicking the earth behind him like a backstroke swimmer as they tobogganed down the bench.
Maeve and Thumb picked their way down the burnt-over land to a point of rock where they had a pretty good view back uphill through a canyon. From here it was easy to make out what was left of the house they’d seen on the news. Something about it must have defied the fire because firefighters were still pouring water onto it But flame licked out of what was left, and it looked soon to be a dead loss like the foundation they had seen. Nearby, smoking blackened trunks stood up where eucalyptus trees had been. The firefighters were too busy to notice two people far below in the great blackened emptiness, two people who were slowly turning black themselves, covered in the ash their passage raised.
“Can I?”
Thumb lifted the binocular strap off her neck with some urgency. He’d seen something below. They were junk binoculars made of beige plastic, 10X20s, too powerful and wobbly to hand-hold properly, but he lay down and braced them on the rock.
“¡Chale! I don’ believe it.”
“What do you see?” Maeve’s eyes darted over the blackened universe below. The wind had let up a little, and the smoke was rising to seaward now, boiling off of a long arc of red flame. There was a big area of rocky outcrop like a paved field far below. It provided a gap in the fire line through which she could see to the hillsides below and even to the empty highway and the gray ocean. Thumb dropped the binoculars and took off running downhill hard, and she picked them up immediately.
She looked first at where Thumb seemed to be running, the rocky outcrop. It was like an electric shock hitting her: a young man lay on his stomach there with what was clearly a sniper’s rifle braced on a granite boulder. He looked strangely like the boy she had glimpsed for just an instant rolling out under the Malibu garage door and sprinting away. She swung the binoculars immediately toward where he was targeting. They had such a narrow angle of view that it took her a while to find his target. Finally, through a wavery haze of smoke at the edge of the fire, she saw two men sitting with their legs dangling over an apparent cliff-edge, one tall and black, one white. Someone else was there, too, lying across the lap of the black man, but it was the silhouette of the white man that took her full attention. Amazing how little visual information the mind required, she thought: It was her father. A kind of relief welled up in her that he wasn’t lying dead in the burning house up the hill, or somewhere in between. Then she felt a confused panic. Who was the man with the
rifle? And was he, in fact, aiming at her father?
She sat up and dropped the binoculars, surprised how much she now could make out with her naked eye. Thumb was more than half way to the sniper, sprinting recklessly downhill. Strangely, the sniper was so focused, or the noise of the fire and the wind and the helicopters was so loud, that he didn’t seem to hear her new friend coming.
She jolted as she saw the rifle recoil and a few moments later she heard the bang of the shot rolling back and forth across the hills. In a panic she scrabbled for the binoculars and focused immediately on the figures at the edge of the cliff. Her father seemed okay, and the big black man, too. Then, slowly, she saw the black man lean and fall to one side. Thank God it wasn’t her father! she thought—with a tiny addendum of guilt for once again wishing to shift misfortune on someone else.
Again she abandoned the narrow field of view and used her naked eyes. Thumb was running hard and drawing close to the sniper. The young man turned abruptly, having become aware of Thumb, and started fighting with the bolt on his rifle. Thumb drew the pistol out of his waist and fired again and again, and she couldn’t help cheering. She even found herself thinking with pride that it was the very same pistol that had wounded her, and now it was defending her father. The sniper’s body was flung back on the flat rocks and the rifle bounced away. He had clearly lost the duel with Thumb.
By the time she looked back to the cliff where the three figures had been, the brushfire was approaching, making it hard to see. They seemed to have disappeared. She took off running herself.
Bless you, Thumb, she thought, as she leaped, light as air, down the charred slope. That’s worth any number of old bags hanging off my body!
TWENTY-TWO
Saving the Kids
“Oh, little sister,” Gloria cooed gently, consoling the weeping girl as she sat heavily on a tangled coil of firehose and held Luisa’s head in her lap. “You’re a long way from home, girl. Shh, shh. I’ll take care of you, don’t you worry. Shh, now.”
Gloria Ramirez had hitched her way there on a police helicopter from Harbor Division that had been sent Code 8A—working a fire—to replace a Westside chopper that was down for the afternoon for repairs. She was still a little shaken by the white-knuckles trip flown by a cowboy who obviously liked to hotshot when he had a woman riding shotgun. She wondered if it was in her Paiute genes to stick close to the earth. She didn’t like flying much under any circumstances, and there was something too mystifying about whatever it was that kept you aloft in a helicopter.
After landing, she’d ridden out to the scene with some sheriff’s deputies and helped with what she could, settled a battered and wearied Jack Liffey down to rest on a foam pad provided by the firemen and tried to talk down the inconsolably weeping girl, the very Luisa Wilson they’d been searching for for weeks. Gloria had deciphered bits and pieces of the tale sputtered out to her, details that half explained, among other things, the red-eyes-open Jamaican who lay ten feet away from her in an unzipped body bag.
Gloria was there, in the midst of the bedlam, but, the truth was, she wasn’t temperamentally ready to be there. She felt like screaming at Jack to please normalize his life a little, please just give her a chance to adjust to one big change at a time and not hit her with so much at once.
Jack Liffey was slashed about the neck, though a few butterfly bandages seemed to have stopped the bleeding, and he was finally over a wave of paroxysmal vomiting, trying to clear the smoke from his lungs. He’d had oxygen for a while but didn’t like the mask and pulled it off, keeping it by his side, just in case. He was just beginning to get himself oriented again after all the ruckus. He was surrounded by chugging firetrucks, pumping water from one to the next, and fat canvas hoses running along the pavement, blooming fine sprays from their the metal collars. Somewhere, not too far, a successful fireline was apparently holding its own, protecting a clutch of valuable beach houses. Firemen came and went quickly, with their usual calm and competence, extracting tools and equipment noisily from the trucks.
He watched Gloria’s back, seeing how tenderly she sat and cradled the girl. There was an unzipped olive green body bag near the women, with Trevor Pennycooke’s head and shoulders exposed. The Jamaican was decidedly dead, making Jack Liffey feel surprisingly bereft. He’d begun to like the poor hardcharging Rasta gangster quite a lot. He understood that Trevor had been doing his best to infuse a kind of makeshift hope into Luisa Wilson’s sad life.
A small detachment of sheriff’s deputies trooped down off the hillside to join them, leading a couple of kids, and Jack Liffey decided he was hallucinating for sure when he saw that the shamefaced pair looked a lot like Maeve and Thumb. One of the deputies carried a black Walther PPK in a big plastic baggie, its magazine removed.
He sat bolt upright, realizing it was no mirage, and sure enough Maeve ran to embrace him. Before he could say a thing, she whispered: “A guy up there was trying to kill all of you with a sniper gun. Thumb stopped him.”
He looked at Thumb, who had turned his back to one of the deputies, submitting to handcuffs. How on earth had these two met? How had they got here? You’re going to rewrite that goddam essay another million times for this, he thought.
“The vato up there was trying to kill these guys,” Thumb objected.
Maeve jumped to her feet. “I shot the sniper. He was trying to kill my father.”
A deputy—a shrewd middle-aged man wearing the department’s street tans—looked at her skeptically. His aging eyes looked like they could see right through rock. “Everybody please make use of their right to remain silent.”
“No, I’m Spartacus,” Jack Liffey said, and the deputy’s eyes wrinkled up in suspicion. Jack Liffey didn’t even know who the sniper had been, but he had long ago decided it was always a good idea to confuse the issue as thoroughly as possible whenever his daughter was involved. “I shot the sniper a half hour ago,” Jack Liffey insisted. “That’s my pistol you’ve got. You think it’s hers, go ahead and ask her the make and caliber.”
She glanced down furiously at him.
“It’s a Walther PPK,” Jack Liffey volunteered. “Nine millimeter. I took it as payment for a job years ago.”
“That’s my strap,” Thumb said indignantly. “It cost me six hundred dollars, ese.”
“Shut. Up,” Gloria commanded, seconding the sheriff.
“Yes, would you all please can it,” the deputy said. “Detectives will be here soon to take your statements. In the meantime, is everybody here okay? Any hidden wounds? No more confessing, okay?”
The deputy walked away to his car, reached in the window for a microphone on a coil-cord and began a conversation.
Jack Liffey felt himself gathering some form of coherence slowly out of his wooziness, sobered by the need to protect Maeve. He forgot completely about his stinging cuts and strained hip muscles. The arrival of his daughter had sharpened up his protective instincts no end. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked softly.
“Thumb saved your life,” she explained.
He looked at Thumb and guessed that the pistol the detective held was the very one that had wounded Maeve, even though he claimed he’d thrown it away, and if they ever ran it through ballistics, it was going to get a whole lot tougher to protect the boy. He couldn’t let himself lie there any longer like a slug, so he cocked his legs and sat up stiffly to try to get a handle on things. The wildfire smoke was arching over their heads out to sea, billowy white with large seams and inclusions of dirty ashy gray. He didn’t fear the fire anymore. He had to assume the firefighters knew what they were doing, and he guessed the whole covey of fire trucks had massed behind some safe fire line.
“Glor,” he called softly.
Her face was far less anxious than he had gotten used to seeing. Luisa seemed to have passed out again across her lap, but she might have been in shock. For the moment they were almost alone.
“And how are you doing, Jack?”
“Do you real
ly think we can save the kids?”
She smiled. “All of them?”
“Every one of them,” he said, thinking of Thumb. “No exceptions.”
“It’s going to be rough getting all the stories straight. Let me talk to the deputies. I’m out of my jurisdiction.”
“And get the girl a tetanus shot and a rabies shot. She was bit by a dog.”
“After all the cuts, you’ll probably need one, too.”
“Do you think we can save you and me, too?”
“Us?” she said neutrally.
“You do have a tendency to see failed love as the norm.”
“It’s been my experience.”
“How about this time you look at me hanging around your place as just desirable enough to console you for all the negatives. It might be enough.”
“We’re getting old, Jackie, aren’t we? Maybe we should try and make do with what we got on the shelf.”
“That’s all I want. And save the kids.”
Dear Diary,
I just cant get over how much I miss Trev once I got accustomed to the idea of him being around. I think he kind of went to sleep in that slide down the hill & I hope his last time was without pain. I hope he is meeting Highly Slassie right now.
I am luckily fallen among good people. Mr. Liffey says Trever & him were really enemies when they first met. Im sorry about that. Gloria and Jack are letting me live with them for now. The house is so full of books I can read forever as long as I am here. They are all trying very hard to get the other boy out of jail & I hope they find a way. Maybe if I had never existed Trev would be still alive.
I know I can’t go back to Owens & they said fine. They say I can be a daughter to them if I want. I can see it is something they seem to want a lot especially Gloria. Maybe I will do it.
Jack Liffey gets a girlfriend in the return of John Shannon’s national bestselline series
Jack Liffey’s new girlfriend, Gloria Ramirez, a police sergeant of Paiute-Latino heritage, convinces him to look into the disappearance of her beautiful eighteen-year-old niece Luisa, who vanished from her tiny reservation in the Owens Valley. To escape abuse, Luisa threatened to run away to LA’s porn industry, and in fact she becomes caught up in the equally seamy phone sex business, then hostessing, and finally in the trashy business of videotaping the homeless performing wildly dangerous stunts for cash.
