by John Shannon
*
Roski waited, but Beef noticed Sgt. Acevedo draw his hand happily out of a cookie jar with several joints.
“Hey, dibs,” Beef called
“That’s my weed,” Zook said.
Nothing but the joints seemed to matter just then. Beef left his phone in Roski’s hand and stood up to inch himself toward the policeman.
The policeman slowly developed a grin as he watched Beef approach. His hand went to his holster, unsnapping the strap over his Glock. “Don’t get too close unless you wanna French kiss,” Acevedo said.
In the Marines, Roski had taken a course called “Village Entry,” where they’d been taught that the minimum personal safety distance was five feet. Any closer and you couldn’t react in time. Beef was getting there with Acevedo.
“Don’t you trust me, Manny-Wanny?” Beef carried a strange warp in his voice.
But Roski’s eyes were drawn irresistibly to the phone, and he swiped the photos forward. Smoke billowing out an auditorium double-doorway with people rapidly exiting. A close-up of a slashed tire. A spray-painted smiley face with slant eyes on a shop window. A broken picture window on what looked an expensive house. A girl lying on her side on the ground.
Roski froze.
“No trust here, big guy. Down in Chiapas, my grandparents had a saying: ‘Trust is next to God.’ But after the drug business came in, it became, ‘Forget trust—you can meet God later.’”
It wasn’t just any girl in the photograph. An Asian girl with long dark hair. She was handcuffed and her ankles were taped together. She seemed to be lying in a gravel wash. Hello, Sabine, Roski thought. Sonofabitch.
“Haw! You Mexes is great comedians.”
“Beef, don’t!” Zook called.
Roski couldn’t tear his eyes off the phone. There were two more pictures of the girl, one showing a gunshot wound in her forehead. Jack, you’re not going to like this.
“Hey!”
“Shit, no!”
Roski heard a scuffling going on, but he couldn’t look up. He swiped forward again. The bitter chill retook him, almost as bad as the first one, seeing the girl. A lighted cigarette poked out of a matchbook that rested on a pile of crumpled newspaper. The next several photographs were all of the early stages of a forest fire. Bugs usually stuck around to watch.
The deafening gunshot broke Roski’s angry trance, followed by a shrieking like a steam-whistle from Acevedo. He saw Beef’s hand on the pistol still in the cop’s waistband. Beef yanked the pistol out fast and whirled to aim it at Zook.
Zook’s eyes went wide with bewilderment. “Tony, we’re besties—”
*
Jack Liffey staggered up to the women. “I can’t deal with this. The pain is awful.”
Just then they all heard a gunshot, then another, from the cabin.
“I guess we’re going in,” Paula Green said, drawing her pistol and glancing at Gloria and Jack.
“I guess we are.”
“Just please!” Jack Liffey clutched his left shoulder and toppled into a pool of mud.
“Or maybe not,” Gloria said.
“Can you help me lift him?”
“I will if I can or not.”
*
Ellen felt like a wet housecat scrambling up the deer trail, soaked to the skin and freezing. In her mind’s eye, the fat one was only a few feet behind her, about to grab her ankle and yank her back. Lord, that monstrous appendage!
She emerged from the chaparral into a startlingly denuded fire zone with only stubs of former plants. Off to the left she saw a small shelf of rock far above the creek, and she calmed down enough to go to it and press herself in under the shelter, clutching her ankles and breathing deeply.
Down very deep she felt a kind of continuing fear that she’d never felt before—the end of the innocence of terror—and she wondered if she would ever recover. She knew she’d be reassessing the Orange Berets for the rest of her life, but she refused to repudiate her impulse to justice.
All at once her whole world rumbled, and she pressed a hand to the rock overhead for comfort. A baritone vibration was palpable beneath her. The noise swelled and acquired sharper overtones, clattering and clacking. It was from the ravine. She watched in awe as a tidal surge of water and rock and debris fled down the gorge. The cliff opposite gave way and slumped into the flood.
A crack opened up below her shelf as she watched, horrified. She wanted to flee but couldn’t move.
*
As the women propped Jack Liffey between them, they heard the terrible rumble begin, like a giant machine turning over deep in the earth.
In Jack Liffey’s headlights, they caught a glimpse of the first destructive wave coming down the gorge. Stones in the flow grated horribly against one another, the kind of sound that you guessed people rarely heard and survived.
“Don’t be no scaredy-cat!” Paula said.
“His truck’s blocking us,” Gloria said.
“Throw him in the back. We’ll have to take his.”
*
Inside the cabin, everyone seemed to realize the terrible noise meant impending death. Roski grabbed the only guy he could get his hands on and hauled Beef out the back door into sheets of sleety rain. He frog-marched him straight across a clearing and uphill. A surprisingly dead weight, gone into some kind of panicked freeze-up. Roski was incredibly strong from constant weight training—one of his few vanities. The young man eventually began to resist.
“Help out or die,” Roski said. Beef began to get control of his legs.
Roski heard the rasp of rock on rock, and one glance showed boulders leaping above the watercourse like dolphins. His only cogent idea was to go up and up. Eventually, Beef tore out of Roski’s grasp and tumbled backward.
“Stay off me, you old fart.” Beef struggled to his feet
“Look at the flood, man. It’s going to kill both of us.”
“Shit on a stick!” The flow was too much for the gorge, spreading out wherever it could. The cabin below was apparently swept away.
Both men scrambled upward.
“Shit shit shit!”
They flailed through weeds and brush and came out into burn. Beef had little endurance and sat heavily in exhaustion. “Leave me for the Injuns. I’m a no-hope.”
Roski considered for a moment, and then came back to squat next to Beef. “Tell me about Sabine Roh,” Roski said mildly. “I saw the pictures. We’re all guys together.”
“The other Chinese cunt?”
Roski nodded serenely. Other?
“What’s to know? She was following me around like a dog and driving me nuts; she pretended she liked me. Whatever happened to her, she deserved it.”
While he was talking, Beef slowly withdrew a big serrated killing knife from his Redwing boot. He seemed to think the movement went unnoticed.
“It’s too bad you know the name, old man,” Beef said.
“Hold on, pal,” Roski said equably. “After you took care of the girl, you started the Sheepshead Fire to cover it up? Seriously? I saw the picture of the matchbook, too.”
Beef haw-hawed once. “Life is tough titty. I don’t ask God for nothing in the bad times, because I don’t ask in the good times neither.” He brought the K-bar up with a smirk as if to show Roski how he was about to die.
Roski sighed, and without any windup rammed the heel of his right hand very hard into Beef’s throat, crushing his larynx. In the Third of the First, they’d been given Israeli Krav Maga training in hand-to-hand combat. The trouble with an extravagantly aggressive martial art was that when you really needed it, all you knew how to do was kill.
Anthony Buffano collapsed like a deflated balloon, gagging and clutching his throat. Roski lifted him by a handful of shirt and dragged the worthless hulk across burned-over hillside to the edge of the ravine and tossed the big sack of crap into the debris flow, watching the body flail end over end as it descended the cataract.
Nobody killed a firefighter on his watch.
He knew he’d never tell anyone about this except Jack Liffey
Jack, where the hell are you?
EPILOGUE
The Long Sleep
A light rain was coming down as the skirmish line, wearing bright orange vests and fiberglass helmets, made its way across the vast rubble field, poking deep into fresh mud with fiberglass poles. Several dogs ran ahead of them and pawed the ground here and there. Excavating machines waited far down below on Serrano Place. Only a few homes in the neighborhood had survived, teeth in a shattered denture.
“Where the fire trail crossed the creek,” Walter Roski said. “If you’ve got a survey map.”
George Maloof, the head of the San Dimas Mountain Rescue team, pointed out what little he could decipher of a slope where no landmarks remained. The landslides had ultimately torn loose a half-mile of mountain and buried two centuries-old canyons, five old cabins, two fire trails, the surrounding slopes, and much of the neighborhood, where another rescue team was working on the debris of houses with a chugging Jaws of Life and prybars.
Maloof studied his handheld GPS, on short loan from the Air Force for the rescue operation. It was more sensitive than the commercial units, using twelve satellites to locate itself within a centimeter.
“Maybe where that German Shepherd is alerting.”
“How many people have been found?”
“I don’t have a total. Thirty-some dead. A few were alive in the flat, nobody up here.”
“Dumb question, sorry,” Roski said.
They walked on in gloomy silence for a while, watching the soil as if they could see into it.
“I ran into a religious group once,” Maloof said, “who said wanting anything better than you’re given after a tragedy is an insult to God.”
Roski wondered if this guy was religious and what religion. But the personal was personal.
“Inshallah,” Maloof said. “When what you want didn’t happen, you praise God and learn to want what did.”
Barks and human shouts swirled around them. Roski knew he was overwrought, as usual. “The real trouble with catastrophes is that the idiots who survive talk as if they had a special deal with God.”
Maloof didn’t smile. “Yeah, that’s what idiots do.”
The dog had given up alerting and moved on, but the spot had a small red flag. A large oval of hardening mud showed a grayer and smoother texture, as indecipherable as a faraway spiral galaxy.
“Yeah,” Maloof said. “We’re ten meters directly over the cabin.”
*
Gloria grabbed at Paula’s blouse to hold her back. Paula had parked in the shadow of the 1930s art-deco hulk of L.A. County Hospital, condemned to death after the 1994 earthquake and now just offices. The replacement glass and steel Kleenex boxes looked like every other hospital in the world.
“I know I screwed up with the Bakersfield guy. Haven’t you ever been hit by a craving you didn’t expect? You think nothing can touch you and then some guy like a hundred other guys hits you with a magic raygun. It’s a goddam hostage situation. It’s junior high again. And when it’s over, you think you’re back in your normal world and he drops you a stupid little note—Can I just have permission to think about you, my darling? Why do we think love is so great?”
Paula frowned at her. “Girl, the real problem is you got sex stuck up here—” She tapped Gloria’s forehead. “—instead of down where it belongs. Come on.”
Paula Green badged a couple of post-9/11 security guards at the back door to butch around the metal detector on the way to the cardiac ward.
“All I really know about life came from my mom,” Paula said vaguely. “She said it’s bad news to whip the slaves.”
Gloria laughed.
“Elevators over there.” They hunted up Five-West, and Paula barked into the intercom beside the locked doors until it buzzed, and they were into Cardiac Intensive Care.
A semicircle of ten glass cubicles faced a nurse station. Inside the nearest one was a six-foot-long inert object on a bed. The object looked a lot like Jack Liffey, though it was the focus of a small universe of apparatuses, with wires and tubes leading to monitors and wheezing machinery. Two women were glaring at one another across the recumbent object—one young, fairly tall, and Maeve. The other was older, petite, and Asian.
“That be her,” Paula said grimly.
“Uh-huh.” Gloria hip-thrust Paula aside, dug out her own badge, and showed it to the nurse sitting at the Star Trek controls.
“Room one. What’s the story?” A voice that was not to be delayed or denied.
“Came in with near total coronary blockage. Circling the drain. They did an emergency triple bypass. Unusual case—he only has three coronary arteries. Lucky he lived this far.”
The nurse had obviously been through police situations before—County was the biggest trauma unit in the U.S., famous for its weekend knife-and-gun club in the ER—and she summarized fast and well.
“His body came through it, but we have no idea how long his brain may have gone without oxygen. They think he had several myocardial infarctions over a couple of hours, but a massive one toward the end. He must be one tough cookie. Officially, his condition is guarded.”
“Those visitors,” Gloria snapped.
“We only allow one, if any. The Asian woman said she was his wife. The girl forced her way in a few minutes ago and said she was his daughter. Security is on its way to deal with them.”
“Call off the dogs.”
Gloria was manifestly in charge now. She used her cane to hobble around the big dashboard to the cubicle, and Paula held back. Tien and Maeve glanced up from their mad-dog glaring.
“You,” Gloria said, pointing at Tien. “Outside now to talk. Maeve, stay with Paula.”
The Asian woman nodded at Gloria’s command. She seemed to know who Gloria was, but Gloria didn’t care. All she knew was she needed to win this fight. She slapped the big square switch that opened the doors and led this man-stealer out to the snack room.
*
Ellen Chen lay on her own bed, in her own room in her parents’ home, her infant daughter breathing softly in the bassinet. The night before she had hiked down the hill after the worst was over and given herself over to a fire crew. Strangely, no cops had shown up at her home, though she’d told a sympathetic fireman everything, the kidnap and the handcuffing. She’d told them everyone she thought had been in the cabin, then she’d refused a hospital checkup and insisted on being taken home.
“I’m just wet and cold, man.”
Ellen plucked out her journal, untouched for weeks. She read her last entry:
We’re told “meaning well” is all that matters, that it excuses any consequences. That’s the problem with individualism. We are responsible, even if we can’t know what will happen. I accept it.
How grandiose I felt only a few weeks before. She pondered for a while. So strong and pure. She found a pen and added:
I must talk to that troubled old man. I bet he knows things I don’t.
*
Tien and Gloria squared off in the snack room.
“You the pain-in-ass in Jack’s life,” Tien snapped. “Another hairy American girl who can’t never be nice to her man.”
“You got it,” Gloria said. “And you’re the short time that opened her crack for GIs with five bucks.”
The Asian woman paused and seemed to deflate a little. “I start this nuclear missile war, okay. Sorry, sorry. I’m from good family, plenty college, not street trash. There some way to stop this? We both breathe deep. Both two care about Jack.”
“That remains to be seen—” Gloria had been about to hit her with a blast of ranting, but she stopped herself. This face-off might be the toughest war she’d ever had—a war for the rest of her life. And winning might not be simply a matter of overpowering the opponent. Who could tell where Jack’s head was? She’d certainly given him reason to walk out. “Let’s de-escalate. Say your piece, woman.”
They star
ed at one another for a while, breathing deeply. A man in a smock looked in, took fright at the tension in the room, and fled.
“I want to make Jackie happy in his last years. Give him big boat, nice Porsche, Italian suit, Rolex, fine shoe, and make his daughter rich, too. I give her scholarship all her life. What you gonna do? Close your knees to him? Get boyfriend?”
“Say what?”
“Don’t think this come from Jack complain. He never. I got source.”
It didn’t seem like finicky Jack to grumble to a mistress. “Slow down, woman. I hear you’re filthy rich and you want to make Jack rich, too, and all his family for three generations.”
“I always want everybody happy. Win-win-win. You go away right now, I give you ten million dollar. Company stock. You want cash money in paper bag, I get it. You want something else, you say.”
Gloria was struck dumb. Ten million dollars! Plus leaving Jack and Maeve rich and pampered the rest of their lives. How dare she turn that down on their behalf? Particularly after all the grief she’d given him. And the money for herself—Jesus. More zeroes than she’d ever thought about. She could be the benefactor of the tiny Paiute reservation outside Lone Pine, replace every shabby trailer with a ranch house.
*
He lay with his eyes closed and his arms wrapped around a small pillow on his chest. Paula Green had been in enough ICUs to know that the glowing numbers seemed fine. Pulse around ninety. No weird spikes in the EKG. Blood pressure was normal. The rest of the equipment was from Mars.
Paula asked Maeve for an account of Jack’s condition.
“The nurses say it was lucky you guys got him to the ER when you did.”
What Maeve didn’t tell Paula was that some fire official had come by in the tiny hours and asked her to pass on a simple message to her dad: The guy who killed your girl is history. It had to mean the girl her dad had been looking for. Killed. He would see it as another failure.
“They did a bypass last night. The doctor said he had so much plaque in his arteries he was ready to keel over at any moment.”
Gloria came striding back into the cubicle alone, looking like she’d been falling a mile and hadn’t quite hit yet.
