Dangerous Games (2 page)

A man in a straw sombrero pedaled past on his kid's banana bike, balancing two big shopping bags on his lap and yawing left and right. Two mariachis were hurrying somewhere in their maroon outfits glittering with silver. They sidestepped to give the meandering bike plenty of room. It was a little reminder that he was well out of his own pond.

One other good thing about that sycamore, he thought, was that it pretty much hid his view of the kids hanging out on the porch three doors up and across the street. In their uniform of T-shirts, dark glasses, and baggies, they were always accessorized with Budweiser cans. They were Greenwoods, and this was their turf. He'd talked a bit to the youngest one, Li'l Scooby, but basically as far as they were concerned, he'd simply dropped into their barrio one day from Mars. Li'l Scooby told him he thought only teachers and doctors were Anglos. The fourteen-year-old had never seen the ocean, never been west of the Harbor Freeway, and he immediately stiffened up into warrior mode whenever one of the older boys showed up. Two years back, Jack Liffey had befriended his old girlfriend Marlena's nephews, but he had no connection to these kids, and getting to know them was tough.

He'd tried to get close to the Balderamas in a tiny frame house just south of Gloria with the fridge on their back porch. The grandmother was home all day, and the place was crammed with colorful tawdry crap of all kinds, way more than the usual Virgins and religious artifacts. There were parrots side-by-side with polished brass icons and ash trays that looked like toilets. He'd read once that every collector was unconsciously creating some allegory, but he had no idea what this
abuela's
might be. His Spanish, despite the lessons he'd been taking doggedly, was even worse than her English. On the other side was a house that provided home base for a head gangbanger, so Gloria had warned him off trying too hard there. It was difficult to believe his bland condo was only ten miles away. At the same time, he was beginning to feel at home here.

Maeve came out and lay down on the grass with her hands behind her head, keeping him company.

“So what would be the practical consequences of being an existentialist?” he asked her, taking up a topic from breakfast. She was reading Sartre and having a hard go.

“I'd have to move to France and smoke a pipe.”

“And die in an auto crash in the Alps, yeah, if you like Camus. But, seriously.”

“Just like you, I'd have to find some way of building a viable moral system from scratch. Without the easy props.”

“Don't you think you've internalized a lot of your mom's and my values already?”

She made a face. “You're talking psychology, Dad. That's different. I mean
principles,
the kind that are intellectually defensible.”

The lawn looked a bit scraggly once the leaves had been cleared off, and he realized it might be a good idea to fertilize before winter hit. And buy containers for more flowering plants. The whole neighborhood was so awash with gaudy blossoms that Gloria's yard looked a little insipid in comparison.

“Is it really that hard to know what's right?” he asked. “I've never seen the need to rev up all that intellectual apparatus as a way of figuring it out.”

“Well, there's always the kitten and the Rembrandt in the fire.”

He smiled as he raked two heaps of leaves into one big one. He had begun to like the grating twang of the old rake. “I know you'd save the kitten ten times out of ten, no question.”

“You wouldn't?”

“It always seems to me an artificial choice. You can't tuck the kitten under one arm, the painting under the other and haul ass? I mean, I know there are plenty of gray areas in the world, but they're usually a wee bit more complicated.”

“A lot of yours seem to involve unzipping your fly at inopportune times.”

He grimaced. “Not that again. Give me a
little
break. It's been quite a while since I strayed. Remember, Rebecca dumped me, and it was only after that that I started seeing Gloria. And you like Gloria better than her, anyway.”

“Would you go back to Becky if she whistled—you know, just put her lips together and blew?”

He wondered how many teenage girls could summon up lines once uttered by Lauren Bacall.

“What was that movie?” she asked.

“
To Have and Have Not.
I would
not
go back. I'm completely crazy about Gloria. I don't even mind that she's a cop.”

Jangly dancy
ranchera
music started up somewhere nearby.

“What about you and David?” he asked after a bit of reflective silence.

David was her—
beau
was the old-fashioned word he thought she'd used the other day. Both of them were in their junior year at Redondo High, and David had CalTech in his sights. Jack Liffey supposed they were going steady, as he would have said in high school. If he didn't like it, he still wasn't going to object and throw her into overdrive. Everything happened too soon these days. Divorce by eighteen, remarriage by nineteen, dark night of the soul by twenty, midlife crisis at twenty-one. …

“What is it about ‘what about' that you want to know, Dad?”

“How serious are you two?”

“Do you mean sex, has David got to home plate yet?”

That torched a whole bundle of nerves, but he tried not to let it show as he came over to work on the southern side of the lawn.

“Not really. I mean, are you thinking long term? Is it going to interfere with college?”

“How did we get here from existentialism?” she asked, and they both knew it was only a diversion from talking about David.

“I wish I knew. Love gets a lot more mysterious as you get older, and existentialism a lot less so. You can quote me.”

He heard an ominous rumble and a lowered seventies Chevy sedan with primer spots pulled near the curb and idled loudly with ragged muscle-car belligerence. There were four shaved-head kids inside, and he saw out the corner of his eye that the Greenwoods had all disappeared from their porch and driveway.

“
Ese,
where you from?” a kid in the shotgun seat demanded to know.

“Nowhere,” Jack Liffey said. It was what you said. It meant you weren't affiliated with any of the gangs. Normally, they didn't bother with Anglos.

The boys on the near side of the car were making those complex hand gestures out the windows—throwing sign—that were meant to announce who they were, but he didn't have a clue. Little Valley was to the east, where the city gave way to county. The Maravillas, a sort of consortium of subgangs, commanded a barrio a few blocks west. And even the Mara Salvatruchas, the citywide Salvadoran gang, had an outpost, the Inez Locos, in an apartment building nearby. That was all secondhand info imparted by Gloria. Jack Liffey couldn't even read the spray-painted gang
placas
that came and went on walls and any other flat surfaces available.

He figured going on raking was his best bet.

“You dissing us,
pendejo?”

“No, I'm not.” He kept his voice as neutral as he could, but stopped raking and looked up to meet their eyes. He knew better than to try out even the politest of polite greetings in Spanish just then. He was sharply conscious of where Maeve had been lying on the grass, without looking toward her. He hoped by some miracle she had slipped back into the house.

The kid at the back window had a T-shaped moustache-beard combination and was mad-dogging him with fierce black eyes.

“I would never be impolite to anyone as powerful as you gentlemen.”

“Well, fuck Greenwood,
lambiche, que watcha.
”

Too late he noticed that T-moustache in back was displaying a small black pistol.

“Insane respect, man,” the
pistolero
said.

Jack Liffey dived for the leaf pile—feeling foolish and naked—as he heard three shots, one seeming to ping off the front fence, and then the squeal of tires as the lowrider accelerated away. He hadn't been hit, and he jumped up and ran out the gate after the car, focusing on the license plate to get a partial, JSP after three numbers, one of the very old gold-on-black California plates. It took only a second before he decided chasing after armed gangbangers carrying only a rake wasn't such a great idea.

His heart was hammering as he walked back up the street, panting, and he saw people appearing on porches up and down the block. He forced himself not to think of any racial epithets—even to vent internally—and to concentrate on the fact that they were really big wounded children, no-hopers, kids without jobs—grown callous and mean—but still just kids.

Then he saw Maeve lying in a strange position on her side. At first he refused to believe that the dark liquid seeping away down the grass was her blood. He turned and pointed straight at Señora Torres on her porch across the street.
“Call 9-1-1!”
he screamed.

She rushed inside, and Jack Liffey knelt beside his suddenly quiet daughter.

“Maeve, can you hear me?” He shuddered violently. “Maeve!”

There was no answer. He lifted her blouse, just enough to see the ugly entry wound in her abdomen. He ripped off his shirt to press against the seeping blood. His mind turned into a complete jumble of panic and guilt and rage. Off in the corner, an observer struggled for the meaning of
lambiche.
What had happened? He'd made every effort to be respectful, and how had it gone wrong?

Exit wound,
a voice inside his head now cried out, taking him all the way back to his one day of medic training in Basic. Always look for that, too.

TWO

The Last Juvenile Delinquent

He was bent forward on the uncomfortable bench, holding his head with both hands as if it might spin off and fly away. The air in the busy room smelled of ether and ammonia and something else that he couldn't quite identify. Maybe just the odor of human fear and distress. L.A. County General Hospital, an immense Deco edifice on its own hill just north of the I-10 in East L.A., was reputedly one of the largest buildings on earth outside the Pentagon, though so badly earthquake-damaged that the framing was already going up for a replacement. Its ER probably handled more knife and gun incidents than any other hospital in the country, so he consoled himself with the expertise and experience of the doctors treating Maeve. The ER waiting room was the size of a bus station but remarkably quiet for a space holding so many wounded and terrified people.

It had been a long time since he had felt so panicky and guilty at the same time, and Kathy, Maeve's mother, wasn't helping much, sitting across from him in her own bank of plastic chairs with her arms folded, glaring at him. When he'd called the Harbor Station, Gloria had been out on a fraud case in Wilmington but he knew she'd get the message and be there before long. He was counting on her to run interference with the Hollenbeck Division cops who'd already had a go at him once. First things first, though: he desperately required a visit from an exhausted-looking, blood-spattered ER surgeon resembling George Clooney who would assure him that Maeve was going to be just fine.

“I'm not mad at you, Jack,” Kathy volunteered, none too covincingly.

“Well, I'm mad at myself, but I don't know why. I don't know what I could have done differently. I didn't challenge them, I didn't dis them.” He knew what she was thinking: Her former husband's life had become so ragged, so caught up in the fringes of the city that he continually put Maeve in harm's way without meaning to.

“You sure you didn't bristle a little? You've got a temper.”

“I
swear,
Kath. I'm not an imbecile. I don't pick trouble with gangbangers.”

He looked at her trying to get a fix on her thinking. She'd aged, he noticed, but he supposed he had, too. Her typically Irish colleen look had taken on an artificiality now with the too-even red dye in her hair, and her face had gone wrinkly with worry lines the way a freckled complexion can, but she was still a handsome woman.

“You look healthy,” he said.

“You don't. You look like a schizophrenic on work release.”

They fell silent as an ambulance crew brought somebody moaning and gasping past them on a gurney. It was amazing how calm the EMTs stayed.

“Blood is always thicker than water,” one of the EMTs offered carelessly as they disappeared through swing doors.

“Blood is thicker than water,” Jack Liffey repeated.
¡Viva la raza! ¡Viva la familia! ¡Viva el barrio!
He shook his head. He was very tired and confused and couldn't sort out his thoughts, but “support your homeboys” was never a sentiment that sat well with him. It always seemed to lead to finding an “other” to hate.

Maeve had been in surgery for nearly five hours now. Four hours or so back, as he'd come through the archway into the waiting room, a guard had almost tackled him to relieve him of the Swiss Army knife that had set off a metal detector.

“It's like some huge open-air zoo,” Kathy said.

“What do you mean?”

“I'm not sure. I just feel weird here, exposed somehow.” She shrugged. She looked suddenly very drained. And very frightened.

He sighed. He figured
here
didn't mean the hospital, but the whole Eastside. He subsided into himself, but still aware of the babble around him and unable to completely ignore the sniffling of a preteen boy two seats away who waited with a friend, his arm cradled and wrapped in a bloody plaid shirt that had the handle of a kitchen knife protruding. Could he have dealt with something like that at the boy's age?

Then Gloria Ramirez stood there in all her impressive cop calm, and his heart lifted. Before speaking to him, she paused to kneel in front of Kathy for a minute, and the two women held hands and spoke softly. Jack Liffey could see Kathy begin to cry then stop. Gloria embraced her.

Eventually, Gloria came and kissed him on the cheek. She kept her face next to his as she whispered, “I'm so sorry.”

Tears welled up suddenly, and he fought them back.

“What have they said?” she asked.

“Not a word. In four hours, more.”

“Oh, for
Chrissake.
” She got up and strode immediately across the busy room, decisively pushing past the double doors. He and Kathy watched her disappear like simpletons expecting a magic trick to occur there.
Tragedy makes us all primitives,
he thought.

It was about ten minutes before she came back. Again, Gloria went to Kathy first, and he could tell by the way his ex-wife's whole body lost tension that the news was bearable.

“I'm sure she's going to live, Jack,” Gloria told him. “I've seen enough gunshot wounds to know. If she was going to die, it would have happened. One of the assistant surgeons was taking a breather, and he told me they're struggling to save her right kidney. She's lost a few feet of her intestine, so I'm afraid she'll have to wear an ostomy bag for a few months—which is no picnic for a kid—but she's tough. Her wound isn't critical. When they come out, prepare yourself—they won't be bright and cheery, and they'll say something like
serious
or
guarded
to cover their back. But it's okay.”

“She can have one of my kidneys right now if it'll help.”

Gloria shook her head. “It won't be necessary. You can live a full life on one kidney. And they may still save number two. Can you tell me the cops you talked to?”

He was unable to reply, trying to take in her report on Maeve's condition, but he dug out the card that the lead cop had given him. His partner, an obvious rookie about nineteen had hung back, listening and learning.

The card read,
Sgt. Dean Padilla, LAPD, Anti-Gang Unit.

The gang detail had, until fairly recently, been called CRASH—the rather ludicrous Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums—until Rafael Perez and the Rampart Scandal had disgraced that acronym for all time.

“Padilla's okay,” she said. “I know him. What did you tell him?”

“You're sure she's going to be all right?” It was hard to shift gears. The memory of Maeve unconscious on that blood soaked gurney was all he could think about.

“Trust me, Jack. The naked truth is they don't waste four hours of painstaking surgery in a public hospital on somebody who's circling the drain. Sorry, that's a lousy expression. Can you tell me what you told Padilla?”

He took hold of himself and repeated to her pretty much all of what he had told the cops a few hours earlier in the waiting room. Every word the gangbangers had said to him, as close as he could remember, along with the description of their car and the three letters he'd got off the plate.

“Describe the boy with the gun again, please?”

“It was a revolver. He had a shaved head, late teens, I'd guess. Chunky build, from what I could see. He had a mustache and one of those perfectly formed straight down exclamation mark beards under the lip so it all made a ‘T.' They were throwing those gang signs with their hands, but it didn't mean anything to me. Maybe one part of it was three fingers with the second-to-the-little-finger tucked in, and the thumb tucked, too.”

“Could be an M.”

“He had on a black T-shirt as far as I remember. It happened pretty fast.”

“I understand. Don't blame yourself.”

“I'm trying my best not to. What's
lambiche?
”

“Roughly, a kissass. I don't think it's anything special. Just a random insult. Now what was it that you
didn't
tell Padilla?”

He watched her eyes, now as hard and flat as stones. She was on the job. “You can't know me that well yet,” he said.

“Yes, I can.”

It took him a while. “Several years ago I was backed into a corner.” He wasn't sure he should say this, but the relief that Maeve would live had pulled some plug in the side of his chest, and a lot of emotion was rushing out without any exercise of his will. “I killed a guy. He was unarmed. It changes you when it sinks in. It rearranges the whole sense you have of what's normal for you, who you are, what you're capable of.”

“So?”

“So, if I see that kid again, I'm not sure I won't kill him. I'm just telling you, Glor. Don't go ape on me.”

“You need a dose of Father Greg Boyle.”

“Unconditional love for the gangbangers, sure. He's famous for it.” Father Greg Boyle—G-Dog to the kids—was the patron saint of the gangbangers and had made it his policy not to write off a single soul for years. His parish had started Homeboy Industries to give them jobs and refused ever to turn them into the police when they came to him in trouble. “I try to appreciate the concept. I'm just telling you how I
feel.
They shot my baby.”

“I understand, Jack.” She regarded him somberly. “You have any idea how many of our neighbors are living with a loss like that? Kids that died senselessly in a drive-by or just the result of poor aim? Almost every family has one dead cousin or son. In the next few days, they'll come to comfort you, bring you things like
chiles rellenos.
Ask them about it.”

“I'd rather strangle the little fuck. Sorry, but that's the way it is.”

Luisa Wilson went into the back bedroom and shut the door quietly so no one would hear. She had made it into her own private space, like that wonderful red-tailed hawk's nest she had watched for years from a taller hill back in the Owens. She had a single mattress with two sheets and an old blanket, her old army surplus B-4 suitcase laid out next to it on the floor as a closet, an upended red plastic crate for a bedside table that held her three romance novels. The only thing in the room not hers was a big poster on the wall that she couldn't do much about and was finally getting used to. It was from one of Rod Whipple's movies,
Coming Traction,
and showed a nude Amber Lynn driving a tractor away from three dungaree-wearing men in hot pursuit of her. Luisa had set one of the last of her Owens rocks in the corner of the room, a small rounded nondescript pebble, by its presence tying this place to the one she had left behind.

It was amazing, she thought, how little you really needed to create a refuge. She'd only been here three days, after crashing at various other unlikely L.A. pads, and yet she felt such an immense sensation of comfort in her nest. Rod didn't even insist on sex very much, just that first night when he was bored really, and he didn't ask for anything weird at all. She was coming to like him. He was lively and fun, when he wanted to be, and he seemed to be a protector.

She leaned back, turned on the light, picked up Treasure Chest Ranch and opened it where she'd sheep-eared the page.

Ashton had dark hair that wasn't always tidy, thanks to his outdoor lifestyle as a rancher and broncrider. He seemed to be gittin' over his mother's messy divorce and his father's new 18-year-old blond trophy wife. His eyes were a piercing blue and steady as sapphire now. He was always active, squirming a little where he stood, and he had a great body—strong shoulders, muscular thighs, tight pecs and abs.

Yum! Teresa thought. Oh, yum!

She was just sinking into it when a knock came at the door. “You busy, Lu?”

She didn't answer right away, but apparently it wasn't really a question because Rod came in and sat on the end of the bed, grimacing as he gave out a big theatrical groan. “Oooh. You have no idea, kid, the
headaches.
The director wants me to shoot second unit, no extra money. The editor complains we don't cover him. The cameraman says he can't stand shooting video, it's too flat and soapy, and he's never going to do it again. The famous Keith is gonna finally bring the money tomorrow. But, of course, Keith's
not
gonna bring the money tomorrow.”

She folded the page back over and set the book down.

“Whatcha reading?” He took a look at the cover, with its impossibly dimpled cowboy clasping a blonde beauty and frowned. “You finish high school? I'll get you something good to read.”

“I was second in my class.” She didn't tell him there were only twelve students in senior year.

“That's great. Why don't you save up a little money and start in at a JC? Look what it did for me!” He chuckled at his own expense. “But I'm serious, you know. Unless you're dumb.
Are
you dumb?”

“I don't think so.”

“There you go.”

She worked up her courage. “If you went to college, why are you making these kind of movies?”

He laughed. “You mean, why am I only AD on fuck films when I could be directing
The Godfather, Part IV?
You're wrong, kid. The system is crap—it's all killer robots and things blowed up real good. Why not bypass it altogether? We get to be the last rebels in the world. We film people going down on each other and how many Tarantinos out there actually dare do that? Who's the real indie filmmaker? I'm a cattle prod up the world's ass, and it's all a gas. Anyway, the
serious
feature I made on the cheap right out of college failed so miserably I dare not mention its title lest the movie gods hit me with a lightning bolt. I couldn't get a distributor. I couldn't even get a screen at Slamdance.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, though she understood little of what he'd just said.

“Aaah,” he said dismissively. “It was pretentious crap. I mean it, I love what I do. I'm a juvenile delinquent writ large, and I get to stay this way as long as I want. I even get laid as much as I want.”