Dangerous Games (20 page)

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.

“By now, some of the other women are trying to calm her down. Robles fights his way through the crowd and clobbers the woman's shoulder with his nightstick to make her let go of the little girl. Which actually works. But now the cop-hater grabs at the little girl, and the result is that between us we dislocate her shoulder as we all go to the ground. I can tell something bad has happened because the screeching goes up about three notches.

“There's plenty of people trying to make peace now, but Robles is going nuts, and he's whaling on the cop-hater next to me. And when the mother grabs at him, he gives her a pop in the gut with the butt-end of his stick, and this gets her to throw up all over him.”

She smiled briefly again. “I suppose if I were on the outside and if we hadn't hurt the little girl, it would all be pretty funny. It's just the sort of stuff that happens all the time when worlds collide.”

“Somebody filed a complaint over
that?
”

She sighed. “Robles was in trouble now, sandwiched between the woman and the cop-hater on the ground and I had to pry the little girl off me and pass her off quickly and spray the woman and then the guy. It's only pepper spray, but she starts yelling that I've blinded her, and I have to spray a couple more people before I'm through. We made a thorough mess of it, in truth. I felt like Dirty Harry wading into a gang of terrorists. I'm not sure what I could have done different, but I'm not proud of myself. And the poor kid's in Little Company of Mary.”

“There's limits to diplomacy.”

“Sure, and in the end, I won't really be disciplined, but it's on my record.
Damn,
it was a clean record. I was so proud of my ability to talk people down.” She let her folded arms drop, and he saw his chance. He moved in and held her and she cried softly on his shoulder.

After a while she ran down. “I'm not sure why I'm crying.” She pushed him back to arms' length and looked at him quizzically. “I think maybe it was something to do with my own rage snapping. It tells me I'm not really a child of the damn New Age. And also, I think you're going to give up on me eventually. It's the fate of cops.”

“Don't be such a poop. I love you.”

“Yeah, but you don't love what I do.”

“That's not true. I respect sorting out messes. You're crying because you
are
part of the New Age, whatever that is. Your own anger got to you and reminded you you're not perfect.”

“I thought I had it all figured out.”

The pot started to boil over, but he got to the knob first, dropping it to simmer. “Everybody who thinks everything's all figured out is full of shit,” he said. “You know that.”

She touched his cheek coquettishly and offered a shy smile. They ended up making love, at first standing up in the kitchen, then in the short hall and then in the living room, while the lamb stew boiled off all its liquid and destroyed itself.

Dear Diary,

Trev is asleep now and I am so lonely! Today he showed me how to load his gun. Its a funny thing. You push it & it all just opens up like a book to show you the round thing where the bullets are. Their easy to take out if you got fingernails. Then you just close it up & it clicks. Its very heavy & he tole me that he would take me shooting sometime so I could learn to hit tin cans. I dont truly believe I could shoot at a living thing.

I made him promise to take me to a real restaurant tomorrow. Im tired of always sitting on plastic benches & plastic tables in places like Macdonalds. He said he knew just the place but it was a long way away.

NINETEEN

Meetings

“My view on de ting naow, dawta: My likkel life, I-an-I see so much time be waste wit no gain at all. Skifflin an givin licks an work for dogheart mans—tings like dose be
wrong
an
dred.
” He went on for a while about his sense of disappointment at the waste of it all, though a smile seemed to belie much of the regret of his words, his voice rising a little in the hush of the elegant restaurant he had brought her to.

She could see eyes here and there in the room, belonging to men in business suits, keeping track of him as if he were a madman who might head their way any moment. Taylor's was an old and venerable L.A. businessman's steak house—even Luisa Wilson could see that, with its red leather booths and signed photos of local politicos and celebrities near the door. She could tell that Trevor Pennycooke's colorful clothing and his overlarge presence were making the wrong kind of impression, but she didn't care.

“Lisn me, de basic ting wit any man is have a small land wit a gaadin an naa be dependin' on no man fe you keep.
No bosses.
” That last loud proclamation swung the headwaiter around like a punch as he sauntered past, leading two young women toward a booth. The headwaiter frowned, backing a few steps with an eagle eye on the Jamaican, and then he turned and went on. Oblivious, Trevor went on telling her about a beautiful place he knew on a hill outside Kingston, a spot perfect for raising children. It had lush banana trees, and you could look down at a sleepy village on the slope below, and the earth was rich and brown. All that was needed was a bit of money to set them up and build a little house.

“You be one true bonafide to keep me companion dere!”

Luisa was working on a small medium rare steak, with an occasional glower of disapproval from her lover as he talked. She figured it would probably be her last, but she wanted it. The menu had not contained much of interest for a militant vegetarian, so he was eating slabs of an eggplant that he had brought with him, in the pocket of his chartreuse jacket, and had prevailed upon the waitress to have grilled for him, “Witout de assistance of de fat of beasts.”

At the nearest table, a man in a cashmere sweater, sitting with two women wearing too much makeup, leaned to whisper to one of them, who rolled her eyes and glanced briefly their way. She said something in reply that made the man chuckle.

Just to show every one of them where her loyalties lay, Luisa stroked Trevor's giant hand on the table. “I want you to take me with you to Jamaica.”

He brayed a laugh. “Girl, you only got to stop eatin' flesh like dis an we a oneness in de heart. Flesh of beast make you sick and p'ison de liver. Some Rastas eats of the fish of the sea, but only them with scales like it say inna Bible, but I-an-I don eat of no living beast.”

“I'll do my best to please you, Trevor.”

“The key to me is peace and
serenitude!
” Trevor Pennycooke announced, his voice rising alarmingly.

“I can feel it in you.”

Trevor Pennycooke took a large mouthful of eggplant, and suddenly his eyes went wide. She thought at first it was something over her shoulder that had caught his attention, but then she noticed how much darker and bluer his face had gone. She'd had basic first aid training on the rancheria, and, when both his palms went to his neck in the universal sign of choking, she knew what she was seeing.

He got up and staggered into the nearest table, making an ack-ack sound, and knocking over a bottle of red wine so that an athletic-looking man in a silk jacket rose in barely suppressed rage.

His companion called, “Tommy, don't! Something's wrong with him!”

“He's choking!” Luisa called out.

She was a little worried about pulling off a Heimlich's on someone so much bigger than herself, but she would save his life or die trying. Trevor was already staggering in panic toward a second table, the one with the man sandwiched between the two women, all of whom watched with horror as the flailing apparition approached. Luisa caught up to him and wrapped her arms around his amazingly slim waist. She locked her hands into a double fist and repositioned them until they were just under where she thought his diaphragm was. She prayed once quickly to the Paiute gods, then yanked with all her strength.

It worked the first time just like magic, and a greenish glob of eggplant dispatched like a missile across the table, followed by a similar mass of projectile vomit. The occupants of several tables backed away in horror as Trevor sucked in a slow triumphant breath.

Trevor Pennycooke raised both fists in the air and hollered, “All praise to His Majesty Haile Selassie I!”

Several men rose at their tables and shouted.

“Can't you be civil, man!”

“Get yourself under control!”

Luisa Wilson faced them down. “This man almost died!” she shouted. “But he's still alive, and he's worth ten of you!”

Light flooded the upstairs bedroom. Slowly, they both became aware that they were both awake and drifting. He nuzzled her a little, but she was no longer in the mood.

“Late for work?” Jack Liffey asked. Her schedule was so ragged, he never knew for sure.

“I'm off today. To do with the 1.81.”

“Ah. We could do something together. Maybe go for a drive. Something nice, whatever you'd like.”

“It is not necessary to be the cruise director. I'll survive this.”

“I never doubted it.”

“I'd like things to be simpler.” She watched him. “But I can't seem to do it by myself. People like you come along and make me want you. And the minute I want you, I realize I want to have had a real childhood and a happy time in school and two little sisters and dolls and a picket fence. Without all that, what have I got to give you?”

Two enormous tits, he thought mischievously, but it would not have been smart to say it aloud.

“My marriages don't work out, Jack. My relationships.”

“We're both getting older,” he said. “Maybe we can settle for less than perfect.”

“That's not the point. I'm not being finicky. It's some kind of grief I'm carrying that kills things.”

He rested his hand on her forehead, and it was feverish, but it usually was in the morning. She stored up heat in the night like a dozen cats, and he often had to kick off the blankets on his side. She sat up but clutched the covers modestly. “I can see the treetops whipping out the window. We've got more Santa Anas.”

“I'm inclined to try to make the most of the life we have left,” Jack Liffey said, unwilling to let the subject go.

She pushed his caressing hand away, rather hard. “If it's not too spoiled.”

“I don't think it's just sadness,” he said. “You're really angry at me.”

“I guess I am.”

“Do you know why?”

“No. But I'm glad you notice. You can just orbit in that zone.” She pressed a finger against his nose to hold him down. “It'll keep you attentive.”

Prozac, he thought. Barrels and barrels of it in her tea.

* * *

Rod Whipple was dozing shallowly, drifting in and out of sleep, when Kenyon Styles came in and sat on the edge of his bed. He was already mostly awake by the time Kenyon stretched himself out on top of the covers. That brought him all the way out of his busy and disturbing dream. It was probably light outside, something like nine judging by the nervous but rested feeling he had—but the room had blackout curtains, and it always felt earlier. A car alarm went off somewhere for a few seconds until someone got the key in the ignition.

Without giving a sign that he was awake, Rod rolled to face away from Kenyon, who seemed to have recovered from his coughing fits, though his breathing was still raspy.

It seemed only a short time ago that it had all been something like a prank, paying some toothless old winos to bare-knuck it in a parking lot. It wasn't exactly something he wanted to boast about to his family, but it wasn't consign-him-to-hell material either, just maybe an extra week or two in purgatory. He wondered where the path had diverged toward serious mayhem. Or did paths always diverge without you knowing it? Was this the way Al Capone ended up ordering all his competitors shot to death by Thompsons, starting out with simple hotfoots and wedgies? He almost chuckled at the thought. Back in Chicago they still talked about the great Scarface.

If they both managed to survive
Dangerous Games II,
there was not going to be a
Dangerous Games III
—at least not for him. He intended to run home to make his independent film with his old friends, even if he was pretty sure Kenyon would do his best to screw him out of as much of his share as he could.

All of a sudden Rod felt a hand resting heavily on his hip.

“Um.”

“In the dorm at UCLA, me and Greg used to have this thing. We'd get in bed and talk about our girlfriends, where they were, who they were fucking. We'd go into details. It was just a thing, you know.”

He didn't want to hurl the hand off but he didn't know what to say. He was not interested in this new concept.

“How
is
your girlfriend?” Rod asked.

“You know, I've been finding her less and less … satisfactory. All she ever wants to talk about is feelings.”

“Are you planning to start a fire today?”

“We need to go meet our new ‘line producer' and see if he's ready to go. Sort of Smokey the Bear in reverse.”

“I don't know, Ken. We've done some pretty dangerous stuff, but this is way past any of that. Why don't we just call it a wrap now? We've got enough material for
II
.”

Rod felt the covers tug down a little, and a hand began to massage his shoulders.

“Don't!”

“Hold still. I can feel how tense you are about this.”

Rod had his usual morning erection and couldn't get out of bed without Kenyon noticing. He needed to pee badly.

“Stop it, please.”

The hand drifted, working its way into the neck of his pyjamas toward his chest. “Ever turn a trick, Rod? I've got plenty of money.”

“No, man. This is not for me.”

He jumped out of bed and sprinted for the bathroom, doing his best to conceal the tentpole holding out his pyjamas. He shut the door and locked it as discreetly as he could. But now he faced the usual dilemma of how to pee with his morning erection without peeing into his own face. He waited, thinking of baseball, imaging the different pitches, thinking of batting averages he'd memorized, and finally, he felt himself going limp, and he could pee.

“You okay, Rod?”

“I'm fine.” He sighed in relief.

“You think we should bring some
American
ginger ale to this nigger?”

“Let's just forget it,” he called back. “But I'm never going to listen to Bob Marley again.”

Jack Liffey stepped outside to get the
Times,
and he could smell it instantly on the air—brushfire. Astringent, prickling his nose as if the air carried the ash of some acidic trees, though the brushfire was probably a dozen miles away. Everyone in L.A. recognized that smell long before the sky turned dark and cinders blanketed the freshly shined cars. With the prevailing wind coming off the desert, this one had to be out in the San Gabriels somewhere, maybe in the mountains north of Claremont or Glendora. Luckily, he was planning on going the other way later.

He turned on one of the local channels. They'd be covering the fire with their helicopters if there wasn't a police chase circling the freeways.

“… There's an abandoned cabin up Icehouse Canyon that they don't think they can save, but no other structures are endangered for now.”

“Mary Lou, do they have any idea what started this blaze?” A frazzled-looking blonde in a sweatshirt was glancing regularly over her shoulder at a ragged line of fire on a hillside.

“Not yet, Don. I haven't been able to speak with the division commander yet, but I will. Let me tell you something you never hear on TV about one of these brushfires. It's
very
scary.”

“I understand, Mary Lou,” he said, a patronizing whicker in his voice. “We'll get back to you in a few minutes. Over to Stan Pollard at the second fire in Altadena near the base of Mount Wilson. Stan, are any of the broadcast antennas or the observatory threatened … ?”

Jack Liffey turned the sound off, and started making coffee. Gloria was showering. She was finally beginning to worry him. Or rather, he was finally beginning to wonder if he might not eventually lose touch with the tenderness he still felt for her. She seemed to want to crush it out. Something in her was fiercely resisting being loved. He felt he had so few years left that he wasn't sure he could afford to give them all to someone so damaged. Not that he was perfectly balanced himself, but he was ready to make a commitment, ready to try. And Maeve was demanding it.

The water had stopped a minute ago, and he could hear the telltale squawk of the medicine cabinet closing. He waited for her outside the bathroom door with a cup of her favorite tea. The door came open, and she seemed a little startled. She was wrapped demurely in a bath sheet tucked over her breasts.

“Thanks, Jack,” she said as she took the cup perfunctorily and walked on.

“I'll track you down like a wolf,” he said. “I'll make you accept my love.”

She stopped in the bedroom door and sipped. “What if I can't?”

It was the sedated sleep that did it, he thought. The wrong damn drugs. “I'll give you a few laughs, then. Everybody can laugh.”

She looked back over her shoulder and smiled. “It's a deal.”

Dear Diary,

After the bad time in the restaurant Trev & I went for a walk. The whole place had signs in some foreign language. I think its Korean. Nobody was very friendly but I didnt feel anger at us. Tho a funny thing happened. This oriental man was walking a big police dog & he broke away & ran straight toward Trevor. I stepped in front of the dog because I have always been pretty good with animals but maybe he don't speak English & couldn't understand me. He jump & bite my ankle. Trevor pulled the dog off & spoke soft to the dogs face & he ran away. At home he bandaged me up & used some Jamacan medicine on my foot. It still hurts pretty bad tho.