Dangerous Games (23 page)

“Tanks for de boost-up, mon.”

The fire hissed and crackled directly below them, very near, as they crested out of the ravine. It was like something gaining on you in a nightmare. It was a nightmare. The hot smoke was much worse now, blanketing and blinding them, and fear caught him up once again, nearing panic. He didn't even know which way to run. The panic was oddly voluptuous, almost sexual, and it was all he could do not to abandon them and run on alone. The howling of the fire was so close that he expected it to reach out and tap him on the shoulder.

She could see three big black-and-white CHP cruisers parked crisscross, completely blocking the highway. The cops had set up just beyond the turnoff for Rambla Pacifico, and she followed a big Ford Expedition up Rambla along with most of the traffic, largely sports cars and SUVs that all seemed to want to U-turn right away on the wider spots of the road, making a tangle of vehicles at every angle. They were backing out of driveways, making three-point U-turns, just trying to get around so they could drop back down to PCH and return toward Santa Monica. It took her a while to get past the jam, honking away to still the cars, like threading a convention of first-time drivers.

Thumb had her Thomas Bros. open on his knees. “This will get us there,” he said.

“If it's not blocked, too.” When they crested the higher spots of the road, they could see a curious mix of dark and light smoke, a whole cloud bank of it, peeling away from the hillside perhaps a mile farther on. She pulled carefully around an abandoned ladder truck on the side of the road, the front tire flat, and dozens of storage doors on its side standing open, as if insatiably ravenous children had descended on a candy truck. They passed a small development of homes that all looked abandoned, two of them with lawn sprinklers spinning slowly on the roofs. There was a turn onto Piuma Road, heading west, the way they wanted to go but it was blocked by what looked like an Eagle Scout standing beside a light green pickup truck. He turned out to be a very young Forest Ranger and Maeve handed him one of the business cards she'd had printed—one of the last few her father hadn't found and destroyed. It said
Liffey & Liffey, Investigations.

“Insurance investigation,” she said without hesitation “There's evidence of arson up here.”

“You can't go up yet.”

“Captain Watson in the arson bureau called and told me the fire was knocked down enough up on top to have a look.” She'd heard firefighters use the term “knocked down” on the radio before and had always found it weird, as if you put out a fire with boxing gloves.

The young man seemed unsure of himself.

“Come on, we're in a hurry,” she insisted

At last, he stepped aside. She waved a thank-you and drove around the truck. Thumb was awestruck.

“
¡Hijole!
You're
loca.
”

“I've seen my dad work. He always says a clipboard and a sense of entitlement will get you anywhere.”

Thumb watched out the rear window, just in case the man gave chase. “Man, that was like Obiwan Kanobe—that trick you did on Mr. Smokey the Bear.”

“You know, the forest service insists he's called Smokey Bear. Isn't that's nuts? Everybody says Smokey
the
Bear. Names are what people think they are.”

“
Sobres.
” He smiled. “Ain't no Zor the O.”

She smiled. The roadside was empty for a mile or so, but she started seeing pumpers pulled half off the pavement, linked from one to the next by fat hose with water runnels darkening the asphalt at the joints. When the map showed they were only about a half mile from Cold Canyon Road, they passed abruptly into fire country. Here the land was burned black and still smoldering in spots on both sides of the road. Then their path was blocked by fire trucks parked side by side. The fire fighters all seemed to be off somewhere. She backed a ways and pulled well off the road onto a gravel patch that didn't look hot.

“We can walk it from here.”

Maeve noticed him retrieve the pistol and stick it in his waist but didn't object. They could always dump it if they had to. She grabbed an old pair of binoculars her father had given her and slung them around her neck. Stepping up onto the berm at the edge of the road, she could see that the hills were charred all around, smelling that tingly fire smell, with small trees and bushes reduced to upright black sticks and hardly reacting to the gusty wind which whisked ash eddies up off the ground. A few spots fumed like volcanic vents, but the active fire was far below them, an almost continuous arc of red flame flickering and surging at the base of the smoke column.

Not far off the road, down a lonely gravel drive bordered by a little surviving iceplant, there was a sooted-up slab foundation with a rock chimney and a few blackened studs sticking up, all of it still smoking angrily in the wind. It was painful to look at, it was so definitively destroyed. She examined the hills nearby with the binoculars but reminded herself that the house they had seen on the TV, the one with her father's car, must be higher up near the origin of the fire, probably out of sight. Thumb found an address painted on the curb at the driveway, which wasn't far off the one they had worked out from the Thomas's.

They waited on the berm for a time, watching a helicopter with a water bucket on a cable and a fat old two-engine propellor plane dropping chemicals on the fire.

“There's no point trying to get up to that house,” she said. “If Dad was up there, they'll have got him out already.” Dead or alive, she thought, but superstitiously she didn't say it aloud. “If he's … okay, he'll probably be down there, ahead of the fire. Let's go.”

“What if they see us?”

“They've got other stuff to worry about. The fire's not going to turn back on us.”

“How are you going to be?” he asked, still hesitant, pointing to the ostomy bag under her loose blouse.

“If I have to, I'll empty it. I hope it won't upset your stomach.”

“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?