On the Nickel (24 page)

There was only silence and he figured they were ascending silently.

He aimed to the right side of the stairwell, timed it out as best he could to what he heard and fired twice. Not as loud as theirs, but loud enough. Then he fired once quickly to the left, just for the hell of it.

‘Work with that,
pendejos
!' Jack Liffey shouted. ‘I'm Palladin tonight. There's plenty more to come!'

⁴
But only in Woody Guthrie's song and Nunnally Johnson's movie script, both of which were vast improvements on the embarrassingly sentimental breast-feeding scene at the end of the original book.

‘O
h, man, did you hear that?' Paula said quickly to Gloria. ‘That wasn't no firecrackers.' The gunshots had been blocks away, muffled by the walls of a building, but they both knew the difference between a gunshot and black powder tamped into a small cardboard tube for a festival. They knew it intimately and from far too much experience.

‘Makes my day,' Gloria said, settling into a kind of job-related assurance. ‘Damn big handgun. Drug-dealer's piece maybe. A.forty-five or a mag, I'm sure.' She realized this guessing the caliber of a gunshot was like other L.A. residents speculating on the Richter level of an earthquake, an endless local sport.
Probably only a four-point-two, unless it was far away.

‘But I bet there's a lot of that night shit out here. I spent my first New Year's Eve on the job in Seventy-Seventh Street Division, and it was like, you know, Baghdad on steroids. There was automatic weapon fire solid from eleven-thirty to twelve-thirty, I swear to the God of guns, whoever he is. Some of us went out onto Broadway and followed our ears and caught a big Latino family in their own back yard, walking a circle around two card tables with a dozen weapons, guys grabbing the next and the next and firing in the air, while the women sat on folding chairs reloading like the Alamo. I guess it's a tradition in Sonora or wherever. The next morning the janitor showed me what he'd swept off the division's flat roof – two big buckets of fallen blunts and copper jackets.'

They stood beside Gloria's car in the dark and listened intently to the thrum of downtown noise – a crackling transformer on a power pole, the faraway freeways, maybe something deep in the earth turning over slowly.

‘Made me want to wear a metal hat next year, but Ken got me down to Harbor, and Harbor Division wasn't half so bad.'

‘I say it came from there,' Paula pointed. ‘I got radar ears.' Her finger pointed off through a vacant lot. Not far from where her pointing finger ended up she was startled to discover the head of a leather-skinned man with long straight black hair under a headband standing stock still only three feet away, as if catatonic, eyes wide open.

‘Sorry, man,' Paula offered, but he didn't so much as budge.

He looked like a true burned-out case, Gloria thought. A Native American – she guessed that much; her own people. Gloria waved a hand in front of the man's eyes but he didn't come around.

‘Shit. It is the Nature Channel,' Paula said.

Crystal meth could leave people frozen like that for hours, Gloria thought. ‘Let's go on foot and listen for more shots. The car's too loud.'

‘Go, girl,' Paula said. ‘I love this and I hate it.'

‘Really? What part?'

‘The hunt for trouble. Isn't it what we're trained for?'

‘I don't know,' Gloria said. She'd never heard this note of edgy melancholy in Paula's voice. ‘I always think the best part of the job is
un
tangling things. People all choked up in their problems and their relatives. Trying to bring peace to them.' The momentary upset began to melt back into her bloodstream, her nerve fibers.

‘Sure, all that, too. But hunting them out. First you find them, then you whack them a few times upside the head to get their attention – then you bring the peace.'

Gloria tried to take it as a joke, but the tone was pretty grim. Something was demoralizing Paula.

‘And maybe the only peace you bring them is a hellhole like Corcoran for twenty-to-life. So be it,' Paula said.

‘What's this about?' Gloria said. ‘I'm always here for you, Paula.'

‘Welcome to L.A., girl.' Paula laughed, without much humor, as they reached the far side of the vacant lot. ‘What you perceive here is the curse of being an emotional human being. No, a
woman,
a vuln-able pussy under all this damn gear. Sorry, sister. Dieter dropped me hard last week.'

‘Oh, shit. I'm so sorry. You didn't say.'

She shrugged. ‘He was ‘sperimenting, I guess to tell. White boys and that ol' brown sugar, you know how it go.'

‘I can't barely see, man. I'm a cutter, but I got to see good to carve. We got to wait a while for my eyes to bogue it out.'

‘Go for it, Mr Rice. Keep your eyes tight shut. Ain't got no eyedrops but the water'll help.'

‘That steam was awful bad.'

‘Are you gonna be OK?'

‘Outstanding,' Thibodeaux said. ‘A few minutes or so here.'

‘Take your time, little brah,' Steve McCall offered from where they sat side-by-side on the staircase.
A sad little song,
was what he really thought.
This psycho is going to go down hard one day, maybe very soon.

‘He's got iron balls, whoever this Liffey is,' McCall said. ‘Palladin, shit. That fuckstick.'

‘Maybe we got to burn them all out. I got the gas.'

‘Vartabedian wouldn't like
that,'
McCall said warily. ‘You can send that scheme back to your idea fairy.'

‘Burn the fat Armenian out, too. Fuck him.'

‘Man, this is so far beyond right and wrong. Shit belongs to the guy who stays in control.'

Thibodeaux tried to open his eyes, which watered and burned. He knew his partner wouldn't recognize the source of the quotation that was coming. ‘It's nobler to declare yourself wrong than insist on being right – especially when you're wrong.' He cackled, but the pain made him grimace, and he had to press the heels of his palms to his eyes.

McCall stared hard at the little man while he seemed to be blinded. This is just more of his adolescent crap, he thought. ‘That some of your Nietzsche shit?'

‘Get ready to ratfuck the weak,' Thibodeaux fluted. ‘I had my ass on the line in the sandbox over there just like you, man. You know damn well the bold always fuck over the slaves.'

Things became primitive so quickly, McCall thought. He watched the little man with something like pity. The compulsion to be a loser was always there in losers. For all his bravado, Rice Thibodeaux embodied it like a genuine retard. Petulance was the only real emotion Rice seemed to know.

But then McCall started to recognize a tiny mirror of himself. He, too, had lost everything he'd once owned – a passable marriage to his high school sweetheart with really big tits, a pretty nice cabin behind his in-laws, a job he liked in a hobby-and-comics shop – a whole sense of self back then as a guy for whom things were starting to come out right. Little by little his assets had fled, without him ever making a genuine outcry against the gradual decline of expectations. Betty picked up a librarian lover, moved out, the folks asked him to go, his boss insulted him, and then walking in impulsively and enlisting in the strip-mall Army Center beside the Ralphs. Maybe after that his brain had been devoured by the parasites of the Eye-raq syndrome that they all laughed about. He'd read somewhere that you always decay from the inside out.

So, maybe the little psycho was on the right track after all: they were both just lying there as speedbumps in life when they ought to stand tall.

‘Is there another way to get up here?' Jack Liffey asked.

‘The fire escape is rusted out at the bottom, frozen. Won't move an inch – that ladder thing.'

He'd learned this man's name was Samuel Greengelb, and he acted like the one in charge. They all sat on the hall floor now, around the corner from the barricaded staircase, the boy with his harmonica and notebook and Maeve carrying an aluminum baseball bat for some weird sense of protection. The other small man was wearing a yarmulke and tweeds and cradled his little purse .25. There had apparently been a third tenant standing with them, but he was gone, whisked away by the winds of looming threat. Jack Liffey rested his .38 on his lap, the barrel still vaguely warm from his warning shots. Sitting around the lantern, he guessed they looked like some demented campfire party at a pretty haphazard scout jamboree. The boy was scribbling away like mad, as if taking notes from memory.

‘So, Morty, you're wearing the yarmulke. For religious I never figured you.'

Morty shrugged. ‘I had other things on my mind. Everybody's marginal something. Maybe at heart I'm a Jewish commando.' He grinned. ‘The Lehi Group, Avraham Stern, and all that.'

‘Calm down,' Jack Liffey said. ‘Gentlemen, please concentrate. Any other ways up here? Service stairs? Elevator? Over the roof from another building?'

‘My blessings on you all anyway,' Morty said.

‘There aren't any other stairs, Mr Liffey. The elevator's broken. If they fix it and try it, we hear it groan and gasp maybe ten minutes on its way up.'

‘I don't trust the fire escape,' Maeve put in. ‘The bottom may be broken, but what if they go up to the second floor and go out a window?' She gave them a moment to consider her logic. ‘It comes out in that room. I saw it.' Their eyes all went to a doorway standing open nearby.

Greengelb clapped his forehead: the What-an-ignoramus gesture. ‘The young woman is perfectly genius. I never thought. What a
shmuck
! That's the old Rubio room, the cookroom. A little hibachi Miguel kept out on the fire escape so we could all cook some meat. About his
carnitas
he always warned us was pig.' He shuddered a little.

‘You're Morty?' Jack Liffey asked the man with the .25.

The man nodded. ‘Morton Lipman. Retired working-class Jew. I'm a proud cobbler. Yes, Jews without money, we exist.'

‘Mr Lipman, you're armed. Would you go into that room and keep watch for now? You can fire a couple of wild shots if somebody starts to come up. Please try not to hit anybody.'

‘Take my light,' Greengelb said magnanimously, holding out a red plastic flashlight wound with tape.

Morty Lipman seemed to give everything he did some extra thought. ‘I'm leaving the door open, OK, so I can run away from any
golems.
Man makes plans but …' He poked his thumb toward the ceiling to indicate The Man Upstairs.
‘He
laughs. Anyway, the darkness I don't like. I admit.'

‘The Lord will provide,' Greengelb said.

Lipman winced. ‘I only wish He would provide until He provides.'

‘Go,' Jack Liffey urged. ‘We don't have time for a theological dispute.'

‘It's
cultural,'
Lipman said earnestly, and he walked stoically toward the open doorway.

‘Anything else?' Jack Liffey asked. ‘Air shafts? Trash drops?'

‘Nothing, sir. You think our slumlords offered all the fancy amenities like Mr Hilton? Swimming pools? Gym? We're lucky to have glass windows.'

The man laughed for a moment, his belly snapping open two buttons of the tight white shirt, his legs still tucked under him stiffly. He looked like an outlandish update on the Laughing Buddha, Jack Liffey thought. And why not? Children were surrounding him – Maeve and Conor. If he remembered right, the Laughing Buddha was the one who would bring abundance – patron of the weak, poor, and children. Maybe one day he'd become a Buddhist. His goofy mental state hadn't completely left him, despite the danger.

‘How long have you lived here?' Jack Liffey asked Greengelb.

The man seemed a bit chagrined. ‘Seventeen years, Mr Liffey. When I came – staying here so long as that, I had no intention at all. But they fail you badly sometimes, families. Am I not right? And I was a bigger asshole then, too. To divulge this is not so easy with my mind slowly failing.'

‘Yes, families fail,' Jack Liffey agreed.

‘Dad!'

He held up a palm. ‘People all do their best. Sometimes more, but it's up to the children to do better.' He meant Maeve.

‘The children …' Greengelb gave an elaborate shrug. ‘Mine moved away. They forgot this old embarrassment, their father. The
putz.
Their mother remarried. Slowly I got forced out of the jewelry business. And they never answered my cards. For many years. It eats the soul, all that being ignored – if there is a soul. But, you know, after a while being ignored is just another kind of underpants you wear.'

He was indeed a Buddha, Jack Liffey thought. Reconciled to loss. Desire extinguished.

‘Hey, retards!' An angry shout up the staircase burst over their little campfire chat. It was the man with the golden curls. ‘We got guns tonight, too. And we got matches and lotsa gasoline. Think it over if you got some big yen to burn up alive. Every one of you.'

Jack Liffey stood up and waited near the staircase, with his back to the wall. He had a strange sense of being inside the moment, on top of things. ‘Your boss wouldn't like that!' he shouted. ‘You'd burn the hotel down to save it?'

‘Fuck my boss, all the way up and down his asshole! We got a failure to connect here, Mr Palladin. Don't go and disengage. Here it is: you're all going out on the street
tonight
or you're crispy critters! End of story.'

Jack Liffey thought of loosing another shot, just for the hell of it, but what good would that do? The threats sounded serious.

‘Let's get your man Vartabedian down here and negotiate!' Jack Liffey called. ‘It's all doable. I promise.'

‘I don't think so, Mr Palladin. This is just you and us – tidy as shit, no capitalism involved. Just our egos.'

‘I'll have to consult,' Jack Liffey said. ‘We got armed men out on guard. Give me an hour.'

‘Don't bullshit a bullshitter. You got fifteen minutes to live, and then I torch the whole place. There won't be no more warning.'

A chill went up Jack Liffey's spine, extinguishing the last of his strange euphoria. Burning alive was one of the routes to death that terrified him. Right up there with all the others.