Streets on Fire (21 page)

One of the fangs was coming through the matted cloth and it hurt like hell. Jack Liffey managed to wrench his body around and slam the dog over himself to the opposite side. The dog’s body hit heavily, the furious chewing only interrupted for an instant before the dog’s legs were digging for purchase again. Jack Liffey found that opposing those mad surges of dog energy was exhausting him.

“I got a night scope, mister! Don’t hurt that dog!”

“Call it off!” he shouted up the slope.

“Not a chance.”

His jacket was beginning to give up the fight and it wasn’t going to be long before his forearm was raw meat. Jack Liffey got flat onto his back in the slide, tensed and then dug his heels. The instant his heels caught, momentum took him upright, lifting him and the dog off the hillside. He felt his back straining under the weight of the animal. Rex must have weighed in at fifty pounds.

Loco, forgive me, Jack Liffey thought.

He transformed all that momentum into a body spin like an Olympic weight thrower and flung the dog straight out from the hill. There was a sharp pain as angular momentum ripped the dog’s jaw off his forearm. A plaintive howl rose into the night and then a gunshot sent him giant-stepping downward again into the darkness.

“
You bastard
!”

In a few seconds the howl broke off abruptly far down in the ravine and two more shots cracked. He thought he heard the sizzle of a round passing near his ear.

The shots got him kicking off recklessly, and this time he stumbled and began to windmill again, which might have been what saved his life. He landed hard on his chest and slid another twenty feet, the air knocked completely out of him so his insides went solid and he could not breathe. He came to a stop and lay in agony for a long time with his nose in the dirt, fighting lungs that did not seem to work. The shooting had stopped, but lack of air was beginning to panic him.

A breath trickled into him finally, then a shallow exhale, and he eked another small breath, as something inside began to loosen up. Maybe he was going to get to stick around for this life after all. Gradually he became aware of his surroundings: There were no voices calling after him anymore, no more gunshots. He guessed they were regrouping, sending a car down to wherever the ravine would empty him out. Little by little, he found he could expand his lungs. He hoped someone had called the police over the gunshots, but maybe they were a nightly occurrence out in this farthest rim of suburbia, all the would-be Daniel Boones potshotting coyotes and jackrabbits off their decks.

He scrambled down the last few yards into cover in the bottom of the ravine, wedging in among the water willows, mule fat and yerba santa, where he settled to his knees and tried to get his bearings. He parted the leaves cautiously. Back up the hill he could see a spill of light from the deck, where one man was silhouetted against the sky like a tiny tin figure. The figure appeared to be scanning back and forth slowly with the rifle. He knew he had better stay well down in the brush, because his image would stand out like a giraffe at noon in that night scope. These days, you could buy the damn things from gun catalogues for a few hundred dollars.

He brushed himself down and found that his thin shirt hadn’t been torn in the ragged descent, testament to the looseness of the silt on the hillside. Remarkably there was only a skin abrasion, where the dog’s fangs had been torn away, and one little puncture.

There was a faint scent of damp off the ground, though in high summer it could only have come from lawn runoff. There would be no running streams up here. He felt with his hand and the sandy bottom of the ravine seemed dry enough.

What would Daniel Boone do in this predicament? he wondered. Make his way back up the hillside, treading in his own moccasin tracks? Whistle up a faithful Indian companion? There were damn few real options. If he followed the canyon down, he figured he would run smack into one of the Gideon’s 300 sent to outflank him. And up was worse. The night was dark, but not so dark that he couldn’t see how the vegetation thinned out progressively up the ravine until it gave up completely many yards below a drainage pipe at the high road. That was just about where he had parked, he thought, but if he tried to go that way he would be completely exposed for the most perilous part of the scramble. If he settled in for the night, they’d eventually send someone after him. And the longer he waited, the worse it would get.

Down was easier, he thought, so down it was. He got up off his knees and started picking his way discreetly through the brush, trying not to sound like a moose beating the undergrowth. It wasn’t steep, but underfoot there were tippy flat rocks, matted vegetation and loose gravel, all invisible, so he planted each foot carefully before shifting his weight. Here and there, the land dropped away a foot or so in a little terrace and he clung to the branches of a brushy willow to lower himself.

He checked the deck up the hill and the figure still on watch. There was a suggestion now from the man’s posture, a hand to the ear, a cock of the head, that he was consulting a cell phone tucked up to his ear. As Jack Liffey returned to his descent, the aroma of sage grew stronger on the warm air and he realized he could hear faint traffic sounds now, probably from the Simi Freeway far out in the valley. The Ronald Reagan Freeway. There was even, oddly, a smell of frying hamburger on the faint warm wind.

What little light there was caught on a white plastic pipe emerging from the hill at chest level. It wasn’t much bigger than his forearm and it trickled water. He heard it as much as saw it. As he passed the outlet, he could tell that the matted organic matter underfoot was damp. He hoped nothing nasty was coming out of the pipe, just runoff from late night lawn watering. A bit of mud clung to his shoe and the going got squishy for a while, but it hardened up again quickly.

About fifty yards ahead, the ravine fanned out wide and ended at a road embankment as if dammed there. A big culvert pipe passed under the road. Anyone up on the embankment would have been clearly outlined against the lights of the city far out in the valley, and there was no one. So far so good. If he could crawl through the culvert, he might just pass into some domain where there was more than one route downward.

Every hair on his body stood abruptly to attention. An animal squeal
right there
had torn the quiet, coinciding precisely with something soft under his foot, something that yanked away and then hissed angrily at him. As his heart thundered, his mind fastened on the dog he had hurled out into space, but quickly he realized that squeal had nothing to do with a dog, not even the vengeful spirit of a dog. Whatever it was waddled away into the brush, leaving a glimpse of white fur, a stripe—and then, unmistakably, he knew what he had stepped on. A smell billowed over him like rotten fruit, like death, like a chemical plant gone up in flames—in fact, like nothing else on earth. He had been skunked.

His legs, his right leg in particular, had been sprayed point blank and that sweet caustic smell, which he had never minded that much as long as it was faint and distant, off in the brush along the highway as his car roared past, was now so strong that it made him ill with revulsion.

He sat down and started to take his pants off, but thought better of it. Down in civilization he would be better off stinking of skunk than running around in his underwear. And by now it was on his skin, too, so he would stink for the foreseeable future. He was a walking beacon for a quarter mile around to anyone with a nose. He leaned back to get his own nose as far as possible from his legs and retched into the dirt. Fortunately, he hadn’t eaten in a long time and it remained dry heaves.

Just as he stood up, a dark van came fast around a spur of hillside, the kind of sudden ominous digression you experienced in a nightmare, and it squealed to a stop directly above the culvert. That dark rectangle sat there now, completely out of place, a poisoned shape against the rounded innocent slopes. He heard the far door open, and then saw a figure in a cap come around to stare uphill. The figure carried something in each hand, and a bright flashlight came on and began to probe and flit. Jack Liffey ducked deep into the recesses of a mule fat bush, just as the man must have caught wind of him.

“Aw, Jesus H. Christ,” Doug complained into the hot pungent night.

*

“And then Robin went back to her bedroom to get the birthday cake with the sixteen candles on it, and she saw that her big poodle had eaten about half of it. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you she’d baked the magic powder she got from the rabbit into the cake.”

This was the third time Maeve had been forced to loop back through her improvised story. Storytelling wasn’t anywhere near as easy as Ornetta made it seem, but the girl was being very patient. She had turned on her side in the bed and seemed to be rapt. She had listened without interrupting for almost ten minutes.

“And so—poof—he wasn’t a poodle any more. He was a handsome prince with a big chin and long curly hair, and he was grinning at her and promising to carry her away because of all the kind things she did for him earlier.” She knew she hadn’t told it very well, but Ornetta smiled.

They heard noise in the house and listened intently. They were worried; the older women. They both seemed to have aged another ten years over the day, worrying about the riots, then fretting about the girls, in addition to carrying all the unspoken worries about Bancroft Davis, who was staying all by himself across town now and had a heart condition. It was not a good night to need medical help from the outside world.

“Maybe I could have your daddy as a kind of back-up daddy?” Ornetta suggested, as if dropping her expectations a notch.

“I’m sure.” Maeve wondered how she herself would have responded to so much loss, if it would have left her with the feeling that she needed a backup for every relative. A grandma, a just-in-case grandma, maybe a third-stringer. “I’ll tell him we’re already sisters.”

She looked at the tiny spot on her finger, where she had pricked it to mingle her blood with the younger girl’s.

“I wish there was some easier way to be blood sisters,” Maeve said. “It stings.”

“I guess it gotta hurt,” Ornetta said in a small voice. She seemed to know.

*

With his getaway blocked at the embankment, Jack Liffey had retreated a safe distance up the ravine. For the moment, Doug seemed content to wait, as far from the skunk smell as possible. Now and then he washed the beam of his powerful flashlight idly up the canyon, with side trips probing the slopes.

The man from the deck had disappeared, ominously, so there were now two more of them on the loose somewhere. Jack Liffey wondered if one or both were working their way down through the canyon foliage. He listened but could hear only crickets and faint traffic, and the buzz of a light plane far out over the valley. Then he heard a gunshot, close below him, and his whole body convulsed in reflex.

Doug had both arms straight out, and he appeared to be aiming a big pistol, cop fashion, alongside the flashlight. The man’s arms ratcheted up a few degrees and he fired again, then lifted and fired again, apparently firing blindly at likely bushes. There wasn’t much chance of getting hit, but Jack Liffey hugged the ground to make as small a target as possible. There was one zinging ricochet off rock not far away, and after eight shots, the pistol fell silent and the flashlight went out.

These guys were really nuts, Jack Liffey thought. He stared hard. It seemed the man was dialing up a cell phone.

His ear caught a strange sound far up the hill, a
foomp
like the slam of a big air-tight door. He squirreled around in a squat and focused on the row of houses up there. Nobody on deck. Before long there was a glow at the very top of the ravine, near the drain pipe, throbbing to light up the weeds at the edge of a vacant lot. The glow pulsed yellow like a Boy Scout campfire off in the woods. He heard a car start up somewhere in the direction of the luminescence, every sound proposing a direct personal threat. A chill tapped at his neck as paranoia took hold and he snapped around, but Doug still stood on the road, talking now on his cell phone.

The sound of the car engine dipped lower in strain, as if working hard against resistance, and then a large shape made its way slowly into the vacant lot: a car shadow with glowing windows. It was hard for him to believe his eyes. In terrible slow motion, a car with a fire brewing up inside it was rolling across the sloped lot. It looked like a second car was pushing it. The car tilted down abruptly where the lot ended, hung for an instant and pitched off into space. It was a white car with darker fenders on one side.
It was his Concord
.

The car didn’t fall far before its front bumper caught on the dirt and threw it sideways, to tumble side over side with an enraged momentum, tossing off sparks. The roof hit, then a big hop. The crashing and banging of each impact filled the night with gathering discord. He could picture a huge
Looney Tunes
fireball heading straight for him as if a living creature, eating up everything in its path. He looked around hastily, but all he could do was shelter flat in a small outcrop of rock. He went down on his stomach, keeping his neck wrenched up to watch, mesmerized by the terrible downward crash and somersault that was coming his way. He had always assumed that real cars going over real cliffs did not explode the way they invariably did in films—an effect that was undoubtedly touched off by a half stick of dynamite strapped to a gallon bottle of gasoline—but his car was already on fire. What would happen if the gas tank ruptured on one of its impacts? He tried to remember the last time he’d filled up.

All of this ran through his mind in a fleeting instant and then that crashing doom was very close. He clasped his arms over his head and felt a shock in the earth, far too close, heard a horrible rasp of metal rending and then felt the breeze of the poor dying Concord passing directly over him. He sat up quickly and noticed that Doug and the van had skedaddled.