The Concrete River (19 page)

Then the water did reach their elbows. He tried to convince himself the rise was only from the feeder pipes they passed, and those puny streams wouldn't raise the level much more.

“
Peter
!”

He heard the faint roar behind them, an animal loosed into the storm drain. There could be no going back against the current, but he resolved to make the manhole before it arrived.

“We're almost there,” he lied.

The roar drew closer, chasing away all other sounds. His mind was busy fighting the panic:
go on, scream and give it up.

The light was so faint he was afraid of overrunning the manhole so every few strides he slapped at the top of the pipe.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” she wailed.

The water dragged at his arms and thighs as he tried to hurry, and then the water level teased his belly. He visualized a narrow band of air trapped in the top of the pipe. Would it stay? He was assailed by a mental picture of the manhole he had seen as a boy, down near the ocean, the cover blown off late in a storm and water spouting into the air.

Eleanor cried out as if struck.

Water buoyed him and he was half dog-paddling, half hurled along, his head scraping the top. Panic breathed into his ear. She might have screamed but the sound was lost in the boom of a train through a tunnel.

“Here it is!” he cried out. He fought for something to grab in the shaft overhead. There was blessed light. His fingers scrabbled against concrete and the water pressure was pitiless. The flow dragged his legs past, flipping him onto his back so that his fingers strained to hold onto the last edge of the shaft. He heard her hacking wet cough. Then a ton of elbows blasted into him and tore him loose so the two of them swept into darkness, gathering momentum.

“Cling to me! Keep your face forward!”

He was disoriented as he surfed along, feet first, and the oily foam made it hard to breathe. Sticks and debris floated alongside his face and something clung to his shoulder, buffeting, trying to drag him down. It took a tremendous act of will to keep from hammering his fists into her. Her nails bit into his neck, and the rage became primitive as he lost orientation: she was taking away his one chance.

He breathed through the fingers of one hand, trying to keep out the slime. There were only a few inches of air in the top curve of the pipe now. He saw a flash of light and heard a momentary booming—an echo from a direction he only realized was up when they were past. They'd swept past the next manhole. The nightmare image came again: pinned flat to a grille of steel bars as water boiled past them. The incredible
pressure
of all that water behind.

Her grip on him weakened. He cried out as they hit the wall at a curving reach in the storm drain. There was a flash, either real light, or some artifact of the blow, and then he found a metal rung in his hand, startling with its solidity. He pawed desperately with the other hand.

He got both hands on the crusty metal, and still the water tried to tear him loose, pulling on his legs with an impossible force. It must have been Eleanor's deadweight clinging somehow to his leg. His palms burned. He tore his head out of the foam into an airspace, gasped one clear breath and shouted with relief. He wanted to kick his legs free of her, kick off the killing tug. The impulse was almost irresistible.

Control! By pulling with all his strength and thrusting with his free leg, he wrenched himself around until he was sitting upright in a small manhole shaft, head and shoulders out of the water as the current streamed hard past his hips. He made the immense mental effort to force himself to release the rung with one hand and reach down to the deadweight. He pawed for anything to grab. His hand slid off what must have been a bare shoulder, rejected her hair, and finally closed on a thick brassiere strap. He found a reserve of strength somewhere and for one terrible instant used both hands to drag her forward. Finally her head broke the surface. He wedged her body between himself and the edge of the shaft and let the water and debris thunder past.

He gasped for a moment, allowing himself a moment of peace. Far overhead there were three pinholes of light. As the panic subsided, his eyes adjusted to what might have been Eleanor Ong's immobile face. She didn't seem to be breathing. He barked out a snarl of frustration, a sound he had never made before and hardly recognized as his own. In despair he began to press her chest against the tunnel edge and release it, no more than a token of artificial respiration. Set her adrift, a tiny voice said. Climb out. You did what you could. You're absolved. He thought he saw a ghostly shoulder covered with lacerations, bleeding darkly into the current, but he wasn't sure.

He swore. He cursed. In anger he shook her shoulder. She felt clammy and cold.

“
Eleanor
!”

He slapped her face hard and abruptly a spasm took her body. She rolled her head around and vomited. Then she shuddered and coughed, pawing him with sudden strength. He placed her hands on the rung between his.

“Hang on, hang on.”

He babbled and laughed wildly, had no idea what he was saying. It was a miracle! She was alive! They'd have to say rosaries for years to make up for this! She went on retching for a long time, until she ebbed back into a steady sobbing.

It was time to get out. He helped her get her arms up two rungs and then boosted her two more, but she would never make it any farther under her own power. He could see a white flash of bone and realized she had a compound fracture half way up her lower leg. She must have been in shock for a long time. He got his head between her thighs to lift her piggy-back another rung. Then another. She was heavy.

“I love you, God,” she said deliriously. Who was it she loved? Him or God? “I've never loved like this.”

Straining with legs and arms he hoisted her rung by rung, and she pulled her upper body along as best she could. The boom of the water diminished.

“We'll make it, we will.”

Finally she uttered an excited grunting, like a mute. Her head had reached the manhole and the three bright eyes showed through. He could tell she would never have the strength to lift the manhole cover by herself and he used his hands to plant her good foot firmly on a rung. Then he fought around her in the confining shaft, noticing for the first time that her blouse had disappeared somewhere and her shoulder really was lacerated. He heaved against the cover, but nothing moved.

He caught his breath, panting like a wrestler, and planted himself firmly. He couldn't fail now. He put all his strength into a thrust, and finally heard a metallic complaint. The manhole lid broke free and clanged an inch to one side. One more shove and light flooded in, the sky overcast and raining but the cool air delicious of amnesty.

Were they far enough from the dairy? He slid the cover again, not really caring where they were as long as they were out of the storm drain. He boosted up onto his belly and then he was outside, lying on a deserted wet street. He reached back for her hand and forearm. Her head rose out of the manhole, gasping in the wonderful cool air. He hauled her out.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our…”

For almost a minute he lay laughing softly as she said her prayers and then they both ran down.

“I was tough enough,” he said with relish. “And I owe you a laugh for your joke.”

“Huh?”

“The pickle in my pocket.”

She just shook her head slowly, and he realized she was delirious and didn't remember much of anything. She was bedraggled and bleeding and pale, and he saw her watching him with a curious tenderness. She set one palm against his cheek. She smiled gently, and later he would blame himself for not demanding an explanation for what she said.

“I don't think you're going to make it,” she said.

He sat with his right leg cranked across his left knee, rewrapping the Ace bandage. The whole right ankle was black as ebony under the skin where the ligaments had torn. The left wasn't a picnic, either, and it had its own Ace. By noon the joints usually got used to the new dispensation and stopped complaining as much. Codeine helped, too.

He was a lot better off than Eleanor Ong who was at Hollywood Presbyterian-Queen of Angels, trussed up in traction like a spitted roast. They weren't letting her see anyone yet. He wondered idly what happened when they merged a Presbyterian hospital with a Catholic hospital, if the Nuns had to work in pairs with dour Scots nurses so they'd nullify each other.

“Ow!”

What the ankle didn't like was a lateral twist.

The future was still in the balance. He was beset by a kind of manic-depression that yawed from moment to moment. One moment it was enough to be alive, and the next everything felt precarious again. There were two men somewhere in the city who thought he and Eleanor were dead and would be more than happy to rectify their error once they found out about it. If he dropped a dime on them, there'd just be two different guys a week later.

The violent physical ordeal had left its calling card of mortality. He found he was locked into a profound unease that made him want to go hide in a closet. He took four ibuprofens, an anti-inflammatory dose, and lumbered around his living room with his face screwed up. Mild pain was salutary if you calibrated it carefully. Discomfort was the no-man's-land where ideas germinated.

The doorbell startled him. It was a clumsy mechanical device that you worked by twisting a big thumbscrew on the outside, but he rarely heard it because the guard was supposed to call ahead.

He saw immediately that it was a cop of some stripe. The man wore a dark suit and skinny black tie and he let a leather ID wallet dangle open that said he was FBI. The eyes under the crew cut were as dead as rocks.

“I'm Special Agent Curtis Cobb. Are you Jack Liffey?”

“I thought you guys traveled in pairs.”

“May I come in?”

He thought about refusing, but there was no percentage in it. “You guys all
special
agents? Any of you ordinary agents?”

Cobb stepped in, looking around with a glance that didn't seem to see much but was probably going faster than an adding machine.

“I've got coffee going.”

He expected a refusal, but the agent nodded. “I wouldn't say no. Is it strong?”

“You can stand the spoon up in it.”

He went to pour two cups.

“You've got a limp, Mr. Liffey.”

It wasn't a question, so he didn't answer.

“Milk? Sugar? Sweet 'N Low?”

“Black. Were you injured? It looks like
both
ankles. That's unusual.”

Let's see who blinks first, Jack Liffey thought. “What's on your mind? Go on, sit down.”

The FBI man sat on a director's chair and Jack Liffey handed him the coffee and then swung a hard chair around so he'd be about two inches higher.

“The police in Cahuenga say you were looking into the murder of Consuela Beltran.”

He waited. It was shaping up as an extended duel of politenesses, and the FBI man was beginning to glare a little.

“This touches on an ongoing investigation of ours. You really have no shield protection to keep from telling us what you know. You don't want to screw around with us, Mr. Liffey, you really don't.”

He thought about that for a moment. He was right, he really didn't want to screw around with them. He just wanted a level playing field.

“I find missing kids, it's what I do. I found Mrs. Beltran's boy once, a couple years ago, and brought him home. Then Mrs. Beltran went missing and her mom came up from Mexico and asked me to find her, but when it turned into murder, I figured to butt out.”

“But you didn't butt out right away, did you?”

“Murder is for the cops.”

Cobb went to the inner pocket of his coat. It turned out to be two small photographs which he leaned to hand across—the Cowboy and his friend, mug shots with numbers under their chests. It was nice to see them that way.

“The first is Bobby O'Connor, lately of Navasota, Texas. They call him Snakeskin.” That was the Cowboy. “The other one is Al Butera, they call him Squinty. He's not much, but he's company for Snakeskin.”

“Colorful names,” Jack Liffey said.

“They work for one of the families in New York. These two aren't made men or anything. Even Butera. He's Sicilian, somebody or other's cousin, but the only way he'd get into the Mafia is if they went to affirmative action. They're just mechanics. You know what that means?”

He nodded. It was what he figured. There would always be a couple more hired thugs on deck.

“I think you had a run-in with these two. They messed up your office. Then you hit their car. Sort of a Laurel and Hardy routine.” He seemed to like the coffee, but he had nowhere to put down the cup. Jack Liffey had seen to that. “You ever see the two-reeler about the Christmas Tree Salesmen? It's that guy with the mustache and he slams the door on their tree. Then they fume a bit and Laurel scratches his head and Ollie tears off the guy's porch light. The guy with the mustache does a slow burn and then marches out and dents their car. Pretty soon he's wrenching fenders off and they're throwing his piano out the window.”

“I can see you don't have a lot to do all day in the Bureau.”

“Looking at your ankles, I figure there's a few tits-for-tats we don't know about.”

Jack Liffey remembered the two thugs talking about having to get permission. “Who's their boss?” he asked.

Cobb perked up a little at the direct question. It gave him an opportunity to come back and swing his dick a little. “We're not in the business of disseminating information. You want to help us?”

“I already did.”

“I can tell you that the case you butted into relates to the big-time casinos, not the kind that hire overweight washed-up singers for their lounge acts. There's a lot of people want to see that action stay in Vegas and there's others want to spread it around. The last casino built in Vegas cost over a billion dollars. You don't want to stand between these guys.”

“I think we pretty much agree on that. How do I convince them I'm out?”