Dangerous Games

by John Shannon

  “The online nursery business died?”

  “Just about all online business died. Except porn, of course. I set up Web sites for folks now, and host them. Babs is studying architecture.”

  The boy on the floor started making thut-thut-thut machinegun noises.

  “How would you like a jackliffey.com?” he suggested.

  “I don’t think so, Chris. I don’t have a computer. I don’t even have a cell phone. It’s good to see you and Babs are still together.”

  Babs had been in a lesbian relationship when Jack Liffey had first dragged her into helping with one of his jobs, and he had introduced the two of them, without any ulterior motives whatever. He had to admit Chris Johnson was a pretty charming character—he had the sort of buoyant energy and confidence that always attracted dogs and children—and he wasn’t bad looking in the bargain. He was so blond he was almost transparent, and he still had the football body he’d once worked at in order to play wide receiver for a college team. Babs had startled Jack Liffey back then by latching onto Chris almost immediately, abandoning in the process a long-time girlfriend. Jack Liffey had been afraid he’d get in dutch with the whole lesbian world, but nobody seemed to object.

  The baby started to wail, and Chris tested the diaper, then offered a bottle. That did the trick.

  “I’ve learned to type one-handed.” He sat and demonstrated at the keyboard of what must have been his primary computer. It was amazing, the blur of his right hand, while the left cradled and fed the baby. “Multitasking,” he said. “I can even tuck a phone in my ear at the same time. I hear you’re shacked up with a cop out in East Los. How’s that working out?”

  “It’s interesting. At our age, we’ve both had enough disappointments in life that we’re still a bit cautious.”

  “You mean she’s about to kick you out.”

  Jack Liffey laughed. “I wouldn’t say that. Our relationship is just teething.” He thought of mentioning Maeve’s drive-by shooting, but he just didn’t want to go into it. “I like Gloria a lot. Trusting takes time.”

  “You never went all that long in between women, my man.”

  “Maybe that was my problem. What about you? At the time, I didn’t bet an awful lot on you and Babs hanging in there.”

  “These little guys make a big difference.” The boy with the trucks was now making airplane swooping sounds. “But they’re worth every worry line. They make you look at life fresh.”

  He didn’t want to get sidetracked into the glories of fatherhood. He had Maeve, and she would do fine. “I have a favor to ask.”

  “Of course. You never show up unexpectedly to play handball.”

  Jack Liffey pulled up an old ladderback chair. “I went to a sporting goods store one time looking for a handball, and, you know, the guy there said they stopped carrying them because they were the number one theft item. Isn’t that a great concept? Eventually they’ll eliminate the number two and number three, and then the store will have nothing worth stealing at all, and maybe all sports will die.”

  “I forgot you were an anti-fan.”

  “It’s not important.” Jack Liffey handed him the flyer—explaining who he was looking for. “I visited that first talent agency on the list, and already I want to run myself through a sheepdip full of disinfectant. Can you hack into their databases and look for her name for me, or anyone else who sounds like an American Indian and signed up in the last two weeks?”

  “Child’s play. I’ll check out some other sources, too, and call you this evening.”

  “Thanks, Chris.” Jack Liffey squatted down by the little boy and picked up a plastic airplane he hadn’t noticed. It was a P-40, with very slight indentations in the gray plastic to suggest the toothy Flying Tiger grin. If there had been a decal, it was long gone. It was strange how seductively beautiful the old prop warplanes could be. “This is great.”

  “From my own youth.”

  “The last time we were on the same side as the Chinese.”

  “Yeah, but they make all our consumer products now. We don’t dare piss them off. We’d have to start over at the Stone Age.”

  Jack Liffey flew the fighter around a bit and tried out his own thut-thut-thut. Little Vance Johnson won the dogfight with brute force, crashing a dump truck into him.

  “I hear you did good today,” Keith hollered over the windrush in the Miata as he drove her over Topanga and down to the Malibu beach house. “You’re a quick learner.”

  She was back in comfortable clothes, jeans, and an old pearl-snap cowboy shirt she liked, with her B-4 bag in her new room. She saw no reason to shout back to him, especially as he wasn’t asking anything much, and she just felt like settling in with the flow of everything, him, the drive, the job. She loved the yellow chaparral along the road, broken up by sumacs, tree tobacco, a few coast oaks—multimillion dollar homes set way up on their own roads.

  She stared at one of those homes for a moment, and though sums of money in the tens of millions didn’t mean very much to her, she decided that, put together, all the homes she’d ever known in Owens wouldn’t trade for one fancy six-car garage like the ones they were passing.

  Ten million here and ten million there and, pretty soon, you’re talking real money. She grinned. One of the girls had said that at break.

  “I got the beach house from surplus inventory of this company I used to work with, picking up failed savings and loans. It didn’t cost me a penny, and, technically, it’s invisible to the tax people. Life is all about deals, kid. You gotta get unblinkered about stuff.”

  He seemed too young to be talking like that, but they came down a hill and turned onto the coast highway. It was a really breathtaking moment for an inland girl, the water blue as a robin’s egg, choppy with a handful of sailboats as the sun was about to go into red couds, and the breakers rolling up and crashing right against the edge of the road. Seeing the Pacific always made her feel an outsider but more so like when it was getting dark, like the other night at the party.

  “If the Levine boys are waiting, don’t say a word.”

  She didn’t know who the Levine boys were, but it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t be inclined to say much to anybody. Soon they came to a row of beach houses right up against the road, only the garages visible, the houses trapped between asphalt and surf. A Porsche was parked diagonally in front of their garage, and two lanky men with no hair at all glared at the Miata as they approached. One of the men looked Asian but tall for an Oriental. Keith did a funny whoop-whoop with the accelerator and came to a stop as the men sauntered over.

  “Hey, thong miao,” the Asian guy said.

  “Fuck you, too,” Keith said evenly.

  “You better be stone cool, you welching cunt,” the other one said.

  Luisa had never heard a man called a cunt before. It seemed weird. The Asian man pulled back a cowboy vest to show that he had a big black automatic pistol in his waist. Looking at the pistol made Luisa feel sleepy.

  “I can get plenty of guns, dipshit,” Keith said.

  “If this place had deer,” the other said languidly, looking over the beach houses, “they’d put out a cocaine saltlick.”

  “We get deer off the hills. I got your money right here.” He tossed them a fat roll of bills held by a rubber band and waited while they flipped through it.

  “You’re my absolute picture of a big time operator, Tweak,” Keith said, “just the cat’s hairball. Next time leave the muscle home, or you can do business with my whole crew of angry spades.”

  “Next time, be on time, jerkoff. Levine waits for no man.” They got into their Porsche, started it noisily and zipped away without looking back into traffic, causing a pickup truck on the highway to fishtail and honk.

  He took her inside and told her to hang out or fix herself some food or whatever, while he did some work in the back of the house. There was a deck over the water that was just stupendous, and she opened the rolling glass window and went out to watch the waves for a long
time. They made her feel good, as if in time they might just wear away everything she didn’t like about the world. The rising and falling roar was immensely soothing. The sun finally went down into a line of cloud over the water, with lights coming on in a few tall buildings down along the curved coastline, probably Santa Monica.

  After a while, he opened the sliding door to say he had to go out, and he’d be gone until late. When it got too cold to stay outside looking at the lights, she came in and watched a huge flat screen TV for a while. But there was nothing on she liked, and the videos lying around were all porn and chop-socki, which didn’t interest her, so she went into her nest and went back to reading.

  She was asleep on the white leather sofa when he came back. He was on something, his eyes flitting around restlessly, but he took her hand and hauled her back to a huge bed in the back room. She undressed and let him do what he wanted to her because that was the way it worked, and she may as well not have been there while he bonked away. Just before he came, he broke a little glass tube under his nose and sniffed something and cried out. Then he rolled off and sighed.

  “Kid, wake me up with your mouth at nine.” And then he was snoring like a cartoon.

  Dear Diary,

  It’s so hard to have a love affair with one of these hell-bent types. I had such longings & hopes for this man & me but he did me wrong almost at once. I slept & wanted to be taken off to some magical place where everybody was nice but even in my dream the men were mean & asked for things from me all the time. They would make fun of me when I got lost in this big city & I didnt know the words they used. I think Keith was one of them.

  My crime was I didn’t wake Keith up early enough for him, as he said to, & he was very mad & as punishment he tore my book in two that I was reading & threw both halfs off the porch onto the sand. It didn’t matter that I had set out a bowl & the cereal for him & made coffee. He wasnt nice to me one minute until he needed me to get in the car. My heart is cracked & I feel so dejected & alone again. Help me, Diary.

  SEVEN

  A Little Hotbed of Tranquility

  The rear fender of the bicycle had fins hacked off an old Cadillac, bullet taillights and all, and they were lashed on crudely with wire and sticking out diagonally. The little trailer platform behind rode low between what looked like blue plastic hot wheels, and on the trailer stood the object that his eye had lit upon before all the rest—a brightly painted five- foot tall Virgin of Guadalupe, complete with her full body golden aura. The old Latino in charge was pedaling his mistress hard up the slight incline. It seemed a lot of weight to be hauling around, physically and metaphysically.

  “Buenas días, Virgen,” Jack Liffey offered out his car window as the statue’s fixed eyes passed fleetingly over him. There were probably far more appropriate salutations, but he hadn’t learned them yet.

  A radio hung off the handlebars playing loud rancheras, some sad complaint about lost love, the Latino equivalent of country and western.

  He could practically have walked to the police substation from home, but he wanted to go on to the Valley to make another stab at finding Little Deer. He was there because Sgt. Padilla had left him a phone message that morning to come in and look at some mug shots.

  Padilla himself wasn’t visible as Jack Liffey entered, but a younger uniformed officer stood at a table dropping an assortment of items into plastic baggies and storing them in a carton—a watch, lidless mustard jar, a hearing aid, a glass globe with a snowman in it. He gave the snowglobe a good joggle to watch it snow before storing it away.

  “Is Sgt. Padilla around?” Jack Liffey asked.

  The officer nodded over his shoulder. He had taken the snowglobe back out of its baggie and was shaking it again. Undoubtedly, he had never seen Citizen Kane.

  “Liffey! Back here.”

  Padilla was in a barren interrogation room, tidying up what looked like several pages out of a family photo album. The sleeves were stiff and opaque brown with cut-out windows that showed only faces, presumably to cover any captions and conceal names.

  “Have a seat. I’ll be ready for you in a minute. How are you and our Gloria getting along?”

  Now that he was publicly living with a cop, Jack Liffey recognized that maybe they all thought of him as part of the extended cop family. Perhaps it would be appropriate to be a trifle friendlier to all lawmen than he usually was, but in this particular case he was still having trouble figuring out the man’s attitude. Anyway, he knew Gloria’s and his relationship was their own business.

  “Just great,” he answered.

  “No you’re not. Nobody gets along great with Ramirez.”

  He remembered the way he’d put it to Chris Johnson the day before and decided to try it again. “Our relationship is teething. We’ll be okay.”

  The cop brought his eyes up to look at him without moving his head. “Suit yourself. How’s your Spanish? I hear you’re doing a course at City.”

  Jack Liffey was a little disturbed to be under so much observation. It was as if the entire LAPD and their loved ones made up a small gossipy town. “Mi espagnol es muy shitty. Can you believe I wasted my time taking Latin in high school? So now I can talk to very old priests and pharmacists.”

  Sgt. Padilla scowled. “Why the hell did you do that?”

  “All the college prep kids did back then. I don’t know, it was a survival of the old classical education days, Greek and Latin, or maybe we were afraid to go into the Spanish classes and compete with all those native speakers.” Racism might have had a bit to do with it too, he thought, but he wasn’t about to mention that.

  “You’d have found out a lot of those kids named Sanchez didn’t speak Spanish so good. They could talk about going to el churcho in their carro, but that was about it. Some of these ckolos get a real shock when they do down to TJ and get laughed at.”

  “Es una lingua hermosa,” Jack Liffey said diplomatically. “I’m only doing three hours a week, so it’s slow. I guess I know just enough to get myself in trouble.”

  “Well, here’s a phrase for you. Estirar la pata. Literally, it means stretch the paw. It’s about the same as saying kick the bucket. That’s where you’re gonna end up if you’re not careful with these guys.”

  He tossed three sleeves across the table, each with about a dozen mug shots.

  “I eliminated a lot of unlikely bangers, guys who live in Compton or Riverside. But these fit your description.”

  Jack Liffey saw him immediately, on the first sheet, but didn’t let on. Padilla had obviously chosen all the ones with unusual mustaches, droopy Pancho Villas, pointy imperials, bushy shrubs hanging over the lip, mustaches with goatees, and several other T-mustaches like his man.

  He kept on talking to Padilla aimlessly while he looked the photos over, as if scrutinizing closely. “Did you choose to work in this division?”

  “I grew up in San Antonio, but I like this part of L.A. It’s got history. You know, the White Fence gang has been here since 1920?”

  “You didn’t have gangs in Texas?”

  “Oh, sure, but it wasn’t the same. L.A. is the gang capital of the universe, and we’re exporting to every country in Latin America now. The blacks are colonizing Kansas and Ohio with little sets of Bloods and Crips, and Mara Salvatrucha controls El Salvador.”

  “It’s drugs.”

  “Sure it is. But you tell me the secret to stopping drugs.”

  “Jobs would help.” He tried to push the sleeve up against the photo a bit to see if there was a name or address associated with the photo, but the stiff cardboard wouldn’t budge. “I’ve narrowed it to five. Can you arrange a lineup so I could see them in person?”

  “Point them out.”

  He choose all the T-mustaches, and one that was almost the same with a blunt imperial. Padilla put Post-its on the photos he pointed to.

  “I’ll see what I can do. We’ll have to do it over at Hollenbeck. They have a lineup room with a one-way.”

  “Thanks.
”

  “How’s your kid doing?”

  “She’ll make it. She’s tough, but she has to wear a shit-bag on her side for a while, and no one her age is going to like that.”

  “Beats estirar la pata, man.”

  “You said it.”

  He realized he hadn’t heard from Chris Johnson for some reason, so he stopped to call from a pay phone at a gas station on the edge of Boyle Heights. Functioning pay phones were getting harder and harder to find, but he couldn’t really afford a cell.

  “Dude, is that really a pay phone?”

  “Sure.”

  “Hold on.”

  Jack Liffey heard a little symphony of electronic sounds, and then the noise broke off abruptly as his three quarters chimed down into the coin return slot.

  “I don’t think I want to know how you did that.”

  “You don’t. I left a message a while ago on your home machine. It took me longer than I thought because one of those nude model outfits actually turns their computers off most of the time. You can’t beat that for a firewall. I’m afraid there’s no record on your kid or anybody like her in the last two weeks, I’m sorry.”

  A huge high SUV, with tire wells like bomb shelters, pulled alongside the phone and throbbed away as the driver gave him the evil eye. Probably waiting for a drug call.

  “Could you do another hunt? Don’t tax yourself, but there was a porn star a few years back called Little Deer. I think she was a Sioux.”

  “Yeah, a real beauty. She did some high quality stuff at the tail end of that era when they still shot on film.”

  “You heard of her?”

  “You probably don’t even know who Bettie Page is, do you?”

  “Nope, but Betty Boop and I used to hang out.”

  The driver in the tall SUV looked at his watch ostentatiously, gave Jack Liffey the finger, and then abruptly gusted away.

  “Tsk, tsk. A guy in your position should keep up on the popular culture.”