Dangerous Games

by John Shannon

  She couldn’t pretend to ignore the chill on her thigh any longer. She mustn’t have fastened the clip properly. She swore softly at Oskar and headed for the bathroom before things could get any worse. The instant she locked the door behind her, she tugged her loose jeans down and felt her thigh, but there was no dampness. She lifted the shirt and the bag showed no evidence of a leak. Puzzled, she hoisted and wriggled the jeans back into place and then she began to laugh.

  Amazing what tricks the mind will play on itself, anticipating the worst. She could feel right away that she had a whole pocket full of quarters, and it was only a metal chill she’d felt through the cloth of the pocket.

  Dear Diary,

  I am really sure now that this job is not for me. The typing makes me nervous tho I am pretty good at it & switching back to clicking things on the screen confuses me. And little did I realize that it would make me bashful to think a man is looking at me in this little round eye on top of the screen. Oh really I just dont like stringing men along & pretending their not on a timer yet when they are already. The other girls are nice & helpful to me but I just keep imagining dancing in the forest in a white robe & my buckskin coat with an eagle feather. I felt so good those days with Tuu-ee the deer watching before Bobby & Jo ran off together & left me.

  EIGHT

  Little Deer

  The viewing room at Hollenbeck was shabbier than the one he’d been in over on the Westside, but so was everything else on the Eastside that depended on public funds. Looking for a runaway kid once, he’d had a quick tour of all-Latino Roosevelt High near Gloria’s house, and by the time he got to the graffiti’d bathroom with the toilet-stall doors ripped off, he’d decided that a suburban white PTA would have lynched any administrator who allowed this to happen to their kids’ school. But the alienation of children was such an intractable problem, he thought—showing up as graffiti, random vandalism, litter, and good old daily hostility. Poke it down here, and it popped up there.

  “Stand by, Liffey, it’s the usual,” Sgt. Padilla said. “When they march in, the suspects won’t be able to see you through the one-way here.”

  For some reason the back bench of the viewing bleachers was filled with a half dozen cheerleaders in tiny purple skirts, chewing gum and giggling. They looked junior high age, all Latinas except one girl who looked Chinese, and he did his best not to look up their microskirts.

  “Are they here to root for their favorite suspect?” Jack Liffey asked.

  Padilla barely smiled. “They’re here for the next show. You can put up with it, right?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  “Come right up to the glass and get a good look.”

  Jack Liffey came down front, and Padilla looked him over like an unusual species of rodent, not necessarily repellent, but not something you wanted around. “You didn’t by any chance connect yourself to the Maravillas, did you? I mean, so the gangbangers would think so.”

  “Huh?”

  Padilla shrugged. “I suppose not. You see, the Maras are evergreen on the street.”

  “Could you say some of that in English?”

  “They don’t pay street tax to the Eme so the O.G.s have declared them open season. No special reward. It’s just okay to hit them any time you want.”

  He got some of that: The Eme was the Mexican Mafia, at least the Southern California form of it, and O.G.s were Old Gangsters—the seniors and leaders. “Christ on a crutch. Did I make some gang sign accidentally?”

  “Relax, it’s not like a Cub Scout salute. You got to go out of your way. Let’s look at the bangers.” He hit a button on an old squawk box on the wall beside a torn grille. “Dori, send in the heavy boys. No butt-pinching on the way.”

  “Dean, how dare you! I’m too wore out for such jokes.”

  “We happen to know you like those tight teenie butts, that’s all.”

  There was only a feedback squall, making Padilla wince and switch it off. Six young Latinos sloped in and faced front under the big numbers as if they were familiar with the drill. Most did their best to put on a stony face. They all wore some variation of the uniform: baggy Chinos and checkered wool shirts or plain white T-shirts, and all had either the odd T-mustache or a mustache plus some form of lower-lip beard. It was the second one, and Jack Liffey recognized him once again, just as he had in the photograph. He was muscular, a little shorter than the others, impassive, closed off from his surroundings as if living completely in his head.

  “See anyone?”

  “I don’t know.” Jack Liffey settled on another one with a T-mustache. “Could you have number five come forward a little?”

  The sergeant switched over the intercom and ordered number five to take two steps forward and then turn to show his profile. The boy flashed a hand sign with splayed fingers as he came forward, probably his gang sign.

  “I didn’t say show us your brains, Chato,” Padilla bawled.

  One of the other youths broke up and had to bite his lips as Number five glared back at him.

  “Nah. Sorry. Too tall.” Jack Liffey had the definite sense that Padilla was watching him with much more interest than the boys.

  “He was in a car, how can you tell how tall he was?”

  “Tall people broadcast it.”

  “Let’s try the short one then. Number five, step back. Number two.” The shooter took a breath and came forward without making a fuss. “Cabrón,” Padilla announced, “I want you to look straight at the mirror and challenge me. Say, ‘Where you from?’”

  The boy mumbled a little, looking straight ahead.

  “You can do better than that.”

  “Where are you from?” the boy said, leaving too much space between the words as if he were translating from some other language.

  “Doesn’t sound like him,” Jack Liffey said.

  “You sure?” Padilla seemed to know something.

  “I had a good look at the guy. He’s not there.”

  Padilla went on a bit longer, calling boys forward, but Jack Liffey shook his head and shrugged them all off.

  “Okay, latas, beat it. All of you, out.”

  The cop turned on Jack Liffey again. “You’re not running some game on me, are you, Liffey?”

  “What would that be?”

  “I think it’s called Get My Own Revenge.”

  He shrugged. “My daughter’s doing a lot better today, and I’ve calmed down. The guy wasn’t there.”

  “Sure, sure. Just don’t let me find one of those kids beat to a pulp some night and your knuckles all scraped up. I’ll remember.”

  “You got it. Thanks for trying.”

  Jack Liffey slipped away as fast as he could—as Padilla was dealing with the cheerleaders—and he hurried down the musty yellow corridor past tired propaganda posters about fighting crime and stopping graffiti. It was as ugly and dispiriting a space as any in creation, and he almost sprinted to his VW in the Official Police Business lot. He started up and pulled out to wait in the alley behind the station as a black-and-white accelerated out past him in a big hurry, then turned on its siren briefly as it sped onto the next street. Two of the boys came out and got into a beat-up Hyundai, not an especially common car in Boyle Heights. Another came out and strutted away angrily. Finally, his guy stepped out the back door of the station. He sauntered across the lot, still lost in his own head, and unlocked a big American-style bicycle that was chained to a substantial pepper tree in the parkway of Chicago Street.

  Jack Liffey let the car drift along the alley and then turned to follow up a residential street as his guy pedaled hard, and he stayed a block or so back. The bicycle was going fast enough so it didn’t feel terribly unnatural to drive so slowly. It was a balloon-tire, coaster-brake Schwinn, just like his first bike back in San Pedro. He didn’t know they were still around—probably a retro fad.

  He had to brake the car for a moment as three boys ran a small ice cream pushcart fast out of an alleyway. Behind them, an old Latino in baggy whites, proba
bly a recent immigrant, was just zipping up after wetting down a bush when he noticed his cart was missing. The boys were already digging into the chest and hurling Eskimo pies and Fudgesicles into yards left and right. A wisp of dry ice vapors trailed out of the cart’s open hatch, like some ghostly emanation.

  Jack Liffey had no time to deal with popsicle theft. He kept his eye on the bicycle pulling ahead and accelerated past the scene. In a few moments, he was only a block behind it again. There was one worrisome period when he had to idle, double parked, as his quarry parked and popped into a mini-mart that had an Aztec warrior painted on the front wall. He came back out rapping a pack of cigarettes and headed on.

  There was another nervous moment after a red light caught him at Chavez with the bicycle dwindling north ahead of him. This was the business heart of Boyle Heights, once known as Brooklyn Avenue, and the streets were busy enough here that it would have been easy to lose the kid. But he wasn’t far back when he saw the bike turn up an alley. This was a problem, since the alleyway was only a car wide and his old VW would sound like a taxiing 747 in the space. Jack Liffey waited at the alley entrance, the road surface as cracked and weedy as a mud flat, assuming the boy was almost home.

  Fortunately, he was right. The kid stopped and leaned over to open a gate in a low wooden fence and then yanked the front wheel into the air and dexterously pedaled unicycle-style through the gate and into the yard. The gate shut behind him, but Jack Liffey could see one side of the big swing-open windows on the detached garage open momentarily.

  He drove up the alley as quietly as he could. What he saw of the old clapboard garage was covered with muralwork and fancy graffiti. It sat behind a small cottage, the back yard full of bougainvillea and geraniums and a pile of used lumber. I’ve got you, you bastard, Jack Liffey thought.

  He paused in the alley when a graffito came into view that he felt he could translate:

  Siempre quise ser alguien

  Ahorra soy yo.

  It wasn’t that hard even though the writer had misspelled a word and left off all the proper accents. I always wanted to be somebody: Now I’m me.

  Jack Liffey drove on around the block and down the street in front to get the address. Sleep tight, fuckhead. Stay yourself a while longer.

  She was taking a break in the old kitchen, sitting at the Formica table with a cup of coffee that she’d finally broken down and poured, listening to a girl named Debbie, who came from Beatty, Nevada, maybe one hundred miles by fast untraveled and unpatrolled two-lane highway from where she’d grown up in the Lone Pine Rez.

  “I hate that effing desert,” Debbie said. “I really do. It dries your skin like a furnace, and it’s full of crotchety old farts who never give a soft word to nobody. My pa used to say, all the Okies who came out west and couldn’t make it on the Coast bounced back to the desert.”

  Debbie was in her forties and would have been good looking but her mouth seemed to have caved in as if her jawbones had been extracted and new ones substituted, two sizes too small. When she opened her mouth, Luisa could see that her teeth were yellow and crooked. For break, she had thrown on an immense T-shirt with stylized flames and a slogan that said: My old man went to hell and all he got me was this damn T-shirt.

  “That’s not my case,” Luisa said. “My people been there forever. I heard grandma say they used to send the sheriffs up into the hills to drag us down in chains and make us work on the white ranches.”

  “Aw, that’s awful. We had us Injuns in Beatty, too, but they seemed to me even meaner than the whites.”

  “Maybe they had a reason.”

  “I’m not criticizing, Lou. I just like people to be gentle and kind.” She sipped at a glass of something bright red like Kool-Aid. “I had a guy this morning kept talking about my package. Wanted to see my package.” She laughed. “I thought I ought to stick a big bow in my undies, see what he said.”

  “Most of these guys are so sad,” Luisa said. “I mean they’re kind of like those high school boys who get rowdy and pull your hair when they really want to just say they like you. It’s so stupid. What do they get out of watching me play with a vibrator?”

  “I don’t know, hon. For a lot of guys, I think they just like to be reminded there’s sex someplace in the universe. And maybe the more stupid we look, the better for them.”

  The front door slammed and they fell silent, wondering if it was Joe, the fat man who ran the adult magazine and video store down the block and came in once an hour to make sure everybody was behaving.

  “Hey, girls. Crapping out on my time, I see?” It wasn’t Joe. It was Keith, and Luisa could see he was really fucked up. She could read him now by his eyes, and his eyes were all over the place, squirrelly and going flat.

  “This is our break time,” Debbie said.

  “Did I ask you?” He grabbed Debbie’s hair and yanked her head back. “Did I ask you?”

  “I don’t work for you, man.” Her voice squeaked a little over the pain.

  “You still better respect me, bitch. Are you really from hell?” he said, noticing the T-shirt.

  “You think you’re a cop?”

  “I asked you a question, bitch.”

  “Stop it, Keith,” Luisa demanded.

  Without looking, he backhanded her, and his hardened hand knocked her off the chair to the floor. She thought about biting a chunk out of his leg, right through the fancy slacks, but remembered the wonderful advice her grandfather had given her once—Never kick a bear unless you can kill it.

  “Are you from hell, bitch?” he repeated.

  “Yeah, you bet.”

  “You bet what? Say it, say I’m from hell.”

  “I’m from hell.”

  “I can’t hear you, bitch.”

  “I’m from goddamn hell, sir.”

  He let go of her hair with a showy flourish. “See how easy that was? Now the only thing left between us is respect.”

  “Sure thing.”

  He helped Luisa up. “I got another job for you. You’re destined for better than this shit-hole. Put this on.” He took a minuscule knit bathing suit out of the pocket of his jacket. She could see that it wouldn’t cover much. “Are you smart?” he asked her.

  “Why?”

  “I ask, you answer. You’re always reading books. You got to be smart enough to memorize.” Debbie was glaring at him, sipping at her red drink, as if very near hurling it at him.

  “I guess so.”

  He handed her a four-by-five card solid with printed text. It seemed to be about a video game called Robo-Tanks Invade.

  “Just so it’s not Danger Games,” Debbie said, and Luisa remembered she’d been warned about that.

  “You want some more, Miss Hell?” He held a finger an inch from her eye.

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re graduating today to spokesmodel,” Keith told Louisa. “You get to stand around looking sexy in front of a big TV screen and talk whatever shit, while a bunch of businessmen and fifteen-year-old boys try to get a look at your tits. How hard is that? Just memorize that shit. Let’s go.”

  “What about this job?”

  “That’s all squared. Forget it. It’s history. I’m going to take you places.”

  “Call me,” Debbie bleated, and Keith glared at her as he grasped Luisa’s upper arm with his hand and hauled her out of the kitchen.

  “Forget her,” he told Luisa. “Trailer trash like that will only drag you back. You’re on your way to being a star.”

  She wondered how she was supposed to change from a frilly negligee to a bathing suit in the little open Miata, but when they got outside, he had a big white van instead, and he trundled the door open to reveal a half dozen other young women in skimpy bathing suits, sitting on their haunches on the bare interior. Their eyes all came up at the sound of the door, and they fell silent, near alarm at the sight of Keith.

  “Girls, this is Luisa. Somebody share a little nose or something with her to charge her up, and we’re off f
or the Convention Center.”

  As usual Chris had cadged an address for him out of the system, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to know how. If it was still current, Little Deer lived in Woodland Hills on the north flank of the Hollywood Hills looking out over the San Fernando Valley. Not a bad address, something on Sorrento, not far off Old Topanga Road. Italian names often added a little class in Southern California, though he doubted that would work in Connecticut.

  On his way into the hills, he had to pull to the side suddenly to avoid a conga line of kids on blade skates who were steering right down the middle of the road, three boys and two girls. They were coming very fast, and each of them wore a plastic globe with rabbit-ear antennas, like a space helmet from some fifties sci-fi movie. But what really grabbed his attention was the fact that the space helmets were all they were wearing, not even knee pads, on their pasty white flesh. He waved cheerfully as the snakeline of naked kids rattled past, like scalded animals, but they were intent on maintaining their course. It suggested one of the new humiliation TV shows, but he didn’t see any cameras.

  He entered an older neighborhood and found the house. It was pseudo-Norman, with thick stucco walls, a steep pitched roof to throw off all the snow and a big parabolic window in front. It had the look of being lovingly tended over the years. A cobblestone driveway appeared to have been added lately and a magnificent bed of roses, though none of this was necessarily Little Deer’s work, he realized. With the turnover in Southern California, you were always inheriting somebody else’s sweat and dreams.

  He knocked. There was a little old-fashioned eyehole, a metal grid the size of a postage stamp with a tiny swing-open door inside. He had his phony badge ready and noticed that he was starting to lose some of the silvering off the plastic. He’d have to get something better.

  “Speak,” said a raspy voice as the eye-door came open.

  He held up the badge. “I’ve been sent by the Adult Entertainment Coalition to talk to Miss Little Deer. About her trust.” That was ambiguous enough, he thought.

  “They should have called.”