by John Shannon
He nodded. “They should have called,” he agreed. It was lunchtime at the one-man office so it wouldn’t do her much good if she tried to phone for verification now.
He heard the unsnapping and sliding of a half dozen bolts, and the big heavy planked door came open a few feet. Jack Liffey rotated his chest a little to give himself just enough space to slide into the tiled entryway, but he wasn’t prepared for the person he saw there. A wizened old crone, shrunk as a raisin, rested her weight on two aluminum arm crutches, her head wrapped in the kind of turban women use when they’re going through chemo. There were bright pink blotches the size of silver dollars on her sunken cheeks, and she couldn’t have weighed more than 90 pounds under the baggy sweatpants and T-shirt. He had a terrible premonition but did not want to make a misstep.
“My name is Jack Liffey,” he said, hoping for reciprocation.
“And you want?” she rasped. She hadn’t budged, and he could not get any further into the house unless he kicked out one of her splayed crutches and elbowed her aside.
“Are you Little Deer?” he asked, as neutrally as he could.
She stared for a while. “That name is no longer in use,” she declared. The weird impersonality puzzled him, as if Little Deer had fled the place, taking the name and all the cash, and leaving this shadow behind.
“What name is in use?”
“Talutah Sunkawakang.” Her voice was becoming weaker, losing force, as if strained through a wad of cottonwool. “A medicine man told my parents that name was suited to my birthpath. It has an English translation, but I have never liked the idea of using English words in this context. Little Deer was invented by a pimp.”
So this was what was left of Little Deer, he thought. He couldn’t help comparing the wraith before him with the vibrant woman in the photos he had recently seen. It wasn’t difficult to guess what had happened.
“Even the name Sioux is a corruption of a French word for our language group. We call ourselves the Dakota, the Lakota and the Nakota. I’m Dakota, or Santee.” She seemed to be running down and breathed heavily as if she’d just run a dash.
“Would you like to sit?” he suggested. “It’s HIV, isn’t it?”
“Full-blown AIDS. But you won’t catch anything, Mr. Liffey, unless you fuck me or drink my blood.”
“I know that, ma’am. What you see in my face is not fear. It’s meant to be sympathy.” On purpose he touched her arm, and offered her his to help her inside. “Let’s sit down.”
She let the half-crutch dangle from its wristlet and took his arm. “Thank you. I have a month or two to live. This visit isn’t about the Adult Actor’s Trust, is it?”
“Well, not trust in the sense of a monetary fund. But, trust, yes.”
The living room to the right was down three steps, and she took them extremely slowly, planting both feet on each stair before feeling for the next one down. Leather sofas and chairs faced a wonderful view of the Valley out the picture window, the way other living rooms faced a TV. There was no television set, he noticed, at least not here.
“I was in the wrong business at the wrong time. But for a while—a profitable while—it seemed like the right business and it let me help several other people. I was good at it, very good, and very beautiful.”
He saw that she had a taste for plain speaking. Maybe the approach of death did that, he thought, or maybe it was just her former profession. He lowered her gently into what was apparently her preferred chair. She sat, ignoring him, lost in her own thoughts.
Her self-absorption interested him. She herself seemed uninterested in the purpose of his visit. But it was understandable in her position, he thought. He didn’t know how he would take looming mortality. Even a random nighttime insomniac premonition of death left him covered with sweat.
She stared out the big window at the air that was beginning to yellow up around the high rises on the valley floor. But still she said nothing.
Jack Liffey took out Luisa’s photograph and studied it a moment before leaning across from the sofa to hand it to her. “Could you tell me if you’ve seen this young woman?”
She looked at it and didn’t reply. But something suggested to him that she had seen Luisa. “Who are you?” she asked finally.
“My name is Jack Liffey. I find missing children and take them home if they want to go. If they don’t, I do my best to make sure they’re not in trouble.”
The dying woman thought about this for a moment. Then she spoke softly: “I saw this girl a few weeks ago. She came to my door just as you did. I don’t know how she found me.”
Jack Liffey started to say something but she held up her hand.
“She was horrified when she saw me, of course, and I tried to use that to get her to go home. But she wouldn’t listen to me. She had an idea that had gotten her this far, and she was determined. She thought she was good at sex and wanted to earn her living that way. There was nothing more I could do to discourage her, and as soon as she politely could, she left.”
She began to cough, and Jack Liffey, who’d seen a pitcher on a table, went over and poured a glass of water. Handing it to her, he asked, “Do you have any idea where she went?”
“I’d heard of a young man who called himself Rod Whipple. An old colleague mentioned he might be better than most of them—or, then again, he might not. But I gave her his name, and if she was as determined to find him as she had been to meet me, well, then, he’s your next visit, I think.”
Jack Liffey thanked her politely and left, seeing himself out. As he started the car he realized he was out of breath, as if he’d run a long, long way.
NINE
Salvage
The blaring commotion was almost unendurable—mindless infuriating noise. A TV screen the size of a bus just behind her bathed her in ever-shifting flicker, and there must have been huge loudspeakers behind the screen, pouring out the blurps and fizzes of laser combat. Robo-Tanks Invade had to compete noisewise with similar games throughout the huge hall, and she was meant to find the dead moments here and there to bark out the phrases she had memorized, “A new generation of complex surface rendering! Four gig data transfer! Do the math.”
Only one made any sense to her: “Renegade machines on the rampage against America.” She was also supposed to switch from foot to foot and shift her pose around three points of the compass, to make everyone aware of the banner just below her chest that said “Robo-Tanks Invade, by Intuity.” Maintaining the cheerful smile was the hardest part, but obligatory. The muscles in her cheeks burned with the pain.
None of the girls she’d come with were within her restricted sight range but several other models were, including a trio in identical feather boas who were go-going like mad on a platform suspended over the front half of a life-size jet fighter. This one seemed to be called “Kill, Jet, Kill!” and every once in a while holes in the jet’s nose burped a little smoke and red lights inside flashed.
“Hey, you, yeah you, you got great nipples!”
She knew her nipples showed through the loose knitting of the unlined bra and she didn’t like it, but there was nothing she could do but smile idiotically at this acne-plagued boy. “Brave American teens rise up to stop the tanks!” she bawled out as something bright red went off behind her head, bathing the boy in firelight.
The crowd was a mix of teens, geekish guys who were mostly taking notes on clipboards and men in business suits talking to one another gravely or shouting into cell phones. There were almost no women, except the bikini girls and a few skinny intense types hanging out with the geeks.
Luckily, she had a good view of a digital clock on the far wall, and since it was approaching nine she expected it all to start winding down pretty soon. It had been a longer and harder day than she’d expected. She was bone weary of posing, and her throat was sore from a genuine attempt to make her outbursts of information heard. One of the girls had given her a little speed late in the afternoon, but that had worn off long ago; now she was ready to sit back do
wn in the van, her back against the metal ribs, and be driven home, potholes and all. She was almost through Treasure Chest Ranch and wanted to get back to find out how it was going to end.
Keith came into view around a kiosk that had done nothing all day but flash images of race cars. With him he had a Japanese man in a three-piece banker’s suit and several of his other girls in tow. He waggled his hand to summon her off the little platform. As she climbed down wearily, the Japanese guy actually made a small bow to her.
“The night is young, Lu,” Keith said. She didn’t like the sound of that at all.
“What’s this?” she whispered to one of the girls.
“Hostess time,” a redhead said with distaste. “For Intuity’s international sales force.” Another one added, “They smell like old butter except they all use something stinky like Russian Leather. If you’re lucky, you can get yours to pass out drunk.”
Keith’s tiny parade left the Convention Center, making its way across the nearly empty street to a fancy hotel with a lobby like a Spanish mission. Intuity seemed to have reserved a large suite on the top floor, and as they came in they saw a half dozen other Japanese men in suits scattered around the room.
“Look,” the redhead whispered breathlessly. “That one’s about to light a Virginia Slim.” It was true, one of the Japanese businessmen on the end of the leather sofa held a lighter to a long pale pink cigarette. “His dick is going to fall off.”
The other women giggled, and Keith turned fast to point at them. “There’s later,” he warned. He handed each of the women a bottle of Chivas out of a cardboard carton and then divied his crew out to the men. Luisa drew the tallest of them, who rose and bowed to her just like the other one. She didn’t know what to do but bow awkwardly back.
“Do you rike great music?” he said to her in a voice so heavily accented it was difficult to make out the words. She thought at first he was asking about someone named Greta Musicker.
“The symphonies by Mr. Baya-do-ven?” he amplified.
“I like books,” she said.
“Very good,” he said. “I also like your literature. We will discuss Mr. Hema-winga-way and Mr. Fawa-ka-ner.” And he led her back out to the hall and then to the room that had apparently been assigned to them.
Kenyon Styles had just chewed him out ferociously for obsessing about the risk, and he was in a bad mood because of it. He’d never been able to handle anger well. If Rod allowed his partner to get the upper hand, Kenyon would just keep for himself the whole payoff they were working for. But this new stunt really was too out-there and even just thinking about it chilled his spine.
“This is completely batshit, Ken,” was almost the last thing that he had, in fact, said, a minute earlier. “You’re going to kill somebody. I mean—fuckin’ A!”
He waited at the bottom of the long curving staircase of the Water Steps that meandered down past several fancy restaurants and shops on the flank of Bunker Hill in downtown L.A. At one side was the rocky rivulet, gurgling away in its chest-high channel, the water that gave the place its name, and on the other side was a handrail that might just keep things under control, with a little luck. It was after one A.M., and that irked him, too, because Kenyon knew he had to get home and get some sleep because he was A.D.ing on an early shoot way out at the other end of the Valley in Chatsworth. It lifted his mood only slightly when the horrible irony occurred to him for the first time: his day job was porn. Like some girl from Kansas who was only acting in Hamlet until the waitressing job opened up.
A single sharp whistle skirled down the staircase, and he brought the camera up, hit start and then put it on pause. Let them live through this, he prayed. At least Kenyon had bought them cheap Styrofoam helmets.
Two whistles, and he brought the camera up to his eye. Just before all hell broke loose, he noticed the flashing dot in the viewer and hastily switched out of pause. He heard it before he saw it, a rattling like a skateboard coming to pieces. The shopping cart was still erect when it came into sight around the bend in the staircase. Two terrified winos in white helmets were strapped inside, clinging to one another and howling as the cart bounded down the steps. The top-heavy vehicle slammed hard into the handrail, ricocheted off with a clang like a hammer on steel and started to list crazily as it continued on. One of the winos screeched and threw up his arms like a teenager on a roller-coaster.
The shopping cart was still well above him when it went over and hit hard on its side, one of the winos yowling frightfully as his arm was caught beneath. The other man hit face first on one of the steps and went quiet and limp. Somehow, the cart spun half around on its side and slid a few steps more before catching an edge so that its prodigious momentum kicked it upward, toppling end over end. Both the riders had gone silent by the time it hit bottom and came to rest against a light pole. Rod ran forward, his video camera still rolling.
He tried to keep shooting as he felt for a pulse in the neck of the bloody mess on top. The beat was strong, thank god, as was the other pulse on the man beneath. Perhaps they’d been so liquored up and limp they’d actually made it down alive.
“Back away!” Kenyon shouted as he hurried down the steps, his camera still rolling. His lens prowled the scene and then Rod saw him dialing 911 on a cell phone. He often liked to get an ambulance arriving to punctuate a stunt.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he hissed. “Get back.”
“I was afraid we’d killed them.”
“What do we care? We got releases.”
He stood in the dark alley, watching a police helicopter circle noisily overhead like a huge buzzard. The big searchlight wasn’t on, at least not yet, and it was doing what the cops called “orbiting” to make itself a harder target for a random sniper, sweeping a pattern of big circles rather than hovering in place. The focus seemed a block or two west.
He was pretty sure it wasn’t there for him, but not for the first time he sensed himself on the far side of a particular divide, one that meant the police presence was the opposite of reassuring. He’d retrieved his old .45 from the hollowed out Oxford Companion to American Literature where he kept it in his office at Gloria’s house, and he was carrying the bulky pistol in the small of his back. Now would not be a good time for that superbright light to come on while a squad car wailed up to roust him.
He’d seen his quarry climb into his graffiti-covered garage a few minutes ago, carrying an oversized beer bottle and, of all things, a big textbook. Maybe it was a doorstop, he thought. Who knows, maybe the kid was actually studying something. He really wanted to know what had gone on in the kid’s head, and he was doing his best not to pigeonhole him automatically as a sociopathic gangbanger. This, even though the enraged portion of his psyche felt he was overdoing the liberalism a bit. The fury Maeve’s wounding had aroused in him was no longer quite as intense as it had been, but it was still there, simmering near flashpoint.
Jack Liffey had killed a man once, and though he didn’t much like violence, what better reason was there than to avenge an innocent and vulnerable daughter? His thought processes weren’t whirring away very efficiently, he could tell that. Mainly, he was wallowing around in what was left of his anger and desire for retribution. There was enough of it to do the trick. He now intended, as he always had, to put the kid down at first sight and walk away into the Boyle Heights night.
A radio was playing cumbias somewhere, and another was giving out a Norteño ballad as he walked slowly across the alley, opened the low gate as quietly as he could and went to the swing windows on the side of the garage. They had been inserted into the side wall fairly recently, surrounded by patches of rough off-color plasterwork like a bad Bondo job from the body shop. There were no curtains, and the young man inside lay on his stomach on a cot, with his head sticking over the edge to read the open textbook lying on the floor. With two-column pages and small insert lithographs, it was unmistakably a history text—some bizarrely impassive portion of Jack Liffey’s mind was noting det
ails while the rest seethed.
He watched for a moment more, and then he took the .45 out of his belt and yanked the unlatched window open.
“Que pues?”
The young man craned his neck around without alarm, but when he saw it wasn’t a friend, he swiveled around on the cot to come to his feet.
“Just sit tight,” Jack Liffey said. He wasn’t aiming the pistol as much as displaying it for effect. “Yeah, you know who I am, don’t you?”
“Well, fuck you,” the kid said.
“No, fuck you,” Jack Liffey said.
“Fuck you first.”
Jack Liffey actually found himself laughing. “Look at that. We just had a meaningful exchange of views.”
“Fuck you,” the young man said again, not even changing the tone, as if nothing had gone before.
“What’s your name?”
“Chinga tu madre.”
“You don’t want to spend your last five minutes on earth cursing.”
The youth glowered at him so hard that a vein on his temple popped out.
“I guess that means you’re trying to look scary, but it needs work. It just looks like you’re trying to take a dump and having trouble with it.” Within reach was an old chrome and vinyl dining room chair, patched up with black electrician’s tape, and Jack Liffey pulled it around to sit facing the young man. “My daughter is going to live, no thanks to you, but she’s hurt pretty bad. I just want to know why you shot at me.”
A trace of human expression finally flitted across the young man’s face. The helicopter came around above the garage, and they both gave subtle evidence that they were aware of it. The boy seemed to be suppressing an urge to speak but finally gave in. “I don’ know.”
“You don’t know? Man, have you got a sister or somebody you love? Maybe your mother. How would you feel if I busted a cap in her direction for no reason and I was such a lousy shot I actually hit her?”
He shrugged, for just an instant looking a little chagrined.
“Not so much fun on that side of the gun, is it? Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t shoot you where you sit.”