The Cracked Earth

by John Shannon

  “I will never surrender of my own free will,” Detective Sergeant Bobo Creighton called into the phone in a peculiar emotionless staccato. It had been on a poster over their bunk, part of the Soldier’s Creed, and they had made endless jokes about it. To this day Jack Liffey did not know how Bobo had gone from redneck to peacenik to soldier-technician to cop, but he was the only friend he had in the police force, even if it was Denver. “I don’t see you much no more, boy.”

  They chatted for a while, but they both knew Jack Liffey wanted something.

  “They got a new system here, Bobo. Ever since some creep got the address of a starlet from the DMV and then stalked her home and killed her, you want a name or address from Motor Vehicles, you got to be somebody with access. You’ve got to know the code for the day.”

  “I heard about that, pardner. Rebecca Schaeffer it was, from the sitcoms. My girls were crazy about her.”

  “How ‘bout you call up some cop liaison number and get that code of the day for me. You know I’m no stalker.”

  There was a long pause. “What do you do these days, Jack?”

  “I find runaway kids. Honestly, Bobo. We’re on the same side.”

  “Where you at now?”

  Jack Liffey gave him his number.

  “If you don’t hear from me in twenty minutes, I got a bad case of second thoughts.”

  But he heard in ten, and got what he needed.

  “HI, this is Sergeant Flor in Rampart Division,” Jack Liffey said over the phone. He was wobbling in and out of a nasty José Jimenez accent. “Couple things I wan’ choo ta do for me.”

  “What’s the password?” The clerk had a throaty voice, but dead bored, like a hooker asking if you wanted to go around again.

  “Oh, yeah. I got the word here somewhere. I writ it down. Here we go: evening notion.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Tell me what you can about California 2MDD576.”

  He heard the computer keys clacking away at the other end.

  “That’s a tan Oldsmobile registered to a Danny Firestack.” She gave him an address in Saugus. That was Canyon Country all right.

  “And what have you got registered to Tyrone Pennycooke?”

  That took even less time. “ ’Ninety-three Ford Explorer, green.” An address in Windsor Hills, not far from him. Windsor Hills was an island of county land in the hills north of Inglewood, some of the choicest black middle-class homes in the United States.

  “Now, Liffey, Jack. What does he drive?”

  “Nineteen seventy-nine AMC Concord, white.”

  “What idiot would drive that?” He hung up.

  HE swung over Slauson to have a peek at Windsor Hills. Most of the houses north of Slauson were 1950s and later, those split-level ranch numbers with scalloped eaves and big decorative birdhouses over the garage. But Ridge Glen was older, Tudor and Norman and Spanish places, probably built where they’d torn down the 1932 Olympic village. He parked a half block from the big beige bungalow where a green Explorer sat in the drive. A “For Sale” gallows was planted on the lawn, with a little plastic leaflet box that said TAKE ONE. He sauntered up the block past the house, took a leaflet, checked out the Explorer, and continued on.

  The green-black-red bumper sticker said IRIE across it, which he figured was some kind of dread talk. He read the leaflet as he strolled: the house had four bedrooms, two and a half baths, a den, a remodeled kitchen, and it gave good curb appeal: $209,000. About half what it would be worth a few miles northwest in a white area, curb appeal or no.

  He wondered whether Terror Pennycooke was the seller or just a tenant. There was a broad shady porch with a big glide on it like something out of Bedford Falls. At the corner he touched the rough bark of a liquidambar tree like tagging home and turned back.

  Two African-American boys about ten came out of nowhere carrying model airplanes. They made rat-a-tat noises and swooped the planes at one another. It was like stumbling into a photo negative of his own childhood. His best friend Kenny Orcot had flown a control-line Stuka against his Spitfire with its balky .049 gas engine, but Kenny’s mom had moved away when she divorced. It had been the only divorce in the whole neighborhood. What a strange aberrant moment in American history the fifties had been, he thought, a blink of white middle-class daydream caught fast between the Nazis and crack cocaine.

  He didn’t see anyone else and he got into the Concord and headed north, wondering if the name Ridge Glen wasn’t an oxymoron.

  JACK Liffey took a shortcut up Veteran and stopped for a minute to watch the Crockery Man at work. He was up on his scaffold, a squat Mediterranean-looking man covering his house from ground to roofline with colorful fragments of plates and saucers and cups set into plaster. He’d pretty much finished the lower half, but it would take years of neighborhood protests and injunctions for him to finish the rest. Buckets on pulleys waited on the front lawn full of more building material. He waved, but the man didn’t see him.

  He and Maeve had awarded it the first point in their contest of L.A. oddities.

  THE receptionist was on her knees trying to scoop runaway Skittles off the plum carpeting.

  “Remember me?”

  She looked up, scowling, then seemed to remember him. “I must look totally geeked out.” She stood and showed him a handful of the candies. “I switched from M&M’s when they put in those awful blue ones. You want Brucie?”

  “Sure.”

  “Watch your step.”

  She tapped a key on her keyboard. “Bruce, that cop guy was here before wants some face time.”

  “Thanks, Bambi.”

  The receptionist went down on her knees again and crawled toward him. It was disconcerting, like being prayed to.

  “A whole bunch of red ones. Jeez.”

  Bruce Parfit opened the double door and hung in it with a distracted air. “You catch us in a serious crunch mode, mate. Perhaps another time.”

  “I know who burned up Dae Kim’s.”

  The man’s manner changed instantly. The long ponytail bobbed, then he seemed to notice his receptionist grubbing under the desk and shrugged helplessly before beckoning Jack Liffey inside.

  “Last time we had a little chin wag it nearly lost us our best filmmaker.”

  “It was you they were after, not me.”

  Bruce Parfit led him along the corridor past a homemade banner that said, YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE. A young man stood along the wall straining at something in his hands. As they passed, Jack Liffey could see that his index fingers were deep into an old-fashioned straw finger trap. He hadn’t seen one of those in years.

  A woman in a work shirt and overalls stood at a whiteboard in a small bay off the hall writing up numbers in fluorescent colors. She noticed them passing. “Bruce, I tell you, you just can’t comb a hairy ball smooth.”

  “We’ll still give it a go, Joanie.”

  Bruce Parfit sealed them into his big corner office, cutting off the fast beat of techno-dance music from somewhere. Out the floor-to-ceiling window, the digital display on the big billboard was still counting up smoking deaths.

  “So…”

  “I’m going to take your side,” Jack Liffey said. “I’m not sure why. Monogram may have a legitimate grievance, I don’t know about that, but they got me pissed off. Wasn’t it Chairman Mao who said my enemy’s enemy is my friend?”

  Bruce Parfit smiled gently as he sat behind the big clean desk. “Me and my mates used to think the Great Helmsman was the ridgy-didge.”

  “Pardon?”

  “That’s Australian for the bee’s knees. These days I think the world can get on pretty well without him and all he wrought.”

  “If we start adding up what the world can get on without,” Jack Liffey observed, “there’s no telling where we’re going to end up.”

  “Mate, ask not what I can do for you. Ask what you can do for me.”

  “Monogram’s not really your problem. Your problem’s in Japa
n, with Mitsuko. They’re a big zaibatsu cartel that owns Monogram the way they own pocket change and geishas and a few blocks of downtown Sydney. You don’t mean much to them until you become an irritant.”

  “I know Mitsuko. They bought up a lot of mining rights back home.”

  “I have a friend who knows Mitsuko, too.” This had come from Mike Lewis. “During the war they used Chinese and Korean slave labor. They worked them to death and after the war two of their executives were brought before the war-crimes tribunal in Tokyo. Actually they were given life sentences, but there was an unpleasant deal to let them go. There always is.

  “Anyway, they play rough. In Japan, if a zaibatsu feels somebody beat them unfairly, they use yakuza to get even. All the zaibatsu have ties to the gangsters. So over here they did the next best thing, they used a strong-arm agency Monogram Pictures has had on retainer for decades.”

  He thought of Terror Pennycooke and could almost taste ginger ale.

  Jack Liffey paused a moment. He definitely had the man’s attention. “I’ll take care of the local talent because it’s become personal, but I thought you might want a chance to get even with the home office across the seas.”

  The Australian’s eyes widened slightly. “That’s a flaming big fish to grill, mate.”

  “Have you got any first-rate hackers? I know one, but he’s out of action for the moment.” He smiled, thinking of poor Chris Johnson forced to work on an old 486 computer without a modem, pacing back and forth through the tangle of unusable electronics in his living room and having to go to the pay phone at the corner to call out. No phone line was a condition of parole.

  Bruce Parfit looked at the ceiling for a moment, leaning back in his chair, then out the window at the layer on layer of smog, squarish mid-rises like upended Kleenex boxes, and tall teetery palms. “A test match of electronic aggro.”

  He sat up straight and punched a single key on his computer. “Michael, is Ad in with you?”

  “Sure, Brucie. We’re all on wall time.”

  “Row on in here.”

  “Can it wait?”

  “Now.”

  In a moment the door came open, held by a very young Asian, while a skinny black kid on polio crutches lurched in and sat hard on a leather bench. He was far too young to have had polio, and he wasn’t very good with the crutches, so Jack Liffey guessed he’d only been crippled a few years. The Asian shut the door softly and sat on the front edge of a purple sling chair.

  “This is Jack Liffey, a friend of ours. Michael Chen, Admiral Wicks.”

  They barely acknowledged him. It took a moment to realize that the last bit was the black kid’s name, not an honorific. There were a lot of African-American Generals and Admirals for some reason.

  “I hope this is important, Brucie,” Michael Chen said. “We were in a killer run of code.”

  “It’s important.”

  “Well, bazz fazz and rowrbazzle,” Admiral Wicks said.

  “You’re too young to know Pogo,” Jack Liffey interjected.

  “We read reprints.” His remarkable chocolaty-brown eyes came around, fixed and flat enough to hide behind, and he finally gave Jack Liffey a moment of hostile study. “I just want to establish that you’re old enough to have read the original, and you feel sufficiently bad about being old.”

  “I feel sufficiently bad, thank you.”

  He nodded at his crutches. “You know, the thing that challenges you can become an interesting new way of looking at the world. You want to find a challenge for everyone.”

  “I’ve got my own problems, thanks. One thing about this little tech war we’re going to talk about, I’d like you to plan it out but put it on ice until I give you the go-ahead. I want to see if there’s any chance of a peace treaty first.”

  14

  WAVING A DEAD CHICKEN AT THE PROBLEM

  DOWN CRENSHAW AT VERNON AND ELEVENTH THERE WAS A twenty-foot doughnut propped up against the sky. Beneath it was an L-shaped streamline eatery with some fading signs for doughnuts at yesterday’s prices and a promise that they were the city’s best. He parked in the lot that Continental Doughnuts shared with a repair shop, and a dozen eyes in a group of loungers followed him idly as he went inside. This was an African-American area and there probably weren’t a dozen Anglos a day who sat down in the red plastic booths.

  He didn’t sit down either. He nodded to Josette, who worked the counter three days a week, and then inclined his head toward the other angle of the L. “Josette. Ivan in back?”

  “He getting ready for his taxes.” She waggled a finger to beckon him in closer and he leaned on one of the red stools on its chrome stalk as she eyed him with a smirk.

  “You got that look, that glow, like you gettin’ laid, Jack.”

  “You’re observant.”

  “Seeing stuff’s a survival skill these days. Hope she’s worth it.”

  “Me, too. She’s pretty scary.”

  Josette laughed. “Man, don’t be disturbing his figurin’ for long. I told him, spend it all before you got to pay up, but he don’t listen. He gonna get his butt kicked by the state equalization.”

  The security door opposite the employee rest room was ajar an inch and he knocked once and pushed it open. Ivan Monk sat at a flimsy table, where he was jabbing at an old PC with two fingers.

  “What’s up, Jack?”

  “Hopes.”

  “Same old same old.”

  The doughnut shop was only the butter on Ivan Monk’s bread. He made the bread tracing bail skips and doing all the other odd dirty jobs people left for detectives. He was good at it and Jack Liffey had passed a number of runaways his way, particularly when the kids ran south of Jefferson or east of La Cienega.

  “Hey, you ever work a spreadsheet?” Ivan Monk asked. He pushed away from the keyboard that looked ridiculously tiny and frail under his big hands. He was a nice guy, but he always looked like he was about to break your arm.

  “Man, when the Arabs invented the zero, they came up with everything I needed to monitor my finances.”

  Ivan met his eyes skeptically. “You need to get yourself a doughnut shop for fallback money.”

  “Always wondered where you came up with the capital.”

  Ivan Monk took a sip of what was probably good Scotch from a tumbler. He knew better than to offer. “That’s none of your business, so I’ll tell you. It was my savings from the merchant marine. Where’s your savings from making all those fighter planes that they went killing babies with?”

  “My own babies ate it up.”

  “Man, I happen to know you don’t pay your child support.”

  “Ouch. You’re right, but I think about it a lot.”

  Ivan Monk snorted once. “Maybe I’ll track you down one day for Kathleen Liffey. What can I do you for?”

  “Do you know a Jamaican named Terror Pennycooke?”

  “You got business with him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I hope you’re kidding me. Tyrone P is one crazy fuck. He used to be in one of those Jamaican posses that carried the good dope from L.A. to Kansas City and beyond. Latterly he’s become a general-purpose dirty doer. He plays bold for anybody that pays. Likes a big gun, C-4 plastic explosive, and what he calls petrol bombs.”

  And ginger beer, Jack Liffey thought.

  “Most Rastas are gentle souls, but he’s not on that track at all. Stay away from him, Jack, if you got any kind of good sense.”

  “Thanks, Iv. One more thing. What does ‘irie’ mean?”

  Ivan’s brow wrinkled up. “Spell it.”

  He did, and Ivan Monk laughed. “Man, that’s pronounced ‘eye-rye.’ It’s a bit subtle to explain to a man like you, a peckerwood from Babylon, mon, wit no linguistic suss.” He laughed, then lapsed into standard English. “Dread talk does a strange and philosophical thing with its pronouns. Somehow they got the idea that the pronoun ‘me’ was subservient and fit only for slaves. Maybe it is, you know? It’s an object form, after all, and the
doer is always the subject. Anyway, they use I a lot instead of me and my: give it to I, that’s I car, I did it I-self. Even the plural, instead of we, it’s I-and-I. You okay so far, Babylon?”

  “I got lost back at C-4 plastic explosives.”

  Nothing could slow Ivan down. “Now it gets really subtle. ‘I’ took on a kind of holiness to the Rastas and they started substituting I for initial syllables of a lot of common words. I believe in I-quality. You’re my heart’s I-sire. I’m gonna I-ceive a letter. And so on. It’s half a verbal game, of course, but the other half’s an I-claration of independence from the language forms of the slave masters. After you know that, eye-rye is simple. Rye is standard Jamaican English for right. So ‘irie’ is a form of all-right. Meaning something like right-on.”

  “Copacetic there, old buddy. Thanks for the seminar. Someday I’ll teach you redneck.”

  Monk shook his head. “We already know it. That’s the nature of being a minority, Jack, you gots to pay attention.”

  ON the main drag they sold mufflers, window glass, bowling supplies, and karate lessons. A half-dozen townlets that spread across one end of Canyon Country had voted to merge in the mid-1980s to form the instant city of Santa Clarita, and Saugus was the poorest of the lot, caught in the middle, mainly just soil erosion bisected by a highway. What there was of a downtown had been hit hard by the last two earthquakes and left with a lot of skewed buildings and “For Lease” signs. Over the hill in upscale Valencia there was Cal-Arts, the snobby arts institute, and out to the east there were newer suburbs with postmodern ranches, but here in the core there were mostly Baptist churches and guys tinkering with Harleys.

  On the drive up the freeway, he’d found that if he focused hard on the road, he could just about forget what a mess he’d made of his daughter’s visit. As usual, there had been a whole lot of little steps that mostly made sense, and then all of a sudden you lay there tied naked to a bed with your daughter screaming in the hall.

  Danny Firestack lived a few blocks off the main drag on a street without sidewalks where most of the little boxy houses had aluminum foil in the south-facing windows. A man at the corner had a compressor chugging away in his drive and he was spray-painting the dirt and weeds in his front yard bright green. The sky above the neighborhood was deep blue, as if that, too, had been improved.