The Chinese Beverly Hills

by John Shannon

  Then his hand rested high on her thigh and she was back in the mundane present.

  “Are you comfortable, Maeve?”

  “Tell me what to do to become comfortable.” This was the test. Bunny had warned her.

  “Your jeans are far too tight to sit like that. Loosen the top button.”

  She popped the button, and then undid a button of her blouse, too. How absolutely crass.

  “If you’re warm, you should take off your shirt,” he said mildly.

  She opened her eyes and saw him staring hard at her breasts. “Sir, you can help me evolve or you can play with those. It’s your choice.”

  *

  Paula Green had a clear view of the elevators from the bar. It was approaching midnight and she felt her stakeout determination weakening. She’d be thrown out of the bar at two a.m., and she wasn’t going to spend the wee hours in a wet bush.

  Abruptly an elevator slid open to disgorge Jack Liffey. Don’t stop for a nightcap, please. There were only two others in the bar.

  Disheveled, he hurried right past the Tap Room. She was astonished to see he was weeping like a child.

  SEVENTEEN

  Danger Is Simpler than Life

  Ellen drew her body into a fetal position on the cabin floor. It was the thunderous gunshot nearby. The dogboys had been snapping and barking at one another, testosterone overload, when it happened. Upward she saw a ragged hole in the roof the size of a fist. Rainwater was coursing through the gap to splash the floor near her.

  This was a hell of a cloudburst, a real storm-of-the-century, she thought, trying to find something she could concentrate on to calm herself. The trembly panic was impossible to control.

  Ellen wriggled around to watch the big guy. That type seemed to be all over the landscape in America, big-boned and red-faced, with cold, piggy eyes. They had no inner reflection, and they always hated women.

  “Shut up, Zook! Just shut up!”

  “Look wat’cha done to the roof! You never had any sense! All the way back when you was on double Ritalin.”

  “Zookers! You’re my only friend!”

  “Give me the gun. I’ll trade you for a beer.”

  “I got to protect me tonight. They’re after me!”

  “They is…?”

  “I seen cops looking at me.”

  “Everybody looks at you, dude. You’re a guy people look at.”

  “Well, let Miss Kung-fu look at this.”

  Ellen heard a zipper and screwed her eyes tight. Oh, no.

  “Beefer, mellow out!”

  He kicked her in the back and she gave a muffled yelp. “Open them slant eyes, fortune cookie. You ain’t never seen this on no bamboo guy, I promise. Open or I kick your head.”

  Rather than get kicked, she opened her eyes. Antonio Buffano stood astraddle her, waving something out his fly like a foot and a half of limp pink fire hose. No wonder he had a rep. It just wasn’t possible for a human penis; it was some freak of nature, a repulsive mutation.

  He haw-hawed away. “She can’t believe she gonna get the big beef injection.”

  “Later for sure. Here’s a beer, B. Give me the damn gun and climb off your horse.”

  “Back off, man!”

  She heard another earsplitting gunshot and clamped her eyes tighter, hoping against hope that the smaller one hadn’t been shot. A scream of pain disabused her.

  *

  Seth Brinkerhoff, wearing silk pajamas, stood dazed in the downpour in front of his house. His wrists were manacled behind him, his bare feet freezing. “Look, I’m an attorney. I want to see the warrant again.”

  “You saw it, puto. You have the right to remain silent. Use it.”

  Four officers from the San Marino Police Department in rain overcoats had forced his gate and then burst into his big Spanish Revival home, while two others shoved him outside into the rain. He was soaked and very annoyed

  Seth had looked first for the judge’s name. David Corbett, okay, and the signature looked legit. He’d read as far as: Affidavits having been made before me by—some name he didn’t know—who has reason to believe that on the properties—when they’d yanked it away.

  “You’re messing up, Sergeant. This’ll be thrown out as illegal search if I can’t see the warrant.”

  The cop with the flat nose reluctantly unfolded the warrant from his coat pocket. But they were interrupted by an officer hanging out the front door.

  “We got it, Sarge. Cowabunga. Bring the suspect in. Let’s make him step in his own shit.”

  They all trooped to his study, where a semicircle of cops were tutting and ogling his computer screen. It took him only a few moments of shock, staring at unspeakable photos of child pornography, to realize what was happening to him.

  “That’s planted,” he said evenly. The only question was whether they’d planted it themselves, just now from a thumb drive. Or maybe it had been insinuated into his cloud account by a good hacker.

  “Sure,” Flat Nose said. “Every swinging dick in prison is innocent. You’re the worst kind of scum. Everybody hates a short-eyes. Where you’re going, don’t bend over for no soap.”

  There was going to be a lot more humiliation like this ahead, Seth realized. Talk about being single, the contentious divorce, maybe even the black hooker he’d picked up five years ago.

  “I want a lawyer. I’ll call him now.”

  “Not from here. Don’t touch a damn thing.”

  They frog-marched him outside. Of course he realized who had set him up—and if so, it was all going to be watertight. It was virtually impossible to fight the fifth and sixth richest men in the United States.

  *

  Jack Liffey sat on the glide on his porch, after a half hour sitting disconsolately in his car in the driveway. A sheet waterfall streamed off his roof onto the scraggly grass to flow down to Greenwood. He’d had to drive home cautiously through the swamped streets even with his high clearance.

  Sweep me into the L.A. River and then out to sea, he challenged the gods. What would he say to Gloria when he finally went into the house?

  Remorse does strange things to you, he knew.

  Okay, let’s go. He unlocked the front door. “Glor, I’m home!” And I sure got a lotta ‘splainin’ to do. She was usually up till three or four, but he heard nothing from upstairs.

  “Gloria!”

  Still nothing. Okay, she was pissed.

  He mounted to the second floor just as lightning flashed outside and then rumbled. Loco charged past him, heading for some deep refuge. Abandoning ship, eh, Jack Liffey thought.

  He opened the door to the bedroom and saw she had only the nightlight on. Gloria was quite still, a long shadow of mounded-up covers. He knew she wasn’t asleep. In sleep, she purred and wheezed at least.

  “Glor, I’m here. Do you need anything?”

  No reply. There was a faint photoflash through the curtains, far away. Grumble.

  “I have something to talk about. It’s not a good time for it, but it never is.”

  He sat gently on the corner of the bed, careful not to touch her shape under the covers. “Are you okay?”

  He waited. Nothing.

  “All right, it’s a rough life. I’m afraid I have a confession, hon. I won’t hem around. I’m sorry—I know you told me to go have an affair, but honestly I started before you said that. It just happened. I guess everybody says that.” He winced, waiting for a domestic lightning strike.

  Nothing.

  “This is such a soap opera situation. I don’t know how to escape it. It was that Vietnamese woman I told you about long ago. She’s so different from me it unlocks something. Maybe that’s what you felt with Sonny. No, I’m not blaming you.

  “Okay, I know you’re pissed. I better say it all. Here’s the worst part. The pull is terrible on me and I don’t even know if it’s over.

  “Please talk to me, Gloria. This is hard, and I love you very much.”

  A powerful fizz-bang detonated close by
, the flash filling the room briefly. Everything inside him was roiling. Against his better judgment, he reached out to rest his hand on her hip. Inner shock jolted him as he fell through her heaped-up blanket. He hurled the cover back and saw only sheets. Damn. Now he’d have to do it all over again.

  He made a cursory search of the house—she wouldn’t be hiding in closets, and her little SUV was still immobile at the top of the driveway, one tire almost flat. Had Sonny come to claim her?

  At last he found the note on the fridge. The childish block letters weren’t Gloria’s.

  Jack Dont worry Im taking Gloria out for a beer She needs a break Paula

  He felt himself deflate, and the release of all that pressure revealed that the indigestion was still with him. Have to find some Tums.

  The phone ringing just about sent him off the ground.

  “Where the hell are you?”

  “Uh-oh.” A man’s voice. “One problem inserts itself into another,” the voice said. It took Jack Liffey a few moments to recognize Walt Roski.

  “Walt, it’s okay. Really. What’s up?” He tried to refocus. They were approaching what they called the hour of the dark night of the soul, the hour of the gun-in-the-mouth. It was 1:15.

  “I just got some information about the girl, and I’m afraid the rains are going to erase the heel of the fire forever. Can you help me? We can still get there if we hurry.”

  “I’m your man,” Jack Liffey said wearily, not feeling at all like his man.

  “Meet me at the fire gate.”

  “Twenty minutes at most.”

  *

  “How you doin’, hon?” Paula asked.

  “The ribs are not happy,” Gloria said, dealing with the physical pains of her first car trip in months. “And that other thing’s no fun.”

  Paula had told her about Jack and the Vietnamese woman. They sat in the drumming rain, looking out over the wilds of a park at the edge of the mountains, only one live soldier left in the last six-pack.

  “Sorry,” Paula said.

  “Don’t bust on me, girl.”

  “I ain’t, hon,” Paula said. “I bet you worried that you told Jack to go do his bone.”

  “I heard him talk about this woman before. Long gone, so he said. Hah. A hot prick-slayer as rich as two Donald Trumps.”

  “You the hottest prick-slayer of all time, girl. Stop beatin’ yo’self up. I know Jack loves you. But I seen you push him away.”

  Gloria swigged more beer. “Let it go. I don’t know why I do what I do. He says he loves me. It scares me to death.”

  “Get unscared quick, hon. Jack is swimmin’ on the loose, and this Vietnam woman got a big ol’ fishhook stuck in him. He came down from the penthouse crying like a baby.”

  “Can you make it a little less real?”

  Paula shook her head. “No, I won’t. You need a cold shower. Jack’s a good man and you went and runned him around the ol’ green devil with yo’ own fun. You ain’t got no maidenhead left to trade for. I only wish I ran into a Jack for me. I grab him quick.”

  Paula’s cell phone rang in a little hip-hop beat. She said, “This her. Paula Green, yeah.” Her face went through about twenty changes as she listened.

  *

  For some reason the gate had been standing open in the furious downpour when he arrived. Despite Roski’s annoyance at waiting forty-five minutes past the “at most” and Jack Liffey never showing up, he was pleased that at least he didn’t have to get out of the Jeep Wrangler to unlock the gate. It had become the sort of bucketing rain that would soak you to the skin in a few seconds.

  He yanked the lever for four-wheel and low axle, and then ground up the trail that was running with several inches of water from one side to the other. Even with four-wheel, the car squirted left and right.

  True white-knuckles driving in the dark, relying a lot on the rally lights on the rollbar over the cab. Even the wipers were having a hell of a time keeping up in the worst volleys. He couldn’t really remember a rain as heavy as this. The media would be full of record blah-blah in the morning. Not seen since blah-blah. Blah-blah people were killed. He hoped not, but people always wound up swept down the storm channels, with firefighters chasing them from bridge to bridge with nets and ropes.

  A lightning bolt seemed to hit the mountainside not far to his right, the flash revealing his surroundings. He counted. At thousand-three, the crackle-rumble rolled over the car. Half a mile.

  *

  “Beef, listen to me. You on angel dust? You got to be yourself.” Zook clung to his own right arm where he’d been slightly gunshot, more or less by accident. Beef had sheepishly helped him wrap a t-shirt around it, though it still dribbled blood.

  Zook thought of grabbing the gun away, but he couldn’t take the chance. There was a dangerous glitter in Beef’s eye tonight, and the guy was stubborn as an anvil.

  The girl lay at their feet as they argued. Zook had no armament available but the reasoning of a thinking man. He told Beef that women were people just like men, but sort of underdogs in the scheme.

  The storm blustered, hitting with bursts of four and five lightning bolts. Now and again they heard a rapid clatter on the roof like golf balls. Hail. One flew in through the hole in the roof and bounced a foot. Zook went on telling Beef about how men made women look at themselves with male eyes as he kicked a big metal washbasin under the leak.

  Beef’s eyes seemed slyly confused, and he still flapped the pistol around. Zook knew he had to get the pistol away.

  *

  The swami was weeping with his forehead chastely on her knee, and she wanted to jump up and flee, but a more generous nature held her back. We’re all weak, after all.

  “It’ll be all right.”

  The man said something in another language—Hindi? She rested a hand lightly on his hair, but yanked it away at the greasy feel.

  A zigzag of lightning out the window burned onto her retinas. L.A. wasn’t much prone to thunderstorms.

  The man sat up, the mortification in his face so total that she couldn’t bear to look at him.

  “I thought I’d reached an important juncture, but I may not be there.”

  “We’re all human, sir,” she said.

  “Higher evolution requires extreme discipline,” he gasped out.

  Another glow-flash from the mountains far to the east.

  “Mahve…”

  “Maeve.”

  “I truly want to teach you, but I find I want your body with equal fervor.”

  “Let’s not spoil things,” she said.

  His nose began to run and he rubbed it on his sleeve. She began to suspect he was on something like coke.

  “At some point in the process you have to surrender everything, even the wonders of your body,” he said.

  “Surrender to whom?”

  “To your own glorious future, my dear.” His eyes were fixed on her, but only with his own hunger. She guessed even his chagrin was faked.

  “I wonder if this is a moral problem or a scientific one.”

  “I don’t see a problem, only resistance,” he said weakly.

  “I see bad faith. But I can make it simple.” She undid her blouse, thankful she’d worn an opaque white bra. “You can play with my breasts, as I said, or you can choose to guide my evolution.”

  *

  Roski braked as he reached the cars stopped at the cabin. His rally lights showed immediately that the small bridge beyond the cabin had been swept away, and the angry cascade was frothing just below road level. He’d get no farther tonight.

  One vehicle in the road was a panel van. Behind it was a beige Chevy Caprice. The dome light in the Caprice came on and a short, stocky man got out wearing police gear with a transparent longline over it. An acne-scarred face came into the throw of the rally lights, and Roski felt sympathy immediately. The Zapata moustache hid nothing.

  He walked back to Roski. “You look official.”

  Rolling his passenger window down admit
ted a spray of rain. Roski didn’t feel compelled to identify himself, but he did.

  “I’m an arson investigator with County Fire. Walter Roski. Who are you?”

  “Sergeant Manuel Acevedo, Monterey Park P.D. Manny to you.”

  “Climb in, Sergeant. The rain is terrible.”

  The man shrugged, as if nothing as insignificant as rain bothered him, but he got in. He hadn’t shown a badge, but Roski believed him. That deeply entitled police belligerence was hard to fake.

  “You’re out of your jurisdiction, Sergeant. I take it this is surveillance.”

  “I got reasons. And you’re here because of what?”

  After months of despondency, part of Roski wanted to get into a dick-waving contest with this absurd character. Any worse and he’d be past caring at all.

  “My crime scene is three hundred yards up the road, where a Chinese girl died in the fire. I’m obviously not going to get there tonight. In fact, we’re both in danger right here. The burned-over hills up there are pretty iffy in this weather.”

  He saw the policeman glance at the creek and take in his conjecture about danger. Boiling, dirt-filled water was just below the land, teasing above it with trees and brush. They said it wasn’t the height of the water as much as the speed of its rise.

  “You think it’s gonna let go?” Acevedo asked.

  “Who knows? It could take out half of San Marino down there, but if people insist on building houses in the debris zone, screw ’em.”

  The cop caught his what-the-hell tone and stared. “Most firemen I ever met is goody-two-shoes, but not you. Hear what I’m sayin’?”

  “I’m in a bad mood, Sergeant. Can you tell me who your surveillance is about?”

  The cop gave an odd little shoulder roll like a boxer freeing his joints to fight. “You know who owns the cabin?”

  “I’ve met some of them. Bikers. I had to tell them to hold their parties down.”

  “So should we warn these skells to get the hell out of here?” Sgt. Acevedo said. “The FBI came to see me today and told me Chinese eco-terrorists are planning to bust a cap on everybody, even Mickey Mouse.”

  Roski took in a deep, slow breath. And the Earth was flat, resting on four elephants on a giant turtle. What was below that? Turtles all the way down.