The Chinese Beverly Hills

by John Shannon

  “You can forget that, Sergeant. The Chinese girl who died in the fire was planning to become a nun. One of these bikers might even have killed her.”

  The car was rocked by a squall so intense it felt like an ocean had dumped on them. Acevedo’s eyes went to the windshield as if the glass might crack in the onslaught. “You got evidence of that or you just winding me up?”

  “Nothing for a DA yet. Look, the Feds decided to go after terrorists; that’s what they do. If you’re a hammer, everybody’s a nail.”

  “That doesn’t mean shit to me.”

  “The Chinese girl was handcuffed and we’ve got one of her skull bones with a bullet wound. It’s possible the whole damn fire was set to cover up the murder. And I think—no proof—that somebody raped her before she was killed. Any guesses?”

  The policeman went silent. Where the hell was Jack? Roski wondered. He needed Jack’s stability and perspective.

  *

  “I got to have my fun!” Beef complained.

  “Dude, you’re my oldest friend, but I gotta tell you, your proclivities tonight come as a surprise,” Zook said.

  “What the fuck’s ‘proclivities’?”

  “What you want to do.”

  “There it is,” Beef said petulantly. He kicked at Zook’s books on the floor. “I got my own dealings in life. I don’t just do what you tell me.”

  “What are your plans for the girl?”

  Please don’t ask! Ellen thought. She saw that the sane one was still bleeding.

  “Zook, she’s a Chink. Who cares? I caught her watchin’ me and I gotta teach her a lesson.”

  “Attractive in theory. But you know, dawg, kidnapping is a federal crime.”

  Ellen was attending very closely. Beef didn’t even seem to hear him.

  “I got my dreams, too, Zooker.” He leaned forward to stare down at Ellen, which made her glance away. “I bet this one’s real smart, like all the slopes. We know smart girls just love to fight a while and then give it up.”

  “I think it’s problems of scale that are making your heart go pitta-pat, Beef. Really small openings, so to speak. Orifice disproportion, we say in philosophy. I didn’t open the cabin door to lay down my good and let you take us to federal prison.”

  The discussion grew belligerent again. Ellen wanted to retract into her fetal position, but decided not to budge. She’d been unobtrusively twisting in the handcuffs for some time. Her hands were slim and she had a double-jointed thumb, but she hadn’t done much more than chafe her wrist.

  “Zookie-man—”

  “No, Beef. This is mad bait. I’m not going to no jailhouse over this.”

  The gun started wavering toward him again.

  “Gimme the piece, dammit!” Ellen watched Zook thrust his hand out flat toward the gun. She tugged harder at her wrist and almost yelped with the pain. “I mean it! Don’t throw your life away for one night’s fun. I’m a serious man, and I’m on your side.”

  The deafening blast could have been a bolt of lightning, but it wasn’t.

  “Asshat! Jesus Christ, you shot me again!”

  Ellen watched Zook squat down and mash his hands against his bleeding tennis shoe. One really big tug-and-twist got her wrist an inch toward freedom.

  *

  By two a.m., nine inches of rain had fallen in the San Gabriel Mountains over twenty-four hours. A mile east of Sheepshead Canyon, where the blaze had started twelve days earlier, angry froth boiled down all the watercourses. The roots of burned-out sagebrush and buckwheat offered little holding power as the sandy, granitic soil became oversaturated. Organic sediments leached away first, leaving only slippery grains of silica.

  An undercut cliff gave way a few inches at a budge until the remains of a pointy yucca tumbled into the stream to carry downwater like a ball of razors. A crack yawned open, and a surviving clump of beavertail cactus slouched toward the stream, pushing along the earth below the crack. In the fissure, exposed to the air for the first time in an eon, a boulder the size of a bathtub suddenly broke free and took a ledge of earth into the water with it. The boulder tumbled twice to gain maybe fifteen feet in its million-year march to the sea. An even larger bank nearby began to slump, just as a ragged collection of timber from a former structure swept by.

  A rumble announced something very different upstream, and the water level in the wash began to diminish.

  *

  Paula’s car came to a stop at the open fire gate not far from where they’d been girl-talking. Water flooded out. “Damn, the Chatahoochie in flood! I don’t know about this.”

  The beer overdose had turned her relatively mellow, and Gloria readjusted herself to relieve some of her hip pain and look out. In the headlights, she could see water sheeting off the fire road into the street, carrying gravel and dirt with it.

  “We ain’t equipped,” Gloria said. Paula was driving a Honda Accord.

  “I’m on it.” Paula smiled. “Danger a lot simpler than life.”

  “It’s why we’re cops. How’d you hear about this place?”

  Paula raised her eyebrows. “Good friend in the state bureau. Sorry to tell you, girl, they’re camped on your telephone. He say two hours ago Jack got a call from the arson guy and they agreed to meet right here.”

  “Okay. Jack says so, he’ll do it. They must’ve went up.”

  “You good to go?”

  Gloria pointed up. Paula drove straight into the exit flow of frothy muck and water. The car began wheelspinning and fishtailing as she accelerated and steered madly.

  *

  Avulsion, the process was called. A seasonal flow had come down the same canyon intermittently for centuries, even millennia. Suddenly it dumped an impenetrable dam of rock and earth across its course. A new lake swelled behind the dam, until somewhere upstream a hunting finger of water found a new escape from the lake, perhaps a similar watercourse abandoned when the mountains were young. Water escaped down the old/new course.

  This creek would soon avulse, water building up against its fresh dam—mud and stone, a rusted water tank, a crushed cabin, a 1950s Mercury, and a lot of trees. Had a geologist been standing there watching, he’d have noted with alarm what was happening, but he wouldn’t have known which way to run.

  *

  On Red Oak Drive, a quarter mile from the fire trail, Jack Liffey’s old Toyota pickup seemed to have drifted into the rear of a parked Mercedes. The Toyota’s engine was still running, chugging and rocking as it began to weary.

  Jack Liffey sat in the driver’s seat, his face frozen into a rictus of pain as his right hand clutched his left shoulder. He came to life, aware that he’d probably been somewhere else for a while, but not for how long. He opened an eye as the searing pain lifted. What the hell was it? A muscle cramp? Gas pain? This was no time to coddle his useless old body. He took a part-by-part inventory and everything seemed present and working.

  He’d promised to meet Walt Roski, so he would meet Walt Roski.

  EIGHTEEN

  Where’s Jack?

  “Yo!” A deer hurled itself out of nowhere between the Studebaker and the cabin.

  “A deer in the headlights,” Roski smiled. “How many times have we used that cliché?”

  Sgt. Acevedo clearly didn’t know what he was talking about. He pointed toward the swollen creek that was suddenly dropping below its banks after flooding onto the roadway. “What the hell is that? You know any geology, Arson?”

  “Maybe the creek shifted course up above.”

  The rain seemed to be determined to carry on undiminished for forty days and forty nights.

  “What’s so important for you at your crime scene?”

  “Nothing now,” Roski said disconsolately. “It’s down the drain.”

  Acevedo looked back to the cabin, where the driving rain was dispersing smoke faster than the chimney could pump it out. “I’m going to door-knock and get into the warm. I got some issues here.”

  “Fine with me.” Right now, Roski
felt ready to hit somebody, and this might give him more opportunity. He’d been looking forward to talking to Jack. Where the hell was he?

  *

  The mud and rubble flowing out the open firegate dammed itself into long crescents and then brimmed over them on the dead-end street. Jack Liffey could only assume Roski had gone up already, so he crunched the pickup slowly toward the gate and through. Luckily he had a high clearance.

  His headlights picked up only a sheet of dark water ahead, but a few weeds marked the shoulders of what should have been the fire road. He coughed in spasms from time to time and wiped sweat from his forehead despite the chill. He tried to reconstruct what he’d eaten down in San Diego to upset him so. Onion soup and some tough hamburgers he and Megan had grabbed on the way back. Maybe chewing that gristle was why he felt like somebody had punched him in the jaw.

  From time to time lightning left an image of the mountains burned on his retina. A day of omens and signs.

  *

  Bunny was half dozing across the sofa when Maeve arrived and got out two beers immediately. “Thanks for the boob warning,” Maeve told her.

  Bunny burst into tears of relief. “I was so scared of losing you to the swami, Maeve. But I was good, wasn’t I? I let you meet him.”

  “Come here. I think your jeans are too tight.”

  *

  Ellen’s initial panic had eased a little. The insane world normalizing. Zook’s minor bullet wounds were even coming to seem comic. He had his shoe off and Beef was helping him wrap the foot with a dishrag and duct tape. Beef kept the pistol in his waist.

  One big tug and her right hand would be out of the cuffs, but she was saving it for a better moment. Don’t poke the bear until you can run. A Chinese aphorism—probably from a fortune cookie.

  A heavy pounding rattled the front door. “Police!”

  “Get her out of here!” Zook snapped.

  “Woodshed,” Beef grunted.

  She clenched her fist to make sure the cuff stayed on as Beef lifted her roughly and dragged her like a ragdoll. He lifted a timber out of angle irons to free the back door.

  “No noise, Chinko.”

  Cold rain swept over them as he dragged her legs through mud and into a shed nearby.

  “Hold on, gentlemen!” Zook called from inside.

  “I don’t give a damn what you’re flushing, Zook,” a male voice shouted. “I’m cold and I’m not narco.”

  “You had me at ‘Police,’ dude! I’m taking a dump.”

  “Thanks for the report.”

  *

  Roski followed the cop in and the punch of warmth was quite agreeable. A Franklin stove steamed across the room.

  “What’s all this, Zook? You’re bleeding from every fucking part.”

  Sgt. Acevedo glanced around and noticed Beef waiting at the back door with a big pistol in his waistband. The reaction was instant, almost reflex, his Glock out like Wyatt Earp.

  “Lose the piece! Now!”

  “I’m in my own place! Right, Zook?” Beef had drawn his own pistol out, but only vaguely waved it about.

  “You’re going to die where you stand, fat boy.”

  “Put your gun down.” The indecisive sway of the pistol gave way to a vague aim toward the policeman.

  The hair was standing up on Roski’s neck. “Gentlemen, let’s be calm—”

  “Shut up!” the cop blurted. “Last chance, Beef.”

  “You’re the invaders!”

  “Put… the fucking… gun… down! I won’t say it again. You are dead in five seconds.”

  “I ain’t your pussy!”

  “Stand down!” Roski bawled. Against his better judgment he stepped into the line of fire. “I’m in charge. First Marines! You—” Roski pointed at the big guy to save Acevedo a little face. “Son, set your pistol on the floor. Nobody’s going to get shot here.”

  “I was in my rights.”

  “We can talk about that later. I’m standing right here and we’re all safe.”

  The other young man spoke up for the first time. “Jesus, Beef! Put your strap down. We know Manny.”

  Beef stooped slowly and set his pistol on the floor. Roski realized how tense he had been. His jaw hurt with it.

  The big guy looked him in the eye. “I was in my rights.”

  “Be glad we don’t have to test that theory.” Roski collected the long-barrel .357. He motioned discreetly to Acevedo to lower his Glock. Acevedo’s pocked face was beet red, his eyes insane with an ancient fury, something left over from the age of reptiles.

  For some reason Beef pulled out a cell phone and took a photo of Acevedo at his most trembly. He guffawed. Planning a lawsuit?

  Roski rested a comforting hand on the policeman’s shoulder. “We’re on top, Sergeant.”

  “Have a beer, gentlemen,” the one called Zook offered, almost plaintive.

  “I’m good,” Acevedo said blankly. He held out his palm to Roski for the weapon. “First Marines, huh?”

  Roski handed him Beef’s .357 and the policeman stuck it into his waistband and holstered his own.

  “Third of the First,” Roski said. “Thundering Third. Haditha Dam.”

  The policeman nodded. “California 185th armored. Mosul. Fucking IEDs everywhere. And sand niggers.”

  The phrase annoyed Roski. “You seem to know these guys.”

  “You cut confidential informants a little slack.”

  The big one couldn’t stay quiet. “We ain’t snitches.”

  Roski looked around the room and figured the worst was over. “You’re going to need a doctor,” he said to Zook, who was still bleeding.

  “It ain’t nothing.”

  Just a lovers’ quarrel in the land of the dirtbags, Roski thought. Jack, where are you? I need your sanity.

  *

  A mile above the cabin, the pressure of water built up at the bottom of a dam that had formed naturally only a half hour ago. Seepage penetrated the soil and the sandy mud approached the condition known as liquefaction—where dirt flowed like water.

  Upstream, a boulder the size of a bus tumbled into the current and a small shockwave raced toward the dam. A section of mud blew out and the short-lived lake ate the dam away and surged back into the wash it had followed for a thousand years.

  *

  In the pitch-dark shed, Ellen Chen twisted her wrist hard, and her hand came free with a stab of pain. She lay for a minute on what seemed a woodpile. She shook her arms to celebrate the delight of release and unwound the duct tape from her mouth and head. The first tangible benefit of her short hairdo.

  Then she freed her ankles. She knew she had to put space between herself and the nutters right away. She felt her way to the door as the woodshed clattered all at once with hail. Great, what more could go wrong? The ordinary doorknob turned easily.

  Ellen peered out and saw the lighted windows of the cabin fifty feet away. The ground was littered with dime-sized hail. She found a canvas log carrier left carelessly by the door. It would protect her from the hail. She held it taut above her head. A few hailstones hit her hands, but it worked.

  She rejected going down to the fire road because she’d have to pass right by the cabin. Uphill, a deer trail. The night was terribly cold, and she tried to remember if Che had ever made an escape in such conditions.

  *

  Big, soft hailstones mashed against the windshield and the wipers fought hard to clear the slush.

  “Holy—!”

  Paula stood on the waterlogged brakes and just managed to halt before ticking a Jeep Wrangler abandoned in the road beside a big neutral-colored Ford. A van was ahead of them.

  “What the hell is all this?”

  “Folks that sure ain’t expecting traffic.”

  “They gettin’ some. If Jack’s in there, I bet he’s not happy.”

  “When’s he ever happy?” Gloria said.

  “Hush, girl. You played your part in that.”

  “You’re a hard woman.”


  “You want me mellow, shoot me. Can you manage a little walk in the mud?”

  “I got my cane.”

  “I’m the primary here, remember that.”

  “You shoot ’em all, except Jack, and I’ll tell you if you done right.”

  *

  Beef sat sullenly in the corner, entertaining himself with what seemed photos on his cell phone. Every once in a while he emitted a guffaw without much humor in it. He seemed to have only two mental states, Roski thought: sulkiness or a kind of scornful glee.

  Zook launched into some garbled philosophizing about how women were oppressed by their own eyes or maybe men’s eyes; Acevedo was rummaging in obvious hiding places for something, and Roski decided on having a beer after all. He needed it. Bending to the cooler, he caught a glance of the big guy’s cell phone.

  “What’s that?”

  Beef hid the screen against his chest. “You a Chink-lover, Mr. Marine?”

  “I can take ’em or leave ’em.”

  “Okay. You got to like this, then.”

  He held his phone toward Roski with the image of a defaced Chinese business sign. Then he punched forward to a photo of one of the racist posters Roski had seen on the street in the valley. “This is our get-back.”

  “Very clever,” Roski said lightly. “What else do you have?”

  *

  The two women were halfway to the cabin, Gloria hobbling badly on her cane, when they heard yet another car approach. They looked back to see Jack Liffey’s pickup slide into Paula’s Accord with his brakes locked up, not hard enough to do much damage. The roadblock had obviously caught him by surprise, too.

  “That answers one question,” Paula said.

  “That’s my man, all right,” Gloria said.

  He got out of the pickup, astonished to see them there.

  “You know why I like him,” Gloria said. “Jack always worries more about what I’m afraid of than what he’s afraid of.”

  “He don’t look right, girl,” Paula said.

  She was right. He staggered toward them, clutching his arm.