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The Burning Ground

Page 6

by Adam O'Riordan


  “I think of Cooper and me in that foxhole, times I woke up with him lying next to me, I think it’s for to keep warm? Man, I get mad.”

  Lindberg watched the expression drain from Jesus’s face.

  “It just comes down on me, I pick up this piece of driftwood from the sand, start swinging it down on top of those guys. Like on TV when you see the hunters going at those seals. Nothing could stop me. Nada.” Jesus chuckled as he recalled the scene on the moonlit beach. He wiped his hand across his mouth.

  “I remember there was singing and the sound of a guitar from a fire down the sand. Then the singing stop and these guys with no shirts on come running over shouting at me.”

  Lindberg nodded and tried not to blink.

  “So I swing the wood and one goes down, BAM! and then the other. Hit him so hard the wood snapped in my hand. Then two more guys come at me but I lay them out this time with my fists. Two shots to the face without even thinking about it. Then I pull one of them into me and take a bite right out of his ear. And now I’m screaming into the dark: ‘Who else wants to fuck with Jesus Porfirio?’”

  Lindberg watched the veins thickening in Jesus’s neck as he spoke.

  “Do you,” Lindberg paused, “do you think you killed them? With the driftwood, I mean?”

  “Nah. Takes more than you think to kill a man. I mean to really hurt someone.” Jesus gestured with the neck of the bottle toward the phone booth where the emaciated woman had been dragged away.

  Lindberg thought about this for a moment. “What did Cooper do?”

  “Cooper? He just stands there crying like a little girl who lost her dog. ‘Gimme the keys,’ I say. When I walk back up the beach there’s all this shouting. Suddenly the other guys get brave when my back turned, claro? But I just walk back to the pickup.”

  Lindberg nodded.

  “I drive it back to my momma’s house. We use it for a couple of weeks. Run errands, take my sisters’ kids to the beach one afternoon. Then one day Cooper calls, all nervous. Asks if he can come get the car.”

  Lindberg held Jesus’s gaze.

  “‘Sure,’ I say. So he come with his mother, this old bear in her church bonnet, who just stands there shaking her head as he walks up the drive.” Jesus broke into a smile.

  “We was all laughing so loud.”

  Lindberg nodded, unsure what to make of the story as a green pickup truck pulled up on the forecourt.

  “Here we go,” said Jesus, setting down his beer on the car floor. He got out of the car and followed a thin man in dungarees into the gas station. Lindberg watched the two men talking. As he spoke to Jesus the thin man thumbed the buckles on his dungarees, rocking back and forth on his heels. From the car it was hard for Lindberg to gauge the tone of the conversation. After a few minutes the men emerged onto the forecourt. The thin man held out a limp hand to Jesus and, turning to his right, spat on the tarmac. They shook on something, then Jesus returned to the car, passing himself through the gap between the two red gas pumps.

  “Yeah. She’s alive,” he said. “So now we get some sleep. We got to meet someone tomorrow.”

  Lindberg turned the key in the ignition.

  “There’s a motel across the street. We go there,” Jesus told him.

  Lindberg washed his face in the sink. He stared for a moment at the haggard mask that met his gaze in the cracked bathroom mirror: the skin on his neck sagging, the patches of hair at the edges of his throat that he had missed when shaving that morning. Jesus had insisted it was too late to drive him home. He was happy, he said, bedding down in the back of the car, telling Lindberg that he didn’t trust motels as he had a cousin who worked up at the Paramount Pest Control Service on Riverside Drive near the Elysian Park Expansion who had had contracts to service motels across the city. “Vermin, lice, even in them upscale joints. I’m better here,” he had said, patting the backseat of the Pontiac as if it were a first-class cabin on an Atlantic cruise liner.

  That night on the badly sprung bed in the motel Lindberg dreamed of Adella as a couple quarreled noisily in the room next door. In his dream he was watching her from the bathroom of the Old Man’s house again, as he had that first Christmas, but this time she turned as she reached the car and began to say something to him. But in the dream Lindberg couldn’t hear the words or read her lips, and pressed his ear against the bathroom window in a desperate attempt to make them out. But there was nothing but silence when his ear was pressed up against the glass, and when he would turn to see if she were still there, he would see Adella leaning from the car, growing smaller as it pulled away, mouthing the same words over and over in an attempt to make him hear.

  At 7 a.m. the next morning, Lindberg spoke to the Old Man from the phone in the motel lobby. It was close to the desk where the elderly receptionist, hair scraped back in a bun, had checked him in last night, scratching down the information from his driver’s license into the motel’s ledger. As Lindberg spoke on the telephone she would occasionally look up from her knitting and offer a vacant smile that showed her large teeth, yellowed at the gum line, her eyes magnified behind the thick round lenses of her spectacles.

  “Those sick fucks.” The Old Man’s voice was dry and paper-thin.

  Lindberg listened to his breathing amplified down the phone line.

  “They sent a piece of her dress to the office.”

  “Was there a note?” Lindberg asked.

  “No note.” The Old Man paused. “Just a scrap of soiled fabric.”

  Lindberg felt himself retch. He swallowed it down, sour, hot and acidic.

  “Well,” Lindberg rallied, trying to hold back the panic in his voice, the rising sense that this was all beyond his control, that Jesus was leading him on a wild-goose chase. That Adella would never be found in this city with its two million inhabitants or that if she was, she would be like that girl in Gardena. Trying to hold back his anger at the Old Man for sending him instead of Chase. His growing fury and perplexity that any scheme, no matter how crooked or corrupt, that the Old Man was involved with might merit keeping the police at arm’s length when his own daughter had been taken.

  “I think we have a lead here,” Lindberg said, steeling himself.

  “Time’s running out,” the Old Man told Lindberg.

  “Time’s running out,” the Old Man repeated, softer this time and with a sigh. Then he hung up the telephone.

  In the motel parking lot Lindberg found Jesus sitting in the backseat of the Pontiac, hands across his lap. His apron folded in a neat square next to his sandwich box, stifling a yawn like a child who had arrived early to kindergarten.

  “OK, now we go meet someone,” Jesus said as Lindberg got into the car. He looked as if he had slept in his clothes, Jesus thought. Lindberg said nothing and started the engine.

  “We are getting close,” Jesus said leaning forward, patting Lindberg on the shoulder as a jockey at the Santa Anita racetrack might the flank of a horse he had just ridden in last across the finish line.

  “Ricardo Eakins, but you can call me Red.” Red was small and frail with a thin wheaten mustache. He wore an oversized satin Dodgers jacket. He looked like the kid Lindberg had once seen on the cover of a comic book in a drugstore. The three men sat down at a booth in the back of the diner on Olympic Boulevard.

  “It ain’t news. Crews been doing it for time immemorial.” Red looked around the diner. A gray-faced couple three booths down were spooning puce-colored soup from their plates.

  “Started with the Chinamen up in San Fran but they kept it in house so we never really got wind of it down here.”

  “Go on,” Lindberg said, trying to sound patrician.

  “They get to know a girl. Shoot her full of junk. Send a letter to Daddy demanding cash for her safe return.”

  “And?”

  “And most times they get what they want. Plus it’s low risk as the broad basically kidnaps herself.”

  “So the girl is involved?”

  “Hard to say. Most pro
bably she don’t even know herself what’s going on she’s so full of dope.”

  He slowly patted himself down for a cigarette until Lindberg intervened and offered him one of his own.

  “Thank you,” he said nervously.

  “So where do we find them?”

  “Ah, that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Red sniggered.

  “Our mutual friend didn’t tell you?” he said to Jesus.

  Lindberg turned to Jesus. Jesus shook his head.

  “See, here’s the thing, Pops, giving you an outline of this racket is a risk but a calculated one.”

  Lindberg watched Jesus’s hands slowly balling into fists as Red spoke.

  “You want to know where they’re at, then I gotta ask around which means exposing myself, if you get my drift?”

  “You want more money?”

  “Got it in one.”

  “How much?”

  “Well,” he said, taking a long pull on his cigarette, “you have to ask yourself, Mr. Lindberg, sir, what’s that little girl’s life really worth?”

  Red flinched as he finished his sentence as if half expecting some act of violence to be visited on him. But Jesus sat still and let Lindberg do the talking.

  “I’ll need to make a phone call.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Lindberg stood up and made his way to the phone booth at the back of the diner leaving Red and Jesus alone at the table.

  “So what’s the deal here, Sancho Panza?” Red asked, leaning back into the booth. Jesus said nothing.

  “No disrespect, you don’t strike me as the type to be caught up in this kind of caper. What angle are you working?” Jesus remained silent.

  “You know what,” Red said, lowering his voice, “together we could lead this guy a merry dance?” Red raised his eyebrows and leaned in across the table.

  “Cover all our overheads for the year to come?” he said, rubbing two fingers together against his thumb. Jesus raised his index finger to his lips.

  Red threw up his hands. “Have it your way.”

  They sat in silence until Lindberg returned.

  “We can go up to two hundred dollars for information leading to the safe return of Miss Smart. Half up front, half when she’s safely home.”

  “No dice,” Red said instantly.

  “I’m going to need,” he paused, weighing up Lindberg, the wingtip oxfords, the gold lighter he had set on the table when he offered him a cigarette, the signet ring, the suit and the expensive fedora.

  “Three, and all up front.”

  “OK,” Lindberg said softly like a weary parent indulging his child.

  At which Red, angered at being so easily out-negotiated, got to his feet.

  “Give me two hours then meet me back here.”

  Jesus waited outside the diner while Lindberg walked the five blocks to the City National bank where earlier that morning the Old Man had told him funds would be made available should he need them. When Lindberg returned Jesus was leaning against the window of the diner wearing his apron like a short-order chef taking a breather from the kitchen, watching pedestrians stop to buy their papers at the row of vending machines outside.

  “No sign of him?”

  Jesus shook his head.

  Lindberg slotted a quarter into a vending box and, lifting the hatch, pulled out a copy of that morning’s edition of the Los Angeles Times. The plane crash he had heard about on the radio the previous day had been given several column inches on the front page. There was a grainy picture of the debris from the Lockheed Super Constellation taken from the cockpit of the plane that had been sent out to reconnoiter the wreckage.

  Lindberg stood tutting to himself as he read the details of the tragedy; the names and ages of the victims listed in full, tourists, mainly, returning home to America. As Lindberg read the list of names, images of the dismembered bodies floating in the gray waters of the North Atlantic formed in his imagination. Then the images of the dead from the plane crash gave way to the dead girl behind the Dumpster in Gardena Chase had described around the Old Man’s table. Only this time, in his mind’s eye, Lindberg saw that the flesh on the girl’s neck had been gnawed away leaving the white rings of cartilage on her windpipe exposed, and when he looked carefully the face he saw was Adella’s. The image disappeared as soon as Lindberg snapped the paper in two, folding the article, with its list of dead Americans, closed in on itself. It began to rain, dark pools and rivulets forming on the asphalt. Jesus looked at his watch. Almost two hours had passed since Red left. The pair made their way back inside the diner. Lindberg stopped at the door and turning to Jesus said, “It’s just so hard, you know, knowing she’s out there somewhere.” Jesus nodded, looking out at the office workers sheltering in the doorway of the building across the street.

  “Somewhere out there,” Lindberg continued, “I mean, she might just be right around that corner.”

  “We’re close,” Jesus said.

  An hour later Red returned. He set the soaking sports pages of a newspaper down on the diner table. The ink from the newsprint had bled on his hands. He wiped them on his pants. Lindberg pushed an envelope across the table to him.

  “OK, for the record, Pops,” Red said, sweeping a lock of wet hair back from his eyes, “there are no guarantees here. I put my head over the parapet and this is what I came back with. If it ain’t right. then bite me. You and your boy here ain’t getting none of this back. Comprende?”

  Red slipped the envelope inside his jacket.

  “Try this address.” He slid a laundry ticket across the table. Lindberg turned it over. “Mention my name: there’ll be hell to pay.”

  As Red stood up he unzipped his Dodgers jacket to reveal the hilt of a black pistol tucked in the waistband of his pants. He gave a saccharine smile and for a moment Lindberg was reminded of the freckled kid from the cornflakes commercial.

  “And I’d move quick if I were you,” Red said. “Word is, that girl of yours ain’t long for this world.”

  The address Red gave them was a disused toy factory down by the 6th Street viaduct, where the shallow LA river sluiced across a wide concrete expanse, the air above criss-crossed with power lines. The rain had eased off now but the sky was still leaden, threatening a further downpour to come.

  “This looks like the place,” Lindberg said, the front wheel of the Pontiac brushing the curbstone as they pulled up. “So what do we do now?”

  “Now we go and collect the girl,” Jesus said in a matter-of-fact way as if taking receipt of groceries at his overstocked store.

  A steep concrete walkway led up to the factory’s entrance. The two men ascended the ramp, Lindberg gripping his fedora by the brim at his side, Jesus in his apron, carrying his aluminium sandwich tin. Lindberg wondered what a passer-by might have made of them—perhaps they would have seen a factory owner returning to the site of his bankrupt business accompanied by the foreman, who looked almost proud to be back at his former place of work, such was Jesus’s manner as they ascended the ramp. There was a folding metal grille across the entrance and a large padlock, thickly caked with rust, hanging at the center. Jesus inspected the lock, weighing the brass shell in his hand, then from his sandwich box produced a pair of metallic-blue bolt cutters no more than six inches long.

  As Jesus set to work cutting the shackle, Lindberg noticed for the first time the tremendous strength in his forearms, the ridged tendons flexing as he gripped the bolt cutters in his small hands. Lindberg watched the shackle warp, then the rusted body curl up toward Jesus. Then the broken lock fell to the floor. Jesus dragged apart the two halves of the metal grille. As he did this a noise made both men recoil. A pair of wings beat frantically at the air in front of them. A pigeon hung at eye level, the crown of its head thrown back, its claws splayed. The bird righted itself and flew out between the heads of the men. It was quickly followed by more birds from inside the factory. Lindberg ducked back as they flew out, squatting and shielding his face with his fedora.
Jesus watched the birds ascend in a tight circle toward the viaduct.

  “We kept a coop full of rollers when I was a kid,” Jesus said as Lindberg rose to his full height and dusted himself down.

  “One day me and my big brother got in a fight over which birds was mine and which was his. Ten years old, I come home and find him slashing their throats with a box cutter. His friends standing around the yard howling and laughing as them birds tried to take off. Blood all over the concrete and these rollers that I’d raised from chicks just flapping, trying real hard to make it up into the air. A few of them got over to the other side of the street. I remember them in the bottom branches of the trees there, dripping blood down onto the sidewalk, then one by one just falling out with a thump.” Jesus shook his head. When the birds had disappeared from view Jesus went back to his sandwich box and took out a Cordahide flashlight.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get her.”

  The windows at the back of the factory had been boarded up. The ground floor was stripped of most of its machinery, only a few wooden work benches remained. At the center of the factory floor the beam of the flashlight picked out a trestle table turned on its side. A scrawny pigeon with ragged tail feathers and a glossy boil on one of its pink feet cooed and pecked at the concrete as it strutted in a circle around the table. A row of rotting, mildewed cardboard boxes stamped with Chinese lettering were piled three high the length of the far wall. With the flashlight Jesus picked out the remains of toys from the production line that someone had sorted into uneven piles: water-damaged patchwork rag dolls, grimy plastic baby arms, the chassis of tin cars. In the far corner there were signs of a bonfire: a pile of pale ash in a circle of broken bricks. Jesus walked over and placed the palm of his hand over the ashes. He rose slowly to his feet and turned the beam of his flashlight in a ninety-degree arc along the ground. The beam froze a few yards from the spent fire on what looked like dried coils of human feces covered with newspaper.

  “Hobos,” Jesus said. “These ain’t our guys.”

 

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