by John Shannon
Gloria’s eyelids felt made of lead. She caught her head as it was about to nod against the cop in parade uniform sitting to her right. He was actually taking notes in the big lecture hall. His shoulder patch said City of Redding, which she was pretty sure was somewhere north of Sacramento and wasn’t all that big a town. She’d bet they didn’t even have a DNA lab.
Earlier, she’d gathered up a shopping bag worth of stapled handouts off the tables at the entrance to prove she’d been here, and to give out to the eager kids in the Scientific Investigation Division who all wished they were, instead of her.
‘Call of nature,’ she whispered, as she stood up, hoiked her overstuffed bag and pressed past all the bony knees in the Fresno State University’s Peters Auditorium.
She had no doubt her new captain had sent her up here as a punishment. For keeping a messy desk, she was sure. He’d sent her several ludicrous memos about it. She had five murder books open, more than any other detective in the Harbor Division, but all Caesar cared about was a tidy office! The story was the man had messed up royally in Pacoima, missed a community meeting and then missed a court date that had let half a dozen bad boys walk. So they’d kicked him sideways to Harbor. She could hardly bear to think it, but the new central house downtown was probably protecting him because he was a Sanchez. Fuck that. There weren’t any Old Boys in the headquarters to look out for Native American women.
In the lobby, she collected a few more handouts and her bag was so full she had to tuck the new ones under her arm. A uniformed cop stood nearby with his forehead pressed against the big glass lobby windows, ostensibly looking out at a grassy precinct of the college where a few students sat in little groups. He looked like he was about to weep.
OK, she thought, it’s only us losers here, and we all know it. ‘Are you OK, man?’ she asked, against her better judgment.
His face came around, furious. ‘I don’t care any more,’ he said. ‘I just don’t give a shit.’
You didn’t always do what you ought to do in life, she thought. Even Jack Liffey relaxed his galactic-size sense of duty sometimes, she was sure.
She rested a hand briefly on the cop’s shoulder, as if that made up for everything he was suffering, and walked straight out of the auditorium toward the parking lot. Sometimes she felt she was always fleeing her better angel, but she had her own problems.
In an hour and a half her little Toyota RAV-4 was parking in front of Sonny’s house in Bakersfield, and bless whichever angel, his car was already in the drive.
‘I can see pretty good through the hog wire,’ he said at the security door. ‘You’re here early, and you got weevils in your wheat.’
‘It’s not your clever words I need right now, Sonny.’
He grinned. ‘Ride a bug homeward.’
Chad stepped quickly in front of her and held her trapped between two vending machines as they saw the gunman sprint confusedly into the alcove.
The stubbly-unshaven young man held square black pistols in both hands, like some revenge movie poster. For some reason he also wore an artificial-looking long bright red wig, and he froze electrifyingly in front of Chad, his fidgety powder blue eyes lost somewhere far away. The last of the other students were noisily fleeing the machine room, and Maeve gently pushed Chad aside, not wanting that kind of protection.
‘Let me get you a sandwich,’ Maeve offered.
‘No thank you. I’ve already eaten,’ the gunman said in a quavery voice. He seemed to look straight into Maeve’s eyes.
‘Don’t be upset, friend,’ she said. ‘Talk to me. What’s your name?’ Chad struggled to get in front of her again. Both pistols wavered vaguely in their direction.
There were squeals and shouts and the sounds of running feet out in the table area.
‘I know I can help you out of this,’ Maeve said, with great gentleness. ‘If you put those things down on the ground, I’ll buy you a Coke and we can sit and talk. I’m sure I can keep the police from shooting you. You know by now that they’re coming. What’s your name?’
Chad was startled enough by Maeve’s intervention to keep his mouth shut and stop trying to force his way between them.
‘I have to create my own luck,’ the young man said bitterly. A pistol waved around, but it seemed he was only wiping sweat off his forehead.
‘I have perfect luck,’ Maeve said. ‘You can have some of mine.’ Her life had been implausibly punctuated by events much like this one, many due to her father’s job, but she had learned a lot from Gloria, too. How to calm. How to de-escalate. How to get in touch. ‘My name is Maeve. What’s your name?’ she tried again.
He seemed mystified, dazed, and she wondered if that was a step forward. ‘Who are you?’ he barked at her.
She said, ‘Please put the guns down, friend. No one will touch them. I’ve helped a lot of people who really need to talk.’
‘I’m sick unto death,’ he said. ‘I need death.’
There was a long break when the noises outside were hard to interpet.
‘I’m from Lamar, Colorado, and my girlfriend is an Arab, and nobody cares.’
‘What’s your name?’ Maeve asked yet again.
‘Salaam Beyda.’
‘Hello, Salaam, peace to you.’ He didn’t look the least Arab. ‘Please put the guns down. Have you converted to the peace of Islam?’
‘I want to! No one lets me!’
‘You mean your parents?’
‘They made me eat bacon!’
She thought she saw a tear in the corner of his eye. But just then a flash-bang explosion made them all jump a little, and a SWAT team in body armor and face shields like giant black insects came around the corner, high and low, left and right, pushing into the alcove quickly behind their short assault rifles. Salaam turned toward them with the pistols still in his hands.
‘Stop! Everybody stop!’ Maeve yelled. ‘He’s OK!’
At least five of the submachine guns fired at once, plus something with a deeper sound, much more powerful from farther away, probably a sniper rifle. Salaam did a little dance as he was struck many times from at least two directions. Parts of what must have been the boy’s head splattered over Maeve in a wet sensation that she would never forget. That was it. It was done.
She brushed madly at herself to remove whatever it was that clung. There was just no question what had happened, no point wondering, no point at all objecting. She sat down disconsolately in front of a snack machine. Gloria would see it as a failure. Chad sat down next to her and put his arm around her. She realized tears were streaming down her cheeks.
‘You did your best,’ Chad said. ‘You were really really incredible, Maeve.’
‘Who are you?’ a SWAT cop screamed in her face.
‘Fuck you – you stupid macho killer.’
That was pungent enough to get them both thrown face down on the concrete immediately with heavy knees in their backs, and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic wirewraps.
‘Man, I wish we didn’t have no deal with no Colombians,’ Harper said. ‘All that I-gonna-keel-you bullshit.’
Stoney shrugged.
‘Those pogues are just zombies of death,’ Harper said.
‘You were in Iraq,’ Stoney said.
‘You think?’
‘Yeah,’ Stoney said. ‘In Nam, pogue meant people-other-than-grunts. Same-same? You know I studied linguistics – long ago, pogue was Irish prison slang for a queer.’
Harper shook his head. ‘So don’t drop the fuckin’ soap in the shower. Always the bookman, ain’t you? That old school stuff – it’s all dead to me, Stone. We both got our fat lips and our curly chest-hair. Brah.’
The last word a bit sarcastic. They sat in the book-crammed pool house where Marcus Stone now lived out his austere and much retrenched life with seeming contentment. It had once been his own pool house to rent to others when he’d owned the big Woodland Hills home beside it. He’d been married then to Lilith Levy, the head of the History Departme
nt at Cal State Northridge, though he’d started calling her Lithium Lady, when he wearied of the interminable depressions and anxious tantrums. It had been a lifetime ago now.
‘OK, what if we just shoot them down and take their snow?’ Stoney suggested, not very seriously.
‘They’re up-armed like a SEAL platoon now, my man. Who thought you could store weapons in ordinary safe-deposit boxes in a bank? You go in a podunk bank empty, and you come out strapped like Chuck Norris.’
‘What a sad thought. People flying here and subverting our fine capitalist banking system,’ Stoney said. He poured out a little more rum and Coke for himself.
‘Sometimes I ain’t sure if you’re gettin’ up in my grill, Stoney.’
‘If you did know, you’d probably have to kill me. Don’t you worry, my boon coon. Tomorrow, we meet these South Americans. We be nice as mice to them, treat them like white men, and I test their product with my Captain Midnight chemistry set our college Jap taught me, and if the powder’s not Boraxo, we give them the cash, and you run them back to the airport, and it’s all over for another few months.’
‘That’s when things get the most squirrelly. All of us holding all that cash and snow at Costco.’
They ticked glasses. ‘We’ll let ’em keep the money. This time, anyway,’ Stoney said.
Harper glanced around with a scowl. ‘Is this crib where you gonna live forever, man? It sucks big time.’
‘I’m a modest man of modest tastes.’
‘I best think you ain’t laughin’ at me because you ain’t laughin’.’
‘On the real, Harp – back in the day, you do something you can’t never ever take back, even if you want, against the Man. It’s best to stay out of the light for a long long time.’ He reached over and squeezed Harper’s shoulder. He hadn’t touched the man in a long time. ‘Forget this crib. You and me. I am where I am, and I’m OK with it. You know what a badass African party is?’
‘No.’
‘It’s when somebody comes into your own home and disses you bad, and you’re forced to stomp all over their ass. I don’t like these guys not doing you straight with your props – you my brother, Harp – especially I don’t like this O guy. Make sure tomorrow you got us a bunch of your old Rollin’ Seventies pals nearby if we need the backup.’
‘Dis yere be Mr Jack Liffey?’
Phone to his ear, he boosted himself straight up in Gloria’s leather TV chair, where he’d been brooding – relearning the ways jealousy put you through a lot of mental adjustments and took you down funny little back roads you thought you’d forgot all about. She’d called only a half hour ago to say she’d be away another day. The caller-ID feature gave him six six one, which was Bakersfield, as if he needed the extra dig in his ribs. Fresno was five five nine.
This new voice was astonishing, so much like his dead friend Terror Pennycooke’s that he wondered if the Jamaicans hadn’t found a way to make the dead walk and talk. There was no percentage in letting on to anything, though.
‘This is Jack’s friend,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘I can reach Mr Liffey if it’s important.’
‘Cha, how many white men lie to me – I lose count.’
Even on the phone, Jack Liffey could hear the man suck his teeth. ‘Friend, they lie to me, too, all the time. Tell me what it is you want.’
‘Dis Liffey man, yes, he be dere when my big brother kill. He owe me.’
‘Jesus Christ, man, Terror Pennycooke was my good friend and ally.’ He shouldn’t have said it, but he did. ‘Afterwards, I got his girlfriend into a school. Who the fuck are you?’
Cunning came into the phone voice. ‘Mr Jack it is, uh-huh? I require to talk to you, face on face.’
‘Sure. And when we meet, if I even see a bottle of Jamaican ginger beer, I’ll shoot you where you stand. Do you understand me?’
The man laughed a bit longer than necessary.
‘Are you the little brother? What’s your name?’ Jack Liffey asked.
‘Ratchet. Pennycooke. A name to be fear.’
‘Where you staying? You don’t have to give me an address. Just a city.’
‘Some Ca-no-ga shit.’
‘Canoga Park? They stuck you in the fuckin’ Valley? OK, fine. Get a car or take a bus or run, and you find Lake Balboa in Van Nuys, maybe five miles east of you. I’ll be there in an hour. Don’t worry. I’ll know you.’
‘Cha, man, I-an-I done be nuttin’ but civil wit’ you. Don’ be no evil-man.’
‘Ratchet, if you’re half the man your brother was, I’m your best friend. But I don’t recommend staying in this city if you’re working for the same people he did. There’s no future in being a hit man for drug-dealers. One day, there’s always gonna be more weight on the other side, and more cops.’
‘You be dere, Mr AD-vice. Just don’t do me no dirt.’
Business like this could ruin the nicest day, Jack Liffey thought. But he hadn’t been having the nicest day, anyway. Somewhere way down in the madhouse they were playing the Jamaican card, right on top of his jealousy card.
‘Don’t be a rude boy, Ratchet. Your brother Trevor was a good man.’
It doesn’t look any too posh, but using only cash and my one phony ID, I check into the Sputnik SurfRider Motel out here at the scraggly end of Malibu at Topanga Beach. From the road there’s a tall pole with one of those spiky fifties emblems from the glory days of the leap into space that nobody’s bothered to update as it rusts away. Inside the room, the kindest thing is to think retro. No clown prints, but the bed actually has a padded white leatherette headboard, held to the wall with brass buttons every eight inches. I don’t care, of course. All I need is privacy, and sometimes, like any movie star, I have to pay a lot extra for that. Here I’m Joey Wilson.
I don’t use my cell in case they’ve got the CIA or FBI on me. I use the house phone to call an old friend, Art Castro, who works at a detective agency downtown.
‘Art, this is me, the guy you once chased off that stalker for – don’t say my name. He was starting to drop threatening notes. We clear?’
‘How could I forget you, my man? You was a stand-up guy, and you slipped a kind word in my boss’s ear. May have saved my job. You in trouble?’
‘Not a bit of it. I’m just AWOL for a few days from a movie, and you know how hysterical those guys get.’
‘Millions down the shit-can every second, yeah. What can I do for you? Anything, man.’
‘I’ve got a name from way back in the when. And I want to find him fast.’ In fact I have two names, but I’m pretty sure of the right one now, and I’m going to drop the other one. I can remember Moms talking about a Stoney. ‘Marcus Stone. Stoney. Back in the day, he hung out for a while at one of those swinger clubs – the Sandstone Retreat in Topanga. I got reason to think he taught at a college out in the Valley and he was something special. OK?’
‘I’m on it.… You want to stay “location unknown” and call me? Here’s my prepaid cell. Untraceable.’
I copy his number down.
‘I’ll connect you two by sunset or no money changes hands.’
‘Money is no problem, Art. Just do what you do, and you’ll end up very happy.’
I hang up, staring at a bad painting of a surfer in an impossible curl, and wonder what it’s going to be like if I actually meet this guy – my father. Will he even want to see me? He won’t be a bum, knowing Moms – but what’s become of him after all this time? He may have a huge family and be so uptight he doesn’t want to know me.
She told me he was a Black Panther for a while, so I carry around this mental image of him in a big Afro and black leather jacket, like those sixties photos of Huey Newton or Bobby Seale. I remember trying to grow my own Afro for a while when I was eighteen and strutted around a bit in the mess – it just looked scraggly and stupid. Anyway, that won’t be what Stoney looks like now, age maybe sixty, maybe sixty-five. He’ll be gray as a dead TV.
Pacing the motel room, I nearly walk headlong into a ve
rtical yellow surfboard that’s been made into a floor lamp. Jesus. OK, I’m in Malibu. What a contrast from my Panther imaginings to this, I think. Those white kids of the nineteen sixties – I suppose it was their way of rebelling to risk death in the surf. But maybe everything I know is lies. Maybe Pops wasn’t teaching at a college at all, maybe he was a janitor cleaning up the bathrooms at a McDonald’s. Risking death by minimum wage.
It is what it is, I think. His drop of sperm did its work.
As Gloria was about half again his size and weight, and appeared a bit tired, Sonny Theroux did a lot of climbing over and around and over again to get at and make available all their erogenous zones. All this randy circling around on his part blew out a lot of the squat candles he’d started up in the dark-curtained bedroom. He hadn’t worked so hard at loving in years. There was something about the way she mixed abrupt unselfconscious demands and a yielding to every suggestion he made that really tickled his fancy.
‘I do believe you’re the sexiest woman I ever sparked and larked.’
‘Oooh, a little higher! Right there, sweetie! Hard now! Do it!’
After a while, they were both thoroughly worn out. Oversported, he thought.
‘Gimme that slack gearshift to hold on to,’ she said. ‘I’ll know when the motor’s running again.’
‘Woman, I’m’a take a pretty bad heartache after you.’
‘I hope that doesn’t mean what I think it does.’
‘It means I’m crazy in love with you, Gloria Ramirez, you’re so far past my best dreams that I been having fantasies about you for months. It’s the big thing, the real thing. I want you to leave Jack and be all mine – right here, or L.A., or Paris, or Bangkok, or we can go live on your Rez. I don’t mind.’
‘Cool your jets. You’re lettin’ your head go runnin’ around after your dick, Sonny. Let’s enjoy the time we got.’
‘I ain’ never been a Tom-catter.’ He tried to look her in the eyes, but she wouldn’t meet his. ‘I can’t say it any plainer. I want to marry you forever and ever. He ain’t married you.’