by John Shannon
What I’m starting to notice is that two rows in front of me, on the aisle, there’s an old Buick that’s all wrong. All the windows are down for air, and every few minutes a bit of a head rises enough over the seats to glance at the Escalade, then another head. I don’t like the look of this comedy at all. An ambush? Some kind of takedown of a dope deal? What an irony it would be to find my dad at last, just as he gets killed in a drug deal going bad.
Naturally, one of the Skinnies has trotted up near the Buick, and he winks to me, then starts doing cartwheels in the aisle.
I lean over to look at myself in the rear-view mirror and there they are – my secret eyes. Nobody but the Skinnies, and maybe Paulita, ever sees them. I used them very briefly a few times in movies when I was desperate to get past some crappy action-movie line, but no one seemed to catch on, no one except a handful of other crazies who wrote fan letters to tell me what they’d seen.
Mr Bird, what Providence were you violating when you said in Morgan the Magician, ‘I belong to those who are the great controllers of the universe.’ I saw your terrible eyes when you said that.
These letters I burn. Who cares about a schizophrenic fan or two who can see through the mask?
Oh, Paulita, maybe tonight I’ll slip in, and you’ll let me get my meds.
That was some damn fancy driving, Ratchet thought – big up onna you, Winston. He was still a little winded from trying to keep up, a few blocks back, and cranking away at the big sloppy Impala steering, throwing a bad scare into a half dozen ordinary drivers along the way before he had to back down. No hurry, really, since Harper had told him where the meet was to go down. But, cha, it was good to watch Tyrone Bird drive that low German car like it was glued to the road. Truly like watching Jamspeed up at Discovery Bay. He wondered if being in movies taught the man that. You de best. I like you more and more, ma’an.
I-an-I gonna watch your back, you like it or not. But what is it make you come here, with bad bwoys all over dis unhappy place, and drug business come dis way fast? You remember dat ting you say to Julia Roberts in de great film Cracking Up? ‘Sometime you got to look at youself and judge youself from a second place. You got to look at you dreams and see if they tell you back off what it is you doing.’ I hear you good. I need dat second place, Mr Tyrone. Mr J. Liffey, maybe him got him one. Maybe he be pretty good fren’, I say. The guy who know the score, like the guy with the checker flag at Jamspeed.
Jack Liffey had heard her murmuring on the phone very early in the morning out in the hallway.
Earlier in the night, as they’d gone to bed, he’d rested his hand on her bare shoulder, but nothing more. And when he’d taken it away without trying to do more, she’d said, ‘Thank you, Jackie. I’ll remember that.’
When she’d been on the phone, he’d listened closely for any talking-to-Sonny loving intonations, but it had sounded more like she was dealing with Harbor Division, entreating extra time off.
He certainly felt himself on the outside of things now. Looking in through cupped hands pressed to the armored and darkened glass. He wasn’t planning on getting up yet, though it was far too late, and he hadn’t slept much. What impressed Jack Liffey was the absoluteness of it all, his whole future. It was right there in front of him, and he had no control over a goddamn thing.
He watched her pack up her little duffle again, before it was even light outside. His heart did its dipsy-doodle down to his toes and back up part way, maybe as far as the knees. She was obviously heading for Bakersfield. So soon?
‘So soon?’ he said aloud.
‘Come morning. Don’t you think I should get it over with? Find out?’
‘Well. When we all thought Loco was dying, the vet asked me if I wanted her to lie about it. I said, absolutely. Lie like crazy.’
Gloria looked over at him, where he was sitting up and holding the sheet to his chest like a virgin. ‘Loco is still dying,’ she said in her hardest, self-unforgiving voice. ‘Just slower now.’
‘Hell, we all are, Glor. Even Walt Kelly died, and Pogo should have lived forever.’ As a child, the Pogo cartoon strip had been his shield against his father’s rigidly racist writings and screwball neo-Nazi friends.
She turned thoughtful for a moment. ‘My foster parents hated Pogo. They said it was too cynical and too smart. Not the animal, the strip. Smart always threatened them, I think.’
‘I learn more about you all the time,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘I think it’s my goal in life.’
‘Well, I don’t hate smart, Jackie. I hate not knowing for sure who I am and what I need. And what’s going wrong.’
‘I told you, any time you want to abandon L.A. and go live in a dusty trailer on the Paiute Reservation in Lone Pine, I’m with you all the way.’
She went back to packing. ‘When reservations are that small, they call them rancherias. I don’t think the options are that simple. Any feeling of loss takes me back to my childhood – but my childhood isn’t really in Lone Pine any more.’
‘What loss is it?’ he asked, trying to ignore chills of fear.
‘Don’t ask me the hard ones right now, please. Wait for me to get through this.’
‘You know I will.’
‘I don’t know a damn thing.’
I get out of my car and find a loose shopping cart in the huge parking lot, and without obviously looking at anything I push it past the Skinny who’s making faces and plucking at me and then right past the primered and dented Buick Riviera with the front fender a different blue. Uh-huh, there’re five young black guys in this old hooptie, all slumped down, and I see hints of weapons. A curved ammo magazine, a blued gun barrel.
I turn on acting mode for them – Oh, I’ve forgotten where my car is! And then – Oh, there it is! – back behind me, after all! If I can’t convince half-assed gangbangers with the faintest gesture, I’m really not much good, am I? Of course there’s nothing in the shopping cart, so if they’re half-way sentient, they ought to realize I’m fucking with them. But then maybe I’m a store employee, out collecting carts. On several shoots back east, I’ve been amazed how many people actually return carts to their marked bays, almost all of them. Nobody in California ever does.
That damn Buick is bad news, I realize, as I climb back into the Porsche. Guns and goofs. I want to protect my dad – even if he isn’t really my dad. Let me believe, gods.
* * *
There was a place on Sepulveda on the way to the airport that rented all sorts of high-end cars so you could impress your girlfriend or your contact, or whomever you were picking up, Stoney thought. That must be where the Colombians had rented what was probably the biggest, most expensive production car ever made – the Maybach 62 – that came rolling very slowly into the Costco gate. Harper’s little cousin, B-Dog, had been coveting that damn thing ever since it had been introduced, replacing the Mercedes 600 in his fantasies. It looked like a Rolls that had fallen through some other dimension and melted a bit at both ends. Harper knew it cost over five hundred grand and was just Euro-shit, as far as he was concerned. He’d rather have a big-fin Caddy from the sixties with lots of chrome.
The Maybach chugged across the parking lot and finally settled precisely over the fading Indio emblem on the asphalt. Four eyes in the Escalade one space away watched maybe sixteen eyes in the Maybach suspiciously as the smoked windows hummed down.
‘Welcome to the land of opportunity,’ Stoney said out his window.
‘Tranquilo,’ an unidentified voice said. ‘Somos todos amigos, amigos.’ We are all friends.
‘I want to speak only to Señor Jhon Orteguaza,’ Stoney said.
The tall lighter-skinned man in the back seat made some subtle signal as he sat upright and then nodded. ‘We have met several times before, Mr Stone.’ He was the lightest of them, but even he would have been taken by many bangers for a Mexican, though maybe a rich Mexican.
‘First, sir, may I indulge my curiosity? What is it you gentlemen painted on this parking spot?’ Stoney s
aid evenly.
The Colombian showed no effect at all. ‘It is personal, amigo, but out of my great benevolence I will tell you. It represents Oshun, the Orisha of love and sex. She is kind, but she has a terrible temper. If you use her too hard, she will take vengeance. She became very special to my mother, who acquired an interest in the powerful Caribbean deities.’
‘Believe me, Mr Orteguaza. I respect you totally and I respect your mother and her deities; you have all props here. We have never cheated you, and you have never cheated us, and that goes a long way in this world. But I need to know why people telephone me from Medellin and Cartagena late at night and say, Cuidado, señor. This Jhon Jairo needs a large infusion of cash money quickly and trust him only if you wish to die.’
‘These are my enemies, Señor Stone. What can one expect enemigos to say? They wish to make you suspicious, of course – to make very hot water for me and to destroy our deal. When I get home, I will crush some of these enemies.’
‘I would, too. But your enemies call my private telephone number, and that worries me a lot. We’re both simple honest men, sir. I do not doubt that. This is just business we are talking about. We’re not into waving our dicks to see who is the big dog here, but I’m fully and completely prepared, if that’s what you have in mind. Please don’t doubt it. This is nothing but an honest business deal, with many many people watching over it.’
Harper was so relieved that Stoney hadn’t asked him to do the talking. Jesus Christ! You could cut the tension with a dull knife. This was way way over his head. He’d never seen Stoney push a deal so hard and look so worried. He reached across the seat very low and touched Stoney’s knee to warn him that he was scared.
‘I don’t know all your idiom, Mr Stone. I think I can guess about waving dicks. Anything can be purchased, these days, even private telephone numbers. Perhaps from your corrupt DEA. But tell me, you don’t work sometimes for your police? Just to confuse them, perhaps. Maybe a man named Keeler?’
A small electric go-cart with SECURITY written on the side chose that moment to tootle around the periphery of the lot. The old black security guard inside was doing his best not to look at things too hard, and they all fell silent for a bit of mad-dogging as the cart buzzed past.
‘People have been hurt for suggestions like that,’ Stoney announced. How would Orteguaza know such a thing? He was getting a bigger and bigger premonition of trouble ahead. The air seemed to grow thick around him.
To show his cool, Orteguaza lit a slim brown cigarette. Everything, from both sides, was being done with a slow formality. ‘Times are hard everywhere, señor. Your drone aircraft watch everything we do in our country, even my ranch on the coast, your government poisons our coca fields with phenoxyl esters, and even the price of gasoline for transport goes up.’
Stoney began to wonder at what point trading these veiled worries and veiled threats had started to seem like a good idea to the Colombian. At that point, you couldn’t roll the dice again.
‘I go to the gas station, too,’ Stoney said. ‘Tell me straight, señor. Are you bumping the price on me?’
‘No, sir. The price is twenty-five thousand a kilo, for all forty kilos, exactly as we arranged.’ Orteguaza blew strong-looking smoke across the facing seats and into the front seat of the Maybach, and his boys up there turned their heads away discreetly. ‘When I make a telephone call –’ he displayed his cellphone as if Stone might not have seen one before, ‘– a kilo of powder will be transported right here, as if by magic, and your boy can test it.’
Harper stiffened, but didn’t react further. He was ‘the boy’ now. He’d paid his USC chem student a lot of money to teach him how to test cocaine, and he had everything he needed in the back seat to do the titration himself. Why carry a cherry kid along? But that wasn’t what was worrying him.
‘We are all honorable men,’ Stoney said, ‘but we don’t want to leave open any possibility of mistakes. Once my boy tests the kilo that you have chosen for him and pronounces it one hundred per cent correct, then, perhaps, some confederate might cheat both of us and deliver thirty-nine kilos of baking powder.’
‘You suggest we are cheaters?’
‘I want only the custom we have established. As is our custom, you bring the load in your pickup truck or your old car or whatever your delivery guy is going to use, and I get to choose the bag to test.’
‘I don’t think that is going to be possible today.’
For the first time, Stoney was really alarmed. The million dollars in rumpled cash was taped up in Ralphs’ bags in the trunk, as he’d never done it before and shouldn’t have done it this time, and that left him terribly vulnerable to a skunk-and-run.
Why had he changed precautions? He’d just felt that with Harper’s pals out there in their car, and the unknown Ratchet in his car, and the Panchos in at least two cars, one or more hidden out there somewhere – with all the unpredictable Costco shoppers to-ing and fro-ing and the little whirring security cart rounding the perimeter – he’d assumed the Colombianos would make the delivery as usual and let him select a random baggie to test.
The goddess of love was painted on the ground, OK? No goddess I know sends trouble, Stoney thought. She deals with trouble.
‘Suppose, when I’m happy with my one kilo, I bring you one bag of cash money to count, say twenty-five thousand dollars. The rest will be delivered to you later.’ This was all going bad far too fast.
Maeve got up late, which was understandable after her ordeal at the college and the police station. Luckily Chad had never given the cops any lip, and they’d let him go right away.
‘Can I make you a late breakfast?’ Jack Liffey asked.
She was still a bit bleary looking. ‘What is a late breakfast? I picture little tombstones over fried eggs.’
‘You’re not Leo Gorcey.’ They’d once had pun contests, and she’d always loved the Bowery Boys in the old old reruns, howling and rolling on the floor at the man’s malapropisms and self-importance.
‘Thank God. And I’m not Groucho, either. You know I’m the only person my age who knows who those guys are?’
‘That’s a true loss to the country. That goofball humor was the high-water mark of American Culture.’
‘You used to say that was Bugs Bunny.’
‘Him, too. Oh, yes.’ He knew her one fast-food weakness. ‘Two frosted raspberry Pop-Tarts coming up.’
‘Oh, thanks, Dad. I’m not so into that any more, but I can do it.’
While she was in the bathroom, he toasted three of them, thinking he’d make a show of eating a late breakfast with her. She came into the kitchen in an old chenille robe of Gloria’s, sleeves rolled into big wads at her elbows, and he almost wept. He poured some coffee and served the tarts on Gloria’s colorful talavera plates.
‘Glor at work today?’
‘Probably,’ he said. He hated lying to her, but he would if it was best – though he wasn’t very good at it.
‘I don’t like that answer.’
‘I don’t much like daughters attaching themselves to random gunmen and getting on the wrong side of SWAT teams.’
‘We pretty much talked out that subject last night, I think. If you remember. Is this Gloria’s big thing that’s going on?’
‘Big thing?’
‘She warned me weeks ago that she might be away for a while, looking into something that she said “might change a lot for us,” and she said I had a right to know that much. Jesus, you guys get dramatic at the drop of a hat. It’s got to mean another guy.’
‘Let’s just see what happens, hon. I’m doing my best to normalize here.’
She put her hand on her father’s wrist as he was about to pick up the Pop-Tart. ‘Don’t eat that.’
‘The poisons in it?’
‘I want it, and I know you don’t.’
Everything just gets harder and harder, he thought.
Harper was getting even more nervous as the face-off wore on – clutching a hand
ful of Stoney’s shirt from the side. Stoney pointed calmly, drawing everyone’s mute attention to the little electric security cart out at the perimeter fence, like a distant moon of the planet Costco, coming around again. Whatever went down, Stoney thought, this was absolutely the last time he’d do business over a fucking Caribbean magic symbol.
‘I know what’s wrong here,’ Orteguaza said calmly.
‘All of it’s wrong,’ Stoney said. ‘There’s no powder here, and no money. Because there’s no trust.’
‘That’s the word. Trust is not here. My English is so weak.’
‘No, it’s not. We all want to go home in one piece to our women, right?’ Stoney suggested.
Orteguaza met his eyes firmly, and it was like looking into the mouth of hell. Later he would swear to himself that the eyes glowed red from deep within.
‘Women are just cunts,’ Orteguaza said. ‘Señor Stone, consider your skin being flayed off your bones for many days while my doctors keep you conscious and alive. This is not the way to do business among honorable men.’
Stoney heard the Escalade door open behind him. He glanced around involuntarily and saw Harper get out and slap his neck. He wanted to shout to stop him, but it was too late now. Harper was carrying a Steyr assault rifle in one hand and he hunched down behind the hood of the Escalade. When Stoney glanced back at the Colombians, metallic glints were appearing in the interior twilight of the Maybach, too, weapons dragged out of jackets and grabbed from the floor.
Orteguaza raised his eyebrows. ‘Let’s not ruin such a nice car.’
‘Then go in peace,’ Stoney said. ‘I permit it.’
‘You say you permit it.’ The voice came like a rumble from deep in the bowels of the earth, but before it was out, there was a squeal of burning tires some distance away – he guessed it was the Rollin’ Seventies’ car coming on fast, with bangers hanging out the windows holding their armament. Sure enough he heard automatic fire start up – with about as much chance of hitting his Escalade as the Maybach.