by John Shannon
‘Good, good.’
‘It ain’ over till the G-Dog bark.’ G-Dog was the tallest and most deeply, quietly angry of the Rollin’ Seventies, and Stoney had never figured out whether he was thoughtful or just lost somewhere deep in all that rage.
‘OK, G, what you got?’
‘Dart gun they use on the fuckin’ tigers in the jungle, with M-99 darts. It’s mad bait. The mother you hit go right to la-la and some duck-sucker can stand over him and shoot him dead.’
Jesus Christ, why not shoot him dead in the first place? Stoney thought, but what the hell. Better an enemy out cold. He’d hoped for a little more armament, maybe some more explosives, but it would have to do against South American cholos, who might not be able to get much more in L.A. than rusty revolvers from some Mex gang or whatever they could buy quick. Though they had retrieved that RPG from some big deposit box at the bank, the one they’d fired off at Costco. Couldn’t have been much more than that in a safety deposit box, he thought. No tanks, no nukes.
Stoney’s cell rang, and snapping it open, he saw the number was his police snitch.
Sonny parked the mini-van in the nearly forgotten enclave of old money out in east Bakersfield south of the country club. New money had gone out to the western periphery across Highway 99, but the houses here were large and Spanish or even pseudo-Tudor, on curving roads without sidewalks, built in the 1920s or some other prehistoric time before the sprawl and white flight from as far as L.A. had swollen the old south valley townlet of maybe thirty thousand on old Highway 99 up to half a million.
‘You want to take the lead in talking to him?’ Sonny asked.
She nodded. ‘This is as touchy as it gets.’
‘Look at these houses. How did a cop buy here?’
‘That’s a little luxury of knowledge we don’t want to get into right now,’ Jenny Ezkiaga said. ‘They are nice, though.’
‘I don’t get over here a lot.’
‘Why would you? These folks don’t hire people who run at our speed. They own the stores, they don’t rob them.’
They both got out of the car, shutting the car doors softly, as if to minimize their presence in the super-quiet neighborhood.
‘These are the ones who rob you with a fountain pen, as Woody Guthrie said,’ Sonny added.
‘The legend says he was quoting Lincoln,’ she offered, as they started up the long rising lawn.
‘Can we trust Saldivar?’ he asked.
She puffed through very tight lips. ‘Can we trust the sun to rise tomorrow? I’m in the lead here, partner. Stand down.’
But before she could steady herself for the task, Efren Saldivar stepped out on to the screened verandah with a frown and a black aluminum baseball bat, limping a little on a big plaster cast over his right foot. They knew his on-duty accident probably didn’t bear a lot of scrutiny. They say he’d been moving a desk in the police station and dropped it on his own foot. An alternate version had his partner Tom Etcheverry doing something incredibly stupid during the same move, like stopping abruptly to tell a joke and causing the accident. Almost everybody liked the second version best.
Saldivar was still young looking, maybe late thirties, and darkly handsome, with the usual tidy cop mustache. He wore expensive casual clothes, a nice polo and a pair of gray sweats that would pull easily over the cast.
‘Freeze, motherfuckers!’ Saldivar said, probably out of habit, or just a joke, as he rapped the bat on his porch. But they both froze, a good ten yards short of the steps.
‘I’m sorry to hear you were injured, Efren,’ Jenny said. ‘It looks painful.’
‘Thanks so much, Jenny. I know you’ve come here about my foot’s welfare. You, too, Sonny.’
‘I wish you only well, L.T.’
Saldivar just glanced at him, and then returned his gaze to Jenny, knowing where the real muscle lay.
‘No, you can’t come up on the porch. Every time you show up, woman, one of us got to worry about an abrupt end to their career. Yes. The foot hurts like a bastard. Thank you. For the first time in my life I feel really impaired.’
‘It’s not you we’re here for, Lieutenant; it’s about your partner. You know perfectly well he’s not playing with all fifty-two cards. You’ve been walking after him in the park with a pocketful of doggie bags for years.’
Saldivar looked like he was about to say something nasty, but a motorcycle came noisily past and seemed to change his mind. His eyes took on the aimless resentment of an old snapping turtle, and he shrugged and rapped his baseball bat on the wood again.
‘Do you want to know what’s happening with Tom or not?’ she asked. ‘His ass is in your hands.’
‘Oh, probably not. Just try me half way.’
Something had got her back up, and Sonny liked the result. ‘Remember that L.A. cop, Gloria Ramirez? Of course you do. The one who came to help Jack Liffey and his daughter and humiliated the whole department by mounting a real police investigation all by herself. Look, I know I’m over the line. You can get angry now and not learn anything, or you can let that drop. The woman was sent up to a conference in Fresno last week.’
‘That damn DNA thing.’
‘Uh-huh. She was in town here on the way. Never mind the details – your partner ran up against her and arrested her when she was pretty far off balance, but he never took her in to Truxton to be booked. I think a worst case is happening right now or just about to.’
Saldivar’s eyes went to Sonny. ‘What’s your part in this, pendejo? You dally a little with the bitch?’
‘Sir, she’s a friend of mine, and she’s missing. You’d do your best, too. I been a cop. Long ago, in Louisiana.’
‘Your manhood isn’t much to me, guy, but I guess to you it feels like the real thing.’
Jenny whacked Sonny’s arm with the back of her hand, and he shut up. ‘Sir, you’ve got to know by now your partner’s a bit of a sociopath. With a bad grudge against women, especially this woman.’
Saldivar glared at Sonny for a moment, then turned back to Jenny. ‘Have you got any real reason to be spewing all this manure?’
‘She’s been gone overnight, Efren. No official arrest. No paperwork. Price admitted Etcheverry drove away from the scene with her in the car. Things happen in the dark of night. One of your buddies who was there says privately that Etcheverry was sticking his hand up her skirt pretty hard after he arrested her.’
‘OK, shut up now.’ The cop glanced down at the baseball bat that still dangled limply. ‘It’s failure that you never get over,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Tom’s been a failure from when we was both in the second grade at Bessie Owens school.’
He looked off into the sky and sighed, the sigh of a man foreseeing something truly unpleasant. ‘I got to deal with this, not you. You get that? Just go home, peeps.’
‘We can’t do that.’
‘Get in my way today, and I’ll shoot you on sight.’ Saldivar hopped to the screen door and shoved it open hard, and the pneumatic closer rebounded once before banging shut behind him.
Maeve led him up to ‘the chairs’, both of them huffing and puffing a bit along the last forty-five degree stretch of crumbling asphalt roadway and then a slippy-slidey climb up dirt and sand.
‘Have you ever heard of Sandstone Retreat?’ she asked.
‘Huh-uh,’ Chad said. Chad had insisted on coming back in the morning to see how she was, so she took him for a walk to keep this all away from the girls. From Axel, actually.
They settled with sighs on to the white resin chairs on the knob. They grasped paper coffee cups with plastic caps that had gone a bit misshapen and disappointingly cool during the long ascent.
‘You don’t think a street can get any steeper and then, wham, it does,’ she said.
‘Steep enough,’ he said. They sipped the coffee as they caught their breath. He frowned and poured his out on to the weeds.
‘I just heard about this place,’ Maeve said. They’d driven to the only parking spot a
t the base of the hill.
‘Which house is this retreat you mentioned?’
‘I think it’s that long gray building down there. Back in the day, it was some kind of sex cult, even had celebrities coming from all over.’
‘I bet sex cults are all pretty much the same. Like religious ones. It’s amazing when you read those old guys and they go on and on about their penises. Henry Miller. Mailer. Roth. It’s like they had to kick the world hard, like some stingy Coke machine, to get their share of sex.’
Maeve smiled, once again having to look away from the tug of Chad’s dazzling beauty. She wondered if his dad’s third wife had been some beauty queen starlet. ‘I bet you always got your share in high school.’
That statement seemed to annoy him a little, but she couldn’t help that. She bet it was true. The detachment made him seem unreachable for the moment.
‘I had girlfriends. I really didn’t think of high school as a big reality show with some squeaky announcer keeping score. Did you get your share?’ he asked.
‘I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing, Chad.’ She was feeling generous toward him and let the hostility go. ‘Do you think there’s such a thing as having too much sex?’
He frowned at the puddle of coffee that he’d discarded. ‘Maybe if you’re buying popularity with it, it’s probably the wrong currency and it’ll bite you on the ass.’
‘I think we can both agree on that. That’ll kill something in you pretty fast. But … I don’t know. I’m thinking of a place like that that makes sex a big fetish. What happens to you if you turn sex into a recreation? The old in-and-out, as guys used to say. Two, maybe three partners at once. Or doing it ten times a day. Do you think it hurts something in you?’
He looked at her in a way she couldn’t interpret, and then shrugged and looked out over the hillside. ‘I’ll bet some people do fine and others get freaked out. Like going to war and killing. Some do fine, some don’t. Californians have made whole junk cultures out of skateboards, and surfing, and custom cars, and pickups that jack themselves up and down fast. We can probably do the same with sex.’
‘Is a junk culture anything poor people choose to do?’ she said slyly.
‘Is sociology just the anthropology of white people?’ he countered.
‘Touché. Thank god you’re no dope, Chad. For all the crazy things I’ve got caught up in in my short life – and I’ve told you some of them – I’ve never done what must have been Sandstone sex. Sex without even the pretense of affection.’
‘Is this an elaborate way of blowing me off?’ he asked.
‘Why are you asking me that?’
‘Radar,’ he said. ‘I feel the start of a freeze-out.’
Maeve watched a pair of mockingbirds dive and soar, harassing the hell out of a red-tailed hawk. Defending their nest, probably. What was more understandable than that? ‘Life’s not all about you, Chad. We both just started college, and I’m a little overwhelmed by it all.’
‘I thought we were doing pretty good, actually,’ he complained.
Chad was like a dark room to her, and part of her wanted to know what was in it – but not terribly urgently.
‘I think we’re good friends,’ she said.
‘I thought so, too, until you started to worry me.’
‘Let’s not hurry life. I don’t even know what high school you went to,’ she said.
‘Reno High, right in Ward One downtown. With all those poor people and junk cultures.’ He smiled halfheartedly.
‘What else was special about it?’
‘Nobody there had heard of the blacklist. So I could have a regular high school life. Regular is pretty much OK with me,’ he said gently. ‘I think I’m regular. That’s why I’m not at Princeton.’
The abrupt softening in him affected her. ‘You do attract me, Chad. If that’s what you want to hear.’
FOURTEEN
Life Is Sugar, For True
For a savvy cop, Saldivar was pretty oblivious to having a tail. Maybe it was the urgency of his concern for his partner. And it helped that Sonny was following in a fairly anonymous white mini-van. Bakersfield wasn’t the most complex city-plan around, so it wasn’t that hard to follow Saldivar’s 1969 fastback Mach 1 Mustang, with its louvers over the rear window and its black bent-wingtip-spoiler over the tail. They trailed him out of the country club streets and then across the grid – toward the oddly bypassed chunk of Old Downtown that had pretty much been abandoned to druggies and punkers. Saldivar seemed to know right where he was going.
‘How are we going to keep Jack out of this if it’s bad?’ Jenny said. ‘I don’t want him driving supersonic over the Grapevine with murder in his heart.’
‘Let’s worry about Gloria right now,’ Sonny said.
‘I have a feeling she can take care of herself. Look, Saldivar’s pulling over.’
They slowed as the Mustang turned hard and stopped in the driveway of what looked like a meth house, a stucco box with a dead lawn in a really bad neighborhood, steel doors and oversize burglar bars everywhere. Jenny didn’t know what Etcheverry drove, but there was a beat-up Camaro out front, and a big Ford pickup, too, probably the most anonymous vehicle in all Bakersfield.
The steel drug door had been torn open long ago and the regular door must have been open, too, as they watched Saldivar work his way up to the porch on his crutch and go straight in. They parked a half block up the road and shut the engine off as a tattooed kid on a skateboard clattered past and gave them the finger, then both fingers.
‘Can I shoot him?’ Jenny said.
‘Suit yourself. It’ll save somebody trouble later. Nice neighborhood.’
‘Not much worse than yours.’
‘Point taken.’ Sonny’s Oildale, an oilworker and poor-white ghetto only inches above the mud flats of the Kern River, was an unincorporated district so scabrous that even Bakersfield refused to annex it. This area was Bakersfield proper, but the city had pretty much disowned it.
In a moment, Saldivar hopped back out the door of the ratty bungalow, kicking at nothing in particular, except maybe life, with his heavy foot-cast, which almost threw him off balance. He stared in supplication at the heavens for a moment or two and then sat hard on the stoop. He put his face in his hands.
‘If I didn’t think such things were excluded from our world, I’d say he’s crying,’ Sonny said.
‘The imagination reels.’
At the Airport Radisson, Orteguaza was announcing to his men that if Sem didn’t call back in ten minutes, they’d go and show him how a partner ought to behave.
But Randy Sem called back in five minutes. ‘You want a reliable distributor for your coca, here’s the number to call; ask for Gideon. He’s ready to go.’ He read off a number. ‘On the other hand, you only want violence, God help you, go to Hillside Memorial Park and set yourselves up. It’s a Jewish cemetery right off the 405, not far. I can send Stoney and his boys to meet you there. Which is it going to be, Mr Man-o-war, business or pleasure?’
As usual, he felt at the center of things and in control, even though he suspected this man’s nonsensical way of addressing him was not meant to be respectful. His mentor, Abelardo Rubio, had long ago taught him never to worry about what worms thought of you. And also never to move on in life without wiping the ground clean under your feet. ‘Are we supposed to dig his grave in this Jew place?’
‘He ain’t been bar mitzvahed, Colombiano. Just think of Hillside as a big grassy place with no cops in it where you can shoot someone. If that’s your choice, you pighead madman, don’t ever call me again. I want a reliable business partner.’
‘You send Señor Stone, amigo.’
The line went dead.
‘Get ready to move,’ Orteguaza snapped to the room. ‘We got to pick up the heavy stuff from Dieciocho.’
Jack Liffey let Winston in. He was juggling a big cardboard tray of paper coffee cups, little cream canisters, and a selection of the asphalt-hard confections that these f
ranchises called scones.
‘Trash ’n ready. You all tek de fruits.’
‘Calm down, Winston,’ Jack Liffey admonished. ‘Let’s speak ordinary English. Eat a little sustenance yourself, because we have work for you.’
‘I et some dry bananas from the market – a terrible swap for the good little red sweet Jamaican bananas – and two mangos that tasted like they been soaking all week in petrol.’
Tyrone Bird drank down a whole cup of the black coffee. ‘Oooh, man. Yes. Dear, doctor. More of that.’
Jack Liffey handed him his own cup, and Ty gulped down about half of that, too.
‘As you can see, our man here needs something strong. And he knows where the real thing is.’
Tyrone Bird wrote out a note to his wife, and told Winston where to find his house in Mandeville Canyon, not so far away. Winston showed no reluctance at all.
‘Thanks from the bottom of my heart, Winston,’ Tyrone said. ‘I don’t forget favors.’
‘I-an-I no Jah man like my brah – none o’ dat Rasta perturbs me, but I b’lieve we all climb de good mountain together. Both o’ you good men.’ His deep black eyes met theirs with something like devotion. He seemed caught up in his shaky self-image and his dialect again.
‘Three Musketeers,’ Tyrone said with a smile.
Jack Liffey wondered if he’d fallen through some crust of reality into a high school play. But why not? They grappled a clumsy three-way handshake.
‘OK, de wicked got to be injure. De Musketeer – dey vanquish dere foe.’
‘Go, friend,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘Don’t kill anyone right away. Call me first if there’s trouble.’
Winston hurried out the door with a big infectious grin, tucking the note to Mrs Tyrone Bird in his shirt pocket.
‘Utterly amazing,’ Tyrone said. ‘What a wondrous people Jamaicans must be. If you could pick up that island and set it down in Kansas, the whole middle of the country would vibrate with their energy.’
Jack Liffey nodded. ‘His brother Trevor was one of the most un-selfconscious heroes I’ve ever met. Always weirdly off the wall, but always with a heart of gold and the will to make things right.’