by John Shannon
‘Do you mean you stand up for the weak of the world?’ Only a fine actor could have said that line aloud without sounding absurd.
Jack Liffey smiled. ‘It must sound silly to you, too. I loved the Lone Ranger to distraction as a kid. You know that poor sad man who played him on TV, Clayton Moore – he believed in it all, he really did. It was touching. He’d go to supermarket openings in costume and talk to kids about always telling the truth and trying to make a better world. In that wonderful rich voice. Years later, I hear he begged for a tiny role in the movie remake, just a walk-on to pass the baton, but the Hollywood assholes didn’t want the guy around. Serves them right – the movie turned to shit.’
‘He was before my time, but I’ve seen the old black-and-white TV. I think I qualify as the weak here. Do you want me to list my vulnerabilities?’
‘No, not at all. I just want you to believe I’m on your side. And tomorrow morning, I want all of my own coffee.’
‘God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t think. I really needed something strong.’
‘It’s OK, son. We can get more. But I mean it about being on your side. I don’t give a goddamn about Meier Reston or Joe Lucius and all their self-important movietown boasts about their power. Money has its power, I know it, but I have enough to eat tomorrow. That’s plenty to keep my ethics out of the gutter. They came to me and rented my experience to find you, but it was just a rental – nobody buys me …’
Ty smiled, between furtive glances at the strange empty places in the room. ‘I wonder sometimes if those movie hotshots have souls. One of the writers I pokered with used to call them empty barking husks. Thank you, Jack. I know I’m sliding down a bad glide in my head right at the moment, and you know it, too. When Winston gets back, I’ll swamp everything inside me with the dulltime drugs. It’s no fun, but it makes me appreciate people who know about failure.’
‘Oh, that’s my middle name, son,’ Jack Liffey said.
They heard a backbeat rap at the door that could only have been Winston Pennycooke.
‘That should be my meds, bless his Jamaican soul.’
Joe Lucius’ personal cellphone rang its ta-daaa, mimicking the racecourse trumpet, and it meant he’d better get it. ‘Hold on, girls. This better be important,’ he barked into the phone. The hookers rolled away and waited patiently.
‘Joe, I got a bead on Tyrone. It took a whole FBI undertaking to track the GPS in his cellphone.’
‘No brag. Just tell me.’
‘He’s still close. I think he’s on his mission from God to find dad. Should I go drag him in?’
‘Meier …’ There was a very long pause, his imagination filling with naked producers tossed into active volcanos. ‘Did you not hear me earlier? What was it about ripping out your lungs and eating them that you didn’t understand? I said we shoot tomorrow or else. Hire some muscle – hell, hire some brain. Fuck up anyone who gets in our way. Bring me Tyrone Bird at nine a.m.’ He hung up.
Marcus Stone stood on the highest ground he could find and looked out over the small campus-sized Jewish cemetery that had been shoved up against a shallow curve of the 405 Freeway. The cemetery was built on rising hills that were cut up at angles by a dozen sturdy columbarium walls, or whatever the hell they called those long blank structures that held urns full of ashes. There was a big mausoleum below and, weirdly, a tiny Greek temple and a stepped waterfall dedicated to some singer from ancient time named Al Jolson.
Stone knew the place because he’d had a friend buried here years ago. Because of some misunderstanding Marcus Stone had been stuck waiting two hours, so he’d wandered around, looking at things. It was better than he remembered as a place to defend, which was certainly a new way of thinking about a cemetery. The patchwork of thick walls looked impregnable from up the hill, you could get up high above the entrance, and the hilliness let you and a chosen squad or two sprint from one columbarium to another.
He turned and nodded to the dozen or so young black men behind him. They’d all parked outside the cemetery on the uphill side, two-thirds of the Rollin’ Seventies, carrying crumpled shopping bags and sports satchels with multiple weapons in them. Looking totally out of place, they gathered near him. ‘My po-lice say the Colombians be coming here at three, lookin’ to catch a fade with us. They think they be here first, and they be coming in the front, down there off Centinela. So we keep the high ground. We go up top of these wall-things, both sides of the road. Get on the roof. Wait till they got to spread out. We use only text on the cells to communicate.’
‘Ain’ be no Eighty-Three Hoovers, Stone-man? Promise this be all crackers.’
‘It’s the same Spanish crackers that hit us at the Costco,’ Marcus said. ‘You wasn’t there, Ace-high. Most of them black, but that’s just the Colombian way. Don’t let it confuse you. They don’t even speak English. We got them outmanned and we got grenade launchers and shit. We the cavalry here an’ we gonna get us some Injuns.’
He let Harper take half the crew across the narrow cemetery roadway and boost themselves up on to the roof of a long two-story columbarium that looked as thick as the Great Wall of China. Oh, here it is, Stoney thought. I guess I been moving toward this badass showdown all my life. They didn’t show us respect at Costco, and then they killed Li’l Joker like a dog. So there’s no grays here, no in-between thinking, no old-school mercy. Just the Colombian ass-clowns and us, and we’re going to waste them all.
‘Let’s bust a cap on these cholos,’ he said to the squad of foot-soldiers who’d stayed with him, most of the bangers from the Costco. ‘Anybody got an extra strap with some distance to it? I only got this.’ He showed his Desert Eagle pistol. It had never seemed important, or even practical, for him to have a rifle. He wasn’t some peckerwood deer-hunter.
‘Jeez, Stoney, you don’t go to no sock dance without no socks. Here.’ G-Dog handed him a little Ingram spray gun and a couple of extra 30-round magazines, no more accurate at distance than his pistol, but at least it could fill the air fast with a lot of metal.
‘OK. Let’s get up on top of this thing and we the boss.’
* * *
Jenny Ezkiaga stood in the doorway of her spare bedroom in Bakersfield.
Gloria lay on the spare bed, utterly naked now and showing the bruises merging into one huge discolored mass. The blood had been gently sponged off, but she moaned and shifted a little from time to time like some form of sealife driven by invisible ocean currents. Jenny’s partner Teelee Greene knelt in the corner of the bedroom clutching her daughter, mesmerized by the sight of Gloria and watching over her like a helpless guardian angel. Teelee was reminded of her own miserable marriage with its irregular beatings with no warning, not so many years ago.
A female gynecologist had come to the house in the afternoon, sworn to eternal secrecy, and had examined Gloria’s wounds carefully, sewn some and salved others, and then left behind two syringes of morphine, to be used only if the double dose of ibuprofen failed to kill the pain. The doctor promised to dummy up some medical forms for a series of Jane Doe X-rays and ultrasounds in a clinic where she sometimes worked. But next morning – before it opened.
Jenny watched a few more restless twitches, caught Teelee’s troubled eye for a moment, and then went back to the kitchen where she’d made Sonny wait. ‘Shouldn’t we call Jack?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
She glared for a moment. ‘You’re going to have to handle your own complications, Sonny.’
‘Don’t you think I know that? We need to keep our heads down until we can get her out of here. He’d go berserk. He would, you know. If he saw her now, he’d probably go to the big cop funeral that’s coming up and shoot those two again in their coffins, and then he’d die in a rain of lead from the assembled Bako P.D. Not to mention the sheriffs and all the other P.D.s around who’ll be sending their envoys. Jack’s not very popular here.’
She nodded. ‘I know it. And I hate to think what Gloria’s own pals in LAPD would
do to this town if they knew the real story. They’ve got Navy SEALS and all that shit. We could have a guerilla war between cities. What a mess. If we get through this, please don’t bring her back here for your own pleasure.’
‘You know I’m really in love with her. It’s not just random fun, OK?’
‘She’ll be wherever she is, and you and Jack can fight it out with machetes if you want. But not here. We already owe too much to Lieutenant Saldivar. I’m still surprised he let us out of there.’
Neither of them had to mention her other handicap: being the most open and public lesbian in a city that was more or less run by conservative Evangelicals.
‘Sooner or later, I’ll run out of bonus points for my great-granddad and granddad, the sheepherders, and for going to Bako High, and then Teelee and I will have to skedaddle.’
‘Why don’t you leave now and go to the coast where you’d have a real community? Inland is another state, maybe another century.’
‘This has been my family’s town since 1910 when Domeka Ezkiaga was plucked out of the Pyrenees and brought here by a rich landowner and turned loose on the Kettleman Hills with a crappy little tent and a thousand sheep to watch. Once a month, the first Sunday, poor Domeka got to dress up in his only suit and be driven down to Bako for a meal at Noriega’s with the other herders. Think of the loneliness, man. My family earned its place in this town before any dustbowl Okies.’
He’d heard the tale before. ‘Those intolerant assholes all deserve scorpions in their boots.’
‘You learn to acclimate by not expecting any better.’
For some time Tyrone Bird had sat and stared at a handful of long pale green medicine capsules on the table with a glassy-eyed smile of cartoon lunacy, like Bugs Bunny with a spinning ring of stars over his head, occasionally looking up at some vacancy in the room that was probably not vacant for him.
Who knew what tricks his Skinnies were getting up to to stop him from downing the pills that would probably push them down into some dark recess of his tortured psyche, Jack Liffey thought. In the end Ty offered the vacancy in the room his middle finger and swallowed one pill, then another. He didn’t even need water to get them down.
‘Your wife send a note,’ Winston announced. He’d waited discreetly.
Tyrone poked his index fingers together for some reason, gingerly, as if they might spark. He ignored the envelope. ‘Not yet.’
Jack Liffey thought that this poor man would probably never experience a moment’s peace in his life without medications – and using the powerful psychoactives, who knew what side effects he had to put up with? He’d heard complaints from other clients. A dulling, a clouding, a kind of dementia that left you grasping anxiously for words or memories, strange internal wrestling matches that the anti-psychotics could set off. Most of all, the feeling of having your psyche inhabited by some consciousness that was not really your own.
‘You OK, Ty?’ Jack Liffey asked.
‘Not really. The Skinnies are fleeing for safety. Some other creatures may come forward soon. But they’ll be calm and well-behaved, no worries.’
‘You’ve been well-behaved yourself.’
‘You don’t know the chaos and fear inside.’
‘No, I don’t. Take your time, man.’
Jack Liffey took Winston into the bathroom where they could talk about Stoney without Ty hearing. Winston had no idea where Stoney had gone. He’d been given a disposable cellphone by Stoney’s lieutenant, Harper, but no number to call. We call you, Ratchet. You put your thumb up your ass and wait.
Jack Liffey took it from him and keyed back through the menus to find recent calls. He knew a bit of the technology from some help Maeve had given him once. But the numbers he found were just strings of asterisks, and there was no way to select one of them. He assumed that meant the phone was blocked in some way.
‘Stoney’s in trouble,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘We know that.’
‘Him done da ting himself, Jack. Dat man built of trouble, you noseeit? You think Ty his real-an-true son?’
Jack Liffey opened the bathroom door a little and peeked. Tyrone Bird was constructing small diagrams on the motel’s kitchen table with the remainder of the capsules.
‘I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t think it’s very likely. Everybody fucked everybody at this creepshow. And every single sperm is out for itself. What are the odds? I think his mom may have liked Stoney special and dropped precautions, but who knows?’
They heard powerful cars revving in front of the motel and looked at one another. ‘Think anyone followed you?’
‘Can’t swear naa, ma’an.’
Then there was a heavy and persistent knocking at the door, and even Ty looked up, but rather blankly, as they came out of the bathroom. Quickly and surreptitiously, Ty herded his pills back into their vial as if Big Nurse might come to take them away.
‘Open the fuck up! Or we’ll kick it in and charge it to you.’
Jack Liffey recognized the self-important voice of Meier Reston. It took only an instant to realize that Ty was going back now, no matter what anyone wanted. There would be heavies out there, for sure. He guessed the film folk would have a hell of a time getting much of a performance out of him on the medication.
The door banging went on and on, like a crazed man who was in it for the long haul.
‘You want to go back to the set, Ty?’ Jack Liffey asked softly. ‘It’s up to you.’
The man shrugged lethargically. ‘Sure.’
‘We’ll do what we can for Stoney.’
Somewhere, not far behind Tyrone’s eyes, an opaque shutter had fallen.
‘I don’t suppose with that famous face you could have hid out much longer. It doesn’t even matter who snitched. Get the door,’ Jack Liffey said to Winston.
He wanted to see what would become of Reston’s aggressive demeanor – all of a sudden facing the giant Jamaican. It was just mischief. There was nothing to be gained by balking the man or hustling Ty out the bathroom window, and if the actor went back to the set, at least he’d be out of the Marcus Stone orbit of trouble.
‘What I do?’ Winston asked.
‘Just look tough but don’t do anything. Go on.’
Winston opened the door a few inches, and two very big white guys pushed the door all the way open, twin wrestlers. They glanced at the Jamaican dismissively and turned to Jack Liffey. Conspicuous bulges under thin jackets showed that they were armed, too, should it be necessary. The whole package was just a boast of power, the expensive jewelry of coercion by the rich. Jack Liffey ignored them and looked at Reston, who waited calmly behind.
‘You didn’t need the Air Cav, Meier. Ty’s not in running shape.’
‘Fuck yourself, Liffey. You never phoned us. You can kiss your fee good-bye.’
‘I did that a long time ago. Ty’ll come peacefully. I want you to take good care of him. He’s got the meds he needs now. If you take them away, you may do him real harm.’
‘We got plenty of doctors with the right feelgood to help him work.’
‘If you hurt him, so help me, I’ll make you sorry.’
All of a sudden someone outside was shouting, ‘¡Puta! ¡Puta!’ but no one took notice.
The wrestlers grasped Ty’s arms, about as gently as gorillas, and lifted him to his feet.
‘You’re over in this town, detective,’ Reston said.
‘I was born over. I’m an old man now, Meier, but I don’t walk away. I like Ty a lot. Treat him like your son. Please, man. For the good of your own soul.’
‘Bring him along, gents. You two back off and stay inside. Have his luggage sent along.’
Jack Liffey watched uneasily. The sight of Ty Bird being frog-walked slowly toward the door cauterized something deep inside him. Defend the weak, hadn’t he just said it to Ty? At least when you could. But maybe even more when you couldn’t.
Outside, a big Hummer was parked beneath the moronic Sputnik on its pole.
‘What do I do?�
� Winston asked Jack Liffey as the giant wrestlers pushed Ty past him. He put on a fierce expression as if he might have a secret karate way to overwhelm them.
‘It’s OK, Win.’
Reston stared back into the room from the forecourt. ‘You just did something smart for a change, asshole,’ Reston said.
‘Remember, the guy’s hurting.’
Reston frowned. ‘It’s so nice to see a real loser really lose. Don’t get in our face again.’
‘I’ll be around,’ Jack Liffey said.
Reston made a dismissive shrug, and the twin wrestlers half-carried Ty across the parking lot toward the Hummer as Reston slammed the motel door.
‘I din’t like that,’ Winston complained.
‘Me, too. We’re not through, caballero. Can I have your phone?’
He may as well use Stoney’s dime, he thought. Jack Liffey called his home first, for messages that didn’t exist, and then he called Sonny in Bakersfield to try to find out about Gloria, but no one picked up. At the message tone he said, ‘Sonny, for Chrissake! Put me in the picture or I swear to God I’ll drive up there and barbecue you.’
Too much was going bad at once, but that was always the way it was.
WHER THY AT? The text message came in after an unobtrusive clunk on Stoney’s cell. From what he’d taken to calling Squad B across the road, probably from Harper. Poking his forehead over the parapet of the facing columbarium, he could actually see a couple of Squad B lying on the roof opposite. Just like Squad A, they’d probably ascended the makeshift stepstones of the bronze flower holders pegged into the marble.
Ain no psychic, he texted back. There had been very little activity down at the Centinela gate beside the chapel and parking lot, only a few maintenance three-wheelers pottering around and one stray Oldsmobile that’d entered. But it was only an old man in a fedora who got out and strolled forlornly across the grass to leave flowers. Stoney had one Dexedrine tab in his pocket and he wondered if he should take it now to pep up his attention. Harper called it Special Forces popcorn.