by John Shannon
‘Boss, it’ll bring the cops.’
‘You think they don’t see this?’ He indicated the pillars of dark smoke from the brushfire and smoldering house. Already a speck of a noisy helicopter was heading in their direction.
‘Then how do we get away?’
Orteguaza placed the barrel of his pistol against Andrés’ forehead. ‘This is important business, amigo, but business has got to be done right. You want to die now or worry about later?’
‘I’ll get the W.P. Yes, sir. I don’t like this el norte. I am too far away from anybody who cares about me.’
‘I care, dear Andrés. Hombre mio, I want Willie Pete now.’
‘¡Caballero! Your wish is my deed.’
Stoney followed the old man along the low underground passageway, bent over, as they heard muffled explosions behind. How could the police let this go on?
Every once in a while, Rubin paused in his flight to wave the flashlight ahead of him and do a little intricate foot-dance, and Stoney could tell he was drunk as a skunk.
‘Cool it, man. Get me out of here or I’ll shoot you in the ass. I hate tight places.’ He’d had a small case of claustrophobia since he was a child and could never bear an MRI.
‘Almost there, pard,’ Rubin said briskly.
He didn’t ask what ‘there’ was. Maybe an underground casino built by the Chinese.
Rubin reached a crude staircase of metal rungs up against a mud wall where the tunnel ended. He climbed slowly without handrails, splashing his flashlight against the ceiling above him. Rubin shouldered hard against what appeared a small wooden tray set into the roof. It slid aside and soil dribbled down from above as daylight flooded the tunnel. The sound of gunfire entered with the light. The tray wasn’t hinged, but was obviously heavy as Rubin shouldered it another foot to the side. Then he pushed hard with both hands to expose a full rectangle of blue sky. Stoney noticed that the sawed-off was gone, dropped who knows where?
Karl Rubin raised his head slowly into the world to look around. He yanked his head back down. ‘Into the mouth of safety,’ he slurred, and beckoned to Stoney. ‘They’re far away.’
Jack Liffey parked as close as he could get, forcing the pickup off the narrow pavement and against the dirt roadcut to let pass anything that needed to pass. He saw the smoke rising in the distance, straight upward in the unnatural stillness of near noon. A bit farther along Saddle Peak Road, there were several cop cars with their light bars flashing away like flying saucers, and a helicopter was circling. When he opened the window of the pickup, he heard the distant popping of automatic gunfire, a far explosion, more gunfire.
With a chill, he glanced at Winston. He looked so much like Trevor who had been killed running from a raging brushfire, a firestorm really, not too far from here. The parallel was too eerie to think about.
‘I’m not sure why I brought you with me, my friend,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘But we know this is where Ty’s going. I owe it to you to tell you that we’re only about three miles from where your brother was killed. I think I’d rather you stayed in the car.’
‘Mr Jack, there was no one better than Trevor, and he said he trusted you. You don’t know the end of this at all. I got to watch your back.’
‘Thank you, Winston. I didn’t do so well watching Trevor’s.’ He studied the lay of the land now. ‘We can’t drive past the cops. I think we can get to the ranch on foot that way.’
‘Is Ty really crazy?’ Winston asked. ‘I mean, in his head?’
‘Don’t think that. It’s a way of dismissing someone who’s troubled and maybe ill. I’ll stand up for him.’
‘I will, too, ma’an,’ and, with his door opening only an inch against the cliff, Winston had to slide across the seat to follow Jack Liffey out of the pickup. Surprisingly, he stuck a big revolver from a paper bag into his waist. Stoney’s associates must have given it to him at some point.
* * *
I drive extremely fast in the Porsche along Mulholland and for some reason the gate is open west of the 405 so I can enter dirt Mulholland at the old Nike Station – mainly just a fire road for the next six miles. I enjoy drifting hard through turns like a Southern moonshine runner, terrifying the poor teenagers who are just out for a day of truancy – mountain bikes, beer and sex.
I cut over Santa Maria Road, another fire road, and then Topanga Canyon to Fernwood. Almost home, Dad. I pull up when I see a big Highway Patrol Ford crosswise ahead, and the brushfire smoke rising beyond.
Time to hike, I think. I’m overdue for an anti-Skinny pill, but I decide to let it go. Maybe my Skinnies will enjoy a little spectacle.
For anyone watching the smoldering Sandstone Resort just then, it was a moment that was never to be forgotten. It began with a smoke trail coming inward from the north, a rocket grenade of some sort, then pure white eye-smarting flame bloomed inside the house and burst through the roof. An immense fountain of flaming debris belched upward and outward, slow as a dream, spreading across half the sky and arching over out at the tips of the trails of so many individual white-hot cinders as the fire-god unfolded himself into a perfect chrysanthemum of annihilation, dimming the sun. Embers sizzled their way downward all around into the summer-dry brush, igniting scores of brushfires.
Jack Liffey and Winston Pennycooke had stopped in their tracks at the sight. Jack Liffey’s mind had been drifting as they hurried across the uneven ground, fretting over so many worries, but it was focused now.
‘Dat so dread, ma’an!’
‘White phosphorus,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘Really bad shit.’
As he and Winston watched the fireball subside, the roof and second story of Sandstone Resort began to sag and then it all started to fall in big chunks into the story below. All that ecstatic sex, all those forbidden secrets in the ball-room, being extinguished by an inferno that didn’t give a damn.
NINETEEN
Hellfire
Jhon Orteguaza was mesmerized by the gigantic blossom of burning phosphorus. Shangó, the Orisha of fire, one of his mother’s favorites. He felt like falling on his knees to worship, but his discipline prevailed and he lifted the binoculars. He was keeping a careful watch through the heat-wavery air, and he saw the small punctuation marks of two men running downhill ahead of small brushfires. The one in back actually appeared to be aflame himself.
‘The hunt is on,’ he said in Spanish. ‘Ándale. Compañeros, there go the rabbits.’
Lieutenant Jimmy Harrison waited, almost trembling with frustration. His hand rested on the torn-open wrought-iron gate of Sandstone Resort, awaiting orders to deploy his squad and stabilize the situation. The command to stand down, to wait, was truly unusual. He ground one toe in annoyance. Latin American terrorists were running amok in his city, they’d already killed a cop, off duty or not, and killed quite a few other people, and they’d badly desecrated a cemetery. His SWAT team wanted to move immediately, each man wanted to move – they were all as restless with it as he was. There was no Zen at all in waiting.
Jimmy Harrison had trained with Navy SEAL Team Six many years ago; he had almost fifty hostage rescues and barricaded suspects to his credit, none of his guys had ever been hurt, and rescue was his sworn duty, his purpose. He had never before been told to stand down when a civilian was in danger. They were strung out along the Sandstone wall, each man a safe distance apart, two eleven-man metro SWAT teams wearing full body armor and the dark blue Kevlar ‘Fritz’ helmets that unfortunately made them look a bit like SS troopers. Each man carried a Kimber updated version of the old reliable 1911 .45 auto, a pistol that would immediately stop any argument. Most of them also had Car-15 assault rifles or Heckler & Koch MP-5Ns, and a few carried sophisticated sniper rifles or shotguns or flash-bangs, but nobody had grenade launchers or missiles or tank-killers. Maybe in the next dispensation, their armament would finally catch up with the bad guys.
A big tanker truck would have been necessary to replenish the testosterone they were burning off, just exercising the
ir violent thoughts. Each team did have an armored BearCat truck. But several of the terrorists seemed to be carrying those Iraq-war rocket-propelled grenades, probably with HEAT warheads that could punch right through their trucks. He guessed all the hesitation back at ‘Upstairs’ had to do with finding some kind of backup to protect them, but he knew they could deal with it on foot. They were pros and they could always deal with amateurs.
Clearly, ‘Upstairs’ didn’t want a repeat of the chilling North Hollywood firefight of 1997 – that horrible street battle in which two goofball bank robbers wearing full body armor and carrying automatic weapons with Teflon cop-killer ammunition, had sprayed more than 1,600 rounds all around them as they walked coolly away from the bank, miraculously not killing anyone, but badly wounding nineteen cops and civilians.
Both SWAT teams stilled in reluctant awe to watch what they could see of the white phosphorous starburst. How many more of those rounds did the suspects have? They had no protection for that. Where were they getting this stuff? The arching lines of the incandescent metal scalded their way unnaturally through the morning and eventually touched down to start new brushfires, or maybe to burn all the way to China.
‘We gotta go now!’ Harrison yelled into the cell. ‘I’m taking responsi —’
‘Wait at that gate! That’s an order,’ his phone crackled. ‘It’s still a hold, Jimmy, still a hold. Command’s doing a square dance upstairs. Do-si-do and cover your ass. To be honest, I think something big is on its way.’
‘For chrissake, captain. I seen civilians in the line of fire. Upstairs got two minutes. Two minutes and I’m gonna lose radio contact, and I go.’ He made the hissing sound of a dead line, but it was only a threat. Orders was orders.
* * *
I climb the low stone wall easily and cut cross country toward the house. My meds are wearing off, and a single Skinny squats in the brush watching me, wiggling his hands with fingers no thicker than pencils, then jumps up to trot along parallel to my course.
‘Eat me,’ I say aloud. ‘Go away. This is bigger than you and all your buddies. This is my father.’
Just as I come over a hill, I see a horrendous fireball go off all at once at the house, like one of those TV clips from Vietnam – that terrible photograph of the little Asian girl with all the burn scars on her naked body, running screaming up a dirt road. The house won’t survive this. I watch closely, and as the burning remnants of the explosion arc over in the sky and descend, leaving their tails of smoke and fire, I think I see two faraway people who haven’t quite made it out of their range. Damn. Sure enough, one of them seems to be hit by an ember and spins around madly, winding trails of smoke off his body.
In a near panic I run through a grove of sumac toward the fire, fearing it’s my father who’s burning. Why? Why not? I’ve lost sight of him but I know the world is always trouble for the guys who don’t control the storyboard, and something about the way he spun and then ran again suggested the Marcus Stone I was only getting to know.
Joe Lucius and Meier Reston can go to hell, I decide, along with the whole If He Hollers project. I’m so sorry, Chester Himes. I love you to death, a credit to our people, a great writer, etc., etc., but I don’t have time for you now. I don’t have time for movies at all. I finally admit to myself that ‘Let’s Play Pretend’ is making me ill deep inside. I need something real.
Saying that to myself makes me feel a bit panicky for a moment, as if someone might hear and cut off my air. I know I’m deeply impaired, and I’m probably casting away some last chance in the movie world. So be it. I am impaired – I’m a half-controlled schizophrenic, I’m a lost working stiff, I’m a black orphan – but I won’t let any of that damage me as a moral human being, even if they call me crazy as a loon. I watched this Jack Liffey make his decisions, and I liked the way he stuck with what mattered to him, what mattered period.
I run fast now over a little ridgeline and see two men, across a shallow ravine, running hard in a meadow of yellowing fieldgrass. The rear one is still smoldering off his back. Gunfire echoes horribly from the hills again, acoustics from far to the right and behind them, ugly and rapid. I really hate that sound, though for years I’ve heard it over and over as make-believe.
Jenny parked her station wagon in the driveway of the Boyle Heights house. Jack’s pickup wasn’t there. Gloria seemed to have passed out pretty thoroughly during the fifty mile passage through the mountains and down into the San Fernando Valley, but luckily Jenny had the address and a Thomas Bros. mapbook. She liked the look of the area off I-5 that the book called Boyle Heights, with its old frame houses and Latino street life, and she wondered how it was that she could identify it almost immediately as a Latino neighborhood. Lots of flowers in the yards, front fences made of ornamental wrought-iron spears, a bit too much rubbish in the street, an ice cream pushcart on the sidewalk with a little bell on the push bar. She envied Jack the daily fascination of a non-Anglo suburb.
She turned in the seat and called behind her. ‘Glor? Anybody home?’
No answer. She’d need to go through any address book she could find inside for Gloria’s doctor. But first she had to get her into the house and into her bed. She didn’t think she was strong enough to do it by herself, but she bet neighborliness prevailed here. As long as she didn’t pick out a home with a running feud against the local cop.
Jenny picked a two-story house across the street, and she walked over, hearing a vacuum cleaner roaring inside, and knocked hard on the open doorframe. ‘¿Cómo estamos, señora?’ Jenny tried, as colloquial as she could get.
An old woman, holding a strange-looking hose vacuum in rusted chrome from the 1940s, smiled back and, just as she deserved, launched a burst of idiomatic Spanish back at her that contained norteamericano words and strange constructions that Jenny had never heard in her college classes.
‘Speak slowly, please,’ she begged. ‘I’m still learning.’ Actually she knew Castilian and Basque-Aragonese Spanish very well (though not much Basque itself), but she had trouble with L.A. Norteño – which was called caló on the street.
‘Sorry, señora. What do you require?’ the woman said in labored English.
‘I have brought Mrs Ramirez home from far away, and she is hurt and unconscious,’ Jenny said in slow Castilian Spanish. ‘She was beaten by some bad men. I need help getting her into bed in her house and finding her doctor. Are you a friend?’
‘¡Por supuesto! Of course!’ The woman dropped the vacuum instantly and shouted, ‘Agusto! Come here right now!’ She pounded on the wall. An eighteen-year-old with earbuds buzzing like insects appeared from within the house. He yanked them out, and they followed Jenny across the street, with the woman talking fast again, just beyond Jenny’s capabilities.
The three of them managed to slide Gloria out and stagger-carry her to her bedroom. In searching later for an address book, Jenny found Jack Liffey’s note on the fridge: ‘Rescue in Progress. Back soon. Jack.’
It was incredibly annoying, but what could she do but wait and keep hunting for a doctor’s phone number somewhere in a drawer or notepad? She would slap Jack Liffey silly the very next time she saw him.
Luckily I’m still young so I can outrun even a man who’s running for his life, especially this man ahead of me who’s staggering now with pain and is clearly Marcus Stone. He’s showing ugly ropy burned flesh through the charred-away holes in his jacket and shirt. He must have been hit by a fleck of the horrible fire. The other man is gone, I don’t know where. Probably saving himself.
Short rips of gunfire are going off behind us, and I hear a helicopter overhead. Will it be our savior or just TV looky-loos?
‘Dad! Hold on!’ I call. ‘It’s Ty.’
Shouting at him from nearby is like swatting him with a two-by-four. My outcry has destroyed some fragile equilibrium holding him upright. His limbs flail out of control and he falls awkwardly into the tall dry grass.
He moans and bangs his forehead repeatedly on the dirt
. Yes, this is truly pain. I wish I had morphine.
‘Dad, we can’t stay. I’m sorry about the pain. They’re getting closer.’
I don’t know if he even recognizes me. His eyes are wide with shock. I help him up, and I feel he’s almost insensate with the agony and panic. We stumble only a few steps before we both go down, and bullets are crackling past us, a few burying themselves into the earth around us.
Marcus Stone levers himself up to a sitting position, having found somewhere in his jacket the biggest shiniest pistol I have ever seen, and he uses two hands to fire it back into the grass in a monumental aimless rage, again and again, until it’s empty. I doubt if he’s seen anything to aim at. It may even be an attempt to kill the monster of pain that’s clawing at his exposed back. I can see one wound too clearly, burned right down to a flash of white, which can only be the bone of his shoulder blade.
Jack Liffey and Winston Pennycooke could see the drama clearly. Insects going to war across the canyon. The semicircle of hunters were firing away and drawing closer to the two men who were up now and trying to run together, like hopeless drunks. He had no binoculars, but presumptions of identity were enough. They had clearly seen Tyrone Bird come out of nowhere to join the wounded man who had to be Stoney.
A police helicopter seemed to be harrying the relentless hunters, a loud voice shouting something unintelligible on a P.A. and flashing their big sungun lamp at the men below, but an LAPD helicopter carried no weapons, by law. And the peculiar old Posse Comitatus Act from the end of Reconstruction in 1878 had banned the use of any military weapons against civilians – unless Congress declared an outright insurrection.
A startling smoke trail soared out of the grass where one of the Colombians had fired an RPG at the helicopter. Jack Liffey was amazed at their arrogance, to take on the police in a faraway land. The rocket grenade contained no guidance system and had no chance of hitting the helicopter. It burst harmlessly in the air, far past the aircraft. But it was enough for the pilot. The helicopter scooted away.