A Little Too Much

by John Shannon

  ‘OK, Win. What are friends for?’

  ‘For help when help is no other way.’

  They took off down a shallow ravine along the hillside, high-stepping to use the momentum of their descent and dig a stabilizing heel into the soil at each leap. At the bottom, Jack Liffey thought he’d seen a rattlesnake momentarily but kept right on going and labored up the other side. Then it was really hard work, his years making him huff and puff, climbing into the whipping cheek-high grass and mustard. A few of the weapons had clearly turned in their direction now, and he heard the pa-zing of rifle rounds passing at head level. Part of his mind reminded him it was tiny little supersonic shock waves that he was hearing, from little tubes of hot metal doing their best to slam into him and make a mess of his body, and another part tried to tell him about the very long odds of being hit at this distance.

  Where were the cops? He’d seen innumerable black-and-whites parked outside. And down the road, two whole SWAT trucks, for chrissake.

  ‘Mr Jack. Can I shoot back?’

  ‘Hell, yes.’

  As they labored uphill, Winston took little trouble aiming at what couldn’t be seen anyway through the tall grass, but he fired two, three times in the general direction of the hunters with the big revolver that someone had given him. Maybe it would keep a head or two down. Jack Liffey didn’t waste any shots from his own .45. He might need them later when he could see something.

  He’d directed their run well – he could see Tyrone’s head facing backwards fifty yards dead ahead, going much slower now. The young man was dragging something behind him, making futile progress.

  ‘Mr Jack?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Something bad is going on here.’

  Jack Liffey wanted to laugh, but didn’t. Yes, indeed. Something bad. He knew Winston had no way of seeing the past. A brushfire, a gunfight, a run to escape, and Winston’s brother Trevor had died all at once of one unexpected gunshot. How could he let that happen again? Mrs Pennycooke would never forgive him.

  ‘Where the coppers?’

  ‘It’s like they all decided to go on vacation.’

  As he gasped uphill, Jack Liffey fell behind and became aware of the sun beating down, merciless. The whole insane firefight was complicated by so many things he didn’t understand, and by a duty he didn’t really want. Why wasn’t he with Maeve and Gloria, helping with their problems? But his whole life, his sense of duty had trapped him here.

  ‘Ty!’ he yelled. ‘We’re with you. Stay low.’

  ‘Mi arse!’ Winston screamed in pain.

  ‘What is it, Win?’

  ‘Worry not, ma’an. I got a damage of no importance. In mi bati, where I sit. Is likkle nothing.’

  The two of them tumbled unexpectedly into the grass hollow where Tyrone Bird lay gasping next to the unconscious Marcus Stone. Stoney’s skin looked a greenish gray, and that was worrisome. Shock, Jack Liffey knew.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We’re under control now, Ty. You and I take his arms and shoulders. Win, you’re stronger, you take his feet. Your new wound going to prevent that?’

  ‘Never. Don’ pay no heed.’

  ‘I won’t forget this,’ Tyrone said. ‘I guess you can’t ever try to fly solo.’

  ‘You say it, brah,’ Win replied.

  They stooped and managed to pick up the limp Stoney, but it was going to be quite a carry. He weighed at least two forty. Jack Liffey wished they had time to make a stretcher or even an Indian travois, but he heard the repeated coughing of the assault rifles behind them, closer now, and a few crackles of rounds passing nearby in the tall grass.

  ‘L.T., they’re on the satellite phone.’ Jimmy Harrison took the phone that they kept in a recess of the BearCat. It was about the size and weight of a big brick with an antenna like a long fountain pen. Unlike cells, it communicated directly through an overhead satellite – a system once known as Iridium.

  ‘Harrison here.’

  ‘Jimmy,’ his commander’s voice said, ‘We know they can’t monitor this phone. Stay backed off, that’s an absolute order. These are Colombian drug-pushers, you and I both know it, the chief knows it. But Homeland Security has declared them a foreign terrorist invasion —’

  ‘Andy, that’s bullshit. My men could put an end to this in fifteen minutes.’

  He heard another laugh. ‘Jimmy, there’s going to be no end of blame and trips to Washington to testify, and they’ll construe it all wrong. Consider yourself lucky to be out of it.’

  ‘Lucky isn’t standing down and watching these skells kill citizens.’

  There was no more laughter. ‘Well, you’ve got your orders, J.H. There’s fancy aerial support coming in fast, and there’s always a lot more citizens where those came from.’

  Maeve was sitting in her room in Topanga, a little dazzled still by the hairy artist looking at her first painting and telling her she had ‘real talent.’ She’d never had the faintest idea.

  Bunny summoned Maeve to the crummy little TV they kept in the living room. ‘This is all going on right here in Topanga. We better lock the doors.’

  It was a local news channel, most of which had abandoned showing anything but celebrities punching paparazzi, goof-balls trying to fly in beach chairs with hydrogen balloons, and baby animals at the zoo. A news-copter was distantly circling some kind of gunfight up toward Tuna Canyon, misidentified on screen as ‘Tuno Canyon’.

  Maeve saw a replay – ‘Earlier Today’, the on-screen type said. A big explosion that created a burning firework star right on top of a rambling flat house. ‘Live’, the screen said now, and a jiggly shot showed a group of men with rifles chasing a few other men carrying someone through dry grass.

  Maeve looked away. Too many times in her life she’d picked out signs of her father in TV scenes just like this – it took so little: a distinctive way of moving he had, a bald spot at the back of his head. This time she made sure she wouldn’t work herself up unnecessarily. She stared at Bunny instead, that big huggable woman.

  The TV voice was babbling away, but she managed to tune it out.

  ‘Bunny, you’re really nice.’

  She looked over, startled. ‘Are you making fun of me, Maeve?’

  ‘God, no. I’m trying not to look or think, just in case my dad is down there. That’s the whole truth, so help me dog.’

  Bunny stared hard at her. ‘You told me the cord was cut.’

  ‘I’m trying. What are the odds it’s him, anyway?’

  Bunny flicked off the set. ‘OK. I’ll help. Let’s go have a Cosmo.’

  * * *

  ‘Down the ravine,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘We’ll go faster downhill, and we might find somewhere to hole up.’

  They bent their course downhill, as the gunmen fired and fired. Remarkable how much missing there was, and he remembered reading Che Guevara’s memoir and the firefights during the Cuban Revolution that had gone on for what had seemed hours with no one hit at all. Adrenaline and amateurism.

  Jack Liffey headed them toward a small outcrop of rocks he saw below in the gully that would afford some protection. They couldn’t carry Stoney much farther. They scrambled over the sandstone outcrop and set Stoney down in the lowest swale of the bone-dry streambed. His skin was even more gray-green than before.

  ‘He’s cold,’ Ty said, feeling his forehead. ‘My god, his lips are blue as a crayon.’

  ‘Cover him with anything we’ve got,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘Turn him around so his legs are uphill. And keep checking his breathing. He’s lost blood, maybe internally. Maybe it’s just the pain. But he’s in shock, and shock is no joke.’

  Jack Liffey and Winston took flat cover behind the sandstone and aimed their pistols back uphill. The grass was too high to see very much, but the shrubs were much thinner toward the bottom of the arroyo, particularly the last thirty yards or so.

  ‘We’ll get off a few shots if they come close,’ Jack Liffey said. ‘Make them count.’ He didn’t think Winston had any shots lef
t.

  Winston reached over and touched Jack Liffey’s shoulder. ‘Remember that movie, ma’an? Some Red Indian he say, It’s a good day to die.’

  ‘Winston, it’s never a good day to die.’

  Lieutenant Harrison’s satellite phone squawked. ‘Here it comes. Have your men take good cover, Jimmy. You got incoming.’

  ‘What the hell?’ He swallowed his anger. ‘Cover up, men! Use the wall! Incoming!’ But incoming what?

  Captain Lon Schuster made a V-gesture over his shoulder briefly to his copilot/gunner who sat directly behind him and about eighteen inches elevated in the Longbow Apache. They were conscious of flying some of the first state-of-the-art attack helicopters entrusted to the Air National Guard, and all they’d been told was that insurrectionists were down there, and they’d be guided in.

  ‘Handyman Two, this is Handyman One,’ Schuster said into his throat mike. ‘Target’s in sight. Nine-ten men with auto weapons and a couple big RP sticks. Clean ’em up and green ’em up.’

  The two attack helicopters worked quickly to arm their weapons systems and their defenses, green indicator lights coming on one after another. The copilot worked his laser joystick to paint the tallest man down below with a bright red laser spot.

  Jack Liffey heard a tremendous roaring, thumping sound coming up the hill behind him and chanced a look. A chill took his spine hard. This is like Nam, only doubled. He’d never seen a chopper so crammed with outriggers full of missiles and cannons and other weapons. It had to be the meanest-looking machine ever made.

  The Colombians saw the black helicopters coming, and suddenly Jhon Orteguaza noticed an incandescent red circle the size of a 200-peso coin joggling on his chest. The helicopters slowed and their tails bobbed like big stick insects as they came to a hover, maybe fifty meters away.

  ‘Shoot them down!’ Orteguaza commanded. ‘We have Shangó with us!’

  All of the Colombians trained their rifles on the helicopters and went on automatic fire, feeding in new magazines as necessary. The two last RPGs they had fumed away fast, directly at the haughty, stilled flying machines.

  Captain Lon Schuster smiled when the Apaches’ automatic defenses kicked in and smacked the rocket grenades into useless puffs of smoke with intensely concentrated bursts of chain-gun fire. The other rounds from the ground fire just deflected harmlessly off their underside armor. Now and again one snicked off the thick cockpit plexiglass and bounced away. So much for the defensive phase. ‘What do you want, cap? The chain gun?’

  The chain gun was capable of firing so many rounds so fast – more than ten a second – that its distinctive groaning sound would have filled the air near the insurrectionists with a near solid wall of moving metal slugs.

  Back at the gate, the infrared binoculars that Schuster carried gave him a clear view of the tall Latino facing the Apaches. Defiantly the man took out of his pocket and tugged on a goofy-looking pointy knit cap. Then he spread his arms like Christ on the cross. Do your worst, he seemed to be saying.

  ‘Look at him. The guy wants to play. OK, let’s play. Give him a Hellfire.’

  ‘Jesus, cap. That’s so overkill. It’d blow open a bank vault.’

  ‘What isn’t overkill, Tommy? You can push one button back there, and this damn beast goes auto and engages hundreds of different targets in less than a second. Should we set her down and fight them with swords in order to fight fair? Look at the guy. He wants your Hellfire so bad. He’s begging for it.’

  The Hellfire was a missile designed to penetrate a heavily armored tank, a cement bunker, a refuge cave. The god Shangó must have loved it when a Hellfire flamed downward directly toward one man wearing a cotton shirt.

  EPILOGUE

  You Can’t Fix Everything

  The Fire Department helicopter out of Van Nuys couldn’t touch down because of the angle of the ravine, but it hovered busily in the wind gusts, a foot or less off the slope, and three SWAT cops lifted Stoney into the metal basket locked to the skids. They strapped him in.

  ‘Take me. If he needs blood, I’m his son,’ Tyrone told them.

  One of the cops looked skeptical, but reached out and boosted the young man aboard the half-open door.

  For about the fifth time in the last ten years, Jack Liffey had his Ballester-Molina .45 pistol taken away from him by the authorities. Winston had quite sensibly lost his empty revolver some time ago in the weeds.

  They sat on a bench in the Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station in Agoura, waiting for the obligatory debriefing. Or browbeating.

  ‘Do you want to meet your brother’s girlfriend?’ Jack Liffey asked Winston. ‘I can take you.’

  Winston seemed to think about it for a while. ‘I got my own girl on Jamdown, and I already got ideas about here. Let’s let this woman have her new life. I think any avenging and reckoning and all that stuff is finished. America is chakachaka.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A big mess.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘Liffey!’ a voice shouted, unnecessarily.

  He looked up to see a heavyset deputy with an air of angry fatigue and figured the man was going to be pretty much unreachable as a human being. Just the facts, man.

  The two Mexican laborers who’d been hired that morning at a mosca with a dozen others in Long Beach were on Terminal Island now, pulling out double-head nails that held a giant flimsy replica of a freighter upright against substantial four-by-four buttresses. They had no idea that what they were doing was known as ‘striking a set’.

  ‘Gringos are crazy,’ one said. ‘What is all this phony crap?’

  ‘Who cares, compa? It’s good day-money.’

  Maeve parked at the curb on Greenwood. She had no idea what the old Buick station wagon was doing in Gloria’s driveway. She’d crammed her backpack, preparing for a weekend at home, and now she lugged it up the sloping yard to the door.

  ‘God, I know you,’ she said, when Jenny opened the door. ‘You’re from Bakersfield.’

  ‘It’s not like Transylvania.’

  Maeve smiled, remembering all that had happened in that town. ‘Is Gloria home?’

  ‘You’ve got to prepare yourself. She’s been beat up pretty bad. She’s sleeping now.’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘Do you know her regular doctor’s name? I’m having trouble finding out.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll show you. She’s got reason to keep it private. She says the police management hold everything medical against you. Even your period.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘But the deal is: you’ve got to tell me what happened.’

  Jack Liffey brought Winston home late that night after they’d been released by the sheriff’s station. He found the house surprisingly filled with all sorts of people: Jenny Ezkiaga, for God’s sake; Maeve, Señora Campos from across the street; and, worst, a very unconscious, almost comatose, Gloria, covered with bruises and bandage wraps after her adventure, whatever it had been. So much sex in the world, he thought, and so much violence. How could you keep them apart?

  ‘Who’s going to explain this?’ he demanded, when he couldn’t wake Gloria.

  ‘Jack, calm down,’ Jenny said. ‘Things go wrong. You can’t fix everything all by yourself.’

  JOHN SHANNON

  A Little Too Much

  Private Investigator Jack Liffey is hired to find a popular African-American actor, Ty Bird, who has disappeared from the set of his new movie. It turns out that Bird, who is battling schizophrenia and a regular onset of playful hallucinations, is off on a hunt to find the father he never met.

  Meanwhile, Jack’s home life is falling apart – his daughter, Maeve, has moved out to go to college at UCLA, and his partner, Gloria, is spending less time at home – and he feels increasingly lonely. However, as Jack’s search for Bird takes him to some of LA’s stranger suburbs, he finds out that someone is coming to seek revenge ...

  John Shannon is one of America’s leading writers of
neo-noir, and his Jack Liffey series of novels is one of the most critically praised mystery series in the genre. He lives in Los Angeles.

  The previous title in the Jack Liffey series, On the Nickel, is also available from Severn House.

  For further information

  please visit:

  www.jackliffey.com

  Cover image: John Shannon

  www.severnhouse.com