by John Shannon
“I sure didn’t want to troop through a police station.”
But Steelyard had suggested the location. The bleachers were just upchannel from the old fireboat house, and they faced an open area next to the water where somebody was building a full-size reproduction of a square-rigger, the wooden ribs lashed together now like a whale’s skeleton. There was apparently no hurry to complete it, as only three men were working there at the moment, and they seemed to be moving at half speed.
The two former classmates approached one another warily along the bottom tier of the bleachers until they were close enough to shake hands. Then they sat at uncomfortable angles on the bench so they could see one another to talk. “I would never have figured you’d become a cop. Never.”
“You were the brain. I sure didn’t expect you to become a private dick.”
“You’ve been checking up.”
“You were in the papers quite a bit last year.” Jack Liffey had more or less accidentally thwarted a terrorist attack, exposing himself to a lot of what he had thought was plutonium powder but turned out to be harmless granite dust. Still, it had shut down one of his lungs—hopefully, only temporarily—and earned him a Citizen’s Medal of Outstanding Valor, plus a lot of free publicity that had done him no good whatsoever.
“I’m not really a detective, you know. I worked in aerospace for a while and got laid off, and I just sort of fell into tracking down missing kids. It’s more satisfying than making pizza.”
Neither one of them spoke for a few moments.
“So how did you end up a cop?” Jack Liffey asked after a while.
His companion waited some more, probably out of habit, Jack Liffey thought, since he was trained in interrogation techniques. “It all came to me when I was watching Star Trek.”
Jack Liffey laughed for a moment but cranked it down and shut it off when he noticed that Steelyard seemed quite serious. “Was it the pointy ears?”
“You know, Jack, it wasn’t. I saw all these different folks working together on a team to do good in the world. I wanted to be on a team like that. Since the United Federation of Planets or whatever didn’t seem to be recruiting, I settled for the LAPD.”
His tone was hard to work out. “You did pretty well for yourself if you made detective.”
“I do my job.”
The silence lengthened out.
“If we’re through waving our dicks at each other here, I’d like to talk about the Petricich kid.”
The cop grinned a little now, but just for a moment. “Gotta stay in practice. It’s good to see you, Jack, really. You were good to me in a really bad time in my life. Remember when we used to make play ghosts with a golf ball tied into a handkerchief?”
The memory gave Jack Liffey a bit of a chill. Even now, he had no idea what they’d been playing at back then. Once in a while, much later, when he knew about things like that, he’d wondered if Steelyard had been gay and struggling with it. “Yeah. I just had a stroll through Averill Park. What a great town this was to grow up in. Barring other problems, of course.”
“I had the other problems, as you know. I didn’t get along with my stepdad. Back then, I was the only kid I knew with divorced parents. Now everybody’s doing it.”
“Different times.”
A brisk argument was going on up on the scaffold inside the boat’s skeleton. The second carpenter had come up and apparently was trying to put back something that had been hammered off. Jack Liffey caught a few of the words wafted into the bleachers against the prevailing breeze, including shithead and pendejo and cabrón.
“Are you working for Dan Petricich?” Steelyard asked amiably.
“I’m really just looking into it as an old friend. Dan was right behind us in school. The kid’s pretty screwed up. Dan’s afraid he’s attracting trouble like a lightning rod.”
“I can’t really figure out these goths or whatever they are, but I’m the last guy to start sneering at kids in trouble.”
“Yeah.” They talked of their own divorces for a while, and a big green container ship came up the channel, hooting now and then as if in pain from the tugs pushing it around. As it passed, Jack Liffey noticed an endless stack of containers identical to the ones it was carrying to Terminal Island.
“What can you tell me about what happened?”
“We’re not sure the kid is even the target, but the perp left two playing cards out of some Japanese deck, the two and three. The trouble is, that leaves fifty more chances for mischief. There were also pointless messages written on the cards, along with a Jap rubber stamp with a funny name.”
“A hanko?”
“I think that’s what my partner said.”
“It’s usually a signature. Could I see the cards?”
“Are you officially working for Dan?”
“Not yet.”
“I think I’ve got to cover my butt, then, unless he gives me a release. Sorry, Jack.”
“I understand. I’ve got to think about this whole business. I’m under doctor’s orders to take it easy, and I know my daughter and womanfriend will both kill me if I decide to do this.”
“You got a daughter. That’s great.”
“Sixteen going on thirty-five. She’s a wonderful girl. Really, some days it’s just her energy and brain and her good heart that keep me going.”
The second ship carpenter now muscled his way in and started hammering the piece back together while his partner pointed and protested. Jack Liffey hoped it wasn’t a critical part. It would be disconcerting to set out to sea one day and have the stopper come out. But then, what did he know about boats?
“I had a daughter, too. She got in a lot of trouble and I couldn’t stop it.”
“It takes a lot of strength to keep that stuff out of your soul, but you seem to be doing okay.”
“You don’t know me well enough to say that.”
“I guess I don’t. I’ll be in touch.”
They shook hands again, just a touch, and Jack Liffey walked away.
Steelyard watched the man walk back toward a beat-up old VW, and he couldn’t help entertaining a number of might-have-beens. For his money Jack had been the smartest boy in the senior class and might have done a lot better for himself, but he’d always had a malcontent streak, maybe even a self-destructive one. He remembered vaguely that Jack had refused to give the valedictorian’s address at graduation. Or, rather, the school had refused to let him give the one he’d written, which reportedly had been a little too fiery. Steelyard grinned. Burn it all down. The times had been like that, and here they were now, both of them uneasily on the side of order, more or less. Maybe one day he’d show him the trains.
* * *
“You’re avoiding talking about your father again. He’s like the five-hundred-pound elephant standing there in the corner.”
“He’s not even in the room anymore. Let’s leave it that way.”
“You know what reality is?” Dicky Auslander said, making a little tepee of his fingers.
Dicky’s consultation room gave Jack Liffey the creeps, and he made a face. Auslander was full of theories, none of them very profound, and Jack Liffey wasn’t going to touch a sucker line like that.
“It’s when you pretend the thing isn’t there that it sneaks over and kicks your ass.”
“That’s a super theory, Dicky. I hope you get it published.”
If Jack Liffey didn’t show up weekly, he lost the regular stipend some victim’s legislation was granting him for a while. But his goal was to keep the sessions brisk and empty because he didn’t trust Auslander. There was a new painting on the wall now, where an earnestly restful seascape had once been. He was glad the old painting was gone; it had been done by someone who’d obviously never looked very closely at the sea, probably sitting in a warehouse in Kansas copying the same photo over and over. The new one was an abstract with a lot of fiddly little markings creeping over it like insects. It seemed more authentic in some way, though it was also mo
re disturbing and left him edgy.
“How’s the relationship with Rebecca?”
“Great. We’re still going slow on it. I stay at her place sometimes and then she takes a turn and stays with me. More often at my place, really, so Maeve knows where we are. Becky’s just great—solid and funny and affectionate. I can’t believe my luck.”
“Why would you say that, Jack?”
“Oh, come off it. You don’t have to leap on everything I say.”
“Do you think you’re good for her?”
“I’m good to her. I may not be fit to judge the other. We’re doing fine.”
“Have you had any of your bad spells lately?”
“Yeah, some.”
“I’m going to ask again: Have you ever thought of trying one of the new antidepressants? Sometimes all it takes is a bit of a chemical nudge to jolt you right back into the groove. I’ve seen them work miracles. Don’t keep dismissing the idea out of hand.”
“I gave up drinking, Dicky, to show myself I could. I’ll use your tranqs from time to time when the anxiety starts getting the best of me—but that’s all. It’s my belief that my natural mental state contains something of value to me, and I’m not inclined to use those big, blunt tools to hammer at it. What’s really wrong is I’m going nuts sitting home reading. I need to get back to work.”
The small house that contained Auslander’s clinic vibrated with some new equipment in the physical therapy room next door. The year before, Liffey knew they’d done a lot of anger work in there—people boffing each other with those big foam-tipped cudgels—but that approach seemed to have gone out of fashion.
“What does your lung man say about that?”
“He’d probably tell me to wait, but I don’t think I’m going to ask permission.”
“So why are you asking me?”
“I guess I’m just thinking out loud.”
“For the record, then, I disapprove. I think your mental state is too fragile for anything very stimulating.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Maeve showed up just after he’d pulled in, and he made a point of not asking where she’d been as they walked to the condo. At a certain point you either trusted your offspring, or not. Maeve made a beeline for the answering machine, as if there might be a message for her that needed to be censored, but the only one was for both of them, and she cranked up the volume.
“Jack and Maeve, I’m sorry but I’ll be stuck hovering over the parents setting up for next week’s school pageant so I won’t be able to make it home by dinner. I’ll see you later this evening. My cell is on the blink, but my pager works. Love you both.”
“Pageant,” Maeve said, rolling the word around in her mouth like an exotic food.
“I guess rich schools still do that sort of thing. Fly in some camels and rhinos, dress up the girls like Scheherazade.”
“Funny, I know that name but not who she is.” He always marveled at her unself-conscious honesty. Maeve went to the fridge and took out a flavored iced tea with some goofy name, the only thing she drank these days.
“There was a sultan who believed all women were unfaithful, so he vowed he’d marry a different bride every day and strangle her the next morning. But Scheherazade was too clever for him. She started telling her elaborate tales, then every morning broke off right at the crucial moment.”
“The Thousand and One Nights?”
“You got it. That’s how long she had to tease him with her stories before he changed his mind.”
“I forgot that you know everything.”
“Far from it. For instance, I don’t have a clue why you pay four eighty-nine for a few bottles of iced tea that we could make for a quarter. In fact, I don’t know much of anything about the world you’re growing up in. It’s not like mine.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll bet there are things that go on at your school that would astonish me.” He nodded at her encouragingly. “Go on, astonish me. I’m not prying, it doesn’t have to be personal.”
She screwed up her face. “I have to think about it because it’s all normal to me.” She swigged her tea as he went through the mail. Mostly bills, but none of the bright red ones that you really had to pay right now or go without something important.
“Okay, here’s something that’ll seem pretty strange to you, but first, I don’t do this, okay?”
“I believe you.”
“There are these hook-up parties. Not everybody goes, but a lot of kids do. They go to meet somebody just to have sex with, but no emotional attachments, just sort of like calisthenics. They go off and do it and then just leave. Hooking up.”
“In the era of AIDS?” He was dumbfounded. The very idea of high school kids sex-swapping like a fifties daydream of the idle rich cranked up his free-floating anxiety another notch.
“I suppose most of them are careful. I don’t know.”
He was quiet for a while. “Okay, you did it. You flabbergasted me.”
“Was all this leading up to something?”
“You know me too well,” he admitted. “What do you know about vampire goths?”
She came across the room and tugged his collar open a bit to peer closely at his neck. When he got the joke—a little tardily—he chuckled. “I get a chill every time I pass garlic in the supermarket.”
“Ha-ha. There are a few of them at Redondo. But I think they just play at it, dressing up for parties. I’ve heard they do body piercing and lick the blood off the needles. Gross.”
“Do you think you could get me some names, from up in PV?”
“Dad, are you on a case?” Maeve glared at him.
“Not officially.”
“Oh, great. So if your other lung just unofficially collapses, everything will be fine.”
He gave an elaborate shrug. “These vamps, I can’t believe they’re enough of a threat to do me any harm.”
“We’ll see what Rebecca has to say when you tell her you’re going back to work. You’re going to be soo busted.”
December 15
A practical note: This evening I located and unburied my weapons kit on the island. A certain number of paces due east of a certain object on a certain road, then due north into an oil sump wasteland. I had left it only two feet deep in unpleasant soil, but any random disturbance would have ignited a fourteen-pound satchel charge of C-4. One needed to know how to disarm the mechanism. I took out the old Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun that I used to use incountry and that I had taken the trouble to disassemble and ship home in five parcels. Stripped, wrapped in Saran, the firing pin and trigger assembly soaking in cosmoline. A patient old friend, it must have awaited me with great serenity, like a sheathed kenjutsu that rests on a shelf uncomplainingly for centuries for the spirit of Justice to draw it forth again.
Unusual sensations. I must admit this to myself as I reassembled the automatic shotgun. I must admit. The rush of a ronin who has learned that his master may not be dead after all. It fits the description from that other journal: at last I am drawing the bow back in stages, hikiwake, the samurai call it. The god of war is by my side, in modesty and respect and comradeship. I am quite certain that this is the path, the virtues are self-evident. I can hear my blood coursing through my veins. Holding the Franchi again fills me with radiance.
Honor is salvation. I serve you, Father, as if I am already dead.
The act itself was hardly worth writing of. It was swift and sudden, as it should be. Break through to completion in one step. The boat sank there. No one saw me, no one was harmed.
Loyalty. Justice. Bravery.
He opened his eyes from a lucid dream in which he had willed himself fluent in Spanish, even if it still hadn’t done him any good. The two Latinas he had been dreaming about had whispered too softly, though definitely about him—and then there she was, real, undressing in the dark bedroom in silence. “Ahh. One of life’s great mysteries,” he said.
“Which one?” Rebecca asked, swive
ling her bra clasp around to the front to unsnap it. She looked pretty worn out.
“God, so many. Your body. You returning to me like some demented swallow. Your body. Ah, yes, your body.”
She crawled onto the bed and then over him like a skinny animal. Her limbs were very slender, and gravity accentuated her small breasts. “You should go back to your beauty sleep,” she suggested, but not seriously.
“With an eyeful like this? You’re kidding.”
She lowered herself gently upon him and they made love much more tenderly than usual, missing some of the urgency she usually inspired. Afterward, she apologized for getting caught up in the pageant preparations for so long, something about a mock medieval castle some of the more competitive fathers were building across the school’s back lawn.
“What time is it?” He could barely keep his eyes open, but it seemed terribly rude to go to sleep right after sex.
“Almost two.”
“So you didn’t see Maeve?”
“I think she was on her laptop when I came in. There was that blue glow, but I didn’t disturb her.”
So he wasn’t busted yet, he thought. “You know, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going stir-crazy. I don’t know how much longer I can be expected to sit home days watching As the Stomach Turns.”
“Uh-oh. I’ve had enough naughty kids stand in front of my desk to know that tone.”
“But you like me naughty.”
She ran a finger over his lips. “There’s naughty and then there’s naughty. This one is about breaking the cookie jar.”
“I agreed to do a guy a favor, but it’s nothing very strenuous. A boy got tied up as a prank by somebody. He’s already back home. It’s not like he’s missing. I’ll just look into who did it and why.” He’d already called Petricich and asked for a token retainer to make it official and told him to inform Steelyard so he could get a peek at the evidence.
“Have you told the gentlemen from—where is it?”
Just outside Bethesda it was, the home of the Armed Forces Radiological Warfare Institute. Technically they were still monitoring his condition, what they called a sentinel case—but in fact, his doctor was just a local lung man with whom they consulted. “I’ll tell Massoud when I see him. I told Dicky Auslander today. He wasn’t happy about it, but I’ll take it easy. I promise no gunplay or slapping people around.”