by John Shannon
“You’re ready.”
“Damn straight. I’m glad we cleared that up. I’m ready. Now I’m going outside. Just part of the process. You can cower in the corner until he comes for you, if that’s what you want. Or spend your time fucking Gloria, if you can wake her up. I’m going out the back with my Jap-killer. You might want to lock the door behind me.”
Maeve drove back to Brighton Street, and the whole family was still up. The lights on the Christmas tree were on. “I think my dad’s in trouble,” she said bluntly.
“What can we do?” Bancroft said.
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s talk it over,” Bancroft said. “Maybe we can figure something out together.”
“Go to channel nine,” Ornetta said. “They always got the car chases and stuff.”
Twenty
Where Does Honor Stop?
Jack Liffey followed Steelyard to the back door, where the big man turned back and smiled. “What did that Indian say? Today is a good day to die.”
“Please don’t do this,” Jack Liffey said.
Steelyard snorted. “We have the ordnance, we have the manpower, we have the motivation.” He winked at Jack Liffey. “That’s sure some awful shit, isn’t it?”
He slipped out, and Jack Liffey locked up after him, trying hard not to speculate on the man’s suicidal tendencies. He stared at the little brass knob. He had no idea what the cheesy Kwikset deadbolt was worth against a pro; probably not much. Or Steelyard’s deer rifle and night sight, for that matter. He figured Ken Steelyard was prone to overrating the importance of technology, just like the LAPD, just like the whole country. He’d vote for skill every time.
Jack Liffey went back into the front room and knelt to pat down Gloria’s body with a kind of guilty abandon. He found the pistol on her hip under her jacket, in a little leather holster hooked over her belt. He took it away from her and hid it in the toppled water cooler, which seemed the official gun repository. Then he shook Gloria’s shoulder after kissing her once on the cheek. It took a moment, but she shivered and sat up all at once. “Jesus, what?”
He put his hands on her shoulders. “Time to come back to the world, that’s all. Nothing’s happened. Yet.”
Her eyes were unfocused for a few moments more, and then she began to seem more like herself.
“Jack, God, I’m sorry.” She looked around. “Where’s Ken?”
“I don’t know how much slack to cut him anymore. He’s gone off on his crusade.”
She shook her head and took out her cell phone, but it still had no dial tone. “What are we going to do?”
“Do you know Morse code?”
“Are you nuts? Nobody knows Morse code.”
“Well, I know SOS. Dit-dit-dit, dah-dah-dah, dit-dit-dit. We can rig up a light in the front window and interrupt it with something … the venetian blinds or that cardboard on the floor. If anyone onshore is watching, they’ll see it. That’s worth a try for a few minutes. After that, I don’t know.”
He found a gooseneck lamp on an empty desk in back and brought it into the front room. With the lay of the buildings and the big bridge abutment to the west, there was no chance of a direct line of sight to the police station, or even to the shoreline in San Pedro. But there were hundreds of houses up on the hill that could see him, hundreds more than when he was a kid and the whole slope had been weeds and secret climbing trails and garbanzo beans—the hill where, at age twelve, he had stepped on what felt like a garden hose until it wriggled under his foot and then rattled at him and he had run more than a mile home with visions of that snake wriggling right behind him every step of the way. It was all houses now along the flank of the hill—rich people, horsy people—but you couldn’t stop the world just to suit your nostalgia.
He plugged in the lamp, pointed it out at the hill, and, feeling rather silly, began fanning the cardboard in front of the bulb, short-short-short, long-long-long, short-short-short.
“Do you think anyone will see it?”
“It’s a pretty distinctive signal if somebody does. Half of them are yachtsmen up there. They ought to figure it out.”
“I should be out there protecting my partner.”
“He left you behind on purpose.”
“Where’s my pistol?”
She must have just noticed.
“Ken took it,” he lied. He had a feeling that being weaponless might be the best protection against a samurai warrior. Her little 9-millimeter was not going to be much good against whatever the Special Forces could produce.
Just then he heard a gunshot, and his heart sank a foot. It echoed a few times between the warehouses. He wasn’t an expert on typing gunshots, but it sounded like a rifle. “Oh, Jesus.”
“Jack, we’ve got to do something.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do. Try your cell again. Try it in the back room. Try any phones you find.”
In a few moments she came back, shaking her head disconsolately. “No good. The regular phone’s dead, too.” She stood beside him at the window.
“What about the radio in the car?”
“Ken said the whole car was buggered, and the doors won’t open.”
There were two more shots, one after another, roughly the same quality as the first and about the same distance away. Maybe four or five blocks, he guessed. He decided there was an immense epistemological difference between hearing one isolated gunshot and hearing several more shots a bit later. A solo gunshot might have been a sniper hitting his target unexpectedly, but now you knew either he wasn’t hitting or the target was shooting back.
“Poor Ken,” he said. “If he didn’t get the guy with his first shot, he’s had it. Do you think they’ll hear that on the mainland?”
“I don’t think so. The wind is out of the west, and it’ll blow any noise out into the harbor.”
Then the power in the room went out, right in the middle of a long O on his semaphore. She gave a gasp. “Let’s get away from the window,” he told her.
He closed the blinds, and the only light now filtered into the room through a curved window of wavery glass bricks in the corner. They sat side by side against an inner wall and listened for any more signs of the battle outside.
“We’ve got to do something, Jack. We’ll never be able to live with ourselves if we just hide here.”
“I’m kind of at a loss.”
“God,” she said, all of a sudden. “It’s Christmas Eve.”
“Yeah, I got myself together enough to stop and buy Maeve a color printer and I haven’t even had a chance to wrap it. I’m sorry, I didn’t get you anything. This was kind of sudden.”
“Me neither.” They kissed, but it was only for a moment and rather chaste.
“Okay, you wait here,” he said finally. “You’re a cop, which makes you a legitimate target. I’m just a civilian, and he knows me. I’m going to stand under that streetlight out front and show I have no weapons, and maybe he’ll talk to me.”
“The idea frightens me to death.”
“Well, it doesn’t thrill me, but I’ve read his book about the samurai code, and I don’t think it’s within the code to kill an unarmed man, whatever I represent to him. I get to be a man of peace tonight. I think it even runs in my character.”
She clung hard, but finally she had to let him go.
One TV camera had set up on the bluffs at Sixth and Harbor looking across the channel, where it was about three hundred yards wide over to Terminal Island. There was a channel nine logo on the big camera, so it wasn’t even a network affiliate, but, after all, it was Christmas Eve, and the heavy hitters were probably all at home. A blandly handsome man in a ski jacket was doing a stand-up, saying into a microphone that the police weren’t allowing helicopters to overfly the island, because there had been warnings that a renegade Japanese American they were calling the Samurai Green Beret was rumored to have a Stinger missile.
There was yellow tape everywhere, keeping people back. After they�
�d checked the television news reports, Maeve and the Davis household had agreed that the only thing for them to do was drive down to the harbor. Nobody was giving any names on the air, but Maeve knew for sure her dad was on that island they’d sealed off. Bancroft insisted on taking his big Buick, and it was Ornetta’s idea to pick up Declan Liffey on the way. Neither of the girls told the older folks anything about him except that he was Jack’s father.
It took Declan almost a minute to recognize his well-known driver. “My heavens, you’re Bancroft Davis. You were bitten by those dogs in Mississippi.”
“Yes, sir, I was.”
Genesee turned in her seat, her eyes fierce as hot coals. “He was near killed three times. Some Klansmen wannabes caught him once by himself and took him out on a levee and put a gun to his head.”
Ornetta and Maeve eyed one another, holding their breath and gritting their teeth.
“That dishonors all white people,” was all Declan Liffey said.
Policemen with waving flashlights wouldn’t let them stop on the freeway where the ramp toward the Vincent Thomas Bridge had been blocked off by police cars and sawhorses. So they had to exit on Harbor and drive along the channel to the low cliff, parking next to the old ferry building, where they could see up the slope to the TV camera plus a crowd of rubbernecks. Maeve had just read Day of the Locust, and she recognized Nathanael West’s thrill chasers, drawn to any break in the common run of life. She pressed her way uphill to a police post at the top of the cliff where they had a fancy telescope on a tripod, giving them the best view out over Terminal Island. An area was roped off with more yellow tape that said POLICE LINE—DO NOT ENTER over and over. Maeve called to one of the policemen over the tape. “My name is Maeve Liffey. Is my dad, Jack, out there?”
An older officer in a suit strolled toward her. “Your father is Jack Liffey?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My name is Captain Adler.” He held up the yellow tape to let her in.
“This is his father and some friends of his.” She indicated the others struggling up the gentle slope behind her, Declan and Ornetta pushing Genesee in her portable wheelchair, and Bancroft doing pretty well in his walker. Adler frowned at the whole group, but nodded slowly and let them all duck and enter the area of grass behind the tape.
“Stay right here at the edge, all of you. We think your father may be over there, miss. He’s with a senior police officer and his partner. At the senior officer’s request, we’ve sealed off the bridges to prevent trouble. The last thing we need is a lot of people running around out there in the dark. Unfortunately there’s a skeleton crew loading a coke carrier out on Pier Two Hundred. We’re trying to get permission to go in and evacuate them, but we’ve lost communication with the island.”
“What about ham radio to the ship?” Maeve said.
Captain Adler raised his eyebrows to acknowledge her insight. “You’re a bright kid. It’s a different band from our units, but we’ve thought of that. The harbormaster is trying to raise them now. The ship is only loading, and it’s quite possible they’re not manning their radio room. There’s no reason to believe anyone is in any danger. Please just wait here. We’ll let you know if anything develops.”
He moved back toward the telescope, where half a dozen uniformed officers waited, taking turns peering into the lens, swinging the big telescope back and forth and talking into various kinds of walkie-talkies and the pack sets attached to their shirts.
The slope was just too steep for a wheelchair. They lifted Genesee out and set her gently on the grass. Ornetta knelt to make a backrest and put her hands in a protective way on her grandmother’s shoulders. Maeve watched this, and then went up to her own grandfather and put her arm around his waist. He seemed surprised, but rested a leathery hand on her shoulder.
“Jack’s a tough cookie,” he said.
“He’s been beat up a lot since you knew him,” Maeve said. “I think he needs help. Liffey and Liffey Investigations.”
The old man glanced down at her. “You stay right here, young lady.”
“I meant in general.”
* * *
The streetlight directly across the road from the cat food research facility seemed to be the only one on the street operating, though there was a glow from something on the next block. He wondered if leaving this one light on, like killing the cell phones, could be attributed to Joe Ozaki. Jack Liffey just didn’t want to frighten himself with too much reference to superpowers. He stood in the cone of yellow beneath the cobra-necked streetlight, his opened empty hands in plain sight, and once in a while he called out. He decided not to use Steelyard’s name in case the man was still alive out there. No sense giving him away.
The way the coastline curled around here, the mainland was due west of the island, and a chilly wind came off the land. You could see Christmas lights outlining the eaves of almost all the houses on the flank of the Palos Verdes Hills. A few seemed to have fancier displays that were hard to interpret from so far away but probably were the usual sleighs and mangers and angels. Time for the Magi to show up, Jack Liffey thought, this very night, bearing their frankincense and myrrh. And some police backup.
Now and again he glanced discreetly across the street, where there seemed to be a small disturbance in the slats of the pulled-down blinds, Gloria Ramirez peeking out at him. There was a fair amount of ambient light as his eyes adjusted. To the north, there were tall yellow security lights shining down on the huge container yards and the holding lots for import cars that were parked nose to tail, with opaque paper over their windows, Suzuki after Suzuki, Mitsubishi after Mitsubishi. The distant lights gave the air a faint glow, and drew an eerie orange radiation off the underside of a solid cloudbank.
“Come on, Joe! I want to talk to you!” His voice carried between the buildings, muddied a little by its echo. The only other sound was the moaning and sighing of the wind and that faint, low rumble from the machinery he’d heard before.
“There’s still time to fix this! You’re a war hero!” he shouted.
Just as he was about to give up, he noticed what seemed a thickening in the darkness in the very darkest provinces of the road, maybe two blocks ahead. It wasn’t exactly a thing he saw, more a small lopsidedness he sensed in the night itself, an occurrence, the way scientists spoke of a disturbance in space-time, a bending of gravity. No matter how hard he looked, it did not resolve itself. Then the hair on his neck stood up as he saw that the phenomenon seemed to be moving, very slowly, toward him. Gradually he made out a complex shape, but it was bigger than a man and more angular. He had to fight a dread that pulled him hard toward the meaningless safety back inside the building with Gloria.
Eventually he heard a whine on the cold air and made out a squarish shape of some sort. Had somebody sent a robot, one of those bomb investigators? Then he saw it was an ordinary forklift puttering slowly toward him. The fork was down, and something irregular sprawled across a palette that joggled toward him about a foot off the ground. The machine whirred into the outer edge of his circle of light, and, though he didn’t want to acknowledge it, it was pretty clear that the burden on the palette was an inert Ken Steelyard, his distinctive Redwing boots hanging off one side of the wood and his head off the other. His chest was dark with what must have been blood. There was no rifle.
The forklift came to a stop twenty feet away from him and switched off. Joe Ozaki stepped out of the driver’s seat in his black jumpsuit. As they stood facing one another, a whiff of the acrid propane exhaust reached him on the Christmas Eve breeze.
“I hope he isn’t dead,” Jack Liffey said.
“He’s dead. He tried to kill me.”
Jack Liffey stared hard. There was no movement from the blood-stained form slumped on the old palette. Jack Liffey hadn’t seen all that many dead people in his life, and he gave the body his respectful attention. Good-bye, old friend, he thought. I knew you a long time ago. I forgot you for a while, but I’ll remember you now.
“Just where do you think the line is drawn where honor stops? He challenged me. He came here after me. He fired the first shot. I had no choice.”
“You’re expert enough at martial skills. You could have disarmed him or incapacitated him.”
“It was time. Liffey, you’ve challenged me, too. And the woman in there.”
That gave him a chill. “She means you no harm. Don’t worry about her, worry about me.”
It was the first time he’d ever seen Joe Ozaki smile, just for an instant, like someone dismissing the transparent threats of a child. “She’s watching us right now,” Ozaki said.
“She and I are both unarmed. I saw to that. I’d like to hear a definition of honor that includes killing the unarmed.”
His adversary eyed him, almost with curiosity. “You don’t know it yet?” The man thought for a moment, his whole body stiffening into the misnamed “parade rest” posture. “Honor means to be resolute, to be desperate, to be nearly insane with strength of mind, to do things in the right way so that you manifest the good that resides in your entire ancestral line.”
“I don’t understand any of that.”
“Have you ever been caught in a bad rainstorm? If you run from house to house, trying to stay under the eaves, the method will be useless and you’ll still get soaked. But if you set out already decided that you’ll be soaked, you can walk like a man and still do your duty to your father and his fathers.”
“My father is a racist shithead. Do I really want to honor him?”
“Then you have a problem.”
“Maybe you and I could honor one another. It’s Christmas Eve. I’m not a believer, but I respect a lot of those values. Just look up at the hill and see all those lights meant to represent hope and forgiveness and maybe a kind of second chance in life.”
Ozaki didn’t look. “Honor does not turn on and off. I’ve studied this carefully. Where would you have me turn it off? At noon yesterday? Do I forget the early 1900s, when my ancestors were brought over here as farm labor? Do you want to turn it off in 1905, when the California progressives came up with the expression ‘Yellow Peril’ and formed the Asiatic Exclusion League? Even the sainted Jack London was a member.