by John Shannon
“How’s it going, Jack?” he said emptily as he read something. “You been one-H before, I bet.”
“If that means in jail, I have. I’ve even been in an army guard-house. But I never really get used to the—what is it?—resource deprivation. I would be delighted to get out of here.”
“I think I can get her to settle for assault, with some supervised probation time. Is that a go?”
“I helped kill a cop-killer. They should be giving me a medal.”
He shrugged. “The whole thing should have been HBO—that’s handled by officer—right there on the scene. But they’ve got a flea up their ass about a big mercy killing case at a nursing home. Time served and checking in with some squarehead once a week ain’t bad, Jack.” He held up an eight-by-ten photograph to peer at it, made a sour face, and put it back in the briefcase so Jack Liffey never saw it. “Jesus, man. You made a mess.”
Jack Liffey was glad the PD hadn’t felt like sharing the photo. It was vivid enough in his recollection. When he’d finally worked up his nerve to do what he had to do, realizing there was no way out, he hadn’t wanted to make a bad job of the coup de grâce, so he had hit pretty hard, but the crude knife had been sharpened so well that it had almost severed poor Joe Ozaki’s neck. The head had yanked back at the blow, his mouth jolted into a strange grin, and then the head flopped forward, as if hinged, which, as he was to learn later, was exactly the way it was all supposed to happen. In Bushido code, only criminals had their heads fully severed.
“Get me as off as you can.”
“Sure, Jack. Sorry it didn’t go easier, but you seem to be a bit of a shit magnet on this one.”
Later that afternoon, he was taken down an elevator to a different area, a big room with a lineup of bank teller cages. He was sat down behind a glass window inches thick. A telephone handset hung from a partition.
In a moment, he was grinning ear-to-ear as Maeve settled onto a stool on the other side, looking very earnest. Her mouth started moving, but he couldn’t hear a thing, and he had to rap on the glass and point to her own handset.
“… Daddy, it’s so horrible seeing you like this.” Her voice was like a fly in a bottle, buzzing far away. She said she wasn’t fond of his denim getup either, with a number where a pocket should have been.
He didn’t want to upset Maeve any more than she already was, so he went for a little Damon Runyon humor. “Da mouthpiece sez he can bribe da judge and spring me outta dis joint.”
She made a pained face. “Don’t joke, Daddy. This is really, really awful. And they’re probably listening.”
“More power to them. We’re making a deal for probation. The lawyer’s pretty sure the judge will go for it.” It took some doing before she was convinced he wasn’t just mollifying her.
“I want you out now. You know, I could go to Becky and ask her for the bail money. She’s got plenty in the bank.”
“Absolutely not. Just have patience, hon.”
To change the subject, he asked how Ornetta was doing. For some reason she got a sly look. “I’ve been staying with Gramps since Christmas and, you know, he’s trying fairly hard not to be his old self. He keeps saying he’s the same inside, believes the same things, but I know he’s changing. By the way, Mom is pretty pissed at you for telling her that your father was dead.”
“Kath would have loved his Sambo routines and all his greedy-Jew stories. And all his theories about light-skinned people being the acme of evolution. Not to mention his plan for sterilizing the mud people for their own good. Or maybe it was just most of the mud people—we always needed to keep a few to do our dirty work.”
Maeve seemed to get impatient. “I’m sure he’s changing, Dad. Ornetta visits us and he really seems to like her.”
Every bigot in the world had one black friend, Jack Liffey thought. It didn’t mean a thing. He thought of all the years he had argued and cajoled and shouted at his father without leaving a dent in all those fortressed beliefs. He also thought of the essays he’d had his friend Chris Johnson download from the Internet only a few years back, just to get a look at his father’s most recent rants, essays Jack Liffey had soon discarded, held at the corners by two fingers, like something the cat had killed and left at the back door.
“Well, hon, I sure hope you’re right. I have a terrible feeling he’s just a lonely old man putting on a big front to please you, but I’ll give him a break. You’ve got magic power in you, I won’t argue that.”
“It’s Ornetta with the magic.”
“So does she.”
“Last night she told us all a story about—” The phone went dead suddenly, and he was left staring at her lips moving happily on the other side of the glass. He loved seeing her so close—her mobile, emotional face; her skinny, vulnerable arms; a certain determined set of her lips, just like her mother’s—and he didn’t want to interrupt her, so he went on watching. Finally, a deputy appeared behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.
She kissed her hand and held it against the glass. He reciprocated, though it was not very satisfying.
Late that afternoon Gloria Ramirez came to the bars outside his cell, leaning on one wooden crutch. She had on a knee-length black skirt that revealed a long plaster cast on her leg. The other leg looked great—muscular and shapely. Her police wallet with its badge hung from a plastic cord around her neck.
“They say you’ll be out tomorrow.”
“Hope so. Chipped beef on toast is not my idea of a gourmet snack.”
“If that’s the worst—”
He waved it off. “Sure.”
“We found Joe Ozaki’s journal. I’ll try to fix it so you can read it if you want.”
He got up off the built-in bench to get a better look at her. She looked great there, even in the dim light. “I guess I’d like to read it. You know, he might not have gone over the edge if Ken hadn’t been pushing him so hard.”
She nodded. “We call it suicide by cop—pushing cops into killing you. Maybe this was the opposite, you know? Suicide by perp. Ken had his own trouble. But he didn’t keep a diary.”
“Steelyard knew he was outmatched. I’m sure he gave Ozaki no choice. Ken admitted to me that he’d tried to eat his gun a couple of times.”
“Damn. I didn’t know.”
“What we have is two tragedies colliding. That’s the nut, really. I liked Ken, but I liked Joe, too. His country sent him to Vietnam and made him into a first-rate warrior, but they never told him anything that could make sense of what he was sent to do. And that Bushido crap he stumbled onto just made it all worse.” Jack Liffey shrugged. “He grabbed it because it was Japanese and seemed to give his life some meaning. Race is always a lie, always.”
“Really?”
“I believe it. We’re just humans. That guy, he’d have been better off watching Shane and High Noon. Do your best. Keep the peace. Love the schoolmarm. Never shoot a guy in the back. And don’t hurt the civilians. That all works. He stuck himself with a philosophy so brittle it couldn’t deal with forgiveness, or forgiving yourself, or even with the friendship I offered. Bushido broke him.”
“Jack, this is such guy stuff. No woman would do all that.”
He nodded. “You’re probably right. The heart beats the head every time.”
“Come here,” she said in a throaty voice.
He came toward the bars.
“Put your hands on the bars right here. And here.”
He did, and she pressed her breasts against his hands. “Get out soon.”
“I’m doing my best.”
Convalescent though Jack Liffey is—John Shannon’s previous novel, the widely acclaimed City of Strangers, left his veteran detective in an L.A. hospital with a collapsed lung—he cannot resist the summons to his hometown of San Pedro, shipyard to Los Angeles, where a string of mysterious accidents is distressing local residents.
A child has gone missing. Then a fishing boat sinks. An invaluable model railway system is senselessly trashed
. A lifework—more than 700 irreplaceable pages of manuscript (by Jack’s irascible father)—gets shredded. Inexplicable as these personal misfortunes may be, one thing is certain: They are not accidents. For each scene bears the signature of a Japanese playing card, its face inscribed with a cryptic message.
Joe Hamasaki, a disaffected Japanese American who served as a Green Beret in Vietnam, is meanwhile daily recording his thirty years of rage in a journal. Embracing Bushido codes of honor, he has vowed to exact justice for the misdeeds visited upon his father during the World War 11 internment of Japanese people living in the U.S. By those same codes he determines his only worthy antagonist to be Jack Liffey.
The stakes are running dangerously high by the rime that Jack traces Joe Hamasaki to the eerie, deserted industrial installment at Terminal Island, for by then the increasingly desperate Hamasaki has just one of those ominous Japanese cards left to play. And it’s a deadly ace.
JOHN SHANNON is the author of six other titles in the Jack Liffey series, including Streets on Fire, The Orange Curtain, and City of Strangers. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
Visit Jack at JackLiffey.com
Jacket design © Andrew Newman Design
Jacket photographs © Getty Images
Author photograph © David McDougall
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