by John Shannon
“Is that your final word?”
He looked off into the middle distance like a cat seeing things nobody else could see. “This guy—this dumbshit wants me to be an albatross around his fucking neck the whole rest of his life.” He cocked his head and looked curious for just an instant. “I used that thing all my life and I don’t even know what an albatross is.”
“It’s a guy who keeps little boys for immoral purposes,” Jack Liffey said as he stood up. Just before he left he said, “You’ve got a hell of an Alley Oop pass.”
16
DEEP INSIDE HIS PROMISE
HE WASN’T SURE WHY HE’D FIGURED THAT GETTING IN NICK Giarre’s face would work, but he had expected it to work and now that his visit hadn’t panned out very well, he was feeling a bit clueless. He felt like one of those TV detectives who started every show by threatening the bad guy at the top of his lungs, on behalf of the client, so the bad guy would spend the next forty-five minutes beating up the client.
Giarre was probably right, the environmental agencies would take forever to act and they wouldn’t threaten GreenWorld with anything more than a wrist slap. Jack Liffey worried it all the way home without coming up with an answer, and when he got back into his complex it was almost ten at night and there was a sack of potatoes on his doorstep, but he’d seen this particular sack of potatoes there before. It was Maeve curled up asleep on the rope welcome mat with a can of Pringles in one hand.
He picked her up, surprised how light she still was, and felt a little pang deep inside at the vulnerability that suggested. She came blearily awake.
“What’s up, punkin’? Lost your key?”
“Mom took it away.” She hugged him. “Oh, Daddy, it’s awful!”
Uh-oh, he thought. “What is it, sweetie?”
It was so terrible she couldn’t get it out right then. Loco was happy to see her, first sniffing someone different on the air and then looking up as Jack Liffey carried her inside, and then actually wagging his tail, like a real dog. He deposited Maeve on the threadbare couch and gently removed the can of Pringles.
“I hope this wasn’t dinner.”
Loco got up on the sofa, another no-no, rolled his eyes quickly to Jack Liffey to make sure he was getting away with it, and then snuggled up to Maeve to commiserate with whatever it was the dog sensed was bothering her. She balled up her fists and rubbed them against one another, then caught herself at it and clutched her knees.
“Mom’s getting married. To her new man.” She shuddered, as if the new man were Robert Mitchum with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles.
“Whoa,” he said, almost involuntarily. He got out two diet Cokes, mostly as a delaying tactic as he thought about it, and sat on the orange canvas captain’s chair that was the only side furniture he could afford. He examined what he was feeling and found he wasn’t so much bothered by the thought of some new man sharing Kathy’s bed, or her mealtimes, or her closet space, but of someone else playing father to Maeve.
“It had to happen sooner or later,” he said evenly. “The divorce has been final for two years. You knew we weren’t going to get back together.”
“But, Daddy, he treats me like a little girl, and he watches stupid TV shows.” She thought a moment and then decided she had to reveal the worst. “And he picks his nose in the car.”
Jack Liffey laughed. “It’s amazing how many people think a car’s a private space for things like that. If that’s his worst trait, you’ll be okay.”
She didn’t want to be consoled. “Daddy, he teaches social studies. Only dorks like social studies. And he believes it all.”
“Somebody’s got to believe it. If everybody was cynical like us, who would we have to rebel against?”
She huffed a moment. “You’re just being contrary.”
“Actually, I think I believe it. I grew up with Ozzie and Harriet and the Beaver, and it gave me some reference for normality. It’s a kind of pastoral vision, that world. What’s going to happen to kids who only see the Power Rangers and Beavis and Butt-head?”
“I don’t want to talk about philosophy.”
“I’m sorry, punkin. Let’s talk about Butt-head while I make you some dinner.”
She giggled.
“What happened to the last guy, the real-estate salesman? And, by the way, how come I’ve never heard about this guy and already she’s marrying him?”
“I didn’t think it was serious, so I didn’t talk about him. You know, they just teach in the same school. I thought he was her friend.”
He knew there wouldn’t be much in the tiny pantry off the kitchen, or in the shelves over the sink, but maybe the freezer. He came to a full stop when he opened the freezer door. Here was a little reference for normality all right, he thought. Marlena’s .25-caliber purse pistol was sitting on the frozen peas right where he’d left it. He put it in his pocket and pried a couple of frozen chicken breasts out of the frost and put them in the microwave, packaging and all.
“You feel like Parmesan chicken?” As a rule he’d pound out a couple of breasts and sauté them with some Kraft cardboard Parmesan and spices, and they usually turned out all right. And Kathy wouldn’t complain too much that he was wrecking Maeve’s health because it wasn’t red meat.
“Sure. I’m famished, I guess.”
Speaking of Kathy, he thought. He checked the answering machine and there was the message, blinking up at him over and over as if it was trying to scratch an itch. She was undoubtedly worried about Maeve and he’d have to get back to it, but he’d let it go on itching for a while yet. He hunted up the spices and a little butter. “You’re going to have to find some way to make your peace with this guy,” he said. “Your mom likes him enough to marry him and she’s not an idiot.”
“She probably just likes the sex with Butt-head.”
His eyes went wide staring down at a pat of butter on a saucer, but he didn’t say anything right away. This was going to be an issue with Maeve sooner or later, he thought, and he shuddered to himself theatrically because he knew she couldn’t see him. A part of him made a stab at imagining Maeve asking to borrow a condom while a zitty teenage boy waited at the door, then it went worse on its own and he saw a big pink vibrator tumble out of her purse. He cringed and made a face, and the rest of him chased the images away.
“I’m sure she likes sex well enough.”
The doorbell rang and mercifully cut off that particular line of discussion, and he wondered if he’d see a zitty teenage boy through the peephole.
“Want me to get it?” Maeve asked.
It was probably Kathy, he thought, frantically waving an arrest warrant for kidnapping. “I’ll get it.”
He didn’t use the peephole first and it wasn’t a gawky boy, nor was it Kathy, it was Quinn, in his full spit-polished Culver City police uniform and a grim look on his face. He wondered if he was about to be arrested for whatever they called it short of kidnapping—violation of custodial agreements, or custodial interference, something like that.
“Liffey,” Quinn said, about the way he’d probably name a dead possum in the driveway.
“Still here.”
Quinn seemed to be thinking something over.
Just so the policeman wouldn’t embarrass himself with some obscene outburst, Jack Liffey said, “My daughter’s here for a little while, too, then I’m taking her home to her mother.”
The cop’s eyes picked out Maeve, then dismissed her presence. So it wasn’t about that, he thought with relief. Quinn gestured Jack Liffey outside, but rather politely for him. “I got something to show you.”
It was Jack Liffey’s turn to think things over. “Uh-huh. You’re not gonna sandbag me down the trail a piece, are you? You’ve actually got something for me to see?”
Quinn almost smiled. “Don’t be a guy with a problem.” He gestured again and Jack Liffey shrugged agreement. The microwave was still burring away.
“Punkin, check the thawing chicken, okay?”
“I’ll take charge.”
He followed the policeman out of the entrance bay that his apartment shared with three others, and suddenly his neck iced up as he thought of the illegal purse pistol thawing in his pocket. Wouldn’t Quinn love to catch him with that, he thought. Of course, he could always shoot Quinn four or five times and head for Mexico.
The young guys who hung out on the retaining walls bouncing basketballs were a bit more subdued than normal as the man in uniform strode past. A big jet that was still on its power climb passed overhead. Some nights they took off from LAX out to sea and then U-turned east to pass right over his condo and some nights they seemed to be making their big turn somewhere else and he could never figure out what the difference was.
“It’s in my car,” Quinn said. The big black-and-white Caprice was parked in one of the emergency slots near the entrance. “Do you believe everything we do comes back to haunt us?”
“No, not really. Things don’t have purposes.”
“Well, I reckon they do.” He swung open the rear door of the squad car and there was the redhead with the buzz cut glaring at him. Tim something-or-other was the name, if he remembered right, the brighter of the two bounty hunters, but right now his hands were handcuffed behind his back and he just looked angry.
“Marlena complained to me about a guy fitting this description who pushed her around.”
A guy fitting your description did the same thing, Jack Liffey thought, but he decided not to pick a fight until he found out what was going on here.
“I caught him skulking around her place.”
“Skulking,” Jack Liffey mused. “That got an official number, like a four-twenty-two or something?”
“So what do you think? Ever seen the guy?”
“What was it about this guy put you in mind of events coming back to haunt us?” Jack Liffey asked.
“I rousted him a couple weeks ago and he said he was after a bail skip. Never mind about that. Marlena said you had some trouble, too.”
“I always have trouble of some kind.”
Quinn was getting impatient. “Let’s just don’t do that now. Here, you’re a sensitive kind of guy. Check this out.” He wrenched up the redhead’s sleeve.
There on his arm were the usual SS lightning flashes, a swastika, the letters BWT, and a death’s-head. It was all professionally done, not the blurry blue jailhouse tattoos you saw on a lot of jailbirds.
“That’s not all,” Quinn said, and he pulled open the man’s shirt. Across the top of his chest it said in Gothic letters:
I WANT SOME PLACE I CAN SETTLE,
ALL I NEED IS HEAVY METAL.
Under that it said SKINS FOREVER and then, beside a big dagger with a snake around it, KILL KIKES, NIGGERS, AND LIBERALS.
“It’s all spelled right,” Jack Liffey said, with incredulity.
“You ought to like this, you’re a liberal, right?”
“Sometimes I’m angry about the way things are, it’s not quite the same thing.”
“Fuck both you guys with a square fence post,” the redhead muttered.
“Another country heard from,” Jack Liffey said.
“What country would that be?” Quinn asked, taking him literally.
“The country of the assholes. I don’t know this guy and I don’t want to know this guy.” He could see a glimmer of surprise in the redhead’s eyes, which clouded over quickly. Sooner or later the muscles in his jaw were going to get tired from all the teeth-clenching he was doing.
“Have it your way.” Quinn opened the front door and took out a book-sized parcel wrapped in Saran and duct tape. “This is sell-weight of the big H. It’s worth a mandatory fifteen years sleeping with a lot of convicts.”
He tossed it on the redhead’s lap and the man wriggled away as if it were burning hot. The package slid down his thigh and rested there on the worn and stained upholstery. The man’s eyes went from the package to Quinn and back to the package, but he’d apparently decided there wasn’t much percentage in protesting.
“All you got to do is say you saw him with it. You just did.”
“I’ve got food thawing,” Jack Liffey said, and he started walking away.
Quinn followed as far as the steps that led out of the parking area.
“What’s your problem here, Liffey? I know this guy played bold with you.”
“My ideas don’t go in that direction,” Jack Liffey said. “And you’ve got enough trouble as it is with Internal Affairs.”
“Mrs. Quinn didn’t raise a boy stupid enough to let IA get him. Keep that in mind if you ever decide to snitch me out.”
“I already told you my ideas don’t go in that direction. I don’t snitch.”
“Maybe I’ll just turn sunshine loose around your pad.”
“Do what you’ve got to do.”
He wondered if he’d ever get Quinn out of his hair. Even when the man was trying to be helpful, he was a pain in the ass. When he got back, Maeve had the chicken breasts thawed and pounded and ready to go, but she was sound asleep in a gangly tangle of limbs on the sofa. He carried her into his bed and called Kathy and swore on several stacks of Bibles that he’d bring her back first thing in the morning, very very early, for sure before Kathy went off to work.
“LISTEN, it’s not a good idea. We won’t ever call your future stepdad names again,” were Jack Liffey’s last words to his daughter when he dropped her off at 5:45 A.M.
“Who? Oh, you mean Butt-head,” were her last words to him, then she giggled and ran off into the house. It was already warm out, the sun barely up and the air at blood heat.
It was so early he got a cup of coffee and toast with the early birds at a dingy coffee shop, where a boom box set to the news station was up on the counter beside the iced-tea machine, rattling away with some commotion that was going on, but he didn’t pay any attention. He decided he’d do his daily look-in on the boy downtown after a while and then figure out what to do about GreenWorld. He wondered if Chris Johnson or one of the guys at PropellorHeads could help him somehow, but GreenWorld didn’t seem the kind of business that relied heavily on computers.
Two stools away there was a bleary-eyed man staring into his coffee cup as if even this wouldn’t be enough to wake him up. That was ordinary enough, particularly for the hour, except this guy had a big bloused white suit with large yellow polka dots and full clown makeup with a round red nose. Maybe they really were all crying inside.
“Refill?” the waitress asked.
“Hit me hard.”
The bounty hunters were a separate problem for him. He probably should have let Quinn set them up with the dope, but if you started doing stuff like that your whole world might just corkscrew down out of the sky in some haywire death spiral. The world would always encourage things toward the in-betweens and grays and ambiguous zones, but you had to resist it. He figured it was better you either stuck with the truth or you went all the way the other way. He didn’t want to be part of the modern predicament, but there it was.
MEANWHILE, Faye Mardesich was just then experiencing a flood of relief at the firm knock on her front door.
She’d just hung up from talking to her son for the first time in weeks. It had been a disturbing phone call. The boy hadn’t called to talk about coming home, he’d simply identified himself and asked abruptly where his father was. When she told him Milo’d taken a second shift at GreenWorld that night and wasn’t back yet, Jimmy had sounded funny. He said he thought there was some sort of trouble at GreenWorld, it was on the news, but he’d go listen and get right back to her, honestly he would. She’d felt a chill go all the way up her backbone and she started worrying seriously about Milo, imagining a dozen terrible fates, but then the knock, Milo’s knock, she’d always know it.
He’d forgotten his key, that was it.
She hurried across the room and opened with a smile. It hadn’t been Milo’s knock after all, and her smile collapsed all at once like one of those big buildings on the eleven o
’clock news, brought down surgically by dynamite. It took a moment to recognize him, heavyset and grim, wearing red suspenders. She’d only seen him that once, and it had been at night as he smoked his cigarette beside the tank truck.
“Hallelujah,” Schatzi said as he showed her a pistol in his waistband. “Step back inside, woman at risk.”
IF Jack Liffey had turned on the radio on the way, he might have found out sooner. As it was, all the geezers standing around the lobby of the mission watching an old TV alerted him. Even then it took him a moment to focus, as he was distracted by the sight of an old man with a deep scar on his cheek who was wearing a pair of women’s glasses with rhinestones in the winged corners.
“… There seems to be no letup, Dave. The plume is still boiling up to about a thousand feet and then spreading out and sinking under the inversion as it cools. There’s almost no wind and it’s still spreading in all directions from the epicenter. Maybe there’s a little preference for being blown west …”
He pushed his way as gently as possible into the midst of the old men, the aromas of piss and vomit and stale bad whiskey almost overpowering him. It was hard to tell what was being shown on the screen, except for a logo in one corner that said 5 NEWS LIVE and an inset of a pretty-boy news anchor in an untidy polo shirt. It seemed to be a helicopter shot of an unnaturally yellow cloud, lumpy on top like cumulus stained the color of fresh marigolds. It didn’t look much different from any angle as the camera chopper circled, though there was a fat pillar rising higher and brighter at the center. The camera zoomed back and tilted toward the horizon and you could see that the cloud started thinning and paling some way in the distance.
The little talking head touched its ear and stirred. “Walter, we have no word on the chemical composition of the cloud yet, except the initial report from the fire-department spokesperson who said he’d been told it contained ‘several reaction products from a runaway chemical process’ and some of the products are presumed to be toxic. The highway patrol is increasing the evacuation zone to include all of Burbank north of Olive. Burbank Airport was shut down fifteen minutes ago and inbound flights will be diverted to LAX, Long Beach, or Ontario …”