The Concrete River

by John Shannon

  “Remember I said this little stage at the side of the blueprint was way too small for an opera house, and there weren't any flies for scenery and lighting. I was right. Here's another clue, down in the fine print of a memo.”

  He looked where Lewis was pointing. The sentence said: … as we discussed on the phone, we need something special to draw the punters in.

  “I know the word from England. It's a half-contemptuous term for a small-time gambler. And then here.”

  Jack Liffey followed the finger again. It was a letter from AT&T confirming the prices for conditioned landlines to two numbers, one in the 310 area code beginning with 419 and the other in 818 beginning with 514. “That first one is Inglewood and the other is Arcadia. Ring any bells?”

  “Inglewood's a relatively upscale black area and Arcadia is rich Republican dentists.”

  “Think.”

  “Maybe somebody's setting up orthodontia for all those shiny white teeth.”

  “A conditioned landline is a datalink. It's usually not for conversation but for digital information.”

  He certainly did have some annoying mannerisms, Jack Liffey thought. “I do know the words, Mike. We called them drops in aerospace, and we had them all over the building.”

  “I'll bet you didn't have them going to Santa Anita and Hollywood Park, though, did you?”

  The phone rang and he leapt up nimbly.

  Jack Liffey read the letter again, a chill forming along his legs and working its way up his spine. Lewis whispered into the phone, like a little emblem of the fear he felt all of a sudden. Dedicated lines to race tracks. He hadn't quite put it all together, but he had an idea of who he was probably up against now and he didn't like it.

  Lewis came back and settled into a faded old sling chair from the 1950s. “You can probably guess what kind of place has small lounge stages, landlines to race tracks and talks about drawing the punters in. There's a few local option poker parlors in Gardena and Commerce and the Indian reservation out by Cabazon, but those are small potatoes. The state constitution tolerates what they call ‘games of skill’, and the courts have always generously considered poker a game of skill. Must be knowing when to show ’em and when to fold ’em makes it a skill. Anyway, people have been trying to get full-bore gambling for years. Look at the size of that rubber factory. That would be the biggest casino west of Vegas, and within a forty-five-minute drive of ten million people.”

  The magic time in L.A.—everybody said a place was forty-five minutes away, no matter how far it really was.

  “I haven't heard anything about relaxing the laws for craps and roulette and slots, but who knows what agendas are grinding away in secret.”

  “Yeah,” Jack Liffey said. “It could be important to some people to stop it, too. There's an awful lot of money invested in people driving more than forty-five minutes to do their gambling.”

  “Those are people you don't want to fuck with, is what I think,” Lewis said simply.

  “I already did.”

  Jack Liffey went straight to the phone. He noticed it was after one a.m. He called his own phone and listened to several messages, many of them from Mike Lewis. One was from Art Castro. “Oh, man, give me a call, please. I think you went and pissed on a nest of scorpions.”

  He called and got Castro's wife, sounding bleary.

  “I'm sorry, Olga, this is Jack. You better wake him up.”

  It took a while, and when he came on he sounded slower than normal.

  “I didn't mean call back at this hour, hombre.”

  “As long as you're up, how about filling me in?”

  “Okay, sure, long as I'm up.” He yawned with a little squeak at the end. “I got a friend in the body shop business. You know, they got a computer network these days, some of them, find parts from each other. Anyway, he saw where a M3 was getting some new windshield glass and he called over there for me. M3s not exactly falling out of the trees, probably of interest to you. These guys, they was getting all new tires, too, and as long as they was getting new rubber, they upgraded the tires, you know, went to the big ZRs for, like, driving 150 and shit. Two hundred bucks a pop. They bought one for the spare, too, and the guy in the shop had to open the trunk and pull up the carpet to replace it. First thing he found in there, he found some Nevada plates wrapped in a rag. Had some dirt on them but pretty new. He'd been in Nam, this guy, and he knew what C-4 plastic explosive looks like. And everybody knows a Mac-11 with the long clip. These are bad dudes, esse.”

  “Okay, Art. Thanks. Leave it alone now. You never heard of me, and your friend in the chop shop never heard of you, too.”

  “It's not a chop shop, hey. I don't hang with no bangers. Good luck, man, really.”

  “Thanks.” He hung up and saw Mike Lewis watching him. “You, too. Burn all that stuff and bury the ashes.”

  “You can't close Pandora's box, Jack.”

  “You damn well better hope I can.”

  “You got any protection?”

  “You mean guns? A bit, but not here. What can you offer?”

  Lewis considered. “You can borrow a 9-mm Walther.”

  “Why not?”

  He got it out of a shoe box in the hall closet, a shiny blued little automatic. “Here's the only thing you got to remember. This is the safety. You flick it up like this.”

  “Jesus!”

  The exposed hammer fell as if the pistol was firing.

  “Stupid hair-raising design. Germans engineers design everything for the convenience of the engineers. The first trigger pull after you use the safety is stiff because it has to recock. Okay?”

  “Thanks. Let's hope I don't have to shoot anybody.”

  “It's a thought.”

  Lewis offered him a heap of bedding and he slept fitfully on the sofa, with gusty rain lashing the uncurtained windows that looked out over the arroyo. Siobhann kissed him on the cheek on her way out in the morning, and Mike Lewis dragged himself out not long after. “What's the weather out?” Jack Liffey asked.

  “Look's like the rain's over for now. Does it matter?”

  “Moisture matters. Here's why.”

  He borrowed a box of bandaids and Mike Lewis watched while he used them end-to-end to strap the pistol to his ankle so it held tight but would break away easily with a tug.

  “Man, where did you learn that? That must be the state-of-the-art in detective craft.”

  “It was a Crimestopper. Very underrated, Mr. Tracy.”

  *

  He went straight to the Liberation House where a very worried young man met him at the front door.

  “Can I speak to Eleanor?”

  The boy blocked the door. “She never came home last night.”

  “Yes, she did. Why don't you go knock on her door.”

  “We've been in her room, man. We looked all over. Agnes'd've heard her on the steps. She never came in.”

  Jack Liffey's blood turned cold. “I dropped her off at midnight.” He pushed past the boy, and the boy resisted for an instant and then fell away.

  “I'm telling you, she isn't here.”

  Liffey strode up the stairs past a fretting older woman in a long kimono and went straight to Eleanor's room. The bed was more or less as he remembered them leaving it. He went to the small closet and racked the hangers back and forth. He had a clear picture of the striped blouse that he had folded so carefully and left on a damp white sage, and it wasn't there.

  He went down the stairs and across the kitchen to the back door. The woman in the kimono padded after him without making a protest. Eleanor would have come in the back, just thirty yards from where he'd dropped her. Unless they'd been watching the back, waiting for her.

  He kicked bundles of rags aside, but the doorlock fought him and he almost tore the door off its hinges. Then it swung open and he stopped in his tracks. There was a three-step concrete stoop leading down to a walk. Sitting in the middle of the stoop on the nubbly footwiper was a rubber rattlesnake.

 
FOURTEEN

  Overdetermination

  Time to go home and face the music. It was his first lucid thought after seeing the rubber snake. Nothing cute like a gun on his ankle was going to be much help now. As he drove west, an overwhelming sense of despair hollowed him out. What on earth had he been thinking of? He had screamed a challenge into the dark doorway of a dream, and the nightmare had erupted out of the dark to swallow up someone he loved, as any sane man knew it would.

  Up ahead, one of the Toonerville Trolleys was stopped on the elevated Green Line. People milled excitedly looking at something on the tracks. A man in a traindriver's uniform seemed to be kicking the side of the first car as hard as he could.

  Then he was past the bridge and into the vast no-man's land of southeast L.A., where the poorest blacks and Central Americans lived side by side in gathering animosity. He tried to squeeze himself down, to become small and compact so that when the time came to act he would be ready.

  He nodded absently to the guard going into the condo and parked in his usual spot beside the big Olds with the reflective AA stickers: One Step at a Time and Take it Easy. He took a roundabout route to an alcove where he could see his door. It wasn't kicked open. He considered flinging it open and hurling himself inside like some TV cop, but it was all too melodramatic so he just stepped in.

  The light on his answering machine blinked rapidly, which meant it had malfunctioned again. Of course, it might not have been from Vegas. It might even have been from Kathy or Maeve, some minute readjustment of blame for his paternal failures.

  He thought of walking to his office but decided to drive, in case he needed to move fast. He left the Concord facing out in the lot, just out of sight of Margolin's coffee counter.

  The padlock was still on the crude hasp that held his boarded up door, and beside it was a small yellow note. All it had was a phone number and a fat letter S. The initial might have stood for almost anything, but snake occurred to him right away, and when he looked closer, he saw that it was probably a crude drawing of a snake. He folded it into his pocket.

  Downstairs Marlena was squatting beside a plastic tub of mail, sorting it into her boxes.

  “Jack! I was worried.” She stood and smoothed a tight skirt over her hips. “You didn't answer, all the time.”

  “I had to stay out of sight for a while.”

  She blocked his way so he had to hug her.

  Very softly she said into his ear, “You're my only chance.”

  He shuddered. “There's a lot of people would jump in the L.A. River if I were their only chance.”

  “And some are more beautiful, I bet.”

  “That's not what I'm saying.” He just couldn't attend to her now. “Can I make a call?”

  “You know where it is.”

  She gave one long squeeze before turning him loose.

  The number was a 310 and might have been almost anywhere on the periphery of the city.

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Jack Liffey. I got a note.”

  There was a moment of near silence, with only the electronic wheezes of phone devices talking to one another.

  “Liffey, huh.” It was a new voice, one that he recognized. “You got more wind on you than a little bull goin’ uphill. My car insurance wants to talk to you. You want to help out your little filly, who's gone and got herself tied up, you'd best mosey this way. And, pard, don't even think about calling the sheriff.”

  They gave him an address that sounded like Cahuenga and hung up.

  So, the worst was true after all. He stood with the phone in his hand, utterly incapable of moving. How had he signed up for this? An out-of-work technical writer, down on his luck and scrambling for cash in a mean city. Maybe he'd tried to even the odds a bit too hard, but this had turned out way beyond his sense of risk. He had to concentrate hard to move at all, not to run down into stasis. Hang up the phone, Jack.

  “I've got to go somewhere,” he told Marlena.

  “Come back to me, querido.” She hugged him from behind.

  “Some real bad guys,” he said. He looked up and saw a kid in a bright red T-shirt jumping up and down in the window, making faces. He couldn't work out whether the action had any meaning. “I think they're the ones who did the woman.” He couldn't think of anybody's name he was so distracted. It took him a moment to remember the name Consuela, then Eleanor and finally Marlena. “I think I know why now.”

  “Can't you call the police?”

  “It's my doing. I've got to undo it.”

  “Would money help you any?” she whispered, and the boy at the window redoubled his jumping, darting his tongue obscenely.

  “Bless you for asking.” He wrote down the address in Cahuenga and gave it to her. “I don't know if it will do any good but if I don't call you by eight tonight, go to a pay phone and send the fire department there. I don't think they'll be stupid enough to stay in the same place, but the fire guys are paid for driving around in their red trucks so you may as well use them.”

  As he started for the door, the boy fled.

  “Don't you care that I'm afraid for you?” she asked querulously.

  He looked back for a moment, trying to work out what she had said. “It means a lot.” What means a lot? “Thanks, Marlena.”

  *

  He felt obliged to go straight to the address, though everything inside him begged to dawdle. It was ten and the roads were still clear, as if it took the drivers all morning and into the afternoon before they could work out how to get together to jam up the streets. He was more frightened than he'd ever been. The round had his name on it now, and he couldn't believe in things being off target. He remembered times, even in Nam, when death had seemed so far away that it was part of another life, but now it was close enough to touch.

  He got stuck at a light behind a battered old round-fender pickup. The driver argued fitfully with someone who wasn't there. His head jerked and his right fist shot up and hit the cab roof, so hard Jack Liffey could hear the dull clang over the traffic noise. Then gems spewed away from his side window and the man's fist emerged into the sunlight for an instant. It took a moment before Jack Liffey realized what had happened. The man was having a bad morning of his own. With the light still red, the pickup lurched forward and fishtailed into a right turn, smoking a tire.

  Jack Liffey looked down at the street, where glass fragments caught the sun. The incident had been sent by something or other to tear away the last fragments of normality. This was what the French philosophers called overdetermination. Reality poisoned you to death, stabbed you through the heart and then shot the corpse a few times. He wanted to be far away, somewhere safe and clean, where things behaved predictably, but what was coming seemed likely to be very close and inescapable and not very redeeming.

  He started up again when a car honked at him. The sky eastward was scrubbed sparkling by the soft rains, and far in the distance he could see dark cloud over the mountains. A thunderhead climbed skyward, and a long line of planes marked the approach lane to LAX. He tried to fathom what had brought him to this exact spot, sinking along a trajectory he could not control. He had a tidiness streak in him, but this was too unruly to explain.

  He could hear the rattle of his tappets. The engine needed oil, and the red light would come on in another hundred miles. It didn't seem to matter at all. In Cahuenga, he saw a couple of taxis like more ill omens. You never saw taxis in L.A. They were visible at the airport, but they evaporated from the universe as soon as they left it.

  The address he'd been given was a small lot with a filthy mattress tented up in high weeds. Behind the mattress was a concrete foundation with a few charred two-by-fours where a house had been burned out. It looked vaguely familiar and then he saw the fading graffiti. CINQUE RULES! Viva Tanya! And, much smaller, Down with imperialism and all its running dogs. It must have been the cowboy's idea of a joke—this was the house where the Symbionese Liberation Army had holed up and cops from four jurisdictions had pou
red gunfire in until the building caught fire and burned. The fire department would get a big kick out of the joke if Marlena had to call them.

  Up the street an extended family of Latinos were under the hood of an old Pontiac, some handing around parts and others pointing and tugging at things. Just then the BMW came around the corner and drove slowly up beside his car. The blacked passenger window whirred down and he saw the Cowboy only three feet away, looking at him neutrally. The other man was driving.

  The Cowboy's hand reached languidly out the window holding a large porcelain eagle. The bird was hand-painted in pastel colors, one of those horribly expensive statuettes from Germany that grandmothers bought from mail order ads. He held the eagle out at full stretch and rotated it once as if trying to sex it by peering in under the tail, then he let it go. It hit the pavement and broke cleanly at the base of a wing. Jack Liffey realized for the first time that something was wrong with the Cowboy's eyes. One of them was glass, but it was hard to tell which one.

  “I got a new CD player built into the trunk,” the Cowboy said mildly. “Carousel. Ten disks all stacked up and you play it through your stereo with a gizmo with a lot of buttons. Whenever I got somethin’ broke up I always fix it up better than before or add on something. You see the point? You got to stay ahead of the curve.”

  Jack Liffey saw his problem now—he'd only been trying to stay even, and everybody else was staying ahead.

  The Cowboy got out and pressed the seat forward, jackknifing himself into the back of the M3. “You get in front.”

  It was all so civilized. Jack Liffey got in dully and they pulled away and drove for a minute before the Cowboy spoke again.

  “When I was ten, the river up and flooded one wet spring. House was right on the bluff over the Brazos and the water come up to the front porch and me and pa spent all day out there killin’ water moccasins that come up out of the river. We used .22s until we ran out of ammo and then baseball bats and a shovel. That's a true fact. Pa ran around crazy as a parrot eatin’ stick candy, but I got so I liked the job. I got to teasin’ ’em before I whacked ’em out. After a while I even got to think kindly on ’em a little. They was only doin' their nature. Still, I had to hit ’em. That was my nature.”