Dangerous Games (22 page)

TAPED EARLIER
came up over the logo, and the small foreshortened figure of a man could be seen scurrying along the edge of a paved road with a roadway flare, setting fire to the weeds. The camera panned over to a downhill line of fire that was already threatening a flat-roofed house on a dirt road. A couple of men seemed to be filming this fire. The cameras were smaller than the usual news cameras, so the men appeared to be ghoulish homeowners recording the death of their own homes with amateur equipment. The announcer babbled away, but Maeve was only half listening. “… hot flare … amazing calm … maybe twenty years old … we may be watching pure evil at work …”

“
Madre,
” Thumb said.

The screen flickered and the words in the corner returned to
13 LIVE.
The flat-roofed house was ablaze. A sunk driveway led to a big garage, and a car seemed to be parked down there, half charred and smoldering.

“Oh,
NO!
” Maeve shrieked.

“What?”

She could feel her face burn in sympathy with the flames, and her hands stretched out involuntarily toward the TV, all her muscles stiffening. A VW Bug with two primered fenders, left front, right rear. Her father had said he thought the girl he was looking for was in the Malibu hills.

“That's my dad's car!”

The camera pulled away from the car, and she tried a desperate act of will to make it go back. As the helicopter circled, the camera panned around and tried to stay on a prone figure on charred ground that had obviously been overtaken by fire. The person was too thin and too tall to be her father, and he seemed to be clutching a little video camera. One arm was still moving a little. She felt an immense relief and then a momentary guilt at being thankful for someone else's misfortune. While she watched, begging the helicopter camera to come around again to the car, to show her some detail that would belie what she knew, the TV set broadcast the sound of two gunshots. Instantly, the man in the helicopter began to jabber, and the helicopter scooted outward and higher, losing sight of the house.

“Are you sure?” Thumb said.

She nodded dully, and they both watched as they could hear the pilot shouting “We're taking fire!” and all they could see was a chaotic streak of landscape as the helicopter retreated in a tilted circling evasive maneuver, the cameraman bravely struggling to find a target.

“I owe you two a life,” Thumb said. “Let's go get your father.”

“You didn't kill anyone.”

“I have.”

She wasn't sure whether it was rueful or proud, and just then she didn't care. “We don't even know where that fire is.”

“Mulholland and Cold Canyon,” he said. Obviously, he had listened more carefully than she had. She tried to picture a route. To get there, she'd have to drive east along the 10 and, when it hit the ocean, up the coast highway, but by the time she made the turn onto PCH the traffic would be a nightmare—or blocked by the police. By then most of the traffic would be fleeing the other way, but, anyway—Thumb was right—she had to try.

“Let's go.”

“I got to get something.”

He turned his back to her and, trying to hide it, he tore open a small box and yanked out a black pistol that he stuck in his waistband.

“Is that the one … ?” she asked.

“
Claro que
yes. I'm sorry.”

“That's over. I forgive you. But it's dangerous for you to be keeping it.”

Trevor Pennycooke had halted momentarily when they finally boosted the girl up to the deer trail. Without warning, he drew his big ungainly revolver and fired a couple of shots back into the flames. Jack Liffey could only think of the man-of-war at the beginning of
Heart of Darkness,
standing off the coast of the Congo and firing its cannon into the endless jungles to punish some nameless indiscretion of the continent. This pistol fire would have about as much use, but maybe he discerned a target back there in the dancing heat.

“Bal'heads tink dey beat on me like a drum. I-an-I a snake fe squeeze dem dead.”

“Yeah, okay, Trevor, but not
now.
” Jack Liffey could feel the heat pouring down the hillside like an avalanche from an open furnace door. The fire had become a steady roar now, an animal poked into authentic rage. “Let's get her out of here.” The dear trail was only wide enough for one, but he struggled slightly off trail on the downside to offer the best footing he could to her one good leg. Just as he got the pace he tripped on some outcrop and lunged forward, dragging her along, before he caught himself. She whimpered with pain, but he could tell she was trying her best not to. Pennycooke followed close behind, as if to protect them from the fire. Before long, the trail tilted down at quite an angle, and he had to find a new cadence, his heels hitting the steep dirt hard. His own ankles were starting to hurt.

“I-an-I take over naow,” Pennycooke insisted, and Jack Liffey felt a strong hand on his shoulder. The live sparks and firebrands streamed past, and he hated to slow down even for the changeover. It was a miracle that the fire hadn't leapfrogged ahead of them on the flaming debris.

Pennycooke picked her up and put her over his shoulder like a long sack of grain. Jack Liffey was amazed at his strength and balance as he started to jog heavily down the trail, the girl's dark pigtails jouncing behind. Even unburdened, he had to hurry to keep up. A minute earlier, there had been a news helicopter but no evidence of fire department aircraft—all those angelic water-droppers you saw on the news. He supposed they were busy on the other fires or charging up with fire retardants somewhere. If the fire hadn't been so loud itself, howling behind them, he figured he would have heard sirens from the fire trucks. But there hadn't been a one. He wondered if they'd all been sent to cover the fires in the east.

He saw a flame lick upward out of the brush to his right, an offspring of the main fire. He'd read that wildfire raced uphill faster than a man could run, climbing on its own heat and the grasp of its taller flames, so he supposed they were lucky to be chased downhill.

Trevor Pennycooke stumbled ahead, and Jack Liffey lunged forward to help catch him before he went down heavily. The Jamaican gasped once. “Thankee, mon.”

Somehow, they had lost the deer trail, or it had petered out on them, and they were kicking and high-stepping their way through chaparral now, waist-high dry weeds, wild grasses, and concealed stone outcrops. It was pure brute strength that kept the Jamaican tearing through the weeds at almost a trot, carrying his limp burden. Jack Liffey was having trouble himself getting a breath, with the smoke and the exertion, plus one lung still weakened by its recent collapse. An echo of Dickens entered his weary mind: somewhere nearby there is pain. And exhaustion.

A hundred yards ahead, and well below, they could see the dark scar of a paved road, two lanes without shoulders, a guard rail along the lower side. There wasn't a single vehicle escaping along it. Why?

Maeve drove fast, too fast for the little Toyota, which was starting to feel floaty at about 100, losing traction on the freeway as she wove grimly in and out between other cars in the faster lanes of the 10, and she had Thumb dial star 3 again on her cell, the speed-dial for Gloria's house, but it was still busy.

“Please don't get us busted with a
cuete
in the car,” he said, one hand clinging hard to the shoulder belt next to his neck and his palm flat against the dash.

It was
Calo
slang, but she could guess. “Put it in the glove compartment. I'll take the blame.”

He did just that, and then redialed and by his expression she could tell he'd got a ring. He held out the cell.

“Gloria—don't talk—this is Maeve. Dad's caught in that fire in Malibu. I saw his car on TV—that big house off Cold Canyon was the first one to burn up.” She grimaced as she swerved around an SUV full of kids. “I'm going there now. Do what you can.” She rang off before Gloria could argue, then switched the phone off completely and dropped it into her shirt pocket.

Thumb pressed both palms hard against the dash now, wincing silently from time to time—but he didn't want to admit a girl's driving was frightening him.

“You drive pretty good.”

“Hope I don't hit a slowpoke. If I do, there's going to be a fine spray of my own shit all over the inside of this car.”

“I'm not sayin' nothin',
chica.
”

They slithered down the weedy bank to the road, and it felt good to stand on pavement. Trevor Pennycooke lifted the girl off his shoulder and set her down to rest stork-fashion on her good leg. The six-foot cliffbank protected them a little from the blast of heat that was visible as a speckled wavery wind passing overhead. Jack Liffey guessed that they had actually gained on the fire.

“The road's no good,” Jack Liffey said. “I think this is Piuma. I came up it once, and it switchbacks like crazy for miles.” He pointed straight across the road back into waist-high yellow grass and sighed. “Straight down is the way.”

In the end, it was a different issue that settled it. Jack Liffey happened to be hanging his head, staring down at just the right spot in the roadway to see the startling and baffling spark of a tiny collision, instantly inhabited by that weird sound of a high-velocity ricochet. A few seconds later, they heard the crack of the rifle far above. He pointed to the white gouge where the bullet had come in at a shallow angle and then ricocheted away.

“Who bust dat cap?” Pennycooke stood out fearlessly in the road and squinted back toward the fire, visible as a solid wall of billowing flame.

“That was a rifle, probably with a scope on it. I think it's your friend Keith—the guy you circumcised.”

It was just possible in one spot to make out the break in the weedline far up the hill where Mulholland ran. A fire captain's sedan and a pumper truck were parked up there, but no one was visible. Trever Pennycooke aimed his big Webley uphill and fired several shots blindly into the fire before cursing and discarding the empty revolver. Jack Liffey realized he had lost his own pistol long ago. Farewell, old friend.

Pennycooke hefted the girl onto his shoulder again, and they stepped over the low guard rail and back into the chaparral. Jack Liffey felt guilty letting the Jamaican do all the heavy lifting, but he knew he was too near his own limits.

A noisy helicopter came high along the hillside behind them, dangling a swaying firebucket on a cable. Jack Liffey caught a glance of orange mist falling away from the bucket. It didn't seem to him it would do much good against a fire this size. The helicopter warped away toward the ocean, its bucket swinging in a big arc with the turn. He remembered a half dozen of his friends once trying to piss out a roaring campfire. Even with beer-engorged bladders, they'd done no more than give the fire a short hissy fit and engulf themselves in an unpleasant smell.

There was a much bigger Canadian flying boat that could scoop up tons of water, and the city had borrowed a couple of them one year but had never sprung the money to buy one. There were no freshwater lakes convenient, and there was intense objection to using sea water on a chaparral fire. Better to let the land burn than despoil it with salt water. Some environmentalists also objected to building homes for the rich up in the fire zone in the first place, as argued by his friend Mike Lewis. Inevitably, the fire departments would have to commit to defending these homes, and inevitably they would burn, the city spending millions to make vain and dangerous stands on back roads for a handful of high-rollers.

He pounded along behind Pennycooke and Luisa. He could tell that his mind was doing its best not to think directly about the inferno at their back. It was like the sound of a thousand cigarette packs being crumpled, plus a deeper roar, under that, like the steady howl of a bear the size of Nevada.

TWENTY-ONE

Zor the O

He was wrong about gaining on the wildfire. It was starting to flank them now, perhaps just a twitch of wind direction or maybe a bedding of some faster-burning plant that gave a yank to the flames so they sped forward to the right of their deer trail. Now, the three of them were running for their lives. Or two of them were running; the girl was still draped over Trevor Pennycooke's shoulder. Jack Liffey couldn't keep his eyes off the errant thrust of the flame, kinking his neck that way again and again. It was like a living thing, hanging back unexpectedly, then lunging forward in attack, taunting them—vile orange slaps of fire, sudden mouths that engulfed a dry bush at one bite, the flames creeping low for a moment and then taking a ballet leap. His hands and neck were covered with grass cuts, stinging himself with his own sweat.

For a while, he had heard sirens and airplanes, but now he could hear only the crackle and thunder of the living fire that was determined to outflank them. Luckily, the dear trail trended away from the flames, but then it dropped steeply into an arroyo that was too dangerous to enter, and they had to set out across the open brush, weeds slashing at their ankles. Trevor Pennycooke was visibly tiring ahead of him, but if he set the girl down, so they could triple up, it would only slow them up.

“Can I help?” Jack Liffey called.

“Trod on.” The man was gasping for air. “We all ruff necks, mon.”

They must have been spotted by the fire department helicopter because it made a low pass from in front and hit the chaparral just ahead with a faint orange spray. The edge of the mist cloud drifted onto the threatening flame to their right and gave the beast a momentary surprise. It reared and smoked a pure white emanation, as if in a rage, then lay back down and carried straight on, more determined than ever. Get a bigger plane, he thought. There might have been another gunshot from behind, he wasn't sure, as a kind of sizzle seemed to pass near his ear and then the crack of a shot.

Running for his life, Jack Liffey became lightheaded, and in the steady rhythm of his run and the muddle of his thoughts, he began to stew on Gloria's sullen rejections, and to wonder why so many of his relationships with women ended so badly. He had an overwhelming urge to lie down and let his thoughts swirl over the problem, nap on it.

Was it him, he wondered, some perfectionism he carried or some way he pushed women into dissatisfaction? Was it the types of women he chose? Wounded birds, as Maeve had said? Or was it just, after all, a matter of luck? Or maybe all his life he'd been trying to reproduce some relationship from his childhood, as a psychologist he detested had once suggested, and get it
right
this time.

He really thought he was doing his damnedest with Gloria, trying as hard as he could to make her feel loved, but it just wasn't working out for her. His own feelings aside, he didn't want his failure to disappoint Maeve once again. How many potential stepmoms had bailed out on him? His thoughts piled one on another in the chaos of stumbling and running, all accreting into the urgent rhythm of nightmare. He did his best not to let the danger take him that last measure over into panic.

He was running now on some automatic impulse that had carried him beyond the point of exhaustion, his legs turning rubbery with fatigue. Even stranger musings began to clutter his mind, as if he were drifting toward a kind of running sleep. Indignities made him wince, faces he didn't know sniggered. A sudden sense came over him, that there had always been something beckoning him from just beyond the bedroom window, and he had never opened the window, never climbed out there. A flash of clarity: Perhaps it was simple, after all—he had clung too hard to women who offered him comfort, who soothed something in him, who made love cheerfully.

Smoke made him retch then and drove away the clarity. It was those early years after Viet Nam, the first ones with Kathy when he had lost the instinct to raise hell. Had he forsaken some energizing principle then so that all women—like wolves—ended up sensing his weakness?

As he ran, he worked his way through every breakup, working forward through hazy images of their faces, seeking primal causes: Kathy, his Kathy, née Fitzgerald, so scornful about his lost employment, his retreat into drink, his outrageous and unacceptable new profession as some kind of character out of a pulp novel. The image of her scowl made him wince even now.

Eleanor Ong, fastidious, anxious, the emotionally simmering ex-nun—he remembered she had offered an epitaph for him as she gave him up and planned her retreat from the world, back to the convent: “I don't think you're going to make it, Jack.” Could she have been right?

Lori Bright, the once-and-nevermore movie star who died in the Burbank quake but only after seducing him with her mercurial sexuality, a kind of effervescent and constant role-playing. And there had been his own complicity in some deep iniquity of the spirit—the corrupting power that her celebrity had worked on him.

Marlena Cruz, stolid, sentimental and ordinary, resourceful, insanely jealous, drawn like a moth to gimcrack religion and finally to a sympathetic co-believer, a big male doofus that she could count on.

Rebecca Plumkill—a bit like Kathy, he realized now—career headmistress too prim and conventional in the end to put up with what he did for a living, tarring his fingers in the world's back alleys. And now Gloria Ramirez … Gloria Ramirez, a Native American orphan, studying him with eyes as hard as black diamonds, cynical as any cop, her life pitched like a tepee over the vent of some volcano that was gradually coming to life, steaming and rumbling. He wanted to know what it was all about.
Why me?
Why so many
kinds
of failure? But his mind was as weary as his legs, jumping from image to image, never staying.

Trevor Pennycooke stumbled and fell forward with a cry, toppling heavily with the girl over his back, and Jack Liffey hurried forward to help. The fire still raced along behind and beside them, running forward on its bright fingers, a deadly race to some finish tape. “Shoulder-to-shoulder,” he insisted. “We're the three musketeers. All for one, or all for one.” He was so woozy, he didn't know what he was saying.

“I glomm it,” Trevor Pennycooke said as they hoisted the girl to her feet.

She drove on the shoulder to get around an accident between two mini-vans in which whole families seemed to be arguing right there in the lane. The traffic was lighter than she expected going north on Pacific Coast Highway through Santa Monica, past the bulk of the Jonathan Club and the rows of beach houses, past the cliff where the Pacific Palisades began, and past the big wall of railroad ties and steel they'd erected against landslides, a near permanent condition along the highway. It was amazing they hadn't blockaded the road yet. The fire department and all species of cops hated lookie-loos.

They could see two water-dropping helicopters dangling buckets far ahead as they shuttled to and from a hot zone. A massive plume of gray smoke was billowing off the land and far out to sea, not rising much until it hit some wall of cooler air out there.

“I never been here,” Thumb said. He was staring across her at the ocean, at the three-foot swells that were rolling up the narrow beach.

“It's just a short drive from Boyle.”

“I never seen the ocean.”

She was flabbergasted. She couldn't imagine growing up in a coastal city without having seen the ocean. She wondered what else he and his friends had never seen. Then, she wondered how many Anglo kids had seen Boyle Heights or City Terrace or the wonderful Latino murals on Estrada Courts and Ramona Gardens, all things she had only seen since her dad moved to East Los with Gloria.

“Have you seen the Watts Towers?”

He shrugged.

“Have you been to the snow?”

“I got no car, Miss … can I call you Maeve?”

“Of course you can. I don't have some cool nickname.”

“Maybe we find you one.”

“You can think about it, but I don't want it to have anything to do with my shit-bag.”

“I'm really and truly sorry I did that.”

“I know you are. I'll get over it, Thumb.”

They passed under the pedestrian bridge in the Palisades beside the arcaded hulk of what had once been Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Cafe. She knew it had been a popular restaurant in the forties, when PCH had been known as Roosevelt Highway. Her dad had told her some Catholic TV company used it now to make upbeat films for teens—exorcising the ghost of one of L.A.'s most notorious murders of the 1930s.

“It'll be easy to get over,” she said lightly. “Like you get over anything. Time passes, and then you're somebody else, and the stuff you were so worried about is in the past.”

He gave an embarrassed laugh. “Don't change. I think you pretty good the way you are.”

“Don't go there, mister.”

His gravity rushed back, like an inner nature asserting itself. “Have you been so tough all your life?”

She almost smiled. “Not yet.”

The front of the wind-forced fire had finally turned on its flank and pressed them down into the gully to escape, but it was still pacing them implacably up above. The ravine gave them partial relief from the Santa Ana-driven smoke and ash, but only partial. It was still hard to see, hard to breathe, with the fiercer gusts shoving them into stumbles as they took turns supporting the girl. Trevor Pennycooke no longer had the strength to carry her over his shoulder. Judging by the terrible crunching sound just above them, the forward edge of the brushfire was running just behind them but staying at the top edge of the gully. Unless there was a drastic shift of wind, fire didn't usually spill downhill. At least that's what Jack Liffey told himself.

“Mon, there someting bad luck hyer.” As if the Jamaican had sensed his thoughts.

“We're alive. We're not burned. That's good luck.”

“All men are hostages to fortune,” Luisa said in a daffy earnest voice, and he wondered where she had read that.

“What dat?”

“Don't even think about luck,” Jack Liffey insisted. “It's nothing to do with this. We're getting out of here for sure.” He knew if they kept going downhill, and if they could stay ahead of the flames, they would have to hit PCH and the ocean eventually.

He nearly shouted when he felt something squirm underfoot and his spine tingled. A jackrabbit, a little singed on its long ears, did a contorted little leap sideways from his oafish foot and then took off downhill, rapidly outdistancing them.

“My ankle is killing,” Luisa complained.

“We know.”

“No, it
hurts!
”

She had her arms over both of their shoulders now, and she barely touched down as long as they could move in coordination. But the bottom of the arroyo was so uneven that they kept breaking apart and then she'd have to take her weight unexpectedly on the bad foot. He could sense her gasps, though the howl of the fire itself outbid just about every sound but shouting.

Then they were all bowled forward at once by a tremendous force, as if a linebacker had blindsided them from behind. Jack Liffey scrambled to pick himself up, overwhelmed by a musky smell, and something sharp hit him in the forehead and knocked him back down again. There was a shrill bleat just as he was getting himself oriented again and found himself lying in a pile of arms and legs.

“You two okay?”

Hoofbeats hammered away down the ravine, and he glanced in time to see the rump.

“Evil badness, mon! Dese fire spirits is bona
fide
.” Pennycooke was up on all fours, shaking his head. He was bleeding from the arm where a hoof must have grazed him.

“It was a panicked mule deer. We're on a game trail.”

“Praise Jah, hyer be no rhinos.”

Jack Liffey laughed once, liking Pennycooke a lot better for the spunk. Luisa sat rubbing her ankle where the Ace was coming undone.

“Up, up. No time, folks,” Jack Liffey mother-henned.

As they helped one another to their feet a fat possum waddled rapidly past, pausing just long enough to hiss at them. It was like being trapped in a children's book, he thought—next we meet
Mister
Tortoise—but without the children's book guarantee that it would all turn out well in the end.

For just an instant's lull in the gusting of fire and wind—was it imagination?—he thought he heard mariachi music. He hoped it wasn't some strange presage-of-death phenomenon peculiar to Southern California. The smoke grew whiter for some reason, and then, with a new chill on his spine, he heard a crackling directly behind them. The wildfire had made the leap to the bottom of the arroyo. All he felt for an instant was a tremendous desire to live, to abandon any assistance to the others and run—his entire moral universe succumbing to fear.

Terror Pennycooke lifted the girl over his shoulder again, huffing a little with the effort. A gopher or some other fat rodent thumped past quickly, as if the humans didn't exist, his flank singed pitifully into dark curls.

“Let's step. Truss wi' me, mon. Good knowin you.” He held out a hand and Jack Liffey gave him an ordinary handshake, no banging or twists or Masonic embellishments.

“We're getting out of this. Don't doubt it.”

“Good on you.”

Jack Liffey took the lead, holding the tail of his shirt across his mouth and nose to filter a little of the smoke. He pressed small boughs aside and tried not to let them whiplash back on the others. He was the lead now, and his heart missed a beat when he realized that the bottom of the arroyo took a hard turn to the right, directly into the worst of the crackling roar where the fire had got well ahead of them. He saw how steep the bank was but he didn't even hesitate.

“Up the hill, folks. Sorry. Fire to the right.”

He leaned into the angle of the hill, and a few yards up he caught at a tough-seeming shrub with one hand, reaching back with the other. Pennycooke made a face and caught at his hand, nearly pulling the arm out of its socket as he lunged uphill with the extra weight of the girl. They picked their way up, using rocks and clumps of low weed as footholds. Jack Liffey let them go ahead and slipped in behind to push on Pennycooke's rump like a helper engine on a heavy train. Luisa's head dangled as if she were unconscious.