Dangerous Games (4 page)

Art Castro had shrugged. “It could be just a matter of personnel, Jack.”

His mind went back to Canyon Country and Gloria's aggressive driving, coming around the right side of a Porsche with skis on the roof.

“Have you ever been to Owens?” she asked, definitively changing the subject.

“A few times. I even came up here on a job once, the father of a girl I was looking for was directing a big-time film in the Alabama Hills. I like the little town there, it's like a snapshot of the past.” He knew L.A. had stolen the water from the valley long ago, and growth there had pretty much frozen in place, leaving the town a tiny market, a general store, and a lot of cafes for the road traffic. “I think three-quarters of all the cowboy movies ever made were shot in the hills there.”

“Remember, it's not really my home,” Gloria said. “Even if my mom did die in the street in front of one of the bars. I was fostered out young.”

The dying-in-the-street business was the story she had finally and grudgingly been told. What was acknowledged was that the woman had been drinking a lot and not very choosy about who she slept with. In the end, Gloria Ramirez had turned her back on the aggravating couple in East L.A. who had brought her up to hate Native Americans, sistered up with a rotating crop of Latino orphans brought in mainly for the state money. She had finally worked up her nerve to search for her birth mother, which resulted in a dismal trip up here on her vacation three years back.

“So this Nellie Emm is your mom's sister.”

“I think so. She has an old photo of them as girls, and the one that's not her looks a lot like me. I wasn't stupid enough to go around the place offering money, or every warm body on the rancheria would have been my relative.”

“What's a rancheria?”

“It's what they call a reservation when it's too small to be a reservation. And don't call it a rez, please, that's like saying Mex. One of my uncles, with a nice sense of humor, told me a rancheria is defined as soil erosion with a casino, but this one is even too small for that.”

“I think it was General Sheridan, no friend of Native Americans, who said a reservation was a worthless piece of land surrounded by scoundrels,” Jack Liffey said.

She was still speeding, and they overtook a big SUV with a ski rack on the way to Mammoth. They headed north through the high desert, passing another alphabet street every mile, the stretch where he and Maeve had once played their name-a-tree-that-starts-with, name-an-actress, name-a-city-in-Europe game. He wasn't in the right mood to suggest it to Gloria. Something big and soggy and unhappy was eating at him, like the hangover of a bad dream, but a hangover with the teeth to gnaw its way up his leg.

He'd never really got over the fact that years ago he'd had to accustom himself to seeing Maeve only at her mother's whim, and had little control over her fate. They weren't estranged, far from it, but in this litigious world, custody rights trotted along behind income.

FOUR

Nobody Runs Away From Heaven

Luisa had
Treasure Chest Ranch
propped up on her knees in her cozy nest, and again she was lost in its sweetly seductive delights, addled a little by a handsome stranger saying, “Hey there, Little One, you ever find out how far you could travel with your shoes off?”

There was a single knock, and Rod barged right in followed by Keith, a skinny guy who looked like a college kid in old Levis and a kind of maroon velour shirt. He had a shaved head and wore a goatee that really made him look like a goat. Rod seemed a bit skittish, like his companion was a bomb liable to go off at any moment.

“Hello, Luisa. I want you to listen to Keith, who's got some great ideas for us.”

She hid away the novel, face down, but even the back cover with its purply look was a giveaway. Keith, though, showed no interest in her reading matter. His eyes were fixed on her like a laser beam, scanning up and down her body, and he seemed terribly intense. The only guys like this she'd ever run into before were deer hunters she'd hung around with back home for spending money, and just for a few days. But she'd gone careful with them after they'd shot up a poor town cat for target practice and then got a bit rough with her, as if their meanness had excited them.

“It's a pleasure to meet you, Luisa,” Keith said, forgetting that they'd been introduced before. “I've seen the rushes of your work, and I've gotta say you're a natural. You look good, you act like you like it, and your smile is as good as Jewell Topaz's.”

“Thank you.” She didn't know if being a natural was good or not, and she had no idea who Jewell Topaz was.

“Your voice is nice and deep, too. That's always an asset.”

“It's been like that ever since I had the scarlet.”

“You look great, that goes without saying. Your tits are big and natural, and you're not covered with tattoos so we don't have to spend half the day painting you with makeup. How would you like to start earning steady money? No more iffy video shoots? Real money, so you can get your own place in town and buy a car or whatever you want?”

“What do I have to do?”

“It's easier than the videos, really,” Rod put in.

Keith glanced over at him, and she could see Rod stiffen a bit under his gaze.

“Sorry, K. Your party.”

He held his glare on Rod a while longer and then turned his goat-face back toward her. Luisa felt the hair rising along her spine. “Mainly, you'd be posing and talking on the phone.”

She didn't know whether to believe him or not. Rod had promised there wouldn't be any sex in her first video, but it hadn't turned out that way. “You'd be an employee of a big corporation, with a steady paycheck and health benefits, and just like me you'd have to pitch in and do whatever was needed from time to time.”

He came closer now and sat right beside her on the mattress. She wished she'd put on underwear, and she hoped it didn't show that under her oversized T-shirt she was naked.

“You'll have it made. You can make up your own name, too, be whoever you want. This is the big time calling, kid. It doesn't come around and knock on your door twice, so you got to move fast to stay in the fast lane. Most pretty girls show up in this town and wait tables and starve for years.”

“I can't add very good,” she said. She knew she'd never make it as a waitress.

“Well, then,” Keith said, opening his palms. Instead of remaining there in midair, one of his hands reached out toward her and all of a sudden grasped her left nipple hard through the thin cotton.

“Oww.”

“This is your big day, the biggest damn day of your life. This is Brittany getting her first break.”

He wasn't squeezing hard enough to cause real pain, but enough to let her know he had the power to do whatever he wanted with her.

“Pack up now and we'll go.”

“I got to think about this,” she said.

Keith glanced over his shoulder at Rod, who looked nervous. “This isn't really an optional arrangement, Lu,” Rod said. “Your services have been purchased.”

That got her back up a little, but Keith squeezed a little harder on her nipple, sending a fiery sensation through her chest that made her grit her teeth, so she nodded quickly. She knew enough not to buck guys like this head on. But she wasn't able to pick up the Owens stone as they marched her out, and she would lose her last connection.

Dear Diary,

Little did I expect when I made my leavetaking from Owens that I would have gentlemen fighting over my favors. This new suitor looks a little like Kid Rock & he said that I was a grand lady & I was very surprised that he took such a liking to me. He easily defeated Rod with the power of his personality and strength & swept me away to the aura of his protection.

When we were alone he seemed to like me for what I am & not just looking at the surface. In his dashing sports car he said that he would find me work that was worthy of my station in life. Little by little he seems to come to care more about me & he took me to an unbelievable beach house just like the movies. I cannot believe my good fortune. They say fortune always smiles on the deserving. Well.

There was something a little wrong with the lemonade that the heavy woman served them out of a big plastic pitcher; maybe it had been oversweetened with a sugar substitute, but he did his best to drink it and so did Gloria. He kept shifting, trying to find a comfortable position on the homemade Adirondack chair with all its odd angles. The women sat in white plastic bucket chairs. A section of baked dirt served as a patio, and it had a magnificent view of the far Sierras over the near edge of the town about a half mile away. The peaks were still snowy and sharp as razors. The sky was a uniform blue, the color of a baby blanket.

“I ain't got her note. I think Clyde took it.” Nellie Emm was rounder than she was tall, with her hair in long stiff braids. She was wearing a print dress that had been washed so many times its color was ambiguous. She spoke with that skewed intonation that identified a Native American who was speaking English as a second language.

“Was she acting any different in the last few days before she left?” Gloria asked.

“No, no. Not that I notice. She keep to herself.”

It wasn't actually a house, but a beat-up trailer with the decaying remains of a trellis covering where the wheels had once been. The rusting hulk didn't look like it could ever be moved again. The surroundings weren't bad, though. A serviceable fence out by the road penned in a roan picturesquely nibbling the desert greenery in the yard. Jack Liffey saw around them a few mature trees, a big cottonwood as gnarled and beautiful as an oak, a desert shade tree with tiny feathery leaves, and what he recognized as a catalpa with its long dangling seed pods. The trees all looked healthy so whatever branch of government decided such things had ceded the Indians an area where the water table was close enough to the surface so the taproots of the big trees could drink their fill.

“You didn't have any arguments with her?”

“No. She a good girl, really. You remember.”

The other habitations along the rancheria roads just southeast of town varied from old shacks to modulars to owner-built cinderblocks. The pastoral charm of goats and horse-trailers and chicken coops compensated somewhat for the shabbiness and for the concentrations here and there of abandoned machinery and cars, what Gloria told him Latino families referred to as
yonkes.
It probably derived from the English word junk though he preferred thinking of them as Yankees, piles of creaky old shortstops and pitchers, tossed out to pasture.

“Was Clyde ever alone with her?”

“I guess.” She actually shrank back a little as she admitted this, and Jack Liffey guessed she knew a lot that she wasn't saying.

Gloria seemed clear who Clyde was, but Jack Liffey had no idea. Was he a husband, a neighbor, a teacher, a live-in uncle? “Could you tell me who Clyde is?” he interrupted.

“He's my old man, but he got his own place in town. Because of his job. Janitor, nights, at the high school.”

“How long have you been together?”

“Almost two year, since he stop seeing my cousin Berta.”

“Is he a Paiute, too?”

“No, Clyde's a pale guy. Got leg braces,” she added, as if that explained something. “He was one of the really last hard-luck guys that got polio as a kid. But his arms are
real
strong.”

“Can we talk to him?”

Gloria took the address and phone number. It was fascinating to watch a pro at work, Jack Liffey thought, finding out without seeming to press. Not all cops were so smooth. But her aunt had a definite blind spot when it came to Clyde.

“When Lu gets upset, she always just talk about going off and doing dirty movies or taking off her clothes in the highway to give me worries.” She crossed her heavy arms, and her elbows were dimples, the points of the bone sucked deep into fatty tissue. “She wants to make me feel bad I got so big nobody but Clyde wants to see my body. She been throwing up at night to stay skinny. She don't know I know that.”

Out on the plain, a trail of dust showed where somebody was buzzing along on one of those desert motorbike contraptions. Gloria got out of her the name and address of a close friend of Luisa's from high school, Barbara Thigpen. Then her aunt went into the trailer to hunt down a photo.

“Like one of your usual cases?” Gloria asked him softly.

“More or less. The very first girl I ever tracked down was a runaway who'd been rank-amateur hooking on Hollywood Boulevard until she got swept up by a crooked minister who put her to work in a slave shop making leather jackets. I don't know which was the worse trap.”

“Nobody's safe in this world, Jack. Believe me.”

“Don't I know it. I've got a wounded daughter.”

“Whatever you're thinking, I just don't want you to turn down Nellie's retainer. She's got a share of casino money from the Red Feather up north.”

“That makes it easier. I don't usually get thousand-dollar checks from people with their fridges on the porch.”

Nellie Emm waddled out painfully and down the three steps with a four-by-five photo of a girl's head, a really striking chiseled face with dark braids and a smile like a flame that shot straight to your heart.

“She's beautiful,” Jack Liffey offered.

“That been her curse.” Nellie shook her head sadly.

“Qué pues, ése?”

Grinning, Chuy Perez stuck his head in the open French window in the old detached garage where Thumb Estrada had been exiled by his mother.

“Chingao!
Man, you gave me a scare.”

Thumb was lying on his stomach on a cot, reading a big fat textbook on the floor, which he slapped shut.

“I got some brews.” Chuy came in through the window with two big Colt 45s. The only other entrance was the roll-open car door which was permanently locked down now. Thumb had been banished from the house for gangbanging and getting kicked out of school for the third and last time, and he had made the room his own by throwing up untaped wallboard and painting the walls with fancy placas and random images: spiderwebs, a plumed Aztec warrior, guns shooting out dots of bullets, and the smiling-frowning masks: Laugh now, cry later. Most prominent was his
clica's placa
: Bluff Boyz in florid old English letters.

“Trade you some weed.”

“You always got lousy
yesca,
man. What you reading?”

He grinned. “Beto's helping me with history after I had to leave Continuation. There's good stuff to know, man. Gimme that beer.” He actually seemed excited about what he'd read, flipping some pages back and forth. “You know they really fucked over the niggers, even after slave time. They made this secret deal to pull all the
soldados
out of the South and then the
vatos
down there put on sheets and scared the niggers to death to stop them voting.”

“Ese,
sounds like that Florida thing.”

“You don't know your history, you doomed to have it done to you. That's what Beto says.”

“Beto's a pussy.”

“No,
ese.
Just ‘cause he don't bang don't mean he ain't down. He showing me how to get a GED so I can go on up to City. Maybe I could learn computers.”

“Computers is great,
simon.
Chente spends half his life on his thing looking at guys getting blown. He showed me some
güera
with a horse.”

Thumb laughed and gave his two thumbs-up-and-out gesture. He was double-jointed and had made a little salute of the gesture, pushing the thumbs out from his T-mustache where they just fit.
“Ese,
I can't look at that bad shit. I'm still sick from all the jailhouse
maldad,
guys so horny they wanted to fuck the little wild
ratons.
”

“You wanna go hang at Lugo's?”

“Nah, man. It's too close to Greenwood, they see your
carrucha.
”

“I got new plates.”

Thumb shrugged. “I don' like that barrio. They're all stuck up. Bluff forever. Insane respect, man.”

They high fived, and Chuy chugged down his malt liquor and left. Thumb tried to read some more, but his heart wasn't in it. He got to thinking about that strange morning in Greenwood territory, driving up to that Anglo guy in the yard. It was something of a blank, a teasing aggravating blank. He knew there was something there to be understood. He hadn't meant to cap at him, hadn't really been feeling angry or rivalrous at all. It was like the events had had a will of their own, each moment summoning the next. He had an idea about it, almost had an idea, thought he had an idea. He sensed there was a reason. This reason was like an animal waiting to be coaxed forward.

But in the end there was no room for it inside him and it would not come out of the shadows.