Dangerous Games (6 page)

They heard it first, and then they saw the wash of light from the car coming back down the road. As it passed Frog Rock, there was a derisive yodel and a beer can sailed out and skittered along the ground.

“Dorks,” the girl said. “You know. I bet there's one of Lu's rocks right around here somewhere.”

“Maybe she's hoping one day to find her way back to the place where things started to go wrong,” Jack Liffey suggested.

The girl raised an eyebrow. “Whoa! Pro-found. But with Lu it might be a whole lot more daydreamy than that. Maybe she's leaving a track for her guardian angel to follow.”

“Was she religious?”

“Not in any ordinary sense. I just mean that as … I don't know. Wherever her head was at.”

“The way
you
leave a trail of cigarette butts.”

“Hmm. Dad won't let me smoke inside the T-bird, and, boy, can he tell if I do.”

“I don't blame him.”

“He says he'll give it to me if I get into Stanford this fall.”

“If you take that to Stanford, you'll be the most popular girl in the whole West Bay.”

“I could stand a little popularity. The only action I get here is brainless jocks with the mistaken notion that all black chicks are just dying to have sex with athletes.”

“I have a feeling you'll do fine,” Jack Liffey offered. “You seem to be able to poke fun at yourself.”

“Thanks. First, though, I gotta get myself to some place where they appreciate that.” She glanced over to Gloria, who'd been quiet for a while. “You two are an item, right?” Barbara asked. “Are there some more like him?”

“I don't know. I haven't figured him out yet.”

“He seems like a keeper to me.”

“How can you tell we're not married?” Jack Liffey asked.

“No rings. I always check it out. And a kind of carefulness you've got, like you're walking on eggs.”

Gloria laughed softly. “Jack's right, you'll do okay.”

“I can tell you more. I bet
he's
the one pushing for a commitment, and you've been putting him off.” The girl wagged a finger to emphasize her guess.

“That's enough,” Gloria said. “I'm a cop, and marrying a cop is a hard road.”

“Ten-ninety-eight,” Jack Liffey said. It meant, in the LAPD ten-codes, assignment complete, getting back on patrol.

“You keep him,” Barbara Thigpen insisted. “If the other stuff is working out.”

“That's none of your business, young lady.”

“Guy just took her away from me, man,” Rod Whipple complained as he plopped down on the bed. “Just walked in and took her. Said he'd pay me for her later in whatever I wanted, grass or speed or work. Serves me right, I guess, for getting mixed up with him.”

“You said it. I thought you'd've learned after those Italian fuckers wigged on us.”

Kenyon Styles' room in the two-bedroom apartment they shared in Mar Vista was tricked up with a big Mac G5, two twenty-inch monitors and the rest of the editing equipment for a small cutting station. A tableload of computer equipment, a switcher, an effects box, and a fancy software program could now replace several million dollars worth of professional editing gear.
Dangerous Games II
was going to look pretty good for an indie production—better, for sure, than the first one—and now they'd figure out how to market it themselves on the Web. The two Sopranos in silk suits who'd forced them to sell the first one outright for $50,000 were going to make millions out of it. It had been just like something out of
Goodfellas,
a lot of solemn dick waving and glaring and that stupid New Jersey accent.
Ya sign da release or ya get a long nap in da foundation of some new fuckin mall.

“Yeah, sure, I'm a loser. I left my Superman suit home.”

Kenyon opened a Yoo-hoo and made a face as he swallowed. He said it soothed his burning gut. Rod tried to tell him they had cures for all that stuff now, but Kenyon hated doctors ever since high school when they'd shoved a long black tube all the way up his ass without anesthetic, him screaming the whole time. Never again, no doctors, he'd sworn.

Kenyon had two images up on his monitors—the same woman from two angles—and was trying to fuss with the color so her skin tone looked the same on both. Every time he got her skin out of the green, the dress turned purple. The one problem they still hadn't licked, given the fact that they were shooting on the fly with two different cameras, was getting a good white balance. Cutting from one to the other would look jarring and amateurish.

“Look at this.” Kenyon tapped the keyboard, and they both watched a piece of his latest rough cut. Two old men bobbed and feinted, squirting tins of Zippo lighter fluid at one another in an alley, with a lit Bic in the other hand, like gladiators with dagger and flail. They waved and thrust the lighters at each other. The duel went on for a while until there was a whoosh of flame on the sleeve of a flannel shirt, smothered rapidly, then another charge with the Bic and a ripple of fire took a shirttail with a triumphant cry. Neither man seemed in much danger, since they were so drunk they were not connecting with much of the naphtha.

“You zoom too much, dude.”

“Eat me.”

“I can cut most of it out. Just slam the lens to closeup, okay? Or slam back to full.” Kenyon was the better technician, and they both knew it.

“Sure, fine.”

One of the bums on the screen suddenly rushed off into the night, screaming, his long greasy hair afire. Then the editing console burped and froze, a wavery flag of flame emanating from the old man's head.

Kenyon frowned. “I've got some kind of hit there. Goes full lock.”

He fidgeted his fingers rapidly over the keyboard without luck and then hit the reset so that both monitors went black to start the annoying reboot process.

“The girl was great, too. Lovely. We could have used her somehow. I just can't hold onto things.” Before moving to Jersey, Rod Whipple had grown up in south Chicago, amongst fairly conventional Polish working-class parents with a nice conventional Polish name. He'd always wanted to be a filmmaker but was gradually getting depressed about the amount of time he was putting in at the squalid end of the film food chain. Though his metalworking, duct-forming, union-loyal father was dead now, his spirit continued to hover disapprovingly. Luisa had cheered him up for a while, and now she was gone.

“We don't need a girl.”

“I thought we could throw in a little obligatory T and A, like those babes in wrestling who hold up the round cards, prancing around with breasts like Winnebagos. We could've put her in a bikini, or even topless, and had her hold up title cards:
Gladiators of Fire.
”

Kenyon made a face. “People can get tits anywhere. We'll never compete with that. Violence is the new porn.”

“Risk and danger. Uh-huh.”

“Cruelty,” Kenyon added

“Straight-up brutality.”

“Trans-gression.” They traded a soft high five.

“Man, if we can make our ownselves sick with this stuff, we
know
we're onto something,” Rod concluded.

In the last scene of
Dangerous Games I
they had filled a small bathroom floor wall-to-wall with yellow baby chicks and hired girls in stiletto heels to walk around on them as Kenyon filmed the scene down at heel level. Rod and both girls had eventually thrown up into the bathtub. Kenyon had had a second Yoo-hoo and all the upchucking had just given him a new idea for a vomiting sequence—finding somebody who could barf on command and setting him loose on municipal buses, movie theaters, jazz bars.

On the dark drive back to town, Jack Liffey watched the chaparral slide past and mused about what it would be like growing up in that isolated little town and how circumscribed your life and ideas might become, knowing only TV and maybe books. He'd met enough people in the big city, though, who couldn't have found North America on a big world map so he wondered if it mattered all that much where you grew up. Maybe any life, lived anywhere—even Clyde's—was as complex in its own way as some symphony, with an expert conductor hammering away at your soul with his baton.

“You pick up anything I missed?” he asked as she drove.

“How would I know what you missed?” she replied.

“Don't get philosophical on me. I'm too tired.”

“Barbara was trying to understand Luisa in terms of her own loneliness and longings,” Gloria Ramirez said. “That business about leaving a trail through life may have nothing to do with Luisa.”

“You're a suspicious woman, aren't you?”

“What do you mean?”

“That was one opening the girl gave us that had possibilities, and you're ready to reject it out of hand.”

“Yes, Jack. I'm a party pooper. I've seen too many girls chase too many rainbows. We've got some hard facts to work with. Little Deer, if such a person exists. The name Taboots. And the porn industry, which is mostly within a five mile radius of one alley in Van Nuys.”

They approached the Mojave airfield where more than hundred airliners had been mothballed ever since the downturn in air travel after September 11—747s, MD-11s, L-1011s, 737s, even some odd ones he didn't know, probably European Airbuses. Most of their logos and company colors had been painted out—avoiding bad advertising, he guessed—and big plastic plugs covered their engine nacelles like coffee can lids. All in all it was a bizarre sight, like a toy store for giants.

“You seem pretty up on the porn biz,” he said.

“Cops know these things. My first post out of the Academy I worked in the North Hollywood Division. That's got about three-quarters of the porn merchants in the known universe.”

“I don't even know what I really think about pornography,” Jack Liffey said. “I've never bothered with it except as it sucked in a runaway I was after. But in a way, it's just pictures of people loving each other. I suppose it reminds lonely people what it's like. What's really wrong with that?”

She shook her head. “You can say that, but that's the end product. I see girls being exploited, exploiting themselves, if you like—treated like random receptacles for men. That girl mentioned the gangbang thing. A few years ago there was a trend for gangbanging—some girl taking on over a hundred men. Think of the risk.”

“Yeah, okay. But don't they make some films just about couples making love?”

“Jesus, Jack, I don't know. I was three months in Vice, and I know there were biker rape films, and animal fuck films, and pretend snuff films and every kind of degradation you can imagine. I never made a study of it, but all I wanted was out of Vice.”

He was willing to grant her all that, though it seemed terribly defensive somehow, so he fell silent. This was a question that put into play some of the real differences between men and women, he thought.

Just then they came around the dogleg turn of Highway 14, past the airfield again, and he noticed another difference between men and women. They were passing the last mothballed jets on the immense airfield, and she hadn't even glanced at them. No man on earth could drive past over a hundred immobilized airplanes without a hint of curiosity or wonder.

“Okay, I thought I was the hardnose,” Jack Liffey said, trying to make peace.

“I'm hardnose about girls being used and hurt. I always will be. I never had much of a childhood, and I think every kid should have one.”

“Jesus, you think I want to imagine Maeve getting caught up in some racket like that? I just want perspective on it. Sexual urges are pretty deep in us. Maybe some of the women in the industry can deal with it, make their money and get out, without their psyches going ballistic.”

“Hundreds of guys at a go?”

He winced. “Okay, but there's excess everywhere. How many cops did it take to subdue Rodney King?”

“Let's not get started on that. You think one way because you're a civilian, but those of us on the job are always going to feel a little different about the King thing. We've had too many big guys stagger back to their feet and pull out a knife.”

He held up the flat of his hand. It wasn't something he wanted to argue.

“Being a cop has its trials, Jack. I can't walk into a party and get introduced without some jerkoff jumping to his feet and shouting, ‘I didn't do it!' And everybody you approach, absolutely everybody, starts lying to you.”

“Including me?”

She looked hard at him. “You will.”

All of a sudden, he felt as lonely as Barbara Thigpen—sitting beside this woman he lived with and didn't seem to know very well. A chill took his spine. Maybe this one wouldn't work out either, he thought—a sudden uneasiness that extinguished a lot of the relief he'd been feeling for several months. He was abruptly, and against his will, very angry at her and had to rein in an urge to turn spiteful.

It wasn't that he hadn't ever lied in his life, or wouldn't again, but she sounded like she'd never be willing to give him a break, never let him relax from some model of perfection she carried around with her. It was the gold standard or nothing. It's no wonder, he thought unkindly, that she'd been alone when they met.

They drove in silence for a while, and eventually she reached over and rested a hand on his thigh. “It shouldn't really eat at you so bad, Jack. It's just the way we're forced to be on the job. I thought you were tough enough to put up with me.”

It wasn't quite enough for him to feel forgiving. “So did I,” he said.

They rode a while longer, and for several miles he thought of Maeve. Then something dark lifted from his spirit for no reason that he could discern. “Oh, damn, here I've gone and sulked through half the alphabet streets. I can't challenge you to play Maeve's name game.” They had just shot by K Street on the Antelope Valley Freeway.