On the Nickel (13 page)

He smiled. ‘Amazing. Another generation torments the new one.'

‘Come on, come on. There's no torment here.'

He waved her in at last. ‘You've got the hospitality of everything going, believe me. But it's not much. Hard surfaces, cold looks and schizophrenics. Hey, that could be a song. ‘Hard surfaces, cold looks and schizophrenics,' he sang. ‘And nobody sleeps like a baby.'

She stepped in and saw his guitar leaning against the rickety table at the window. Her focus bored in on an open journal book with a pen beside it on the table. She sidestepped, surreptitiously she thought, to try to get a glimpse of a little of what must have been a diary, but he hurried over and slapped it closed.

‘That's private, friend.'

‘I was looking for you in Hollywood – that was your dad's best guess,' Maeve said. ‘My name is Maeve. Hollywood is the usual destination in this town for music-heads on the lam.'

‘I don't think I want to explain myself to you. I came here because I came here.'

‘Cool. You picked The Nickel because it's the utter bottoming-out of America's moral abandonment of its poorest and weakest.'

His eyes widened. ‘Well said, Maeve.'

‘I'm sure I could have said it better.' She sat in his only chair, beside the closed diary that drew her eye from time to time. ‘I was scared at first walking around out there,' she admitted. ‘I bet you were, too. There's still a few guys out there who scare me, but mostly they're just people, aren't they?'

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Lost people who drink too much and bad-luck people and some really really crazy people. They may be strange, but nobody wants to be here. I think so, anyway.' He plopped down on the edge of the bed, the only other seat.

Maeve folded her arms. ‘I think we were actually talking about different things, if you listen really close,' Maeve said. ‘I was really talking about myself and my own fears, wasn't I? You were talking about the people who live out there.'

‘Maybe.' He screwed up his face and looked even younger for a moment. ‘Back in high school, I gave up trying to cure my really angry friends. Goths and punks. They were so angry they were like chained dogs who were straining out at the end of the chain, and you couldn't do a thing for them. Seeing it that way helped me see them better.'

‘Were you part of the garage-band tribe?'

‘Uh-huh, and a little Goth, too.'

‘I think I'm still in the movies-and-books tribe.'

‘I don't think we have to be so extreme any more,' he said. ‘Maybe we're all a little bit of everything, even soch and dweeb. You know, I heard a homeless man play a Beethoven concerto this morning. Not perfect, but pretty damn good. Jeez, let's give credit.'

She noticed that there was a delay before he spoke, and almost everything he said was considered first, measured out, trying so very hard to be fair – or just not quite trusting her. He didn't have that pop-off-at-the-mouth quality that she knew she had. ‘You seem to stay very slow and thoughtful. That's a compliment, Conor. My foot's been stuck on the accelerator for years.'

He smiled, also delayed. ‘That's where the prestige is, isn't it? The fastest mind, the quickest wit. But you can slow down, too, I'll bet. And without drugs.'

‘I don't do drugs. Have you got a slow-down theory? I'd like to hear about that.'

‘I think so. But right now, all I can think about is the Musketeers. These old guys are fighting the pirates who want to take over this building. They asked me to meet with them tonight to make plans.'

‘I met the chief, I think,' Maeve said. ‘I'd love to sit in, if I could.'

Like a signal in some spooky dream, her voice drew a knock at the door.

‘That must be them,' Conor said. He got up and opened the door, but seemed to be knocked back by an invisible shove.

‘You don't deserve this palace, kid!' the tall one with the golden curls barked at him. The short one already had his switchblade open and was waving it at Conor.

‘Come back to me, sport,' Gold-head said.

The short man took three quick paces inside and wrapped his arm around Conor's neck, holding the knife point up, just poking a little into the soft underbelly of his chin.

‘You guys are really fucked up,' Maeve said.

‘Mouth
shut,'
the tall man demanded. ‘But
real
shut. It's this one we wanted, sweetie. But maybe we're going to take both of you because you seem to be hitched now.'

‘I don't give a damn about this guy,' Maeve said, taking a leaf from one of her dad's stratagems. ‘I don't even know his name.'

‘You keep your version. We'll keep ours. Start for the door now, girlie, or my pardner sinks his knife right up through your boyfriend's tongue.'

‘Don't! I'm there.'

G
loria began to worry when she called the school, using the police codeword for the week – Frosting – to establish her bona fides, and the attendance clerk at Redondo High told her Maeve Liffey hadn't responded in home room and was presumed to be out sick for the day. A discreet call revealed that she wasn't at her mother's, and by dark she hadn't shown up home at Boyle Heights.

Maeve Liffey was presumably at it again, the scourge of evildoers, answering some Bat-Sign that only Maeve could see in the sky. Well, strictly speaking, it wasn't that great a mystery, Gloria thought. She knew Maeve was out looking for Conor Lewis. She had total recall of both sides of the phone conversation with Mike Lewis, between Jack's scribbles and the boy's dad responding. And she'd also gone out of her way to find out for Maeve the address of the ATM that was Conor's last cash-out the day before – Mike's Market on the edge of Skid Row. Jesus! Gloria thought. She didn't look forward to spending her evening after a twelve-hour shift down on The Nickel, fending off horny old men, trying to make sense of mushmouth ravings and avoiding the body sores that would give her a methicillin-resistant staph infection in a blink.

She heard a pounding behind her and turned to see Jack Liffey glowering from his chair and hitting the side of the stove. When he saw that he'd got her attention, he started to write.

YOUR WORRIED LOOK SAYS TROUBLE. MAEVE ISNT HERE. QED.

She didn't know what the hell QED meant, but she got the gist of the message all right.

‘Yeah, Jack, Maeve didn't come home. I'm off to look for her, right now.'

TAKE YOUR PIECE.

‘You want me to shoot her when I find her? Don't worry,
querido.
Going into the world armed is department policy. I'm an officer of the law even in my down time. I can't go to a Sunday picnic without my sidearm.'

Loco limped in and rubbed against her legs in an ingratiating way before plopping down beside Jack.
Thanks for that,
she thought.
I did contribute quite a bit to your cancer fund, old man.

SORRY IF IM A BIT RATTY, Jack scrawled.

‘It's OK, Jack. I know worrying about Maeve always does it to you. You're damn good at finding runaway kids, but I'm better at ordinary police work, and you know it. This
should
be ordinary. We know she's looking for Conor Lewis.'

NOTHING ABOUT MAEVE IS EVER ORDINARY.

They both smiled at that, and she crossed the kitchen, hugged him awkwardly and kissed his forehead. Every time she was about to step out of the house, she had an intuition that one of them was about to be struck dead, shot in the back by a teenage killer with an AK – such a nice boy, everybody said! – or blasted in the heart by a sudden blood clot stuck sideways. She always made sure her last communication was a moment of affection.

‘Love you, civilian,' she said.

She detoured to the bedroom to get the small photo of Maeve they kept in a silver frame by the bed. She already had a surreptitious copy of the faxed photo of the Lewis boy.

They lay uneasily on either side of the super-high pickup truck bed, locked down under the camper shell. They were handcuffed and footcuffed to tie-downs that the men had pried out of recesses in the sides of the bed, and both of them had been duct-taped around the mouth and then around again. Maeve wondered what raw nerve in the world's underpinnings she had touched to set all this off. She assumed it was her doing. She just couldn't believe they were after Conor.

Maeve had recognized the one with the knife all right, but the fact that he'd brought yet another thug along, and a thug who didn't seem to approve 100 per cent of the whole venture, probably meant she wasn't destined for a night of someone's perverse sexual pleasure. That helped, but nothing really made sense.

It was possible that Conor was trying to tell her something with his facial expressions, but she'd always found that words – clear, direct, unambiguous – were worth a thousand pictures as well as a thousand passionate and desperate gestures. By turns he seemed to be miming fear, idiocy, nonchalance – he could have been signifying anything in some twisted game of charades. Who could tell?

It wasn't a long journey in the truck, and she wished she'd been counting turns the way real detectives always did. She was pretty sure they were still downtown somewhere. The abrupt stop and then the tailgate
skreeking
open and the little crazy creep unfastening their cuffs and hauling them out into a pitch darkness outside meant only uncertainty. He shoved them both under a steel roll-up door that looked like it led into an abandoned warehouse. She tried to look around for landmarks, but he pushed them on too fast, using his knife to poke her painfully in her butt. All she'd seen was one sign, a badly painted
Hsun's Toys
on a back door. She knew that the commercial toy district was against the northwest corner of Skid Row. She'd read that the Korean and Chinese toy merchants had begun hosing down their sidewalks day and night, trying hard to discourage street people.

The roll-up door clanged down hard behind them, leaving them in a big echoey room, with half collapsed cubicle partitions on one side and lots of pipes and ducts from overhead dangling cut wires. One old sewing machine hung from an electrical conduit pipe like a public notice of what the place had once been. It was so close to her that she could read its brand, Juki, which she'd never even heard of. Whatever became of Singer and Pfaff? Maeve and Conor, both with steel handcuffs snapped down on their ankles, were frog-marched into the remains of nearby cubicles. Maeve was recuffed out of sight of Conor to a pipe that rose straight out of the floor all the way to the ceiling. The knife-man took delight in ripping the duct tape around once and then off her face hard.

‘Owww! Damn you! That hurt.'

‘It was meant to. Pain is good for the soul, girl.'

‘Give me the knife and I'll help your soul,' Maeve snapped.

‘I only use my own pain when I don't have someone else.'

She didn't like the smirk she saw and decided to shut up. The big guy leaned against her cubicle wall as the little one went off to attend to Conor.

‘Owww!' she heard. Undoubtedly that was Conor's tape coming off.

‘No sympathy from me,' said the big one. ‘We plucked you out of that human landfill.' For the first time she noticed with surprise that he was wearing a red Rutgers sweatshirt. She didn't really believe he'd gone there.

‘You went to Rutgers?'

‘Lousy football team. In a dipshit league,' he added. ‘Everybody in Jersey would rather play for the Mafia.'

‘Why did you pick me up? I'm nobody.'

He made a contemptuous flap of his lips. ‘Your boyfriend means something to the old Jews that we got to move out of that place real quick to make room for progress. Consider yourself collateral damage, precious. Nobody nowhere gives a flying-A shit about a couple of runaways.'

She figured she should have left it there, but she couldn't help herself. ‘I'm no runaway, you idiot. My mom's an L.A. cop. You've screwed up big time.'

He pursed his lips and seemed to think about it for a few moments and then disappeared into the darkness. A minute later it was the little psycho sauntering in, snapping open his switchblade with a happy flourish and slicing open the back pocket of her jeans like gutting a fish to retrieve her cheap wallet. It wasn't her normal wallet. She'd taken a cue from her dad and assembled a ‘city wallet' for expeditions that maximized the possibility of losing it to a pickpocket. This plastic one contained a photograph of George Clooney, one working credit card among several dead ones, a little cash, and a doorkey known only to god – but one of the stuffings had unfortunately had to be her real driver's license that she knew listed her mom's address. She wasn't sure what her mom would make of these jerks, but she wished the address had been Gloria's, who could certainly defend herself with more elan.

‘Don't bullshit me on this,' Gloria said. ‘I'll bet your name's not Mike neither.' She'd clapped her badge against the thick plexiglass window, and now she had her finger on the photo of Maeve, holding it in the metal slide-under tray that was the only physical access to the market's inner cage.

‘I see girl,' the Vietnamese man told her, nodding obligingly. ‘She here look for boy. Polite all mothahfuck. Is your girl?'

‘What did you tell her?'

‘I say I see boy. I very helpful. I say he come for ATM. Then he go that way.' He pointed left, which was the truth.

Gloria held up the photo to the black security guard, who was keeping a respectful distance from her.

‘Mr Minh no speak with forked tongue, ma'am.'

She bristled and almost went for him. ‘Is that supposed to be hilarious?'

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. Not at all. I love everyone.'

She realized the guard had no way of knowing she was a Paiute Indian, so the comment was relatively innocent. ‘Do you know anything else?'

‘The Fortnum Hotel two doors down,' he said. ‘It's an SRO. And remember me in your prayers.'

‘You're better off if I don't. The Great Spirit and I don't see eye-to-eye much. Here, split this with Mike.' She handed him a twenty. She'd never get it back from the sweetener slush fund in her own division, because she was off duty, but she was feeling generous.

‘Thank you, ma'am. I wanted to be a police officer myself. Very very much once.' Gloria stood beside the waist-high freestanding steel ATM a few moments, noting there was no camera attached and no overhead camera focused upon it, and she debated her feelings, and then she turned back and tucked her business card into the rent-a-cop's shirt pocket. ‘Call me if you still want in.' He was young enough if he was motivated, and clean. He just had to be free of serious felonies.

‘Bless you, ma'am.'

She nodded and stepped out into the rancid shit-smelling aroma that emanated off the trashy pools of water at the curb. The Nickel – everybody's idea of a great evening stroll.

At heart I am profoundly melancholy,
Gloria thought,
and that may never be something that the Great Spirit will forgive. But maybe Jack will. Oh, I need him whole again.

She looked left. The Fortnum's sign up the block had seen better days, to say the least. One long squiggle of cursive neon tube, which would say NUM HOT if it could light up, had swung down to dangle vertically from the metal sign. She couldn't believe the gentrifiers were snapping these places up. But it was all location, location, location, as somebody had said. Or was it just cheap, cheap, cheap?

‘So, the
nudnik
is back.' Samuel Greengelb had unwisely opened his door, holding on to his aluminum baseball bat, but he had a sense the golden-haired man could just reach out and take it away from him like an infant's lollipop if he wanted to. ‘We want our heat back on.'

‘Shutup, kike. Learn something.'

‘Don't be a
nudzh.'

‘I said
shut up
! Your benefactor, the generous owner of this building, has just sweetened his offer to all of you. It's now twenty thousand dollars. For each of you fighting kikes. But only if you're out of here in three days. This fantastic offer will not be repeated.'

‘Puh.' It was an exhalation through Greengelb's clenched lips, like steam from a pot lid. ‘We should trust a
putz
like Vartabedian? We who know about real Brownshirts? Ira was three months in Mauthausen-Gusen. You go look that up. He's so upset he won't come out of his room.'

‘Ancient history, Grandad. We got that pretty boy from room 205 that I know you like and we're holding him till you get out. You know my partner is a little crazy about playing games with his knife.' He showed the old man the high school photo of Conor that he'd taken away from the girl. ‘If you want this dippy kid as a big stack of bone-in sirloins, just let me know. My pal can wrap and deliver.'

‘Who is this boy? You leave children alone.'

‘Play it your own way, gramps. But I have a lot of trouble restraining my friend. He used to be a butcher way over there in N'awlins before that Katrina, you know, and he's dying to try out his skills on a fresh bag o' meat. Twenty thousand clams for each of you.'

‘I have to talk to my friends.'

‘Sure. You'll find your benefactor is a true gentleman. You got twenty-four hours for your answer. Give or take half a second. It's not like you deadbeat fucks got to go off to work tomorrow. Find time to talk it over quick.' The big thug looked at his watch. ‘I'll be right back here at eight at night. My advice is not to think of yourselves as anything special. You don't get to be no Jew heroes. You're just old men who won the lottery.'

‘I'm not the boss of anything, but we'll talk.'

‘Do that, Granddad. I'd hate to have to throw all you Christ-killers out a window.'

‘Can we at least have the heat back tonight?'

‘Wear a couple coats. You start asking for favors and benefactors aren't so nice.'

* * *

‘Maeve, are you over there?' Conor hadn't spoken for a while, though the thugs seemed to have left the area some time ago. The night was going to be cold, and the cement floor was already damned uncomfortable on her hip, as well as her breath wicking dust up into her nose at every stirring.

‘Where would I go?' Maeve called. Her hands were well and truly manacled around the pipe. ‘Disneyland?'

There was a long silence, while the building groaned and popped in the dying of the day. ‘Wasn't there some sports thing about saying Disneyland on TV?'

She decided to keep it light. He seemed given to panics. ‘I heard winners got a free trip if they said they were going to D.'

‘People sell themselves awfully cheap,' he said.