On the Nickel (25 page)

The two female cops came warily around a corner that reeked of rot and human piss, Paula almost chipper again to be on the job, but then Paula raised the back of her hand, like a soldier walking point on patrol. She nodded at the high-lift Dodge Ram, black and shiny and expensive, parked down from the Fortnum Hotel.

‘I see it,' Gloria acknowledged. No one around here, certainly not the residents, the mission ministers or the psychologists, even the bleeding-heart welfare workers, would drive that beast. Then she remembered there was a fire station only three blocks away.

‘Maybe a fireman,' Gloria said. ‘They love that macho shit.'

Paula shook her head. ‘They have their own fenced lot. You don't leave a money-trap like that out on the street at night, not around here. It's just screaming “I got a big fat stereo.”'

‘Yeah. I feel like ripping it off myself, on general principles. Bust any cocksucker who'd drive that thing.'

Paula grinned. ‘Editorials later, sis. Look there.' She pointed.

Two blocks farther away, in murky dusk-light, there was an old white pickup truck. It was amazing, Gloria thought, how little profile you really needed on a vehicle to recognize it. ‘Jesus Christ. It's
got
to be a coincidence.'

‘I don't believe in coincidence. Wasn't that the first lesson at the Academy?'

‘I had a friend drive that to my house and I left Jack so fucked up and weak he looked like he was going to sleep for a month.'

‘Look at me,' Paula said.

Gloria did, surprised. The urgency in the woman's voice had been stunning.

‘I'm right at the rock bottom of literalness here – girl.' There was something desperate and furious in her tone. ‘Don't confuse me with long explanations. My cop soul is not going to take its clothes off for a long, long time for nobody. Is that Jack's truck? Simple yes or no.'

‘Ninety per cent.'

‘Do you know the black one?' Paula asked.

She was a little hurt that Paula didn't quite trust her. ‘No. Zero. Except it reminds me of half the asshole cops I know. Why do you want to drive a truck that'll tip over at the first pothole?'

‘Op-eds later, as I say. OK. We got your husband on the job here – on his own job – and we got at least one Buford in the mix. And we know Buford doesn't live here, because nobody leaves a car worth anything like that down here overnight. You think he's that guy you heard was the enforcer?'

‘Logical. He had a pal, too.'

‘Nearby somewhere I bet they all come together, friend and foe.'

‘I talked to an old Jewish gentleman at the Fortnum right there. That's the next target of the loft builders and he told me they were getting jammed up.'

‘Backup?' Gloria said.

‘On what basis? We're not even officially here, girl. This is do-it-yourself night. You picked it. Girls' bowling night.'

‘Oh, the world is so full of bad news. Hold that thought.' Gloria was already walking toward the over-tall black truck to check it out. The bed had a steel tool chest, bolted down and locked. The thick plastic bed liner wasn't even scratched, as if the truck had never been used for any trucklike purpose.

The cab was almost as anonymous under her flashlight, with an empty CD case discarded on the dash, and a few gum wrappers on the floor. A red-striped rag lay on the far seat.

She felt Paula come up behind her. ‘Ever watched your laundry going around in the dryer?' Gloria asked.

‘Not so much.'

‘Check that stripy thing on the seat.' Gloria yielded her some room.

‘I don't know.'

‘It's a man's boxer underpants. Look at it,' Gloria said.

‘If you say so. So there's a guy out there who can get his dick caught in his zipper. Or maybe it's just a rag. I know I'm off my feed, but what's got you by the short hairs tonight?'

‘I check out everything. I'm an Indian, hon. We're the original folks on this continent that figured out that nothing ever works out for us.'

‘Oh, let's not get into a pissing match about who's more beat down. Your people walked happily over the land bridge from Asia. They weren't downstairs on the slave ships.'

‘True dat. But watch this.' Gloria knelt at the front wheel of the truck, unscrewed the rubber cap from the air valve of the giant tire and used the refill of her ballpoint pen to let the air hiss out of the knobby tire so the truck sank slowly like a big shot elk coming down on one knee. ‘Just another evening in paradise,' she said.

‘You on the warpath, girl.'

Gloria smiled. ‘Real warpath woulda been taking out my Swiss Army knife and stabbing that sidewall like some
pendejo
juvie. This is just a little stick-around message.'

Paula's eyes went to the Fortnum. ‘Let's go round up the mokes.'

Rice was still whining about his eyes so McCall led him down the first floor hallway until they found a bathroom. It was filthy and strewn with ribbons of unspeakable toilet paper and broken porcelain basins. Some of the piping had even been stripped from the walls, leaving tracks ripped out of the plaster. Must have been copper. One sink still worked and there was a rubber stopper with a broken chain waiting patiently on a little glass shelf. McCall stuffed in the stopper and ran the water. Both taps ran cold.

‘You gotta soothe a burn,' McCall said. ‘It hydrates the metapringles and all that shit.'

‘The what?'

‘Don't worry about it.' When the basin was full, McCall pushed the tiny man's face down into the water.

‘Hey! Shit!'

‘Suck it up, man. It's honest pain. We got work to do tonight.'

‘Owie.
Owie,
man!'

McCall was actually enjoying inflicting a little hurt on the asshole. Why not? Thibodeaux had been a crimp in his tailbone ever since the evening he'd run into him in the Porthole Bar on Wilshire playing with his knife and talking about all his secret missions in Eye-raq. Bullshit
in extremis,
for sure.

‘The next time your eyes hurt, just remind yourself that the only thing you see is light. You don't really see the shit you're looking at; you just see the photons that bounce off the shit, and photon's got no weight at all. Therefore no way to cause pain.'

Rice Thibodeaux started to object but McCall pushed his face back down into the basin. He knew he was making it hard to breathe, but the little fuckster ought to get a taste of that – having bragged so much about waterboarding towelhead
jihadis
for Blackwood.
How do you like it your ownself, you pissant?

Lipman had come back from his post, freaked by various noises from outside and some shifting shadows. The old men had begun deferring to Jack Liffey as they discussed their predicament, and he could see they now expected miracles from him. Why not? His pistol was bigger than theirs, he thought, with the last outpouring of his strange mood. He could see they were pretty scared – and that anyone could respect; that was simple and true.

They were all back around the lantern in the hall, five minutes of their fatal deadline elapsed. There were tiny sounds in a bedroom nearby, maybe rats and maybe not, but he couldn't worry about that now.

‘Basically we've trapped ourselves in a box canyon,' Jack Liffey said. ‘I understand the theory – you gentlemen circled the wagons on your home turf, but if the hostiles are serious about torching this place, it's a whole new ballgame. They don't seem to be operating on the same wavelength as – what's your landlord's name? – Moses Vartabedian? Presumably, this guy's chief wish is to keep the building in good shape for the future. But he's hired exactly the wrong leg-men.'

It was so nice to be able to form words out loud that he could sense himself going overboard, yakking away at the obvious, but he couldn't stop himself. An immense wheel had turned inside him and opened the floodgates. ‘They're different from each other, these two, from what I've been able to observe, but they have one thing in common. I think they're the kind of army vets who've been through some nasty traumas, and they find it hard to sit still now. I knew them from Nam. You're in a frigid room with one of these guys, and they get up and open the window to make it colder. They need movement, any movement, to tell them who they are. They cope with surprises by grabbing control, and if they can't control, they lash out. They'd probably destroy the world, if they could. The job, the hotel, us – it's all nothing to them. That's my guess, and just so there's no illusions here, I'm betting Vartabedian hasn't figured it out yet.'

‘So?' Greengelb interjected.

‘I think we better promise to leave the hotel tonight but stall as much as we can and see what happens. Listen. It's not the end of things if we leave tonight. Safety first. I'll get us back in if they board it up, I promise.'

He was highly tuned to the logic of their aggressors and of these two old men now. He could see both sides had worked one another up to a fever pitch, and he didn't want either to do something irrevocable, hurl some challenge that would set off the other. He understood at once that this was the way the world would blow up one day, lonely rage against lonely rage.

He tried to take responsibility. The boy scribbling in his notebook beside Maeve was still an unknown quantity – Mike's son and maybe a handful in his own way – but that situation looked to him like it could wait.

‘I wish to thank you, sir, for putting yourself in danger for our sake,' Morty Lipman said. It sounded like the preface to a dismissal. ‘It is what we would all wish to do if we had the chance, to be one of the just men in the world, but I doubt if many of us could do it. As for me, leaving the building is not an option.'

Jack Liffey's eye drifted past Lipman to the women, and a Dorothea Lange photograph came to life right there, materializing silently, a forlorn-looking woman in a cotton dress so threadbare it looked like its own insubstantial weight might tear it off her shoulders, and nestled beside her, a much younger, but exact, edition of herself. Both of them not so much blond as bleached out by adversity. The daughter leaned into her mother and clung fiercely. More to protect than for her own comfort, he guessed.

‘I reck' you OK, mister,' Felice said when she caught his eye.

‘He's my dad,' Maeve put in quickly. ‘He
is
OK.'

Jesus Christ,
Jack Liffey thought,
this is all too much.
The moment took on an eerie calm – surrounded by all these refugees from the violent and unaccommodating world outside.

‘Dad, you know Felice and Millie now. This is Conor. I should have introduced him immediately.' She smiled with a kind of embarrassment. Conor lifted his eyes from his notebook, in one of his rare acknowledgements of his present surroundings. ‘Since you know his father and he's kind of your case.'

‘Hello, Conor,' Jack Liffey said. ‘I know Mike well.'

‘I know you do, sir. He speaks highly of you.' The boy met his eyes for a moment, obviously reluctant to give up his scribbling.

‘I'll get you all out safe,' Jack Liffey said, though he wondered what compelled him to make a rash promise like that. He guessed it was going to be a rough night. He checked his watch and saw he had three minutes left on golden-curl's ultimatum.

Overconfident Palladin confronts the sociopaths,
he thought. The jerks downstairs were like the damaged Viet Nam vets of his own generation, who'd mostly been abandoned to their own devices. More than a few of them had fallen as far as The Nickel out there, or worse.
Stop thinking, man. It's time to act.

He was about to call out to the thugs – trying desperately to think of a delaying tactic – when a door clapped open and a familiar woman's voice skirled up the staircase, distantly, as if hollered across a wide canyon, rather than directly up the stairwell.

‘Hello, in there! This is the LAPD. We're looking for any of the Liffeys or Conor Lewis!'

‘We're looking for any of the Liffeys or Conor Lewis!'

McCall heard it clearly. He immediately let Thibodeaux yank his head out of the basin of water and sputter. He reached for his big Desert Eagle in its shoulder holster. If they really were LAPD, though, that was not a very good idea at all, he thought, and he left the pistol snug where it was.

‘Shit.'

Thibodeaux stood straight and shook himself, throwing water like a dog coming out of a lake, and then he rubbed his eyes.

‘Shhh. You OK?' McCall said softly in the bathroom.

‘OK by me, jackoff,' Thibodeaux whispered. ‘But fuck you. You're a mutant.'

‘Shh, there's cops out there.'

McCall pulled the big pistol out anyway, since its heft gave him comfort. ‘We need cops tonight like your guy Nietzsche needs a smiley magnet.'

‘Huh?'

‘Forget it.'

‘Don't hold out.'

‘I'll tell you later.' Jesus, how did he get saddled with this goofball?

‘Also Sprach
McCall,' Thibodeaux murmured, which meant nothing at all to McCall.