Terminal Island (25 page)

“He's reminding us he's still there,” Jack Liffey said.

They rode on a while with no further shots. He could feel, or maybe only imagine, the gradual rise, and he began to wonder what they would meet when they came to the tower. There was a permanent ache in his lung now from the powder, a tightness across his chest. He studied the conduit walls, and at every rivet and irregularity, he could see a fur of the powder.

The vibration changed noticeably under them, got rougher as if they were nearing a drive motor or some sort of transition. “I think we'd better get ready for something.”

Not too far ahead, the circle of the walls seemed to disappear into a faint radiance, as if the conduit opened into a different dimension.

“That's got to be one of the towers,” he said. “Let me get ahead of you.”

He wormed over her, briefly enjoying the contact with her body but regretting the billow of coke dust he sent up. The coke was starting to penetrate his socks and trousers and neck, gritty and dry and irritating. His eyes focused hard on the glow ahead of them, the circle of faint light expanding gradually, welcoming them into another world. As they got closer, he could see the peaks of powdered coke on the conveyor dropping away like a river going over a falls, and there was a steady
shish
sound, growing in volume, like a giant hand dragging through a sandpile.

“Uh-oh.”

He got up on his hands and knees, facing the opening that was approaching inexorably. To the right, down low ahead, there was a slight disturbance in the uniformity of the glow. The light was so weak it was hard to know what it was, but anything was preferable to a sudden drop … into what? His imagination supplied a forest of spikes pointing upward down below, then, perversely, an upturned shark's mouth. All at once, he pictured his job in 'Nam: he would watch the radarscope day after day for planes suddenly winking off, hearing cries for help on his earphones, and then dispatching first an A-6 ground attack fighter for protection, followed by a rescue chopper that would drop a nylon line and Stabo webgear for the downed pilot to climb into. He longed to see a nylon line dangling there at the end of the conveyer, with a big swivel hook he could grab and snap onto his belt.

The small outcropping to the right of the conveyor became clearer, and it was almost as good as a chopper dust-off.

“Take my hand!” he called. “There's a catwalk! Get ready to jump right!”

He suddenly spasmed into a bad coughing fit but did his best so suppress it. What irony if they lost their chance to a fit of coughing! It would have been easier to pull off with both his hands available to catch onto whatever the catwalk offered, but he clung to hers.

They rumbled closer to the drop-off, section after section of the coke mound plummeting away, and he could feel a cool mist on the air, like a light rain. The catwalk had a railing that ended close to the conveyor, so if he could hook the railing with his free arm he could swing her up behind him. But he would have only one chance for the grab.

“I see it,” she said. Her voice was dead calm.

When the time came, he panicked a little when he pushed off hard and the yielding coke gave suddenly under him, nearly sabotaging his lunge. He missed the railing with his hand but flung his whole arm around it from the far side and caught it painfully in the crook of his elbow. He yanked hard on her arm behind him and felt her launch herself past him to get her chest onto the gridded metal of the catwalk. Immediately she gave him an extra tug that saved the day and pulled his torso up, beside her. They hung there on the dead edge of the catwalk on their bellies, just as they had on the fence, and he felt the coke pouring over his legs, trying to drag him down into some abyss he didn't even want to see.

She recovered first and squirmed up onto the catwalk, wriggling past him. She squatted and tugged hard on his free arm with both hands. Working inch by inch, she finally got him completely onto the walk, and he lay there for a time trying to catch his breath, moisture prickling all over him.

“I should have let you jump first,” he said. “You're stronger.”

“We made it. That's what matters. Look down there.”

He crept forward a foot to put his head over the edge of the walk. There was just enough light from a series of ventilators to see the dark coke spilling into a huge mound far below, where two big metal screws fed the coke dust into other openings. Only one screw was turning, but, rotating or not, the big metal screws were not something you wanted to fall onto.

He rolled onto his back to look upward and saw white plastic pipes and fine sprayers. Presumably they added just enough moisture to keep the coke dust manageable. The catwalk continued around the inside of the tower to a red door, just like the one they had entered, and on to a ladder that led down to a small platform exactly between the screws. He let himself cough long enough until his good lung seemed to have the strength to carry on, and it was a relief to enjoy the relatively damp clear air under the misters.

“Like it or not,” he suggested, “I think we've got to take another ride.”

“You're probably right,” she said. “We know he's tracking us.”

As if her words had summoned the Devil himself, an angry fist slammed into the metal tubing right behind them, answered by a slap on the concrete block wall across the tower. A fuzzy rod of brighter light extended out into the silo through fine billows of dust, right where the conveyor spilled its load. Joe Ozaki was timing his shots with uncanny accuracy. Now there was the faint comfort of being inside the concrete block silo, but soon.…

“He seems to know everything.”

“You talked to him. What's he like?”

“I can't say. Not really. He didn't seem like a psycho, but he's pretty eerie. He's feeding on his father's grievances, and I suspect there're his own feelings from 'Nam, too—we'll never know what that did to him. But it's all mixed up now with his own crazy brew of Bushido philosophy. The thing is, he's trying to kill us, and none of this matters now. We've got to go.”

They had all settled onto the grass to wait, and the crowd below them had grown and grown as the local TV station went on broadcasting, with a breathless reporter offering meaningless updates like one of those police chases that the TV choppers followed relentlessly, at least three times a week, along the LA freeways.

Ornetta was whispering in her grandfather's ear, and Maeve wondered if it meant she was explaining to him Declan Liffey's life's work.

“O come, all ye faithful …”

Voices rose in the air as a group down the slope began to sing Christmas carols. It frustrated the TV reporter, who'd been rabbiting away about the “protocols” for dealing with barricaded suspects that he'd just gotten from one of the cops. He gave up for the moment, invoking the spirit of the day and holding the microphone out to the carolers.

Bancroft Davis shinnied very slowly down the slope several feet, working his hips and arms painfully, until he was right next to Declan Liffey. Maeve was on her grandfather's far side and watched the old black man lean in to whisper to him. “I lost my son,” he said gently. His voice was amazing, since, with all the singing and chatter on the hill, Maeve could still hear his baritone clearly.

“A year and a half ago I hired your son to find out the truth for me. He did. He found out that Amilcar and his fiancée had been dead for some time, murdered in a fit of rage by a group of thugs after he mouthed off at them. I'm afraid Amilcar never learned the transforming power of nonviolent love. I wish I still had him so I could convince him about Martin Luther King and Jim Lawson and Bob Moses, but these were always just names out of the past to him. He never saw how love and forgiveness transform hating.”

Declan Liffey did not respond to the old black man, but his face was twisting and flexing in a rictus of some terrible emotion.

“I guess you could say I lost my son, too,” Declan Liffey whispered into the night. “I wish I could have him back.” Maeve could see his shoulders give a shudder, and then she realized that the warping and crumpling that she had witnessed in his features was his own peculiar surrender to grief. He started to weep, and Bancroft turned his upper body to hold him just as Maeve fell against his other side and hugged him, too.

“I'm still me,” Declan Liffey insisted softly. “Inside I'm still me.”

Maeve was crying, gulping a little against the musty jacket her grandfather was wearing. Down below she could hear the crowd go on singing their hymns, with a number of people obviously la-la-ing away when they didn't know the words.

They stood side by side on the small landing between the two big screws. They were impressive, all right—corkscrews the size of dump trucks. One of them was static but the other was turning over slowly, digging coal dust out of the damp mountain and spiraling it toward a conveyor that was moving west. There was just room to slip between the top of the rotating spiral and the roof of the conduit, but there was nothing to grip, no way to get up there.

“Not one of your great forms of public transport,” he said. “For humans, I mean.”

“I bet, statistically, it's very safe. Probably haven't had a single passenger accident.”

He chuckled despite himself. “When you're right, you're right. I'll give you a big boost over the screw onto the conveyor.”

“Then how do you make it?”

“A leap and a prayer.”

“Jack, the last time we did something like this, not fifteen minutes ago, you admitted I was stronger. Let me give
you
a boost. I can make this on my own.”

She flexed an arm for him like a Gold's Gym muscleman, and he actually felt it. It was startlingly strong, the whole upper arm hard as a tree, and he knew, too, she was a good ten years younger than he was.

“Jesus, you must pump iron. Okay, it's age before beauty,” he conceded, and a laugh racked him with coughing for a few moments.

He positioned himself at the edge of the short catwalk, squatting and bobbing to get some spring in his legs. He tried not to look at the big screw that was turning over slowly only a few inches from his nose, making crunching and hissing noises where it churned through the coke. But he had to look up to judge his leap, the blunt steel spiral blade whisking past, stirring little eruptions and boils in the surface of the coke pile, as if small animals warred beneath the surface. There was muscle of a sort in that giant screw, an almost malign force. It was quite capable of crushing an arm against the conveyor. But if you timed it right and got a good leap, there was just room to get over.

He felt her hands against his bottom. “Wait for three this time, for Chrissake,” he said.

“You count it.”

He didn't even want to think about what it would mean if she couldn't make the leap through the gap after him.

“One … two … THREE.” He pushed off hard with his legs, and she shoved, and his chest scraped the steel a little and his knee knocked hard at the top of the device but he dropped on the far side face-first into the choking pile of coke. Something tweaked his foot briefly, and more coke was deposited on top of him. He pushed off the rough canvas and erupted out of the mound of coke, sputtering and coughing. He rested on his knees, spitting coke dust, and as soon as he got his eyes open, he looked back. She was silhouetted against the slight glow in the tower, bobbing a little, as if working up her courage.

“Come on!
You're strong!” He could hear his voice bang and echo its way down the long tube, and he went on spitting out grit.

The opening looked treacherously small from this angle, but finally he saw her make a leap for it. In midair he saw her jolt sideways with great force, like a rag doll hit by a hammer, and her course shifted noticeably. One of her legs had clearly slammed against the giant screw as she came over, and then she kicked against something. She had fallen through into an odd posture, freezing that way as the machine shoveled piles of coke over her. With a real shiver of horror taking him, he crawled and fought his way back toward her as fast as he could, his knees slipping and sinking.

Only a leg showed. He dug her out and tugged until she was lying on her back, conscious but grimacing in pain.

“Where is it?”

“Leg.”

In the intermittent faint pools of light from the ventilators, he saw a great tear in her long navy blue skirt, and then a gash deep into her flesh where she had caught her left leg on the device. She might have some injury, too, from the first jolt he had witnessed, but that would have to wait.

“Maybe I wasn't stronger,” she offered in a strangled voice, as if she couldn't quite get her diaphragm working.

“That blow would have snapped my leg off,” he said.

He didn't like the way dark, thick blood was oozing out of the cut on her leg. He dug out his Victorinox and pried open the little scissors. The spring that reopened them at each snip had given up the ghost years earlier, and it was a long, aggravating chore to take a half-inch bite into her skirt, stop and pry the blades open again, then take another bite until he had enough to grab to tear strips for a tourniquet. He tied a wad of cloth hard over the wound, and it seemed to slow the seepage. He had no idea how bad the coke dust would be for an open wound, but there was no way to avoid it. It was everywhere. He felt it in his hair and crotch and shoes, even working its way into his eyes so he had to keep looking for a relatively clean patch somewhere to wipe them.

Once he was done with his ministrations, Jack Liffey turned his attention to getting the two of them off the conveyor again at the next tower.

“Grip my hands,” he ordered her, and she did. “Pull,
pull.
Okay, your arms are still strong. We'll make it.” And after a while, “I'm not leaving you behind for the Indians.”

She smiled weakly, and he started to say something but went into a coughing paroxysm. This time it took him over completely. The convulsing went on and on, and he had to flop onto his back to try to stabilize some of his bucking and kicking and to keep from hurling a body part into the small gap between the conveyer and the metal wall, where he'd do himself some real damage.