The Concrete River (16 page)

“So I got my uncle and we chased it across the attic holding up bedsheets to corner it. I got it finally and that little lump in my sheet started to make its distress call, a high-pitched screeching so awful that you wanted to kill it right there, anything to stop it. I had to climb down and cross that house with this bird banging against my hands and screeching a mile a minute. Out on the back porch I tossed it up in the air. The bird fluttered up about ten feet and then took off for a vacant lot, but it didn't have much strength left and it was losing altitude all the way, still going like a tiny smoke alarm.”

“It went straight in like a glider, and the instant that scared robin hit the weeds, I saw a big blur of black above it. It was a shiny old rook the size of a cat diving straight down on the robin. That scream went up a note, and then the rook was flying away with the robin in its beak. I never even knew rooks were meat eaters. Now that was one hard-luck robin, I'll grant you that, and saving it temporarily like that made me feel like some agent of doom, but here's the punch line. You'll never convince me there was some sort of pattern in that bird's bad luck, no numerology or fate or God's big plan. That robin just couldn't keep it's mouth shut at the wrong time. Ten minutes later or ten minutes earlier the rook might have been off somewhere else. The robin might have dived in the weeds and found a nest of worms and fattened up so it lived to tell the tale. You can't get bitter about that. It's a crapshoot. If you're willing to take the good, you can't get angry about the bad.”

“So, you're a stoic saint. I get it.”

Telling the story, or her reaction to it, had left him vaguely unsatisfied. Nothing had been granted. She was still sending God get-well cards.

“Are you really happy being a detective?” she said after a time.

“I don't think of myself as a detective. I find lost kids.”

“You're not looking for lost kids right now, though. Aren't you worried about the men after you?”

“I should be. Maybe I don't have enough imagination. Are you happy being a do-good?”

“It's close to what I used to do, what I was trained to do,” she said. “Do-good.” She toyed with the words, as if trying to decide whether to protest.

“That's not an answer.”

“I'm in some kind of transition, Jack. I can't get a focus. Things seem too complicated. Some days little things pester me and some days I feel fine with what I'm doing.”

They were funneling down a dead straight blackness between vast groves of orange trees, like a deep velvet version of night. It was hypnotic and eerie, the kind of road where the county put up signs telling you to run with your lights on during the day.

“You know the word
noise
? In engineering? It means too much data, you're getting data you didn't expect mixed in with the stuff you did expect. You're getting noise in your life. You thought all you had to do was deny yourself and love God and do your duty and you'd be satisfied forever and ever. Then this biological alarm clock started buzzing and telling you, ‘What's in it for me?’”

“That's too schematic, but there's some truth in it.”

“I'll bet nobody's ever made much of an effort to know you.”

“What do you mean?”

“All you nuns, you probably take each other for granted, sitting around your big wood tables. You haven't been married, and you probably didn't get really serious with anybody before you took the vows, or you wouldn't have taken the vows. And at the Liberation House in Cahuenga you look like you're the den mother, watching over everyone else. I'm just guessing. You get so flattered when somebody looks at you close, it's like nobody ever did.”

She made a sound that might have been a soft laugh or even a sigh and pressed her head against his shoulder. “I never thought of it that way. And now that a big handsome hard-edge detective is paying attention to me, I should roll over and become his floozy.”

“I don't think I've ever heard anyone use that word.”

“We nuns tend to be antiquated, and sheltered, too.” She rested a palm softly on his swollen penis. “Whoa, what's this?”

“That's good luck.”

*

She said she didn't want to push her luck at Liberation House, though, so he dropped her off up the T-alley so nobody would see her sneaking back, and he drove straight up the Harbor Freeway to spend the night on Mike Lewis's sofa in the Arroyo. He didn't bother calling because Lewis never went to bed before two.

On his way through the four-level downtown he saw an eighteen-wheeler toppled on the third ramp up, the cab broken through the guard rail and dangling into space. Helicopters circled, playing searchlights on the truck. Something dark was dripping from level to level but hadn't hit the Pasadena yet. He was lucky to get through because the Highway Patrol was just setting up cones and flares.

The living room light shone out onto the drive.

“Jesus, Jack, where have you been? I did everything but send up smoke signals. I thought you'd… Well, I was worried.”

“I didn't know you cared.”

“I'm glad you're still breathing, it's the way I like you best. Come look at something. You are now number one of the Find One Hundred Things Wrong With This Picture.”

Mike Lewis beckoned him over to the growing scatter of papers on the living room floor. “Keep your voice down, Siobhann sleeps light. Your packet of goodies was laundered by someone, but they weren't careful enough.”

He stretched out his arms and lowered himself among the papers like Mephistopheles going down through the floor.

“Remember I said this little stage at the side of the blueprint was way too small for an opera house, and there weren't any flies for scenery and lighting. I was right. Here's another clue, down in the fine print of a memo.”

He looked where Lewis was pointing. The sentence said:
… as we discussed on the phone, we need something special to draw the punters in.

“I know the word from England. It's a half-contemptuous term for a small-time gambler. And then here.”

Jack Liffey followed the finger again. It was a letter from AT&T confirming the prices for conditioned landlines to two numbers, one in the 310 area code beginning with 419 and the other in 818 beginning with 514. “That first one is Inglewood and the other is Arcadia. Ring any bells?”

“Inglewood's a relatively upscale black area and Arcadia is rich Republican dentists.”

“Think.”

“Maybe somebody's setting up orthodontia for all those shiny white teeth.”

“A conditioned landline is a datalink. It's usually not for conversation but for digital information.”

He certainly did have some annoying mannerisms, Jack Liffey thought. “I do know the words, Mike. We called them drops in aerospace, and we had them all over the building.”

“I'll bet you didn't have them going to Santa Anita and Hollywood Park, though, did you?”

The phone rang and he leapt up nimbly.

Jack Liffey read the letter again, a chill forming along his legs and working its way up his spine. Lewis whispered into the phone, like a little emblem of the fear he felt all of a sudden. Dedicated lines to race tracks. He hadn't quite put it all together, but he had an idea of who he was probably up against now and he didn't like it.

Lewis came back and settled into a faded old sling chair from the 1950s. “You can probably guess what kind of place has small lounge stages, landlines to race tracks and talks about drawing the punters in. There's a few local option poker parlors in Gardena and Commerce and the Indian reservation out by Cabazon, but those are small potatoes. The state constitution tolerates what they call ‘games of skill’, and the courts have always generously considered poker a game of skill. Must be knowing when to show ’em and when to fold ’em makes it a skill. Anyway, people have been trying to get full-bore gambling for years. Look at the size of that rubber factory. That would be the biggest casino west of Vegas, and within a forty-five-minute drive of ten million people.”

The magic time in L.A.—everybody said a place was forty-five minutes away, no matter how far it really was.

“I haven't heard anything about relaxing the laws for craps and roulette and slots, but who knows what agendas are grinding away in secret.”

“Yeah,” Jack Liffey said. “It could be important to some people to
stop
it, too. There's an awful lot of money invested in people driving more than forty-five minutes to do their gambling.”

“Those are people you don't want to fuck with, is what I think,” Lewis said simply.

“I already did.”

Jack Liffey went straight to the phone. He noticed it was after one a.m. He called his own phone and listened to several messages, many of them from Mike Lewis. One was from Art Castro. “Oh, man, give me a call, please. I think you went and pissed on a nest of scorpions.”

He called and got Castro's wife, sounding bleary.

“I'm sorry, Olga, this is Jack. You better wake him up.”

It took a while, and when he came on he sounded slower than normal.

“I didn't mean call back at this hour,
hombre
.”

“As long as you're up, how about filling me in?”

“Okay, sure, long as I'm up.” He yawned with a little squeak at the end. “I got a friend in the body shop business. You know, they got a computer network these days, some of them, find parts from each other. Anyway, he saw where a M3 was getting some new windshield glass and he called over there for me. M3s not exactly falling out of the trees, probably of interest to you. These guys, they was getting all new tires, too, and as long as they was getting new rubber, they upgraded the tires, you know, went to the big ZRs for, like, driving 150 and shit. Two hundred bucks a pop. They bought one for the spare, too, and the guy in the shop had to open the trunk and pull up the carpet to replace it. First thing he found in there, he found some Nevada plates wrapped in a rag. Had some dirt on them but pretty new. He'd been in Nam, this guy, and he knew what C-4 plastic explosive looks like. And everybody knows a Mac-11 with the long clip. These are bad dudes,
esse
.”

“Okay, Art. Thanks. Leave it alone now. You never heard of me, and your friend in the chop shop never heard of you, too.”

“It's not a chop shop, hey. I don't hang with no bangers. Good luck, man, really.”

“Thanks.” He hung up and saw Mike Lewis watching him. “You, too. Burn all that stuff and bury the ashes.”

“You can't close Pandora's box, Jack.”

“You damn well better hope I can.”

“You got any protection?”

“You mean guns? A bit, but not here. What can you offer?”

Lewis considered. “You can borrow a 9-mm Walther.”

“Why not?”

He got it out of a shoe box in the hall closet, a shiny blued little automatic. “Here's the only thing you got to remember. This is the safety. You flick it up like this.”

“
Jesus!
”

The exposed hammer fell as if the pistol was firing.

“Stupid hair-raising design. Germans engineers design everything for the convenience of the engineers. The first trigger pull after you use the safety is stiff because it has to recock. Okay?”

“Thanks. Let's hope I don't have to shoot anybody.”

“It's a thought.”

Lewis offered him a heap of bedding and he slept fitfully on the sofa, with gusty rain lashing the uncurtained windows that looked out over the arroyo. Siobhann kissed him on the cheek on her way out in the morning, and Mike Lewis dragged himself out not long after. “What's the weather out?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Look's like the rain's over for now. Does it matter?”

“Moisture matters. Here's why.”

He borrowed a box of bandaids and Mike Lewis watched while he used them end-to-end to strap the pistol to his ankle so it held tight but would break away easily with a tug.

“Man, where did you learn that? That must be the state-of-the-art in detective craft.”

“It was a Crimestopper. Very underrated, Mr. Tracy.”

*

He went straight to the Liberation House where a very worried young man met him at the front door.

“Can I speak to Eleanor?”

The boy blocked the door. “She never came home last night.”

“Yes, she did. Why don't you go knock on her door.”

“We've been in her room, man. We looked all over. Agnes'd've heard her on the steps. She never came in.”

Jack Liffey's blood turned cold. “I dropped her off at midnight.” He pushed past the boy, and the boy resisted for an instant and then fell away.

“I'm telling you, she isn't here.”

Liffey strode up the stairs past a fretting older woman in a long kimono and went straight to Eleanor's room. The bed was more or less as he remembered them leaving it. He went to the small closet and racked the hangers back and forth. He had a clear picture of the striped blouse that he had folded so carefully and left on a damp white sage, and it wasn't there.

He went down the stairs and across the kitchen to the back door. The woman in the kimono padded after him without making a protest. Eleanor would have come in the back, just thirty yards from where he'd dropped her. Unless they'd been watching the back, waiting for her.

He kicked bundles of rags aside, but the doorlock fought him and he almost tore the door off its hinges. Then it swung open and he stopped in his tracks. There was a three-step concrete stoop leading down to a walk. Sitting in the middle of the stoop on the nubbly footwiper was a rubber rattlesnake.

Time to go home and face the music.
It was his first lucid thought after seeing the rubber snake. Nothing cute like a gun on his ankle was going to be much help now. As he drove west, an overwhelming sense of despair hollowed him out. What on earth had he been thinking of? He had screamed a challenge into the dark doorway of a dream, and the nightmare had erupted out of the dark to swallow up someone he loved, as any sane man knew it would.

Up ahead, one of the Toonerville Trolleys was stopped on the elevated Green Line. People milled excitedly looking at something on the tracks. A man in a traindriver's uniform seemed to be kicking the side of the first car as hard as he could.