The Concrete River (17 page)

Then he was past the bridge and into the vast no-man's land of southeast L.A., where the poorest blacks and Central Americans lived side by side in gathering animosity. He tried to squeeze himself down, to become small and compact so that when the time came to act he would be ready.

He nodded absently to the guard going into the condo and parked in his usual spot beside the big Olds with the reflective AA stickers:
One Step at a Time
and
Take it Easy
. He took a roundabout route to an alcove where he could see his door. It wasn't kicked open. He considered flinging it open and hurling himself inside like some TV cop, but it was all too melodramatic so he just stepped in.

The light on his answering machine blinked rapidly, which meant it had malfunctioned again. Of course, it might not have been from Vegas. It might even have been from Kathy or Maeve, some minute readjustment of blame for his paternal failures.

He thought of walking to his office but decided to drive, in case he needed to move fast. He left the Concord facing out in the lot, just out of sight of Margolin's coffee counter.

The padlock was still on the crude hasp that held his boarded up door, and beside it was a small yellow note. All it had was a phone number and a fat letter S. The initial might have stood for almost anything, but
snake
occurred to him right away, and when he looked closer, he saw that it was probably a crude drawing of a snake. He folded it into his pocket.

Downstairs Marlena was squatting beside a plastic tub of mail, sorting it into her boxes.

“Jack! I was worried.” She stood and smoothed a tight skirt over her hips. “You didn't answer, all the time.”

“I had to stay out of sight for a while.”

She blocked his way so he had to hug her.

Very softly she said into his ear, “You're my only chance.”

He shuddered. “There's a lot of people would jump in the L.A. River if I were their only chance.”

“And some are more beautiful, I bet.”

“That's not what I'm saying.” He just couldn't attend to her now. “Can I make a call?”

“You know where it is.”

She gave one long squeeze before turning him loose.

The number was a 310 and might have been almost anywhere on the periphery of the city.

“Yeah?”

“This is Jack Liffey. I got a note.”

There was a moment of near silence, with only the electronic wheezes of phone devices talking to one another.

“Liffey, huh.” It was a new voice, one that he recognized. “You got more wind on you than a little bull goin’ uphill. My car insurance wants to talk to you. You want to help out your little filly, who's gone and got herself tied up, you'd best mosey this way. And, pard, don't even think about calling the sheriff.”

They gave him an address that sounded like Cahuenga and hung up.

So, the worst was true after all. He stood with the phone in his hand, utterly incapable of moving. How had he signed up for this? An out-of-work technical writer, down on his luck and scrambling for cash in a mean city. Maybe he'd tried to even the odds a bit too hard, but this had turned out way beyond his sense of risk. He had to concentrate hard to move at all, not to run down into stasis. Hang up the phone, Jack.

“I've got to go somewhere,” he told Marlena.

“Come back to me,
querido
.” She hugged him from behind.

“Some real bad guys,” he said. He looked up and saw a kid in a bright red T-shirt jumping up and down in the window, making faces. He couldn't work out whether the action had any meaning. “I think they're the ones who did the woman.” He couldn't think of anybody's name he was so distracted. It took him a moment to remember the name Consuela, then Eleanor and finally Marlena. “I think I know why now.”

“Can't you call the police?”

“It's my doing. I've got to undo it.”

“Would money help you any?” she whispered, and the boy at the window redoubled his jumping, darting his tongue obscenely.

“Bless you for asking.” He wrote down the address in Cahuenga and gave it to her. “I don't know if it will do any good but if I don't call you by eight tonight, go to a pay phone and send the fire department there. I don't think they'll be stupid enough to stay in the same place, but the fire guys are paid for driving around in their red trucks so you may as well use them.”

As he started for the door, the boy fled.

“Don't you care that I'm afraid for you?” she asked querulously.

He looked back for a moment, trying to work out what she had said. “It means a lot.”
What means a lot?
“Thanks, Marlena.”

*

He felt obliged to go straight to the address, though everything inside him begged to dawdle. It was ten and the roads were still clear, as if it took the drivers all morning and into the afternoon before they could work out how to get together to jam up the streets. He was more frightened than he'd ever been. The round had his name on it now, and he couldn't believe in things being off target. He remembered times, even in Nam, when death had seemed so far away that it was part of another life, but now it was close enough to touch.

He got stuck at a light behind a battered old round-fender pickup. The driver argued fitfully with someone who wasn't there. His head jerked and his right fist shot up and hit the cab roof, so hard Jack Liffey could hear the dull clang over the traffic noise. Then gems spewed away from his side window and the man's fist emerged into the sunlight for an instant. It took a moment before Jack Liffey realized what had happened. The man was having a bad morning of his own. With the light still red, the pickup lurched forward and fishtailed into a right turn, smoking a tire.

Jack Liffey looked down at the street, where glass fragments caught the sun. The incident had been sent by something or other to tear away the last fragments of normality. This was what the French philosophers called overdetermination. Reality poisoned you to death, stabbed you through the heart and then shot the corpse a few times. He wanted to be far away, somewhere safe and clean, where things behaved predictably, but what was coming seemed likely to be very close and inescapable and not very redeeming.

He started up again when a car honked at him. The sky eastward was scrubbed sparkling by the soft rains, and far in the distance he could see dark cloud over the mountains. A thunderhead climbed skyward, and a long line of planes marked the approach lane to LAX. He tried to fathom what had brought him to this exact spot, sinking along a trajectory he could not control. He had a tidiness streak in him, but this was too unruly to explain.

He could hear the rattle of his tappets. The engine needed oil, and the red light would come on in another hundred miles. It didn't seem to matter at all. In Cahuenga, he saw a couple of taxis like more ill omens. You never saw taxis in L.A. They were visible at the airport, but they evaporated from the universe as soon as they left it.

The address he'd been given was a small lot with a filthy mattress tented up in high weeds. Behind the mattress was a concrete foundation with a few charred two-by-fours where a house had been burned out. It looked vaguely familiar and then he saw the fading graffiti.
CINQUE RULES! Viva Tanya!
And, much smaller,
Down with imperialism and all its running dogs.
It must have been the cowboy's idea of a joke—this was the house where the Symbionese Liberation Army had holed up and cops from four jurisdictions had poured gunfire in until the building caught fire and burned. The fire department would get a big kick out of the joke if Marlena had to call them.

Up the street an extended family of Latinos were under the hood of an old Pontiac, some handing around parts and others pointing and tugging at things. Just then the BMW came around the corner and drove slowly up beside his car. The blacked passenger window whirred down and he saw the Cowboy only three feet away, looking at him neutrally. The other man was driving.

The Cowboy's hand reached languidly out the window holding a large porcelain eagle. The bird was hand-painted in pastel colors, one of those horribly expensive statuettes from Germany that grandmothers bought from mail order ads. He held the eagle out at full stretch and rotated it once as if trying to sex it by peering in under the tail, then he let it go. It hit the pavement and broke cleanly at the base of a wing. Jack Liffey realized for the first time that something was wrong with the Cowboy's eyes. One of them was glass, but it was hard to tell which one.

“I got a new CD player built into the trunk,” the Cowboy said mildly. “Carousel. Ten disks all stacked up and you play it through your stereo with a gizmo with a lot of buttons. Whenever I got somethin’ broke up I always fix it up better than before or add on something. You see the point? You got to stay ahead of the curve.”

Jack Liffey saw his problem now—he'd only been trying to stay even, and everybody else was staying ahead.

The Cowboy got out and pressed the seat forward, jackknifing himself into the back of the M3. “You get in front.”

It was all so civilized. Jack Liffey got in dully and they pulled away and drove for a minute before the Cowboy spoke again.

“When I was ten, the river up and flooded one wet spring. House was right on the bluff over the Brazos and the water come up to the front porch and me and pa spent all day out there killin’ water moccasins that come up out of the river. We used .22s until we ran out of ammo and then baseball bats and a shovel. That's a true fact. Pa ran around crazy as a parrot eatin’ stick candy, but I got so I liked the job. I got to teasin’ ’em before I whacked ’em out. After a while I even got to think kindly on ’em a little. They was only doin' their nature. Still, I had to hit ’em. That was my nature.”

“The woman doesn't know a thing. You can let her go.”

“That so?”

“That's why I came quietly.”

“We ain't negotiatin’ here. Just shut the fuck up now.”

There was dark cloud all around, but the car purred along in a charmed patch of brightness, light smarting the eye off the hood as if the gods had cleared a little space for their vengeful powers to work.

Crossing the river, he saw that the river had slacked off, only a foot or two of runoff moving down the central channel, then the car turned south and east into forsaken industrial land. They humped over railroad tracks into what a sign with a picture of an old glass milk bottle suggested had been a dairy and then they idled slowly along a dirt track cleared of rubble. Now and again the air dams hanging under the bumpers scraped on some upraised chunk of dirt. They stopped beside a low flat building that said
OFFICE
. Standing alone nearby was a plank shack that might have been yanked whole out of a deep mountain hollow in West Virginia.

“Get out,” the Cowboy said.

Jack Liffey stepped out onto a little island of cement in a sea of mud. The Cowboy's friend locked up the car with a double-bleat of the car alarm and they walked to the office through sucking mud. There was a smell of manure in the air, and a faint deep noise, luring and anxious, maybe only a conception of noise as his mind tried to fill in the space, like the sound that a huge empty place makes in the distance. A gray curtain of rain had fallen over the mountains, and there was a tiny flashbulb flash in the thunderhead, too far to hear.

The Cowboy ducked inside and came back out, like someone going to the refrigerator for another beer.

“You're gonna have to hang around a bit, like a side a beef.”

The other man had a big black pump shotgun now, and they took him to the shed where the Cowboy fought with a rusted padlock.

“You shouldn't never interfere with nothin' that don't bother you personal. You just smelt out the wrong hound's butt, pard.”

It was dim inside and felt damp, smelling like chalky plaster. He went rigid when he saw Eleanor Ong lying on her stomach on a piece of stained carpet, her hands tied behind her back with an extravagant amount of rope. A tennis ball was duct-taped into her mouth. She rocked a little when she saw him, her eyes crazed, but he didn't see any evidence of wounds. She was still wearing the clothes he'd last seen her in.

When he looked up, the shotgun was on him.

“I'm not in this business to let diddlysquats shoot up my car. You get that yet?”

“I understand. You've got me now. How about letting her go?”

Without warning the Cowboy slapped him hard with his open palm so Liffey's head rocked back and his cheek caught fire.

“How about you keep the fuckin' shut up? You're only alive because my boss ain't made up his mind on you.”

He took the shotgun, and the other man tied Jack Liffey's hands behind him. They dragged him across the room and tied a loose end of the rope to the trap pipe under a basin. He was on his knees on the concrete floor with the basin tight in his back.

The Cowboy turned the shotgun around and rested the butt against Jack Liffey's cheek. The rubber butt-plate felt warm.

“Just be happy I don't give you a little quick dentistry, tough guy.” He laughed dismissively. They left, and Jack Liffey could hear the padlock snapping down.

He looked at Eleanor. “I'm sorry I got you in this,” he said mournfully. “I didn't know it would go so bad.”

A chink of blue showed through the roof and it was all he could do to keep from looking at it. Like the bright eye at the far top of a deep well. One more horror was all he needed.

“Can you nod or shake your head?” Her head barely moved. She made a series of tortured noises and he guessed the duct tape was caught in her hair and made it painful to move. “Did they hurt you? Make one noise for yes, or two for no.”

She made a kind of groan from deep in her throat. She clearly made it twice.

“Did they grab you last night when I dropped you off?”

Yes.

“You came straight here?”

Yes. Tears were now running down her cheeks.

“Did they ask you anything?”

No.

“Did they try to get you to do anything?”

No.

“They just tied you up and left you?”

Yes.

“Has anyone looked in this shack at all since then?”