The Concrete River (20 page)

“That's a good question. I think the first mistake you made was getting involved with no way of covering your butt. The second mistake was making the first mistake. Do you know something that can hurt them?”

Jack Liffey just stared back, watching the FBI man trying not to fidget with the coffee cup.

“It doesn't really matter. What matters is whether they
think
you can hurt them. If they do, you've got a real problem. Maybe not the kind of problem you'd have if they was Columbians. Those guys would level Culver City to get you, they'd strap an A-bomb to your newsboy. These guys are rational, but they don't give up.”

“What are you offering me? Witness protection?”

“I think it could be arranged, if you know something that could put these two and a couple more like them behind bars.”

“Live in Dubuque. Call myself Joe Schmo.” After all, he thought, what did he have left to hold him? Kathy wouldn't even let him talk to Maeve on the phone. He certainly didn't have much of a job. He had a tiny condo with a ridiculous forty-year mortgage that, after the L.A. real estate collapse, was worth a lot less than he owed on it. He had a fifteen-year-old car that wouldn't get him as far as the suburbs. Eleanor might even be willing to move with him.

Still, his identity inhabited a certain space in the world. How could he let someone chase him out of it? He'd spend the rest of his life in a made-up space. He grimaced. It was not one of his options.

“I like my name. Sorry.”

The FBI man finally set the cup down on the floor. He spread his arms wide as if appealing to a whole congregation of Jack Liffey's personalities.

“What's a name? Pick another river. Ireland's got plenty of them. Has this city been so great to you, you want to die prematurely here?”

“It's got its moments.”

He'd lived with generalized anxiety for a long time, riding it up and down hill with his moods, he'd even got about as used to it as you ever could. This might not be much worse if he worked it right.

“You're gonna be in some heavy-duty shit, you know. Even if we bust Snakeskin and Squinty for something else. Their boss is gonna want a clear field.”

“You couldn't tell me his name? Just an initial? I could guess and you could whinny when I get close.”

“Names wouldn't do you any good.” He stood up. “I can tell when a guy's got his mind made up. I'll stop back by if their aim is off the first time, make sure you're still plugged into the breathing machine at County. Might change your mind. Who knows, you might get lucky.”

“I'm counting on it.”

*

There was a big sign on the reception wall, the kind with the background etched away to leave raised letters: ‘Assets Located. Bodyguards. Child Custody. Debugging. Embezzlement. Executive Protection.’ It went on an on for four columns, through ‘Inventory shortages’ and ‘Mergers, Acquisitions’ and ‘Questionable Documents’ to ‘And Most Other Matters’.

“Can I help you?”

“I'm here about Most Other Matters,” Jack Liffey said to the woman, whose blue eyes were already narrowing. He seemed to be passing through a manic phase. She wore a conservative green dress and her hair was punished back into a tight hairdo that looked as if it had been yanked down by a roto-tiller. This had to be Ellen.

“Art Castro is expecting me.”

“You'd be Jack Liffey,” she said.

A tiny scrupulous voice echoed inside him that he should really only challenge the powerful, but gatekeepers had always annoyed him out of proportion. Their usurpations and assumptions.

“I would be, if everything worked.” He looked down at his ankles. “I'm running about half a Liffey.”

“Please have a seat.”

He sat and thumbed through a month-old
Sports Illustrated
. There was nothing else. A nineteen-year-old seven-footer brought in from Italy was having trouble getting used to Salt Lake City. Some petite swimmer was making sure her nipples showed through the spandex. A washed-up quarterback was opening a cattle ranch in Wyoming. It was like reading random messages from another universe.

“Jack, come on back.”

Art Castro leaned into the waiting area, the tidy mustache looking painted on his round face. Jack Liffey followed him down the corridor.

“Did she announce me?”

“No. It's one of her penalties. She would have, sooner or later.”

“Remind me to stay on her good side.”

Art Castro laughed softly. “She keeps out the riff-raff.”

“So you only work for people who don't need you. It's a concept.”

In the office, a tiny chihuahua was vibrating and panting in the center of the rug.

“Good grief.”

Art Castro frowned. “Calm down, Pedro. My aunt asked me to pick him up from the vet's.”

At least it wasn't named for a Cuban revolutionary. Jack Liffey sat in a hard chair near the desk, and the dog took an immediate liking to his scuffed shoe, licking and sniffling at it.

“They're wound too tight,” Art Castro said.

“I wonder what they were bred for? What could they possibly do?”

“The variety within the dog species is unique among mammals,” Art Castro said pedantically. Now and then he liked to remind you he had a college degree. “What this one is good for you'll have to ask a mesolithic man from the Sonoran Desert. Or my mesolithic Aunt Cecilia.”

Jack Liffey kept thinking of the scene from Tolstoy where the overbearing countess snatched the cigar from the general's mouth and tossed it out the window of the moving train, and without missing a beat the general snatched her lapdog and sent it after the cigar.

The dog crooned and began fucking Jack Liffey's foot.

“Hold on, there, pal.”

Art Castro sighed and scooped it up, then set it down on top of a filing cabinet. The dog went rigid with its forelegs stiff, gnarring rhythmically like a cicada.

They talked politely for a while about the smog, about the decline in property values, and the tendency of people to hide away in their own gated neighborhoods.

“There won't be any public land left. We already haven't got any parks. This city is shameful on parks.”

“We've got beaches.”

“
You
got beaches. Browns and blacks are marooned inland.”

“Maybe the Big One will come along and move the shoreline inland a few miles.”

The dog mewled and started snapping its tiny jaws.

“What can I do for you?” Art Castro said finally.

“I want to send you a package to hold. It's the usual kamikaze sort of rules. I don't want you to open it unless something tragic happens to me, then you'll find instructions on what to do inside.”

Art Castro cocked his head, without replying. He looked around at the dog, which had gone quiet again, then back at his hands which he opened in front of him as if inspecting whether they were holding anything.

“You sound like you're in trouble.”

“I can't tell you the what-fors, Art. I need this. I'm sorry.”

“I've never known this sort of thing to do much good, but you call the shots.”

“How do I keep your secretary from opening it when the postman drops it off?”

He rubbed one eye. “Well, if you write
Private and Confidential
on it, you can pretty well bet she'll open it.” He dug in his desk and finally came up with a card. “Send it here.”

The card simply said AC Enterprises and had a P.O. box in Bell Gardens. “It's a front I keep.”

Jack Liffey memorized the number and the zip and handed the card back. “Thanks.”

“You're giving me the bads. Can't I help?”

“I don't think you want to get involved. I'm hoping this is a way out, not a way in deeper. Okay?”

“Don't worry about sounding innocent on my account. I know you're not one of the bad guys.”

There was a tiny sound of water and Art Castro glanced around. Dog pee dripped over the edge of the filing cabinet and the smell was remarkably strong all of a sudden, like opening an old box you found in the back garden.

“Shit.”

“I've got to go.”

“Abandon me in my hour of trial.” He shook Jack Liffey's hand. “You're a great kidder, Jack. I hope this works out.”

*

It was a seedy-looking bar, driven to outlandishness by the sideshow crowd who'd spilled in from a carny site nearby. A midget with a big head was perched precariously on a bar stool, talking to a man who was over six feet tall and couldn't have broken a hundred pounds. He looked as if he'd been assembled out of a dozen No. 2 pencils.

The midget waved flamboyantly. “So the Devil goes, ‘You got to give up your soul at the end,’ and the lawyer goes, ‘Sure, no problem, man, but I don't get it, what's the catch?’”

The skinny man threw his head back and laughed in a rapid staccato that reminded Jack Liffey of the chihuahua.

“Could I get a beer? Whatever's on tap.”

Ten minutes earlier, nobody had been at the old dairy, just tire marks in the mud, but it didn't have the look of a place that had been cleared out. On the way there he'd seen the carnival tents going up, and the activity drew him back, like good dense cover for a duck shoot. Berkov's Fun-o-Rama, the trailers and trucks had said in garish reds and golds. He was careful not to let any of the guns show.

“How did the great DiMaggio do today?” somebody cried out in a terrible Cuban accent.

“Honey, I'm home. And you gotta lot a’ ‘splainin’ to do.”

An overweight bartender waggled his eyebrows a few times as he set a waspwaist beer glass in front of Jack Liffey. “You wanta run a tab?”

“Sure. You know anything about the old dairy down on Gleason?”

“We don't serve a lot of milk.”

“Water either, I bet,” the pencil man butted in. “You know why W.C. Fields never drank water?”

The midget giggled. “No, why did W.C. Fields never drank water?”

“Because, sez Mr. Fields, fish fuck in it.”

They both thought that was uproarious. Jack Liffey had heard it, but smiled politely. “I just wonder how long the dairy's been vacant.”

“Long as I can remember,” the bartender said. “You got a reason to ask?”

“I know somebody looking for land around here. Know who owns it now?”

“Who knows? Probably the Arabs.”

“I see somebody in a BMW coming and going. Must be planning to do something with the land.”

“Are you a cop?” A little wave of stillness spread outward from the bar, heads cocked for the reply.

“Nah, I'm an insurance agent. You know, it's amazing how many people don't know the advantages of term insurance. I'll bet you're seriously underinsured on your accident and personal liability. You take your average person, now, they haven't even got a private supplement for disability.” That was dull enough to turn the buzz loose again. Even the pencil man sitting next to him lost interest.

The bartender remembered something that needed his attention down the bar. There was nothing any of them knew that would help him. He knew what he had to do, and he only needed to prepare himself. They said scared money never wins, but he was betting on it. You couldn't rely on courage. Sooner or later everyone failed in courage. All you could rely on was worrying things to death.

“Buy us a drink?” the pencil man said.

“What's yours?”

“Cognac.”

It was beer glasses in front of the midget and the pencil man, but Jack Liffey shrugged. “Two cognacs,” he called along the bar. It was bad karma to make new enemies now. There were a dozen other people drinking in the room, a pair of bearded twins with heads a size too small, a big woman with breasts bobbling under a lacy shirt, and a lot of fairly normal looking men with tattoos.

“You
is
a cop, ain't you?” the pencil man insisted. “Insurance is just blowin’ smoke up our ass.”

“Nope.”

“I can smell ‘em.”

“How come you're not helping set up the tents?”

”We're talent. Talent don't get paid to sweat. You know why I don't like cops?”

“You don't need a reason. Nobody likes cops.”

He drew himself up to a kind of dignity. “Cops're all trained to see evil and so that's all they see. It's like doctors, they just see disease everywhere. I happen to believe people are inherently good inside.”

The midget guffawed. “Nietsche was wrong. It's the devil who's dead.”

The bartender brought snifters of cognac and the pencil man nodded his thanks. The midget bent forward, kneeling on the stool, to inhale the aroma over the snifter, and he broke into a wide grin as if reminded of something rapturous in his youth.

“Can I get a marshmallow? I always drink cognac with a marshmallow.” No one paid him any attention.

“You know, I ain't bulimic,” the pencil man insisted. “You might think it, but I ain't. It's just metabolism and will power. Now, Jane Fonda was bulimic. And look where it got her.”

“If I can't have a marshmallow, I want a little parasol. Hey, proprietor, I want a little bumbershoot in my drink.”

They were too self-consciously exotic to hold his attention any longer. He left some money and walked out into a startling new mist just as a black BMW with smoked windows was disappearing toward the dairy.

Time to rock and roll, he thought.

A fog was creeping in, flowing half way up the telephone poles and slicing itself to ribbons. It cushioned the sky and hushed the streets, an eerie dirty fog that you didn't see often in L.A. In his childhood he'd walked downhill to school into fogs like this, thick ones up from the harbor where the foghorns bayed forlornly, and his legs had disappeared into it first, then the rest of him would be sucked down into the prickly damp.

The warehouse along the road was a colorless shape through the mists. Even the carnival tents were draining of color, and the big eighteen-wheelers that had looked so garish.

Inside he was full of turmoil, tense and confused and blank as if he had forgotten who he was. Then he focused and the outside world didn't matter at all. He felt the angular object in his jacket pocket, the other one uncomfortable in the small of his back. He'd expected anger, but mostly he was just impatient to get it over.