The Concrete River (21 page)

A kind of unease invested the things around him, as if they'd become other than what they were. The steering wheel might suddenly reveal that it had been a snake all along and writhe away. The tall industrial fireplug looked unfamiliar and threatening. Had it been there when he went into the bar? It wasn't fog at all; it was a strange fear etching his vision, like a fine rain of acid frosting a pane of glass.

A legless man went past on a skateboard, paddling the ground urgently with thick leather staves in his hands, then fading into the mist just as a Coke can flew after him, struck the sidewalk and clattered. An old woman limped after him on an aluminum walker, shaking her fist.

It was time. He reached for the ignition key but cause-and-effect seemed to have gone out of the world. The car lurched away from the curb without ever seeming to start. He passed the legless man, bent forward to flail along faster. Everyone had a mission, Jack Liffey thought.

The carnival site dropped behind, and then he was crossing the concrete river once again, water still running in the central channel. Just upriver a weir dammed the flow shallowly to the full width of the channel, twigs and detritus jutting up over the weir to froth the overflow. Down below, oil-scummed pools lay marooned on the dry flats, and isolated rags of mist hovered over the water. He saw gang tags along the concrete banks but no C60L.

The chain link gate into the dairy yard was open, and in the distance he could see the BMW at the office. He parked diagonally across the gate. Mud sucked at his shoes as he limped across the wasteland. Half way was the slab of a vast foundation and a heap of rotting timbers from whatever the structure had been. Remarkably, it still smelled like cow shit, marinating in the damp.

The fog gathered around him and then shimmered all of a sudden, the air turning strangely molten. Space twittered like aspen leaves. His heart pounded and he whirled around as something grazed his cheek. There was a hiss from the flickering nimbus that surrounded him, a faint close seething like a boiling pot. He reeled back and every atom of his intelligence strained to figure out what was happening. He waved an arm into the aura and felt tickles against his hand, furry bursts of contact. Something nipped at his forehead and he ducked.

Then he saw it plastered to his hand—a termite with iridescent wings. He laughed in relief. He could make them out now, wheeling around, orbiting and milling. He saw an opalescent snow of molted wings at his feet and then he noticed the snow writhing as the wingless bodies crawled across the drifts on their epic trek toward decaying wood.

Circus freaks and legless men and termite clouds and murder—life had taken a strange turn. He brushed irritably at the swarm and stepped out into still air, reestablishing a small sphere of normality. No one had come out of the office, and he saw that he still had the element of surprise.

He winced as his ankle twisted suddenly on uneven ground. The tenderness would be with him for at least a month. He concentrated on the ache to keep his mind from reeling away on other errands.

He slid two sandwich baggies onto his hands and took out the little square Dreyse submariner's pistol, manufactured for the Great War, before wars became so common that they started numbering them. He pulled the magazine out. A
magazine
!, the Basic instructor from his own war had bellowed in his ear, Never never a clip! A pistol—never never a gun! He counted rounds, and then checked the chamber. He had three shots. The Ballester-Molina wouldn't have worked, because when that ran out, the whole world knew it. Like any Browning action, the receiver stayed back after the last shot, exposing the barrel so you could swap a fresh magazine in and let the receiver snap home to chamber the first round, all in one fluid motion.

He stopped at the office door, but he couldn't hear anything inside. He turned the knob very slowly, just in case they'd locked themselves in, but he felt the mechanism give all the way. He wondered where they would be in the room. Breathe, exhale, pistol up, and he swung the door hard and felt it crash into something that gave.

“Ow! Goddam!”

Al Squinty Butera turned, rubbing his shoulder, and his eyes fastened on the little pistol. One hand twitched, as if wishing to go for his own weapon, but Jack Liffey could see the whole rig of the shoulder holster hanging off a straight chair across the room.

Bobby Snakeskin O'Connor sat at the desk, doing something Jack Liffey hadn't seen in twenty years. A lid of grass was spread across the black linoleum top of the desk and he was picking out seeds and stems. A tiny joint was going between his knuckles, and the room reeked of dope. When O'Connor recognized the visitor, his jaw dropped comically for an instant before his face hardened up into calculation.

“Over there, Squinty,” Jack Liffey said. He wanted them both in a small arc of fire. “Knock knock.”

O'Connor settled back and took a hit off his joint to demonstrate his cool.

“Let's get all four of our hands flat on the table.”

He couldn't find the cowboy hat anywhere. It seemed to matter for some reason. Butera shuffled behind the desk, wiped a space clean of marijuana shreds and leaned forward on his palms.

“Don't go hairy-ass apeshit,” Bobby O'Connor said, in a throat voice, holding his breath with the smoke. “We can talk this over.” O'Connor was eyeing the plastic bags on Jack Liffey's hands and he wasn't liking them.

So far, Jack Liffey thought, it had been a nicely structured thirty seconds or so and he didn't feel like pushing anything quite yet.

“What makes you think we have anything to talk about?”

“Cause we got friends with balls the size of a Buick.”

“That's exactly the problem,” Jack Liffey said. “You guys are part-time help, but there's always the first string. I've got to find a way to get back up the food chain and convince somebody I'm out of it.”

“We could promise to pass the news on,” Bobby O'Connor said. “You ain't going to be able to cut the deck any deeper.”

It was Butera who was the question mark. Jack Liffey had to know more about him. And the whole thing was complicated by the way Butera had manhandled Eleanor Ong, it made revenge a wild card that he had to fight against.

“We're gonna play a little You Bet Your Life,” Jack Liffey said. “Squinty first. Pay attention. Groucho never played it this way, and there's no fuckin’ bird with twenty-five dollars gonna drop down. Whether you live or die depends on your answer to one question. Ready? A woman gets in her Volvo and drives from Boston to Philadelphia at forty miles an hour. Then she turns around and drives back at fifty miles an hour. What's her average speed?”

“What the
shit
is this?” It was Bobby O'Connor, rising up out of his chair. “You're plumb loco.”

Jack Liffey brought the pistol up and aimed it at the Cowboy's left eye, the good one, he was sure now. O'Connor puffed once and then subsided.

“Come on, Squinty. I think you heard all the elements. This is the Big S.A.T. You pass and you get another thirty years to live.”

Al Butera lifted his head. “Forty-five miles an hour, the average speed is forty-five.”

Jack Liffey nodded. “Not bad. Not
right
, but not bad for a guy makes his living the way you do.”

“Bullshit!”

“Can you correct him, Snakeskin?”

O'Connor just glared.

“It's a trick question, fellas. You don't have enough information. You see, when she's doing forty from Boston to Philadelphia it takes her longer to make the trip than when she's going back at fifty. So she drives a little longer at forty than at fifty and her average speed is gonna be under forty-five. But I give you a B plus. You got the basic concept of average.”

Jack Liffey turned to Bobby O'Connor, whose face was hardening up again. “Where's your hat, Snakeskin?”

“None of your beeswax.”

“If that'd been the question, you'd've just flunked, wouldn't you?”

Jack Liffey was astonished that he was carrying it off. Something inside him was running on freewheeling.

“Here's your Groucho question, Snakeskin. Boston and Philadelphia—if they can be in two places at once, how come you can't be in two places at once?”

“Fuck you.”

Jack Liffey uttered a honk. “
Wrong
. You should never have messed with me, or the woman.” For some reason he wouldn't use her name in their presence, it would have been like sullying her. “You could have done your job without messing with us.”

The Cowboy's good eye was getting skittish. “Hey, man, I never got a clean shot here.”

“Sure you do,” Jack Liffey said, even noticing the pun, and he shot the Cowboy three times. The first was in the head and messy, causing a blood-curdling shriek that rang up through the flat hard planes of the room. The next shot may have been in the head, too, because it cut off the noise. The third probably missed entirely as he was collapsing like a sack.

Al Butera had backed away to the wall. He was looking longingly at his shoulder holster.

“Don't think about anything but me and staying alive,” Jack Liffey said. He found he was breathing far too fast and he tried to slow himself down. Light swam through the room, and a moment of dizziness came and went.

“Jesus, you just shot him down like a dog. Jesus.”

“I chose you because I think you're smart enough to bring this off, but not so smart you feel you have to outwit me. Here.”

Jack Liffey lobbed the Dreyse at Al Butera and the man, startled, caught it in both hands. He fumbled it around and found out right away it was empty. By that time, Jack Liffey had his .45 out.

“You see what I mean. Now you've got your prints all over it. You got a family, kids? Put the pistol on the table.
Do it now
.”

“I got no family no more.” He leaned in to set the pistol down gingerly, his eyes radaring around to get a glimpse of the Cowboy on the far side. “
Jesus
.”

“I'm gonna cut you loose.” Jack Liffey fought a drowsiness that threatened to knock him right off his feet. “Just give me your full attention. Forget your pal, forget your gun, forget what
you
want. This is a mess, but together we're gonna get over. Where you from?”

“Huh?”

Jack Liffey picked up the Dreyse with his baggie and slipped it into his pocket. “Where were you born?”

“Vegas.”

“I didn't think anybody was born there. I thought Vegas was a place people went.”

“My dad was in security.”

“You mean skimming.”

“I don't know nothing about that.”

“I think maybe I saved the right guy. Now, listen up. You're gonna go back to the guy you work for and convince him I'm out of it. I don't care how you do it. You can say you had some trouble with a guy but he's sleeping in the river. Whatever. I'm out of it, my friends are out of it. We'll never hear from each other again.”

Al Butera just stared back heavily, squinching his eyes regularly.

“Because if anything happens to me or my friends, anything at all, this gun is going to the police with a big tag on it saying, I belong to Al Squinty Butera of Las Vegas. And your prints are all over it.”

“Man, this is tough.”

“It's a lot better odds than you gave me.”

He scowled down at his hands. “I don't know what to tell them.”

“You've got a better sense of the big picture than me. You know who's in charge, you know what it's all about. Believe it or not, I haven't got a clue and I don't want to know. Your pals can't help you out of this one because your pals don't know where this gun is going to be. This is between you and me, not you and me and Vegas. You're on your own. You know, that's what America's all about, Squinty. Rugged individualism.”

Jack Liffey was getting tired of sounding like he was on top of things. It took a lot of effort and he was getting sleepier and sleepier.

“Don't make me think I'd be better off canceling your ticket, too. It's still a possibility.”

Al Butera raised both palms. “I'll think of something.”

“Good. Now you can walk out into the middle of the field there. You come back when I'm gone and do whatever you feel you have to. You can even dump your pal down the same hole where you put me for all I care. He'll turn up one way or another. Beat it now.”

Al Butera didn't even look back. He waddled heavily down the two steps and then walked out into the desolate mudflat.

“Count two hundred steps,” Jack Liffey called. “Then you can stop.”

He looked over the office quickly but there was nothing of him there. Around the corner of the desk, he saw a motionless gray hand, cupped toward the ceiling. There was a dark pool that looked like chocolate pudding gelling up. Okay, Bobby O'Connor, he thought. You're the guy who killed Consuela Beltran, and God knows who else. The courts do not have a monopoly of justice.

For some reason he felt a wrenching nausea, as if he'd just betrayed someone he loved. Outside, Al Butera was a tiny figure in the wastes, still walking, and Jack Liffey headed for his car.

A rolling mop cart was on the landing outside his office, where it shouldn't have been, and it gave him a chill. He stared at it from down below for a while and then hobbled up the steps anyway. By all rights, he'd used up his share of surprises.

From the dairy, he'd gone straight to the big mail terminal at Florence and Central, where the Goodyear plant had once stood, and mailed the Dreyse to Art Castro's private box. He'd run the car through a car wash on general principles—it was good to get anything at all clean—and then he'd parked on the far edge of a supermarket lot and slept fitfully for fifteen minutes. Now he felt just as bad, but he wasn't as sleepy. The three bullets had kicked something loose in his psyche. In fact he felt so bad it gave him a curious sense of invulnerability—the feeling that he was so far gone now he didn't give a damn. It was a dangerous way to be, but he didn't know what to do about it.

“You shouldn't be doing this, Marlena.”

“Somebody got to give a hand.”

She'd transported the litter of papers from the floor into irregular piles on the desk and credenza, and she was mopping down the scarred green linoleum.