City of Strangers (19 page)

He couldn't even save himself, Jack Liffey thought. “I came here to ask you to call this guy off me, but I guess that's not very realistic.” Jack Liffey thought about it again, went all around it, but came up with nothing new. “I found the girl, too,” he said. “But she's skedaddled with what's left of the money, so I wouldn't make any big plans for that.”

He shrugged. “It hardly matters. Now that Miramón's doubled the stakes, giving back the original amount wouldn't be much use.”

A rhythmic banging started up in the covered cage, as if the parrot were hammering its head against the bars. Bayat glared at the cage as if considering some sudden and terminal fate for the bird. Jack Liffey tried to stay very still deep inside himself, tried to tune himself into Bayat to see if he could tell if the man was running some game on him, but his host seemed genuinely stricken by his predicament.

They both felt the tremor in the slab floor. A light fixture on a cord began to sway gently. Their eyes met. “Earthquake,” Bayat said. It was quite mild or far away, and there was no sequel. “I wonder if that's what was disturbing the bird. They say animals can sense them coming.”

“
I
can sense them coming,” Jack Liffey said. “But it doesn't do me any good, because they're always coming.”

The turn indicator stalk snapped off in his hand and he stabbed at its hole in a brief flurry of panic, trying to reroot it, and then he just rolled the window down and stuck his hand out the window, still holding the stalk, to signal his turn into the veterinarian's.

Rolling Wrecks had rented him the old Chevette at a ridiculously low rate. The odometer had died long ago, along with most of the gauges, and a lot of the plastic interior trim was hanging loose or missing. The plastic seat had given up one layer of its color in patches. Just sitting in the car, you could feel the dejection and contempt of everyone involved in its manufacture. The executives had wanted to make something with more profit, the engineers with more pizzazz, and the line workers had all wanted to be home in bed with their hangovers.

“He's accomplished a complete recovery, Mr. Liffey.” The cheerful assistant vet bobbed up from the counter and plucked a key off a rack. She led him outside to where dozens of dogs in separate runs started to go mad to get his attention. “But he hasn't been happy here. He's not an enclosure sort of dog, is he?”

“Loco's not any sort of dog. He's basically a coyote.”

When she pulled the gate open and dragged out the semirigid animal, Loco growled and snapped at her for a moment and then its yellow eyes found Jack Liffey and it went catatonic with wrath. The beast had reverted to those flat wild eyes that he'd known so well when they'd first been hobbled to one another.

“Sorry, boy. But
you
went and ate the poisoned steak. Let that be a lesson to you. Be more discriminating.”

“It was probably Thorazine. It's one of the easiest heavy tranks to get your hands on.”

Jack Liffey shook his head sadly. “He took it from a complete stranger, as far as I know. In most moods, he won't even take ground sirloin from me.” He stooped to hug the reluctant dog and felt a tremble in its flanks. “Loco, I'm sorry. I recognize the terrible irony for you. You were just beginning to get over the call of the wild and become a pet. I had hopes you might learn to fetch my slippers.”

On the way home, the dog lay in the rear seat with its shivering back turned away. Jack Liffey talked to the dog gently and sadly the whole way, recounting his adventures in Mexico, though leaving out any mention of the poor Chihuahua and cat. The front door of his condo released a musty breath of neglected garbage, and the dog broke away from him and scurried straight to its old hidey-hole in the rearmost closet.

There were two calls on his machine:

“Daddy, I'm sooo sorry. Really I am. We need to discuss how I can worm my way back into your good graces. Please call me, please, please. I'll never ever be a pest again. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

That wouldn't be too hard to deal with, he thought, his spirit lifting a little. The machine announced a wildly inaccurate time and date, and then squawked forward to the next caller.

“Jack, this is Arturo. Our friend down south tells me you're lucky to have got home alive and with most of your organs still functioning. J. is okay for now, but Miramón's homies are on the warpath and tearing a wide swath through Ensenada, trying to pick up any trace of the girl. Apparently she got away clean. He says he can't touch your car right now, but maybe soon, if nobody drives it off and strips it. Something big is going to go down in the cartels—he can sense it, he says, like elephants rumbling off in the jungle. Don't call me, I'll call you, hey. Tomorrow I think I move back upstairs.”

Jack Liffey went and got his hollowed-out
Oxford Companion to American Literature.
It felt curiously animate as he lifted it and the heavy .45 shifted inside. He set it on the end table for comfort, like Farshad Bayat with his Browning. He settled back into his favorite chair, losing a little more of its stuffing every time it flexed, and he tried to will himself to stillness. The building creaked a little; a toilet flushed somewhere. Alcohol would be good about now, but he had enough will left to resist that, and besides there was none in the house.

He chanced a peek under the bandage on the back of his hand and winced. The burn ached in a dull, persistent way now, and the flesh was veined and multicolored, disgusting looking, like some kind of deep-sea sponge. It would probably need to be debrided, the strange word that the burn wards used for sadistically ripping off your old flesh, and it would probably stay a real mess of scarring unless he had skin grafts, to join his growing collection of detective-business wounds like the metal plate in his head and the star-shaped bullet wound in his left shoulder. Sooner or later, he could join a sideshow as Mr. Scar, Eighth Wonder of the Medical World.

He tried again to make himself relax. In a sense, the job was over now, he told himself. When Auslander finally calmed down, he might even pay a bonus for finding out that Rebecca was alive. He'd found the Bayat boy, too—but, really, he'd failed to close out either case. He hadn't brought either of the kids home. That was part of the simmer that kept everything from settling down into a kind of end-of-job quiescence. That and the fact that the Miramón drug cartel was still very much on the rampage. And something was still afoot with Fariborz and his conscience-driven fervor. Then there were his own problems underlying it all like quicksand, especially that particularly humiliating one with Aneliese.

Far too many loose ends, too many anxieties, like sores on the roof of his mouth that his tongue couldn't stay away from. Probably just the nature of things, he thought. You could never really close anything out. All you could do was tweak one strand running through the complex skein of billions of strands and pluck it a little and hope at point B down the line, things would be a bit more satisfactory for that strand.

It was probably something like megalomania to think you could do more than that, he decided. Life was just plain untidy. He did his best not to think about his dysfunctional libido—a euphemism, obviously—but it was hard to avoid. He wondered if he'd just finally got so lost in the immensity of things that he was unmanned by his own insignificance. He was sure it had never happened to Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. He touched the spine of the fat gun-laden book for subconscious comfort. That other penis.

Loco wandered out and lay across his feet. In Jack Liffey's current state, the dog's affection touched him so deeply, it almost brought tears to his eyes. The dog began to snore, breaths grating in and out. Here was a beast as worried about life as he was, he thought, just as consumed by his otherness, yet so desperately lonely that he would violate his own coyote species-being and cozy up to the Great Betrayer.

The awful-sounding doorbell shrilled abruptly at him. Loco didn't even stir. Complete moral exhaustion, he thought. He got up and peered out the fish-eye to see the natty FBI man—what was his name? Devil at the crossroads. Robert Johnson. The man was standing well back from the door, probably some procedural training to avoid being dragged unexpectedly into the deep shit, and in his right hand he carried a large black boom box by its flip-up handle, as if he'd just taken it off the kids who hang out in the complex.

Jack Liffey opened the door.

“Mr. Liffey.”

“Mr. Johnson. Here to show me your blues style?”

The FBI man moved forward without invitation, and Jack Liffey backed away ahead of his bow wave to let him in. They sat exactly where they had sat before, and the FBI man placed the boom box gently on the low coffee table. This time there were no kids bobbing up and down at the patio fence.

“Surely my daughter hasn't been sending ripples through your equilibrium again?” Jack Liffey said, still hearing her voice on the phone with its forlorn promise to be good.

“Perhaps
you
have. ‘Ripple' would understate it some.”

“Uh-oh.”

“We share information from time to time with Immigration and Naturalization and with the Border Patrol. They believe but cannot prove that you and a young Persian-American crossed the border illegally from Tijuana two nights ago.”

“We're both citizens. I shouldn't think that was illegal.”

The FBI man squinted at him a bit. “It's illegal, all right, but we don't need to get into that right now. All things being equal, we're not really interested in you at all. We'd like to talk to the boy, if he's who we think he is.”

“He disappeared on me. Maybe I'd better tell you the whole story.” His eye went to the black plastic boom box, and he couldn't help wondering what it was for. The brand name was Sonovox—one of those tech-sounding names they churned interchangeably out of Chinese factories. Was the man going to play him some incriminating tape recording? Surely the FBI had higher-class pocket recorders for that, mini-Uhers or DATs.

“Maybe you'd better tell me.”

He told the man pretty much the whole tale of his misbegotten adventures in Mexico. The only place where he got a bit coy was in whether or not Farshad Bayat knew in advance there had been drugs in the ROX. For some reason Jack Liffey started feeling a throb in his neck, as if his heart had climbed up there and begun banging away for escape.

“Where do you think the boy has run to?”

“He's a good kid,” Jack Liffey insisted. “Really. He got a bit wrong-footed, but he's the son we'd all like to have. Earnest and trying very hard to do the right thing.”

“Uh-huh. But the question is, where is he trying to do the right thing at the moment?”

Loco stirred awake and glanced up and almost did a double take when he saw the FBI man. There was a little vestigial growl in the back of the dog's throat, but weariness took over again, and he flopped back onto Jack Liffey's feet.

“I don't know. I have a hunch he's trying to foil some plan that's started to embarrass him. Probably something to do with his schoolmates. I have another hunch it also has to do with that thing there on the table. Would I be within hailing distance?”

The FBI man made a face. “My colleagues tend to call that a ghetto blaster, unless they get to thinking report-wise and politically correct, and then they use expressions like ‘portable stereophonic cassette tape player.' Actually, some of the older agents in the office call it a nigger-blaster when I'm not around. But they know I'd squash them like a bug if I heard it. I don't know why I'm telling you all this, but my wife is an African-American, Mr. Liffey. A wonderful woman, and we have two fine children who the world also considers African-Americans. I want you to realize that the Bureau has changed a lot since the benighted days of Mr. Hoover.”

“Got any gay agents?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Not to my knowledge. But to get back to your question. …” He seemed to have a big conversational hump to get himself over, for some reason. “What do you know about plutonium?”

Jack Liffey felt a chill on his spine. “It's bad news. The Nagasaki bomb. Breeder reactors. Cancer.”

He nodded. “It's a heavy metal. We don't use it much in reactors in this country, except mixed with uranium oxide, but it's nowhere near as dangerous as most people think. Unlike radium and some other radioactive materials, it's not a gamma-ray emitter. It emits only simple alpha rays—unless you have enough mass for it to go critical, of course, and then it blows up your city. But in smaller amounts, a piece of paper will stop all the radiation it gives off. The only real way it's dangerous is if you breathe it in a powder form. …” He shrugged.

“Like Karen Silkwood.”

The agent didn't acknowledge the name, but Jack Liffey knew it was widely suspected that Kerr-McGee had purposely contaminated her several times for being a whistle-blower about lax safety at their plant before eventually having her car run off the road to kill her. The film had starred Meryl Streep, if he remembered right. Not that any of that mattered.

“Inhale about half a gram, and it'll kill you quick,” he said in a flat voice. “But that's far less lethal than a lot of other substances. Arsenic, for instance. Twenty milligrams of inhaled plutonium will kill you in a month. Anything less and you're just upping the statistics for getting cancer one of these days.”

He paused for a moment to let Jack Liffey think it over.

“Take a good look at that boom box.”

Jack Liffey extracted his feet from under the contented dog and got up to look closer at the tape player. He touched the CD lid and instead of the lid coming open, a much bigger section of the top popped up. It was cleverly done along the seams of the plastic case. There was a fat white paper bag about the size of a half brick under the lid.

“That's not? …” he said.

The FBI man shook his head. “Ordinary Globe A-1 wheat flour. There used to be a little C-4 explosive under it, just enough to scatter the flour into the wind. We're pretty sure this was a test device, for what the press is calling these days a ‘dirty bomb.' You use a tiny bit of explosive to spread around something nasty. Plutonium-oxide powder is heavy—twice as heavy as lead—and that compartment would hold maybe two thousand grams.”

“Are there more of these?”

“We think we've seized all the prepared tape players save one, and we also seized a map that locates many of the synagogues in the L.A. area. There's a cell of fundamentalist Islamic fanatics, mostly Sudanis and Algerians, who were apparently going to set these little dirty bombs off indoors on the Sabbath. They were meant to kill as many Jews as possible, and make it necessary to close down the synagogues for quite some time.”

“Where the hell did they get plutonium?”

The FBI agent shrugged, but not really as if he didn't know. He just wasn't going to talk about it. Jack Liffey stared in horror at the bag of flour. Robert Johnson leaned forward and flicked the little switch that turned the radio on, and a jazz station started playing softly, ominously.