City of Strangers (24 page)

“Hello,” a boy answered.

“Billy, this is Jack. Can I speak to your mom?”

“Ma! It's Jack Liffey! We saw you on TV!”

That set him back a little. The local news must have had something on him.

“Jack!” she said breathlessly, and he could instantly picture the fullness of her, the eyes that wanted so much to burst out of her and
help.
“Are you okay? Billy called me in last night to see something about you on the TV, but there was nothing in the paper.”

“Nothing serious, just banged up. Aneliese, hold on, let me speak.” And say what?
Let's be friends.
Jesus, how could you do this and not sound like a soap opera? “I've really loved knowing you. Really.”

Mickey was grinning like an idiot at him. I'll strangle you, you stupid plastic hunk of sentimentality, he thought. He could tell from her breathing that she knew where he was going. How could she
not
know? People had plenty of radar tuned up for this stuff. “We both know our bodies were trying to tell us something, or mine was. It just wasn't working—I don't know why. You're a great woman; it's not personal. I didn't plan it to happen, but I met somebody else.”

After a few moments of silence, he heard her make some sort of indecipherable sound. These British types were pretty held-back, he thought. He was hoping for that. “And your body worked fine with her, did it?” she asked, with a tiny edge.

“Yes. Could we still be friendly, or is that excluded now?”

Then she said something that really threw him, not what he expected at all. “Jack, you're a living, fucking treasure-trove of neuroses.” She laughed, maybe half-genuinely. “It's all right, really it is. Call me when everything settles down for you, but not before.”

“I will. Honestly. I'd like to. …” But she had hung up, and he wondered just how angry she really was. She hadn't quite kept her composure, but she hadn't started screaming at him, either.

Mickey was still grinning idiotically, but Jack Liffey's eyes were looking right through the big mouse, focused much farther away, as if hoping that somewhere out there, just out of sight maybe, there was some spartan and fundamental truth to be discovered that could settle the human condition in such a way that he would never again have to make a phone call like that.

He was overjoyed after lunch the next day when the nurse announced that Maeve and Fariborz were going to be allowed in to see him. Maeve first peeked in and then came straight to the bed and put both hands on his arm under the sheet. “Daddy, we were so scared about you.”

She had saved his life once before and still he didn't quite know how to express his gratitude. “If you keep disobeying me to save my life, I'm going to have to rethink the whole question of paternal authority.”

“I don't know how adventurous I am anymore,” she said, the line above her eyes crinkling up. “Fari told me what those guys were trying to do, and it gives me the creeps. I don't like the idea of radiation at all.”

Fariborz took a step closer and thrust out his hand. Jack Liffey shook it.

“Thanks to both of you for tackling that guy. He seemed to me about the size of a mountain right then.”

“The cops were right behind us.”

The young man had something behind his back and he brought out a deep red rose and gave it to Jack Liffey. “There is an old Persian proverb. If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a flower. Thanks to you, sir, for carrying that bomb into the elevator. It might have hurt us.”

He didn't quite know what to do with the rose in his hand. “It turns out the bomb wasn't all that dangerous after all. You brought me safely across the border, son. There's something quite biblical in that.”

“Mohammed had a guide when he had to flee Mecca. Abu Bakr, one of his first converts. He was a rich man who gave much of his fortune to ransom slaves.”

Jack Liffey poked the rose into a drinking glass on the table. “How is your faith doing?” he asked the boy.

“Bruised a little, but I'll be fine,” Fariborz said shyly.

Jack Liffey took the boy's arm for a moment. “When I was in Ensenada, a man told me I was about to meet my doppelganger. Do you know what that is?”

“I think so.”

“Most people think it just means a double somewhere in the world, but it's a little more sinister than that. A doppelganger lurks in your shadow and chats with you and slowly adopts your traits until it becomes you.”

He smiled. “I promise not to lurk, sir.”

They all laughed, and Jack Liffey told Maeve about Auslander's bonus and the possibility of seeing Paris. “Are you game?”

“Wow, is a bear Catholic? Does the pope pee in the woods?”

He grinned. When he had last offered that fractured pair of aphorisms, within her hearing, the pope had been
shitting
in the woods. How like her to sanitize it a little. She was a good kid, he thought.

They talked some more, and suddenly Jack Liffey noticed that Maeve was crying silently. The tears were just welling out of her eyes.

He took her hand. “Hon, it'll be okay.”

She nodded, but she went on wiping away tears, and he wondered what they had told her at the nurses' station that they hadn't told him. After a while, the nurse threw the kids out, but at the door, just as it was shutting, he glimpsed Maeve leaning in to hug Fariborz, her head tucked into the boy's chest as if she needed consoling. Uh-oh, he thought. Somebody must think it's worse than they're telling me. He was suddenly so exhausted he closed his eyes, wondering where the lethargy had come from, and he drifted off into a doom-laden sleep.

When he opened his eyes, the room was much dimmer and a nurse was standing over him. “Can you see your wife?”

It took him a moment to focus, drag himself out of a collapsing pit of sand and dust. Kathy? He hadn't seen her in a over a year. At least she probably wouldn't tear into him while he was in a hospital bed.

He nodded, and the nurse brought in Rebecca Plumkill in a frumpy housedress. She dragged an uncomfortable plastic chair next to the bed and sat.

“I died and went to heaven,” he said, after the nurse left. His throat was truly scratchy, and the collapsed side of his chest was frightening him again; but he forced himself not to think about anything but the immediate, the glowing woman sitting there.

“Oh, Jack!”

“Bec. It's good to see you.” She leaned toward him and kissed him on the mouth. He had a little trouble getting his breath afterward.

“I had no idea I could come to want someone so much again,” she said.

“Did you really need that Sears dress?”

She shrugged. “Shouldn't a ‘wife' look a little matronly? They wouldn't let me in unless I said I was your wife.”

Her palm pressed briefly against his erection which had come forth dutifully under the covers.

“Oh, soon,” he said.

“I want us to do other things, too. Read great books to one another late into the night.”

“If we're not too busy,” he said.

“We can do both, I promise.” She kissed him softly on the cheek, but the emotion must have taken the last ounce of energy he had. He drifted off to sleep again, pillowed up on fields and fields of red roses.

In the middle of the night he awoke with real panic clutching him, gasping for air. He wriggled around and draped his upper body over the side of the bed, coughing compulsively at the floor. Even the good side felt heavy as lead now, blocked. The obstruction wouldn't clear with coughing, but by hanging head-down and switching the nasal cannula into his mouth, he found he could slowly suck some oxygen into the good lung and ease the panic. He studied the streaky pattern on the white linoleum. He saw little rubber wheels, a tiny slice of the closet door. Wood grain, Formica—everything in the room carried a terrible inhuman coldness, belonging to no one, made only to be cleaned easily or moved easily or changed easily.

He was so weak that he didn't even know if he'd be able to get back up onto the bed. This is what being alone really means, he thought. Every soul was a stranger at the end of its days, as the rest of the world went its merry way somewhere. Truly walled off, inside yourself, hearing the gallop of death.

But that was nonsense. He had it all going his way now, he thought: a wonderful new lover, bonus money coming in, a trip to Paris in the offing with a sweet, bright, loving daughter. He could enjoy it all to the fullest if he could only get in one good breath, only cough away whatever it was constricting his good lung. But he couldn't.

Y
ou reach a point in your life you know your soul isn't charmed—only some days, for Jack Liffey, the rough-edged LA private-eye who's made a calling of his compassion for the city's lost youth, it feels like he's holding up the sky. Twice divorced, short of cash, delinquent in child-support payments for his delightfully precocious daughter Maeve, and now driving a lamentable old VW, Jack has got his burdens. And in City
of Strangers,
the sixth novel of this powerful, best-selling series, he's also got an exceptionally troubling case that confronts youthful idealism with the apocalyptic fervor of fundamentalism.

Hired by an old college classmate to track down his rebellious runaway daughter, before long jack finds himself searching for her boyfriend, the bright, earnest Fariborz Bayat, as well. Coincidentally, it appears, he too has gone missing, with three other Persian-American boys from their elite L.A. high school, and joined a cell of Arab Islamic terrorists. Liffey's investigation thrusts him into the restive ethnic mix—Muslim, Jewish, Baha'i, Christian, and secular—of the Persian-American communities in Los Angeles, but his leads take him south, to Mexico, where once more fortune betrays Jack and he's abducted by two corrupt cops working for a sinister four-hundred-pound drug lord.

Soon it is Fariborz who is rescuing Jack. A grisly, nightmarish journey through the noisy border town of Tijuana gets the two of them illegally back into California, only to land them on the brink of deadly disaster—unless they can thwart the cell's plot to set off a dirty bomb full of radioactive waste high over L.A.

JOHN SHANNON
, formerly a factory worker, reporter, TV writer, and political activist, is the author of five other titles in the Jack Liffey mystery series:
The Concrete River, The Cracked Earth, The Poison Sky,
the widely acclaimed
The Orange Curtain
and highly praised
Streets on Fire.
He lives in Los Angeles.

Visit Jack at
JackLiffey.com

Jacket design
© Andrew Newman
Design

Jacket photograph
©
Getty Images

Author photograph
©
David McDougall

CARROLL & GRAF

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