Dangerous Games (18 page)

SEVENTEEN

Till the Wheels Come Off

“Some
carrucha
man,” Thumb offered appreciatively from under the VW's dash. “This is a real
classico.
”

“Just like me.
Classico
and worn out.” They'd already gone over the essay, and the boy wasn't happy at all about being asked to rewrite it yet again. Finally, he'd capitulated after looking over the few notes. It was still structural editing; Jack Liffey hadn't even started on the word-by-word work. “I used to have a real car. A Concord straight six.”

“Man, what's that?”

“Sort of a Rambler.”

“Like you?”

“Another obsolete model.”

“Obsolete?”

“Out of date.”

“Hmm. I knew a guy, had to take the back seat out, but he put a big Chrysler V-8 in one of these.”

“With that much power you'd need an anchor to keep it on the ground.”

“Listo.
I'm done. Lemme show you.” He opened the glove box to show off a tiny new toggle switch fixed to the left side, just in reach of the driver's seat. He flicked the toggle down. Then he turned the ignition key, and it ground and ground without starting. “The coil don't get no spark. I put in a solenoid to cut it off.”

He flicked the switch up with a flourish, and the engine started on the first twist of the key. Thumb gave a little pump of triumph, like all the athletes on TV.

“That's great. Let me at least pay you for the parts.”

“Man, no need. They all from Midnight Auto Parts.”

“Ah.” He didn't want to encourage theft, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He got in to let Thumb drive him around a little. He knew Thumb didn't have a car and would probably enjoy the driving. Maybe it would loosen him up some more.

“¡Hijole!”
He turned quickly up an alley when he caught sight of a heavy-set bald man with hard sleepy eyes and a carved ebony cane.

“Trouble?”

“Not if he don't see me.
Bastón
is an O.G. He's
eme,
too, a real
carnal.
”

Jack Liffey knew by now that
eme
was the Mexican mafia, a prison-run supergang that stood above all the barrio crews, taxed them, and decided who could do what.

“It's all about respect.”

“Did you ever think how much nicer the world would be if everybody didn't have to be in warring armies? If we were all brothers. Remember that truce day—the demonstration against the war down at Salazar Park?”

“Yeah.”

“Imagine you could walk anywhere in town and people would smile at you.”

Thumb shrugged and drove cautiously through the alley onto a narrow street of lovely little bungalows with pots of flowers everywhere, all lashing westward in the insistent wind. “The world ain't that way, man. I just got here. Don't blame me.”

“When you think about a better world, what's it like?”

He could see that the question threw the boy a little. Thumb thought a moment and had a little trouble with third gear, lugging the engine before shifting down. He wasn't an experienced driver. “I'm wearing a mask and this bright red and green
traje
like a big hero in the wrestling, and I got a big sword, and when my enemies come after me I just swing them through the guts with the sword. Fwoosh. I want to be so strong nobody fucks with me. I don't bang much, man, but I gotta have the protection, and I gotta be down for my
barrio.
I ain't a pussy.”

Jack Liffey wondered what wisdom he could possibly offer to a cosmos so steeped in testosterone. He wondered if any intimacy at all could pass between their worlds, without continual misunderstandings. “I have daydreams like that, too, but only when I'm frustrated and feeling alone.”

“Uh-huh.” The boy blasted the horn at a car in front of them that didn't start up fast enough on the green light. Jack Liffey glimpsed eyes in its rearview mirror, looking them over. It was a near thing, but the angry driver moved on. Thumb wasn't pushing it and had circled back almost to Gloria's.

“Drive around some more if you want.”

They now took a wider circle through Boyle Heights, passing Roosevelt High School with its football squads working out on the field, and a few hangers-on outside smoking and banging their backs idly into the chain link fence.

“Your old lady don't like me,” he said abruptly.

“I don't really like the term ‘old lady,' Thumb, but there's not much else in English. I don't like ‘girlfriend' either. You could say
novia.
Maybe she's pissed because she's thinking about you taking a shot at my little girl.”

Thumb went quiet for a while. “I told you I don't know what happened, man. It just went off. It was a accident.”

“Yeah, you told me.”

“I'll take you home,
señor,
” he said resignedly.

“I'm not mad, Thumb. I'm puzzled. I want to be your friend, and I still can't figure out what happened.”

“It's so hard. I want to be the wrestler in the mask that fights for
la raza,
you know, but then I'm me, and I do that thing.” He looked genuinely confused.

As a gesture of some kind, Jack Liffey held up his left fist and crooked his doublejointed thumb back. Thumb matched him.

“You know, I got sisters, and one of ‘em was attacked when she was little. A really bad
pendejo
from another street who's dead now. The other sister is married to a guy who's up in Corcoran for banging, and she's got three babies. They both live with it okay. I'm the one who's angry—it's not right, but sometimes it make me do bad stuff.”

“Nobody live out hyere but foreigners, Mr. Two Baldheads, so you no tink dey care one likkle bit.” Terror Pennycooke took out the big Webley .455, a British Service revolver from World War II, and held it in Kenyon Styles' unhappy face. Rod Whipple was frozen in midgesture, opening a beer at the kitchen table across the room. The clunky Webley was Terror's weapon of choice, a nice reliable revolver with a big shoulder-busting cartridge that the cops back home in Jamaica still used. He was holding the pistol now with his wrist rotated so the handgrip was parallel to the ground, the way they always did in the movies.

“We haven't got any money here,” Rod said. “I promise you that's the truth.”

Just a half hour earlier, they had all met in a diner down the street that catered to the whole East Hollywood neighborhood, the hand-lettered menu on the wall offering Armenian
lahmajun
and Salvadoran
pupusas
and four or five other imaginative ways to combine bread dough and greasy meat.

The two young men had patiently tried to explain to Terror that there was no big money at all involved in an appearance in
Dangerous Games.
They never paid their actors more than a hundred bucks, mostly homeless men or reckless daredevils who'd have done their stunts for the challenge and notoriety alone. For some reason, the big Jamaican had stubbornly refused to believe them, persisting as if they were just bargaining hard and would eventually come around.

Finally, growing jumpy, Kenyon had excused himself to use the bathroom and after about five minutes of absence, Rod had realized he was on his own once again, and he had sprinted away into the morning.

Terror Pennycooke had just sat patiently in the diner, grinning confidently, until the two had made their separate ways back to the apartment building in clear view across the street, one of hundreds of similar aging runway apartments in that part of town.

“I-an-I need a discuss byisness some more wit dese buoys,” he had told Luisa. “Hey, you dress up good,” he said, cocking his head as if just noticing that she was really filling out the skimpy blue velvet dress he had bought her.

“I feel good in this. I like to touch the cloth.”

“Mmm, it come off a you fine, too, I bet. You de ongle girl for I, you knaow. You go wait in park dere some time now. Don't fret. Trev come soon.”

After pushing his way into the apartment, Terror had backed the taller young man across the spare-looking living room. He paused to admire a Richard Widmark poster, grinning his devil-grin. A lot of the rude boys on Jamaica had taken Tommy or Udo as street names, from Widmark's crazy-giggling gangster in
Kiss of Death.

Terror set down the shopping bag he carried and patted the poster as if comforting it. “You marked for life,” he said softly.

Rod Whipple held his head in his hands at the kitchen table, and then looked up forlornly from the open kitchen, glaring at both of them. “Ken, I've had about enough of all this.”

“Here de way it is,” Terror said, ignoring him. “A black cat, him run across you pat'. Den your private sector itch you up and you see it Friday 13, and all a sudden, a man like me show up. What you gone say? Just superstitches? Just bad luck? Forget dis guy? He nothing.”

All of a sudden he turned and slammed the heel of his palm straight into Kenyon Styles' forehead, like some kind of machine arm hammering a rivet, and Styles fell backward over the coffee table and lay spreadeagled across the table and the sofa, moaning.

“Stay right dere,” Terror ordered. He turned to Rod Whipple. “Might as cheap me kill two bird before dey hatch, eh?”

Rod put up his palms. “Don't hit me.”

“You say de wiseguys come and dey take away de
Dangerous Games
Numbah One. Dey makes millions, and you two don' make dibbi dibbi. I tink you bwoys thick as two short planks, you no see it, you need a nursemaid to watch over you. I-an-I not greedy like dese yere Eye-ties.”

He turned on a cheap stereo beside the TV, found a rap station and got the volume up. Then he turned the TV on, too.

“We be partner naow, dis is de ting for you to see, for sure for sure.”

“That's absurd. What have you ever done for us?”

“Lessee. I knaow you be need protection, and you need some persuade still.” He retrieved his shopping bag, reaching down into it for a fat roll of duct tape and a fourpack of D&G Jamaican Ginger Beer. He plucked out one bottle and began absently to shake it up. “Who wanna be first? Don' be shy.”

“And that's not all!” the TV set bellowed. “With every order we include six stainless steel steak knives …”

He stopped for gas at the big dinosaurs at Cabazon, as good a place as any, and at a mini-mart in the gas station, he bought a wrinkled hot dog off an automatic griller that rolled them constantly under a plastic hood. “Praise God,” the clerk said as if the twenty Jack Lirfey held out to him was something very special.

“What for?”

“For giving his only begotten son.” The kid had acne scars and a pompadour that wouldn't stay down.

“Do you think God is more insecure than you are?”

“Huh?”

“Why on earth does he need
our
praise?” Jack Liffey was in a bad mood, engendered by Gloria Ramirez, who had chewed him out for taking too long in the shower that morning. A meaningless fidget of her generalized resentment.

“Bless you, sir.”

He relented. “Bless you, too, son.”

“Yes, sir.”

The hot dog was inedible, and he threw it away. As he drove past the big power-generator windmills in the San Gorgonio Pass on the way to Palm Springs, he saw that the blades were churning away hard, facing out into the desert. And the car, too, was bucking a little and slowing unnaturally, even on the downhill into the Coachella Valley. The Santa Ana was blowing up a gale out of the great basin, out of the violent Mojave. That might account for half his mood right there, he thought.

Just before the 111 turnoff to all those rich white-belt-and-white-loafer cities, he passed a car that was shaped like an old dial telephone, skulking along slowly in the right lane. As he got up his courage to pull the wind-balked VW over a lane to pass, the giant receiver lifted a foot off its cradle and a sign popped up to say,
It's for you!
He kept right on going. It did not seem to be a good idea to answer it.

G. Dan Hunt lived on the edge of a big golf course complex in Cathedral City just past Palm Springs. Jack Liffey had read somewhere that there were 110 golf courses in this 20-mile pearl necklace of gated retirement complexes that stretched from Palm Springs to La Quinta, an area where more land was devoted to the strange Scottish sport than to housing the old and monied themselves.

He didn't want to announce himself at the guard shack and give G. Dan a chance to be out, so he parked at the back of a gas station with some cars waiting for engine work, made sure to flick off Thumb's new kill switch, and walked a quarter mile before leaping a concrete block wall. They weren't all that serious about keeping the riff-raff out. No turret guns, no mines or barbed wire.

The houses were all what Mike Lewis had once called Silent Movie Spanish, with red tile roofs and stucco, all over-large for their retired occupants. Patches were artfully missing here and there to reveal faux adobe blocks. Hunt's townhouse was on one of the greens, with a foursome stooping to eye the level of the grass. Being on a green seemed preferable to being located near one of the driving tees where the houses all cowered behind wire screens and tall plexiglass shields. From the patio you could step over a low wall straight onto the rough grass that bordered the green. It must have been weird, like living in a pinball machine.

Jack Liffey stopped in his tracks on the rough. There was a figure out on a nearby patio who bore a strong resemblance to G. Dan Hunt. But the Hunt he knew from a few years back had been an immense chesty man with a bark that could draw headwaiters fast and chase off trouble all by itself. He had been a fixer at every level for a number of studios and had used the violent Jamaican, Pennycooke, for his nastier work. The man he saw now had the same colorful suspenders and the same nose and eyes, but he was more than merely older. He had lost a good hundred pounds. Once again, right in front of him, the Grim Reaper was serving up previews of the big feature to come.