Dangerous Games (21 page)

On the ramp at Fourth where Jack Liffey usually hopped onto the freeway out of Boyle Heights, he saw a middle-aged, well-dressed man commanding the spot where a ragged Latino ordinarily sold oranges. He was too well dressed to be a Vet begging for a handout, and he held a tidy hand-lettered sign:
I was once a social worker. I lost the impetus. Where did my humanity go?

As luck would have it, Jack Liffey's car stopped directly alongside him at the metered ramp.

“Pal, I wish I knew.”

The man grimaced and flipped the sign over, and Jack Liffey recoiled a little, fearing a trick, but it only said:
Will work for satisfaction.

“If you find it, give me a call.” The metering light allowed the bread truck ahead of him onto the freeway, and Jack Liffey had to inch his VW forward. That allowed him to think for another half minute about the hapless social worker, if that's what he was, before the worries of his own life took over: His woman was trouble, and it was a long damn drive from Boyle Heights to Malibu.

The wind was so strong that the smell of the fire fifty miles away had made it to the Malibu hills before him. There were enough torchable bark-shedding eucalyptus trees and other fire-ready shrubs in the hills that if smell alone could ignite, the place would already be a firestorm. He could almost picture the singed Porsches and SUVs chasing madly down the canyon roads toward the sea. He wondered why people lived up here and risked it.

The address he had was off the pavement onto a graded and graveled road, then off that to a spur lane that was only reddish clay and would be a real hell in the rainy season. The house itself was on a knob about as high as several others nearby, though the Santa Monica Mountains crested behind him quite a bit higher. All the land above him across the road remained unbuilt, probably Conservancy land forbidden to developers.

A paved driveway dipped steeply to a three-car garage beneath the house. He idled down the drive and rested his bumper against the garage door, hoping to block any sudden exits. Across the road on the uphill, a line of eucalyptuses was whipping so noisily that no one in the house would have heard him approach, or so he hoped. He walked back up the steep drive, emerging head-first into the gusty windstorm, and he had to turn his face away from driven sand and twigs. Fragments of shredding aromatic bark sizzled past all around. He had always imagined Terror Pennycooke ending up somewhere far out at the exhausted edge of things, but that hardly described the hills above Malibu, some of the most desirable real estate in the L.A. basin, the playground of movie people and music execs.

This was a High Modernist show house from the 1950s, flat graveled roof and floor-to-ceiling glass with flagstone patios and planters, probably worth more millions than he could grasp. Personally, he didn't like flagstone much. Then a noise inside the structure took all his attention.

He patted the heavy lump in his belt where he kept the .45 under his jacket. You could never tell with Terror Pennycooke. What he remembered best about him was his predator's eyes, and he wasn't sure he wanted to face them again without a reliable edge.

Jack Liffey studied the lay of the house and went around in the brush to find a vantage point from which he might be able to see inside through the wall of windows that faced across the patio. He found a likely shrub to half conceal himself in a squat and peered back toward the house where, obscured a little by reflections on the bronzed glass, he made out two people in the living room. In a moment, he could see it was Terror Pennycooke himself, dressed as flamboyantly as ever in bright yellow tropical silk and the oversized tricolor knit cap. His companion was a young woman with long dark pigtails. She looked a lot like the photo he had from Owens. They sat side by side on the floor against a plain Danish sofa and seemed to be taking turns reading from an immense black leather Bible. He saw the girl heft it with difficulty across to Pennycooke, who started in reading immediately but seemed to be stumbling over the words.

It was about as incongruous a scene imaginable for that house, an unmistakable boast of the triumph of the secular white elite. His feelings were compounded of a grudged respect for Pennycooke's Rastafarianism and vegetarianism and outlandishism, plus a compassion for these two outsiders who had found one another—born light-years from this world and equally far from one another's. You just had to give them a break. He knew it was feelings like that that sometimes led him to make ineffectual and hazardous gestures, but watching them grin at one another satisfied something quite deep inside.

He watched for a while longer and then stood up and sauntered across the patio. Terror Pennycooke noticed him first, managing almost a silent-movie doubletake as recognition dawned on him slowly. He firmed up his jaw with anger and opened a lip, preparatory to a splendid Jamaican tooth-suck of contempt, but Jack Liffey held up the palms of both hands as a sign of peace.

“No harm,” he said quite loudly to the expanse of glass.

Her dad probably hadn't noticed but Thumb's address had been printed in the upper corner of the essay, and since her father had said something about him living in the garage, the rest was just Mickey Mouse. She wasn't the daughter of a detective for nothing. She parked her Toyota in the alley and tried to peer in a small back window of the garage, but it had been blacked over from the inside. So she went in the gate to the big uncurtained French window, now open maybe six inches.

For some reason, she wasn't frightened. Whatever angelic protection she got to carry around for being a girl—okay, she thought, a fairly clueless white girl—seemed to have been intensified by the fact of her wound. She cupped her hands against the glass to cut down reflections and peered inside. The inner walls were covered with arty graffiti but she didn't have much of a chance to look it over. A young man with a T-shaped mustache-beard was working hard at a canvas on an easel. It seemed to be a portrait, and astonishingly a creased photograph of her own father was pinned to the upper corner of the canvas. Unlike the photo, though, the painted man appeared to be emerging from the sizing in a chest-back haughty pose. She supposed it was meant to be macho.
El Pachuco
—needing only some show-off drapes and a big swag chain.

She wondered where he'd got the photograph, and then she recognized it as a vacation photo that Gloria had taken last year in Sequoia, her father clowning around after setting up a borrowed tent. It was the only time the three of them had gone away together, and it hadn't worked too well, with none of them all that accomplished at camping and none very pleased with the discomforts. Especially the fact that a third person in the tent, no matter how big it was, made sex pretty much a no-no for the other two, despite her insistence that she would be happy to go for a long night walk if they preferred.

Thumb stood back, squinted, then dabbed a bit of color up off his palette and continued on her father's cheek. After a while she rapped on the big sash window. It didn't seem to startle him, and she waited calmly until he swung it open and took a good look at her, not neglecting her breasts.

“La llorona,”
he observed.

“I know about the famous weeping woman of folklore. But I'm not, I'm the bag-lady.” She raised the side of her blouse to show the ostomy bag, and he winced a little. “Can I come in?”

He offered a hand to help her step over, and she took it.
“Buenas tardes, güera. Sé que tú es Maeve Liffey.”

“Sí, Pulgar.”

“No, say Thumb.
Mi sobrenombre
is
Americano.”

“Don't you mean
Norteamericano?”

He shrugged and offered her a seat on a beat-up old sofa but she remained standing.

“Am I really a
güera?”

“Over here, anyone with
pelo
lighter than this ivory black is
güera.”
He held up a tube of oil paint with a deep black smear on its side.

She smiled. “I remember in
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
they kept calling Clint Eastwood ‘Blondie.' I always wondered why.”

“I'm very sorry I shot you,” he said abruptly.

“I know. If you meant to hit anyone, it was my dad.”

“Is it terrible—that thing?”

“It's not fun. It farts and stinks, but they're going to fix it. I'll be back to normal before long.”

“That's good.” The intimate details seemed to have embarrassed him.

She eyed the painting. “You're making my dad look proud.”

He looked at the painting, frowning. “Isn't he?”

“I don't think of him that way. Not in a puffed-up way, anyway. But I'm not criticizing your work,” she said quickly. “It's fun to see him a different way.”

“How do you see him?”

“He's proud in a quiet way, kind of private and fierce. Whatever he believes in, he … goes for it.” She left out any criticisms she might have made. Stubborn, a little gullible sometimes, falling for the wrong women, walking into danger too often …

Thumb had a funny stare, and it made her a little uneasy. It wasn't menacing, just full-bore earnest.
Un homme sérieux,
she thought, but that was the wrong language. She didn't know if
un hombre sincero
had the same connotations.

“Aren't you afraid to come into the
barrio?
” he asked.

She couldn't help grinning. Trying to help her dad, she'd been through the center of the Ibrahim riot in South Central, and another time she'd been held prisoner by a motorcycle gang in Fontana. “You mean because I think some gangbangers are going to jump out of an alley and rape me? Nobody gets raped with a bag of her own shit hanging off her. And I don't really think this part of town is as bad as my scaredy-cat schoolmates think. People are just people. I like it over here. There's more life on the street.”

Just then Oskar took it into his head to fart noisily.

“I can't control that,” she said with equanimity, or at least a good simulation.

“
Chica,
you are very pretty.”

“Don't come on to me, mister. I didn't come here for that, and I don't even know you. I wanted you to see what you'd done, and I want to make sure you're going to be good to my dad.”

He appeared a little crestfallen. “Your father has been
muy amable.
”

She hoped that meant kind. “My dad is the Lone Ranger. It may not be very smart sometimes, but it's all he knows.”

TWENTY

Wildfire

Just outside the big patio window, Jack Liffey studied the tableau inside and could see now that Luisa Wilson had an Ace bandage wrapped inexpertly around her ankle, and a square of bloodstained gauze taped to her elbow. She collected the big Bible onto her lap as Terror Pennycooke stirred himself to unlatch the door and trundle it open. There was no screen. Perhaps flies were not allowed into Malibu.

“Hello, Trevor. Luisa Wilson?” Jack Liffey stepped inside.

She didn't answer him, but he could tell the name startled her a little. “Your mother up in Owens hired me to find you. I have a hunch that mutant named Clyde molested you, and I promise I won't take you back to the rancheria if you don't want to go.”

“I intend to stay with my beloved forever. We have plans.” This was one strange development, he thought. Talk about odd couples.

“I-an-I
nah
wan you hyer, bal'head.”

“What happened to your ankle?” If Terror was beating on her, there was no question of letting her stay here.

“We were minding our own business walking on Eighth Street, and a big German shepherd came after me. He bit my ankle and made me fall and scrape my arm.”

“Have you had a tetanus shot? Antibiotics?”

“We nah need no lowtal medicine. Dat not from roots.”

He turned to Pennycooke. Rabies was unlikely from a pet, but tetanus was another matter. “I assure you tetanus is no respecter of Rasta medicine. It will kill her. It will freeze her muscles into spasms and clamp her throat shut so she can't breathe. Get her a shot. I'll pay for it.”

It was enough to ruffle the angry flat glare in the Jamaican's eyes, and made him turn to look at her. He really did seem to care about the girl. “Tet-a-nus, you say.”

“Mr. Pennycooke, we need to make a separate peace. I know we had our troubles, but I think we both care about this young woman.”

“Den you jus' trod away, mon. Naow. An dis mon say Jah go wid you.”

“I can't leave her like this. I'm not kidding you. She needs the shots. How long has it been since the dog bit you?”

“Yesterday,” she said. She was starting to get a little worried, too. “I washed it good.”

Jack Liffey held out a propitiating hand to the Jamaican. If she was in love with him, it would do Jack Liffey no good to antagonize him. “Mr. Pennycooke, I apologize for any wrongs I did to you. I sincerely do.”

A whole series of emotions crossed Pennycooke's face, the wheel of colored cellophane rotating unhurriedly to reveal one after another, until his attitude came to rest on a kind of amusement. The smile actually seemed friendly, with no malice at all. “Blessed, how strange dis life turn, Mr. Lif. Mebbe we do mek peace. Mebbe dis be de rebolution till de rebolution come along.”

The girl gave a little squeak of delight. “That's so deep,” she said.

Jack Liffey could feel that they were about to shake hands at last—after the initial glacial approach toward one another—when Pennycooke abruptly raised both hands. He turned to the big sliding door that he had left open. “Hush, mon.”

He went straight outside, and Jack Liffey followed. The brushfire smell was now much stronger, and there was a slow crackling on the air. It was out of sight somewhere, apparently uphill behind the house.

“Badness.” Pennycooke sprinted to the edge of the patio, looking back around the house. His expressive eyes widened out.

Jack Liffey didn't wait for an explanation. He was beside the man in an instant and saw the low line of fire licking slowly through ankle-high weeds down the slope toward the road. Incongruously, like hallucinations, two widely separated men on the safe side of the fireline were aiming video cameras toward them. One was much taller than the other.

“You dead men!” Pennycooke bellowed.

The taller one of the cameramen waved cheerfully without taking his eye off the little camera before him. The fire downhill of them grew rapidly as he watched, strewing sparks ahead on the wind. Now and then a whole flaming, floating islet of undergrowth levitated by its own heat and whisked itself away like something from a nightmare. A sparse line of shaggy-bark eucalyptus trees waited ominously along the dirt road, ready to go up like bombs. The fire was no accident. It had obviously been set alight along a wide front, and there was a definite gasoline smell mixed with the thin smoke gusting past them. A felled tree had been placed across their access road, and Jack Liffey saw in an instant that their cars were useless. They'd never get the tree out of the way before it was engulfed.

“You Danger Games!” Pennycooke shouted, pointing angrily. “You be fuckin' cook an curry!”

“Time to run, folks!” the tall one shouted amiably at them. “Make it look good!”

Jack Liffey grabbed Pennycooke's shoulders before the man was completely possessed by his need to shout down the tormentors. “Can Luisa walk?”

Her name brought him most of the way back from his blinding rage. “Nah, mon. Slow by slow.”

“Let's get her out. This house is going up.”

They both sprinted for the glass door. Terror ran straight into the back of the house. “We've got to go now,” Jack Liffey told Luisa.

She nodded, without any evident alarm, and picked up a small pink notebook from the sofa, which she tucked into her shirt pocket. He took her hands and pulled her up, and he could see the wince when her ankle tried to take her body weight. Then Pennycooke was back with his big Webley revolver in his waist and both his pants pockets bulging with something else. At least he hadn't taken time to collect his ginger beer.

Jack Liffey slipped an arm around the girl's waist and grabbed the belt of her old jeans, leaving her good leg on the outside. “We'll take turns helping you walk.”

They heard a big
whoomp
like the gas igniting suddenly in a wall heater. “They should never plant eucalyptus up here,” Jack Liffey said. He got her out the door in a three-legged stumble, and Pennycooke ran immediately to the edge of the patio and fired a few wild shots toward the cameramen. Jack Liffey steered the girl toward where Pennycooke stood—it was the shortest drop off the patio, maybe three feet. Already he could see sparks and crisping leaves floating past the house.

“De worm done turn!” Pennycooke exulted, gazing up the hill with his arms on his hips.

At first, Jack Liffey thought the Jamaican was referring to his own gunfire, but as they helped the girl under the railing and down onto a dirt path, he glanced back where Pennycooke had been looking. Much higher up the slope, a single tiny figure was making its way along the crest of the hills, along what must have been Mulholland Drive, dragging something like a stick through the tangled underbrush alongside the road. It was as if whatever he carried tore minute holes through the fabric of the day to some brighter world beyond. It could only have been a traffic flare, and it had already set another line of brushfire behind the cameramen.

“What the hell is going on?”

“I tink dat Keith, de coke-a-moke cowboy.”

And as the name registered, Jack Liffey recognized the tiny figure, limping along favoring his groin. The cameramen were on their stomachs sheltering from Pennycooke's shots and keeping the cameras going, so they hadn't noticed the danger behind them. They were almost invisible in the heat dance above the first line of flames.

It was like being trapped in one of
Mad Magazine's
Spy vs. Spy cartoon, Jack Liffey thought—every assailant more insane than the previous one.

“Forget shooting at them, man. Come on!”

He half-walked Luisa along the path past a few ornamentals and then down into a dry wash that ran downhill in the chaparral.

“Jah go wid us.”

Pennycooke caught up and took Luisa's other side. The bottom of the wash was wide here, and free of vegetation, and they went so fast that her good foot barely tapped down at each stride. The gusting wind blew their clothes hot against their backs, shoving so hard that they had to fight a tendency to run out of control.

“Is there another road down below?”

“Yea. Mebbe it take us to Rambla or Malibu Canyon to get down.”

“Great.” He saved his breath for the heavy work of hauling the girl along. Sparks looped past like fireflies, and he heard the woosh of another dry tree igniting. Only a week earlier, he had read in the
Times
that a single acre of dry chaparral was the equivalent of seventy-five gallons of aviation fuel. A pleasant fact to remember. At least the brushfire hadn't turned into a firestorm—not yet. He'd read about firestorms, too—Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, the Oakland fire in 1991, Laguna in ‘93, and at least one of the previous Malibu fires. No one outran a true firestorm.

There was a deep concussion far behind, so visceral it rang in his sinuses. It was either a rifle (no pistol sounded like that) or the brushfire had come upon something explosive. They all craned their necks back. The tall eucalyptus that loomed across the street from the house was catching fire down low among its shaggy bark, but it hadn't been the source of that boom. They had to watch in horror for a moment as the wind tore strips of flaming bark off the tree and sent them toward the house, air-borne rafts of flame. One firebrand caught on the roof but died out slowly on the gravel.

“The house is history,” Jack Liffey said. “Let's go.” And his car, he thought. Another trusty vehicle lost.

The canyon narrowed and became entangled with dead brush. Somebody had to take charge.

“Trev, go ahead for a minute and kick a path through that dry stuff.”

“Fe real, mon.”

He ran forward and kicked away at the impassible barrier of dry chamise plants, releasing medicinal smells into the smoke, until finally he had kicked a path through, then he ran forward again and furiously attacked another blockage of the chest high shrubs. Faint yelps of fright carried down with the ash and smoke, and he figured the cameramen had finally discovered their predicament. The smoky wind grew thicker and darker, full of grit, the eye-smarting teargas of a campfire shifting abruptly into your face. Once in a while, a driven spark stung the back of his neck like an angry insect.

“Oh, de debbil!” Trevor Pennycooke came to a halt and turned with spread arms to catch them both against their hurrying momentum. For the first time Jack Liffey noticed the Jamaican's ripe smell, stronger than the fire itself when you got this close. Pennycooke had backstopped them at the lip of a sheer drop down a crumbly cliff. It was nearly fifty feet down and would have made a lovely waterfall if this wadi ever ran with the winter rainfall.

Jack Liffey looked back and saw they would have to retreat forty or fifty yards to find a slope they could manage out of the ravine, returning into the teeth of the fire.

“Ay! Ay! Ay!” somebody back there behind the shimmering heat wall was yapping like a dog.

“That fucking guy!” somebody else yelled, the voices tiny, panicky, like very small men trapped in a bottle. The fire itself had begun a kind of growl and crunch like some unseen predator eating.

“Let's go folks,” Jack Liffey said. “I see a deer trail up there.”

“My ankle is killing me.”

It was about to kill all three of them, he thought, and it would for sure if this turned into a real firestorm.

“Sorry,” he said. “It doesn't get any better for a while.”

* * *

Maeve went to the window, where she could hear several sirens all around the compass. “They coming for you?” she asked in jest.

“That's fire,” Thumb said.

“Bomberos.
You can tell just from the siren?”

A nearby firetruck gave a series of deep trucklike hoots, and then she could tell, too. They seemed to be all heading westward, and she had a terrible premonition. They should have been going eastward to the Claremont fire, or north to Altadena. “Got a TV?”

He was already turning it on, patting it gently on one side, then shaking it and giving a bigger whack.

“Just don't say it responds like a woman, okay?”

It took him a moment to get her joke, and then he frowned. “Only
cobardes
hit women.”

A lopsided picture finally emerged from the streaks and static on the old TV, far too green, and he fiddled with the knobs until the image straightened up. Channels eleven and five had the Claremont fire. He twisted the old rotary dial to thirteen and what appeared to be a helicopter shot of a hillside fire, with a house already burning. A small logo said 13 Live.

“… Not one of your ordinary Malibu fires. Several phone tips have reported that shots were fired, but we've been unable to get confirmation from the sheriff's department. It may have begun up here with a drug deal gone sour or even a domestic dispute. This one is certainly arson. Only fifteen minutes ago Air Thirteen captured this scene above Mulholland near Cold Canyon Road.”