Dangerous Games (5 page)

“How many of the kids you take home, you think stay there?” she asked. She was driving out a dirt two-track toward a ranch south of town where Clyde Hinman supposedly had day work shoveling out a stable.

“I don't take them home if I don't think they'll stay. I'm not on the job to create repeat business, like some dentist offering the kids lollipops.”

“It must tick the parents off if you tell them the kid won't come back.”

He shrugged. “I think they pretty much know when a kid is past the point of no return. It's not always a bad thing. But it's always different, too. Sometimes, I can get them to come home on their own. Allow a little more time. Force a little family communication ‘til all that emotion pours out. Sometimes, you just have to let the rebellion play itself out. Easy to say when it's not your kid. Mostly, you've got to find out what went wrong for the kid, look close at the home life. Nobody runs away from heaven.”

“They say Satan did.”

“You believe in that?”

“No, but all those old stories have got some kind of psychological truth.”

“I don't believe in evil, Glor. Just sickness and sick needs in people. There's no Satan in any kid I've seen, even the sociopaths. Calling something evil is just a way of not looking at it. Religious people love not looking at things.”

She slowed on the dirt road to let a family of quail scurry ahead and then dive abruptly out of her path. The last baby quail looked back, almost as if grinning at its successful challenge to fate.

“I don't know, Jack. In my job I've seen some pretty bad kids, kids who really like to hurt people, and sometimes their parents seem pretty much normal when you meet them.”

“Humans move in mysterious ways. I don't know. Maybe families are always a lot more screwed up than they look. This is all too general for me, Glor. I'm used to thinking in particulars.”

“Like Ken Steelyard.” This was her former partner who had tried to eat his gun several times and had finally pulled a reverse on the legendary suicide-by-cop ploy of so many barricaded sad sacks. He had committed suicide by bad guy, a former Green Beret. Steelyard had been a childhood friend of Jack Liffey's, who'd done everything he could to talk him down.

“We both did our best for him,” he said. “What part of that tangled mess would you like to call evil?”

“Maybe just something behind the scenes, pulling strings.”

“Nah. Ken's misery was born of everything that happened to him from age three on. There's no horned red devil in the bushes. In a way, I failed him, and you too. We failed him by not figuring out what he needed, but maybe that kind of failure is inevitable. We tried. He wouldn't take antidepressants because he was afraid it would get around the office and kill his reputation as a tough guy. How can you ever know enough about someone?”

“I can't figure out whether you're profound or just naïve.”

He laughed. “If one of those alternatives makes you upset, or pisses you off, I'm the other one. That must be the ranch.”

It was easy to see where the horseshit was being shoveled. A small trailer rested at the wide entry to a stable, and now and then a mass of mucky dirt and hay hovered just in sight before dropping smokily into the trailer bed. Gloria parked to one side, and they slammed the doors hard enough to announce themselves.

In the dimness, a huge bare-chested man coughed once and took a break, leaning on a large flat-bladed spade, his face and shoulders covered with sweat. He had no hair at all and looked like a cartoon wrestler from the waist up, though he had to prop his skinny braced legs against the stall walls.

Jack Liffey felt himself back on the track of a missing child. He knew what he was doing now, and there was always a returning grace in that.

“Clyde Hinman?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Who wants to know?” There was an over-the-top belligerence in his voice.

They introduced themselves as a relative of Nellie's and a friend, looking for Luisa. It was fairly easy to see him stiffen at the name Luisa.

“I didn't do nothing.”

“We're not vice cops, Mr. Hinman. If she came to your bed, it's none of our business.”

“Screw you, city boy.”

“We don't mean you any harm, sir. We just want to ask you a few questions about her.”

Abruptly, the big man swung his spade hard at Jack Liffey's head. He ducked, which threw the man off balance, and he staggered a few steps in his braces. Magically, Gloria Ramirez had her pistol out, the black Glock. He wasn't even aware she'd had it under her jacket all this time, but he remembered it was L.A.P.D. policy to have its sworn personnel armed at all times.

“Freeze.
Now.”

“Jeezus!” He dropped the spade as he caught his balance and staggered back a step. Jack Liffey noticed he was wearing what looked like a whole embalmed garlic bulb on a leather thong around his neck. He wondered if there was a vampire problem in the valley.

“Mr. Hinman,” Gloria said evenly, “would you like to spend the next thirty days locked away for assault?”

He didn't say a word, but his eyes bored into her, seeking an opening.

“I suggest you sit, right there on that mound of horseshit. Now. I'm a cop, and I can drop you where you stand, and no one will ever question it.”

There was a degree of authority in her voice that amazed Jack Liffey. He'd seen her toughen up before but never quite like this. The big man looked unhappy but did as ordered. He tried to cushion himself with his arms but sank into the mound of horseshit.

“Tell us about Luisa,” she said.

“Friggin' little bitch.” He glared back at her.

While she was questioning him, Jack Liffey noticed something in a corner of the stable and went to look. It was a paper bag that was all greasy inside, containing a spray can of PAM. No wonder he was so belligerent, he thought. That stuff ate brain cells. He'd thought only gang wannabes, junior high delinquents and such did spray. Then he remembered the banana oil smell of Testor's Model Airplane Dope when he was a kid, and he could still feel a faint afterglow of that feeling that said all was right with the world, and he wondered if that was why he'd liked making model airplanes so much. He took out the can and sprayed it empty into the air; the big man looked over angrily. Gloria Ramirez still looked like she was about to shoot, and Jack Liffey wandered back.

“Did you ever get yourself so sprayed up you tried to give the girl a poke?” Jack Liffey asked.

The man gave him the finger, wiggled it, then sucked on it.

“Let's go,” Jack Liffey said. “This guy hasn't got enough brain left to remember.”

“I'll remember your sorry ass, city boy. You and the fat bitch here. I'll get you some dark night.”

“She's not fat. Hell, just shoot him,” Jack Liffey asserted.

The other two both looked a little shocked, but she got it first. “Good idea,” she said.

“I'll say he attacked you.”

“
Hey
—you can't do that.”

“What'll we say? He got all sniffed up, tried to kill me with a shovel. You saved my life. Go on, shoot him.”

Clyde Hinman turned impudently to face her. “Okay, fuckin' shoot me, bitch.”

“I wouldn't dirty my bullets.” She lowered the pistol and began walking back to the car, but she didn't holster it.

“One thing,” Jack Liffey said. “What's the garlic for?”

The shirtless man looked down at the pendant as if seeing it for the first time. “The bad smell keeps off flies,” he said.

“How can they tell?” Jack Liffey said.

FIVE

Wuthering Heights

Somebody had left a poster of a huge frog's face with bug eyes and a pink tongue on the side of the cubicle, just out of sight of the little camera on top of the monitor.

“The clock will kick in right here when you hit the button to take a customer.” His finger rapped the spot on the screen where it said 00:00:00. “After a minute, you got to make them come up with a credit card number somehow. At first, you let on it's just to verify their age, but after three minutes you tell them about the charges. Actually, the charges start at a minute and a half. They'll never know the difference. The clock turns yellow when the money's rolling. Lovey-Dove, Inc., don't get squat, and
you
don't get squat before you see that turn yellow. So hook ‘em in or you're just wasting your breath. Show a little skin, show your bra, write what the skeezes want to hear.”

Luisa settled back in the steno chair wearing the weird peekaboo nightgown and black underwear Keith's friend Donna had given her. She was feeling very strange and out of sorts, but somehow not frightened. Possibly, because there was a whole row of similar cubicles where a wall had been taken down between two bedrooms, and other girls were sitting in front of other monitors in an eery kind of silence, punctuated by the chipmunk chittering of keyboards, coughs, and sighs.

She knew how to type, so they started her here, but Keith said if she did good he might have them move her up to an audio booth—she had the voice for it. He kept disavowing any personal financial stake in the business. He said he was only functioning as her business manager, to keep her away from the kinds of things Rod had her doing. He pointed to the words
Hi, My name is Ginger. Do you want to see more of me?
on a section of the screen.

“All you got to do is click on the words and they move into your outgoing screen here. Saves you time. There's dozens of scripts in here for all sorts of guys who want you to take it off, or show your breasts or use the aids there.” A row of pink and black and silver penises waited like good soldiers on a shelf. “Click on one of the keywords, and you get a different script.”

A little menu of keywords down the side said:

credit card

credit card insist

show you

talk dirty

be my friend

you do something

my tits

my pussy

my ass

dick size

toys

up the ass

sucking

licking

biting

toes

mommy

sister

boys

my fantasy

pleasure words

“Get the skeeze writing back to you. Find out his name. You can add it to your answer before you send. Makes it personal. The longer you keep the guy online the bigger your percentage. A good prick-tease can make fifty bucks an hour, maybe more. Why don't you peek over the curtain and watch how some of the other girls work it for a while. I'll come back to get you later. Don't worry about anything. I need to see a man about a plan.”

The instant he closed the door behind him, there was a wave of hisses, rude noises, and other sounds rippling through the cubicles.

“Kiss my ass, Keithie,” said a throaty woman's voice nearby. “I got a good fart coming.”

“Oh, the goose walk fine, the monkey drank wine,” somebody warbled.

“Tease
this,
you big twerp.”

“Welcome to Lovey-Dove, hon,” said a calmer voice, right next door, and Luisa could tell it was meant for her. “What's your name?”

She stared at the
My name is Ginger
still up on the screen. “Luisa.”

“Welcome, Luisa. Next one of us on a break will—” The woman's voice broke off abruptly, then came back a few seconds later. “—take care of you. These cameras snap you every 20 seconds, and you got to get used to getting back into a pose quick, like you're in the mood. Guys don't want to catch you picking your nose.”

There were several laughs.

“This guy would eat my snot, that's for sure.”

“Don't think I haven't had guys ask to eat snot.”

“How much can the camera see?” Luisa asked.

“You'll see. Ooops!” Pause. “When you key on, you'll see the camera shot of yourself in a window at the bottom. A little red light gives you two seconds to get ready for the snap.”

“Don't go spending that fifty bucks an hour right away,” another woman called out, which was greeted with guffaws. “Twenty-five, a good hour, that's tops. Hello, you stupid little momma's boy creep, you like seeing these?”

“Stay away from Dangerous Games, kid,” someone called, with real concern in her voice. “Whatever else some prickhead pimp like that offers, say no to DG.”

“What's that?”

“Just stay away, believe me.”

There was a roar of laughter all at once from the far end of the line of cubicles. “I got a guy wants me to call him needle-dick.”

“The first honest skeeze today.”

The girl had agreed to meet them out at Frog Rock after sundown. She told them to head out County Road toward the hills and they'd know.

They speculated on why she wanted to meet them at such an obscure place, and not until evening, but Clyde's maniacal shovel assault might have had something to do with it. They passed a pokey little county campground, with spindly year-old trees and RV spaces laid out bumper to bumper. There was only one RV visible, a truck-mounted camper, and a man and boy had long ropes lashed to the top of it and were rocking it as if trying to pull the whole vehicle over.

“Man, let's give that one a miss,” Jack Liffey said. “It's not your precinct.”

“L.A. doesn't have precincts. We have divisions.”

“You know what I mean. Anyway, what do you think Clyde's problem is?” he asked.

She shook her head. “You do enough police work, you see Clydes. Some of the guys call them F-DODAs. It stands for fatal dose of dumb-ass. There's no knowing what they'll do. These are the guys who're permanently pissed off and so crazy they can't even get it together to take it out on the wife. They shoot their own toes off. I had one once took a bet he'd put a pistol in his ear and pull the trigger. He won, but he'll never collect. It's a little worse among the poor because it's all that much closer to the surface when you're out of money. I think some of the projects, we'd be best off sending a crop duster over Friday nights and spray them with thorazine, calm everybody down.”

Jack Liffey thought for a moment. “I've seen my share of anger. But there's usually a logic somewhere.”

“Trust me, Jack. There's a large segment of the population that doesn't live in your world.”

“Maybe like the guy who shot Maeve.” His lips tightened.

“Sure. Maybe that banger didn't like your looks. Maybe he just got a new pistol with a hair-trigger. Maybe he didn't know how to use it. We'll get him, but it doesn't mean we'll find out why.”

“I really would like to know. I realize it's a possibility we'll never find out, but it makes me nervous to think things might be utterly random.”

“There,” she said, nodding. There was no way to miss Frog Rock. It had probably looked a lot like one to begin with, but someone had got at it with green and black paint to make sure you got the joke.

“Jesus, that's ugly.” The rock was embayed in a recess in the weathered range of low hills, as if left behind after a parade had passed by. A fire-red 1956 Thunderbird, the model with the little porthole, was parked on the dirt just beyond the frog. It even had whitewall tires.

“That's her dad's, for sure,” Jack Liffey said. “No kid would value that car enough for the headaches.”

“Don't be hasty,” Gloria suggested. “Kids do funny things.” She parked beside the T-bird and they got out and introduced themselves to Barbara Thigpen, who was sitting on the fender of the car. The black girl would have been quite pretty with about fifty fewer pounds, but she was wearing a mini-skirt that left nothing about her thighs to the imagination. Still, that was her business, he thought. She wasn't much heftier than Gloria.

“How come you wanted to meet us out here?” Gloria asked.

“Have you seen Clyde yet?” the girl asked.

Jack Liffey grinned. “Two minutes after we met him he tried to kill me.”

She nodded. “Then you know. The man is a wacko. Plus I can smoke out here without some busybody telling me it's going to give me cancer.” She shook out a Marlboro.

“It's going to give you cancer—and emphysema,” Gloria Ramirez said. Jack Liffey frowned at her, afraid they might start off on the wrong foot, but Barbara just ignored it and lit up.

“I'm immortal. Everybody my age is. And the deal is, yes, we're the only black family in town, and, no, I don't like it all that much. My dad works for the L.A. Water Department, and he was transferred here, from a nice safe black community in Pacoima, out to the one place where L.A. stole all the local water, the whole river, so we're not very popular here on that account either. Segregated twice, you might say. But me and Lu were great friends.”

“Tell us about her,” Jack Liffey said.

“The only problem I had with her was an almost total lack of a sense of humor. She was sweet as could be and soo earnest, and I was lonely in this super white town. She had a secret Paiute name that she eventually told me, and other stuff.”

“What is it?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Sorry, that's what makes it a secret. She had a thing about books and wanted me to read the same books as her so we could talk about them, and I suggested some books about princesses and Victorian girls. She tried, but she preferred simpler stuff. She had a little trouble with the language, unfamiliar words and stuff.”

A car came slowly up the road, an interloper, its headlights washing tentatively through the craggy canyon. It almost stopped, but then it passed on up toward Mt. Whitney, its engine noise gradually dying away. Maybe teens looking for a good spot to neck, he thought. They had all watched the car pass as if fearing something.

“Was Luisa good in school?”

Barbara Thigpen made a face as if she smelled something that had gone rotten. “There's all kinds of smart. I don't think anybody at school ever said to her, ‘Luisa, you're just a dumb Indian,' but it was kind of designed that way, you know—home ec and catch-up math, where all the Indians were. The high school is too small to have AP classes, but there's an AP study group, and we get credit if we pass the tests, so some of us can get into good colleges. She wasn't invited, or it just never came up, I don't know how it worked. Most of the Indians drop out when they can. I said she wasn't dumb. Our AP group read
Wutbering Heights,
and I had her read it, too, and it blew her away. She struggled with the language, but she really loved it.”

She ran out of steam for a moment, watching the glow of her cigarette tip. Gloria started to say something just as a harsh wind gust off the Sierras made them turn their heads away from the fine grit blowing into their faces.

She wiped her eyes and started again. “Do you think Clyde tried to molest her?” Gloria asked.

“More than ‘tried,'” the girl snapped angrily, and then the wind stopped as abruptly as it had come. She shook her head slowly as if clearing off the dust. “I wish somebody would bitchslap that dipshit good.”

“We're not really here to do anything about Clyde, but I'm not saying it can't be put on the agenda,” Jack Liffey said. “First, though, we need to find Luisa. She seems to have threatened to run away a lot, and she'd say she was going to go into porn. Do you know where
that
came from?”

Barbara Thigpen snorted. “That damn legend of Little Deer!”

“Pardon?”

“You never heard of Little Deer?”

Jack Liffey shook his head and glanced at Gloria out of the corner of his eye. She looked just as baffled.

“You don't watch a lot of triple-X, do you?”

“I guess not.”

“Holy shit, we even get it up here. Little Deer came off one of those big Sioux reservations in the Dakotas back in the late nineties, I think it was Pine Ridge. In L.A. she was an instant hit in the porn business. She made so much money she funded some scholarships and things. I'll bet most Indians everywhere know about her if you asked. I've seen some of her films. She was really slim and beautiful, plus the boob implants of course, and she had that great thick Indian hair. Anyway, she was the only role model Luisa probably had for a way to run away.”

“Shit,” Jack Liffey said. “Whatever happened to waitressing?”

“Pissy men and lousy tips. Would you like to try minimum wage?”

“As opposed to screwing a bunch of guys, at least one of them almost certainly HIV-positive? Yes, I would.”

“That's just your puritan objections masquerading as medical.”

“I don't figure it matters what I think, Miss Thigpen. I just want to find Luisa before she gets herself in trouble, and L.A.'s the place where trouble finds you first. I promise I won't bring her back here if she doesn't want to come.”

“Do you have any idea where to start looking for her?” Gloria put in.

“You could look up Little Deer, if she's still around. Lu might just try to find her for help.”

“How about an Indian name that Luisa might use?”

Barbara smiled gently. “The secret name.” She lit another cigarette immediately. “Lu was funny. Every time she finished a book, she wrote down the date in the back of it and the secret name, Taboots. I think it means rabbit in Paiute, though I never heard her ask anybody to use it.” She thought for a moment. “Whenever we went someplace, she always left a smooth rock in some corner, she carried a pocketful of them. It was like she was trying to mark a trail through her life.”