The Chinese Beverly Hills (30 page)

She rejected going down to the fire road because she’d have to pass right by the cabin. Uphill, a deer trail. The night was terribly cold, and she tried to remember if Che had ever made an escape in such conditions.

*

Big, soft hailstones mashed against the windshield and the wipers fought hard to clear the slush.

“Holy—!”

Paula stood on the waterlogged brakes and just managed to halt before ticking a Jeep Wrangler abandoned in the road beside a big neutral-colored Ford. A van was ahead of them.

“What the hell is all this?”

“Folks that sure ain’t expecting traffic.”

“They gettin’ some. If Jack’s in there, I bet he’s not happy.”

“When’s he ever happy?” Gloria said.

“Hush, girl. You played your part in that.”

“You’re a hard woman.”

“You want me mellow, shoot me. Can you manage a little walk in the mud?”

“I got my cane.”

“I’m the primary here, remember that.”

“You shoot ’em all, except Jack, and I’ll tell you if you done right.”

*

Beef sat sullenly in the corner, entertaining himself with what seemed photos on his cell phone. Every once in a while he emitted a guffaw without much humor in it. He seemed to have only two mental states, Roski thought: sulkiness or a kind of scornful glee.

Zook launched into some garbled philosophizing about how women were oppressed by their own eyes or maybe men’s eyes; Acevedo was rummaging in obvious hiding places for something, and Roski decided on having a beer after all. He needed it. Bending to the cooler, he caught a glance of the big guy’s cell phone.

“What’s that?”

Beef hid the screen against his chest. “You a Chink-lover, Mr. Marine?”

“I can take ’em or leave ’em.”

“Okay. You got to like this, then.”

He held his phone toward Roski with the image of a defaced Chinese business sign. Then he punched forward to a photo of one of the racist posters Roski had seen on the street in the valley. “This is our get-back.”

“Very clever,” Roski said lightly. “What else do you have?”

*

The two women were halfway to the cabin, Gloria hobbling badly on her cane, when they heard yet another car approach. They looked back to see Jack Liffey’s pickup slide into Paula’s Accord with his brakes locked up, not hard enough to do much damage. The roadblock had obviously caught him by surprise, too.

“That answers one question,” Paula said.

“That’s my man, all right,” Gloria said.

He got out of the pickup, astonished to see them there.

“You know why I like him,” Gloria said. “Jack always worries more about what I’m afraid of than what he’s afraid of.”

“He don’t look right, girl,” Paula said.

She was right. He staggered toward them, clutching his arm.

*

Roski waited, but Beef noticed Sgt. Acevedo draw his hand happily out of a cookie jar with several joints.

“Hey, dibs,” Beef called

“That’s my weed,” Zook said.

Nothing but the joints seemed to matter just then. Beef left his phone in Roski’s hand and stood up to inch himself toward the policeman.

The policeman slowly developed a grin as he watched Beef approach. His hand went to his holster, unsnapping the strap over his Glock. “Don’t get too close unless you wanna French kiss,” Acevedo said.

In the Marines, Roski had taken a course called “Village Entry,” where they’d been taught that the minimum personal safety distance was five feet. Any closer and you couldn’t react in time. Beef was getting there with Acevedo.

“Don’t you trust me, Manny-Wanny?” Beef carried a strange warp in his voice.

But Roski’s eyes were drawn irresistibly to the phone, and he swiped the photos forward. Smoke billowing out an auditorium double-doorway with people rapidly exiting. A close-up of a slashed tire. A spray-painted smiley face with slant eyes on a shop window. A broken picture window on what looked an expensive house. A girl lying on her side on the ground.

Roski froze.

“No trust here, big guy. Down in Chiapas, my grandparents had a saying: ‘Trust is next to God.’ But after the drug business came in, it became, ‘Forget trust—you can meet God later.’”

It wasn’t just any girl in the photograph. An Asian girl with long dark hair. She was handcuffed and her ankles were taped together. She seemed to be lying in a gravel wash. Hello, Sabine, Roski thought. Sonofabitch.

“Haw! You Mexes is great comedians.”

“Beef,
don’t
!” Zook called.

Roski couldn’t tear his eyes off the phone. There were two more pictures of the girl, one showing a gunshot wound in her forehead. Jack, you’re not going to like this.

“Hey!”

“Shit, no!”

Roski heard a scuffling going on, but he couldn’t look up. He swiped forward again. The bitter chill retook him, almost as bad as the first one, seeing the girl. A lighted cigarette poked out of a matchbook that rested on a pile of crumpled newspaper. The next several photographs were all of the early stages of a forest fire. Bugs usually stuck around to watch.

The deafening gunshot broke Roski’s angry trance, followed by a shrieking like a steam-whistle from Acevedo. He saw Beef’s hand on the pistol still in the cop’s waistband. Beef yanked the pistol out fast and whirled to aim it at Zook.

Zook’s eyes went wide with bewilderment. “Tony, we’re besties—”

*

Jack Liffey staggered up to the women. “I can’t deal with this. The pain is awful.”

Just then they all heard a gunshot, then another, from the cabin.

“I guess we’re going in,” Paula Green said, drawing her pistol and glancing at Gloria and Jack.

“I guess we are.”

“Just please!” Jack Liffey clutched his left shoulder and toppled into a pool of mud.

“Or maybe not,” Gloria said.

“Can you help me lift him?”

“I will if I can or not.”

*

Ellen felt like a wet housecat scrambling up the deer trail, soaked to the skin and freezing. In her mind’s eye, the fat one was only a few feet behind her, about to grab her ankle and yank her back. Lord, that monstrous appendage!

She emerged from the chaparral into a startlingly denuded fire zone with only stubs of former plants. Off to the left she saw a small shelf of rock far above the creek, and she calmed down enough to go to it and press herself in under the shelter, clutching her ankles and breathing deeply.

Down very deep she felt a kind of continuing fear that she’d never felt before—the end of the innocence of terror—and she wondered if she would ever recover. She knew she’d be reassessing the Orange Berets for the rest of her life, but she refused to repudiate her impulse to justice.

All at once her whole world rumbled, and she pressed a hand to the rock overhead for comfort. A baritone vibration was palpable beneath her. The noise swelled and acquired sharper overtones, clattering and clacking. It was from the ravine. She watched in awe as a tidal surge of water and rock and debris fled down the gorge. The cliff opposite gave way and slumped into the flood.

A crack opened up below her shelf as she watched, horrified. She wanted to flee but couldn’t move.

*

As the women propped Jack Liffey between them, they heard the terrible rumble begin, like a giant machine turning over deep in the earth.

In Jack Liffey’s headlights, they caught a glimpse of the first destructive wave coming down the gorge. Stones in the flow grated horribly against one another, the kind of sound that you guessed people rarely heard and survived.

“Don’t be no scaredy-cat!” Paula said.

“His truck’s blocking us,” Gloria said.

“Throw him in the back. We’ll have to take his.”

*

Inside the cabin, everyone seemed to realize the terrible noise meant impending death. Roski grabbed the only guy he could get his hands on and hauled Beef out the back door into sheets of sleety rain. He frog-marched him straight across a clearing and uphill. A surprisingly dead weight, gone into some kind of panicked freeze-up. Roski was incredibly strong from constant weight training—one of his few vanities. The young man eventually began to resist.

“Help out or die,” Roski said. Beef began to get control of his legs.

Roski heard the rasp of rock on rock, and one glance showed boulders leaping above the watercourse like dolphins. His only cogent idea was to go up and up. Eventually, Beef tore out of Roski’s grasp and tumbled backward.

“Stay off me, you old fart.” Beef struggled to his feet

“Look at the flood, man. It’s going to kill both of us.”

“Shit on a stick!” The flow was too much for the gorge, spreading out wherever it could. The cabin below was apparently swept away.

Both men scrambled upward.

“Shit shit shit!”

They flailed through weeds and brush and came out into burn. Beef had little endurance and sat heavily in exhaustion. “Leave me for the Injuns. I’m a no-hope.”

Roski considered for a moment, and then came back to squat next to Beef. “Tell me about Sabine Roh,” Roski said mildly. “I saw the pictures. We’re all guys together.”

“The other Chinese cunt?”

Roski nodded serenely.
Other
?

“What’s to know? She was following me around like a dog and driving me nuts; she pretended she liked me. Whatever happened to her, she deserved it.”

While he was talking, Beef slowly withdrew a big serrated killing knife from his Redwing boot. He seemed to think the movement went unnoticed.

“It’s too bad you know the name, old man,” Beef said.

“Hold on, pal,” Roski said equably. “After you took care of the girl, you started the Sheepshead Fire to cover it up? Seriously? I saw the picture of the matchbook, too.”

Beef haw-hawed once. “Life is tough titty. I don’t ask God for nothing in the bad times, because I don’t ask in the good times neither.” He brought the K-bar up with a smirk as if to show Roski how he was about to die.

Roski sighed, and without any windup rammed the heel of his right hand very hard into Beef’s throat, crushing his larynx. In the Third of the First, they’d been given Israeli Krav Maga training in hand-to-hand combat. The trouble with an extravagantly aggressive martial art was that when you really needed it, all you knew how to do was kill.

Anthony Buffano collapsed like a deflated balloon, gagging and clutching his throat. Roski lifted him by a handful of shirt and dragged the worthless hulk across burned-over hillside to the edge of the ravine and tossed the big sack of crap into the debris flow, watching the body flail end over end as it descended the cataract.

Nobody killed a firefighter on his watch. He knew he’d never tell anyone about this except Jack Liffey

Jack, where the
hell
are you?

A light rain was coming down as the skirmish line, wearing bright orange vests and fiberglass helmets, made its way across the vast rubble field, poking deep into fresh mud with fiberglass poles. Several dogs ran ahead of them and pawed the ground here and there. Excavating machines waited far down below on Serrano Place. Only a few homes in the neighborhood had survived, teeth in a shattered denture.

“Where the fire trail crossed the creek,” Walter Roski said. “If you’ve got a survey map.”

George Maloof, the head of the San Dimas Mountain Rescue team, pointed out what little he could decipher of a slope where no landmarks remained. The landslides had ultimately torn loose a half-mile of mountain and buried two centuries-old canyons, five old cabins, two fire trails, the surrounding slopes, and much of the neighborhood, where another rescue team was working on the debris of houses with a chugging Jaws of Life and prybars.

Maloof studied his handheld GPS, on short loan from the Air Force for the rescue operation. It was more sensitive than the commercial units, using twelve satellites to locate itself within a centimeter.

“Maybe where that German Shepherd is alerting.”

“How many people have been found?”

“I don’t have a total. Thirty-some dead. A few were alive in the flat, nobody up here.”

“Dumb question, sorry,” Roski said.

They walked on in gloomy silence for a while, watching the soil as if they could see into it.

“I ran into a religious group once,” Maloof said, “who said wanting anything better than you’re given after a tragedy is an insult to God.”

Roski wondered if this guy was religious and what religion. But the personal was personal.

“
Inshallah
,” Maloof said. “When what you want didn’t happen, you praise God and learn to want what did.”

Barks and human shouts swirled around them. Roski knew he was overwrought, as usual. “The real trouble with catastrophes is that the idiots who survive talk as if they had a special deal with God.”

Maloof didn’t smile. “Yeah, that’s what idiots do.”

The dog had given up alerting and moved on, but the spot had a small red flag. A large oval of hardening mud showed a grayer and smoother texture, as indecipherable as a faraway spiral galaxy.

“Yeah,” Maloof said. “We’re ten meters directly over the cabin.”

*

Gloria grabbed at Paula’s blouse to hold her back. Paula had parked in the shadow of the 1930s art-deco hulk of L.A. County Hospital, condemned to death after the 1994 earthquake and now just offices. The replacement glass and steel Kleenex boxes looked like every other hospital in the world.

“I know I screwed up with the Bakersfield guy. Haven’t you ever been hit by a craving you didn’t expect? You think nothing can touch you and then some guy like a hundred other guys hits you with a magic raygun. It’s a goddam hostage situation. It’s junior high again. And when it’s over, you think you’re back in your normal world and he drops you a stupid little note—
Can I just have permission to think about you, my darling?
Why do we think love is so great?”

Paula frowned at her. “Girl, the real problem is you got sex stuck up here—” She tapped Gloria’s forehead. “—instead of down where it belongs. Come on.”

Paula Green badged a couple of post-9/11 security guards at the back door to butch around the metal detector on the way to the cardiac ward.