The Poison Sky (19 page)

“That's me,” Jack Liffey said. “Men with questions form a distinct fraternity in this town.”

“And all the others are heavy drinkers.” He knew Jack Liffey was on the wagon. He produced a bottle of single-malt scotch and shared it with the boatman. “I won't offer.”

“It doesn't burden me. I need to know about the toxic-waste business, or about GreenWorld Chemical out in Burbank.”

The boatman put down his pipe and took a packet of Twinkies out of his canvas jacket. He stripped off the cellophane and poured scotch fussily onto one of the Twinkies, dribbling it slowly from end to end so the spongy cake had soaked up as much as it could hold. Then he began to eat the Twinkie with satisfaction.

“GreenWorld. Formerly a subsidiary of ACI, the third largest chemical corporation in the world, part owner of the state of New Jersey. But I think I know what you're really after. Remember when napalm became unpopular, and Dow spun off their subsidiary that made it? When DDT became illegal, Du Pont shipped the production facility to a maquilladora just south of the Mexican border and then cut it loose. Manville waited too long to get out of asbestos and they damn near went under with the lawsuits. Spin off the bad stuff, send it to the third world, let the Thais eat rat poison—it was the corporate game of the eighties.”

“What was GreenWorld's poison?”

Mike Lewis laughed and took a big swig off the bottle. “Their poison was poison. They began with reclaimed motor oil and picking up old photographic chemicals to dredge out the precious metals and they got into storing really bad industrial waste, taking it off the hands of other corporations. Then ACI pioneered ways to neutralize PCBs and dioxins and nerve gases by burning them at very high temperatures, preferably in big incinerators in the working-class end of your city. With all the Superfund money around, it was a growth industry for a while.”

“I thought they stopped those incinerators.”

“Most places did. I worked on the campaign to stop Lancer in Watts. This is a mighty litigious country, and when the poison game started getting more risky than profitable, ACI cut their industrial waste group loose with a pat on the back. Actually they spun it off to a group of VPs and some venture capitalists who liked the gamble. They had the common touch, some of these new owners. There was a lot of corporate bonding with some shady types, I hear.”

The old sailor started flavoring his second Twinkie. When he had it well soaked, he offered Mike Lewis a bite, but Mike shook his head and took his straight out of the bottle instead.

“Sicilians used to be big in reclaimed motor oil,” Jack Liffey said.

“Or what passed for Sicilians out here in the west. Guys like Mickey Cohen. These guys like any kind of gig where you can cut corners and muscle a lot of little guys.”

“How's this for cutting corners? Somebody pays you a pretty penny to haul off their toxic waste and neutralize it and you just dump it down the drain.”

Mike Lewis shook his head. “They monitor the drains. EPA, city agencies, the state.”

“It's a metaphor, Mike. You put it in a truck and dump it at night on a desert road where nobody much ever goes.” That got his attention all right.

“That's not a metaphor. That's a felony.”

Inexplicably the old sailor had started to cry. He stared at half a Twinkie in his hand and wept silently, tears rolling down his cheeks.

“Oh, Holy Moses,” Mike Lewis said.

At first Jack Liffey thought he was reacting to the old sailor's tears and then he noticed Mike was looking down at the water, bending forward, his eyes open wide.

“I thought it was just a tire.”

The other two joined him at the gunwale and they all stared overboard at an oil sheen ruffled by the wind, and then faintly, beneath the surface, a darker shape turning slowly in the current that tugged past the mouth of Fish Harbor.

“Waterlogged,” the old sailor said.

When the shape of the long neck became unmistakable, they could see that it was a Thoroughbred horse, drifting just beneath the surface, though all the legs had been chopped off at the knee. Or eaten off, Jack Liffey thought.

“Not good,” the old sailor decided, and wept some more.

A
T
the end of the dock there were three pay telephones in their little phone-company plastic bubbles. One phone was missing its handset, the second took only credit cards, and the third had its coin slot jammed with bubble gum that had hardened to concrete. He trudged back to the boat.

“Mike, let me borrow your cellular.”

“What makes you think I've got a cellular?”

“Same thing makes me think you don't take ginseng supplements.”

“Okay.” He dug in his gym bag and something clumsy in the motion made him look younger, more vulnerable, but it might just have been the sickly sea light on his pale skin.

On an intuition, Jack Liffey asked, “How's Siobhan?”

Mike Lewis gave a little shrug as he tossed the phone casually over to him. “She went back to Ireland.”

“See her family?”

“For good.”

“Oh, shit, I'm sorry, Mike.” Siobhan and his own wife had been best friends. Mike Lewis didn't look very happy about it.

“I hope it works out for you.”

“I'm learning to like losing. It has fewer responsibilities.” He saluted with a hoist of the scotch bottle. “A dark disenchantment prevails for now.”

Jack Liffey wanted to step back aboard and give his shoulder a squeeze or punch him lightly, but it would have been too awkward. “I hate it,” Jack Liffey said. “Life won't leave you alone.”

“Nothing scares me anymore,” Mike Lewis said. “I've got that.”

Jack Liffey walked a ways up the dock before calling Art Castro's office. He recognized the secretary's voice. She was the one with the big eyebrows who was always eyeing your shoes and wristwatch, something they taught in receptionist school to sort out the losers and make them wait. Art Castro worked for a high-class detective agency and they didn't do a lot of work for losers.

“This is his old buddy Jack Liffey, so you can tell me where he is.”

He heard a dull electric hiss for a bit.

“You remember me, Timex and Sears loafers.”

“Oh, I remember you.” Still more phone hiss.

“Art told me if I ever really needed to get through to him to tell you, ‘
Murieron tres toreros el año pasado.
' ”

She corrected his pronunciation fussily but he could almost hear the disappointment in her voice. “I bet you don't know what it means.”

“Three bullfighters turned in their lunch bucket last year.” They'd set up the password because Art was holding something important for him, some evidence he would probably never need, but if he did, he'd need it in a hurry.

“He's up in Hanson Dam on a stakeout. He'll be in the wild land up in the far north. That's all I can tell you.”

“If I don't make it out in a week, send the sled dogs.”

H
E
thought a moment and then dialed a second number.

He asked at the switchboard and finally got through.

“Quinn.”

“You don't know me, but I have some information for you.”

“The hell I
don't
know you. You're that fuckhead Liffey.”

Jack Liffey waited a moment, but it didn't change anything. “I'm that fuckhead Liffey who's warning you that IA is after your ass. Don't do anything I wouldn't do.”

He hung up. He'd thought long and hard about this call and he could not quite come to grips with why he felt compelled to make it when he disliked Quinn so and would be perfectly happy to see someone pull him down. Bending over backward to give a hand to your worst enemy was a moral imperative of some sort—in his finicky conscience it seemed to have something to do with staying absolutely even in an ambiguous world.

13

BLOOD WILL TELL

S
OUTHERN
C
ALIFORNIA MANAGED TO NORMALIZE ITS DIS
asters by making up scientific scales for them. The equivalent of the Richter scale for wet-season floods was based on anticipated frequency, and in the world of rushing water the Big One was a hundred-year flood. The massive earthen Hanson Dam was almost two miles long, meant to keep a hundred-year flood sweeping down out of the Tujunga Canyons from obliterating the whole northeast Valley. On the safe side of the dam there was a manicured golf course for the rich, but on the inner, danger side they'd left a couple thousand acres of wild chaparral, boulders, dirt parking lot, and the kind of rough parkland that the city offers up to its working poor.

He cruised slowly down the winding access roads. Here and there dusty pads off to the side held a handful of cars and Latino families cooking at portable barbecues or playing soccer. Art Castro drove a big silver Lexus but Jack Liffey guessed he'd have some sort of beat-up agency panel van for surveillances like this. The Lexus would stand out here like a gorilla in church. He smiled, thinking of his woeful Concord with its flapping plastic, which would fit right in.

On one of the parking pads about fifty Asians of all ages were standing under a banner with a big cross and a lot of Korean script as they belted out Christian hymns. He wondered who on earth Art Castro was spying on out here.

And there there it was, a gray Ford Econoline so old the driver's seat was forward of the front axle, the only American van ever made that was as dangerous to drive as a Volkswagen.
MANNY'S SEWER-ROOTER,
it said on the side and it even had a pipe clamp on the hindquarter as window dressing, but it was backed up to the edge of the parking pad so the rear windows would look out over the chaparral to the west and Jack Liffey couldn't think of a single rational reason to go to the trouble of backing that van into the parking slot except for the view.

He parked in front of the van and got out to rap on the side door. “Liffey Pizza,” he called. “Anchovies ‘R' Us.” There was a scurrying sound, like unleashing a big animal, and then the door came open.

“Fucking-A, Jack, step inside quick.”

Art Castro helped boost him up and then shut them in, and it was a remarkable shift, like falling through into another dimension. There was a rudimentary bar, a lot of radio gear, and two easy chairs facing back. The light coming in the back windows was so subdued he guessed they were one-way glass.

“So this is the sort of fancy toy you get when you work for the big boys.”

“You should see the private jet. What are you doing out here?” There was a crazy glisten in his eyes, and Jack Liffey guessed he'd taken something to stay alert.

“I used the magic word on your secretary.”

Art Castro groaned and motioned him to sit. “Dr Peppers in that little icebox. Try to keep your voice to a gentle roar.” He picked up a pair of binoculars with the biggest lenses Jack Liffey had ever seen and gave the area to the west a once-over.

“ 'Course, I could ask what you're doing out here, too,” Jack Liffey said.

“That's kind of on a need-to-know basis, Jack.”

“Couple jackrabbits cheating on their disability?”

“Something like that.”

Jack Liffey borrowed the glasses and peered out the back window. Surprisingly, the binoculars weren't as powerful as he'd expected, but all that optical glass made the scene brighter than day. They had a weird resistance to being moved and he felt the faint tremble of spinning gyros in the image stabilization mechanism that was making the picture rock-solid.

In the distance a strange game was going on in silence, and it was like peering through a thick glass window into another world. Thirty or forty small brown men drifted in shoals behind a ball the size of a cantaloupe that was punched back and forth by men who seemed to have bricks strapped to the punching surface of their fists. One man with a tall pole marked out a position in their midst, and he drifted back and forth regularly to replant his marker without apparent reason. It was like an ancient ghost of some Aztec contest reasserting itself on the face of the land.

“What the hell is that?”

“I don't know much more than you. It's called
ball,
and it comes from the far south.”

“Way past Mason and Dixon.”

“Oh,
way. My
south, Chiapas or Campeche. I don't think you tracked me down to ask me anthropological questions about Mayan ball games.”

Jack Liffey described his bounty hunters and asked if he knew who they were. Art Castro went uncharacteristically quiet, then he hummed a little bit, like a machine resonating.

“What are you taking, man? I thought you were clean.”

“Just a little crystal to stay on top.”

“Special Forces popcorn.”

“Nah, those were those green-and-white amphetamines, but there it is.”

“You going to tell me about the redhead and his pal, or you going to go on humming some more?”

“So they fancy themselves bounty hunters now. They're the kind of guys who start out reading
Soldier of Fortune
in high school and recruit themselves into private armies. They leaked down here about a year ago from some militia in Idaho or South Dakota and showed up at the office one day, because we're the best known name, and they wanted a job with us. Rosewood himself threw them out, and when they threatened to blow up his mother and all her friends with C-4 he had them checked out for good measure. Remember BWT?”

“Bacon with tomato?”

He smiled a thin smile and swept the west with his binoculars again. “Blood Will Tell, I think it stood for. Christian Identity guys, whatever the hell that is. I'm Catholic and I
know
who I am. These guys declared the Deadwood Republic up in redneck land and slapped liens on everybody's property who didn't swear allegiance along with them. The liens are bogus but it can cost you a fortune in lawyers to get them vacated.