Terminal Island (3 page)

“I'd figure him for the guy who goes up on the roof with a high-powered rifle and starts shooting innocent pedestrians.”

Dan chuckled. “He straightened up, I guess.”

“I guess I ought to go to some class reunions, but I can't bring myself.”

“I went to one ten years ago. You get to know what the guys are up to.”

“Yeah, I want to see a reunion, but only through about ten panes of one-way glass.” How many times could you stand to explain how you got laid off from a nice aerospace job all of a sudden, in the middle of a normal life, and then got drunk a lot and lost your marriage, and in trying to dig yourself out, you fell into hunting down missing children as a living? It was probably a lot easier to introduce yourself if you were a success of some kind.

December 14

When the world around you is in decline in every respect, to excel becomes much simpler, sometimes no more than a basic
kata.
Last night, after the task of the day, at midnight I constructed a private willed space. I stood against a closed metal grate in the entry of a cheap souvenir shop on Hollywood Boulevard. I remained there until dawn, passed by hookers, by waifs, lost runaways, drug dealers, by pimps and undercover police. For the first time in thirty years I rediscovered what it meant to be both aware of your surroundings and unaware at once. The pain was lessened somewhat, too. I simply was. I was aware of what passed as nothing, as ghosts of this sad underlife. Almost no one saw me there, enfolded in stillness, and the few who did went on quickly.

The right and wrong ways of behaving are both contained within the trivial. At first, there were distracting thoughts. Then I found the place, on the outer margin of the world, above an infinite cliff. I could have grabbed bullets out of the air with my bare hands. Readiness. I knew: All movement is ritual. Like a new kind of breathing, almost peace.

Father, my obligation to you is heavy. Honor is everything.

I am completely at one with your memory and will serve you as if I, too, am already dead. I rush to my death freely. I must act again, for you, according to the code. I will keep
ahimsa
in mind. Hurt no one who does not hurt me.

Be sincere and hard and quick. Loyalty. Justice. Bravery.

Honor holds off darkness.

The disease of secrets, Jack Liffey thought, the disease of private pain. The boy sat sullenly on a plastic bench at Hugo's Tacos, while Jack Liffey brought him a couple of nondescript crisp tacos and a Coke from the take-out window, ordering for himself a bad coffee and a cardboard tray of French fries.

“I already talked to the fucking cop.”

“This isn't really your hangout, is it?” Jack Liffey said, ignoring the undirected venom. He had suggested going someplace where the boy felt comfortable.

The boy shrugged slightly. He'd no more take an adult into his world than put on a Hawaiian lei. He didn't touch the food. Ants made a line up one of the legs of the concrete table, across a corner to a puddle of catsup, where they milled and gorged before heading back down again.

“I went to San Pedro High, too.”

Jack Liffey might as well not have spoken. He continued, “I wasn't very popular. Before I left, I wrote ‘Fuck the Knights' on the base of the big pirate. I wonder if there's any trace of it.”

The kid smiled at that momentarily.

Jack Liffey hadn't done any such thing, but he understood what it meant to be pissed off enough to want to. “Do you want to be called Turtle or Vin?”

The boy shrugged again.

“Are the Knights still around?” This exclusive fraternity of suck-ups and student council types had, in Jack Liffey's day, colluded with the jocks to lord it over everyone else.

“They leave us alone.”

“I imagine since Columbine the school's a bit on your ass, frisking you for shotguns and such.”

“We can't wear trench coats to school anymore. No big deal. What
was
Columbine?”

He let that alone. He knew the kid knew. “Pedro have metal detectors?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do the campus cops hassle you?”

He shrugged, which might have meant anything. There hadn't been any real security in Jack Liffey's time. It had been an open campus and you could come and go at will. You could play in the parks at night, too. Now it seemed to him as if there'd been a universal toxic spill of some chemical that had etched the comfortable edges off everything in the world.

“You prefer to be left alone, I take it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'll do my best, but I promised your dad I'd talk to you about what happened.”

“Don't do me any favors.”

“How about you just tell me who your natural enemies are at school. Every food chain's full of them.”

The kid looked at him. “Huh?”

Jack Liffey wondered how much of Western civilization he shared with this boy. “You know, each one eats the weaker, catsup, ants, me.” He squashed a few ants with his thumb. “Worms eat the pond scum, birds eat the worms, coyotes eat the birds, bears eat the coyotes, we eat the bears. Somewhere in there, there's something that wants to get you. Surfers? Gangbangers? Jocks? Schools are always like that.”

The boy just looked away for the next few minutes, and Jack Liffey got nowhere with his questions.

“Did you ever have a fight with anybody?”

The boy sighed and finally ate a bite of the congealing taco. “I was at a party in PV last month and some vamps got in my face.”

PV he knew. There had never been any love lost between the working-class town of San Pedro down on the flat and the horsy Palos Verdes hills above. In fact, there were several layerings of new-money towns up there, Rancho Palos Verdes, Palos Verdes Estates, Rolling Hills Estates, and then right up on top, the gated community of Rolling Hills that he'd read somewhere had the highest per capita income in the country, probably the known world. But the word
vamps
didn't register.

“Vamps?”

The boy took a moment, then answered reluctantly. “Vampire goths. They wanted me to drink some blood with them and I told them to fuck off.”

Vampire goths. Jack Liffey was not going to betray his surprise. More weirdness. Generally he liked weirdness, but something about kids playing vampires was just sad and pitiable. “You go to parties with vamps a lot?”

“Some.”

“You remember where this was?”

“Somewhere up on Bridlewood.”

That was PV, all right. It was something. But if he decided to take this case, it looked like he was going to need garlic and some silver bullets. They talked for another half hour as the boy finished the aging tacos and then the fries, but Jack Liffey got no more useful information out of him. In the end he tucked his card in the boy's shirt pocket. “If you think of anything else, call me.”

That would happen right after the boy got a button-down shirt and ran for class president, he thought.

Before heading home, he detoured to the far side of town toward Averill Park, where he'd spent about half his childhood. The park had been a WPA project back in the thirties, but to him, growing up nearby, it had just been a park. It had an artificial waterfall that fed a stream running two blocks between rock retaining walls, and above the stream, trees and then rolling grass hills—the most beautiful urban park he had ever seen. Not a stream, in fact, but a series of long ponds that flowed over stone weirs on and on to the big pond at the end at Thirteenth Street. In the middle was a longer pond with an island and a hump bridge, and just over the bridge, the Big Tree. The Big Tree, the Home Tree, had been home base for a million games of hide-and-seek, and it stood there in his psyche as the anchor point of his childhood. Maybe even where it had all gone wrong. If he could get back to the Big Tree, he thought, maybe he could find some way to set off again, the right way this time. He wondered idly what sort of tree it had been. He remembered gnarled and gray, branching at head height and easy to climb. He hadn't been into botany much then, like most kids, or the scientific names of things.

He found a parking spot behind a bunch of shiny old cars with pom-poms that were spilling out a big overdressed Latino wedding party onto the high grass, where they were posing for photographs. The park below was pretty much as he remembered—along the stream, rustic railings made of concrete molds of the same log, repeating the same knots and sawn-off stub over and over again. At the crest of the bridge he started to get a bad feeling. He stopped and stared. There was no Big Tree at the far end of the bridge, not even a stump where the Big Tree had been. About twenty feet away there was a pepper tree, but not as big as the Home Tree and split in a different way.

For a long time he stood there trying to reconcile his memory with what he saw. They couldn't have eradicated his tree so thoroughly. And this other one, it looked so old and so close to where the Home Tree should have been that their roots and branches would have interfered with one another had they coexisted. Could his recollection be that far wrong? He felt bewildered and disoriented, betrayed in some fundamental way.

Suddenly he was having a little trouble getting his breath, a nasty reminder of his collapsed lung. After a while he found himself on a rock bench set into the wall beside the water, staring dully at the ground at his feet. It was as if he'd never find his way home now. He wiped away a single tear.

Three

Soo
Busted

“Jack Fucking Liffey.”

“Ken Fucking Steelyard.”

They examined one another from opposite ends of the short bleachers, like two tomcats not sure there was enough food set out for both. Steelyard had filled out a lot and his hair was combed back in one of those looks that made him seem even older than he was. He wore an atrocious brown suit and a tie with a gravy stain on it.

“So have a seat,” Steelyard said. “It was you wanted to meet in the great outdoors.”

“I sure didn't want to troop through a police station.”

But Steelyard had suggested the location. The bleachers were just upchannel from the old fireboat house, and they faced an open area next to the water where somebody was building a full-size reproduction of a square-rigger, the wooden ribs lashed together now like a whale's skeleton. There was apparently no hurry to complete it, as only three men were working there at the moment, and they seemed to be moving at half speed.

The two former classmates approached one another warily along the bottom tier of the bleachers until they were close enough to shake hands. Then they sat at uncomfortable angles on the bench so they could see one another to talk. “I would never have figured you'd become a cop. Never.”

“You were the brain. I sure didn't expect you to become a private dick.”

“You've been checking up.”

“You were in the papers quite a bit last year.” Jack Liffey had more or less accidentally thwarted a terrorist attack, exposing himself to a lot of what he had thought was plutonium powder but turned out to be harmless granite dust. Still, it had shut down one of his lungs—hopefully, only temporarily—and earned him a Citizen's Medal of Outstanding Valor, plus a lot of free publicity that had done him no good whatsoever.

“I'm not really a detective, you know. I worked in aerospace for a while and got laid off, and I just sort of fell into tracking down missing kids. It's more satisfying than making pizza.”

Neither one of them spoke for a few moments.

“So how did you end up a cop?” Jack Liffey asked after a while.

His companion waited some more, probably out of habit, Jack Liffey thought, since he was trained in interrogation techniques. “It all came to me when I was watching
Star Trek.
”

Jack Liffey laughed for a moment but cranked it down and shut it off when he noticed that Steelyard seemed quite serious. “Was it the pointy ears?”

“You know, Jack, it wasn't. I saw all these different folks working together on a team to do good in the world. I wanted to be on a team like that. Since the United Federation of Planets or whatever didn't seem to be recruiting, I settled for the LAPD.”

His tone was hard to work out. “You did pretty well for yourself if you made detective.”

“I do my job.”

The silence lengthened out.

“If we're through waving our dicks at each other here, I'd like to talk about the Petricich kid.”

The cop grinned a little now, but just for a moment. “Gotta stay in practice. It's good to see you, Jack, really. You were good to me in a really bad time in my life. Remember when we used to make play ghosts with a golf ball tied into a handkerchief?”

The memory gave Jack Liffey a bit of a chill. Even now, he had no idea what they'd been playing at back then. Once in a while, much later, when he knew about things like that, he'd wondered if Steelyard had been gay and struggling with it. “Yeah. I just had a stroll through Averill Park. What a great town this was to grow up in. Barring other problems, of course.”

“I had the other problems, as you know. I didn't get along with my stepdad. Back then, I was the only kid I knew with divorced parents. Now everybody's doing it.”

“Different times.”

A brisk argument was going on up on the scaffold inside the boat's skeleton. The second carpenter had come up and apparently was trying to put back something that had been hammered off. Jack Liffey caught a few of the words wafted into the bleachers against the prevailing breeze, including
shithead
and
pendejo
and
cabrón.

“Are you working for Dan Petricich?” Steelyard asked amiably.

“I'm really just looking into it as an old friend. Dan was right behind us in school. The kid's pretty screwed up. Dan's afraid he's attracting trouble like a lightning rod.”

“I can't really figure out these goths or whatever they are, but I'm the last guy to start sneering at kids in trouble.”

“Yeah.” They talked of their own divorces for a while, and a big green container ship came up the channel, hooting now and then as if in pain from the tugs pushing it around. As it passed, Jack Liffey noticed an endless stack of containers identical to the ones it was carrying to Terminal Island.

“What can you tell me about what happened?”

“We're not sure the kid is even the target, but the perp left two playing cards out of some Japanese deck, the two and three. The trouble is, that leaves fifty more chances for mischief. There were also pointless messages written on the cards, along with a Jap rubber stamp with a funny name.”

“A
hanko
?”

“I think that's what my partner said.”

“It's usually a signature. Could I see the cards?”

“Are you officially working for Dan?”

“Not yet.”

“I think I've got to cover my butt, then, unless he gives me a release. Sorry, Jack.”

“I understand. I've got to think about this whole business. I'm under doctor's orders to take it easy, and I know my daughter and womanfriend will both kill me if I decide to do this.”

“You got a daughter. That's great.”

“Sixteen going on thirty-five. She's a wonderful girl. Really, some days it's just her energy and brain and her good heart that keep me going.”

The second ship carpenter now muscled his way in and started hammering the piece back together while his partner pointed and protested. Jack Liffey hoped it wasn't a critical part. It would be disconcerting to set out to sea one day and have the stopper come out. But then, what did he know about boats?

“I had a daughter, too. She got in a lot of trouble and I couldn't stop it.”

“It takes a lot of strength to keep that stuff out of your soul, but you seem to be doing okay.”

“You don't know me well enough to say that.”

“I guess I don't. I'll be in touch.”

They shook hands again, just a touch, and Jack Liffey walked away.

Steelyard watched the man walk back toward a beat-up old VW, and he couldn't help entertaining a number of might-have-beens. For his money Jack had been the smartest boy in the senior class and might have done a lot better for himself, but he'd always had a malcontent streak, maybe even a self-destructive one. He remembered vaguely that Jack had refused to give the valedictorian's address at graduation. Or, rather, the school had refused to let him give the one he'd written, which reportedly had been a little too fiery. Steelyard grinned. Burn it all down. The times had been like that, and here they were now, both of them uneasily on the side of order, more or less. Maybe one day he'd show him the trains.

* * *

“You're avoiding talking about your father again. He's like the five-hundred-pound elephant standing there in the corner.”

“He's not even in the room anymore. Let's leave it that way.”

“You know what reality is?” Dicky Auslander said, making a little tepee of his fingers.

Dicky's consultation room gave Jack Liffey the creeps, and he made a face. Auslander was full of theories, none of them very profound, and Jack Liffey wasn't going to touch a sucker line like that.

“It's when you pretend the thing isn't there that it sneaks over and kicks your ass.”

“That's a super theory, Dicky. I hope you get it published.”

If Jack Liffey didn't show up weekly, he lost the regular stipend some victim's legislation was granting him for a while. But his goal was to keep the sessions brisk and empty because he didn't trust Auslander. There was a new painting on the wall now, where an earnestly restful seascape had once been. He was glad the old painting was gone; it had been done by someone who'd obviously never looked very closely at the sea, probably sitting in a warehouse in Kansas copying the same photo over and over. The new one was an abstract with a lot of fiddly little markings creeping over it like insects. It seemed more authentic in some way, though it was also more disturbing and left him edgy.

“How's the relationship with Rebecca?”

“Great. We're still going slow on it. I stay at her place sometimes and then she takes a turn and stays with me. More often at my place, really, so Maeve knows where we are. Becky's just great—solid and funny and affectionate. I can't believe my luck.”

“Why would you say that, Jack?”

“Oh, come off it. You don't have to leap on everything I say.”

“Do you think you're good for her?”

“I'm good
to
her. I may not be fit to judge the other. We're doing fine.”

“Have you had any of your bad spells lately?”

“Yeah, some.”

“I'm going to ask again: Have you ever thought of trying one of the new antidepressants? Sometimes all it takes is a bit of a chemical nudge to jolt you right back into the groove. I've seen them work miracles. Don't keep dismissing the idea out of hand.”

“I gave up drinking, Dicky, to show myself I could. I'll use your tranqs from time to time when the anxiety starts getting the best of me—but that's all. It's my belief that my natural mental state contains something of value to me, and I'm not inclined to use those big, blunt tools to hammer at it. What's really wrong is I'm going nuts sitting home reading. I need to get back to work.”

The small house that contained Auslander's clinic vibrated with some new equipment in the physical therapy room next door. The year before, Liffey knew they'd done a lot of anger work in there—people boffing each other with those big foam-tipped cudgels—but that approach seemed to have gone out of fashion.

“What does your lung man say about that?”

“He'd probably tell me to wait, but I don't think I'm going to ask permission.”

“So why are you asking me?”

“I guess I'm just thinking out loud.”

“For the record, then, I disapprove. I think your mental state is too fragile for anything very stimulating.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

Maeve showed up just after he'd pulled in, and he made a point of not asking where she'd been as they walked to the condo. At a certain point you either trusted your offspring, or not. Maeve made a beeline for the answering machine, as if there might be a message for her that needed to be censored, but the only one was for both of them, and she cranked up the volume.

“Jack and Maeve, I'm sorry but I'll be stuck hovering over the parents setting up for next week's school pageant so I won't be able to make it home by dinner. I'll see you later this evening. My cell is on the blink, but my pager works. Love you both.”

“Pageant,” Maeve said, rolling the word around in her mouth like an exotic food.

“I guess rich schools still do that sort of thing. Fly in some camels and rhinos, dress up the girls like Scheherazade.”

“Funny, I know that name but not who she is.” He always marveled at her unself-conscious honesty. Maeve went to the fridge and took out a flavored iced tea with some goofy name, the only thing she drank these days.

“There was a sultan who believed all women were unfaithful, so he vowed he'd marry a different bride every day and strangle her the next morning. But Scheherazade was too clever for him. She started telling her elaborate tales, then every morning broke off right at the crucial moment.”

“
The Thousand and One Nights?
”

“You got it. That's how long she had to tease him with her stories before he changed his mind.”

“I forgot that you know everything.”

“Far from it. For instance, I don't have a clue why you pay four eighty-nine for a few bottles of iced tea that we could make for a quarter. In fact, I don't know much of anything about the world you're growing up in. It's not like mine.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'll bet there are things that go on at your school that would astonish me.” He nodded at her encouragingly. “Go on, astonish me. I'm not prying, it doesn't have to be personal.”

She screwed up her face. “I have to think about it because it's all normal to me.” She swigged her tea as he went through the mail. Mostly bills, but none of the bright red ones that you really had to pay right now or go without something important.

“Okay, here's something that'll seem pretty strange to you, but first, I don't do this, okay?”

“I believe you.”

“There are these hook-up parties. Not everybody goes, but a lot of kids do. They go to meet somebody just to have sex with, but no emotional attachments, just sort of like calisthenics. They go off and do it and then just leave. Hooking up.”

“In the era of AIDS?” He was dumbfounded. The very idea of high school kids sex-swapping like a fifties daydream of the idle rich cranked up his free-floating anxiety another notch.

“I suppose most of them are careful. I don't know.”

He was quiet for a while. “Okay, you did it. You flabbergasted me.”

“Was all this leading up to something?”

“You know me too well,” he admitted. “What do you know about vampire goths?”

She came across the room and tugged his collar open a bit to peer closely at his neck. When he got the joke—a little tardily—he chuckled. “I get a chill every time I pass garlic in the supermarket.”

“Ha-ha. There are a few of them at Redondo. But I think they just play at it, dressing up for parties. I've heard they do body piercing and lick the blood off the needles. Gross.”