Dangerous Games (12 page)

“It's beginning to look like it.” He still hadn't told her who Thumb Estrada was. He was afraid she'd be obliged as a cop to turn the boy in, and though he didn't have a clue why he'd spared him, he'd made his decision to drag the boy kicking and screaming into a civil world, and he meant to stick to it, even if he had to go round him up bodily to start the process.

“You made this off the tree in back, didn't you? We ought to set up a little booth out here and sell it in the neighborhood for a nickel a glass,” he mused.

“That was
your
ideal childhood that never happened, Mr. Anglo Middle Class. My ideal childhood that never happened was a
quinceañera
gown all in white and big hair and a sea of white roses.”

He put an arm around her. “You never got your gown?”

“My fosters couldn't afford it, not on the $300 a month the county gave them. The whole point of their scam was living off the kids. The cheaper the upkeep, the more to keep.”

“Ah, shit. Was it really bad?”

She stared at him. “It was worse. Let it go. Do you think this thing still works?” A cheap old Polaroid camera dangled from its lanyard off her left wrist, clunky as a toaster.

“They've been pretty well wiped out by digitals, but I think you can still get the film. What do you want to shoot?”

“You,” she said.

“Why?”

“I want to make a collection of the different kinds of shit-eating grins you get on your face when you're lying to me.”

ELEVEN

Notching up the Reality

“I guess you really are a detective.”

“I really am a detective. I'm nobody's tame Mexican spitfire, Jack.”

“There's only one thing I haven't leveled with you about, and I did it to keep from putting you in an uncomfortable position.”

She thought about that, then grabbed his lemonade back and drank it herself, as if to punish him. “I knew I should have insisted right then when I saw you come home with that gun in your pants like some
cholo
punk. You can put things over on me, or you can fuck me. You can't have both, Jack. I never let a man do that.”

He was reminded once again how sensitive and angry she was deep inside—at her foster parents, at being given a Chicano childhood for her Indio genes, at a lot of other slights and indignities, and, oh yes, at men. It gave him a funny feeling, like being flattened out to some two-dimensional character in a soap opera and then being forced to defend the ideological territory that came with it.

He opted for honesty. It wasn't always the best policy, even considering his half-assed perpetual thrashing around in search of integrity—what Maeve called his
portable ethics
—but it was generally the simplest course of action once you'd been caught out, that was for sure.

“Okay, I'll tell you, but then I'm going to have to kill you,” he said. That didn't help, and he put down the sharpening stone and righted the lawnmower. “Please hear me out. I know you're a sworn officer of the law, and you have some kind of duty to report crimes and criminals wherever life takes you. I was trying to keep you clear with your sense of duty. And with your supervisor, too.”

She glared at him and turned the lemonade glass upside down to spill away the last spoonful.

“I mean, isn't it true—if you know something, you have to report it?”

She thought about this for a moment. “Not necessarily. I might be protecting a snitch, or what I think I know might be hearsay. I could name other situations. You get to use a lot of judgment on the street. It's called HBO—handled by officer.”

“Now we're getting somewhere.”

She went back into the house and refilled the glass, then offered it again. This time he took it from her and gulped. It needed more sugar, and it burned down like acid. Just what he deserved, he supposed.

“Okay, I found the kid who shot Maeve. He lives in a converted garage over on Clarence. I went to see him. I don't know what I was thinking about. Maybe I just took the pistol along to protect myself and make him listen to me.”

“Make him listen?”

He shrugged. “Well, he'd shot at me once. I liked him a lot better sitting still and paying attention. You know, I don't think he even knows why he did it. He says it kind of just happened. I think I can see that. He's the usual fucked-up mess, but sometimes kids like that make the best adults of all when they straighten out.”

“I see. It's a reclamation project.”

“You're always high on Father Boyle and his unconditional love for the gangbangers. I don't think my temperament is quite that forgiving. Hell, I know it isn't. I was actually thinking of killing the kid for a while, and, for some reason, the god of mercy just reached out and whacked me, just like that, and I decided to try something else. I don't understand it any more than he understands why he tried to cap me. Though I think he was probably just trying to scare me. To wring some respect out of an Anglo. I'd like to help him. Maybe it'd even up some big scoreboard somewhere.” He eyed her warily. “Are you going to report this to Padilla?”

She let her head hang for a moment, as if a sudden upsurge of thoughts had created ideas within her cranium far too heavy for her neck to support. “Jesus Christ, Jack. It does put me in a tough place. Sit with me.”

There was an old wooden glide on the little porch that had frozen up long ago. He loved sitting on it because it was such an image of neighborly life, and here in East L.A. there were actual neighborly things to see from it, women bent over in flower gardens, children pedaling big-wheel tractors along the sidewalks, teens drinking beer under the open hoods of their jalopies. At the moment, there was only a tiny girl in a pink dress and way too much makeup and an earring, staring straight at them through the chain-link gate.

“
¿Qué pues?
You gonna fight?” she asked them.

Gloria smiled tightly and gave Jack Liffey a one-arm hug. “No,
querida, ya estuvo.
We love each other very much.”

“That's good to know,” Jack Liffey said softly. “Zing went the strings of my heart.”

“Is Maeve home?” the little girl insisted.

“Maeve is away right now,” Jack Liffey told her. “She's staying with her mother for a while. It's
muy lejos,
way across town,
cerca la playa.
”

“Oh.” She seemed very disappointed. “Maeve plays cards with me.”

“That's nice,” Gloria said. “We'll tell her you asked for her. Run along now,
ranita.
”

The girl waved and skipped down the road.

“
Ranita,
that's a pretty name,” he said.

“It's not her name. It means little frog.”

“Sorry, I'm trying.”

“That's okay, Jack.” She squeezed his knee. “I forget sometimes you're a pretty good man, all in all. I'm sorry I went off on you there, but you got to keep me in the picture, especially if you wander off into deep water and get over your head. Out here in my part of town.
Peligro, esse.
It's a hard rain in the
barrio.
”

They both watched the quiet scene for a moment. It was a beautiful neighborhood, if a bit beat up, full of flowers and much-loved front gardens offered up as a gift to the street. There was just a certain insinuation of protection in the fences that surrounded every front yard, so unlike white L.A., suggesting an undertow of prudence and apprehension.

“Whatever happened to that nice world we were supposed to have where kids played kids' games and grew up slowly?” Jack Liffey asked. “Then they learned a trade and got their own house and had their own families? Most Latinos I know are a lot better at families than my people.”

“That world is right out there,
querido,
it's just not the whole picture. A little more respect from the world, a few more jobs, a little less need for macho—maybe it could be the whole thing.”

“You still have bad dreams?”

“Let's not talk about that.”

“It leaks in, sweet,” he said. “You thrash around a lot.”

“You can always leave for quieter parts and all the blondes with the good dreams and the Volvos.”

“That's not what I mean.” He entwined his fingers with hers.

She squeezed his hand back, and he felt the roughness of her skin. “Tell me more about this dumb thing you're doing.”

“I'd like to believe everybody's just an inch from okay,” Jack Liffey said. “As you say. A little less this, a little more that. Look at this punk who potshotted me. Thumb is his street name.” He shook his head sadly. “He dresses like a gangster, he acts menacing at the drop of a hat, and he mad-dogs you. Back in the car, he even held the damn gun horizontally the way all the gangbangers do it in the movies these days. I mean, where do kids like that get off complaining that people take them for gangsters?” He waved a palm in the air as if erasing his argument. “Okay, I'm just frustrated. I
do
understand a lot of it. You fail in school, your dad drinks himself into a stupor and beats your mom, your only heroes are urban warriors, etc., etc.
That's
why I want to give this guy a break. My little Pygmalion.”

“Pygmalion? What's that?”

“Better known as
My Fair Lady.
You're the one that loves Greg Boyle and his theories about saving all these kids. You going to turn me in or let me try to do this?”

“Thumb didn't show up to mow the lawn,” she said, as if that settled it.

“So, he didn't turn his life around on the first try. Is that all he gets?”

An ice cream pushcart came down the road, tinkling its bell. East L.A. was full of them, unlike the white suburbs, like emblems of the world everybody really wished it was.

“I won't tell Padilla right now, but you got to let me back you up. You don't even speak the language, Jack.”

“I try. It notches up the reality a bit. I'm gonna go find Thumb.”

“I said you have to let me get your back. I mean it.”

“Stop wriggling, young man, or I can't stitch it.”

“Who said anything about stitches?” Keith howled and clutched himself again. With his feet tangled in his hastily downed pants, he almost rolled off the stirrup table in the back office. The first doctor's office he'd come to in his panicky drive into Santa Monica had been an OB/GYN and he'd left the Porsche out on the sidewalk, door open and engine running, and blown straight through the reception with a pistol in his hand demanding immediate help. The doctor had sensed some big money to be made and kept his nurse from calling the police.

“You want to be obliged to pee around corners? It's up to you.”

“Oh, shit. Then gimme some Mister Blue. Or at least some Hillbilly Heroin. I mean it.”

“What on earth is Hillbilly Heroin?” Dr. Steinmetz had been practicing on a very rich, north-of-Montana clientele for years now—often abortions reported as D-and-Cs—and he found the wild boy a refreshing change. None of his Brentwood matrons had ever asked for Hillbilly Heroin.

“Oxycontin, you dummy. Give me something for the pain,
now.
Oh,
Jesus.
”

“I take it you'd prefer to remain conscious and waving the gun at me.”

“Yes, yes. Gimme something local.”

With maddening deliberation, the doctor sent his nurse for a syringe and swabbed the mangled tip of the boy's penis with alcohol.

“Owww!”

“I could rebuild it a little bigger if you'd like, but it seems quite large already.”

Keith put both fists on the pistol and poked it at the doctor's midsection. “I swear to God, one more dumb joke about my dick, and I'll put yours in the same place.”

“Patience, my friend,” the doctor said in a firmer voice. “I mainly treat cooze in here, but I'm making an exception for your rough manners out of the goodness of my heart, and the anticipation of a lot of money. Your mistreated member will be blissfully beyond pain in less than a minute. And then we can see about making it just like new.”

“Hurry the
fuck
up!”

“What says the gentleman?” Kenyon Styles asked.

The squat brown man in a denim jumper was a Filipino and had very little English, and he did mainly tire changes or brake linings and other simple repairs for the ramshackle garage in Silverlake. The Chicano owner undertook to translate.

“He say you tell him when you want him to start.”

“Could we get him to sample it right out of an axle to start?”

“No problemas.”

The Chicano owner had been given a finder's fee that was even more than the Filipino was getting, but the Filipino didn't know that. Rod Whipple was feeling grumpy. He'd been fired from a porn shoot and then had an exhausting eighteen-hour industrial shoot the day before and he'd rather be alone right now to unwind, despite an abiding general loneliness. He caught sight of himself in a small cracked mirror under a leggy pinup. The unexamined life, he thought. And then abruptly examined. He was none too proud of what he saw, but turned his attention back to the old Buick going up on the lift.

He had already collected the release, and he had it folded and stuffed into his breast pocket. As the mechanics worked to pull a wheel, he took the paper out and glanced at the name the man had signed and painstakingly printed out on the release: Diosdado Macpagal. He'd expected Jesus or Miguel or something. Diosdado, for Chrissake. Must be God's something or other, he thought. But what god would care about this dumpy old brown man?

“Heads up, Rod.”

“I'm ready, man.”

“Then roll tape.”

I will endure, he thought. Better than this fucked-up guy will. Diosdado Macpagal reached into the opened wheel hub and scooped out two finger's worth of brown axle-grease, wicking up a fine tail like melted cheese. He licked his fingers once and then sucked the whole gooey dark mass of axle-grease off his fingers like peanut butter. Rod's stomach gave an involuntary spasm of disgust. He'd had several sugary doughnuts on the set and a lousy midnight meal of Chinese, and it had all backed up inside him, waiting for something healthier.

He moved slowly sideward to get a better angle as the little man scooped out another gob of the grease and nibbled it coquettishly off his fingers, then broke into a big grin for the camera.

The Chicano owner held out a big opened can of fresh grease with a tablespoon in it, and the Filipino began to eat ravenously right out of the tin. “He like it,” the Latino said for the camera mike. “I gotta order extra grease all the time. He make sandwiches.”

“Wash it down,” Kenyon Styles' voice called out as the man kept spooning out the viscous substance, the texture but definitely not the color of melted butterscotch, taking it into his mouth and chewing ostentatiously with his mouth open.

The Chicano handed him a yellow plastic bottle of 30-weight Pennzoil, and he screwed off the cap and upended it into his mouth like a cold bottle of beer. When he brought it down again, a trickle of gray oil ran down from the corner of his mouth. He wiped his mouth off with his sleeve and grinned broadly. “Mmmmm,
que bueno, hombres.
”

By the skin of her teeth, Luisa had escaped being shoved into the trunk of the Cadillac CTS. She gave them a solemn promise to make no trouble, and now she sat primly in the soft black leather back seat. It was like riding inside an expensive glove. The car wound effortlessly up into the tan hills overlooking the coast. The ocean below was stunning, stretching off toward a few container ships on the horizon. The way the colors interwove, it was a pinto surface of green and deep blue, dotted with the bright sails of yachts that were heeling over on the breeze. She had quickly grown to love the changing look of the ocean and wondered if anyone ever got tired of looking at it.