The Poison Sky (13 page)

He pulled the other arm off and then released the gag, grimacing as it ripped at his skin. He inhaled a big open-mouth breath of warm air. He worked the tape loose on his left arm, and then yelped a little as he yanked off a lot of arm hair. The rest was easy. Foam and hair were scattered all around the chair. He recoiled when the light in the room fluctuated, and then, as the thumping in his chest slowed a bit, he noticed that the Lava lamp had finally started bubbling, big orange globs rising through the blue.

Jack Liffey stared hard at the front door. He wanted to go after them but he thought about Maeve and got a roll of paper towels and cleaned up instead. He wouldn't rest until he evened up the score on them, even if it turned out to be self-destructive, but he wouldn't do it that night. The rule was simple, you had only so much space in the world allotted to you and sometimes people shoved you off it for a while but you had to get it back as soon as you could because you'd never be issued any more.

He went straight to the kitchen and punched redial on the phone. They weren't mental giants, these bounty hunters.

“Yeah?” a man's voice answered.

“This is GTT Night Service. We're having a problem with interference on this line. Have you received any misdirected calls today?”

“No.”

“Good. Is this 542-9791?”

“You gotta be fuckin' kiddin'.” The man hung up and Jack Liffey figured he would have to get Michael Chen to decipher the beeps and boops and tell him the number, if only he didn't dial anyone else in the meantime.

9

PEOPLE WANT MAGIC

“I'
LL RIDE IN BACK,
D
ADDY
.” M
AEVE POPPED OUT THE
door, and after he introduced them, she clambered into the backseat in her gangly way and Faye Mardesich settled into the front. Faye stared hard at the navy-blue watch cap he wore. He'd brazened out the haircut with Maeve, saying it was just something he'd tried out but didn't like much, and now he was stuck with that lame explanation.

“It was a bad idea,” he said. “I got tired of combing and thought this might simplify my life.”

“Did it?”

“Not with all the explanations and sneak peeks.” He thought of doffing the cap for a moment to give her a good look, but then he'd have to explain the scar, too.

Maeve rescued him. “Daddy's a bit weird, but you've probably noticed. Buckle up, you two.”

Faye laughed softly as she did as commanded. “We're all a bit weird with a sufficiently narrow view of the world.”

“How's Milo this morning?” he asked.

“Recovering. They still don't know what it was. They've sent swabs of his mucus to some OSHA lab in Washington.”

“Sounds like he was lucky.”

“Lucky would be still working at his old job. Lucky would be no gas cloud at all and sitting home playing on his computer.” She turned and looked over the seat back at Maeve as the car pulled away from her house. “Maeve, are you weird like your dad?”

“Sure. I like to read books about aeronautical engineering and marine biology. But I don't really like boys yet.” He saw a smirk on her face in the mirror. “That's what Daddy wants to hear.”

“You bet,” he said quickly. “Men are complete jerks, stay away from them.”

At the corner a man in a gorilla suit was kneeling to crack eggs into a cast iron frying pan that rested on the sidewalk. It was hot out but not that hot. He wanted to call their attention to it, but the women had tumbled into an intense communion about dance and music, and he drove on. Eventually, after exhausting a number of styles and schools of dance, they noticed him again and Maeve touched his shoulder and caught his eye in the mirror.

“I'm really not dating yet, Daddy. Honest.”

“Good. I have evidence that women should stay separate forever. They're on a higher plane of evolution. I offer the fact that women do not ever stick up liquor stores.”

Faye smiled.

Maeve seemed to be thinking it over. “I bet that's just the hunter-gatherer instinct men have. They're going out to provide for the tribe when there's no other way.” Her voice tailed off quickly and they could all tell she'd realized it was a little too close to home, with a father who was not doing so well providing for the tribe.

“It's okay, punkin'. I won't rob any 7-Elevens near where you live.”

Faye faced front and squirmed, comfortable. “How much did you find out about Jimmy?”

“He's at the Theodelphian retreat, all right. My hackers found that out right away.” Jack Liffey had called them in the morning, and that's what Michael Chen had told him matter-of-factly. Young Jim Mardesich had reached the level they called a Summitar in record time, an eighth-degree Acolyte of the Germinal Idea, and he was at the study center that they had sequestered amidst the protective coloration of all the other quasi-religious retreats and ashrams and wounded spirit zoos out in Ojai. It was Sunday and PropellorHeads was shut down, so Michael Chen hadn't had time to digest the mass of data he'd downloaded from Milo's computer—overnight he'd siphoned off the entire hard disk—but that could wait.

He tried to drive along Van Nuys Boulevard to the freeway but something had it blocked and a cop was turning everybody north or south at Sepulveda.

“What's up?” he asked the cop out the window.

“Keep it moving, sir.”

So he pulled to the side to have a peek.

“Sorry, folks. I'm an old fire truck chaser.”

He got out and walked to where he could see that a flatbed truck and two VW buses had the road blocked and maybe twenty people were sitting down in the road with picket signs saying
STOP THE COVER-UP,
and
ARREST THE REAL CRIMINAL
! On the flatbed there was a big rolling billboard that looked professionally done:
COVER-UP! MARK DAVID CHAPMAN DID NOT KILL JOHN LENNON! NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS THE ASSASSIN WAS STEPHEN KING!

There were side-by-side photographs of Chapman and Stephen King, enlarged from newspapers, and the resemblance was startling.
THE CIA: FIRST DRUGS AND KENNEDY AND NOW THIS!
it said on the side of one of the VW buses. The group sitting down in front of the sign seemed to be chanting something that sounded like “Redrum backward is murder,” but he couldn't be sure.

He strolled back to the car, wondering why they didn't realize Stephen King couldn't have done it because he didn't use three names. Maeve and Faye were talking like sisters over the seat and he was happy they'd hit it off. He didn't like bringing Maeve along on a job but there didn't seem any danger in an afternoon jaunt to the squeaky-clean little Conejo Valley where Ojai nestled.

“What was it?”

“Just a normal day in L.A.”

The women fell guiltily silent, as if they'd been talking about him. He doffed the watch cap for a moment. “Take a good look.” Then he tugged it back down before Faye could get too interested in his scars. “It looks pretty good on black basketball players, but so do chartreuse pants. I learned my lesson.”

“It's not as bad as you think,” Faye said. “And it makes you look mean enough to eat the bad guys for lunch.”

“We're just going out there to reconnoiter,” he said pointedly. “We'll look Theodelphia-land over, and maybe we can have a few words with Jimmy if they'll let us.” He glanced at Faye.

“I get you,” she said. “No kidnapping.”

“No kidnapping and no blowing your top.”

“How did you know I had a vile temper?”

“I make my living judging character.”

She glanced at Maeve once, as if trying to decide whether to share what was on her mind. “That's a chunk of the story I left out when I told you my ballet dreams. I did time in juvie for it. That's what we called it back in the sixties. There's probably some euphemism now, like Troubled Girls' Rancho.”

She fell silent and Maeve rocked a bit with interest.

“You can't stop now,” Jack Liffey said.

“I know. It all happened after my foot went. I used to be a dancer,” she added for Maeve's benefit. “A very good one, but the bone in my foot cracked up.”

“That's too bad.”

“I was kind of a famous case, actually, for a time there. Good girl gone bad. God had broken His side of the deal, you see—He let my foot go to pieces—and for a while I just decided I had license to break my side, too.” She looked at Maeve again, obliquely, as if deciding how graphic to be. “This was a long time ago, so it took a lot less to be shocking.” She looked back at him. “You remember what high school was like back then?”

“When the gout isn't rising,” he said.

“Third period, on a Monday, and I'm not feeling much like school. I sneaked out of English to go to the girls' bathroom and smoke. Kools.” She shuddered. “God, they were awful.”

“It's okay,” Maeve said. “I'm not tempted.”

“They
were
awful. I avoided one of the teachers on hall duty and got a cigarette and some matches out of my locker and made it to the girls'. I can still see that bilious two-tone green paint with the darker green all round the bottom of the walls as if some kind of vomit flood rose to
there.
I locked myself in a stall and sat on the top of the toilet tank, with my feet on the seat, and lit up.

“I was past even enjoying the sense of rebellion. It was all old hat by then. After a while I heard somebody come in, and with the seat down it was hard to put out the cigarette right away. I crushed it on the porcelain but you could hear it crunching and hissing as it went out and some of the smoke lingered in the air and I figured,
Damn,
I'm discovered.

“And, sure enough, there's this voice: ‘Who's
smoking
in here?' and I know her right away, it's bitchy Martina McCarty, who's also a dancer and a real kiss-ass on the school patrol. We never liked each other much. I could see her cordovan Bass Weejuns and white socks under the door, and I can imagine the smug little grin and I was starting to get down into the anger already.

“Martina was a real social climber, sucking up to all the clubbers and going out with the quarterback, and probably doing things with him … never mind, and I don't even have any dates yet except this geek who turns out to be Milo's friend.

“So she raps on the cubicle door and says in this I'm-going-to-Stanford voice, ‘I know who's in there. Faye Trani's in big trouble, you bet she is.' ”

Faye did an imitation of a nasal girl's voice.

“And I say—oh,
why
did I do it?—I say, ‘Leave me alone, Martina, I've got to tinkle.'

“So Martina laughs for a while and of course makes a big deal out of the word
tinkle.
And just then one of the teachers comes in, Mrs. Dillard that she's pals with, and Martina explains to her about me
tinkling
and they have a good laugh and finally I flush the remains of the cigarette down and come out and Martina goes in and studies a bit of the ash on the porcelain and says, ‘Here's where she crushed the
tinkle,
Mrs. Dillard.'

“And they escort me out of that dreary bathroom just as the bell goes and they walk me past about a dozen girls I know, talking about me getting tinkle on myself and wondering if I inhale when I tinkle and laughing like, What a jerk I am. They take me to the vice-principal, but I don't even care about that, all I can think about is Martina getting together with her boyfriend, the quarterback, that night and telling him about me smoking in the bathroom and talking about tinkling. And they'd have a good laugh about the moron.”

There was a small break in the rhythm of her story while Maeve moaned a little in sympathy.

“I sat in the detention office trying to read a
Reader's Digest
article but I couldn't. I know it's out of proportion, but things get that way at that age—sorry, Maeve—and, anyway, my life's ambition had just been dashed by a broken bone and this idiot girl, who was a third-rate dancer, still had two good feet and couldn't even use them right, and she had her hotshot boyfriend and her nasty little off-to-Stanford laugh.”

He pulled onto the freeway and headed north right behind a flatbed truck with two huge advertising figures, like something out of a Macy's parade. One was a big top-hatted Fred Astaire in a frozen tap dancer's pose, bent forward and one hand low in front of him and the other crooked behind his head as if introducing a new step. The other figure was a big sheep. The way they were tied to the flatbed, it looked like Fred was goosing the sheep, but he decided not to point it out. Faye's story seemed to be a common enough complaint about high-school humiliations, he thought, but he didn't point that out either.

“I knew Martina was released to dance practice last period, and the Assistance League where she practiced was just down the street from the school. It's where I'd practiced, too. First thing I did, I walked out of detention. Then I took all my schoolbooks and notebooks out of my locker and threw them into the fountain in front of the school. It was just a sort of make-or-break gesture. You know, you can't stop now.

“The one thing I didn't toss out was this twirler's baton with the big rubber bulbs on the end. I was just keeping it for somebody, I wasn't a cheerleader. I went down to the Assistance League and found Martina McCarty in the shower and took a full swing with the baton and caught her a good smack right across her white bottom. For an instant I wanted to kill her, but I wasn't quite that whacked out. It did get her attention, however.

“ ‘That's a little
tinkle
for catching me smoking!' I shouted at her, and I hauled back and swung again but I missed as she ran out of the shower. ‘The next one's for laughing about it!' I chased her buck naked out of the Assistance League building just as half the school was heading home. We ran up the middle of the street and she was dripping wet and had a big splotch on her bottom that was going bright red and then she started screaming for help, just in case there was one person in school who wasn't already looking at us.”