The Poison Sky (20 page)

“These two you're talking about weren't smart enough to run the scheme, but their commandante came up with a nasty twist on this scam. He'd file all these liens and then at Christmas he'd send his enemies a forgiveness notice that he was giving them back a portion of their debt. Then he'd send a 1099 to the IRS announcing the amount of the forgiveness as
income.
The poor schmucks. Some of them are still trying to straighten it out with Uncle Sam.”

Jack Liffey laughed. “Man, I wish they'd put a lien on my condo. It's worth half what I owe. I'll FedEx them the paper tomorrow.”

“Don't fuck with these two guys. They're stupid
and
clumsy. It's a bad combination, Jacko, guys who never know when to back off. If they think their macho is in question, they'll shoot their own foot off.” He rooted in a small Styrofoam lunch bucket and came out with a sandwich in a plastic bag, which he investigated with a dubious look. “Want some?”

“What is it?”

“Velveeta on white bread. My old lady's grand plan to make me more American.” He started tearing the sandwich into pieces, crushing them down to small white marbles and dropping them back into the Styrofoam.

He liked Art Castro but he didn't much like being with anyone on speed. It was like being left out of the joke. “Do you think these guys registered a home address when they applied for work?”

Art Castro stared hard at him. “Don't do it, man.”

“They tried to kill me, Art. They messed up Marlena.” He took off his watch cap. “They even shaved my head.”

“I wondered what that was about.”

“There's a code about letting guys do that to you.”

“I used to subscribe to that, too, but now I just kick back and say
nam myoho renge kyo
about ten times. It does wonders for your longevity. These guys are just pond scum, man.”

For just an instant he experienced a terrible sensation of futility. Maybe Art Castro was right. What was the point of spending so much energy to even things up with a couple of miscreants who subscribed to
Soldier of Fortune
?
And for that matter, what was the point of tracking down missing children at all, most of whom would just go missing again first chance? Then the feeling passed, just vanished into the ether. A Dark Thirty Seconds of the Soul, he thought. Everything was devalued these days. He wondered if there was a random electron that fired from time to time in the brain, making you feel there was no Real Meaning in things.

“A man's got to do what a man's got to do,” Jack Liffey said.

“Do-be-do-be-do,” Art Castro said. “You got to mellow on down.”

“Thanks for the advice.” He could see he wouldn't get any more help, even if Art Castro knew their whereabouts. He got up to go.

Art Castro smiled without much humor and spread his palms wide in a gesture of cosmic acceptance. “Just be yourself, man.”

“And if you can't, at least try to be someone rich with a Maserati.”

I
T
wasn't all that far south to the industrial area at the back end of Burbank Airport. Milo Mardesich had told him the address and there it was, a couple square blocks of low buildings and giant Tinkertoys behind chain link. A tall louvered structure boiled off clean-looking steam and a number of rusting chemical tanks looked like they would start leaking if you glared hard at them. He couldn't see a nameplate anywhere.

He parked and strolled around the perimeter, up an alley that took him close to a thrumming corrugated metal building. He stood on a Dumpster to see a compound containing hundreds of rusting fifty-five-gallon drums, some of which seemed to be toppled and leaking. Finally he saw a pair of low buildings close together that might have been the place where they'd caught Milo with the gas. There was no sign of life anywhere inside the wire.

Out in front a black guard sat in a glassed-in guard shack at the service entrance. He seemed to be playing solitaire on a surface that was out of sight. A half-dozen cars were parked in a little lot that was across a few feet of grass from what must have been the office. The stucco over the office door was a brighter yellow where a name had been painted out, and one big glass window showed an empty lobby and a counter where no one stood, like a set for an end-of-the-world movie. There was no pickup truck, but he noted the license number of the big black BMW 750 parked nearest the door—
RECLAIM.

Just as he got back to his car, he saw a little blur coming toward him down the middle of a dreary industrial street. The figure gathered reality, framed by a broken sidewalk along one side of the street and weeds on the other, until Jack Liffey made out a slim, almost weightless athlete, tumbling hands to feet to hands, then cartwheeling and twisting and tossing in a back flip now and then. He wore shorts and a tank top and had a big green number on his back and he came to a stop with a last twisting flip facing Jack Liffey's car window.

“Geroot-patoot,” he said, or something like that, his arms flung up in Nixon's victory V.

“Nine-point-seven,” Jack Liffey said.

The athlete laughed and did a standing back flip before cranking up his strange progress again.

S
ULTANATE
Street was eerily quiet, but somewhere inside the house behind all the screwy gingerbread eaves something was pounding the floor over and over. The sound was odd, mostly vibration coming up through the porch, and he couldn't quite put an image to it. A tabby cat was on the porch and it was confused by the sound, too, its head cocked to one side.

The cat fled when he rang and the pounding stopped abruptly. Faye Mardesich opened up, something a little off in her eyes. He wondered if she'd been sharing drugs with Art Castro.

“Eeep.” She gave a little sound in her throat and then cleared it and a real presence seemed to gather substance and come forward to peer out her eyes. “Jack, am I glad to see you. Come on.”

She backed away and he saw she was wearing leotards and some kind of stretchy top that was made of big bands of elastic that crisscrossed. He'd always liked those tops because you could imagine slipping a hand in easily, but he wasn't thinking along those lines at the moment. Her feet clopped on the plank floor and he saw that she was wearing her husband's big cordovan wing tips. They were laced tightly but her feet still slipped about in them a bit.

“You had to ask,” she said, but he hadn't asked anything.

The kitchen floor was littered with shattered bright-colored crockery and she crunched across it with a mischievous extra little pump of energy from the wing tips to pound the jumble down some more. She retrieved a generous drink she had going. “I dropped the first plate. I mean, it was an accident, the first one. I mean, it slipped. I'm not clumsy. I'm
not.
It made me so mad, I threw the next one, and the next.”

Suddenly he felt trapped and nervous. Something was going wrong in this house. She sipped and glanced up at the ceiling. “Aren't we dysfunctional, one and all. Let me count the ways.”

Thankfully, she didn't. He was not going to tell her about Jimmy now, even though that was why he had come. She was in no condition to absorb it without looping off in some unpredictable direction.

“Maybe you ought to lay off the sauce for a bit,” he said.

“I never liked Fiesta Ware anyway.” She set the glass down with exaggerated care and took up a dance pose that didn't quite work with the brogans. “And one, and two …
plié.
The black keys are called the chromatics, the sharps and flats. You'd think they were superfluous, but they're the true secret of Western music, the sharps and flats.” Tears were rolling down her cheeks, but she didn't seem to be crying. She offered the empty doorway a ludicrous grin.

He hated scenes like this, absolutely hated emotion gone sloppy and melodramatic, but he would stay and deal with it. If he'd learned one thing over the years from all the nasty little lessons life forked up for you, he'd learned that whatever you'd managed to absorb of the honorable, you we're never given the opportunity to deploy it in grand ways, with cheering crowds and a sense of satisfaction, but only in small, messy, and unwitnessed rags of duty like this.

“Let's sit down for a while,” he said.

“I don't even know what to cry about,” she said. “It's like I'm trying to write my own back story. I'm crying, so I have to find something hideously sad to cry about.”

She clomped past him dance-wise, then crossed her arms to grasp the shoulder bits of her stretchy costume and wrench them apart and down so her breasts spilled out. She turned to show extremely large brown nipples and white stretch marks where the breasts plunged. “You could have me, Jack. Milo doesn't come home until tomorrow.”

He held her the way a priest would have, enclosing and comforting and immobilizing. “Let's talk about things.”

She tilted her neck up and tried to squirm around to get him to kiss her, and he pressed the back of her neck to push her face against his chest.

“I'm sorry,” she said finally, going slack. “I need something so much that I get angry and the anger makes me crazy.”

He walked her to the messy sofa and brushed aside a number of magazines. He sat her down and she pulled her stretchy top back up and crushed her arms to her chest in an exaggerated pose of modesty. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

“Try to tell me what you were thinking the moment things snapped.”

She barked a single laugh, like a cough. “I was thinking it was
unfair
that only four months have thirty days, and seven have thirty-one. I know that doesn't make any sense. Maybe there's just a sense of injustice that blows in with the Santa Ana winds. ‘All the rest have thirty-one, except February which … doesn't.' It doesn't even
rhyme.”

There was a loud bang in the kitchen and he waited for another, but nothing came and he decided it was just one of those noises that a house made. Something smelled a little strange, but he let that go, too.

“Long ago I met a guy in Laos,” he said. “He was British and he showed me the way they count off the months in England. Watch.” He made a fist and counted along the knuckles and valleys as he named off the months. “January, February, March, April, May, June, July-August … You've got to count two months on the last knuckle before you start back. All the up knuckles are long months, and the valleys in between are short months. September, October, November, December.”

Her eyes focused on the demonstration as if he'd just disemboweled a house pet, and then on him. “Jesus, Jack, I'm not some bar pickup that you have to charm with tricks.”

He dropped his hands. “You
are
angry.”

She seemed to soften. “And I have enthusiasms and I weary of them. I go through things too fast. You know, I can't even believe in our crusade to save Jimmy anymore. He's a big boy and he can take care of himself. It's Milo I worry about. It's
me.
I've got to have something that doesn't wear out right away.”

She picked up his arm and brought it up to her face and bit his wrist softly. “We are such failures in this family. World-historical failures.”

“That's hopeless talk.”

“It's a place to start. It's not self-deception.”

“You can say that again,” but she didn't. She only shook her head.

A screech filled the house suddenly and they both bolted upright. He noticed the smoke rolling out of the kitchen doorway up at the ceiling, and he was on his feet in an instant. He got to the stove before her and cranked off the knob. Then he picked up the aluminum pot with a towel and got it under the faucet, where the blackening mass sizzled for a while, sending up another surge of smoke that kept the smoke detector going until he reached up with a magazine and fanned the smoke away from it.

“Chicken noodle soup,” she said as she stared mournfully into the pan. “Once. Failures. In my family, we can't even boil
soup.”

The exaggerated remorse struck him as funny, and his laugh started her laughing, too.

“I'm sorry I embarrassed you,” she said. “I would have been good to you but I know it was the wrong thing.”

They opened all the windows and the back door off the kitchen. The cat stared quizzically in at them. They sat down on the small back porch and talked for a while of neutral subjects—pets, grease fires, childhood. She kept medicating herself with booze and it was getting her sleepy.

“Oh, wow, I'm so ashamed. You can go now, Jack. Don't worry. I'm okay.”

“You look better. I want you to know I'm off the clock. I know where Jimmy is and I'll look in on him and make sure he's okay but there's no charge for the service.”

Her eyes were closing of their own will. “I have to nap. I'm sorry about all this.” She went in and crunched away across the crockery and disappeared into the back of the house. He let himself out. He stood in front for a while, wishing he still smoked. It was one of those moments of relief that a cigarette would have completed.

H
E
left Sultanate in a different direction than he usually took, and in a block he braked to a stop in the middle of the road. It was the camouflage netting covering the entire backyard that had caught his eye, all the little peanut-shaped figures worked into the net that probably did make it look like foliage from way up in the air. A black POW-MIA flag flew over the netting, and a concertina of razor wire that ran along the top of a tall chain-link fence marked the entire perimeter of the lot. The front yard was a flat expanse of pea gravel, and poking up through the gravel there were a couple of Claymore mines realistic enough to give him a chill. A wooden gate into an interior motor pool stood open, and when he let the car drift forward he could see a couple of mannikins with M-16s crouched beside an armored personnel carrier. An olive four-by was parked in a gated driveway. It was either a perverse art project of some kind or a guy who'd never really made it home. He wouldn't want to try delivering the mail there.