The Poison Sky (27 page)

“All you got to do is say you saw him with it. You just did.”

“I've got food thawing,” Jack Liffey said, and he started walking away.

Quinn followed as far as the steps that led out of the parking area.

“What's your problem here, Liffey? I know this guy played bold with you.”

“My ideas don't go in that direction,” Jack Liffey said. “And you've got enough trouble as it is with Internal Affairs.”

“Mrs. Quinn didn't raise a boy stupid enough to let IA get him. Keep that in mind if you ever decide to snitch me out.”

“I already told you my ideas don't go in that direction. I don't snitch.”

“Maybe I'll just turn sunshine loose around your pad.”

“Do what you've got to do.”

He wondered if he'd ever get Quinn out of his hair. Even when the man was trying to be helpful, he was a pain in the ass. When he got back, Maeve had the chicken breasts thawed and pounded and ready to go, but she was sound asleep in a gangly tangle of limbs on the sofa. He carried her into his bed and called Kathy and swore on several stacks of Bibles that he'd bring her back first thing in the morning, very very early, for sure before Kathy went off to work.

“L
ISTEN
,
it's not a good idea. We won't ever call your future stepdad names again,” were Jack Liffey's last words to his daughter when he dropped her off at 5:45
A.M.

“Who? Oh, you mean
Butt-head,”
were her last words to him, then she giggled and ran off into the house. It was already warm out, the sun barely up and the air at blood heat.

It was so early he got a cup of coffee and toast with the early birds at a dingy coffee shop, where a boom box set to the news station was up on the counter beside the iced-tea machine, rattling away with some commotion that was going on, but he didn't pay any attention. He decided he'd do his daily look-in on the boy downtown after a while and then figure out what to do about GreenWorld. He wondered if Chris Johnson or one of the guys at PropellorHeads could help him somehow, but GreenWorld didn't seem the kind of business that relied heavily on computers.

Two stools away there was a bleary-eyed man staring into his coffee cup as if even this wouldn't be enough to wake him up. That was ordinary enough, particularly for the hour, except this guy had a big bloused white suit with large yellow polka dots and full clown makeup with a round red nose. Maybe they really were all crying inside.

“Refill?” the waitress asked.

“Hit me hard.”

The bounty hunters were a separate problem for him. He probably should have let Quinn set them up with the dope, but if you started doing stuff like that your whole world might just corkscrew down out of the sky in some haywire death spiral. The world would always encourage things toward the in-betweens and grays and ambiguous zones, but you had to resist it. He figured it was better you either stuck with the truth or you went all the way the other way. He didn't want to be part of the modern predicament, but there it was.

M
EANWHILE
,
Faye Mardesich was just then experiencing a flood of relief at the firm knock on her front door.

She'd just hung up from talking to her son for the first time in weeks. It had been a disturbing phone call. The boy hadn't called to talk about coming home, he'd simply identified himself and asked abruptly where his father was. When she told him Milo'd taken a second shift at GreenWorld that night and wasn't back yet, Jimmy had sounded funny. He said he thought there was some sort of trouble at GreenWorld, it was on the news, but he'd go listen and get right back to her, honestly he would. She'd felt a chill go all the way up her backbone and she started worrying seriously about Milo, imagining a dozen terrible fates, but then the knock, Milo's knock, she'd always know it.

He'd forgotten his key, that was it.

She hurried across the room and opened with a smile. It hadn't been Milo's knock after all, and her smile collapsed all at once like one of those big buildings on the eleven o'clock news, brought down surgically by dynamite. It took a moment to recognize him, heavyset and grim, wearing red suspenders. She'd only seen him that once, and it had been at night as he smoked his cigarette beside the tank truck.

“Hallelujah,” Schatzi said as he showed her a pistol in his waistband. “Step back inside, woman at risk.”

I
F
Jack Liffey had turned on the radio on the way, he might have found out sooner. As it was, all the geezers standing around the lobby of the mission watching an old TV alerted him. Even then it took him a moment to focus, as he was distracted by the sight of an old man with a deep scar on his cheek who was wearing a pair of women's glasses with rhinestones in the winged corners.

“… There seems to be no letup, Dave. The plume is still boiling up to about a thousand feet and then spreading out and sinking under the inversion as it cools. There's almost no wind and it's still spreading in all directions from the epicenter. Maybe there's a little preference for being blown west …”

He pushed his way as gently as possible into the midst of the old men, the aromas of piss and vomit and stale bad whiskey almost overpowering him. It was hard to tell what was being shown on the screen, except for a logo in one corner that said 5
NEWS LIVE
and an inset of a pretty-boy news anchor in an untidy polo shirt. It seemed to be a helicopter shot of an unnaturally yellow cloud, lumpy on top like cumulus stained the color of fresh marigolds. It didn't look much different from any angle as the camera chopper circled, though there was a fat pillar rising higher and brighter at the center. The camera zoomed back and tilted toward the horizon and you could see that the cloud started thinning and paling some way in the distance.

The little talking head touched its ear and stirred. “Walter, we have no word on the chemical composition of the cloud yet, except the initial report from the fire-department spokesperson who said he'd been told it contained ‘several reaction products from a runaway chemical process' and some of the products are presumed to be toxic. The highway patrol is increasing the evacuation zone to include all of Burbank north of Olive. Burbank Airport was shut down fifteen minutes ago and inbound flights will be diverted to LAX, Long Beach, or Ontario …”

The word
Burbank
had gone through him like an electric shock. Jack Liffey glanced around and there was Jimmy Mardesich, on a window ledge by the wall, staring off into the middle distance with a dependent, hangdog look as if he'd lost all his willpower. He also had a bad black eye, a real mouse, and a scabbed-up abrasion across his forehead. Jack Liffey made his away across and knelt in front of the boy.

“What happened?”

The boy shrugged dully.

“It all got a bit real,” Jack Liffey suggested. The boy focused long enough to send him a single flash of fury. It was so uncharacteristic he hardly recognized it. Then the boy settled back into his grave inertia, and Jack Liffey realized something was wrong beyond a bit of random violence he'd suffered.

“What is it?”

“I talked to Mom. Dad called her about midnight and volunteered for another shift. He never came home.”

“Is that GreenWorld?” Jack Liffey gestured to the TV.

“Yeah. Yep, it is.”

Jack Liffey put both his hands on the boy's shoulders. He could feel himself going onto autopilot. “Van Nuys isn't far from there, either.”

“I tried to call Mom again a couple minutes later but there's no answer. She probably saw it on TV and got out.”

“You may not realize it yet, but you are just about to enter the critical part of your life's story.” Jack Liffey knew the boy had a hunger for the dramatic and that got his attention, all right. “Let's go get your dad.”

Was it just vanity, he thought, that made him assume he and the boy could do something? He'd promised to rescue the Mardesiches, that was all he knew for sure, and he was deep inside his promise and couldn't find another way to go.

17

ALL DEATH IS LOCAL

H
E SHOWED THE BOY HOW TO POUND ON THE DASHBOARD
every minute or so to cuff the radio's one functioning speaker back to life. Luckily when the old slide-rule tuner had jammed, it had chosen L.A.'s all-news station.

“… Speaking with Dr. Marvin Symons, professor of industrial chemistry at Caltech.”

“Actually, that's
organic
chemistry. With what little I've been told, it's difficult to say exactly what the Burbank chemical cloud might contain. MIC has been suggested. That's methyl isocyanate, the notorious compound that escaped from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, and killed over six thousand people. Rumors have also mentioned cyanide, and phosgene. Everyone knows what cyanide is, it's the gas used in San Quentin's gas chamber, and it smells a little like almonds. Phosgene is a serious lung irritant that was used in gas warfare for a time in World War One. It smells like new-mown hay or fresh young corn. All three can be deadly in sufficient concentration. If the initial reports of a reaction running out of control in a large toxic-chemical storage tank are true, it's probable that the cloud contains many different reaction products including all the gases we've mentioned plus many others that we know even less about.”

“Oh, great,” Jack Liffey said.

“But what's your best guess, Professor?” As usual, trained up on lying politicians, the radio reporter treated scientific reticence as a form of cover-up.

There was a silence and then a prissy little sigh. “I'm afraid it would be worse than idle for me to speculate right now without more information.”

“That's the best we can do from here, Curtis, talking to Marvin Symons, professor of industrial chemistry at Caltech.”

Jack Liffey glanced at the plastic sheeting over the right side of his car. It was not the ideal window to seal out a toxic cloud.

“Just when you begin to think your world is getting on track, oh man,” the boy said. He shrugged with resignation and Jack Liffey noticed the black eye again. It was mottled dark and almost swollen shut but probably wouldn't get much worse. “I feel like such a child.”

“Don't let melancholy start doing your thinking for you. I'm going to need you.”

Rap-rap.
“The northbound 1-5 is shut down completely at the Ventura, and a massive traffic jam is building back past the four-level downtown. In the north, the 5 is blocked at the Sunland off-ramp and all southbound traffic is being taken off there, but we're told the highway patrol is in the process of moving the roadblock even farther north to the Hollywood Freeway split. The evacuation order has been extended to the city of Sunland to the north of Burbank, and to parts of North Hollywood as far west as Lankersheim Boulevard, and the toxic cloud continues to spread through the San Fernando Valley with no end in sight.”

The boy slowly became aware of his surroundings and glanced around critically at the world outside, as if he might be asked to rent one of the buildings they were passing. “This is an odd route to the Valley.”

“We've got to make a pit stop.”

He drove into the northern foothills of Glendale, where Mike Lewis and Siobhan had moved only six months earlier, apparently just before she had fled back to Ireland. He could see helicopters and small planes circling and circling far away to the west like buzzards waiting for something to die. It was still early enough that he had to pound on the door for a while to wake him up. Finally a bleary-eyed Mike Lewis in a bright red nightshirt opened the door a crack.

“I need your scuba gear. I haven't got time to explain.”

“Jayzus, Jack.“ He pulled the door open and rubbed his eyes hard. He was as wan as an earthworm, and he'd started looking old all of a sudden.

“Do you have two kits? Are they full of air?”

Mike Lewis nodded and then banged his head with his fist, as if clearing it. He yawned and pointed to a door. There was a blast of warmth and dust as Jack Liffey threw open the door that led into the attached garage and went in, and Jimmy Mardesich followed a few steps behind. Mike Lewis stared after the boy with a bemused look. “Good day to you, too.”

“Hello,” the boy said belatedly over his shoulder.

Mike Lewis caught them up and pointed to a rickety loft hung from the rafters just overhead. “There are two of them up there. Siobhan used to go out with me. Do you know how to use them?”

“Long ago. It's like riding a bike, you never forget how to fall off.”

Mike Lewis checked the gauges on one of the consoles. “It looks like most of a charge.”

Jack Liffey pulled the second one down and shoved it into Jimmy Mardesich's arms. “Masks?”

“Right here.” He grabbed them off a nail.

“Let's go,” Jack Liffey said, and then they were outside hurling the tanks into his backseat.

“Might I know what's going down?” Mike Lewis called from the door.

“Turn on the news.”

“Uh-oh. Keep your powder dry.”

• • •

S
CHATZI
was farting loudly, and it wasn't doing anybody any good. Every time he'd fart, he'd look straight up at the ceiling and shout, “Onions!” and then tilt his head back down with his rambling anger stepped up another notch.

Faye was eyeing the roll of silver tape he'd set on her table, and beside it a bottle of spray shaving cream and two yellow disposable razors. She didn't like what was going on one bit, especially since she was worried about Milo and wanted to try to find out what was happening to him, but this crazy fat man kept cursing and pointing his pistol at things near her.

“It is only through much tribulation that we will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

“This is starting to get pretty dopey,” she said.