The Poison Sky (3 page)

“You got a cellular?” Chris Johnson asked.

“I think I must have left it in the Ferrari.”

He laughed. “What do you need researched?”

“The Theodelphian Elect.”

Chris Johnson made a big
O
of his mouth. “Dude, you know, if they even
think
you're investigating them, they come after your cojones with little plastic forks.”

“So I've heard. My colleague Art Castro had a run- in with them once, trying to get a client's kid's money back. They swiped a sheet of his stationery and wrote a letter threatening to assassinate the president in
Art's own
handwriting. Really first-rate forgery. It took him a year to get out from under it.”

A computer buzzed, a bit like a washing machine signaling that it was done. Chris Johnson sat down in front of it and typed for a few moments, then set it working again.

“You chicken?” Jack Liffey asked.

Chris Johnson grinned and got an electric screwdriver out of a toolbox, then brandished it with a whir in midair. He took the back off what looked like an old ham radio. “My parole officer checks this place out twice a week, on a random schedule, but he's so dumb the only way he recognizes a modem is he looks for the RS-12 jack. That's the little gizmo on the end of your phone cord. So you put a different plug on it and tell him it's a rapid data transductor.” From inside the radio he took out a black box and a cellular phone.

“Who's the phone registered to?” Jack Liffey asked.

“You don't want to know, but the gentleman in question used to work for the Republican National Committee. Actually, I jiggered the code so it's a number Airtouch reserves for testing.”

He plugged the equipment into the back of the biggest computer in the room and started to fiddle at the keyboard, then picked up a clipboard and scanned it for something. In a moment Jack Liffey heard a tinny voice talking from within the machine, “Nordstrom's lingerie department. Can I help you?” There was a buzz and then another dialing sound.

“It always helps to loop your calls through somebody's switchboard. These guys want to get cute and trace who's interested in them, let's see what damage they can do to all those red merry widows.”

Jack Liffey knew Chris Johnson would be busy at the keyboard for a while and so he wandered around the room, trying to make sense of the things he saw. One big green screen in the corner was scrolling numbers as if it was working on something all by itself, and another was looping a piece of animation that showed a catlike being biting the head off a guitar over and over. On the wall, a hand-lettered sign said
COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY.
Beside it there was a framed photo of Chris Johnson looking startled and leaning back in a chair as a slim stripper was advancing on him dangling a sequined bra. It wasn't very flattering and Jack Liffey wondered why it was on the wall. If nothing else, his girlfriend should have torn it up on sight. Dot Matrix had a legendary temper.

“That picture you're goggling at was from the last HoHoCon in Phoenix,” Chris Johnson said. Nothing you did anywhere near him ever escaped his notice.

“HoHoCon?”

“It's the phone hackers' convention. It's held at an unannounced site every year. Don't you go to gumshoe conventions?”

Jack Liffey scoffed.

“I put it up to keep Dot on her toes. Hey, there's a whole
lot
of stuff on these guys in here. What do you want?”

“Membership lists?”

He shook his head. “They won't have that on-line. They won't even have it on a computer that's accessible, if they're smart.”

“How about stuff posted by their enemies. Ex-members' horror stories. Inside dope.”

“You're gonna owe me a couple reams of paper. Come back in a while and take me to dinner.” He winked. “Always remember the hacker's code—knowledge wants to be free.”

“So do I but I always settle for a discount.”

2

THE HOLY BOY ROAD

J
UST NORTH OF HIS OFFICE, THE ROADWAY PASSED OVER
the cement channel of Ballona Creek, where a trickle of industrial waste offered back a rainbow sheen in the noon sun. Santanas were due in a few days, and when those hot dry winds blew in off the Mojave, they would dry up the ooze as fast as it dribbled out the waste pipes of the little factories up the road. It was probably thinking about industrial waste that made him notice the battered old pickup truck, pied with primer and paint stains, that was parked just across the creek.

He lingered a bit on the bridge. Two men sat in the pickup, but he really only noticed the driver, who had bright red hair in a buzz cut. For just a moment the driver had braced a big pair of binoculars on the steering wheel. Jack Liffey had acquired an extra measure of caution after a run-in with a couple of minor heavies who'd worked for Vegas casino money. He was pretty sure he'd got himself clear, but he figured it never hurt you much to whistle when you passed a graveyard. His office was on the second floor of the mini-mall straight ahead, wedged between a CPA and a vacancy that had briefly been a clown-and-juggler service, and the redhead had looked straight at his office door.

There was no parking on the bridge, so he pulled out into the center lane and turned left, hoping they wouldn't notice him. Having crossed the creek, he had a long circuitous journey in order to get behind the pickup again. He began to wish that he carried a gun in the car, remembering Bogart popping open a secret hatch under his dashboard in some movie or other. He experienced a chill—a sense memory of the fear he'd experienced when the
real
heavies had been after him. On some of the worst days, he'd felt that something was
right there,
about to wallop into him, and he remembered actually bobbing a few inches to one side, though of course there was nothing.

This time he parked just before the bridge. The curb was red, but he couldn't do anything about that. The second man in the pickup was heavier and looked older, but that was all he could tell from behind. From time to time they exchanged a few words, and the passenger seemed to be drinking from a Styrofoam cup. Jack Liffey wrote down the license number. He wondered if they could be completely innocent, bird fanciers, business-license investigators, cops staking out a car parked in front of Dan Margolin's Coffee Bean, bill collectors after somebody who kept a blind box at Marlena's Mailboxes-R-Us downstairs from him, or party givers who were really desperate for a juggler. But his apprehension was the dark side of something that would keep him healthy and he had to trust it.

A motorcycle accelerated past like a scream of pain, and he walked back to the library and called the police and told them about two men in a pickup on Overland waving big black pistols at passersby. Then he went back to his car to wait. It wasn't long before a black-and-white came up fast in his mirror, flashing lights but no siren, followed by a second police car. They boxed in the pickup and two cops got out and approached with their pistols drawn. Jack Liffey was happy to see one of the cops was Quinn, a real hardnose he'd had a number of run-ins with. Let somebody else get rubbed in it. An amplified voice squawked over the PA from one of the patrol cars, and four empty hands poked out the windows of the truck. Then the men were out and facedown on the pavement without complaint, and he tried to get a better look at them. The redhead looked like a marine he'd drunk with at R&R on China Beach, but that had been so long ago the man would have been a lot older.

Things started going a little unusual then. The cops handed around an ID from the heavyset man and one of them laughed. They let the two men up and they all relaxed a little, but not as much as they would have if the ID had said they were feds. Quinn was waving his finger and having his say at the redhead, something he was prone to do, and the redhead glared back as if he was memorizing features to make sure he knew this asshole if he ever ran into him again. The redhead said something back and made a fist. There was a little more dick-waving like that on both sides, and the cops in the second car saluted in jest and drove off with that little burst of acceleration cops used to show you they were busy people and had important places to get to and didn't have to explain things to you, in any case.

Soon everyone was gone, leaving a hollow space in the street, and leaving Jack Liffey feeling very alone and vulnerable. It was something he had never got used to after saying good-bye to his comfortable cubicle job in aerospace and falling into whatever it was that he did now. This was a world where you were on your own and things like luck mattered a whole lot more than he liked.

Superstition kept him from going to the office right away, where he didn't have anything to do anyway. He bought some dog food at the 7-Eleven and drove to his condo, which was not far east on Jefferson. He wondered if he should start carrying a gun. It wasn't legal, but nobody else in the city seemed to let that stop them. He'd had a bad feeling all day, an itch just out of reach. He wondered if it was some kind of chemical imbalance in his brain, an oversupply of a neurotransmitter in the fear lobe.

He came around the walk into the alcove where his front door was and froze in place. Because of the Vegas wiseguys, he'd taken to kicking up a little crease in the welcome mat every morning when he left. Anyone stepping on it would flatten it out. The jute mat was dead flat now, and there was no Avon catalog on the doorknob, and no maid service business card stuck in the jamb. Somebody had been up to the door, maybe inside.

He put the bag of dog food down soundlessly and pressed his ear against the door. After a full minute of silence, he took a big breath and barked and growled for a little while. There was no answer, so Loco was either dead or playing with Marlena Cruz in the back room and feeling safe. He couldn't remember if she still had a key, but she was almost the only person Loco got along with. All in all, he figured there were two possibilities: he would run into a bullet from a hired killer or an emotional scene with a woman he'd never got straight with. Let fate choose, he thought.

Inside, there was a little yip and then Marlena's voice, “Jack? Zat you?”

“You bet.”

She was sitting on the bedroom floor in an apron, the ghostly white Loco on one side of her and the old Sears vacuum on the other. Cleaning up for him was her way of saying hello and establishing something of a claim. He didn't like the way she did things for him without asking, but he didn't know how to mention it without feeling churlish. Something in it hurt him, made him feel exploitive and ungrateful.

“Me and Loco making friends again.” She ruffled Loco's wiry coyote hair. He saw that she'd put on another few pounds but she still looked pretty good in it and her black hair was wound into a kind of bun that made her look like a flamenco dancer between sets.

“You're the only one he really likes,” he told her. “He tolerates me because I feed him, but he knows a good woman when he sniffs one.”

She beamed. “A good man's got to know a good woman, too.”

“You bet,” he said neutrally. He wasn't sure why he said something as dopey as that, but it seemed to put off dealing with any of the consequences right then. “If he's hungry, I've got some lamb here. He seems to have a species memory of running down sheep.”

She relaxed, as if they were all friends again. “You looked in this dog's eyes? He's pretty spooky.”

They were strange eyes all right, depthless and dull gray and fierce as steel. There was no pet in them at all, no urge to figure out who you were and what you wanted, just the basic outdoors urges working themselves out on their own hook.

“I always figure I'm part of the food chain to him,” he said. “Long as I stay above him and bigger than him, I'm probably okay, but he doesn't get to sleep in the same room with me, I'll tell you that.”

The dog's jaw hung open a bit as he looked back and forth, as if planning to eat one of them.

“Aw, he's just a cutie.”

“Uh-huh, sure. You can look at it that way if you want.”

She ruffled the hair under the dog's chin and Loco seemed to tolerate it. “You working today,
querido
?” she asked.

“Yeah, a runaway boy from a nice screwed-up middle-class family in the Valley. His mom thinks he's caught up in a cult.” He shrugged. “He could be, or he could be hooking on Hollywood Boulevard.”

She wasn't really interested. There was another agenda item stewing and he pretty much knew what it was.

“Do you ever feel that telling the truth is real important?” She was trembling a little with conflicting emotions. “You know, that it's like something that God demands so you stay a good person?”

“Mar, we've been together and then we've both been with other people, and we ought to just be careful, is all. I like you, too, and you don't have to tell me any more about Quinn.” He sat down and touched her hand briefly, just a tap. She was kindly and decent to a fault and he had liked the physical with her, too, loved to touch her and feel how it stiffened her and made her shiver. He could remember touching her in all the secret places, and he would have loved to do it again, but on the other side of the equation, she went to a screwball millenarian church every week and he hadn't been in any kind of church in forty years and she kept Chihuahuas that he wanted to cook up in the microwave and she watched soaps in the morning that made his teeth hurt and she admitted she was tempted to vote Republican because her abusive son-of-a-bitch dad had been a lifelong Democrat and because she owned a small business, and almost everything about the two of them was at cross-purposes. Still, he was lonely and wanted her and he knew it, and he had to be clear to himself about it. She let her warm puffy hand rest on his.

“Can I come over tonight?” she asked.