Streets on Fire (12 page)

“
Habari gani
?” the Mwalimu greeted him.

“
Mzuri sana
. ’Sup? I heard you wanted to see me.”

“Amilcar’s father asked us to talk to this man. His name is Jack Liffey and he’s looking for Amilcar.”

The young man’s eyes didn’t come around, but he nodded. “Anything for the man Ban. Let’s go out in the court, white person. ’Stoo hot here.”

Jack Liffey followed him along the hallway, Kidogo dribbling slowly all the way, and out into a small asphalt yard, just big enough for a half-court, with a hoop set above a blank wall. At least it was marginally cooler here. The young man kept his eyes averted, and Jack Liffey reflected that diffidence and homicidal hatred could look a lot alike.

“How’s your basketball skills?” the young man asked.

“Just south of nonexistent.”

The young man sent him a no-look one-bounce pass, a little harder than necessary. “If you can put it through, I’ll answer a question.”

“Hell, with my height I ought to get a stepladder.” He took a shot, a real air ball that arced over embarrassingly short. He hadn’t touched a basketball in probably twenty years and he realized that he’d seen so much expert play, at least as often as he’d stumbled across it on TV, that his subconscious had forgotten that the ball had any weight to it.

Kidogo took a step to reclaim the ball.

“So don’t answer the
first
question,” Jack Liffey said. “It was, What’s the square root of thirty-four?”

Kidogo smiled, despite himself, went up on a jump and put the ball through without touching net. Then he retrieved the ball and bounced it to Jack Liffey again. It took him two more tries to get it through the hoop, inelegantly, with a high bounce off the rim.

“The last weekend Amilcar was home, there was some sort of problem here in LA. Maybe a run-in. People on campus said he was pretty upset about it.”

Kidogo took two steps and leaped, swung around in midair, and did a reverse slam dunk.

“Nice,” Jack Liffey offered.

The young man still hadn’t made eye contact. “The trouble wasn’t here. I saw Ami that morning at the bookstore, Eso Won, and everything was fine. Him and Sherry were gonna have dinner with me and my woman at Elephant Walk in Leimert Park, but he called about five. It was from a pay phone, I think. I could hear traffic. He was angry and he said he couldn’t make it. They were going home to Claremont.”

“Do you know where he’d gone after you saw him in the morning?”

“Nope.”

“Did you tell the police this?”

“They never asked.”

“Is there anything else you know that could help?”

He seemed to think about it for a moment. “You must think you one tough motherfucker.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Pushin’ in here, askin’ questions where you ain’t—say—
real
welcome, you hear what I’m saying?”

“You know, up to now I’ve found African Americans almost faultlessly polite to me all my life. It’s usually the white racists who can’t manage civility.”

“Must be they little bitty dicks,” Kidogo said, but there wasn’t any real menace at work. The chip on his shoulder was just something he had to wave around a bit to prove something to himself. Jack Liffey felt sorry for all the pain his attitude was going to cause him for the rest of his life.

“I’ll tell them that, if I see any.” He could see he’d got all the information he was going to get.

“I don’t hate whiteys,” Kidogo said, all of a sudden. He lofted another swish through the net and met Jack Liffey’s eyes for the first time, a neutral expression that suggested he had expended all the patience he had available. “I just want a situation where we can be with ourselfs and make our own decisions for ourselfs without some white muckty-muck coming and telling us what’s good for us to be down for.”

“I hope you find the world where that’s possible, I really do,” Jack Liffey said.

*

It was late but still a bright dusk as he got home, one of those hot California summer evenings that swore to you they’d never pass away until all your dreams were fulfilled. If only his dreams were still simmering away on the back burner.

Water was running, and a steady discharge of steam seeped out under the bathroom door. She usually bathed first thing in the morning. He turned the knob softly and saw Marlena’s strong brown shoulder in a fog of bubbles rising off the tub. She appeared to be scrubbing hard at her privates.

“Eeep.” It was a tiny squeal of surprise and two fingers went to her lips as she sat back.

“You forget. I’ve seen that lovely body,” he said.

A froth climbed her breasts like frosting on a cake, and she tried to smile at him but something was wrong.

“You okay?” he asked.

Just then the phone rang, and she said “Please get it,” so peremptorily that he thought she might be expecting word of a death.

“Is this Jack Liffey?” a man asked.

“Speaking.”

“Jack, this is Tom Leary.”

It took Jack Liffey a moment to focus and make the connection—his cousin out in Claremont—and then sense the note of tragedy in the man’s flat suburban voice.

He nearly shouted into the phone. “Is Maeve all right?”

“I don’t know. It took a long time for Mary Beth to tell us what happened.” He hesitated.

“
Please
.”

“Yeah, sorry. Maeve’s got caught up with some motorcycle types out in Fontana and she hasn’t come home yet.”

Something heavy and cold sank to the pit of Jack Liffey’s stomach and kept right on going down.

“Did you call the police?”

“Right away. They just called me to say they checked and nobody was at the clubhouse Mary Beth described. She’s a little hysterical right now, but she swears that’s where Maeve was. The girls were playing some kind of detective game, and Maeve was peeking in a window when a big guy with a beard caught her and took her inside. I’m sorry. It took a while for Mary Beth to bicycle back here and tell us.”

“Was this the Bone Losers?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Yeah, that’s the name she used.”

How on
earth
? he wondered. She must have seen his paperwork, but what was she up to?

“I’m on my way.”

He swung open the bathroom door. “Maeve’s in trouble. I’ve gotta go and I’m taking the Franchi.” The Franchi was a big black twelve-gauge shotgun she kept under the bed. It had a pistol grip, operated either as a pump or semi-automatic and was a lot more intimidating than his pistol. He noticed that she was crying as she sat helplessly in the bath, but he didn’t have time for that.

Jack Liffey drove east on the 10 as fast as he and the Concord could bear, panic and dread gnawing at his stomach. This had always been the nightmare: something gruesome swooping down out of nowhere to gobble up his helpless daughter. But what had she been up to, playing detective? Kathy would certainly blame him for that. Far off to his right, he noticed dark columns of smoke rising up and shearing off westward at several points in South Central, offerings unacceptable to the gods.

She had no idea where she was. With the scratchy fat rope still tied around her waist, she had been carried into a beat-up van and driven miles to a piney little house up a canyon where a lot more of the weird motorcycles were parked.

They were effectively lashed together, she and the beer-smelling gorilla named Lunchmeat, standing outside among the bikes. She tried to imagine him as a child, smaller but still chunky, holding back his tears as he was being beaten and thrust away by a boozy father as big as he was now. She couldn’t really do it, and she couldn’t picture where he lived, either, though she tried to imagine him in a cheap apartment with his possessions stashed around in old fruit crates, and his shirts hung on nails hammered into the walls. He was too far outside her experience, but she needed to imagine who he was. She knew her safety might depend on figuring him out.

The nearest lights she could see from the yard were far out in the valley, obscured by haze. A big road was out there, too, probably the 10, with pinpricks of light crawling along it.

“‘The darkness drops again! But now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle!’”

The skinny one named Greek had his head thrown back, his arms flung outward, and was bellowing some poem into the night, lit up where he stood by the yellow light spilling from a window. Sweat was dripping down his stringy hair and flew off as he tossed his head. On the way up the canyon, Greek had sat beside her on the floor of the van, and she had tried not to watch him rip a small piece off a Chore Boy copper pan scraper, stick it into a weird glass pipe with a little yellowish rock and smoke it hard and fast.

Maeve tried to act nonchalant as she stood among the monstrous motorcycles, but she was really nearly catatonic with fright, and her legs were too rubbery to trust. Bats darted around silently overhead, zigging as if they were bounding off invisible walls. She took a deep breath and forced her thoughts and imaginings to stop flitting around like the bats. What to
do
? Calling out for help seemed pointless, though she certainly hoped Mary Beth had the police heading after them by now.

“Pay attention, little one,” Lunchmeat said. He squatted to get up close and personal with the engine of a motorcycle. He looked like a collapsed mountain, supporting his immense leaning bulk on one hand. “This here is a ’68 shovelhead. You can tell by these two bolts in the cylinder head.”

He might as well have been talking Sanskrit, but she did her best to absorb the information.

“In ’68, the Japs just brung in their big Honda, and the shovelhead was Harley’s answer to the big rice-burners. And see this one here, it’s got electric start. The wussies got to have it these days. Won’t do no jump starts no more.”

“Will there be a quiz?” Maeve heard herself say.

He chuckled. “You got a good spirit on you, Nancy Drew.”

“‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed!’ Owww!
Goddam
!” In midverse, Greek seemed to have lost his balance and fallen against a motorcycle. He was hopping around on one foot, rubbing his knee like crazy.

“Look here, Nancy. This is the blockhead engine that the company calls the Evolution. It’s all smooth on the heads. This is my own baby; I call her Big Potatoes.”

“Why that?”

“That’s the Harley sound,
potato potato
. When that big V-twin mothah’s started up and idling away between your knees, it’s rough as a rasp, going pa-
too
-toh, pa-
too
-toh, and you know for sure you’re on a real man’s machine.”

She’d never felt so lost and helpless in her life.

*

“We make a pretty unlikely pair of vigilantes,” the young man said. He rode nervously beside Jack Liffey, cradling an aluminum baseball bat. The nose ring was gone, and he was dressed in ordinary jeans and a sweatshirt that said only
COLLEGE
.

“Who would be a
likely
pair of vigilantes?” Jack Liffey asked. He was pretty distracted himself, his muscles so tensed that he knew he would be wrung out like a rag before very long.

“True, true.”

He had grabbed up Marlena’s cell phone and called David Phelps on the way, and Phelps had gone through a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend to get an address for the Bone Losers, somewhere out into the foothills of the San Bernardino range not far from a place improbably called Muscoy.

Phelps eyed the big, ugly shotgun that rode between the seats.

“Is that legal?”

“If it’s unloaded, it’s legal to carry it.”

“Is it unloaded?”

“No.”

“I see.”

“It’s only legal in the trunk anyway,” Jack Liffey added, as if he didn’t want the young man to get in trouble by quoting him wrong one day.

“I’m kind of opposed to violence,” David Phelps demurred, though still anxious to be agreeable.

“So am I.”

Phelps studied him carefully. “You look ’Nam age. Were you over there?”

“Uh-huh, but I was just a technician in an electronics trailer out in the jungle.”

“So you’ve never shot anyone.”

Jack Liffey didn’t answer and time stretched out a bit.

“Uh-oh. This isn’t a death mission here, is it?”

“We’re going to get my daughter. As Malcolm X said, by any means necessary.”

“Uh-huh, okay. But did you actually shoot somebody before?”

“Yes.” It was a long story and he didn’t have time for it, and he wasn’t very happy about it. “Sometimes, say when you’re falling out of an airplane, it doesn’t do much good to insist you’re opposed to gravity.”

“Got you. Yes, sir.” He could see the young man’s sense of calculation was working overtime, and it ran hard up against his agreeable nature. “Let’s hope we can negotiate this. That’s what I’m here for.”

“Let’s hope.”

Then they rode in silence down the darkness, threading fast from lane to lane through what was still a fair amount of traffic on the 10. The old Concord wasn’t worth much anymore but it still had a V-8 and it could crank. The inland valley was so smoggy, taillights materialized slowly a mile or two ahead in the murk, starting out orange and growing redder as he swooped down on them.

David Phelps rotated the aluminum bat, as if giving its presence there a second thought. “Whatever happened to ash bats? Aluminum makes that stupid tinny sound when you hit a ball.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s like they have to inject their damn technology into every corner of every sport to make you buy ever newer stuff. Fiberglass pole vault poles, high tech basketball shoes, carbon tennis rackets. Why not just shoot balls out of guns at each other?”

“Do you really care about the purity of the baseball bat?” Jack Liffey asked.

There was a long silence as the young man stared down at the bat in his lap. “Did you know it was a gay football player who invented the high five?”

“And Michelangelo was gay, and Einstein, Marconi and Lindbergh, too.”

“Just Michelangelo. But a helluva painter.”

*

“Kid, what’s up?”