Streets on Fire (26 page)

“It be tested.” He tossed it back into Jack Liffey’s lap, still warm. “You get Mr. Bancroft through the night, Arnold, and maybe you a honorary niggah.”

The pack of feral dogs strutted down Brighton at cruising speed with outriding scouts glancing warily left and right. He wondered if it was the same pack he had seen earlier. If it was, it was gaining constituents, a good fifty strong now. They seemed proud and confident, as if this very night their species had finally reached critical mass and they were on their way to supplant humans as the rulers of South Central. The biggest dogs, the rottweilers and shepherds, held to the front of the big ragged wedge like an officer corps.

One dog out at the edge moved faster than the others. Jack Liffey barely believed his eyes when he turned his attention to it. He had seen three-legged dogs before, usually tripodding along in some hamlet where he had stopped for gas, unfortunate beasts who had been wounded in some accident. He watched intently as this black terrier, with its tail up like a question mark, bobbed around awkwardly in a wide half circle and then bobbed back, and sure enough, against nature and physics, it was a two-legged dog. Only the left front and right rear legs remained, and the animal obviously had to keep up a good head of steam to stay upright. It sprang along faster than the others, circling and panting heavily, a living rollerblade.

One of the pack leaders barked once in Jack Liffey’s direction, a casual warning, and he was happy to be inside a car where he could lock the door and roll up the windows if he had to. They did not seem to sniff him out, though, probably because the air was alive with the tang of fire, feathery wisps of ash drifting here and there on a faint erratic breeze. The pack went on past, with the two-legged dog circling around at the rear, almost toppling as it leaned, and then it bounded hard into catch-up mode. There was some sort of moral about brute determination there, he thought.

The smoke built up like a dreamy fog on the air, haloing the few streetlights that had not been shot out. He wondered what was burning, though it was probably just the usual furniture and liquor stores, schools and post offices. Untrimmed palm trees went up like torches if you could get a flame up into the thatch.

He guessed it was only about eleven, but he was still having a hell of a time staying awake, waging that almost unwinnable war against lead weights suspended from his eyelids. If only he could nap for a few minutes. In frustration, he slapped his cheek. The blow was harder than he’d intended and his ear rang.
Brilliant
, he thought in annoyance. Liffey vs. Liffey, stopped by the ref, TKO in one. Then he recalled there was no such thing as a TKO any more. The people who ruled boxing had done away with the distinction, and it just went into the books as a normal knockout now. Then he was bent over watching a prizefight far below him, tiers of seats all around filled with yelling fans. It seemed a bit like a movie he’d seen before… and then he awoke with a start as a door slammed.

Not again, he thought. But there was no one at the car window this time, and his mind could take its time coming into focus. Down the road, he saw Bancroft Davis in a flannel robe and his wife leaning against one another in their driveway, as they stumbled urgently toward their Mercury. Shaking his head to clear it, he almost went to help them when he noticed dim faces in the front window of the house, which threw him into confusion. One was their little granddaughter Ornetta, but he figured he had to be fast asleep still because the second face in the window looked exactly like Maeve’s. He felt a chill—but surely, he thought, they were still over in Oakwood. They wouldn’t have come back into the heart of the riot.

The old couple got into their big car, and still Jack Liffey hadn’t moved. The car ground once and quickly kicked over, and as it backed out, he realized he was really and truly awake. Where were the two of them off to on a night like this? The old man had looked pretty unstable, and he remembered how shaky Genesee had always been, pushing a walker ahead of her. It had to be something damned urgent to force them out into this deadly night, of all nights, and leave the children behind.

The Merc left at a good clip. The girls’ faces were gone from the front window, and he wondered if they had been a hallucination. It was possible. A number of images he’d seen in his dream still hung with him, a dog glaring at him, a woman with her hair on fire. Before he could make up his mind to go over to the house and investigate, he saw a dark van, drifting slowly down Brighton without headlights, and a shudder of alarm worked its way across his shoulders. His hand found the little spray gun BigLenin had given him, and a finger went into the trigger guard. His thumb felt out the tiny little safety and snicked it off. He hadn’t done much to help so far, but now might be his chance. As long as he didn’t use the MAC-10 to blow away a neighbor out on patrol or local kids scavenging for loot.

He was almost positive he had seen that van before, blocking his escape from the Simi ravine. Dark and featureless, like a messenger from some far more evil world, it rolled deliberately past him, making almost no noise and hesitated just where it shouldn’t, in front of the Davis house. He was out of the VW, his heart racing, just as a wine bottle wrapped in a flaming rag arced high toward the house, then another. He took off toward the van as the first Molotov burst against the clapboard siding of the bungalow and flared orange. And then Jack Liffey was flat on his face. Someone had body blocked him from the side. The MAC-10 was no longer in his hand and a knee dug very hard into the small of his back. He felt his arm wrenched up behind him.

“Be cool there, Mr. Rootietoot.”

He knew the voice. A horrible sickness clenched the pit of his stomach, and his mind automatically pictured Perry Krasny behind him, the shoulders of a Brahma bull and all that weight. No wonder they’d come down the block so slowly. The big man must have been reconnoitering Brighton on foot, a flanking patrol, some sort of Ranger training.

“The old people aren’t in the house,” Jack Liffey said quickly. “There’s only kids in there.”

“Uh-huh, sure. Forgot the milk for the morning coffee, did they?”

“They drove away in a hurry just a minute ago. I think the man was sick.”

“We’ll just wait around and see what comes running out then.”

“
God damn
”—Jack Liffey wriggled and fought, but the man’s weight was far too much for him—“There’re
kids
in there!”

Through weed stubble he could just see the front of the house start to flame up.

*

Maeve and Ornetta had tugged on their clothes after they’d awoken to the clatters and bangs of the aftermath of the heart attack. They had emerged to help Genesee get Bancroft Davis up out of bed and into a bathrobe, but she had ordered them to stay in the house and used some superhuman reserve of strength to support her husband down the porch and toward the car.

Ornetta clung to Maeve’s hand and breathed hard, close to sobbing. Maeve clasped the smaller girl against her to comfort her just as they heard the breaking glass and a kind of
whoomp
sound, like nothing either of them had ever heard. An orange glow flickered through the front curtain. It took only one peek to know what it was. “Let’s get out!” Ornetta shrieked.

They ran into the bedroom and Ornetta grabbed a big metal loop that stuck out of the wall beside the window. She tugged hard but had to wave to Maeve for help, and the two of them heaved together until it gave all at once, like a cork coming out of a bottle. The sash was already up and Ornetta pushed hard on the ornate burglar bars with both hands. The bars swung open with a rusty creak like an old gate and both girls climbed out into the darkness, right past the wheelbarrow and garden tools.

“They must be after your granddad,” Maeve said.

“Then his heart go and save his life.”

They crawled to a hurricane fence on the side of the yard, just past a spindly little tree, where Ornetta put her back to the chain link and shoved hard with her legs to push the bottom of the fence out and up a foot. Maeve thought of the loose fence slats in Venice and wondered if Ornetta had found an escape route from every home she had ever known.

“Roll under, Maevie, and hold it up.”

She wriggled underneath and held the chain link up with both hands while Ornetta rolled through herself into the neighbor’s yard. They dusted themselves off and sneaked around the dark house to a hedge that divided back from front yard. Ornetta knelt and pushed herself into the hedge.

“Dirty old boogers,” Ornetta exclaimed softly.

Maeve wriggled in with her to look through the leaves and she could see a dark panel van out front with its sliding door open. The pulsing firelight was growing now, lighting up the van, and they could see a man kneeling inside wearing a black ski mask and aimed what looked like an army rifle at the house.

“I bet they’re waiting for him to come out,” Maeve whispered.

Something was moving in the vacant lot across the street, too, just at the edge of the long shadow cast by the van, but they couldn’t quite see what was there. Maeve looked hard, and it was like demons churning in the dark, one of them rising up out of a thick puddle on the ground.

*

“If it’s little kids, we won’t shoot ’em coming out. We’re not monsters, Jacko.”

Jack Liffey felt a wave of intense hatred. That anyone would make
that
the gauge of his virtue—not shooting children fleeing a fire.

He could see that the bungalow had caught fire now, flames licking up the siding and over the front eave. He had to believe the girls had escaped out the back. Thinking anything else was insupportable, unbearable. There were no sirens heading their way, and he doubted the fire department had any units to spare. For this night, smaller fires were going to burn until they ran out of fuel.

“Doesn’t it strike you that none of this has anything to do with advancing the white race?”

“
Au contraire
, Liffey. I know where we started out, and I know where things got complicated. There’s been a mistake, fuckin’ A right, but we all have to accept the consequences of what we do and finish them out. Even if they don’t look much like they did when we started.”

“Sure, I see that.” To keep him talking.

The noise of a helicopter swelled overhead; it seemed to be circling. The fire had attracted that much attention, at least. The man didn’t seem concerned, and when Jack Liffey twisted his neck around for a glimpse, he saw that Krasny was wearing a ski mask. Even the flesh that showed through the cut-outs had been blacked with burnt cork. Being caught on TV wasn’t going to worry Krasny very much. The license plates were undoubtedly off the van, too. He held a .38 snub-nose revolver in his free hand. Nothing fancy or high tech but perfectly adequate for putting a hole in you.

“So what happened? Did Amilcar give you some lip?”

“Not me, Brian. We were done up like this to put a little scare in the miscegenators, but the guy yanks Bri’s mask off and gets a good look, and then tops it by saying something foul about what he sees. Showing off for his girl. Leave it to a mouthy nigger to push his bad luck. Bri lost it and his pistol went off, and then poor Doug reacted and chopped them both down. What could a man do?”

“Yeah, the uppity ones are the worst.”

The weight intensified briefly, and he winced. A bright light came on from the helicopter and swept over the ground.

“I wonder what they think they’re going to do with that searchlight?” Perry Krasny said cheerfully. He sounded like he didn’t have a care in the world. “Maybe fly in a big magnifying glass and burn us up like ants?”

“Where are the bodies?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I always wondered what I’d do if I accidentally killed somebody. Bury the body in the hills? Cut it up and send it down the drain?”

He heard a snigger. “They’re in Rose Hills, with all the other dead meat. Nobody’s ever there at night. We dug down another couple feet and tucked ’em under a coffin waiting to go down. Can’t you just see the cops trying to find a couple extra bodies in a cemetery? Oops, not that one.”

“Clever of you.”

“No shit.”

The shaft of light found them for an instant, turning the world into glare, and then skidding off a bit; it wobbled around them as the helicopter circled.

A new shadow blocked his view of the fire. “Nobody’s coming out of there, K. Let’s beat it.”

“You a Christian?” Krasny asked Jack Liffey.

“Not much.”

“Make what peace you can. You’re gonna get to know the big answers real soon now. Best pray to your humanist vapors.” Jack Liffey’s arm was released and the pressure was suddenly gone from the small of his back. His heart thudding, he rolled onto his back and saw the hooded Krasny standing over him, aiming the pistol.

“You don’t have to do this.”

“Sure we do.” The pistol jumped and Jack Liffey felt a searing pain, like a sword through his shoulder, and shouted out. Then forcing his eyes open in the face of the terrible burning pain, and he saw the pistol tracking toward his heart. The two men were silhouetted against the smoky brightness as the searchlight found them again, and he wondered if this was the last thing he would ever see, if the final image really did burn onto your retina. Not now, he thought, not yet.
I want to find out how it comes out.

The light kicked up a notch and Jack Liffey sat up. He didn’t want it to happen lying down.

“This is for the dog, you fuck.”

Perry Krasny aimed his .38 straight for the heart and fired. There was no white tunnel, no kindly uncle waiting for him. In a burst of incredible pain, the world went right out.

*

Maeve shrieked and fainted. At that moment, the light from the helicopter had finally resolved what she was seeing across the street. She had made out a big man in a mask standing directly over her father, and then the big man had fired a pistol right into his chest. Ornetta held her tight, but with all the other noise she didn’t think the men had heard the outburst. She watched as two masked men sprinted back to their van and slammed inside.