Terminal Island (24 page)

Eventually he heard a whine on the cold air and made out a squarish shape of some sort. Had somebody sent a robot, one of those bomb investigators? Then he saw it was an ordinary forklift puttering slowly toward him. The fork was down, and something irregular sprawled across a palette that joggled toward him about a foot off the ground. The machine whirred into the outer edge of his circle of light, and, though he didn't want to acknowledge it, it was pretty clear that the burden on the palette was an inert Ken Steelyard, his distinctive Redwing boots hanging off one side of the wood and his head off the other. His chest was dark with what must have been blood. There was no rifle.

The forklift came to a stop twenty feet away from him and switched off. Joe Ozaki stepped out of the driver's seat in his black jumpsuit. As they stood facing one another, a whiff of the acrid propane exhaust reached him on the Christmas Eve breeze.

“I hope he isn't dead,” Jack Liffey said.

“He's dead. He tried to kill me.”

Jack Liffey stared hard. There was no movement from the blood-stained form slumped on the old palette. Jack Liffey hadn't seen all that many dead people in his life, and he gave the body his respectful attention. Good-bye, old friend, he thought. I knew you a long time ago. I forgot you for a while, but I'll remember you now.

“None of this was necessary,” Jack Liffey said.

“Just where do you think the line is drawn where honor stops? He challenged me. He came here after me. He fired the first shot. I had no choice.”

“You're expert enough at martial skills. You could have disarmed him or incapacitated him.”

“It was time. Liffey, you've challenged me, too. And the woman in there.”

That gave him a chill. “She means you no harm. Don't worry about her, worry about me.”

It was the first time he'd ever seen Joe Ozaki smile, just for an instant, like someone dismissing the transparent threats of a child. “She's watching us right now,” Ozaki said.

“She and I are both unarmed. I saw to that. I'd like to hear a definition of honor that includes killing the unarmed.”

His adversary eyed him, almost with curiosity. “You don't know it yet?” The man thought for a moment, his whole body stiffening into the misnamed “parade rest” posture. “Honor means to be resolute, to be desperate, to be nearly insane with strength of mind, to do things in the right way so that you manifest the good that resides in your entire ancestral line.”

“I don't understand any of that.”

“Have you ever been caught in a bad rainstorm? If you run from house to house, trying to stay under the eaves, the method will be useless and you'll still get soaked. But if you set out already decided that you'll be soaked, you can walk like a man and still do your duty to your father and his fathers.”

“My father is a racist shithead. Do I really want to honor him?”

“Then you have a problem.”

“Maybe you and I could honor one another. It's Christmas Eve. I'm not a believer, but I respect a lot of those values. Just look up at the hill and see all those lights meant to represent hope and forgiveness and maybe a kind of second chance in life.”

Ozaki didn't look. “Honor does not turn on and off. I've studied this carefully. Where would you have me turn it off? At noon yesterday? Do I forget the early 1900s, when my ancestors were brought over here as farm labor? Do you want to turn it off in 1905, when the California progressives came up with the expression ‘Yellow Peril' and formed the Asiatic Exclusion League? Even the sainted Jack London was a member.

“Or how about 1906, when a mob in San Francisco stoned a group of scientists who had come over here from Tokyo to study the effects of the earthquake? Or 1910, when Asian immigration was completely banned? Or 1913, when we could no longer buy land in America? Or 1915, when we were no longer allowed to catch seafood off the Washington coast? Or 1922, when an American-born Japanese woman would lose her citizenship if she married a Japanese man?”

“It's not a very nice record, Joe. I know that. Hell, the Irish were mistreated for a long time, too. To say nothing of the blacks and the Indians.”

“We haven't even got to 1942, when my parents were thrown out of their home and interned at Manzanar. Or 1943, when my dad refused to take the loyalty oath as long as his mother and father remained in a prison camp. Or 1945, when my dad found out all our possessions had been stolen and then ended up fussing about it for the rest of his life, infantilized by his own weakness and shame, like some poor child who's had his toys stolen. This was my
father.
Where does honor stop, Liffey?”

“You've made your point. Just by stirring up all this ruckus. It'll get into the papers. If you go on killing, your point will be forgotten, and the whole story will just become psychobabble about another Vietnam vet who went berserk.”

“Honor has nothing to do with the newspapers, Liffey. You've got to understand that much.”

“Your idea of honor says kill
me?
Somebody who offers to be your friend?”

“You challenged me. You stuck a card to my door. You came over here with my enemies to help them. I can't let that go.” His hands came into sight from behind his back—empty, thank God—and one went to his breast pocket, where he pulled out something small. He let it flutter to the ground at Jack Liffey's feet. He hardly had to look. He knew it would be the ace of that strange Japanese deck of cards.

“I have no weapon. And I won't touch one.”

Joe Ozaki indicated the shadowed form lying across the palette. “That one has two pistols and a rifle. The rifle is under him. Feel free, Liffey.”

“I don't want them.”

“I'll give you and the woman fifteen minutes to run. Who knows? You might make the bridge in that time.”

“Don't do this. I want to help you.”

Joe Ozaki couldn't just disappear this time, backflipping through a dark tear in the universe, but he turned and walked rapidly away, and the night was so dark and his black catsuit so dull that he became invisible very soon. Jack Liffey looked involuntarily at his watch. It was five after nine. At least he would live until nine-twenty.

Twenty-one

Hamster Run

“If we go for the bridge, he'll get us.” Jack Liffey stood with his back pressed to the closed front door, watching the way calculation played across her face. He wondered if all that calculation was getting her any farther than he was managing. “He might just let us go,” he went on, “but I'm not willing to bank on it. He's killed now, and that changes a lot of things. I can't get a handle on what he thinks he's going to have to do about us to earn his Bushido merit badge.”

“Shouldn't we go out and get Ken's guns?”

“If we arm ourselves, we're only challenging him to kill us. I have no doubt he can do it, with or without. Okay, here comes an idea.”

Whether it was the short nap she'd had or the shock of Ken's death, she seemed completely nonplussed. He took her hand, warm and rough and a little damp, and she let herself be towed toward the back door, where they waited a moment, just as Ken Steelyard had.

Turning the bolt ever so slowly, he opened the heavy door cautiously onto the alley. Cool, turbulent air billowed in around them. A dark cloudbank overhead reflected what light there was, looking like a kind of rippled chocolate. They stepped out and immediately got a strong whiff of fish on the breeze. Across the alley there was a two-story mountain of white Styrofoam boxes, the size of foot-lockers. Whole fish had once been packed in them. He was tempted to burrow into that lumpy white hill and try to play possum the rest of the night, but he didn't think they would get away with it. And he had a terrible vision of Joe Ozaki setting the boxes afire to flush them out.

“Feel that vibration in the ground. I think it might be some of those big cranes out at the pierhead. I think there're longshoremen working out there, and we'll be safer if we try to get among them.”

He'd felt the tremble in the floor inside, but out here it had become the faintest audible rumble, mechanical and characterless, impossible to assign to anything you knew, the sobbing of a machine deep in the earth. In fact, the vibration came to him most strongly in the sensitive metal plate he carried in his head from an earlier accident, like a primitive sounding board for a pre-human sense.

“I think it's this way.”

They hurried southeast, away from San Pedro and the bridge, toward the new piers and the raillines across the huge landfill that the port authority had been building for years.

“Merry Christmas Eve, Jack.”

“I keep forgetting.” He had an urge to look back briefly at the Christmas lights on the hill, but he didn't. There was no indication of the holiday on the island, certainly not in this dark alley, where they picked their way around puddles and trash.

“Christmas never meant much to me, but I always wanted it to,” she said. They found themselves talking in short snatches so they could stop to listen for suspicious sounds on the air. “It was like I was looking in at the holiday through a thick glass window. It was something other people enjoyed.”

“Maeve loves Christmas. She loves the giving. I have a vague memory of loving it like that as a kid.”

Was that a noise? They were both silent for a while, and then it came again, the wind rush of a bird, then a distinct flap of large wings. If it was up there, he couldn't see it.

“Maeve's mom was different,” he went on. “Before Maeve was born, she used to go away for the week by herself and pretend Christmas didn't exist. Something in all the commercialism and fake festivity got to her.”

“Maybe that's what I need. They say it's suicide season for single people.”

“I'd like to give you a good Christmas, Glor, if we make it to tomorrow. You deserve it.” Saying that gave him a small rush of emotion on top of the fear.

Then he banged his shin hard on something that was virtually invisible at his feet and swore. They kept their eyes down now, at the hardpan that was suddenly littered with abandoned engine parts and long-rusted pipes rising at angles to threaten their ankles.

“You're a truthteller, aren't you, Jack?” she offered all of a sudden.

He wasn't sure what she meant. It might have been yet another complaint about his being a pessimist in the teeth of trouble, so regularly anticipating the worst. Both Maeve's mother and Marlena had been at him about that, but it seemed to him the only responsible attitude. “I don't know. Rigid rules always trip you up in the long run,” he said.

“You know, a word spoken as meant contains twice the energy of a lie—that's what my adoptive mom always said,” Gloria offered, and he had to think about that. If only it were true. They detoured far to one side of the alley, skirting a broad puddle of oily water that filled a depression.

He took an awkward step over a high curb as they came out into a long, dark, paved road that was penned in on both sides by chain link. Beyond the fence, across a weedy expanse to the north, there was a gigantic floodlit construction of green and red cargo containers, the colors so pure they looked like LEGOs that had been stacked into ten-high formations by an overly-officious governess. A siren wound up far behind them on the mainland, sounding forlorn for a few moments as its waves of sound spread across the nearly deserted island like a gas, and then fizzled off.

Straight ahead, along the road, it was a different world. He turned his attention to the white pipelines that ran overhead on girder supports, the pipes apparently fat enough for a man to stand upright inside them. They climbed at a shallow angle from one gray tower to another, trending south, but never low enough to snag a truck that might pass underneath. There was a whiff of the toy world here, too, with the Tinkertoy tubes a pristine white, supported every fifty yards or so by a rickety Erector set cradle painted playroom yellow. A ladder led up each cradle to a bright red door in the conduit. The nearest of the pipelines, two blocks ahead of them, had flashing yellow lights all along it, like feral eyes winking slowly against the dark. He guessed that the lights meant something was functioning, the conveyor inside was running.

“What are those pipes?”

“I think they cover conveyor belts for petroleum coke. It's like powdered carbon. I've read it's a leftover from the oil refineries, but obviously somebody has a use for it. Maybe they burn it in Japan.”

The rectangular gray towers every quarter mile or so were like the guard towers at the corners of a castle keep, still more strange suggestions of the playtime world. He guessed that they were way stations or distribution forks. Tubes entered each tower near the top, while one or two new ones—at a much lower level—connected to still other towers. It all made up acres of a fairyland of mysterious passageways, leading to the new piers where the giant ships waited.

“It's always reminded me of a hamster run,” she joked wanly. “But for hippos.”

He laughed softly, liking her more and more. The vibration and rumble had swelled, and the tubeline with flashing amber lights was just ahead of them.

“Jack!” She froze, staring at something just at the curb. An upright wooden pole, tall as a basketball hoop, held a sealed metal box at head height that had no discernible purpose.

“Ah, shit,” he said, a chill taking him.

Stabbed to the pole was the ace of kittens, the very card that he had already seen flutter to his feet, or another like it. It was pinned there by some strange star-shaped implement that he guessed was a martial arts throwing device. He had never seen the Hong Kong chop-socky films—they weren't to the taste of any of the women in his life—but the existence of throwing stars and nunchakus and the like had leached into the general culture. He checked his watch: nine-fifteen. Only five minutes of grace left from Joe Ozaki.

“I guess we're not outwitting him,” he said. “Unless he's planted these all over the island to spook us.”

He looked around. Five more minutes wouldn't take them anywhere near the big ship that he could see far out at the end of the conveyors, from this distance a long, low toy boat docked more than a mile away under bright lights. Perhaps they could play hamster, he thought.

“You think we can get over this fence?” he asked.

“I'm game.”

He made a stirrup with interlaced fingers, and she stepped into it with a sensible ripple-soled shoe. He boosted her to the top of the fence. Luckily there was no barbed wire. She hung over on her belly and reached a strong arm down to him. Tugging against her pull and scrabbling his toes against the chain link, he got himself up to belly height like her.

“You've got arm strength,” he said.

“When the gods start you out, everybody gets one virtue.”

“I can think of more than one,” he said, his voice choking against the pressure on his stomach. But there was no time for flirting now, and they leaned forward over the fence until, passing equilibrium, they pushed off and tumbled to the gravelly earth on the other side. He had twisted his ankle a little, but not so much he couldn't pretend it hadn't happened.

“So far, so good. Now up the ladder.”

The throb in the earth was much stronger here, but the instant he clamped his hand onto a rung of the cold steel ladder, he knew he was connected to its source. It was eerie and frightening, a machine powerful enough to send out vibrations that disturbed the earth. He remembered once laying his hand against a massive cold aqueduct pipe, twice his height, and shivering with all that unseen power, just out of sight. He started up first. About ten feet up there was the beginning of a safety cage encircling the ladder, and then, for some reason, a small landing about two-thirds of the way up.

“I hope you're not afraid of heights,” he said.

“Not my phobia. Spiders.”

The second flight of the yellow ladder took them onto a small landing that crowded them against a bright red door. It was numbered 32, and there seemed no lock.

“Hamsters,” he said. “At least he can't see us once we're inside.”

They leaned together to one side to give the door room, and it came open with difficulty, heavily sprung so it would close securely. Along with a sudden increase in the sound, there was an exhalation of black dust that rolled over them out of the darkness. Jack Liffey coughed, retching once from deep in his good lung. He stuck his head inside and saw that there were ventilators overhead every fifty feet or so and that they admitted just enough light for him to see faintly. Right at his ankles, at the door, he could see the heavy V of the canvas conveyor belt grinding along, piled chest high with an endless charcoal gray snake. He reached out, and it resolved itself to black coke dust flowing over his hand. Gloria wormed around the door, and now it rested against their backs, pressing them both hard forward. The belt ran only inches from the wall of the surrounding tube, and if they jumped onto that moving pile of dust, there would be no getting off until the conveyor reached its destination, wherever that might be. He thought of those towers ahead where there appeared to be a drop to a lower level. No choice now, he thought.

They looked at one another and held hands. His watch said it was nine-nineteen, and he could imagine Joe Ozaki lining them up in the crosshairs of some high-tech rifle.

“I think we've got to do it,” he said. He drew his lapels over his nose and mouth, barely able get a breath in the choking air. He saw that she had yanked a corner of her blouse up across her mouth, too, inhaling through the cotton. Something deep inside him resisted any move forward: the coke was so much like the dust that had collapsed his lung in the first place that his body hair stood on end with loathing. The trouble was, he could see no way around this.

“On three,” he said.

“Aw, hell.” She tugged him in before he could count, and they were abruptly sprawled across the yielding, puffing, choking hillock of black filth, yanked forward as they found themselves embedded in the snake. The door slammed behind them, taking most of the light with it. He could feel that the coke had been lightly dampened, but it didn't hold down enough of the dust to keep him from feeling a little panicky. Lozenges of faint glow were projected below the ventilators, gliding along the top surface of the mounded coke like spirits. He brought up the tail of his shirt to breathe through, fearful that his other lung might shut down at the shock.

“I was trapped down a well as a child,” he managed to get out, his voice echoing weirdly off the metal wall, which seemed quite thin. He couldn't say more, since even the thought sent him rigid with a sense memory of the terror he'd experienced back then, seeing only one tiny eye of light far above. He rolled onto his back, then sat up to get his face as far from the coke as possible as they rumbled along.

“I hope you've got a plan,” she said. She coughed a few times herself. “I think I've got a case of prickly heat.”

“That's fear,” he said. “Don't you know what it's like?”

She didn't answer. They rode in silence for a while, joggling a little now and then as the conveyor passed over irregularities or rollers out of alignment. It was funny, but he figured at least he had a good lung in reserve. If he wrecked the working one, they could always reinflate the other. Maybe we should all shut down one twin of the organs we had in pairs. Keep a kidney in reserve. An eye. One brain lobe. He was just trying to figure out if there were two livers or one big one when Gloria Ramirez found his hand and held it tightly.

“Yeah, it's fear.”

Then there was a thump, like a small hammer on the outer metal tubing. A pencil of light appeared about ten yards in front of them, hinting at a billow of dust and tracing a bright spot on the coke rolling past. As they neared the light, he could see metal tabs torn inward at a small hole in the tubing. Nice shot, he thought, and a pretty spooky job of timing their progress along the conveyor. Superstitiously, he tried to squirm away from the bright finger, but there was no way, and it passed first across her arm, illuminating her shirt briefly, and then across his belly. They both looked back to watch the spot drift away behind.