Terminal Island Page 27

  “Uh-oh.”

  He got up on his hands and knees, facing the opening that was approaching inexorably. To the right, down low ahead, there was a slight disturbance in the uniformity of the glow. The light was so weak it was hard to know what it was, but anything was preferable to a sudden drop … into what? His imagination supplied a forest of spikes pointing upward down below, then, perversely, an upturned shark’s mouth. All at once, he pictured his job in ’Nam: he would watch the radarscope day after day for planes suddenly winking off, hearing cries for help on his earphones, and then dispatching first an A-6 ground attack fighter for protection, followed by a rescue chopper that would drop a nylon line and Stabo webgear for the downed pilot to climb into. He longed to see a nylon line dangling there at the end of the conveyer, with a big swivel hook he could grab and snap onto his belt.

  The small outcropping to the right of the conveyor became clearer, and it was almost as good as a chopper dust-off.

  “Take my hand!” he called. “There’s a catwalk! Get ready to jump right!”

  He suddenly spasmed into a bad coughing fit but did his best so suppress it. What irony if they lost their chance to a fit of coughing! It would have been easier to pull off with both his hands available to catch onto whatever the catwalk offered, but he clung to hers.

  They rumbled closer to the drop-off, section after section of the coke mound plummeting away, and he could feel a cool mist on the air, like a light rain. The catwalk had a railing that ended close to the conveyor, so if he could hook the railing with his free arm he could swing her up behind him. But he would have only one chance for the grab.

  “I see it,” she said. Her voice was dead calm.

  When the time came, he panicked a little when he pushed off hard and the yielding coke gave suddenly under him, nearly sabotaging his lunge. He missed the railing with his hand but flung his whole arm around it from the far side and caught it painfully in the crook of his elbow. He yanked hard on her arm behind him and felt her launch herself past him to get her chest onto the gridded metal of the catwalk. Immediately she gave him an extra tug that saved the day and pulled his torso up, beside her. They hung there on the dead edge of the catwalk on their bellies, just as they had on the fence, and he felt the coke pouring over his legs, trying to drag him down into some abyss he didn’t even want to see.

  She recovered first and squirmed up onto the catwalk, wriggling past him. She squatted and tugged hard on his free arm with both hands. Working inch by inch, she finally got him completely onto the walk, and he lay there for a time trying to catch his breath, moisture prickling all over him.

  “I should have let you jump first,” he said. “You’re stronger.”

  “We made it. That’s what matters. Look down there.”

  He crept forward a foot to put his head over the edge of the walk. There was just enough light from a series of ventilators to see the dark coke spilling into a huge mound far below, where two big metal screws fed the coke dust into other openings. Only one screw was turning, but, rotating or not, the big metal screws were not something you wanted to fall onto.

  He rolled onto his back to look upward and saw white plastic pipes and fine sprayers. Presumably they added just enough moisture to keep the coke dust manageable. The catwalk continued around the inside of the tower to a red door, just like the one they had entered, and on to a ladder that led down to a small platform exactly between the screws. He let himself cough long enough until his good lung seemed to have the strength to carry on, and it was a relief to enjoy the relatively damp clear air under the misters.

  “Like it or not,” he suggested, “I think we’ve got to take another ride.”

  “You’re probably right,” she said. “We know he’s tracking us.”

  As if her words had summoned the Devil himself, an angry fist slammed into the metal tubing right behind them, answered by a slap on the concrete block wall across the tower. A fuzzy rod of brighter light extended out into the silo through fine billows of dust, right where the conveyor spilled its load. Joe Ozaki was timing his shots with uncanny accuracy. Now there was the faint comfort of being inside the concrete block silo, but soon.…

  “He seems to know everything.”

  “You talked to him. What’s he like?”

  “I can’t say. Not really. He didn’t seem like a psycho, but he’s pretty eerie. He’s feeding on his father’s grievances, and I suspect there’re his own feelings from ’Nam, too—we’ll never know what that did to him. But it’s all mixed up now with his own crazy brew of Bushido philosophy. The thing is, he’s trying to kill us, and none of this matters now. We’ve got to go.”

  They had all settled onto the grass to wait, and the crowd below them had grown and grown as the local TV station went on broadcasting, with a breathless reporter offering meaningless updates like one of those police chases that the TV choppers followed relentlessly, at least three times a week, along the LA freeways.

  Ornetta was whispering in her grandfather’s ear, and Maeve wondered if it meant she was explaining to him Declan Liffey’s life’s work.

  “O come, all ye faithful …”

  Voices rose in the air as a group down the slope began to sing Christmas carols. It frustrated the TV reporter, who’d been rabbiting away about the “protocols” for dealing with barricaded suspects that he’d just gotten from one of the cops. He gave up for the moment, invoking the spirit of the day and holding the microphone out to the carolers.

  Bancroft Davis shinnied very slowly down the slope several feet, working his hips and arms painfully, until he was right next to Declan Liffey. Maeve was on her grandfather’s far side and watched the old black man lean in to whisper to him. “I lost my son,” he said gently. His voice was amazing, since, with all the singing and chatter on the hill, Maeve could still hear his baritone clearly.

  “A year and a half ago I hired your son to find out the truth for me. He did. He found out that Amilcar and his fiancée had been dead for some time, murdered in a fit of rage by a group of thugs after he mouthed off at them. I’m afraid Amilcar never learned the transforming power of nonviolent love. I wish I still had him so I could convince him about Martin Luther King and Jim Lawson and Bob Moses, but these were always just names out of the past to him. He never saw how love and forgiveness transform hating.”

  Declan Liffey did not respond to the old black man, but his face was twisting and flexing in a rictus of some terrible emotion.

  “I guess you could say I lost my son, too,” Declan Liffey whispered into the night. “I wish I could have him back.” Maeve could see his shoulders give a shudder, and then she realized that the warping and crumpling that she had witnessed in his features was his own peculiar surrender to grief. He started to weep, and Bancroft turned his upper body to hold him just as Maeve fell against his other side and hugged him, too.

  “I’m still me,” Declan Liffey insisted softly. “Inside I’m still me.”

  Maeve was crying, gulping a little against the musty jacket her grandfather was wearing. Down below she could hear the crowd go on singing their hymns, with a number of people obviously la-la-ing away when they didn’t know the words.

  They stood side by side on the small landing between the two big screws. They were impressive, all right—corkscrews the size of dump trucks. One of them was static but the other was turning over slowly, digging coal dust out of the damp mountain and spiraling it toward a conveyor that was moving west. There was just room to slip between the top of the rotating spiral and the roof of the conduit, but there was nothing to grip, no way to get up there.

  “Not one of your great forms of public transport,” he said. “For humans, I mean.”

  “I bet, statistically, it’s very safe. Probably haven’t had a single passenger accident.”

  He chuckled despite himself. “When you’re right, you’re right. I’ll give you a big boost over the screw onto the conveyor.”

  “Then how do you make it?”


  “A leap and a prayer.”

  “Jack, the last time we did something like this, not fifteen minutes ago, you admitted I was stronger. Let me give you a boost. I can make this on my own.”

  She flexed an arm for him like a Gold’s Gym muscleman, and he actually felt it. It was startlingly strong, the whole upper arm hard as a tree, and he knew, too, she was a good ten years younger than he was.

  “Jesus, you must pump iron. Okay, it’s age before beauty,” he conceded, and a laugh racked him with coughing for a few moments.

  He positioned himself at the edge of the short catwalk, squatting and bobbing to get some spring in his legs. He tried not to look at the big screw that was turning over slowly only a few inches from his nose, making crunching and hissing noises where it churned through the coke. But he had to look up to judge his leap, the blunt steel spiral blade whisking past, stirring little eruptions and boils in the surface of the coke pile, as if small animals warred beneath the surface. There was muscle of a sort in that giant screw, an almost malign force. It was quite capable of crushing an arm against the conveyor. But if you timed it right and got a good leap, there was just room to get over.

  He felt her hands against his bottom. “Wait for three this time, for Chrissake,” he said.

  “You count it.”

  He didn’t even want to think about what it would mean if she couldn’t make the leap through the gap after him.

  “One … two … THREE.” He pushed off hard with his legs, and she shoved, and his chest scraped the steel a little and his knee knocked hard at the top of the device but he dropped on the far side face-first into the choking pile of coke. Something tweaked his foot briefly, and more coke was deposited on top of him. He pushed off the rough canvas and erupted out of the mound of coke, sputtering and coughing. He rested on his knees, spitting coke dust, and as soon as he got his eyes open, he looked back. She was silhouetted against the slight glow in the tower, bobbing a little, as if working up her courage.

  “Come on! You’re strong!” He could hear his voice bang and echo its way down the long tube, and he went on spitting out grit.

  The opening looked treacherously small from this angle, but finally he saw her make a leap for it. In midair he saw her jolt sideways with great force, like a rag doll hit by a hammer, and her course shifted noticeably. One of her legs had clearly slammed against the giant screw as she came over, and then she kicked against something. She had fallen through into an odd posture, freezing that way as the machine shoveled piles of coke over her. With a real shiver of horror taking him, he crawled and fought his way back toward her as fast as he could, his knees slipping and sinking.

  Only a leg showed. He dug her out and tugged until she was lying on her back, conscious but grimacing in pain.

  “Where is it?”

  “Leg.”

  In the intermittent faint pools of light from the ventilators, he saw a great tear in her long navy blue skirt, and then a gash deep into her flesh where she had caught her left leg on the device. She might have some injury, too, from the first jolt he had witnessed, but that would have to wait.

  “Maybe I wasn’t stronger,” she offered in a strangled voice, as if she couldn’t quite get her diaphragm working.

  “That blow would have snapped my leg off,” he said.

  He didn’t like the way dark, thick blood was oozing out of the cut on her leg. He dug out his Victorinox and pried open the little scissors. The spring that reopened them at each snip had given up the ghost years earlier, and it was a long, aggravating chore to take a half-inch bite into her skirt, stop and pry the blades open again, then take another bite until he had enough to grab to tear strips for a tourniquet. He tied a wad of cloth hard over the wound, and it seemed to slow the seepage. He had no idea how bad the coke dust would be for an open wound, but there was no way to avoid it. It was everywhere. He felt it in his hair and crotch and shoes, even working its way into his eyes so he had to keep looking for a relatively clean patch somewhere to wipe them.

  Once he was done with his ministrations, Jack Liffey turned his attention to getting the two of them off the conveyor again at the next tower.

  “Grip my hands,” he ordered her, and she did. “Pull, pull. Okay, your arms are still strong. We’ll make it.” And after a while, “I’m not leaving you behind for the Indians.”

  She smiled weakly, and he started to say something but went into a coughing paroxysm. This time it took him over completely. The convulsing went on and on, and he had to flop onto his back to try to stabilize some of his bucking and kicking and to keep from hurling a body part into the small gap between the conveyer and the metal wall, where he’d do himself some real damage.

  Then, all of a sudden, he felt some internal part of him rip from the exertions. He could feel it instantly, as if his rib cage had torn from its mountings. He shouted out at a fiery pain, and then felt a dizziness, as if he’d taken a whiff of some intoxicant. In one more bout, the coughing seemed to blow itself out and left him becalmed in some strange universe. He lay and breathed very slowly, bringing his shirt over his nose and mouth. His breathing was odd, lopsided in a new way, but it was serving better than it should, and he realized all at once what had happened.

  “I was hoping to save you for later,” he said aloud. She was up on an elbow, fretting at him with those wonderful, dark eyes, black with no centers.

  “I think my bad lung just popped, reinflated itself,” he explained for her. He smiled. “Sorry, Doc. I beat you to it.” It felt strange, like walking hard on a leg that you had grown used to favoring. The extra air was exhilarating, even with so much dust around. He hadn’t felt dizzy-drunk like this in a long time.

  “Air is good,” he said.

  “Jack!”

  There was a rasp of danger in her voice, and he forced himself to sit up on the traveling black mound. There it was ahead, that same faint round radiance approaching, a featureless entry into another tower. For just an instant he pictured the two of them tumbling off the edge, plummeting in the cataract of carbon dust straight toward two giant screws, both grinding away. He pushed the image away. If they made it onto this catwalk, assuming there was a catwalk, they wouldn’t be doing any more conveyors, that was for sure. There would be a red door out of the tower, and they would just have to risk the goodwill of Joe Ozaki.

  He pushed himself onto his knees. All his thrashing had managed to dislodge a lot of coke and give them a shallow plateau. “Can you get onto your knees?”

  “I’ll try.”

  He could hear her stirring behind him over the light rumble of the machinery.

  “Oooh, that hurts. I’m up.”

  “Give me your hand.” She clung to the one he offered, slippery with dust, and there wasn’t a drop of sweat to help with the grip, every bit of moisture absorbed by the powdering of coke. She took his wrist in both her hands, relying on him. This time he was planning to thrust his free arm through the railing and catch it in his armpit, grabbing for anything he could, and then use all his strength to try to hurl her up onto the catwalk. But he didn’t see how he could do it if her legs couldn’t push off and give him some help.

  “I need all the kick you’ve got left in you,” he said.

  “I don’t know about my left, but the right’s willing.”

  “Piece of cake,” he said. His eyes never left the opening, and he inhaled to air himself out, full-lunged for the first time in months. The O of pale luminescence widened slowly like the iris of a lens, and he was relieved when he made out the edge of a catwalk on the right, just like the last tower. “I can see the railing. We’re home free.”

  “I’m scared, Jack. I’m feeling weak.”

  “One last heave. Hang on like fury.”

  He kept drawing in those big, satisfying breaths, not used to both lungs yet, and he heard a whimper of pain behind him. He realized the blood loss was catching up with her, and he just hoped she didn’t go into shock.

  The conveyor began to s
hudder beneath them as the opening drew steadily closer. He felt one annoying hammer in his knees, a roller well out of alignment with the others.

  “Get set!”

  He had his left arm thrust out in front of him, anticipating. He grabbed, misjudged, and felt the steel rail hit him hard above the elbow, but his hand flailed around for something to grasp just as support fell away beneath his knee and he started to drop. A wave of panic took him over as it became clear neither of them had the strength for this maneuver.

  “Push hard!”

  Then some inexplicable force sucked them up, some giant magnet above that grabbed them both and yanked them aboard the catwalk. He couldn’t believe she had that much power in her legs, but he lay for several moments enjoying their safety as the panic abated. When he moved his head slightly, he saw blacked-out tennis shoes, and then a human shadow in a ninja suit, backing away cautiously.

  “Thank you, Joe,” Jack Liffey said softly. As far as he could tell, Gloria had passed out.

  “There is no distinction to be made between the battlefield and one’s own kitchen,” Joe Ozaki said in one of his gnomic riddles. “Courage is present or it is not.”

  “I’ll take the kitchen,” Jack Liffey said. But he wasn’t sure whether he’d said it aloud. He was too dazed.

  “All time is within us now.”

  The dark figure came close again and squatted down to handcuff Gloria Ramirez to the catwalk railing.

  “I require you to come with me,” Joe Ozaki intoned to Jack Liffey.

  Twenty-two

  The Coldest Day in History

  One of the cops barked in surprise, his eyes pressed hard to his big, electronically amplified night-vision binoculars. Others, in the crowd below, holding vigil with their own binoculars, seemed to be reacting to something, too.

  He showed up first as a tiny figure trotting hard along the approach ramp that curled onto the bridge. It was only because the bridge was at an angle to them that they could see him at all. Like any short suspension bridge, the roadway rose steeply, so he would remain invisible to the line of police cars blocking the shore end until he crested the middle, which was still half a mile ahead of him, two hundred feet above the channel.