City of Strangers Read Online Free PDF Page B

started to pace restlessly, with an odd little purring. It disturbed his concentration. He thought he’d preempted this by giving the dog its obligatory five minutes of affection. Loco was half coyote and did not usually make much in the way of demands on the human world.
    The purr became a mewl. Something was up and then the rasp-angry doorbell sounded. Damn, he thought. Meditatus interruptus. Still, he was already getting a bit lightheaded. Loco was leaping at the knob as if trying to work out its mechanics.
    And there was Maeve, grinning, carrying her little suitcase, and she launched herself into his arms just as the dog launched itself at her. “I missed you, Daddy.”
    “Oh, me, too, sweet stuff.”
    She bent down to hug Loco, which gave Jack Liffey a chance to rub his eyes surreptitiously. So much sudden love going around was more than he could handle.

Three
Liffey & Liffey Investigations
    “Pretty gutless, Dad.”
    With Maeve’s extra weight onboard, the old VW labored down to third gear, about 48 mph, heading over the Sepulveda Pass toward the Valley. It was lugging so badly now he had to drop to second. He’d had the car for almost a year now and he still wasn’t really used to it. The horrible engine noise of the air-cooled beast unnerved him on long trips, like a Greyhound bus running up his tail.
    “The price was right,” he yelled over the engine.
    Chris Johnson had virtually given it to him—$500, he’d said, whenever he could afford it—after his trusty old AMC Concord had given its life, in effect, to save him from a couple of thugs. The VW hadn’t proved its loyalty like that yet.
    “Can we go to the electronics store first?” she pleaded.
    He was combining her errand to buy some gizmo with his own trip to Kennedy School to start looking into the missing kids. He had always had this primitive spirit of economy that gave him a deep satisfaction in dual-purpose chores, like someone who’d gone through the Depression and hoarded coupons. His father had seemed to spend half his life catching him coming out of rooms and telling him to turn out the lights.
    “And then I drop you at the North Hollywood Library for a few hours.”
    “We’ll see,” she said. He could sense another agenda turning over deep in her psyche.
    “How is it you’re on vacation in October, hon?”
    She grimaced. “I’ve explained that already, Dad. I’m on C-track. It’s not like when you were a kid anymore. We’ve got year-round school. It’s more efficient, and the kids don’t have to help bring in the summer crops anymore.”
    “Really?” He stayed deadpan. “Who does bring in the crops?”
    “Illegals, of course.”
    He glanced at her and she nodded quickly. “Okay, okay, undocumented workers. I didn’t mean anything.”
    “I know some of those expressions are a bit absurd,” he conceded. “ Differently abled —as if a bunch of folks just decided one day they’d prefer riding around in wheelchairs. But it never hurts to call people what they’d like to be called. It’s just politeness. If redneck assholes want to be known as the cranially challenged, that’s fine with me.”
    She smiled. “We had a big discussion of Huck Finn in Mrs. Beecher’s class before we started reading it. You can bet what it was about.”
    “The N-word. It gives me the willies, too. I know it really pays off in the book when Huck finally connects with Jim, but I still can’t say it.”
    “When we read some out loud in class, we read it as Negro. Negro Jim. It was a weird compromise. Do you think it would have been better to say the bad word?”
    “You know, punkin, I think for some questions there just isn’t a right answer. I love Twain, but that word carries freight now that you simply can’t ignore. Someday you can read Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle and we can talk about it. He set up a really intractable dispute, between two pig-headed groups, and he thought he’d worked out an answer, but I think it’s