Terminal Island Read Online Free PDF

darkness.
    The disease of secrets, Jack Liffey thought, the disease of private pain. The boy sat sullenly on a plastic bench at Hugo’s Tacos, while Jack Liffey brought him a couple of nondescript crisp tacos and a Coke from the take-out window, ordering for himself a bad coffee and a cardboard tray of French fries.
    “I already talked to the fucking cop.”
    “This isn’t really your hangout, is it?” Jack Liffey said, ignoring the undirected venom. He had suggested going someplace where the boy felt comfortable.
    The boy shrugged slightly. He’d no more take an adult into his world than put on a Hawaiian lei. He didn’t touch the food. Ants made a line up one of the legs of the concrete table, across a corner to a puddle of catsup, where they milled and gorged before heading back down again.
    “I went to San Pedro High, too.”
    Jack Liffey might as well not have spoken. He continued, “I wasn’t very popular. Before I left, I wrote ‘Fuck the Knights’ on the base of the big pirate. I wonder if there’s any trace of it.”
    The kid smiled at that momentarily.
    Jack Liffey hadn’t done any such thing, but he understood what it meant to be pissed off enough to want to. “Do you want to be called Turtle or Vin?”
    The boy shrugged again.
    “Are the Knights still around?” This exclusive fraternity of suck-ups and student council types had, in Jack Liffey’s day, colluded with the jocks to lord it over everyone else.
    “They leave us alone.”
    “I imagine since Columbine the school’s a bit on your ass, frisking you for shotguns and such.”
    “We can’t wear trench coats to school anymore. No big deal. What was Columbine?”
    He let that alone. He knew the kid knew. “Pedro have metal detectors?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Do the campus cops hassle you?”
    He shrugged, which might have meant anything. There hadn’t been any real security in Jack Liffey’s time. It had been an open campus and you could come and go at will. You could play in the parks at night, too. Now it seemed to him as if there’d been a universal toxic spill of some chemical that had etched the comfortable edges off everything in the world.
    “You prefer to be left alone, I take it.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “I’ll do my best, but I promised your dad I’d talk to you about what happened.”
    “Don’t do me any favors.”
    “How about you just tell me who your natural enemies are at school. Every food chain’s full of them.”
    The kid looked at him. “Huh?”
    Jack Liffey wondered how much of Western civilization he shared with this boy. “You know, each one eats the weaker, catsup, ants, me.” He squashed a few ants with his thumb. “Worms eat the pond scum, birds eat the worms, coyotes eat the birds, bears eat the coyotes, we eat the bears. Somewhere in there, there’s something that wants to get you. Surfers? Gangbangers? Jocks? Schools are always like that.”
    The boy just looked away for the next few minutes, and Jack Liffey got nowhere with his questions.
    “Did you ever have a fight with anybody?”
    The boy sighed and finally ate a bite of the congealing taco. “I was at a party in PV last month and some vamps got in my face.”
    PV he knew. There had never been any love lost between the working-class town of San Pedro down on the flat and the horsy Palos Verdes hills above. In fact, there were several layerings of new-money towns up there, Rancho Palos Verdes, Palos Verdes Estates, Rolling Hills Estates, and then right up on top, the gated community of Rolling Hills that he’d read somewhere had the highest per capita income in the country, probably the known world. But the word vamps didn’t register.
    “Vamps?”
    The boy took a moment, then answered reluctantly. “Vampire goths. They wanted me to drink some blood with them and I told them to fuck off.”
    Vampire goths. Jack Liffey was not going to betray his surprise. More weirdness. Generally he liked weirdness, but something about kids playing vampires