Terminal Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

was just sad and pitiable. “You go to parties with vamps a lot?”
    “Some.”
    “You remember where this was?”
    “Somewhere up on Bridlewood.”
    That was PV, all right. It was something. But if he decided to take this case, it looked like he was going to need garlic and some silver bullets. They talked for another half hour as the boy finished the aging tacos and then the fries, but Jack Liffey got no more useful information out of him. In the end he tucked his card in the boy’s shirt pocket. “If you think of anything else, call me.”
    That would happen right after the boy got a button-down shirt and ran for class president, he thought.
    Before heading home, he detoured to the far side of town toward Averill Park, where he’d spent about half his childhood. The park had been a WPA project back in the thirties, but to him, growing up nearby, it had just been a park. It had an artificial waterfall that fed a stream running two blocks between rock retaining walls, and above the stream, trees and then rolling grass hills—the most beautiful urban park he had ever seen. Not a stream, in fact, but a series of long ponds that flowed over stone weirs on and on to the big pond at the end at Thirteenth Street. In the middle was a longer pond with an island and a hump bridge, and just over the bridge, the Big Tree. The Big Tree, the Home Tree, had been home base for a million games of hide-and-seek, and it stood there in his psyche as the anchor point of his childhood. Maybe even where it had all gone wrong. If he could get back to the Big Tree, he thought, maybe he could find some way to set off again, the right way this time. He wondered idly what sort of tree it had been. He remembered gnarled and gray, branching at head height and easy to climb. He hadn’t been into botany much then, like most kids, or the scientific names of things.
    He found a parking spot behind a bunch of shiny old cars with pom-poms that were spilling out a big overdressed Latino wedding party onto the high grass, where they were posing for photographs. The park below was pretty much as he remembered—along the stream, rustic railings made of concrete molds of the same log, repeating the same knots and sawn-off stub over and over again. At the crest of the bridge he started to get a bad feeling. He stopped and stared. There was no Big Tree at the far end of the bridge, not even a stump where the Big Tree had been. About twenty feet away there was a pepper tree, but not as big as the Home Tree and split in a different way.
    For a long time he stood there trying to reconcile his memory with what he saw. They couldn’t have eradicated his tree so thoroughly. And this other one, it looked so old and so close to where the Home Tree should have been that their roots and branches would have interfered with one another had they coexisted. Could his recollection be that far wrong? He felt bewildered and disoriented, betrayed in some fundamental way.
    Suddenly he was having a little trouble getting his breath, a nasty reminder of his collapsed lung. After a while he found himself on a rock bench set into the wall beside the water, staring dully at the ground at his feet. It was as if he’d never find his way home now. He wiped away a single tear.

Three
    Soo Busted
    “Jack Fucking Liffey.”
    “Ken Fucking Steelyard.”
    They examined one another from opposite ends of the short bleachers, like two tomcats not sure there was enough food set out for both. Steelyard had filled out a lot and his hair was combed back in one of those looks that made him seem even older than he was. He wore an atrocious brown suit and a tie with a gravy stain on it.
    “So have a seat,” Steelyard said. “It was you wanted to meet in the great outdoors.”
    “I sure didn’t want to troop through a police station.”
    But Steelyard had suggested the location. The bleachers were just upchannel from the old fireboat house, and they faced an open area next to the water