The Orange Curtain Read Free Page B

the computer wizards getting their straight-As at Berkeley.
    “See this watch, real Rolex, not knockoff. I know where to get it at good price. Phuong show me last year. What you want to know?”
    “My name’s Jack Liffey,” he said, and he sat back down. “Phuong has been gone for a week. Do you know where she might be?”
    “She work for Frankie the Man. Big Chinaman from Saigon, Frankie Fen, big bossman, he build malls. You ask him.”
    “What’s your name?” he asked the boy.
    “Loc.”
    “Where would I find these people?”
    Loc offered him a ramen pack, and he took it and turned it over in his hands. It was shrimp flavored all right. He decided to give it a try.
    “He got office on Bolsa, next to Asian Garden. Some people like Frankie, some hate.”
    “Do you like him?”
    “You can’t never trust Chinese. They learn to cheat when they baby. Sell you old stuff no good. Plenty crap, and tricky, too.”
    Racism everywhere, Jack Liffey thought sadly. But it was no time to be insisting on moral lessons. He tore off the wrap and bit a corner of the hard block of noodles. It was remarkably like eating a plastic toy. He pretended to like it.
    “I like your haircut. It looks great,” Jack Liffey said.
    When he looked up, he saw they were in no mood for compliments; their eyes were elsewhere. A lowered and blacked out Honda Prelude was coming up the street slowly and it was worrying the boys. The windows, the chrome, even the wheels, were blackened, so the car looked like a little rolling nugget of death.
    “Where could I get a haircut like that?”
    He felt the movement before he saw anything. Loc was up and fleeing down an alley as fast as he could run. The others were going in three different directions. Then he heard the horrible nearby rat-a-tat of automatic weapons fire. His head snapped around in time to see the Prelude drift past, one window rolled down and a boy in a black balaclava holding a little Ingram spray gun skyward, his grin a disembodied Cheshire cat in the darkness within the car. He pointed the gun at Jack Liffey.
    “Bang-bang-bang!” the Cheshire grin shrieked, and then the car accelerated away and Jack Liffey was alone on Golden West Street, a profound chill spreading up his back. He hadn’t even budged. He’d never been close enough to the war, stuck at his radar screens in his air-conditioned trailer off in the forests of Thailand, to get the right instincts.
    “Incoming,” he said softly to himself.
    Billy Gudger parked his 1962 Beetle right under the big red neon hand. He liked the 1962 because it was the last one with the 1200 engine. It wasn’t that it was any more durable—all air-cooled engines were designed to wear out through heat erosion and be rebuilt often, a kind of grudged tribute to entropy—but the 1200 was still the cheapest to rebuild. Sonya Gudger , it said inside the neon hand. Palmistry, Bibliomancy, Tarot. Genuine Rom wisdom. Se habla Espagnol.
    There was an old Buick in front so he went in the back door and sure enough, the heavy curtain was across the foyer and she had a sucker in there. He hesitated by the curtain to listen.
    “…Right here on the mount of Venus, see that grid of lines. It means you’ve walled off your heart and caged it up because you aren’t sure you can trust someone in a close relationship.” There was a gasp and a little hiss of emotion. “Here, too, you can see how your little finger ends before the top joint of the next finger. That means you’re not comfortable sharing your emotions. But you’re very lucky. See this cross, right under the Jupiter finger. It means you’ll definitely find a happy marriage in this lifetime.”
    “When I going to find him? Goddam tired all the wait and all the shmucks.”
    “I can’t say exactly, but let’s look at your lifeline again. It’s an indication of the force of your enthusiasm for life.” She dropped into her don’t-trust-quacks speech and Billy withdrew and went on into the