The Chinese Beverly Hills by John Shannon Read Free Book Online

had it on vinyl. God, we’re getting old. I remember when Jennifer Lopez was married to Ojani Noa.”
    They both burst out laughing, and Maeve felt a wave of love for Bunny. “Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman!”
    Bunny’s eyes went to the computer screen again, but Maeve tried not to notice.
    “Time is so cruel,” Maeve said. She was sinking into a kind of forever coziness with the so-comfortable Bunny, projecting it far into the future.
    “Maeve, I don’t know how to say this and stay mellow. I got work and you can be a real pest sometimes.”
    A jolt of electricity went up and down Maeve’s whole body. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before. “Oh, damn—I’m sorry.”
    “I just don’t need you hanging out in my room all the time. I like you a lot, but I got other things in life.”
    “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m gone.” Maeve jumped up.
    Bunny looked regretful, but she didn’t say anything to take it back.
    “I won’t bug you any more, I promise.” Maeve hurried across the house, past a startled Axel drinking beer alone in the kitchen, and back to her outlying studio in the old garage. She bolted the door and threw herself facedown on her single mattress and wept.
    *
    Jack Liffey got home with two full grocery bags and plans to prepare something nice to eat, his major goal for the day. He had a whole notebook full of observations about the Chinese girl’s bedroom, but the notes—Catholic missal, too-cute dolls, Girl Scout stuff, modest clothing, a few Chinese knick-knacks, a big stack of pamphlets from a group called the Orange Berets—had pretty much been blown away by the alarm bells at the end.
    He’d been patting the underside of her desk drawers, a pointless exercise that never yielded anything useful except in old noir films. This time the devil blinked. A small aqua blue baggie had been taped there with Mylar, and beside it a hand-drawn map that appeared to be a walking trail across the border east of San Diego. There was a scrawl of Spanish on it: esto es la chica Chuey . This is the girl, Jesus. He’d tapped a smidgeon of the powder onto his gum, grimaced, and then tucked the baggie into an old copy of Finnegan’s Wake . A book God himself would never pick up. He’d pocketed the map.
    “Glor, I’m home! I’ve got the makings for drunkard’s pasta.”
    There was no reply. He sighed, set the bags on the cracked yellow and green tile of the kitchen counter and headed up the staircase. It might help, he thought, to drive up to Bakersfield and shoot a few people in the head, especially her lover Sonny Theroux. Nah, it wouldn’t help; but it would make him feel better.
    She was face down on the bed, but he didn’t think she was asleep. If only she would go see some pro to work on her psyche, but she insisted that would be the end of her career at the LAPD. Already she was on long leave and might never climb back onto the hamster wheel for promotion.
    “Gloria, it’s me. Your sunbeam.”
    Eventually she rolled over. “Very funny. You ain’t no sunbeam, but you know what you are?”
    “No.” He felt a chill. No joking, Jack.
    “Second sweetest man that ever liked me.”
    He could see that she was drunk, very drunk. At least it told him she could get up and down the stairs by herself now. He wanted to check in with her about the missing girl, get her advice, but it wasn’t the time.
    “You wanna fuck me near to death, cowboy?”
    “The doctor said no exertions for another week.”
    “You think too much about doctors. Think about me. I’ll just lie here and you do the exertions, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.”
    He missed Gloria’s body a lot, but he wasn’t stupid enough to meddle with her drunk.
    “You want my asshole, Jackie? My mouth? It’s all free, all one hundred percent Gloria. Okay, except this tit. That’s about ninety percent Good Year. And this toenail…”She was staring at her toe, frowning, trying to recapture a train of thought.
    “I could make the