Read Online Streets on Fire by John Shannon - Free Book Online Page A

she exclaimed. “And The Three Investigators. But this is best.” She pointed to the two bottom shelves. Maeve crawled over with her and plucked The Secret of the Old Clock off the shelf.
    “While I’s done sowed all mah wild oats, I still sows a little rye now and den,” Maeve read aloud.
    “Can you believe this?” It was good to find something Mary Beth actually cared about, and she figured she’d better appear more knowledgeable than she was if she wanted to use Nancy Drew as a lever.
    “In the fifties they censored out the guns and the liquor and even the coffee ,” Mary Beth said. “Look!” She flipped madly through another book to find a favorite passage.
    “Have you ever thought you might want to be Nancy Drew?” Maeve essayed cautiously.
    “I don’t think I’m brave enough, but maybe I could be her best friend Bess.”
    “Oh, really?”
    *
    Coming back in on I-10, the 10, as people in LA said, the traffic slowed maddeningly into a snarl about El Monte, and eventually a line of fizzing flares funneled everyone into the far left lane. A gigantic sparrow the size of an elephant, evidently meant as a movie prop or some kind of advertising display, had got stuck under an overpass on its flatbed truck, the top of the bird’s papier-mâché head shredding a bit against the bridge. Several men stood around arguing and tugging on ropes, trying to extricate the bird. A family had piled out of a wrecked station wagon off to the side, and several kids were screaming at one another or bawling.
    It was hotter than he ever remembered the city getting this time of year, and he had half a mind to take advantage of the stop-and-go to lean across the front seat and rip the plastic off the passenger side windows. It was only August, and the worst wasn’t usually until September.
    Maybe the thing on the flatbed was meant to be a wren, he thought, as he inched up to it. It was hard to tell. He didn’t know very many birds once he’d exhausted the obvious ones like seagulls and owls.
    As he’d left Claremont, he’d stopped at a Chevron station to call Bancroft Davis and ask him to arrange a meeting with Umoja, and he’d rung up a pal named Mike Lewis who lived in Pasadena. Mike had been home and willing to receive guests, allegedly hard at work on his next book. Mike was a social historian who’d been lionized after his first big book on LA, even got a MacArthur grant, but the next book had gone after the boosters and developers and they’d come back at him mercilessly, even yanking a university job he coveted.
    Mike’s house was a pretty little bungalow overlooking the Arroyo Seco. Across the street, a crew of workmen with a small crane were excavating what appeared to be a statue of the Virgin buried in the yard. The beat-up old Buick was gone from Mike’s drive, in its place was a workaday new Toyota Celica. Jack Liffey could see he hadn’t gone extravagant with his three hundred grand from the MacArthur, but Mike had never cared much for machines or other possessions. As if to prove the point, he was visible in the kitchen window hammering hunt-and-peck at an old upright L.C. Smith typewriter, the sleeves of some loose white gown flapping away like mad.
    “It’s me, Mike,” Jack Liffey called through the open window. “I’ll let myself in if there’s no dog.”
    Mike Lewis beckoned. There was no dog, but in the front room there was a really stunning blonde in a white Arab djellaba that matched Mike’s. She sat cross-legged in front of a portable light table that was glowing up at her.
    “Hi,” he said. “Mike waved me in.”
    “That’s okay. I’m decent.”
    Mike had slipped in under the civic radar to teach urban studies part time at an assortment of small art colleges. He’d collected quite an arty following among his students.
    “You can say that again.”
    She smiled. “I’m China Cho.” There was only the faintest suggestion of Asian features in her face. “Mike’s my