The Cracked Earth by John Shannon Page B

movie.”
    “I was in it. I didn’t make it.” The second SHARP was fat and looked even more like a biker. The other three at the table wore plain dress shirts buttoned up to the neck and looked a bit sheepish.
    “They made it.”
    “Congratulations to them, too.” He brought his eyes back to the first SHARP. Dogs were said to go into attack mode if you stared at them long enough, but if you could back them down you had them in your pocket forever.
    “I’m happy you found a way to be civil in an uncivil world.”
    “You mean cause we like blacks? Man, they ain’t nothing civil in it. They’re cool dudes, that’s all. I grew up south of Slauson.”
    Jack Liffey didn’t break eye contact. “My name’s Jack Liffey. I find missing children.”
    He fished out the photo and set it on their table.
    “What would Nietzsche say about that?” one of the filmmakers asked.
    “He’d say life is a lot of bullshit with people trying to take people off,” the first SHARP said. He finally allowed himself to look away from Jack Liffey long enough to glance at the photograph. He showed no recognition.
    The music came on all of a sudden, right in the middle of some techno-dance number, like a door opening on a busy factory.
    One of the filmmakers leaned in to look at the photograph.
    “It’s Lee,” Jack Liffey heard, and he lost interest in the SHARPs.
    “You know her?” The filmmaker looked about eighteen and nervous, just barely able to grow the blond mustache.
    “Sure. She was a real pest. She and her pal have been working on a documentary on our local Nazis. We crossed paths some.”
    “Tell me about her pal.”
    “Looked a bit like a Samoan, huge as a house, but I think he was white. He ran the camera and she was producing. They wanted some comments from Christopher and Samuel.” He meant the SHARPs, and he used the first names gingerly, as if he just might not have permission.
    “When did you last see them?”
    “I don’t know. Greg?”
    “Three weeks? A month? What’s that weird smell?”
    “Man, don’t you know grass?”
    “That’s not dope,” the thin SHARP said.
    “It’s patchouli oil,” Jack Liffey said. “Somebody around here’s wearing it.”
    “You musta been a hippie, guy.”
    “All of us were hippies back then. How would I find Lee or her big friend?”
    “Don’t remember his name. He never talked. You could try her school. I think she goes to that ritzy school in Hancock Park.”
    “No good. What else?”
    He shrugged. “Follow the subject. She was going down to get something on that cocksucker in San Diego County, you know, the guy with the shortwave radio show that the militias all listen to.”
    One of the SHARPs cackled. “Heh-heh-heh, you said ‘cocksucker.’ ”
    “Shut up, Beavis.”
    There was a commotion across the room. The boy who’d had his foot up his girlfriend’s skirt was standing up, holding a nude foldout picture of her over his head, showing it off to the room, and the woman in question was snatching angrily at it.
    “Another country heard from,” one of the filmmakers said.
    He talked to them for a while more, but they didn’t know anything else.
    “Good night, gents. Keep up the good fight.”
    “Fuck the good fight,” SHARP number one said.
    “As Nietzsche would say,” one of the filmmakers added.
    Jack Liffey smiled. “Nietzsche said that everything ordinary is habit, and everything extreme is vanity.”
    He let them chew on that as he walked away in a solemn processional step.

8
    NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS
    H E HAD ANOTHER COFFEE AT THE E IGHTH A RT , F RENCH ROAST and good and strong, and he chewed over his situation for a while, all the oddball things that had been plopping down on his plate and how crowded the plate was getting. There was a missing willful girlchild, a movie star whose image in his head gave him the willies so thoroughly his mind shied away, a summons to see the girl’s father, who was shooting an action movie two hundred