Streets on Fire Read Online Free Page A

case?”
    “Lemme think. Nazis on Harleys. A white girlfriend from Simi Valley. A dad who thinks he invented civil rights. A mom who likes Joseph Stalin. And Claremont, a place with nothing but uptight white people locked down in Victorian houses. A salt-and-pepper couple gone missing, two months stale. Cops who aren’t gonna like a guy looks like me showing up in Wonderbread City asking questions. Would you like some more reasons? Trust me, it’s not going anywhere. It’s easy money, if that old dude will pay up, but I don’t need the bread right now, not for marking time and upping my blood pressure. And I sure don’t need the aggravation of putting my face around in Claremont .”
    “So, you’re pretty sure it’s hopeless, even for Mr. Wonderbread?”
    “You right, and you know you right.” He made that series of faces again. Maybe it was his way of changing his mind. “You might find out something out there in Snow Whiteville I couldn’t. I been wrong before—once.”
    “Thanks for the referral.”
    “You done the same for me a couple times.”
    “And happy to. By the way, you know what’s going down over to the east a bit from here? I saw the cops had a lot of barricades up on Vernon.”
    Ivan Monk stared at him as if he’d just asked how to spell his own name. “I wondered what you were doing over here today. You didn’t read the paper this morning, I bet.”
    “Uh-uh.”
    “A couple not-so-bright cops roughed up Ab-Ib yesterday. Some folks took it in they mind to get a little payback and burn out the police substation on Vernon. It’s just a little bitty storefront and will not be mourned, but I have it on good repute that a couple other places burned yesterday, too, and it’s summer heat so a lot of bangers got nothing better to do these days but get busy.”
    “Ab-Ib some kind of sports star?”
    Ivan Monk didn’t deign to answer. He knew Jack Liffey didn’t take to sports much, but there were things you just knew if you lived in a town.
    “I think I’d better start on the Claremont end of things.”
    “That would be smart. Take care of bidness far far away from the land of the bad boys.”
    “This isn’t going to turn into another ’92, is it?”
    Ivan Monk shrugged. “Who can say? I doubt it. But I’m thinking of getting out the plywood say BLACK OWNED .”
    “Uh-oh.”
    *
    Lieutenant Calderón had agreed to meet him at the police impound yard up on Foothill, but Jack Liffey was an hour early and he settled for driving around the shady streets of Claremont to look the town over. He had been out here on a Sunday drive once in the 1960s to visit some ill-defined relative of his father’s, but the downtown was unrecognizable now. What he remembered as a couple of coffee shops, a little variety store named Bob’s or something like that, and a family supermarket was now a couple dozen square blocks of pasta bistros, jazz clubs, coffee bars, and chichi boutiques.
    How had the world come to this? There were no more people in Claremont now, or in the six little colleges that clustered there. There must just be a lot more money about, he decided. He remembered finding an old Life Magazine from the 1950s under his dresser a few years back and thumbing through it idly to see glossy display ads for a can of peas, a ballpoint pen and DEMAND CONCRETE HIGHWAYS—THEY LAST . We weren’t really a consumer society yet, he had concluded, startled by the commonplace nature of what was being offered. This deep need for all material goodies must have sneaked up on the country while he was busy over in Vietnam.
    The first campus he ran into, Pomona College, was just a block east of the village shops. It was a daydream of a social class that was utterly beyond his ken, all Corinthian pillars, ivy, long arcades and big green quads. Five more private colleges inhabited the north and east sides of the town, sharing a big library and other facilities in the middle. The Oxford of California they liked to