The Concrete River Read Online Free Page B

Mexican-Americans who don't like the newer undocumented, too. It's an attitude that's changing, but it's there. You know, last one on the ark shut the door.”
    “Was the campaign bitter?”
    “When isn't a threat to someone's power? It didn't seem to get personalized, because there was no one spokesperson for the Neighborhooders.”
    He unfolded the note Senora Schuler had given him and showed it to her. Call Liffey. Threats. Slow growth.
    “Is that her handwriting?”
    She turned the yellow post-it over a few times, walked quickly to the desk she'd identified as Consuela Beltran's and picked up a pad of yellow post-its. They were the same size but of course that didn't prove anything.
    “Can I see it?” he asked.
    She brought it back and set the blank pad in front of him. He took a pencil out of a marmalade jar on her desk, whittled it down with his Swiss Army knife until he could break out a half inch of lead and then ran the flat of the lead lightly over the pad. The faint impression might have been the same as the note, but that didn't prove much either.
    “You really are a detective.”
    “I saw it in Dick Tracy.”
    “It doesn't make any sense. The election's been over almost a year, and `threats' just isn't their style. Did she call you?”
    “Not that I know of, but my machine's been known to go out.”
    “It's very strange.”
    The banging outside changed pitch. They seemed to have started in on the car with a bigger hammer. A timer went off deep in the house.
    “I've got to go downtown to our soup kitchen now, my turn to serve, but give me a ring this afternoon.”
    “Do you mind if I ask you why you dropped out?”
    “Dropped out?”
    “Secularized? However it's put.”
    “I'm not sure we know each other well enough.”
    “That could be arranged.”
    She laughed. “I was pregnant by a priest. He stayed a priest, the jerk, got himself transferred to Albuquerque. There's a place they send nuns, but I wasn't having any. Call me later about the desk.”
    “My pleasure.”
    Outside the humidity hit him. L.A. was so rarely humid that it was always a shock. The two car-wreckers seemed to be reducing the sheet metal of the Ford to breadboard-sized pieces. He noticed that Slauson crossed the L.A. River just down a long block and he walked that way out of curiosity, wondering if it was filled with styrofoam cups, too. He passed a fairly new mini-mall with Mi Playa Tortas y Mariscos, a Fotografia and the inevitable donut shop. Further on was a nurses' and bus drivers' uniform supply and a dead movie house, with a lobby card for Coal Miner's Daughter . All the buildings had indecipherable graffiti in that angular city scrawl.
    The water ran high and fast between concrete banks, foaming on the bridge supports. It was about three times wider than Ballona Creek. There were no cups, no flotsam at all, perhaps it had been scoured into the bay already. Bright floats on ropes dangled from the bridge, to grab onto if you fell in. Every year like clockwork during high water a few people lost their footing and were chased downstream from bridge to bridge by firetrucks and TV crews. Some managed to grab ropes they were thrown and some drowned.
    The sound of the water was a little too fast to be soothing, but he still liked watching the racing dark surface. He wondered why people always found solace in moving water. You could just as easily see a cosmic indifference, a process of wear and erosion that would go on without you and go on until everything on earth was worn away.
    A flotilla of schoolkids came toward him across the bridge, all loud bantering and fists against shoulders. Two or three danced at the periphery with a mean edge. Something had happened since his day. It was as if the country had gone through a toxic hormone spill and even the six-year-olds had to train up to spear lions. This group was black, brown and white in almost equal numbers, all wearing some flash of green, a bandanna or a shirt. He'd