Free Streets on Fire by John Shannon Page A

its wake. Thank heaven she’d brought jeans, Maeve thought, or the sharp seat would have defeated her. They were both dressed in torn jeans and baggy T-shirts.
    She thought again about poor Mary Beth’s parents. Staying in the Leary home, Maeve had learned that she had begun maturing in ways she hadn’t been aware of. For the first time in her life she found herself observing a couple of grown-ups more or less for what they were. Mary Beth’s parents weren’t just another mom and a dad, relatively interchangeable with all moms and dads. They were in fact jerks, a bit like some of the jerks her own age. They sat around their pool, drinking and arguing and wasting their lives, talking about nothing but shopping and TV and sneering mercilessly at the neighbors.
    “Slow down, you got the racer,” Mary Beth complained.
    “You mean Rocinante?”
    “Huh.”
    “Don Quixote’s horse.”
    “Erf, who’s that?”
    This unexpected growing up seemed to have done some-thing to her feelings for Mary Beth, too. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have liked the girl very much, if she’d just met her and they weren’t related. Mary Beth had almost no attention span and wasn’t all that bright by the standards Maeve usually used. But she did have a big welcoming heart and she laughed at Maeve’s jokes. Also, even though Mary Beth seemed a bit of a scaredy-cat at first, she always seemed to pluck up her courage and give things a go. Maeve decided that she liked her cousin despite her faults.
    “It doesn’t matter.” Anyway, Don Quixote was a man, she thought. “I’ll be Calamity Jane and you can be Annie Oakley.”
    To let Mary Beth catch her breath, Maeve slowed a bit as they approached a derelict motel called The Old 66 Wigwam with separate cabins shaped like teepees. The plaster was beginning to peel away from the framework of the teepees, and a few of the poles sticking up on top had fallen at funny angles. She would have to remember this for her dad. Two points at least.
    “What are Calamity and Annie planning to do out here?” Mary Beth asked.
    “We’re going to hunt down the enemy Indians and spy on them.”
    Maeve felt uncomfortable about using that description. She didn’t really want to make Indians the bad guys, and she knew she probably should probably call them Native Americans in any case.
    “Tribe has abandoned teepees, gone on warpath,” Maeve offered as they both gawked at the motel for the last time and pedaled on.
    “What tribe are we after?” Mary Beth asked gleefully, getting into the spirit of things.
    “A band of Apaches called The Bone Losers.”
    *
    His appointment with Umoja wasn’t until four, and he stopped off briefly at the house to change his sweat-soaked shirt. There he found a note on the fridge.
    I’m at the church this afternoon , she had written.
    The church. The definite article said a lot. She was spending more and more time at The Church of the Open Barn Door, down in the low-rent area of Hawthorne. Father Paul Something-or-other had started out preaching off the back of a truck in a used car lot in the 1960s and ended up building a big domed stadium. Jack Liffey had met a few of the Open Doorites, and done his best to like their cheerful, clean and energetic working class bearing. They were millenarians, but they made no real attempt to predict when Jesus was going to be touching down again.
    He strolled out into the back yard to offer Loco a hug and gave a groan when he saw a burrowed-out spot that it was almost finished under the wire. It was hard to keep a half-coyote down. Loco was staring sheepishly in another direction, and was ridiculously affectionate in response to a few pats, then frowned a bit as Jack Liffey piled some loose concrete blocks over the escape tunnel. Loco seemed to take it in stride, though, Jack Liffey thought.
    Back inside, he swung open the fridge and eyed a few bottles of beer off to the side that looked pretty lonely. He hadn’t had a drink in over four