Free The Orange Curtain by John Shannon

He wasn’t in the greatest shape. The county spread away under them, going bluer and fainter in the haze beyond the air base. Fancy high rises were visible along the 405 and in a few scattered islands.
    “So what’s at issue now?” Jack Liffey asked.
    “You’re looking at it. Airport again. Back in the ’80s, when expanding John Wayne Airport was the agenda, the county begged the Marines to give up the air base there. It was surrounded by miles of open land then and would have been a perfect regional airport. The Marines said Never-Never, Absolutely Never, so the county rebuilt John Wayne, but it only had room for one runway and it’s already pushing its traffic limits.
    “Then the ’90s and irony struck. El Toro became a small part of the peace dividend, scheduled to close soon. Most of the big boys perked up and want this to become a regional airport, but look at all the homes that have crowded up to it in the last decade. It’s the John Wayne airport fight all over again. Though, this time, the smaller businessmen who live near John Wayne would love to see El Toro become the main airport so they could cut back on theirs. There’s the knights in black, galloping down the fields with their lances stuck out in front. But who’s in those suits?” He grinned. “It’s so much fun to watch.”
    “Not as much fun if you’ve got a house down there.”
    “ I’ve got a house down there. I’m rooting against the airport, but that doesn’t mean I think of it as a moral issue. People just follow their interests. Even Marx said capitalism had a historical mission to raise the productive capacity of society.”
    “That’s an edifying thought,” Jack Liffey said. “Did he say anything about when the productive capacity would get high enough so they stop trying to eat us for lunch?”
    “Not that I recall.”
    “Is this airport feud bad enough to get people hurt or kidnapped?”
    Marty Spence made a series of faces as he ran a hand along the grooves in the dog’s neck, like the folds in an outsize spacesuit.
    “You hesitate,” Jack Liffey observed.
    “When billions of dollars are involved, who can say?”

SIX
A Squabble of Seagulls
    His old car rumbled along between the forbidding eight-foot concrete block walls that were so characteristic of the county and made the road seem an autoroute into Cold War East Berlin. Perhaps they were to keep foreign spies out of the ranch homes inside there, he thought. He understood the aversion to having your front yard on a six-lane through-road, but the architects should have looked for another solution. Every housing tract for miles was imprisoned in its own game preserve, with only the roofs and a few trees peeking out at him as he passed.
    On the other hand, in some moods, he found driving along these grim and eventless Orange County streets restful compared to the level of oddity he had grown used to in L.A. No one popped out of an alcove to wave a tomahawk or tapdance in a pink tutu. The Orange Curtain had pretty well penned the bizarre and the random back into the big city. He found an opening in the walls beside a sign that said Seahorse Riviera that led him into the greener pastures.
    It was only because the remote on his answering machine had decided to start working again, as it did just often enough to keep him checking, that he’d got Minh Trac’s urgent message to come back to his home. There were no details because the machine had cut the man off after about fifteen seconds as it was prone to do with people with soft voices, and when he’d called Minh Trac’s number, he’d gotten an out-of-service buzz.
    For some reason Minh Trac was sitting on a lawn chair in his driveway. Beside him was a young man on another lawn chair. The younger man had neatly pressed slacks and a bright knit shirt, and Jack Liffey remembered Mike Lewis once describing a busload of Asian tourists as dressing like escapees from a golf magazine.
    Minh Trac nodded recognition as he