I think it should be hard to get a gun. Really hard. Much harder than it is. Because too many people get their hands on them who shouldn’t. It’s that simple. In my business, I have to use a gun sometimes, there’s no getting around it. But the truth is, I don’t own just one. I own two. When I’ve got one physically on me, which is pretty often, it’s usually my Colt Delta Elite. A powerful ten-millimeter gun that holds eight rounds. I wear it on my hip in a holster, usually under a jacket or shirt. Or sometimes I pin it on my back with my belt. I also have a Sig Sauer P229, which is a powerful gun as well, but it’s smaller, easier to conceal, despite the fact that it actually holds ten rounds. I wear my Sig less often, and almost always totally out of view, in a holster on my ankle.
For some reason, my meeting with Graves prompted in me the desire to practice my shooting. There was something about him. He was . . . serious, maybe even threatening. And being in close proximity to that made me want to get active, to actively pursue getting better at one of the parts of my job. I’ve practiced a lot over the years, and I’m a good shot with both guns. But like most things, shit, anything you’re trying to do well, you have to keep the sword sharp, you have to do that thing that Sydney Scott hated to do at photography school. You have to practice.
Right then, I had both guns with me in a black canvas carry bag that also houses a few other things I often need. I drove to Northridge, an area of the Valley not too far away from Thousand Oaks. Northridge is a neighborhood closer in personality to the one where I grew up, and closer to what most people associate with the Valley. Look, we’re not talking as depressing as where Craig Helton works. No. Not that bad. Northridge is okay. Fine. Bit less upscale than where Graves brokers deals for clarion angelfish and Neptune groupers. Fewer beautiful oak trees. More not-so-beautiful strip malls.
There’s an indoor shooting range in Northridge that I’ve been to a lot over the years, that I like, the Firing Line. I’m pretty sure it was the first indoor shooting range in L.A.
I got there, got a spot for the Focus, went in, bought some ammo, and got another spot, this time for me and my carry bag, in a firing booth twenty-five yards away from a target that looked like the silhouette of the top half of a man.
I fired twenty-four rounds out of my Colt, changed the paper target, and fired twenty rounds out of my Sig.
Afterward, I looked at both targets in the booth. My chest shots and my head shots, out of both the Colt and the Sig, were solid. But not great. I’d improved as I’d continued to fire, but even still, I was a little rusty. Definitely a little rusty. But that’s okay. Because I’d be back here at the Firing Line before it mattered. I hoped.
I headed back to my office. Embarrassingly, I hit some pretty bad traffic, but I eventually made it to Culver City, to my space. I opened up the slider and went and sat at my desk.
I put my feet up, laced my hands behind my head, watched a distant UPS truck make a delivery to one of the warehouses across the lot.
Cold. Yes, the case I was on was cold. And now I’d brought another piece, a new piece, into the puzzle, even though I had no clue whether that piece would fit. Why? Because that’s what I had to do. I had to shake some bushes to see if anything crawled, or swam, out.
So what next? What next?
Dave Treadway. Keaton and Greer’s friend who Craig Helton had mentioned. The one he’d said “wasn’t a prick.” The one who helped him see the light about Keaton Fuller’s character. Treadway was mentioned in the case file along with a few other friends, people who weren’t as close to Keaton. Harrier and Martinez had talked to him anyway, shaking bushes just like me. And Treadway, like Greer and Craig Helton and Sydney Scott, had spoken openly about not particularly loving Keaton. And like the rest of them, he had a tight alibi. Talk to him anyway, I told myself. Go to La Jolla, where he lives, that charming coastal town that sits right on top of San Diego, and talk to him anyway.
La Jolla. Hmm. So I was going to go to the greater San Diego area. I realized that this would give me the opportunity to talk to someone else I needed to talk to who lives down there. Someone who might be able to shed some light on my new puzzle piece, Prestige Fish. His name is Marlon Pucci. He’s an ex–New Jersey and New York City mob guy who now lives on a sailboat in a marina in Oceanside, California, a great little seaside town north of San Diego and La Jolla.
When he quit the crime business and moved to Oceanside, Marlon had never been to California, had no boating experience, knew nothing about sailing or the sea, literally didn’t have a single clue about how to buy a boat, sail a boat, or care for a boat. Much less live on one. He simply had a romantic notion about living on a sailboat in a California marina. So he did it and never looked back. And you know what? He and his wife, Fran, who also had zero prior boating knowledge, are happy as fucking clams. Sitting on their deck in the evenings, going to parties and get-togethers on other people’s boats, drinking in the sun, and, of course, just drinking, period. And never, I mean never, actually sailing their boat. It doesn’t move.
Where did he get this romantic notion? What planted the seed? Well, a murder. Way back when, Marlon whacked a guy and dumped his body in the Atlantic. His mobster buddies nicknamed him Marlon the Marlin. They were razzing him, ribbing him, about his seafaring adventure, but Marlon liked the name. It stuck. What’s more, it placed in him—this Jersey born wiseguy—the desire to own the nickname thoroughly and to one day be a full-on boat-living man. Which now he is. And loving every minute of it. And, by the way, getting the last laugh.
I worked a case for Marlon and his wife a few years back. After I found his wife’s son, who’d been missing, and everything had essentially worked out, Marlon told me to call on him if I ever thought he could help me. Turns out the old mobster knows a whole lot about a whole lot from his past experiences. And to this day, he still has his ear to the ground. I take him up on his offer not infrequently.
I thought, Well, at least these two puzzle pieces fit together. I could take one trip to San Diego and talk to two people. And, wait, Marlon the Marlin? The fish theme of my story was continuing. Was that a third puzzle piece locking in? A sign saying that talking to my old mobster friend was a necessary element to me getting to the bottom of this quagmire?
Perhaps. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence. That’s always the question, right? Is something a coincidence or is it meant to be? Because when coincidences happen, you can say: Yeah, makes sense, feels right, there’s a certain magic to this, it should be happening. Or you can say: Well, nothing like this has happened in a while, and there have been a zillion moments of late that haven’t contained any special magic, so this supposedly special thing isn’t really special at all. It’s only happening randomly, simply because random stuff happens every so often.
Right now, I’m going with the former. Because it’s all I got. You see what I’m saying?
It was too late to hit the 405 South and head toward San Diego. We’re talking stifling, kill-yourself traffic. You know that by now. So I went home, then went to my backyard and took an evening swim in my pool. I’d put a deep rectangular pool in my backyard four years after buying the house. I’d painted the bottom of it a deep, dark blue. In the late evening, when the sun is just about gone, it makes the water in the pool look purple.
It was that time now, the sky just starting to really darken as I dove into the cool, purple water. I closed my eyes and put my hands out and glided the full length of the pool, until my hands softly hit the wall of the shallow end. I came up for air, then turned around, went back down, kicked off the end wall, and shot toward the deep end. This time I kept my eyes open and looked around my liquid purple surroundings like I was a Neptune grouper or a clarion angelfish or a Persian-catlike platinum arowana.
Next morning I called Marlon the Marlin from my house, told him I was going to head down his way, asked him if he had some time to talk.
“For you, Johnny, my boy, I do.”
We settled on 3 p.m.
“Hey,” he said. “Can you pick me up a bottle of rum? Fran’s back East visiting some sick relative, so I can’t send her to get it, and I don’t feel like going onshore.”
Onshore. By that he meant stepping off his boat onto the dock.
“Absolutely. What kind—”
Before I finished my question he said, “Mount Gay. Half gallon.”
“You will see me and a half gallon of Mount Gay at 3 p.m.”
“I’m counting the minutes,” he said as he clicked off.