30

Next morning, early, I went to my office, got out my computer, and started adding to, and of course refining, my case notes. I then looked at them, at each crisp line, from the beginning up to right now.

So how had my story progressed?

Well, Keaton Fuller was a bad guy, we all know that, it’s been confirmed by everyone in his world. And Keaton Fuller was assassinated, probably by a person who does that kind of thing, a person with some experience. And then there’s the Prestige Fish folks, who, I had now confirmed, were part of a Pendella Situation. And who almost certainly had access to someone, or had someone in their employ, who could put a bullet in a guy with a Smith & Wesson M&P pistol from seventy-five yards.

So why was I sure Prestige was a Pendella?

Because of the tequila bottles and the plastic containers. That liquid I could see inside the tequila bottles? Well, it looked like tequila, same golden color, but it wasn’t tequila. It was meth. Yes. Pure methamphetamine. Dissolved into a liquid solution, put into bottles and containers to disguise it, and carried over the Mexican border.

Okay, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was meth. In that I hadn’t taken one of the bottles to the cops and had them run a test on the liquid. But this was a smuggling technique I was familiar with, so I was ninety-nine percent sure. And that was good enough, by a long way, for me.

So where was the lab here in California where they mixed the liquid with acetone and turpentine, where they iced it, where they turned it into white, sparkly crystals ready for the street? Well, don’t know. They could be using a second Pendella business as a cover for that. An auto-repair shop somewhere. A carpet installation company. And how big was Graves’s operation? How deep did it go? How far did it reach? Not sure of that either. But I can tell you this: Just from what I saw, all those bottles and containers, their operation was into the many millions. And roles? What was everyone’s role? Graves, the Mexican man, the man with the long gray hair? My guess? The guy with the long gray hair was the one connected to the cartel in Mexico. Was the one who’d been in business here in the States a long time, knew how to run it, set up the Pendella businesses, bring in shrewd new people like Lee Graves, who could learn the operation and one day run it on his own and who, most important, was comfortable with really dangerous illegal activity if it meant making a shitload of coin. And the Mexican man? I’d say a lower-level guy who ran between Mexico and the United States and had the trust of both sides. And who, by the way, had probably killed a lot of people.

So, Keaton Fuller? Right, Keaton Fuller. Where does he fit in? Graves had said that Keaton was an investor in Prestige Fish. Maybe that was a version of the truth. Maybe Keaton had given Graves some money to buy equity in the drug operation—“all businesses need capital”—but then did something stupid and got popped. Sure. These guys, meth guys, they don’t care that somebody came from Hancock Park. They kill people all the time. They just pull out a gun and shoot you. Punch in, kill guy, punch out, go home.

And you know what? That mentality just might end up helping me.

So what next? What next?

Back to the Valley. I had a few stops to make. I closed up my laptop, closed up the slider, got in the Focus, and headed out.