IT WAS SHOT from a cigarette boat cockpit, a grainy, handheld, amateur color 16mm film-to-video transfer that showed a distant surfer shredding the glassy green-blue near-vertical wall of a huge Northern California wave; something the Feds had found in a cache of VHS tapes when they searched the suspect’s house.
“Have you seen this?” Colter had added a big Proton television to the bookcase in her office since the last time Kirby had been in there. She aimed the remote and froze the image on the screen as a frightening wave began to curl over the pixelated smear of its interloper. A lower-screen chyron read: MAN VS. WAVE. STIX MAHREZ AT MAVERICKS, 9/6/1969. “Look at that. Was he kind of amazing or what?”
Kirby, fronting her desk with the requisition documents, gave the television a cursory look. “I need your signature to provide him with a police presence at his property after he makes bail. Whoever came after him won’t stop.”
“I thought we were asking that bail be revoked.”
“We tested the waters. The judge is unreceptive.”
“Judge Clark?”
“Yes.”
“Democrat. Figures.” Colter stared at the paused, twitching frame of Stix Mahrez, crouched on his longboard, about to duck into the glistening blue tunnel of breaking surf. “Why should the People pay to protect someone who’s so openly hostile to the pursuit of criminals and corruption?”
Kirby didn’t offer an answer. He knew more was coming.
“You need to play hardball,” she said.
“I’m sorry. What?”
“He may never be a useful witness, but Mr. Mahrez can still be a useful informant. You need to give him the proper incentives.”
Kirby shook his head. “You’re unbelievable.”
“I like to think so.” Colter smiled at him, perfect white teeth. “I can take that as a compliment?”
Kirby had to ask, “Have you ever even actually tried a case? In federal court . . . or anywhere else?”
She was unfazed. “What are you saying? I’m young? I’m inexperienced? Or are you wondering who I blew to get promoted to U.S. attorney at the age where most girls are feeling the pull of the ovaries and subscribing to Modern Bride?”
Kirby didn’t know how to respond to this.
“I don’t blow,” she said. “Or whatever. I find the thought of it repulsive.” She said this so matter-of-factly Kirby had to run it through his head again to understand what she was talking about; meanwhile, she continued, “Cut him loose, fine, but I say no to protection.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I can, yes. Unless he helps us—”
“—We’re the reason he needs protection.”
“And, P.S.”—Colter talked over him—“a little bird at the San Diego District Attorney’s Office tells me the girlfriend, with the flower name? Was a high-priced hooker. Back in the day. Pled nolo to a couple felonies, which, gosh, makes her a possible candidate for deportation as an unwanted alien, does it not?”
Kirby stared.
As if innocently, Colter mused then, “How high would Mr. Big Stix jump for her, I wonder?”
—
WHEN THE EBONY TOWN CAR purred, curling down the driveway of Stix Mahrez’s big house, trailed by a San Diego police patrol car, both gave wide berth to the Wash-Tech car detailing van from Del Rio Motors and its water trailer skewed strategically alongside Mahrez’s Porsche and Aston Martin. Detail men scurried out of the limo’s way, pulled their hoses in so they wouldn’t get crimped by the passing vehicles, and killed their power washers out of professional courtesy for the homecoming parade.
All except a sunburned, hydrant-shaped white man working on the Aston Martin’s interior, head down, oblivious, as if he didn’t hear the two cars go by. But after the limo passed and everyone else went back to work, he rocked out from the front seat and looked, his eyes like currants in the doughy face, dark, grim, unapologetic.
Mahrez got out of the limo first, moving gingerly, a searing pain resulting from any sudden shift of weight; he nevertheless reached back to help Rose. Their Guatemalan bodyguard emerged from the house, in huaraches and a festive guayabera shirt, and said, “Hola. Welcome home.”
The cops in the patrol car gave a courtesy honk and continued around the driveway’s gentle arc, no intention of stopping, heading out the other gate.
“Where are they going?” Mahrez took a few weary steps and shouted after them. “Hey. Hey!”
Mahrez watched the cops go with mixed emotions. He didn’t really want them around. But he found himself laid bare by their not staying. A big portable compressor kicked in, the Wash-Tech workers resumed power-hosing the cars, the patrol eased out into the street, no rush, but gone. The sunburned man squinted up at the fried egg of midday sun that hung in overcast, and went back to his vacuuming.
Rose signed: The police are leaving?
“Yeah.” Mahrez nodded to his bodyguard, grim. “You’re gonna have to hire some more security people, Emilio.” He linked arms with Rose and she steered him up the walk. Under his breath, disgusted, or maybe more disappointed, he muttered, “Give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.”
Rose’s hands danced: Say the rest of it.
Mahrez shook his head and signed back at her: That’s all there is anymore.
—
KIRBY FELT A QUEASY URGENCY to straighten out the Mahrez mess as soon as he could. Letting it fester would only increase the likelihood that a rot would follow, and the rot, Kirby knew, would eventually make its way back to him in some even worse form of Holy Hell. It was just him and Fish in Kirby’s cramped office, files from the rolling arrests with mug shots of each suspect clipped to the front of a folder were tiled across an already overloaded desk, wing table, guest chairs, and the floor.
“His name was in the Filofax.”
“It’s not a crime to have your boss’s phone number written down.”
“Shoeboxes filled with crack.”
“In a personal work locker. And nothing to link Mahrez to the drugs.”
“’Cept the Egyptian.”
“Who is about as toxic as Chernobyl. You want to rest your entire case on Saad Fanous, Hazel?”
Fish sighed. “Okay, so if Nick Mahrez is just an innocent bystander to this, can I just emphasize, for the record,” Fish said, “how much that would suck, big-time, because I’ve been getting serious props from my DEA brothers for my historic bust of the man nobody thought could be got.”
“I appreciated your candor. Let’s work backward through our night and see where it went sideways.”
“I was maybe even looking at a promotion.”
Kirby decided to just wait this out.
“Fine. Let’s recap.” Fish walked through it: “My happy hooker gave us the street fiends who gave us the roof jumper, Tigger. Tigger, he gave us the motel tweakers. Solid ground, yes? Said tweakers rolled over on Flavian, car salesman extraordinaire, who, again, we can totally prove was selling the bump to them.”
“Good so far. Saad?”
Kirby let Fish think about it. “Saad Fanous? Personally, I don’t even think he indulges in the monkey dust. He’s too twitchy all by his own self, he doesn’t require any chemical additives. I think Saad Fanous was telling us the truth, he just bought cocaine to impress his girlfriends at the Hot Box.”
“I agree with you,” Kirby said. “But bought it where? Not from Mahrez.”
Fish considered this. “Okay, so walk it back one.” He found and picked up the Flavian folder, referencing it, and said, “In your version, Flavian isn’t just a street dealer, he’s a wholesaler with some retail outlets?”
“Keep going.”
Fish talked it through. “Flav turned reality upside down, what a surprise: he was the one selling to Saad. Not the other way around. In your scenario, Flavian gave us a bum steer—ratted out Saad to protect his supplier. Counted on Saad to go crazy-helpful and confuse everything.”
“Which he did.”
Fish seemed unmoved. “None of this holds up in court any better than Saad’s version, the one where Stix Mahrez is at the top of his food chain.”
They both fell quiet. Fish put the paperwork down and looked for his cup of coffee, which was lost. Kirby said, “How does Flavian know Saad?”
Distracted, Fish gestured to the Fanous file. “The Egyptian leased that righteous red Vette from Flavian seven months ago . . .” Kirby knew where the coffee was, but liked to watch Fish do a slow burn, looking for it. Lifting files, pushing paper piles around, Fish found his Styrofoam cup next to the wastebasket, on the floor, under the desk, where he’d put it so it wouldn’t get tipped. “. . . he could have made the drug connection sometime after, I guess.”
“Okay. Different angle: Who’s Flavian protecting?”
“I don’t know.”
Kirby wanted Fish to catch up with what he just said out loud, but the DEA man took a sip of his coffee, made a face: bitter and cold.
“He make bail?”
“I think it was fifty grand.”
“Do we believe Flavian had fifty grand lying around?”
“I don’t think his double-wide qualifies as collateral,” Fish said, and then, having thought it all through again, saw where Kirby had led him. “Somebody put up the bond.”
“Somebody who didn’t want Flavian ratting him out.”
Fish drained his cup and started out the door. “Well, hell, let’s ask the little snitch.”
—
THE INCREDIBLE VIEW was why Mahrez had bought the land, years ago, and staked a big Bedouin tent on it, thinking, this was it, this was the shit. Back in the day Vic had razzed him mercilessly for putting down roots, common wisdom being in their line of work fungibility equated directly with survival. Vic had a sailboat that he moved every few months to a new berth in a new marina, up and down the coast, Gaviota to Chula Vista. Which is why, while Vic was in Oxnard—having three bullets put into the back of his head by a couple of hired men when Vic jack-in-the-boxed up the main hatch from belowdecks, starting to tell a dirty joke to his fiancée that he never got to finish—Stix was romancing two La Jolla High School surf bunnies with a ball of Lebanese hash and a bottle of mescal in the sultry half-light of his goat hair bayt. He’d gone off the grid and hence survived the first of the Sinaloa Cartel’s bloody territorial purges, 1981: cashed out, put some seed money into the gifted hands of the legendary Dana Point board shaper Primo Santini, and went legit.
RIP Vic. Theirs was a friendship grounded in commerce, Mahrez didn’t so much grieve him as miss the certainty of their bond and word. Not friends, partners, whose unquestioned trust in each other was, ironically because they were drug dealers, so fundamentally American, rule of law, absolute. The fiancée, a hatchet-faced anorexic who called herself Bunny because no one else would, was an early freebaser who fed Vic’s paranoia and spent all his money and probably fingered him to the cartel’s assassins. She had the body cremated and scattered Vic’s ashes in the parking lot at Zuma Beach, where she’d first set eyes on him. Took the sailboat north, intending to go to Portland, but nobody ever saw or heard from her again.
“It’s Stix Mahrez, yeah. I’ve left a couple of messages for him already . . .” Struggling to will his tension headache away, Mahrez listened impatiently to the City Hall side of his call, and watched Rose, out on the grass, playing with her new teacup poodle puppies. They danced away from her arms, barking. She was laughing, and her laugh, unleashed, guttural, raw, always made him smile.
“I understand. Just tell him—” The receptionist on the other end wouldn’t stop talking: meetings, schedule, ground-breaking ceremony in San Ysidro, yadda yadda, Mahrez finally just saying his piece over her, “—sure, sure, I understand, if you could just tell the mayor to call me back soon as he can, yeah. It’s pretty important. Nick—no, Stix—yeah, that’s right, Mahrez. Like the ballplayer, you remembered. Thank you.”
Click.
Steel-gray ocean bled to steel-gray sky.
Viscid stratus clouds hung shallow over water and shore. The Channel Islands loomed like phantasms in the far gloaming, and Coronado Bay was pimpled with the white sails. It was past noon. The bled-out sun wasn’t going to burn through this dozy haze, Mahrez thought, and then wondered how long it would take him to drive to the border.
—
TWO SLOE-EYED GIRLS in halter tops blew bubbles from the steps of a neighboring Winnebago on blocks, listening to Wham! on a boom box and watching Fish pound on the trailer door, and ring the bell, and knock again. Nothing.
“Hey, Johnny Law,” the girls sang at him.
Fish ignored them. “Flavian?” He listened for movement inside the double-wide, and heard only the faint, thrumming tone of water running in a leaky toilet.
Fish’s government ride was parked in front of the familiar, shaded, rust-streaked house trailer at the end of a cul-de-sac. The hot gray day did nothing to improve the neighborhood. Fat, salt-rusted Detroit iron was parked in nearly every carport, excepting the occasional Toyota Camry with a coat hanger where the aerial should be. A big blue dumpster reeked of spoiled meat and grass clippings.
Behind the trailer he found that a piece of flattened cardboard box had been duct-taped over the bathroom window through which Flavian had come crashing into Fish’s arms the other night. Tape intact. No escape or forced entry evident.
A fingertip pull-up on the sill got him eye-level with the back living room window. He could see an unmade sofa bed, a television atop a laminated faux-cherrywood eight-track stereo console, a pile of pornographic magazines spilt across a split leatherette recliner, and a framed, shimmering foil art print of The Last Supper, but with San Diego Chargers instead of the apostles, and Don Coryell sitting in for Jesus Christ.
Fish dropped down and moved through overgrown grass back along the trailer to the bedroom window, repeating his pull-up. There he saw the naked body facedown on the bed’s bare mattress.
Flavian.
Executed.
Hands duct-taped behind his paper-white buttocks, shot twice in the back, neat little entry wounds, bubbled and blue. Blood had spritzed the headboard and the wall and leaked all over, dry now, almost black. Flav’s clothes were balled on a plastic, stackable chair in the corner, and his Air Jordans neatly lined up below it.
Fish said, “Oh, man,” and let go of the sill.