Devil's Harbor (16 page)

Finn calculated. Four or five days meant that he would've gone in Friday or Saturday of the week before last. He made a mental note to see if he could find out where the
Pacific Belle
had been on the sixteenth or seventeenth.

Then, in a concerned tone, Geisinger said, “There's been talk about you, Finn.”

“What kind of talk?”

“Ugly fucking stuff. This morning, these two guys from CBP Internal Affairs came in. They said they were investigating Perez. But their attitude was all wrong.”

“Wrong how?” asked Finn.

“They asked to see Diego's autopsy, not just Perez's. They made remarks about how Diego was wearing his sidearm but hadn't taken it out of his holster. They talked about how it was likely he knew and trusted his killer. Wanted me to say so, too. They wanted to know if the slug was from a Heckler & Koch P2000, the ones you guys are issued with. Then they started speculating on whether you'd had a beef with him. Right there in the cold room, in front of my team. In front of the fucking body, for Chrissakes.”

Finn stared at his reflection in the gift-shop window. “What'd you tell them?”

“I said I was just the fucking medical examiner and they should go ask the ballistics guys. Fucking amateurs. They won't get anything from them anyway. I pulled out a slug, it was a total mess. It was lodged in his heart. He was shot in the fucking back, so the bullet bounced off his spine and got all messed up. Doesn't look like anything. They'll never identify the weapon, not unless they find a casing.”

Benitez hadn't mentioned finding any casings at the San Pedro dock.

“You find anything that could tell you where he was shot? I mean geographically?” Finn asked.

Geisinger shook his head. “All I found in his stomach was beer and nuts. I thought the cops had the crime scene down at the fishermen's dock in San Pedro?”

“They do,” said Finn. “I'm just … I'm just looking to see if they missed something.”

“The water washed away most anything that might've been helpful on the outside,” said Geisinger. “I'm guessing that's why the fucker who killed him put him in there. He must've hit the water reasonably hard, too. The impact knocked everything off him. He ruptured his spleen against the steering wheel, though he was already dead by then. There was tattooing around the entrance wound in his head, telling me they shot him at close range, but not enough to tell me with what, or where.”

Finn rubbed his chin, then said, “I need to see him, Eugene. And the floater, too.”

Geisinger gave him a long look. “Okay, let's go,” he said, but not in a way that indicated he thought it was a good idea.

Finn followed the medical examiner through the swinging doors and down a pale green corridor to the cold room. He zipped up his jacket.

*   *   *

In the anteroom, Finn put on a lightweight gown over his clothes and slipped on a pair of latex gloves. Then Geisinger offered him some VapoRub. Finn scooped some out and rubbed it below his nostrils, clearing them instantly. The M.E., he noticed, didn't bother with either the gown or the VapoRub. Like a fishmonger, he'd gotten used to the smell of his trade.

Inside the examination room, orchestral music was playing from a couple of wall-mounted speakers. Espendoza was laid out uncovered on a metal autopsy table. Sea bugs had gotten into him, accelerating autolysis; Finn could tell by the blue color of Espendoza's face. He averted his eyes from the stumps and stared at that face. Despite its dead-man color, it seemed more natural to him now, or at least how Finn imagined Espendoza might've looked when he was alive. His youth was apparent now; he looked barely old enough to have a driver's license, just the faintest hint of hair on his lip. Finn had hoped that seeing Espendoza's body would help him work out what had happened to him, would reveal some connection that he had been blind to. He kept staring, waiting for it to come to him. He took in the gaudy tattoo of the Virgin on Espendoza's chest; he looked at the small cross in blue ink on his neck that Geisinger had mentioned.

Nothing.

He turned his attention to the other table. A body lay under the cover.

“That him?” he said.

Geisinger nodded. Finn walked over and stood next to it.

Geisinger just looked at Finn. After a minute, he said, “You sure?”

Finn nodded.

Geisinger rolled back the sheet. Diego's face was without color, or at least without one Finn could describe. His eyes were closed. A ragged, red-black wound the size of a dime marked the place where the round had entered on the right side of Diego's forehead. Finn breathed slowly and deliberately. He stood as still as possible and listened carefully, as though he were expecting Diego to say something, tell him who had killed him, where to find that person, what to do. But he didn't hear anything but the hum of the refrigerators.

He felt a hand on his elbow.

“Time to go, Finn,” said Geisinger.

Finn nodded. They left the cold room and headed down the corridor.

“I thought I had something here,” said Finn.

“Bodies play tricks on people,” the medical examiner said. “Sometimes it's better just to let them be.”

Finn thought that was funny, coming from him.

He walked out of the building and unzipped his jacket. He liked Geisinger, but he was glad to be outside. He stood at the top of the steps for a moment, letting the rays warm his skin, hoping they would seep the chill out of him. But the image of Diego's colorless face, the ragged wound ripped in his forehead, was burned into his mind's eye. The urge for a drink came on strong.

“Fuck,” he said.

The receptionist was standing next to a potted plant on the other side of the steps, smoking a cigarette, one arm across her waist, her hand supporting her elbow. She glanced in Finn's direction.

“You grieving, hon?” she said.

He nodded.

“Uh-huh. Who'd you lose?” she said.

Everybody,
thought Finn. “A friend.”

She nodded matter-of-factly. “What happened, he get shot?”

“Three times.”

“Yeah, that'll do it. You some kind of cop?” she said, looking at his uniform.

“Customs and Border Protection,” he said.

“Uh-huh. I heard of that. You want my advice?”

He shrugged. “Sure,” he said.

“Right now you need to be with the people you love and who love you. You're not bringing your friend back, standing there with all those bad ideas I can see in your eyes. Let the Lord be the judge. You got a wife or girlfriend?”

“A wife,” he said, his voice cracking a little.

She crushed her cigarette into the side of the pot.

“Go spend time with her. That's the best place you can be right now,” she said before heading back inside. Finn dialed Mona's cell. The call went straight to voice mail. He left a message, telling her what he'd learned from the coroner. He asked her to check with La Abuelita whether the Caballeros had moved north.

After hanging up, Finn stood there for a moment, listening to the cars passing on the nearby Golden State Freeway, the sound like waves breaking on a shore.

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Finn slept for a couple of hours, then arrived back at the dock just as the sun was setting. He pulled up near the water, far enough from the
Pacific Belle
not to draw attention to himself. He got out the pair of binoculars he kept in the Tacoma for when he was doing surveillance on boat ramps, and trained them on the seiner. As he had expected, there was nobody aboard. He put away the binoculars, sat back, and waited for the sun to set. The smell and sight of the fishing boats was so familiar to him. Finn took a swig of Jim Beam and thought about his father.

When Finn was ten years old, his father had lost his right leg below the knee and four fingers on his right hand to a drum-winch cable on a purse seiner. After the accident, he couldn't fish anymore, and he had taken up drinking full-time, mostly at Bonito's. This was in the old days, before Cutts had taken over. Then he had started a second career piloting boatloads of Mexican pot up the coast. He'd known the waters, and he'd known how the coast guard and CBP patrolled them. He'd been a good smuggler, but he'd been a drunk, which meant he'd gotten careless, which meant he'd gotten caught.

“Takes a fierce storm, son,” he'd said to Finn in the car driving back from the penitentiary when he came out on parole after a four-year stint, “for a man to realize the world don't care if he lives or dies.”

After his parents split, Nick lived with his mother, but he had a key to his father's fleabag apartment in Harbor City and stayed there sometimes. One day not long after his sixteenth birthday, he'd walked in to find his father with a black-red hole under his chin, and bits of his skull splattered over the top of the tan leather recliner. His fake leg lay on the ground next to the recliner. To this day, what remained most vivid in Finn's memory was the gun in his father's good hand and the finger of honey-colored liquid in the bottle of Maker's Mark on the floor beside the recliner. He remembered wanting to drink it and to go where his father had gone.

He took a swig of his memory medicine. These were images he'd spent a lifetime trying to forget. He knew he had to keep going, keep doing what he had to do, keep moving toward the faint light ahead, no matter what. He told himself,
Forget about the past.
What he had to do now was find Diego's killer, get sober, and get Mona back. He looked at the bottle in his hand. Somehow, the first objective seemed more attainable than the second. He thought about what Diego had said out on patrol that morning, how he'd been shook up by the dead-eyed way Finn had killed Perez. And Mona, always telling him how he wasn't in a war zone, always wanting him to go talk to someone, like he needed to be guided back into the fold of the human race.

He took another swig. The truth was, he
hadn't
felt anything when he'd killed Perez except the rush of adrenaline. The feelings had come later, when he was back onshore. He'd started having unnerving dreams.

While he thought about all this, the last of the day faded from the sky. Finn looked out through the windshield at the almost full moon over the water in the bay, and at all the lights of the container terminal beyond.

He tried to imagine Diego's last moments on this earth. Had he been looking at this same moonlight reflection on the water? What thoughts had been his last? Had he pictured Ronald and Nancy bolting across the park?

Finn grabbed his Maglite from the glove compartment and a blue CBP shell jacket from the backseat, the words
CBP FEDERAL AGENT
printed in large gold letters on the back. Then he stepped out of the cab and went to the back of the truck. He unlocked the steel toolbox in the load tray and pulled out his personal weapon, a Glock 17. From a separate drawer he pulled out a clip, which he slid into his weapon. A cool breeze was blowing in from the sea. Finn zipped up the shell jacket, stuffed the Glock into the deep pocket, and walked down the quay to the boat.

No one was around. Feeling more sober than he deserved to, Finn walked up the gangway and onto the steel deck of the
Pacific Belle
. His father had first shown him his way around a fishing boat, so he knew that the small skiff tied fast to the starboard rail was used to draw the net around schooling fish. He walked under the boom with the power block at the end of it, used to hoist the net. The boom was leaning at a thirty-degree angle off the mast and was only slightly shorter than it was. There was the cable drum, and there, the cover to the fish hold. There was everything Finn expected to see on a fishing boat, except for one crucial thing: there was no net. He glanced at the dock, where fishermen sometimes laid out their nets to repair, but there was nothing next to the
Belle
.

Finn climbed up to the wheelhouse and found the door locked. The door to the below-deck cabin, however, wasn't. Finn shone his flashlight over a diner-style table and bench seats, the vinyl covering of which was patched with gaffer tape in a color that didn't match. There was an ashtray on the table with butts in it. He opened a cupboard and found canned and boxed food. In the galley area there were a couple of burners mounted on gimbals, a fire blanket above them, and a fire extinguisher clipped into the corner. Finn opened a locker and found a box full of thick rubber gloves, the kind fishermen use to handle catch, as well as rubber aprons and neoprene-lined rubber boots. Someone had shoved an old rod and reel into a corner of the locker.

He went through to the next cabin forward, which was close and airless and hardly bigger than the dual cab of his truck. Four uncomfortable-looking bunks were crammed into it, each with a stained, thin mattress and a dirty-looking pillow without a case. There were only two small portholes and both were clamped shut. Finn started to feel nauseous—a little bourbon-flavored vomit found its way back up into his mouth; he quickly made his way out into the fresh air.

Back on deck, Finn thought he heard something from the direction of the quay. He had switched off his flashlight when he came up from below, so it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they had, he scanned the quay. He saw a creature, either a small cat or a large rat, scuttle between two bollards. He turned his attention to the fish hold. The hinges squeaked when he raised the cover. He peered in, but of course without turning on the flashlight he couldn't see a thing.

Finn gingerly made his way down the steel ladder, pulling the hatch shut behind him. It was pitch-black inside. The hold smelled of fish and of something else, too. Something a bit like spoiled milk. His feet landed on something soft, like a mattress. He switched on his flashlight. Its narrow white beam revealed refrigeration pipes snaking around the hold's fiberglass lining. He looked down and saw that he was standing on a neat pile of fishing net. He bent down and touched it. It was completely dry—it had been out of the water for so long that dry rot had set in. Which accounted for the sour smell, thought Finn.