The Catalina Cabal

by Bill Thesken

  Someone shouted, “No Corbin!” Then he reached across the table, grabbed at his opponents neck and punched him in the face with a solid right cross. You could hear the crack of the fist against cheek bone clear across the room.

  The poor guy was overmatched and went straight over backwards onto the ground, still sitting in his chair. Corbin leapt around the table, pouncing on top of the guy’s chest and landed a few more straight punches until a wall of men pulled him off and held him back, two men on each arm and two on his neck. He was frothing at the mouth and speaking in tongues like a beast released from a cage. It was everything the six men could do to hold him back.

  The band stopped warming up and the people in the crowd stood on their feet, craning over each other to see what the commotion was all about on the edge of the party. Some of the men hustled Corbin out of the area and towards the stairway leading down to the entrance and the small parking lot. The others in their group put the chairs back in place and helped the beaten man to his feet and sat him back in his chair.

  He had a reddish purple swollen cheek and blood at the corner of his mouth. He pushed his helpers away and held a napkin to his face, humiliated.

  The father of the bride climbed up on stage in front of the microphone and tapped on it with his finger to see if it was live. He was a short burly man with a handlebar moustache and a large glass full of beer in his right hand.

  “Alright everyone, looks like Corbin had a little too much jungle juice.”

  The crowd laughed uneasily at the little joke, and the father raised his glass in a toast. “Let’s give another round of applause for the bride and groom and get ready for the first dance.”

  The crowd applauded mightily and whooped and whistled. They turned their attention to watch as the bride and groom made their way to the dance floor, the crowd parting like the Egyptian Red Sea.

  I decided to follow Corbin and his handlers out to the parking lot to make sure he actually left the premises. I wanted to make sure he didn’t decide to grab a gun and come back to shoot the place up, and potentially have a stray bullet hit one of us, or Gale, who was talking with a group of people near the stage. When someone gets that heated up you have to make absolutely certain they weren’t going to cause any more trouble.

  Unless it was a well-planned diversion, I thought. Anything was possible.

  Trying to get the protection to move away from the protected. I considered that scenario for a moment and then put it aside. The guy that got punched in the face looked thoroughly shaken, and you couldn’t fake the rage in Corbin’s face while he was attacking the guy.

  Not to me anyways.

  I took a quick inventory of the pummeled guy, his condition both physical and mental. He might also be one to have a gun and decide to pull it out and start firing away in heated revenge after getting beaten and humiliated. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened, but he looked harmless and utterly defeated, and so I kept walking.

  I moved through the tables and along the tree line to get a view of the makeshift parking lot on the street. Somehow they’d managed to fit quite a few vehicles into a small space. There were dozens of cars lined up neatly, mixed in with twice as many golf carts, which was the preferred method, and for many the only form of transportation available on the island.

  Two men were talking with Corbin as he leaned his back against a small shiny black truck with a bright yellow paddle board strapped to the racks on top. He had his arms folded across his chest and was nodding as one of the men talked to him. It was the man who gave a toast earlier in the evening, a sergeant with the Avalon police department.

  From their body language the deputy was giving ‘ol Corbin a steady and thorough dressing down. Corbin however didn’t look too worried, his face was stoic, with a red and shiny alcohol flush. He alternated nodding and shaking his head as his preferred method of communication. His lips did not move. After one last nod of his head and a shrug of his shoulders, he opened the driver’s side door of the truck, started the engine, backed out of his space, and drove slowly down the hill.

  I took three things from seeing this.

  First, Corbin was a hothead, and he was also big and strong as an ox, which made for a dangerous combination if you ever got on the wrong side of him as we all just witnessed.

  Second, he had a car on Catalina so he must have lived on the island for a long time. There are less than six hundred cars allowed on the island. To get one, you have to put your name on a list, and the wait time for a permit is somewhere around fifteen years. Someone has to die or move away for you to move up the list.

  Third, a police sergeant just let a guy who’d been drinking, was obviously drunk, and who had brutally assaulted someone with a chair and his fists, just climb right in that car of his and drive away.

  Corbin was connected.

  I went back to the party to check on Gale. She was saying her goodbyes to the wedding party, kissing each of them on the cheek, and waving to everyone else as she moved gracefully towards the exit. She’d planned it this way: she would sing and entertain for an hour and when the dance band was ready to play she would leave the party.

  “It’s better that way,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll get in the way, and I’m not supposed to be the center of attention, the bride and groom are.”

  We bundled into two taxis at the entrance and headed down the hill to the hotel where Gale could change into comfortable travelling clothes, and then off to the heliport.

  The chartered helicopter was a twin engine S-76 Sikorsky, the interior was all lit up. The pilot and co-pilot were in the cockpit looking at their clip-boards and going through their pre-flight routine.

  Tony and Kali got on board, sitting in the two back seats, followed by Rhonda and Garrett.

  The four of us lingered at the stairs. Gale reached out and hugged Amber, and I shook Cody’s hand.

  It was more of a military de-briefing than a goodbye as I turned to Gale. “So, you look good. I talked to Tony about your self-defense training and it sounds like you’re doing the right things. Just remember, the best self-defense in the world is staying alert, keeping your eyes open, and steering clear of danger well before it gets anywhere close to you.” I nodded at Cody. “Keep your feet firm on the deck and your eyes on the bow, right?”

  “You got that right captain.”

  Gale’s face turned serious. “You know Badger, last year when I was kidnapped and strapped into the chair on the second floor of that filthy tattoo shop with a gun pointed at my head, the world was very small at that moment. It’s like every bit of time and space in the entire universe, everything that had ever been and ever would be was squeezed into the space the size of the little black hole at the end of the barrel of that gun. I was going to die right then and there. I expected a bullet to fire out of it any moment, and it’s like time was standing still in a long and horrible everlasting moment. And then I saw you come through the door, in the corner of my eyes I could see you, and it was like an angel was sent from heaven to save me.”

  Tears filled her eyes at the memory and she reached out and grabbed me, hugged me tight, and lightly sobbed.

  Amber and Cody looked on uneasily, and then she wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt and patted me on the shoulder.

  “I love you for that.” Then the moment passed and she laughed nervously as she noticed everyone looking at her. “I’m sorry everyone, I just got a little emotional.” She clarified her statement, pointing at Cody. “I’m in love with you mister, and I know that Amber is in love with you, Badger and you’re in love with her, but I do love you for saving me, and I always will.” She threw her hair back in defiance. “And I’m not ashamed to say it.”

  Amber reached out and gave her a hug.

  “This always happens after weddings,” said Cody. “The girls get all sensitive.”

  Gale playfully punched him on the arm.

  “Actually,” she said. “It’s not really a love type o
f feeling, it’s something more and I can’t really explain it or put it in the right kind of words. It’s something beyond love if that makes sense. I tell you it’s almost religious.”

  “The way I look at it,” I said. “We got lucky pure and simple, getting out of there alive. Call it divine providence or whatever you want, we lucked out, we know it, and that’s the basis of being humble.”

  Gale hugged me one more time and headed up the stairs. “We’ll see you again soon,” she said.

  “Stay safe.” I pointed at Cody as they climbed the steps into the helicopter, he nodded and pointed back to me, his face somber.

  Since I was in the protection business, I studied theories about protectors and the protected and victims and rescuers until I was cross-eyed, and from what I’d digested from volumes of work on the subject, it was impossible to put a label on any one situation. But they all had a common thread and one thing was certain, we were connected for the rest of time, like siblings, or parents and their children. We were family.

  Amber and I walked back to the taxi as the helicopter’s engines revved and it lifted into the air, washing us with a gust of wind and dust, then turned its nose to the East, and flew off into the black sky.

  2.

  We spent the night on the boat and woke to the sound of flocks of seagulls crying out to the sunrise as they flew overhead, searching for food.

  We stretched, made coffee and breakfast, and sat on the deck to watch the morning glow in the east and the last of the stars fade away over the island in the west.

  It looked like it was going to be a nice day.

  Amber didn’t have be back to work at the hospital until tomorrow night so we decided to take a slow and leisurely sail around the island before heading back to Dana Point early the next morning.

  We left Avalon harbor at seven in the morning with the sun rising over the ocean to the east. We went northwest along the coast with a fifteen knot west wind on our port side.

  The island of Catalina is twenty-two miles long and eight miles wide at its widest point. I figured the fifty-mile sail would take around eight hours and we could spend the night back at Avalon before heading back across the channel to the California time zone the next morning.

  Everything was slower here on the island and I kind of liked the pace. I didn’t want to leave too soon.

  At nine-thirty in the morning we passed about half a mile outside of Two Harbors. Here, the island pinched together until it was only about seven hundred and fifty yards across with a small harbor on each side. We passed the eastern side of the harbor, which held around twenty five boats of various sizes. It looked like there were enough empty mooring buoys for another fifteen vessels. I made a mental note to bring the Sugar here for a night or two sometime in the near future.

  At ten-thirty we rounded the tip of Arrow point, tacked into the wind and then headed along the north side of the island just outside the jumbled rocks of Strawberry Cove.

  At eleven we found the body floating in the ocean.

  You see a lot of things floating in the water these days. Trash from ships, trash from shore, plastic bottles and cans. Chairs, pallets, baggies, nets, you name it. But you don’t usually see a body floating.

  I saw the object far off on our starboard side, every now and then bobbing to the top of the crest of a wave and then disappearing into the trough.

  It was orange, and bright, and bigger than most things you see on the water so I pinched into the wind to get closer to it and have a look. When it went by the starboard hull we could see it was a woman in a life vest.

  It had to be a woman. She was wearing a white wetsuit, had long dark black hair, and was face down in the water. Lifeless.

  “Oh my God,” Amber muttered and brought her hand to her mouth.

  I pulled the boat straight into the wind, hit the winches, lowered the sails, started the engine, and motored back to where she was floating. I toggled the forward and back thruster until we were right alongside her, then tried to figure out how to get her on board.

  Now, getting someone who is alive, willing and able to help you get them up and over the gunwale and onto a yacht that’s sitting high off the water line is one thing. Getting a body that is heavy and filled with water is another thing altogether.

  She was dead, there was no doubt whatsoever about that. I could call the Coast Guard and wait for them to get a boat out here to do the recovery, but I wanted to get the body out of the water before a shark came around. I quickly scanned the horizon, there was not a single other boat in sight as far as I could see.

  “Where in the heck did she come from?” I wondered out loud. I worried that her boat probably sank, and there more bodies out there floating around.

  Every boat on the water has a deck hook on board to grab things that are out of reach, like mooring balls and ropes and docks, and other boats to bring them close. It’s a long extendable pole with a non-sharp big and round hook on the end. I unlashed it from the side of the deck, reached down and hooked her right under the shoulder pad of the life vest. Some good it had done her.

  She might have weighed around ninety to a hundred pounds on dry land, but out here, with her lungs and belly filled with heavy sea water she weighed close to two hundred.

  I braced my feet on the swaying deck, gently lifted her out of the water, and slid her backside onto the deck of the boat.

  Now Amber, a nurse, sees a lot of gruesome things in the hospital: gunshot wounds, stabbings, burn cases, broken bones, but even she was shocked and turned her face away for a moment before she could look again.

  Water streamed out of the woman’s mouth and nose. The skin on her face was thick and pasty white with grey splotches, puffy and swollen from being in the water for who knows how long. At least a day, maybe longer.

  There were little bite marks all over her exposed face and neck and hands, from some sort of sea creatures, small fish or eels feeding on her corpse as it floated on the surface. Chunks of white flesh hanging by threads.

  “She looks Chinese,” I said. “Hard to say how old she was but I’m guessing she was probably in her late twenties.” It was terrible to see. “We’ll call the Coast Guard and get under way back to Avalon. I’ll cover her with a blanket, lash her to the deck, and we’ll motor back.”

  Amber made a funny sound and ran to the back of the boat. She threw up over the side.

  I went down to the cabin, and got a couple of blankets and some bungee cords from the storage, and got back on deck.

  I did some quick calculations and decided to wrap her in the blankets to keep her intact and then secure her with as many bungees as it took.

  As I was tucking the first blanket under her I noticed the corner of a large zip locked baggie sticking out from under the life vest. It was wedged in pretty well so I pulled gently at the corner until it came out, and laid it on her chest.

  There were only three items in the bag and I opened it to get a closer look. There was a California driver’s license, a blue Social Security card, and a two inch thick stack of money. Tens, twenties and hundreds, mostly hundreds though, and as I flipped through the stack I figured there must be around eight or ten thousand dollars all wrapped in a thick rubber band.

  I looked carefully at the driver’s license. It said Mei Young Lee, 2575 Bay Shore Avenue, Long Beach, California.

  Talk about a small world. I know the street. It’s in Belmont Shores, a tightly packed oceanside community next to the Alamitos Bay Marina in Long Beach. The street is right next to the water on the marina. I’ve parked the Spice there at the harbor, and walked along that very street to the beach.

  To the west and a couple of hundred yards off the beach sit four man-made islands where they still pump oil from a reserve under the ocean. You can see the Queen Mary permanently berthed across the bay on the south side of the Port of Los Angeles, one of the busiest ports in the world, where all the container ships from Asia unload their cargo. I have a friend who works on the docks unloading
the ships, seven days a week, day after grinding day.

  She was a local girl. An Angelino.

  “So what are you doing in the water with ten thousand cash in a bag?” I asked Mei Young Lee, but she did not respond. I resealed and gently stuffed the bag back under the life vest where I found it, and covered her with the blanket.

  Amber came forward and helped me bungee tie the body to the deck and then went back to the shade of the wheel house and hid her face in her hands.

  “You never get used to it,” she said as I joined her, fired up the engine, and set a course back around the top of the island.

  “What’s that?”

  “Seeing someone in that condition.”

  “But you’re a nurse.”

  “My patients normally continue to live, and leave the hospital still breathing. But every once in a while…” And her voice trailed off. “I’m telling you straight, that you never get used to it.” And she stared off into the horizon.

  I turned the radio frequency to the Coast Guard channel sixteen. “Mayday, mayday, mayday,” I repeated in succession, and when I got a response from their dispatch, I gave our vessel’s name, our position and the nature of the emergency, although it wasn’t really an emergency any more. For Mei Young Lee, that time had passed.

  When we rounded the north corner of the island we could see the Coast Guard cutter barreling full speed towards us, quickly closing the gap within a few minutes. When they were just about on top of us, I idled our boat and they circled around and pulled up alongside to assess the situation.

  I can see now how they closed the gap so fast. Their boat is one of the new response boats, all lightweight aluminum construction, forty-five feet in length, twin diesel engines with waterjet propulsion and able to get up to forty-three knots, which is nearly fifty miles per hour on the water.