The Catalina Cabal

by Bill Thesken

  He held out his hand. “I’m Jack Wilson.”

  “Joe Smith,” I lied. “I live in San Diego.” Normally I would come up with a better alias than that, but it was the best I could come up with on short notice, I was still a bit startled at finding out that Mei Young Lee never lived here, or so this guy said. I was a natural born skeptic and decided I’d better look into this from another angle.

  “Well, I better go a couple of blocks over and see if I can find her house. It’s not a big deal if I don’t, I’m just here on a whim. Thanks for your help.”

  I got on the bike and pushed the starter button and revved the engine a few times, gave him a crisp military salute and headed down the street towards the ocean.

  More questions than answers.

  Why were you in the water with ten thousand in cash and a fake I.D. Mei Young Lee?

  Maybe I was sticking my nose where it didn’t belong and I should forget about the whole thing and just walk away. Walk away and get back to protecting people that were still alive. Just walk away, Badger, I told myself for the third time, but I knew I was talking to a brick wall. I didn’t walk away from things like this. It was a character flaw.

  I hoped I didn’t live to regret this, but had to get to the bottom of it.

  I figured that maybe in a way I was protecting a dead girl.

  At the corner of Bayshore and Pacific Coast Highway I took a left turn and headed south for a couple of hundred yards, pulled into an open parking space in front a large moving van, walked to the back of it, and looked around the corner. I got out my scope and aimed it at the guy’s garage.

  He was talking on the phone and gesturing with his free hand as he barked into the mouthpiece. He was calm and laughing when he was talking with me, but now he looked agitated, and angry. He looked towards the direction I’d taken with the chopper, but I was sure he couldn’t see me.

  The hackles on the back of my neck stood on end again.

  4.

  Eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning in the middle of summer is usually a nice, quiet time in the city of Avalon. Most of the weekend crowd had left early in the morning for the trip back home, and the rest would be gone before mid-afternoon. Locals would have a week of normal life with the island population at a manageable five thousand. By Friday afternoon though, things would change dramatically.

  Next week was a four day holiday weekend.

  The mainland ferries, private boats, and planes would deliver to its placid shores revelers in droves. Thousands of weekend vacationers, drinkers, and partiers came, and the streets would fill to capacity like Mardi Gras. The clubs and bars would be a place of music and laughing and singing through the night, along with the occasional fight here and there in relation to, and equivalent to, the amount of booze poured. The population of Avalon would swell from five thousand to fifteen to twenty thousand in the matter of hours on Friday afternoon into the night.

  Deputy Police Chief Don Baker sat at his desk in his paneled, air-conditioned office, sorted through paperwork, and settled his mind before the onslaught. The Station Commander was on the mainland at a seminar in San Diego for a week, learning how to be a better Commander, leaving Don in charge.

  Either way, it didn’t really matter to Don since he was basically in charge all the time anyways. Being the Station Commander on Avalon was, in a way, a cherry pie position, a political appointment. Most of the guys who were assigned to the job had been on the force for a long time and were on their way out the door to retirement. This was the last stop.

  Don stopped thinking about the Commander and got back to work. Thousands of people were heading to the island for the upcoming holiday weekend. He double-checked the schedule to make sure he had the manpower necessary to keep the peace in case it turned into a war zone.

  Two Harbors would be a problem since it was so far away. There was only one officer on duty until Saturday night and if he had to respond to a fight at one of the bars or moored boats, and needed help, it took an hour to drive the twenty miles on the winding road with backup.

  He double-checked the schedule again. Lenny was their guy on duty throughout the weekend and he was pretty much on top of it. Lenny was a tough guy and he could handle himself in a fight, but he was also smart, and that was a key to being a good cop when you were on your own. You had to be smart and fast on your feet and find ways to head off problems before they became one in the first place.

  The phone rang and he looked at the screen for the caller ID. It said ‘Null’ so the person on the other side had it blocked. He picked it up.

  “Deputy Baker.”

  “We have a problem.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Someone came looking for the Chinese girl. Said he knew her, she was an old friend, and that she gave him the address and told him to look her up sometime. Came riding up in a chopper, a real tough looking guy, square jaw, broken nose, looks ex-military, pretty sure he’s packing a gun. Said he lives in San Diego.”

  “Son of a bitch,” said Don.

  “Yeah. Now you know why we put my neighbor’s address on the ID’s. If there’s ever a problem I’m going to find out about it before it gets out of control. Not knowing is worse than knowing, right?”

  “Who is this guy? Did you get his name?”

  “Said his name was Joe Smith, can you believe it? A real lame attempt at an alias if I ever heard one. I know the bastard’s lying. I got the license plate off the chopper though.”

  “Let me have it,” said Don and he pulled up the California vehicle license database on his computer screen.

  “17V8541,” said the voice on the other end and the chief punched it in.

  It took two seconds for the search to pull it up and there it was on the screen in black and white.

  “Badger Thompson,” said Don. “And the guy’s address is a boat slip in the Dana Point Harbor. Slip number 345. Hold on.” He pulled up another website, the state harbor database, punched in a code to gain access then scrolled down a list and clicked onto the Dana Point Harbor link. He scrolled down towards the bottom, and there it was, slip 345, registered to a Badger Thompson, for a forty-five foot sailboat named the ‘Sugar’. And then it all clicked, he’d forgotten about the recovery report.

  “He’s the guy,” said Don.

  “What do you mean ‘he’s the guy’?,” asked the agitated voice on the other end.

  “I thought I recognized the name, he was on the Coast Guard recovery report. He’s the boater who found the girl in the water yesterday. The captain of the Sugar. They’re the ones who brought her into Two Harbors and transferred her to the Coast Guard ship. He must have searched her body and found the package she was carrying with the driver’s license.”

  “I don’t like this one bit.”

  “What do you want me to do?” asked Don.

  “Nothing,” said the voice. “You take care of Catalina, I’ll take care of the mainland. Just keep things running smooth over there.”

  “When’s our next shipment?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe next week, maybe the week after that. I’ll let you know when they tell me.”

  “Look Jack, I know we’ve talked about this before. I’m thinking this might be my last run to the lane, this is getting a little too hairy.”

  There was silence on the other side for a moment and Don wondered if they were still connected.

  “Are you still there?”

  “I’m still here. Look, we’ll talk about that when the time comes. For now just plan on being ready, and don’t let us down. We’ll figure something out. I’ll be over there tonight with our payment for the last shipment. We’ll meet at the club, as usual.”

  The phone on the other end clicked and Don sat there looking out the window. After a while he remembered to breathe again.

  They were walking on a tightrope with this smuggling business. There were a lot of eyes on Catalina: the Coast Guard, FBI, and Homeland Security. Avalon was a jewel in the eyes o
f the state and no-one wanted anything to smudge it with dirt.

  Five years without a hiccup until now.

  Everything is running smooth until it isn’t, and in a business like this, one little glitch could get you killed or thrown in jail for a long time. And in his case it’d be better to be dead, he knew what happened to cops in prison.

  He had enough money in the bank to last for a long time if they were careful and didn’t go on a hog wild spending spree, and with his side business, the bar in town, he was starting to make a little bit of cash on the side. He didn’t need this smuggling business.

  But he did need money, and a lot of it. For his wife Amanda. Or she might get bored and move on to greener pastures. She seemed moody and a little bit aloof to his romantic advances lately. A couple of weeks ago he sat her down and tried to reason with her, tried to get her to reign in her outrageous spending habits. Now he was getting the cold fish treatment in return.

  He felt a dull pain in the middle of his stomach. He reached into the desk and pulled out a large plastic bottle and popped a large white tablet onto his tongue to calm down the burning sensation of the acid indigestion eating him alive from the inside out. All he needed was more pressure added to his already full plate.

  “What the hell have I gotten myself into,” he muttered.

  5.

  I rode over to the L.A. County Office of the Assessor on East Willow Street by the 405 freeway.

  The clerk at the window was helpful. For two bucks a shot I could get a printout of the public data owner records for any property in the county. I had two in mind. 2575 Bayshore, and the neighbor that came out to talk to me, 2579 Bayshore.

  You can find out anything about any property in the city. Who owns it, their mailing address, what they paid for it, what the assessed value is, the property taxes, any liens or mortgages on it, square footage, usage permitted. The only thing the public data sheet doesn’t show is who actually resides in the home.

  Sure enough the printout for 2575 showed that it was owned by Philip Anderson and his wife Kate. They bought it ten years ago, so the guy was telling the truth as far as that went anyways.

  His house though, was owned by a corporation. Cobblestone Enterprises, LLC, with a PO Box in Long Beach for mail delivery.

  I thanked the clerk, folded the papers into my back pocket and took off on the bike again. When I got back home and had access to a computer I’d look up Cobblestone Enterprises find out who owned it, who was a partner, employees, the works, and look at the Andersons, who were they, occupations, family ties, police and medical records. I could find out anything about anyone with my database platform as long as I had a name and an address. You had to in my line of work.

  When you provide security for people like I did, it was always best to check up on them first.

  For now though, now since I was all the way up here near the Port of Los Angeles I thought I should take a starboard tack on the bike and visit my old buddy Mack. He was probably on a shift down at the docks. He was always either on a shift or heading off of one. Four on and four off, he called them. Four hours of grinding dangerous work, and four hours off and you get paid for the whole eight hours. Go home, take a shower, get some sleep and then back to the union hall to pick up another shift. Two sixteen hour paid shifts per day, every day.

  I texted him and he texted right back. He was heading off a shift and would meet me at the coffee shop near the south entrance to the docks.

  I hadn’t seen him for a year, but he hadn’t changed one bit. When I walked into the busy restaurant, there he was at an inside table. It looked like he’d just devoured a plate of food and had a full cup of steaming coffee on the side. He mopped up the last of the potatoes and gravy with a corner of a bun, and saw me coming through the door, and waved me over.

  “Badger, how you been?” He put me in a bear hug. His arms were like the thick end of a baseball bat with clubs on the end. Strong as an ox from working on the docks for twenty years. Half-Irish, half-Spanish he had black curly hair and freckles splayed over his nose and a twinkle in his blue eyes.

  “Thought I’d take a ride on the bike,” I said. “Get some fresh air. What’s new on the docks?”

  There was always something going on and I liked to hear the stories. The only problem was, once you got Mack going with ‘what’s going on the docks’, you might never get him to stop. He’d been a big drinker in the past, got in trouble, almost lost everything, but that was in the past. He hadn’t had a drink in years and was a cold sober worker now. From an alcoholic to a workaholic.

  “See that guy over there?” And he pointed to a sharp dressed black guy heading to his car, a bright red Ferrari parked in the lot. “That’s Chuck, cool guy, one of the regular bosses. He works every overtime shift he can get, been on the docks for over forty years, probably pulls in five hundred grand a year.”

  He took a sip of his coffee. “Let me buy you lunch.”

  “Naw I’m good.”

  “You sure?”

  “Just coffee.”

  And he waved at the waitress who was buried in order-taking a couple of tables down, pointed at the coffee in his hand and then at me and winked at her, and she winked back.

  “That’s how we do it on the docks, Badger. When we’re down in the hold of the ship and we give the crane driver a signal and he’s about five hundred feet up in the air, he damn well better be able to tell what we’re trying to convey to him. Some of those containers weigh over a hundred thousand pounds and you don’t want to get your signals mixed up and get crushed, you know what I mean.”

  “How’s the port these days, busy?”

  “You kidding me? It’s non-stop. I just got off a four-hour shift and I’m heading back on in four hours for the night shift. I gotta go back to the union hall and pick up my job slip, I might get elevated to boss. We’re disembarking a ship from Taiwan, it’s got two thousand containers and we’ll be done by tomorrow night sometime and then it’ll head up to San Francisco and Seattle before going back to Singapore for another load. You see, they bring their product here and dump it, and we send them our product back as trade using the same vessel. Have to keep the ships busy one way and the other, don’t want to waste fuel, you know. Only problem is the load from our side that goes back over to China is usually less than half what we got coming here. It’s a trade imbalance and we see it first-hand here on the docks. But at least we’re busy, you know what I’m saying Badger? We’re not the guys making the rules, we’re just the workers.”

  “How’s security these days? How do they know what’s in all those containers?”

  “I’ll tell you, homeland security is all over the place. You see when the ship gets close to the shore, they send out a tug boat and board the ship, check out the log, and secure the bridge, hook up the tugs and bring it ashore to the dock. This whole place is on lock down, no one gets in or out without clearance. Then when we start bringing the containers off, every single one of them goes through a scanner. If they see something wrong they take it to a secure area, bust the lock and search the whole thing from top to bottom. They don’t mess around, I’m telling you.”

  He took a sip of coffee and kept going. Man this guy could talk.

  “Last week, get this Badger, they found something when they were doing a scan, they pulled the container over to the side and put it in their secure area, it’s all fenced with barbed wire and armed guards, and they left it for the night. Sometime before dawn, a bunch of guys with guns showed up with a truck, broke into the area, held up the guards, tied them up and drove off with the container. They never found it.”

  “What was in it?” I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It could have been full of weapons, drugs, we never found out, and they never told us. They run their show and we run ours. Just another day on the docks, you know what I mean? So what have you been up to Badge, how’s the protection racket going?”

  I told him about finding the girl off the coast of Ca
talina yesterday, the money and I.D. in the bag. The fake address.

  He listened thoughtfully as I told him the whole sordid story from finding her in the water and turning her over to the Coast Guard, to visiting the house listed on her driver’s license and finding out that she didn’t live there and never had.

  When I finished he shrugged his shoulders. “You say she looked Chinese?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Smugglers,” he said simply.

  “Really?”

  “That’s my guess. And I’ll tell you what, it’s not even a guess, I would bet a week’s wages on it, and that’s a lot of money where I work. Somebody was smuggling a bunch of Chinese in a boat and she fell overboard, simple as that. Or, maybe the whole boat capsized or sank and there’s a lot more of them out there.”

  “That’s what I was worried about,” I said. “That there was more out there.”

  “But you only found one right?”

  “So far.”

  “A hundred percent chance that it was a smuggling operation, and fifty-fifty that she fell overboard.”

  “Smugglers?”

  “It’s happening all the time Badger. Not too long ago we unloaded a giant ship from China, we had a container on the docks and when they scanned it they didn’t find anything wrong, but later that night security came across a dozen Chinese guys trying to get out through the fence. Trying to get out, understand? Turns out they were living in one of the cargo containers when it was shipped from China and it had some trap doors built in so they could escape when the time was right. They rounded them up and took them to a detention center where they probably claimed asylum and are running a restaurant now somewhere in the city.”

  I thought about my buddy running his restaurant down in La Brea. “A Chinese guy saved me one time,” I said.

  Mack shrugged. “Hey, they’re good workers don’t get me wrong. Just knock on the front door for crying out loud and ask permission to come in, don’t break in through the back and sneak in, you know what I’m saying?”