Catalina Eddy

by Daniel Pyne

  Fish nodded for the local cop to kick it the fuck in.

  “Police! Open up!”

  Jamb splintering, Task Force agents bum-rushed past the owner of the offending foot, which was still stuck in the hollow-core door—a posse led by Fish (son of a kindergarten teacher and a Marine helicopter pilot, first in his academy class, top marksman, unmarried, but hopeful)—the baker’s dozen freebasers inside late-reacting after the predictable cognitive delay, rousing, processing, freaking, yelling, flailing, rubber limbs refusing the screams of ruined neurons urging them get out go get out get out get out—

  —too late.

  Fish strode through like Patton. “Kiss carpet, tweakers! Down down down!”

  They did, down, meek, defeated.

  Fish loved his job.

  —

  FECUND.

  “I’m curious, do you always have a target in mind? Or is it sometimes more of a speculative venture?” Colter pushed her Fawn Hall hair back with both hands, and her breasts, under the soft thin acrylic sweater, lifted and separated, Kirby thought, just like bra ads promised.

  “Fecund” was the word for which Kirby, the past half hour, had been searching, heedless of his sorry past. A resumption of two-finger console keyboard typing, letters pixel-stitching across the CRT display: “methamphetamine” . . . “felony possession” . . . The familiar haiku.

  “Always,” Kirby answered her when he was done with the on-screen report. “Always a target, yeah. De rigueur for the blanket warrants. Leader of the pack. The head honcho. Tonight I’m calling him Crack King. Mucho Ding Dong.”

  “I detect heavy irony.”

  Kirby shrugged.

  “You don’t have faith in the president’s War on Drugs?” she asked.

  “Faith doesn’t factor into it. Where we are . . . geographically . . . or let me put it this way: It’s not insignificant that we live on the border.” Kirby waited to see how this would settle with her. “Arbitrary lines of division. Us and them, here and there.” He knew he was overexplaining, wanted to stop talking then, but he couldn’t. “Nothing is ever as clear here as it should be.”

  “Here? In this country?”

  “Right here. Physically.”

  “I’m always very clear on things,” the young woman said. “You might say goal-oriented. I think it’s important to know what you want, and not waver in your convictions.”

  Knock yourself out with that, Kirby thought. “Sounds right” was what Kirby said. “You’re ready for the fog, is what you’re saying.”

  “Fog?”

  “Every day,” Kirby said.

  “But then the sun comes through.”

  “Yeah,” Kirby said. “That bastard sun.”

  —

  FISH HAD his half a dozen crackheads neatly arranged in the Perro Rojo breezeway, cuffed and sitting, heads bowed, backs against the wall, when Kirby and Colter arrived.

  “Tonight,” Kirby was telling her as they came through a shabby patio with the requisite empty pool filled with dry-rotted plywood and broken drywall, “we want the name of the man who’s moving all this second-rate Mexican rock this side of the border. La Alianza de Sangre, the Sinaloa blood alliance, has lost its grip on Tijuana. Somebody’s muscled the market. There’s been rumors of an American. A mythical gringo they call la fantasma. DEA thinks it’s bullshit, that it’s a midlevel cartel scumbag named Juan Blanco making his move. Either way, on that side, it’s not our problem. But on this side we’re looking at almost forty percent more product on the street since last August. So.”

  He stopped and considered the bedraggled arrestees. Colter yawned, covering her mouth with a graceful, manicured hand, while the DEA man, Fish, finally took note and looked her carefully up and down and she pretended not to care.

  “Hello. My name is Gil Kirby, I’ll be your federal prosecutor tonight.” Kirby’s wit eluded his captive crowd. “Listen up. You’re just sardines. Okay? Or maybe, smaller. Krill. Put you on a cracker, you’re not even a full bite, so here’s a onetime offer . . . give me the big tuna, and we throw you back. ’Kay?”

  They stared at him in confusion. Kirby glanced at the DEA agent to see if he was brooding over all the fish metaphors: He was. Then, deliberate, as if to children, he elaborated, “We want the name of your supplier . . .” and waited for a moment, “. . . Anyone . . . ?”

  One freebaser’s veiny arm shot up like a first grader: oh oh oh oh I know—me, me, me, me, pick me—

  —

  THE HALF-NAKED, rail-thin hustler on whom the ratter at the Perro Rojo rolled—Flavian E. Bolero, AKA Danny Bolero, AKA Skinny B., AKA Dr. F. E. Bolo, AKA the Hedgehog—had dived out of the Oceanside double-wide trailer’s louvered window in a shower of safety glass, and right into the open arms of agent Hazel Fish, who’d anticipated this alternate means of egress when the Task Force uniforms rang at Flavian’s front door.

  Dawn bladed the misty coastal hills, with their stumps of manzanita and bleak promise of future subdivisions. Flavian, chest scraped raw, blackened eye and runny nose, shaking and twitching as he fell off the peak of some potent cocktail of uppers and downers, was presently shackled to a backseat security bar and staring dully out at AUSA Kirby.

  “I’m not snitching.”

  Kirby nodded. “Nobody’s asking you to snitch.” He was hunkered down and squatting beside the San Diego County Sheriff’s patrol car while, close behind him, Colter French-inhaled a long, thin Benson & Hedges and scuffed the toes of her pumps in the sandy soil.

  “Good, yeah, well, I’m not doing it, so,” Flavian said.

  “I understand.”

  There was a pause.

  “No, you don’t,” Flavian groused.

  Kirby just stared at him, hands in his pockets. Patient.

  He heard Fish’s infectious laughter drift over from where the DEA agent was trading fond insults with some San Diego Sheriff’s deputies. Flavian cut his reptilian eyes for a moment to Colter and asked Kirby, “Who’s the slit? Is it Take Your Daughter to Work Day?”

  Colter flicked ash off the cigarette and spoke to the back of Kirby’s head. “This is how you work your CIs?”

  “Did you know,” Kirby said, without turning to look at her, “that confidential informants are the leading cause of wrongful convictions in capital cases? Forty-five-point-nine percent. You can look it up.”

  Colter yawned. “You sound like some whiny ACLU press flack.”

  Kirby had been waiting all night for the real Sabrina Colter to emerge. This was more what he’d expected; the eager schoolgirl bit, he thought, must have been hard for her to sustain. Their eyes met, a kind of poker being played. She seemed to realize she’d overexposed herself, and drew back in. “I hate snitches,” Kirby told her. “I hate snitching. I hate these rolling busts.”

  “I’m not a snitch,” Flavian reminded them.

  Pursing her lips, curling her tongue between them, Colter sent silky smoke rings spinning and waited, staring at Kirby, expressionless.

  “Informants lie,” Kirby continued. “Juries believe ’em, we get lazy and rely on ’em. And the traditional safeguards of the criminal trial system are totally inadequate to protect the innocent against them.”

  “Uh-huh.” Colter made a point of showing him how unimpressed she was. “Well, why are we here?”

  He kept asking it. “Am I boring you?”

  “Gosh, no. I’m riveted. Truly.”

  Kirby felt his temper flare and checked it. “You wanted to see what we do.”

  “I did. Carry on. Show me the magic.”

  “Oh, little lady, please, he ain’t even got to the best part.” Flavian flashed teeth marbled like blue cheese. “Go for it, Mr. Federal Fuckhead. C’mon. Scare me with the prison thing. Work my homophobic now’n tell me that tired old prison-shower-and-soap joke. Where I’m gonna be some life-without’
s new girlfriend.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  This surprised him. “No?”

  “No. I hate those jokes, too,” Kirby said, as if frankly, “which means this is it, my man. Dead end. Let’s all go home and get some sleep.” He stood up and stretched. “See, Flavian here, he’s not gonna talk to us,” he told Colter, but continued to stare absently at the shivering addict. “He’s gonna nut up and do his hard time, and whoever sold him all that Sinaloa pure will, two to five years from now, when Flav eventually gets released, richly reward our boy for not snitching. Because they’re like brothers, he and his source. Solid. Am I right, Flav? Solid as a rock. And the source, why, he’d do the same for Flavian.” Kirby shrugged as if in surrender, and started to walk away. “So I guess we’re wasting our time.”

  Flavian blinked, and blinked again, his tiny tweaked mind whirling.

  Colter rolled her eyes as if to emphasize to Kirby how much she couldn’t believe this ploy was actually going to work.

  But Flavian, troubled now, just murmured, “What are you saying?”

  Kirby kept walking. A violent shudder coursed through the thin frame of Flavian Bolero, and he started to tilt his head side to side as if there were bugs in it, stirring, crawling, and, “—Hey! Hey! Hey! Like hell!” Flavian shouted at Kirby’s back. “Fuck him. Like hell he would! Like that Egyptian scumbag’d do squat for me!”

  Colter did the honors and asked the obvious. “Egyptian?”

  Kirby then stopped at the stumpy asphalt curb of the trailer park roadway. He took a pause, not quite ready to turn around yet, staring out at the silken misty darkness resolving itself into a western ocean horizon, barely a difference between sea and sky, wan glow of Coronado to the north. Another gray day rising. A melancholy clutched at him, as if he’d been half hoping that a snitch would surprise him just once and sack up.

  —

  THE EAST SAN DIEGO gentlemen’s club currently operating under the name Hot Box featured twenty-four hours of “live” gyrating pole dancers on the round stage as well as on the multitude of bulky black TV monitors hung from the I-beam rafters of a converted Jiffy Lube warehouse. Everything—walls, ceiling, rafters, floors, bar, chairs, tables, stage—was painted a flat black that ate light. Prince bled from towering subwoofers out the exit doors as the night’s Joint Task Force of Feds and local law enforcement frog-walked the straggle of hardcore, drunken, skew-eyed patrons who, in the gnawing daylight, wanted only to be invisible and go home.

  It’s silly, no? When a rocket ship explodes and everybody still wants to fly.

  Eventually Fish emerged from the front entrance with the middleman Flavian had fingered: a painfully young and proud San Diego State postgrad whose passport declaimed was Saad Fanous, and who the DEA man had found in a private room entertaining some semiprofessional silicone-enriched ladies with his Byzantine charm and a jeroboam of California sparkling rosé.

  Time.

  Time.

  Kirby and Colter were waiting at the suspect’s riot-red Corvette in the parking lot, the plates already run to confirm it was Saad’s, doors flung wide, a couple city cops searching it as Fish brought the frightened-but-still-smiling Egyptian across the pavement in handcuffs.

  “This’ll be our last roundup,” Kirby had told Colter while they were waiting.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Some of the knuckleheads we popped earlier tonight have called attorneys by now, and as soon as word hits the street, the river goes dry.”

  “To mix several metaphors.”

  Kirby was struggling to convince himself that he couldn’t decide whether he would try to sleep with Colter. It was an impolitic and misogynistic calculation, but he didn’t care to be progressive or enlightened, he had long ago surrendered to a rationale that this was just his basic biology, and why fight it? He didn’t have to like her. She seemed acceptably smart, decidedly fit, and cunning, which, he thought, would make it a challenge, at least.

  When Saad was brought close enough, and saw his car, and what was happening to it, his dark eyes went dead. Still, Kirby noted, the Egyptian sustained the empty, obstinate immigrant’s smile.

  “Nice ride,” Fish said.

  Saad caved, craven. “I can get you a sweet deal on one, my chalky brother. I have connections at Del Rio Motors, I will duke you in.”

  Fish wasn’t listening, he was briefing Kirby about a broken pager Saad had that appeared to be mostly for show, but, “The Egyptian had an ounce of controlled substance on him, divvied into eight balls, and seven-hundred-some dollars in cash. Couple of the Hot Box strippers were also holding, and named our boy as having sold it to them.”

  Only to his friends, Saad insisted. “Only to my friends, and only for what I pay for it!”

  “He’s a nonprofit,” Fish cracked wise. “Saad Fanous, meet Gil Kirby, Assistant United States Attorney for the Greater San Diego—”

  “How do you do, sir. This is not what it looks like,” Saad promised, but Fish wasn’t finished.

  “—And . . . his . . . I dunno.” Fish frowned at Sabrina Colter. “Sister? Intern? Prom date?” Fish grinned at her lopsided and then tried to give what Kirby could only guess was a look that said, Isn’t she a little young? And then, flirting, “Hi. Hazel. Fish. DEA.”

  Colter lit another cigarette and ignored him.

  Saad, intent on Kirby, let his smile wick out. “Please. I understand how this works. You want the name of my supplier. I am happy to cooperate. Just tell me. Who would you like me to say it is?”

  “What?”

  Saad’s eyes darted among Kirby, Fish, Colter, his Corvette. “If you can please inform me of the name of the individual you wish me to accuse. I will swear on the Bible.”

  “Hey. You’re a Muslim,” Fish reminded him.

  “Some truths are truer than others, the prophet has said.”

  Kirby felt his spirit sag. This was where it always went, they always got transactional. Whatever you needed they just happened to have. “That’s not how it works,” Kirby said. “I want the name of the person who actually in fact sells you the rock.”

  Saad gave him a conspiratorial look. “Ho. Yes, yes, I understand.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  “Yes,” Saad insisted. “It is ever the same.”

  “It’s not.”

  Saad’s smile rekindled, polite, smug.

  Kirby shook his head. “No sale. Get this guy out of here, Hazel.”

  One of the local cops sweeping the car called out: “Fish?”

  She was holding out a little fat leather notebook, thumb marking a page in the address section. “Suspect’s Filofax. From the glove box. Look at who’s right there under ‘friends and family.’”

  Fish took the book from her and split it open where she’d marked it. “Nick Mahrez,” he read aloud.

  Colter perked up. “Mahrez?”

  “Oh, man,” Fish said. He handed the Filofax to Kirby, and looked at Saad for a moment, in disbelief. “You know Stix?”

  “Of course yes,” Saad said readily. “Mr. Mahrez is my employer.”

  Fish made a whistling sound and Kirby stared at the name in the book, marveling at the odds of it turning up in a routine night of rolling arrests, and he only surfaced when Colter asked Saad, “Are we talking about the Mahrez who was partners with Victor Arnold?” and Kirby became acutely aware of her growing interest in the proceedings.

  “Let’s not jump ahead of ourselves,” he said to Colter, but she pretended not to hear him.

  “Point of clarification,” Colter pressed Saad. “You’re working for Nick Mahrez?”

  A dusty federal Ford sedan screamed into the parking lot, portable flashing bubble light on the dashboard, high beams momentarily blinding them.

  “Big Stix. Yes, indeed.”

  “Is that a nickname?�
�

  “Nickname. Trademark. Reputation. All of this.”

  Kirby chewed on his lip. He could see where this was going, Colter’s hunger, the eager doglike shine in the Egyptian’s eyes: Saad would give Colter whatever she wanted, and, clearly, she wanted Mahrez—a name that came out of nowhere and, given her age, she really should not even have recognized. But now Colter’s evidently hair-trigger ambition combined with her overt ambivalence about, not to mention inexperience with, the raw realities of criminal prosecution, was a potentially catastrophic complication. “Stop. Wait a second. Can we back up?”

  Colter and Saad both looked at him irritably, as if he’d interrupted something intimate; she made a vague, dismissive gesture.

  Fortunately, from the arriving federal car, a curvy, unnatural blonde in well-filled jeans, a taut black T-shirt, and careless makeup strode to them, visibly pissed off, her shiny FBI shield swinging from a lanyard around her neck, ponytail stuck through the backside of her Padres cap. “What do you assholes think you’re doing?” Kirby thought she looked awesome.

  “Tina Z.”

  The blond Fed recognized, “Fish. Jesus—”

  “How they hanging, girl?”

  “—And Kirby?” She dismissed him with a flick of her dark eyes and, “Figures,” then zeroed back in on Fish. “Dammit, don’t you guys read the interagency reports?”

  “Read? Who has time?” Fish leered, teasing her, and wiggled his tongue. “We’re pulling a train of local and exotic cocaine cowboys as you speak. Wanna grease up?”

  The Fed rolled her eyes and glared back at him.

  Colter glanced impatiently to Kirby. “Who is she?” Kirby had to pause. Where to start?

  “She’s FBI,” Tina Z. answered. “And she thinks this is bullshit.”

  Fish got defensive: “What are you all bent about?”

  Kirby began to explain to Colter, “Christina Zappacosta. Special agent, special projects, San Diego subregion,” but it wasn’t so much a conversation now as it was a jumble of overlapping attitudes and agendas, making Kirby feel like a group gripe counselor.