Catalina Eddy

by Daniel Pyne

  He was worried about Rose.

  A warning buzzer split the din and the lights went off. Curfew.

  In a darkness leached with faint fluorescence from the guard station at one end of E-block, Mahrez felt a queasy disquiet overtake him.

  Maybe it was the footsteps.

  Or the abrupt absence of them.

  A loud, two-part metal clack as the door of his cell slid open automatically, triggered from the control panel beyond the outer security door. Followed by the spooky quiet.

  Mahrez rose and walked to the opening. Footsteps, closer, quickening. He peered into the darkness and two shadows blindsided him. Violently drove him back into the cell so fast Mahrez couldn’t react, he was off-balance, there was a quicksilver flash of angled metal, and his breath left him as something punched and seared the soft flesh under his ribs.

  And ripped him open.

  —

  “YOU THINK YOUR COUNTRY is so different. That’s just arrogance,” Saad grandstanded.

  Tina watched Kirby shake his head at the federal public defender. “This isn’t going to work, Bobby.”

  Khorshandi made a nebulous gesture of agreement. There was no gamesmanship between these two, Tina knew; they had a history and a shorthand. The goal was to get a good result, posturing just got in the way. The public defender faced Tina. “What about his cooperation on your other thing, with the haters?”

  “I’m afraid the drug bust trumps that.”

  “I am spoiled meat,” Saad whined.

  “They popped him for distribution, he has zero value to me as a CI, and so my hate crimes case is history. No deals.”

  Saad slumped in his chair, pouty. Khorshandi murmured something in Farsi, Saad griped back at him bitterly in Egyptian, and suddenly they were arguing, then shouting at each other, vehement, in competing languages it was unclear the other even understood. Kirby and Tina exchanged weary professional looks, and she marveled at how effortlessly they both dissembled when in public, and though she thought she saw a glimmer of something new, raw and vulnerable, in Kirby’s eyes, she attributed it to the immediate unreliability of this snitch.

  The door to the room then swung open and Hazel Fish stuck his burred head in. He was out of breath from running there. “We’ve got a fucking problem.”

  —

  MAHREZ WAS NOT ALONE in the isolation ward of the MDC hospital infirmary: two U.S. Marshals idled near the door, and his tragically beautiful, scarred girlfriend, Rose, had coiled next to him on the bed. Kirby and Tina Z. had already toured the scene of the crime with Fish, a fussy, ass-covering prison subwarden having led them swiftly past the line of locked-down cells with blank convicts staring out, all the E-block lights blazing and the subwarden, Fish noted, jacked up into full-bore damage control: “It was one of the mandatory trusties, hadda be. Black on white. Or the goddamned Mexicans. Judge Gibson and her court-ordered desegregation bullshit. Somebody with access unlocked his cell door after curfew. We think it was two guys, one to hold him, one to do the deed.”

  The implication was they’d never catch the perpetrators. Jail was funny that way. Unless you caught the assailant in the act, or found somebody with a grudge to bear, it was Darwinian in its blindness to justice. And, Fish thought coldly, useful when officious assholes like this guy fucked up.

  Blood had splashed the floor near the back wall of the cell, and above it, crudely finger-painted: a bloody circle with a slash struck through the word SNITCH scrawled inside with Big Stix’s blood.

  “He was lucky,” the subwarden had opined.

  “Sure” was what Tina Z. had responded. “Yeah, that’s what I’d call this. Luck.”

  Fish was pretty sure the subwarden hadn’t clocked the Fed’s high irony.

  They found Mahrez sitting up, pale, chest bandaged, girlfriend with the ruined part of her face pressed against his shoulder, her hair spread out like a photo shoot. He had the faraway stare of a man whose life had been turned inside out. Fish knew the look, didn’t care; this man had gamed the system, and karma is a bitch.

  Kirby settled on the edge of a vinyl chair facing the bed, fingers jittering, restless. Tina Z. stayed in the doorway behind him, Fish found a spot against the wall.

  “You think this was a warning?”

  “Nobody sends guys with a shiv to give you a warning,” Mahrez said.

  “Okay. Who wants you dead?” Kirby asked.

  Nothing from Mahrez.

  “C’mon, Stix. We can get these guys. Make you safe,” Fish said.

  “I used to be safe. And then you guys asked me to help you, and, what a surprise. Here we are.”

  Tina Z. said, “The leak didn’t come from our end.”

  Mahrez ignored her and studied Kirby’s suit. “Did you get all fancied up for me?” He touched Rose, and signed as he spoke, hands dancing. “He’s wearing, what is that, Armani? Silk. It’s killer.”

  Whatever Rose responded, unsmiling, ill-humored, stayed between them, because Mahrez didn’t interpret it. Her fingers fluttered like poetry. Mahrez shook his head and shrugged.

  Tina Z. pressed her point, “Less than half a dozen of my people knew you were wired. It was a closed system.”

  “Until you showed your friend, the mayor,” Fish pointed out. They’d rehearsed this; Tina had stressed the importance of remembering to say your friend.

  The room was quiet.

  Nick Mahrez never looked at Fish, just stared at Tina Z. strangely, blankly, the inference slow-dawning. Fish registered the change of temperature: Mahrez realizing that they were thinking the mayor could have been the leak. His friend.

  “Nick. Talk to me,” Kirby said after a while.

  Mahrez said nothing.

  “I’m not pursuing the charges against you,” Kirby said. “Our information was bad. I’m sorry, it happens.”

  Both Tina Z. and Fish looked at Kirby in surprise. This was not in the script. Fish doubted the new U.S. attorney knew what her lead prosecutor was doing. Mahrez mattered to him. And not for the first time, Fish had the thought that Kirby, who, no question, was one of the best lawyers he’d ever encountered, shouldn’t be doing this job.

  “Your information, or your informant?” Mahrez asked.

  Rose’s hands took flight from the blankets, and she vocalized as she signed, some alien tongue, her voice quaking a sharpness that betrayed her beauty, all vowels and fractured modulation in the monotone of the deaf. Mahrez translated. “She says I’ll need protection now, twenty-four-seven three-sixty-five. That you need to protect me. She says I’m a marked man.”

  Kirby began to say he’d see what he could do, but Fish cut him off, unable to hold back his irritation with all the righteous posturing from this lucky old drug peddler. “Help us, help yourself, my brother. No free rides.”

  Mahrez exploded. “You did this to me! I was off the grid, and you put me back on it! This is bullshit! My blood, you might as well have cut me open yourselves!” Everyone was stunned by the outburst, including Mahrez, his face flushed, his breath came quicker. He was evidently in a lot more pain than he was showing.

  Rose rubbed her boyfriend’s back. Calmed him. Her hands traced the air with what could only have been words of love. Fish felt a pang of regret that he’d ragged on the man.

  The room fell silent.

  “Visiting hours are over,” Mahrez said, and turned away from them.

  —

  —THEN AT DAWN, when her alarm chimes, Sabrina Colter slips sleepy-eyed from a downy, white poster bed; wearing baggy flannel pajamas, she yawns and stretches, improbably young and unspoiled, she takes from her bed stand an NCIC rap of juvy arrests and prosecutions

  complete with a two-decades-old mug shot of teenaged Stix Mahrez

  and pads on tiny pink bare feet into the walk-in dressing room-slash-closet where a gleaming white StairMaster awaits her, faci
ng a wall-sized full-length mirror and a compact TV tuned to the morning news:

  . . . blah blah blah—

  she mutes the television, and sheds her PJs, and climbs naked as an angel onto the stair machine, spreading the Mahrez rap sheet over the control panel, to study it as she works out, but glancing up now and then to admire herself, what God hath wrought: the bloom of her perfect skin, the cant of her tapered thighs, the firmness of chest, slow blossoming sheen of sweat like a million diamonds gilding a goddess

  stepping her way naked to heaven and—

  Kirby awoke violently, as if from a nightmare, wide-eyed, disoriented, shuddering. “Fuck.”

  Alone in his bed. Another gray summer day pressing down, radio alarm clock bleeding a traffic report, tangled in the bedsheets and sticky with an addict’s cold sweat of craving sweet destruction.

  —

  “BAH BAH BAH BAH.”

  Tina Z. tried, when she was home, to push everything away and focus only on Willa. Her ability to compartmentalize had always been her strength, and she had a lot to keep separate.

  Parallel universes that threatened to come apart if they ever crossed.

  Parents. Men. Her child.

  But as she shook out Cheerios into the high-chair tray and did vowel vocalizations the way she’d learned from one of the child-rearing books Gracie in White-Collar Crime had given her during pregnancy, she couldn’t stop peering out through the beveled windows to the driveway splashed with early-morning sun, where Bert was talking to the husky guy who’d shown up before the baby even woke; shown up in the grotesque wannabe monster truck with the gun rack and the Hustler decals and “Duke” Deukmejian bumper stickers and the ridiculous blue-chrome roll bar that practically screamed its date-rape advisory. Who was this guy? The cut glass distorted him like a circus mirror. She tried not to judge.

  Albert Zappacosta was her long-term investment, the safe bet, first love, and father of record if not biological certainty (that one time with Kirby, unprotected—one time, what were the odds?). They’d met at Quantico, Bert was in logistics and supply, she was a female agent enigma who’d dropped out of high school, run away from home, put herself through junior college, aced the SATs, cum laude at Case Western, and then somehow talked her way into the FBI Academy, one of seven women who made the cut, much fanfare and prestige, but a lonely journey. Before Bert, she’d never had a boyfriend, never had felt the urge to brook the vulnerability a serious relationship would require or face the withering judgment of the helicopter parents who swooped in and out of her life like a chronic condition, but, boom, Bert, he flipped her switch, and for six months she was as happy as she’d ever be.

  Then came the special assignments with LEGAT, long deployments to Nicaragua and Jordan (while Bert quietly unraveled), promotions, a full-on gender role reversal for which her husband was sorely unprepared (one droll military therapist had called it occupational emasculation), which led Bert to transfer to Pendleton and Tina to seek stateside posting in San Diego, but the move seemed to just make everything that much worse.

  And then the baby.

  Gil Kirby’s baby, Tina was sure of it.

  Neither man knew.

  The baby was supposed to heal them. That had been Bert’s rationale for persuading her to go off the pill and try. He’d hoped it would reestablish their God-given roles, mommy and daddy, man and wife; she even bought sexy pink lace thong underwear from Portugal that gave her a rash and rode up when she ran after bad guys. But her husband, still at Pendleton, still an NCO, a lifer, shot blanks, whereas Kirby did not, and now Bert had all but stopped talking.

  To her.

  But evidently not to fat fucks in jacked macho Chevy half-tons she could only see distorted through the fancy glass at six in the morning when, most days, it was all Bert could do to drag his lazy rear end out of bed before she left for work, to give Willa a kiss and a hug and ask Tina could she pick him up a couple sleeves of Copenhagen long cut, even though he could get them dirt cheap at the PX.

  “Ma ma ma MOMMY.”

  Willa squawked and spat Cheerio mash into Tina’s hair. How stupid, how pointless, how sad that out of nowhere Tina circled back, unprompted, again, to this fundamental indefatigable insistent question of paternity—happy, pale, pink, practically Irish, blue-eyed Willa—Kirby would never change, there was no future for them, whatever they had was a swirling eddy of emotion, and when things come back around and repeat the way she and Kirby did it was easy to assume there must be a resolution in the offing, a deeper connection . . . but it was just today’s fog, it would burn off and be forgotten. Tina had to keep reminding herself it didn’t, wouldn’t, signify at the end of the day.

  The big truck roared and backed out of the drive.

  Bert came in, distracted, and told her the fat guy was interested in buying the dirt bike he hadn’t ridden for two years. When she pointed out that Bert and his so-called buyer hadn’t gone into the garage to look at it, Bert’s eyes dulled and he went to take a shower, and he was still in the bathroom singing “Rock the Casbah” when Tina left to take her daughter to day care.

  5

  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 Dist
rict 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?