Burning Moon

by Richard Barre

  “Okay, Dad,” Denny said. “How long till we’re there?

  “Three hours, plus or minus. Depends on Mr. Lucky.”

  “And you expect to find what?”

  “Whatever’s down there,” Wil said.

  Denny angled a look. “And that’s your big plan…”

  “The hope being that it’s enough,” he said. “That maybe she’ll talk to me.”

  “Damn, Mojo. No wonder you command the press you do.”

  They were up to speed now, a steady fourteen knots, Mr. Lucky blessed with neither big engines, nor new. Yet the day was cooperative, bracing and clear except for the fog still largely obliterating the four island profiles, the bluffed coastline and Santa Ynez range receding as they angled west: glassine water, wind as yet no factor. They saw kelp beds, dolphin pods, cormorants, gulls working a seal carcass, a swirl of something the size of a station wagon.

  Forty minutes passed. Knowing he’d have to be sharp for the dive, Wil went below to stretch out. But lying there was like a tape that wouldn’t shut off: Denny and all that suddenness and soul searching, the thought of losing someone as valued as the someone you’d only dreamed of finding again—balanced by what trust you placed in him unobserved in a lifetime of years. Then there was Lisa and what was happening with her, the Tiens and Under Heaven, the very real possibility that he’d made their list. If not as yet, likely by setting in motion what he had in mind.

  He had the sensation of crossing a chasm, Wallenda style, on a wire, then he was out. That is, until he was shaken awake in what seemed no time, Denny saying, “Up and at ‘em. GPS is lit and I’ve been gridding with the bottom finder.”

  Wil came upright up to the faint barking of seal lions, wave slap, the brine-sharp smell of kelp. “And?” he said.

  Denny’s smile broadened. “Every picture tells a story.”

  ***

  Wil watched Mr. Lucky’s hull and trailing anchor line recede.

  A school of sardines flashed and veered away, colors began shading toward the greens and blacks that came with depth. While not actually cold after the initial shock, the water was anything but warm in his wetsuit. It was, however, unclouded, permitting the light to filter down with him, even though the sun he’d left was tempered by the fog drifting out from San Miguel.

  Forty feet…sixty…eighty, Wil equalizing the pressure in his ears. A hundred…hundred-ten, his bubbles changing from rumble to the pressure-affected chiming sound they made as the reef defined itself.

  Getting his bearings, he picked a direction and tracked it. Lobster antennae waved from hidey holes, sea growth undulated around black urchin, giant starfish, anemones the size of wrestler’s necks. Rockfish, calico, and cabezon took note; a horned shark the length of his arm regarded him, then flashed off. Smaller anemones patterned a rusted-out ship’s locker too big to be from Harmony.

  And then, there it was—off to his right, a discordant note among the spine of ledges trailing seaweed and the sheer drops. H-rm-ny through the algae that softened her profile and stern, telltale’d off her broken rigging and antenna mast. Oddly affecting to view through green half-light the object of so much speculation and heartbreak, the haunting in an otherwise placid dream.

  Wil checked his watch: better-than-hoped-for time.

  He kicked toward her. As the photographs had partly shown, she’d lodged between massive boulders, the closest plunging into blackness. Largely upright, her bow was pitched thirty degrees to the reef. At intervals, thin strings of bubbles rose…as if she were reaching out to the world of air and light and color, even though it was no longer visible. Strands of orange netting still fouled her deck gear.

  For a moment Wil hung suspended: scanning, willing her to reveal what had brought her to this. Nothing. He swam around it, searching for things the investigators might have missed: bullet holes, evidence of fire, ramming, boarding hooks, anything out of place. But apart from the split in her stern, the reef jutting from it, Harmony was silent on the points. The way she’d settled, broken rigging and mast, the loss of her windshield—all said wave action.

  Wil activated his torch, shone it into chaos. Strewn debris, worm-holed charts and upended books, a hooded sweatshirt trailing a sleeve that might once have been red. Looking closer at a sprung cabinet, he saw a bull eel’s head poking from it, jaws parted to reveal needle teeth.

  As two lingcod darted out, Wil went in.

  Pockets of air silvered in the light. He touched one, watched the bubbles scatter, then set about. Silted instruments, two-way radio, and cassette boombox; empty bulkhead mount that presumably held the lost tracking device; Mr. Coffee minus its container; small reefer ajar with the contents long gone; interior lockers with reminders of another world.

  Spotting a semi-reflective surface bonded to a closed drop-lid, he opened it and found waterlogged cassettes, disintegrating tackle box, package of cough drops, rusting can of Three-In-One oil, lead fishing weights, clipped-together screwdriver set, scattered small tools, a ruptured metal flashlight.

  Wil closed the drop-lid, brushed a glove across the plaque; clean again, it read Harmony. 1989. For Island Seafoods. Prying it off it’s hinges, he stowed it in the mesh bag lashed to his belt. He was about to leave when he shone his torch on the larger doorless cabinet, the eel’s head tracking his movements. Something beneath the eel reflected back, the corner of…something. He checked his watch again: sixteen minutes of the twenty-two allotted, the chill already getting to him.

  He nosed the long-handled flash closer.

  Closer…

  As the eel struck at it, Wil slipped in the bar and, with its hook, extracted a CD-case bottom. No lid or disk, just the clear plastic base and black inset hub. Teeth marks along one edge.

  He flashed the deep interior; beyond eel, he saw nothing else. Dragging the base beyond the eel’s reach, he put it in the bag, then propelled himself through the windowless opening. With a look back at Harmony, at whatever Jimmy and Wen’s hopes had been that day, Wil followed his bubbles to the shimmering plane of surface.

  60

  They were midway back, San Miguel an indistinguishable line of fog, late sun shadowing the swells and the approaching coastline. As Mr. Lucky’s engines pulsed, Wil went over in his mind what Harmony had tried to tell him—no marks, no alarm-bell indications of foul play, the eel-chewed CD base—until Denny appeared beside him yawning.

  “Boats and sun,” he said. “Somebody ought to bottle it.”

  “There’s coffee, if you want some,” Wil told him.

  “What do you think got me up?” Helping himself; and after blowing on it and another yawn: “So—you going to tell me what all this gets down to?”

  “I’m still deciding,” Wil said.

  “On the meaning or whether to tell me?”

  “Both.”

  Brief smile. “Can’t say I blame you on the one. I’m not sure I’d trust me, either.”

  Wil skirted intersecting swells, the line resembling a monster backbone. “What about Lorenz?” he said. “You have any idea who killed her?”

  “Me?” Denny sipped coffee. “I thought we’d been through this.”

  “She and her partner were into something involving Luc Tien. Something freelance.”

  “Which would be?…”

  Wil shook his head. “I’m not sure yet.”

  Denny picked up the CD base lying next to the drop lid Wil had pried off. Turning it in his hands, he said, “So right away you thought of your old friend who bags trash for money. Him when he goes out for a beer, her when her guard’s down. Divide and conquer.”

  “Did you hear me say that, Den?”

  “You didn’t have to, it’s written all over your face.”

  Wil kept his eyes on the water, the churn known as Potato Patch receeding on the right.

  Slipping on his sunglasses, Denny said, “Last call on this, Mojo, she wasn’t my type. Besides, not being sure who Lorenz was beyond somebody dealing with you, maybe sleeping with you, wh
y would I?”

  It made sense, Wil had to admit; yet it provided no closure. He said, “You happen to see her with her partner at all? Maccafee?”

  “Big guy going bald, mostly muscle?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Once. Where is he in all this?”

  Wil angled off a larger swell, reset his line of sight. “Inez hadn’t seen him in days. She was concerned about him. She said he had enemies.”

  “Sounds like she did, too.”

  “Then you don’t believe she killed herself.”

  “The hell do I know?” he said. “You tell me.”

  “No,” Wil said. “I don’t. Worried maybe, scared a little, but not suicidal.”

  Denny finished his coffee in a gulp. “All right: agreed, for what it’s worth. Which likely means we’re both wrong.” Eyes hidden behind the dark lenses. “And which leaves us where, exactly?”

  “Us?…”

  “Like I said, Mojo, whoever did Luc has my money. I want it. Now, assuming your VC didn’t do it, which pains me to even consider, look at how the thing was crafted to snare him. Which tells me whoever it was is smart and good. And Pilgrim, you might be needing this Winchester of mine.” Denny lapsing into Stagecoach John Wayne.

  Long pause, the two-edged sword. “I don’t know, Den. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Yeah? When does a pair not beat a high card?”

  “Just…when it doesn’t.”

  “Won’t fit the template, that it? Too much water under the dam?”

  Wil let it ride.

  “Too bad,” Denny said. “For a lot of reasons.”

  Wil swung wide of a fishing boat on an crossing vector, Mr. Lucky’s pulse filling the cabin, Denny adding, “Reason one, the big one: You know damn well I could have done you just by leaving you out there. Yet you went down anyway. And do you really think I’d have come clean about what I do if I was going for the bull’s eye?”

  “Friends versus money,” Wil said after a pause.

  “Not friends, bud, friend. Except when he’s being a righteous prick.”

  ***

  “So why would a CD be aboard at all when there wasn’t a player?” Wil said over the music.

  “Just the AM-FM and Cassette, you’re sure of that.” Denny leaning toward him to hear.

  They were in a restaurant overlooking the harbor. Faces still lit by the day, sailboat masts moving to a music of their own, high clouds and contrails pink with the setting sun. Dinner crowd starting to join the happy-hours and early birds and raise the volume level in the bar.

  “I’m sure,” Wil said.

  “Portable CD player carried by one of them? Washed overboard?”

  Wil thought. “That would depend on if it’s a music CD in the first place. There’s another box I want to check it against. If I’m right, they both came from Luc’s—before he went to the encrypted e-mail system for backup last December.”

  “Right after Harmony went down.”

  “You got it.”

  The hostess touched his arm, motioned that their balcony table was ready. She led them out to it, left them with menus and their drinks. Ignoring both, Denny asked, “So what’s one have to do with the other?”

  “The box I have belonged to Jimmy’s girlfriend,” Wil said. “She or maybe Jimmy used it to store her poetry: overkill for a disk of that capacity, but it’s what was around.” Taking a hit of his club soda.

  “And Jimmy would have had access.”

  Wil nodded. “According to Mia, computer work was among the things he did for Luc. She also told me Wen was working there when Jimmy met her. It would have been normal for Luc to let them use his CD burner, the same one he used to back up his financial and business data. Lorenz mentioned that angle.”

  “Was there a burner among the gear when you found Luc?”

  “No, and I’ve thought about that,” Wil said. “Enough to see a possible explanation.”

  “Door number one: It became obsolete and he pitched it.”

  “Not obsolete, I think. Compromised.”

  “How? Jimmy?”

  Wil set the chewed disk down between them. “Longshot time: Lorenz and Maccafee were leveraging Jimmy for information on Rising Dragon. Lorenz told me she believed somebody else had gotten to the kid: a step up the food chain is how she put it. But if she knew who it was, she didn’t say.”

  “Hard to see Po Sang,” Denny said after a gulp. “They’d be a horizontal step, or one down a rung.”

  “What I was thinking, too.” Popping in an oyster cracker, looking off at the lights coming on, the pink fading off the peaks. “Terry Leong said the San Francisco cops turned an informant. An entity was coming at this guy’s people with a plan to reconfigure the Po’s into high tech and white collar. Street crime and muscle would go to the Dragons. The name he caught was Under Heaven.”

  Denny crunched ice. “Them at the top, of course. Which would mean Po and Dragon heads rolling, those who didn’t take to being reconfigured.”

  Wil said, “I don’t know about the Po’s, but my guess is Under Heaven offered Luc a capo or whatever and got stiffed. Luc had his own designs on the Po’s, and from what Lorenz told me, he hated Chinese of any stripe. Plus, the whole scam would have been his to begin with, only with the Dragons running the show.” Washing down another cracker. “Smart, except for one thing.”

  “Jimmy. Under Heaven offering him the Dragons. Under them.”

  Wil nodded. “Big step up, but a bigger price for it. Sell out his uncle, keep Lorenz and Maccafee at bay thinking they still owned him.”

  “Lot of balls in the air for a kid that age.”

  “Yeah,” Wil said. “Too many.”

  Denny turned his Beck’s bottle, watched the rings it left. “So why San Miguel?”

  Wil shrugged. “My guess? Farthest out of the islands, federal turf, nothing there to speak of. Ideal for a mothership to run cargos in, Jimmy to pick them up and make the payoffs.”

  The waitress came: pen poised, apologetic, an expectant look.

  “Sea bass,” Wil told her. “The chalk board?”

  “Two,” Denny said when she turned to him. “Fries and salads,”

  After writing it down, and with a long look at Denny, she moved on. Wil grinned. “Not every day she sees a movie star,” he said.

  “Whoever the hell she thinks it is.” No grin. “So, Plan A: Jimmy copies Luc’s files onto the disk, heads out to hand it over. After which, Under Heaven takes down Luc and installs Jimmy—with his help.”

  “That would be my guess,” Wil said.

  “You think they ever got the disk?”

  Wil fingered the teeth marks on the CD base. “No. Luc wouldn’t have lasted this long if Under Heaven had it.”

  “So far okay. Possible to verify any of it?”

  “You mean after finding Luc’s killer and proving somebody other than my client did him? I’m vague there. Maybe asking Wen’s mother some more questions.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been to see her?”

  “When I first started,” Wil said, sipping his club. “I just didn’t know what questions to ask.”

  “Wild guess.” Finishing his Beck’s. “There was a little problem communicating.”

  “You could say that. A neighbor told me Jimmy and Wen looked scared.”

  “There’s an understatement: Under Heaven and the ATF, Luc and the whole family thing. Not to mention how big a bastard he was by himself. Who wouldn’t be scared?”

  “And yet Vinh said the kid loved his uncle,” Wil said, giving it a beat. “It’s why he went to Luc’s and stayed.”

  Denny leaned forward. “Meaning Jimmy might have had second thoughts about turning him? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “For sure? No. We may never know.”

  “But lacking evidence, it makes sense.”

  Wil said, “I guess what I’m saying is this…” Reaching into his windbreaker and pulling out the CD Amber had given him: the one Kenny
turned up in Jimmy and Wen’s old couch, the one Mia ID’d as coming from Luc’s. The one with Wen’s sad lines on it:

  And so I call to you,

  My guardian heart

  Land of the white water bud, the jade black earth

  The burning tallow moon.

  Wil lifted the lid, released the plastic hinges and disk and handed the base to Denny. He watched Denny’s look go from curious to intent, watched Denny flip it over and compare it to the eel-chewed base on the table, both having tiny crowns stamped into their lower right corners. He watched Denny run a thumb over each, lean back, meet his eyes.

  Finally say, “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Wil came back. “Just wanted to see if you wound up at the same place I did.”

  “Nice. Remind me not to double down any bets with you.”

  Finally Wil’s grin broke, the one he was holding in. “You’re just lucky I let you sleep out there.”

  61

  Denny off to see what he could extract from Wen’s mother in her language, Wil drove next morning to see Li Tien. To share what he’d learned and what it might mean for Vinh.

  He could hear Matt barking at the window. Then Li was letting him in and Matt was wagging all over as Wil bent to him, led him out to the patio, gave him Milk-Bones he’d brought, Li Tien appearing then with tea service. Over blue-glaze cups she told him Mia was at school, they’d been to see Vinh, who looked as if he were losing weight. He showed her the dedication plaque he’d pried off Harmony’s dash and, for a long moment, she said nothing. Then the cloud came, and she waved it off and went inside.

  Out of respect, Wil took Matt for a walk along the spring- and runoff-fed lake in the open area near the house, Matt running ahead, circling, dashing off again when he’d made sure Wil was following. When they returned, Li Tien was back in her patio chair, the plaque in her hands, the patio smelling of newly-cut grass and ornamental garlic, wet stones splashed by water from the entwined cranes..