by Daniel Pyne
Tina pointed at Saad. “You can’t have him, Hazel. He’s mine. Whatever he’s done—”
“Felony possession. With intent to sell,” Fish barked back.
“—I can pull jurisdiction.”
“And, oh, let’s see . . . we just now discovered maybe he can deliver us the legendary Nick Mahrez for trafficking in the Mexican crunchy.”
This stopped the blond agent short. Saad smiled with polite supplication and interjected, friendly, “Hello, Christina. How do you do?” Kirby signaled for a uniform to escort Saad away to wait in a patrol car.
“Who?”
Colter was studying Fish. “You really think you can make it happen?”
Kirby saw there was no recognition of Mahrez by the FBI agent, which didn’t surprise him—she was deep into domestic terrorism, weapons trafficking, and the resurgent White Power movement that had become an ugly by-product of the Reagan Revolution. Domestic drug dealing had never been on her radar.
“Time out.” Tina Z. got Colter’s attention. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Leverage,” Colter said to Tina, and it sounded like she was trying the word on for size.
“Deliver Mahrez?” Kirby was still trying to put the brakes on Fish’s overeagerness to serve Colter’s cryptic agenda but knew that the forward momentum was already too great. “No,” he said, “no no no. That’s a circus sideshow, and gets us no closer to our local cartel Crack King plus, P.S., Mr. Fanous is not exactly a reliable—”
“—Unless he’s the Crack King,” Colter offered.
“Mahrez? He’s not.” Kirby heard himself sounding like a second grader.
“Well, anyway, you can’t have Saad,” Tina Z. told them. “I’ll call in my goddamn ADIC up in Los Angeles if I need to.” Kirby wanted to let her know he agreed with her, but she didn’t even look at him. “The Egyptian is my primary for something I’ve been humping on for like six weeks. I’m this close, and if you pop him, he’s gonna be useless to me.”
“He’s useless because you gave him too much leash and he’s dealing drugs,” Colter summarized. “Who’s your ADIC? Boyce Johnson?”
“Excuse me. Who the fuck are you?”
A chilled silence dropped on them. Tina Z. had made a slow pivot to glare at Kirby’s young ride-along, who didn’t flinch, didn’t care, and delegated, brisk now, imperious, all-business, to Kirby, “I want Mahrez. I want him cooperative. Do whatever it takes.” She turned to Fish. “You may need to get us some factual corroboration for your”—she used the term, Kirby observed ruefully, as if she’d invented it—“wobbly snitch.”
Then she glanced insincerely at Agent Zappacosta, dismissive, almost an afterthought, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Kirby had never seen Tina Z. so flummoxed. She blinked, and blinked again; she looked to him, then Fish, then back to him, for some kind of clarification. “She’s sorry? Who is she? Sorry? Who the fuck are you?” Tina asked Colter again.
“My new boss,” Kirby admitted, regretfully, before Colter could answer.
Now Fish and Tina Z. looked stunned. This girl of a woman, five-foot-three in heels, impossibly young. Disbelief. What? Boss? Later, they both told Kirby they had been thinking she was some new equal-opportunity hire he’d been saddled with breaking in.
“Agent Hazel Fish, Agent Christina Zappacosta,” Kirby made the official introduction, “meet your new United States Attorney for the San Diego region.”
Colter favored them with a practiced, soulless, popular-girl smile that Kirby had seen only once, briefly, when he met her, and in so doing she aged ten years and assumed the full cold authority of her office. “Sabrina Colter,” she replied. “I’m so pleased to meet both of you, I know we’re going to do great things on the South Coast.”
Then she touched Kirby’s arm lightly. Flirting? Or cutting him off at the knees? Maybe both, Kirby worried. A calculated gesture charged with entitlement and dominion.
“This was neat,” she said sweetly. “Thanks a bunch, Gilly, for showing me around.”
2
“NICK ‘BIG STIX’ MAHREZ?”
“Mmm.”
“. . . Is a local legend.” Kirby loved to talk while they made love.
“Oh. Oh. Shit. Oh.”
Watching Tina Z. try to steer her way through the blizzard of primal, tactile feedback her body insisted on sparking off was a glorious adventure.
“Beach volleyball god and competitive surfer and pot dealer who made his millions back in the day—when dope was still quaint—and then got out, clean. There isn’t a cop or a judge or federal prosecutor of a certain vintage here wouldn’t give his left nut to bring him to trial.”
“Oh. Ow. There.” A shifting of hips. “She called you Gilly.”
The quick turn of topic threw him. “Wait, what?” Then he made the connection, and her implication was clear enough, but Kirby just said, “That is technically a version of my name.”
“Yeah. Your name. Which you”—holding her breath—“won’t yes won’t let anybody yes call you.”
—
IN THE SILTED LIGHT of the new day, under the press of low-lying coastal clouds, a phalanx of SDPD patrol cars and colorless federal sedans swooped down the macadam driveway and into a low-slung Kearny Mesa Industrial Park complex studded with lavender-blooming jacarandas. The vehicles stacked up helter-skelter near the office and warehouse entrance emblazoned with some rainbow STIX SURFBOARDS signage, cops spilled out and Hazel Fish led his Task Force sweeping through the factory on fresh warrants, work stopping as the Feds and local law enforcement shouted and swarmed and secured the premises.
—
“NEVER CAUGHT, never charged.”
“Mahrez?”
“Yeah.”
“Ah.”
—
WHILE SUSPECT AND SNITCH SAAD FANOUS watched, docile, but contriving to appear undone, Fish gloved up and waited for another agent to pop open the metal locker bearing a hand-scrawled FANOUS masking tape label; they removed the filthy gray hooded sweatshirt balled in the locker’s upper basket, the Members Only windbreaker hung from a hook, half a dozen Stix Surfboards promotional caps, paint masks, coveralls, work gloves, pronation-worn running shoes, a forgotten lunch, and a couple of shoeboxes stacked at the bottom under a pile of Playboys and yellowing San Diego Tribs.
Everything got opened, photographed, tagged, and the boxes, as expected, were found to be filled with glassine Baggies of crack cocaine.
In a formality of pure theater, the Egyptian had been read his Miranda rights again, in front of everyone.
—
“HE WALKED AWAY happily ever after,” Kirby said. “Philanthropist and patron. Glassing his boards, giving to charity, celebrity volleyball, surf camps for ghetto kids. Pillar of the community. The whole nine yards.”
“Okay okay okay okay, now just—”
“Of course, all those nut-giving cops and Feds are convinced he’s still in the game, biggest drug distribution network on the West Coast—a claim for which they have never had a shred of proof—and that he’s all cozied up to the Mexican cartels and protected by layers and layers of local corruption.”
Rising tones, her squeak of completion, the release of held breath. “Good. God. Kirby, don’t move,” Tina whispered. “Don’t move, okay?”
“Okay.” Kirby stayed still, hands parked on her bare hips. Her body coiled, tightened. Eyes squeezed closed, her chin dropped, her hair touched his chest. After a moment she took another deep breath and exhaled and said, “So that’s why your new boss is so keen on him?” She sank, trembling, sweaty, sour, naked, her head against his heart.
“Honestly, I’m still surprised she even knew who he was,” Kirby said.
His apartment was hot and stuffy. Kirby’s hands roamed, traced the massive tiger tattoo that curved from Tina’s shoulder to the s
mall of her back. “God, am I gonna need a shower before I go home.”
“I don’t know,” he said, a little rattled, referring to pretty much everything.
Passing the open doorway of the new U.S. attorney’s private office the previous afternoon, Kirby had pretended to be slowed and distracted by a case file in order to watch Sabrina Colter unpack her personal things from a couple cardboard moving boxes. She looked so young, slender blue-pale arms and legs, a freshman moving into her college dorm room.
“Could he be your Crack King?” Tina murmured.
Kirby’s foot cramped. He joggled his toes.
“Kirby?”
“Yes?”
“Where’d you just go?”
The things she brought: Stuffed tiger. Silver pencil cup. Snow globe from SeaWorld. A small carved wooden crucifix.
“Kirby.”
“I’m here.”
“What are you thinking?”
“She’s come with marching orders,” Kirby said. “White House wants to seed the ranks of Justice with believers. Onward Christian soldiers. They’ve sent her here on a crusade.”
“Who?” Tina had to ask, although she well knew.
A New World Plain Language Bible. A well-thumbed copy of The Fountainhead. Miniature scales of justice. Photographs of family, friends, of Sabrina Colter with a who’s who of conservative politics: Deukmejian, Cheney, Bork, Wilson, Meese, Jerry Falwell and the President of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan. Kirby had lingered to watch Sabrina check her lipstick in a reflection, plump them, nick away an imperfection with a manicured fingernail and then look up to see that he was watching her, and she didn’t look away, stared back, said nothing, unabashed, inscrutable and, for one terrifying moment, he was certain that she could read his mind.
“To what end?”
Kirby shook his head. “I don’t know, Z.”
“War on Drugs,” Tina guessed.
“Let’s hope it’s that straightforward. Because now?” Kirby rolled Tina over and pushed himself up to look at her, going full cynical. “They’ve got themselves a High Priest of Snitchdom.”
She said, “Saad? My Saad?”
Kirby nodded and thought of Saad, sitting presently in some bleak DEA interrogation room, eagerly waiting to be deposed, anxious, animated, and so, so determined to please.
“Everybody’s Saad Fanous,” Kirby said. “He’s preaching to the choir.”
Tina pulled him down. “Amen.”
—
A STUMPY GUATEMALAN BODYGUARD squared his shoulders and from behind the heavy, carved oak door peered out at Fish and his badge held high.
“I’m with the DEA,” Fish said. “I have a federal warrant here for Nicholas Mahrez, please step aside.”
The bodyguard spoke without an accent. “I’ll get him—”
But Fish pushed past, into the yawning foyer of the Spanish mission mansion—
“I said I’ll get him.” The Guatemalan, failing to register the serious and sanctioned intent of the federal interloper, tentatively put his hand on Fish and suddenly three uniformed county deputies on loan to the Southern District Interagency Task Force were surging in on Hazel Fish’s heels, lifting the bodyguard and slamming him into a wall, where he made a flat-tire noise.
Fish said, “No, I’ll get him.”
A thrumming drew his eyes down the hallway, where a slender, astonishingly beautiful woman stood reacting oddly to the commotion, stumbling backward and pounding on the walls with the heels of her hands, her mouth open in a panicked strangled scream, a thin shriek, like a frightened rabbit Fish had witnessed, once, trapped by two coyotes outside Borrego Springs. A big diamond flashed on her finger as she turned and lost balance, her hands fluttering out to catch herself.
Fish reflexively pulled his sidearm and started after her. “Ma’am—ma’am, STAY WHERE YOU ARE.”
But she didn’t stop, she stumbled on, down the hallway, hands groping for the walls, as if drunk. She crashed against a table. A huge handblown glass bowl lurched and shattered on the floor, and she went down with it, onto the lacerating shards of glass. Hands and knees. Shrieking. Blood painted her dress, smearing the tile as she struggled to get up.
Gun caught up with her. Her blood was everywhere.
“Jesus. Okay, okay, okay—stop. Lady, don’t move—” He felt the stupidity of the gun in his hand. The bodyguard yelled something and struggled, but couldn’t get free from the deputies who held him.
The woman kept crawling.
“Lady, please.”
Fish was trying to find his holster, to stow his ridiculously unwieldy .44 and minimize the damage the woman was doing to herself, when a tall, lean man came running out of a room at the end of the long hallway, a Bren automatic outstretched in the onrushing man’s hand.
“She can’t hear you!”
A deputy yelled, “Gun!”
Fish recognized Stix Mahrez. Forty going on twenty and improbably tall for a surfer. The silky thinning scatter of white-blond hair trailed his head like motion lines, the easy good looks, gentle Anglo-Saxon features, kind eyes: a California dream boy, eternally young.
His Bren pointed directly at Fish’s head. “Who are you?”
“DEA! DROP THE WEAPON!”
Now both deputies had drawn their sidearms. It was a badly choreographed chop-socky film standoff. Fish almost laughed.
“She’s deaf,” Mahrez said. “Her name is Rose, and she can’t hear you.”
“Put the weapon DOWN, sir.”
The weeping woman crawled to Mahrez, her arm bleeding, nestled into his protective crouch, and Fish saw the mad melt of vermillion scarring across one eye and everything behind it, skin melted so perfectly it looked phony, some horrible joke played on that otherwise perfect face and form. Moved to tears, Fish’s eyes flooded. He looked away, self-conscious, blinking, blotting his cheeks with the sleeve of his shirt.
“She’s deaf,” Mahrez kept saying, and he let his gun drop to his side, and then placed it on the floor, and signed something to her with his hands, taking the woman in his arms before the local cops swarmed them.
—
“THIS IS SUCH INTERAGENCY HORSESHIT. I really was onto something. With my hate-crime sting,” Tina said gloomily, pulling her chipped nails through tangles in her hair. “Now I’m nowhere. Talk about a total waste of six months.”
The liminal cerulean twilight held Kirby’s bedroom in its limbo. A faint wash of moonglow smeared the whorled western sky. They lay limbs overlapping in loose knots of comforter and sheets and pillows that had fallen off the bed with them on their second go.
“You can’t replace him?”
A voice cut through, from a turntable, the raw pain of a torch song tempered by the strange remove of modern jazz. Notes held, cherished, bent, and released.
“I’m dealing with apocalyptic, Second Amendment crazies who think we’re under threat from Sinister Swarthy People Everywhere. No, love, Saad was my ticket, without him I’m shit out of luck.”
Skeptically: “An Egyptian car salesman?”
“It’s all part of a gathering storm, Kirby. I mean, the whole Iran hostage thing was just the preamble. As the Cold War fizzles out, all this mischief we keep pulling in the Fertile Crescent? Or the mujahideen with the Soviets in Afghanistan? Someday those chickens will come home to roost.”
“At least we’re talking about getting rid of the nukes.”
“Smoke screen. Never happen.” Tina got up, wrapping the comforter around her, her bare feet squeaking across the hardwood floor. “And don’t even get me started with Salvador and Nicaragua. Ollie North and his so-called Freedom Fighters.” She found the can of beer and drained half of it, abruptly changing gears again. “But seriously, your new boss doesn’t even look old enough to drive.”
Kirby found a pillow and shoved it under
his head. He loved watching her wind up. “Yeah, well. Supposedly her appointment was some quid-pro-quo thing between a certain sitting senator and the White House. And no, I know what you’re thinking, but she did not trade moist and delicate favors for the job.”
“What then?”
“Demonstrable piety, a glorious Moral Majority bloodline, and a wink to the evangelical base—I believe she even worked directly for Weyrich, right out of college—did a short stint with Justice, couple of years clerking for Burger on the Supreme Court. Rumor is she wrote his dissent on Wallace v. Jaffree, the silent-school-prayer thing.”
“Piety. Fuck me.” Tina sat on the edge of the bed, wouldn’t look at Kirby. She finished the beer. “Before you sleep with her, ask to see photo ID. That’s all I’m saying.”
“She’s not stupid, is my point, I guess.”
Tina made no comment.
Kirby touched her ankle lightly with his finger. “I’m not going to sleep with her.”
Tina made a doubtful noise.
“I’m gonna have to play along on Mahrez, yes, which I’m hoping will be mostly a fool’s errand,” Kirby explained. “Meantime, I keep working my cross-border crack case, find the Kingpin dope slinger, and show my new U.S. attorney how this job is done.”
“As if you know.”
She was teasing him. Kirby just smiled.
“I bet those old SCOTUS goats loved her briefs.” A new song began on the turntable. Sadder. Tina looked sidelong at him. “What is up with this noise?” She meant the music.
“Lily Himes.”
“You don’t seem like a hepcat, Kirby, no offense. Jazz? I took you for a Flock of Seagulls, Men At Work kinda guy.”
“Gay?”
She giggled. “New romantic.”
“I only listen to this jazz,” Kirby said, over the rolling sorrow of a stand-up bass lead. “Himes, Lily. Japan sessions, 1961. It’s an import rerelease on Blue Note.”
“Japan.” Tina frowned. “You’re buying imports and reading the liner notes?”
Kirby said, “Long story.” He didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
