Devil's Harbor

by Alex Gilly

  Finn fared well at sea. It was ashore where he struggled, and before he was married he’d lived a fitful life, observing an iron discipline aboard the Interceptor, then drinking to blackout between shifts.

  Then he’d met Mona and fallen in love and they were married, and for the first few months he’d managed to keep his drinking in check.

  In law school, Mona had been pursued by a series of calculating and ambitious men who had wooed her with the same aloof self-interest with which they practiced contract negotiation. She’d made a point of avoiding corporate lawyers ever since, which hadn’t proved too difficult after she’d chosen to devote her career to immigrants’ rights.

  She’d met plenty of good men in the not-for-profit sector, and had even dated a few, only to discover that good men tended to leave her a tinge dissatisfied—90 percent satisfied, say, as though their good intentions prevented them from reaching that final 10 percent. She’d felt like she had an itch that was always just out of their reach.

  There’d been nothing calculating about Finn’s courtship. His pursuit had been frankly carnal, reckless even, and while he had shown genuine interest in her work and her ideas, he hadn’t seen her work as worthier than his own; as far as he was concerned, she was doing her job and he was doing his. He was interested in her mind, but it was her body that he wanted first. Mona had been attracted to his directness, his blue eyes, and, if she was honest with herself—and this she found hard to reconcile, given her vocation—even his job. That Interceptor you spend all night driving over the sea … how much horsepower did you say it had? In bed, the corporate lawyers hadn’t cared about her, while the social activists had done nothing but. Finn seemed both to care and not to care. There was nothing calculating about Finn.

  They were married and they were happy, especially in bed, but then a year into it Finn had disappeared on a binge. When he’d slunk back through the front door, there’d been tears and apologies and promises, and then a couple of good months. Then he did it again. That time, Mona moved back to her parents’ house, and for a while she’d even refused to take his calls and Finn had had to plead his case through Diego. Eventually, she’d caved—she dreaded that out-of-reach itch—but she’d been self-aware enough to realize she was caving, so she’d negotiated a contract with him, which amounted to: once more and I’m gone. So Finn had made her another promise and so far he’d stuck to it, even though he refused to go to those meetings she wanted him to attend. After a year and a half without a drink, she’d stopped mentioning the meetings.

  Now, however, with the shooting, she wanted him to see a counselor. Post-traumatic stress, she’d said. Grief processing. Talk it out.

  But talking wasn’t Finn’s way. His way was to keep going. Stay busy. When the darkness creeps in, crowd it out with relentless activity.

  His plan now, down on the beach with the cold hard sand beneath his bare feet, was to sweat it out, no matter how much it hurt.

  He ran steady for minute-long stretches, then sprinted as fast as he could for short bursts, using landmarks on the beach like lifeguard towers and storm-water outlets as finish lines.

  His body warmed, his heart thumped, his legs burned. Sweat trickled down his forehead and streamed down his back. He dodged the surf swooshing up the shore. He ran past wet-suited surfers carrying their boards underarm down to the sea, other runners with earphone cords dangling from their ears, housewives walking their dogs even though dogs were forbidden, and svelte young women in leggings doing yoga with their backs to the water, facing the rising sun. He ran past a group of young people in fancy clothes sitting on the sand who had obviously been partying all night. He noticed the bottle in a brown paper bag they were passing around.

  He ran interval sprints the length of Hermosa to the pier that divided it from Manhattan Beach, a distance of two miles. At the pier, he stopped and realized that his legs were trembling. He walked up to the dry stuff, lay down, and did crunches till his abdomen burned. Then he did some more.

  When he was physically spent, he let his body flop onto the sand and lay there for a moment listening to the waves breaking around the pylons. The sun was up now, and a couple of big brown pelicans were sitting on the rail atop the pier above him. Finn gazed at the huge, placid birds. As a teenager, he’d spent hours surfing the pier, and he’d always liked watching the wildlife between sets. Not just the pelicans but the ospreys that circled above and the seals and dolphins that sometimes showed up.

  He hauled himself up and looked out at the ocean. Out in the takeoff zone, five or six guys were sitting on their boards, waiting for the set, their seal-black wet suits glistening in the early light. Finn had run hard; his body hurt. Yet the pall still hung there.

  He figured he’d just have to run harder on the way home.

  * * *

  Finn came through the front door breathing hard and drenched with sweat. Mona was sitting at the table, eating toast. She was smartly dressed but barefoot. Her shiny black leather heels were on the floor by her case, which sat with its telescopic handle extended by the front door. She looked up at him and smiled.

  The organization that Mona worked for was championing, among other things, a bill that outlawed California employers from withholding overtime pay to workers who had irregular immigration status. Mona was flying to Sacramento to testify before the state assembly’s labor committee, and to persuade it to send the bill to the floor. She was staying overnight.

  It wasn’t the first time that members of California’s legislature had heard from Mona Jimenez, and, if she had her way, it wouldn’t be the last. Mona had been only ten years old in 1994, when Californians had voted in a referendum to exclude undocumented migrants from the state’s health care, education, and social security programs, and she had never forgotten the tears on her mother’s face or the worried looks in her father’s and uncles’ eyes. She remembered how the atmosphere seemed to have changed that November day, how she had sat in the backseat of her father’s truck driving through the streets of Lincoln Heights, in the city where she’d been born, and had felt as though when Anglos looked in their direction, their gazes had lingered a moment longer than usual.

  Since Finn was confined to shore duty and no longer did night patrols, their schedules coincided, and he’d promised to drive her to the airport. At the drop-off zone at LAX, he set her case on the sidewalk and opened the passenger door for her.

  She got out and took the handle of her case.

  “Promise me you’ll call the counselor today, Nick,” she said.

  “I promise.”

  She smiled. “Thank you,” she said. Then: “Wish me luck?”

  “Are you kidding? With that brain and those heels, they don’t stand a chance. That bill’s going through, I know it.”

  She grinned, kissed him, and swayed into the airport. Finn sat behind the wheel and kept his eyes on his wife’s behind until an airport attendant waved him along.

  * * *

  Finn walked into the field operations station at Long Beach. The supervisor handed him a clipboard full of shipping-container manifests and took it upon himself to mention the shift Finn had skipped the afternoon before. Finn gave him a long look, and the supervisor didn’t say anything more about it; shooting Perez had made Finn famous—or infamous, depending on your point of view—throughout the CBP.

  He walked along the giant wharf to the truck with the mobile VACIS system installed on its flatbed. It was sweltering inside the operator’s cabin. He tried the air-con; nothing happened. He couldn’t keep the door open on account of the radiation that the VACIS produced—the system wouldn’t operate unless the cabin was sealed. He rang the supervisor.

  “Air-con’s not working. It must be ninety-five degrees in here,” he said.

  “Nothing we can do about it until tomorrow,” said the supervisor.

  Finn swore, loosened his collar, and looked at the pile of cargo manifests. His job was to read the manifest, then look for inconsistencies on the X-ray image
of the container—false walls or ceilings, areas of high density, things that didn’t match the manifest—that warranted opening the container. In other words, his job was to stare at the screen for hours.

  He powered up the system. In an attempt to get comfortable, he took his keys, wallet, and phone from his pockets and put them on the desk next to the monitor. The corner of the card that Mona had given him, for the counselor, was sticking out of his wallet. Finn remembered the promise he’d made.

  He felt irritated. He had a job to do, hadn’t he? It was too hot to call from this damn coffin. And anyway, there was nothing to talk about. Perez had shot at him and he had shot back and now one of them was dead and it wasn’t him.

  What more was there to say?

  * * *

  By the end of his shift, Finn was mentally drained. He’d been sweating for six hours. His clothes clung damply to his body. His eyes were tired. He’d forgotten to bring a bottle of water and now he was thirsty. He finished looking at the last container on his list, powered down the machine, and opened the door.

  It felt good to get some air. He climbed down the steps and walked off the dock. He’d arranged to meet Diego at Bonito’s, a bar in San Pedro, so that they could ask an informant about La Catrina. When he got to his truck, his phone rang.

  It was DMO Glenn’s secretary. “Hold the line for the DMO,” she said.

  The man’s too important to dial his own calls? thought Finn.

  “Agent Finn? I wanted to be the one to tell you that the Internal Affairs investigators have made their report. It’s not good, I’m afraid. Not good for you, I mean. They’re saying there’s insufficient evidence showing that Perez opened fire or even had a weapon when you discharged your weapon and killed him.”

  Finn rubbed his eyes. The pall over his soul darkened.

  “Agent Finn?” said Glenn.

  “I’m here.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Agent Finn, but there’s really nothing I can do about it: they’re recommending the case for prosecution to the U.S. attorney.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Bonito’s was a dim, narrow bar in a single-story block stretching back from a glass front on a barren patch of Harbor Boulevard, just across the Vincent Thomas Bridge from Terminal Island. Its glass front was painted black to chest height, the band of darkened glass above that stenciled long ago with the bar’s name, the lettering now flaking off. There was a little bell above the front door that jingled each time a patron walked through it.

  Diarmud Cutts, an Irishman actually from Ireland and the bar’s current owner, liked to tell that Bonito’s had been the local drinking place for the Japanese fishermen and cannery workers who had once lived on the island, but Finn, who had grown up around Long Beach, knew better: the island’s Japanese population had been interned after Pearl Harbor and had never returned, and anyway the Vincent Thomas Bridge, which connected the island to San Pedro, hadn’t been built until twenty years after the war.

  Cutts also liked to say that Bonito was Japanese for “tuna,” and most everyone let him say it, even the Spanish speakers. If anyone dared challenge his knowledge of all things nautical, Cutts would tell them how many years he’d been in the merchant marine before settling in Long Beach, and of all the seas he’d crossed. The numbers varied according to his mood and degree of sobriety.

  Among Bonito’s regulars were the tugboat crews, longshoremen, shipbuilders, marine surveyors, port police, and cruise-ship maintenance workers from Long Beach and Terminal Island, as well as the crews of the commercial fishing boats that docked in the port of San Pedro. Collectively, they knew more than anyone else about the hidden worlds of the nation’s busiest two ports, and what they didn’t know they could learn discreetly at Bonito’s. Cutts himself had the reputation of knowing everyone and everything. As a source on all matters relating to contraband, he was peerless.

  Finn had been a good customer before his marriage. But for the last year and a half, he had avoided Bonito’s and Cutts. The former was a dive, and the latter was patently a criminal and reminded him of his father and of the life that had killed him. Whenever goods that had plainly come out the back door of one of the port’s bonded warehouses showed up in Bonito’s, Finn had to turn a blind eye if he wanted to keep the line that trawled for bigger fish baited. Cutts didn’t shy from making the most of his immunity: the bar’s old, hardened, chestnut-and-maroon-blotched carpet had a rancid smell rising from it, but all three TVs mounted on the walls were brand-new, flat-screen Toshibas. Although Finn had been avoiding the place, tonight, the mood he was in, he felt in his element.

  The bar itself extended down the left side and was the room’s principal source of light. Diego sat slouched on a stool next to a bowl of nuts and a Dos Equis. He was wearing a black T-shirt over tan cargo pants, his leather jacket on the stool beside him.

  Finn had changed out of his uniform and into spare clothes that he always kept in his truck. He had on an Everlast sweatshirt over Levi’s, his feet cushioned in a pair of pigeon-gray New Balance low-tops. He was nursing a club soda.

  It was a Friday night in the middle of football season. On the Toshibas, a panel of pundits was discussing Sunday’s games. Finn and Diego were discussing Finn’s situation. When Finn told his friend about Glenn’s phone call, Diego wasn’t surprised.

  “The DMO never had your back,” said Diego. “You know why they brought him in, an outsider? Because he’s supposed to be media savvy. He was supposed to give the branch a makeover. Now three months into the job, he’s got a runaway story about a trigger-happy agent? Please. He’s throwing you to the wolves.”

  Finn said nothing.

  “Of course when they call me up to testify,” continued Diego, “I’ll tell them what I saw, end of story. Perez went up that flybridge, came out with a gun, and fired. Then you fired back. Then he went into the water. I was there; that’s what happened and that’s what I’ll tell them.”

  Diego drank from his bottle. Finn toyed with his Schweppes. Without looking, he saw the bourbon on the top shelf behind the bar.

  “You sure it was a gun?” he said.

  Mid-swig, Diego swiveled his neck in Finn’s direction and said, “You’re kidding, right?”

  Finn ground his teeth. “There was a lot of smoke. And the light was bad.”

  Diego stared at Finn. Finn looked at the counter.

  Diego said, “You feeling all right, Finn?”

  “Fine.”

  “I mean, you need to talk about what happened…?”

  “That’s what we’re doing, isn’t it? Aren’t we talking about it right now?” said Finn, sounding sharper than he’d intended.

  Diego put down his beer. “Sure. All right. Whatever you want.” Then he added, “What did Mona say about it?”

  “I haven’t told her yet. She’s in Sacramento at a committee hearing.”

  Diego hesitated, then said, “You know a lot of people hate her, right? Her doing what she does, working for that not-for-profit, all the trouble she’s caused CBP? The lawsuits? You made it hard for yourself, marrying my sister.”

  Finn thought for a moment and said, “She’s your sister. Doesn’t it make it hard for you?”

  Diego smiled. “Yeah, but you can’t choose your sister. You get married, you’ve only got yourself to blame. Everybody knows that.”

  “This from a guy’s been married twice,” said Finn.

  “Exactly. You should learn from my mistakes. Now I live with my dogs, life is simple. I’ve got no problems.”

  Finn smiled. No problems. Right.

  “You’re a real lady-killer, Diego. I can’t understand why your wives left you.”

  Diego grinned. “The first one left because of the second one. There was an overlap.”

  Finn said nothing, waited for the punchline.

  Diego paused, getting his timing right, then said, “And the second one, she liked me better when I was married to the first one.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d heard
Diego deliver that line, but Finn gave him the laugh anyway.

  “Mona’s right,” he said. “You are a moron.”

  Diego chuckled. “You marry a woman like my sister, there was always going to be trouble. I’ve been arguing with her my whole life. She is righteous.”

  Finn shook his head. “We never argue. Not like that,” he said.

  Diego’s eyebrows popped up and he said, “Sure, okay. Whatever. What I’m trying to say is, you’re a Customs and Border Protection agent and she’s a … what do you call it?”

  “An advocate?”

  “Yeah. An advocate for illegals. So, you know, opposite sides. Look, I’m only saying this because you’re my favorite brother-in-law.”

  “I’m your only brother-in-law.”

  “Don’t pick nits. My point is, as far as the CBP is concerned, you’re sleeping with the enemy. So Glenn is a career guy. A civilian, like me. He came over from ICE, right? Worked his whole life in Homeland Security in one branch or another, working his way up? Now he’s got a directorship, he’s up there in his office, he’s got all these field guys under him, most of them ex-military, not giving him any respect; he’s got to make his mark somehow, right, if he wants to make commissioner someday? So if one of his guys is accused of shooting dead an unarmed suspect, and it turns out the guy is the husband of the attorney who’s brought more excessive-force lawsuits against the CBP than anyone outside Arizona, then—”

  “You think he’s going after Mona?” Finn interrupted.

  “I think Glenn needed someone to hang out to dry. If you go down for shooting Perez, he can tell the media he got rid of the rotten apple in the station. At the same time, he can tell his higher-ups in Washington how he got rid of a thorn in the CBP’s side, because if her own husband goes down for excessive force or even murder, Mona’s got no credibility left, does she?”