Wambaugh, Joseph - Floaters

by Floaters (lit)

  He drove out to El Cajon Boulevard and asked the first hooker he saw if she'd ever come in contact with a dumpy old white guy named Mr. Boggs. She hadn't. He asked every girl on the boulevard the same question that night.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EVEN WITH OLYMPIC CHAMPION ROD DAVIS AT THE HELM, THE Aussies so far hadn't been able to beat Team New Zealand. The Kiwis were handling the Aussies as they'd handled everyone else, and giving bouts of anxiety to the Keeper or the Cup every night since the challenger races had begun.

  Nine days had passed since. Blaze met the Kiwi crane operator and Simon Cooke, yet she'd phoned Ambrose only once to say he shouldn't worry, that she was confident. That she shouldn't rush things.

  She was confident? She shouldn't rush things? Was he insane to conspire with someone like Blaze Duvall? He wondered how many years he'd have to serve if the conspiracy failed? If he was exposed!

  In his heart he knew the answer to that: None. He'd rather the than spend one day behind bars. Ambrose Lutterworth could never face exposure, let alone a prison term.

  Blaze Duvall. A face on the darkened ceiling, grinning at him in that way of hers. Undeniably bright and charming, in the way that a street person is charming. Not that he'd ever associated with someone streetwise. In his life, in his world, the most savvy people he'd ever known he'd met in an eight-month army stint during the Korean War. That was before severe asthma had resulted in a medical discharge. He hadn't even succeeded at being a soldier. He'd overheard his mother tell his father that men with IQs of 85 could succeed at that.

  During the months when he was a patient at the army hospital, he read unstated censure in his mother's letters, as though a respiratory disease implied a lack of patriotism. He thought he'd have been a good soldier if he'd had the chance.

  Ambrose needed reassurance from Blaze Duvall. If nothing else, he needed her hands . And at last, after nine days, she'd phoned to say she'd see him on Saturday evening, the fifteenth of April. That she'd be at his house sometime before midnight, hopefully with good news.

  When he'd asked how she felt about their chances, Blaze would only say, "I can deal with them, Ambrose. They're men, aren't they?"

  Easy for her to be flippant, a woman like her. How could she know, how could anyone know, what his life had been like before the Cup? He'd always suffered from insomnia, and he raked emotional trash during the hour of regret, obsessively uncovering every peccadillo, every humiliation, every failure he'd experienced in his uneventful life. A former, lady friend once told Ambrose that some people were unable to dwell on past successes, only on failures. He didn't tell her that there were so few successes.

  Then, after he'd become Keeper of the Cup, after he'd dined with friends , after he'd signed autographs for people in a dozen foreign countries, he'd lie in bed at night and go to sleep recollecting triumphs .

  So while Blaze Duvall kept him at bay, unable to fathom how anxious he was, how fearful, he strove to forgive her insensitivity. How could he expect a person like Blaze Duvall to even grasp the concept of glory?

  Ambrose got out of bed and took his second sedative. He hated to do that, but at last he fell asleep, awakening at daybreak with a pounding headache.

  On Saturday morning, after returning from aerobics, Blaze found an urgent message from Dawn Coyote on her machine. The younger woman said, "It's me. Phone right away!"

  Blaze phoned twice, but Dawn didn't answer. She reached Dawn at two o'clock in the afternoon.

  "What is it?" Blaze asked. "Don't tell me you got busted last night?"

  "No," Dawn said, "but I wanted you to know I'm outta here!"

  "Outta where?"

  "Town. San Diego. I'm leaving and I ain't coming back."

  "Where're you going?"

  "I ain't sure yet, but I gotta get out."

  "What happened?"

  "It ain't happened yet, but it's gonna happen tomorrow."

  "What is?"

  "I can't say."

  "Dawn!"

  "Honest, Blaze, I can't say! It's better for you if you don't know! I'm scared!"

  "Of what? Did you kill somebody?"

  "No, but somebody's gonna kill me if I ain't outta here before Monday morning. That's my deadline."

  "What deadline?"

  "I can't say. But I gotta work hard tonight and catch as many dates as I can. It's my last night on these streets."

  "If you can't tell me anything, why'd you call?"

  "To say so long. And to tell you I'll drop off your answering machine this afternoon."

  "You know I don't like you coming here, especially if you're in trouble."

  "I ain't in trouble today," she said. "I'm gonna be in big trouble Monday if I'm still in town."

  "I love a mystery." Blaze sighed. "Come by at five o'clock, but no later. I've got a big evening planned with a crew of sailors."

  "You're doing sailors , Blaze?" Dawn exclaimed. "I can't believe it! Where do ya catch 'em? Down by the Thirty-second Street navy yard?"

  A cormorant veered, a gull plunged, a pelican soared. Seabirds were gloriously happy on this cool and blustery April morning. Fortney was sitting on the boat seat, enjoying the show, with his hands in the pockets of his blue flotation jacket. Suddenly a shaft of sunlight flashed on a leaping fish. Stormlight on the water seemed to fill sea creatures with inexpressible joy. Fortney felt it; Leeds only felt cold.

  Leeds, who always wanted to show off his muscular calves, was in shorts. He also wore his jacket, but he was shivering. "Sometimes I miss the good old days when I had Saturdays off," he said as he steered the Boston Whaler out onto Sail Bay.

  "You can cure that by walking into the boss's office and saying you wanna go back to four-wheel patrol," Fortney reminded him. "Then you can get weekends off."

  "You might get stuck with partners you don't like even more than you don't like me," Leeds said. "You ever liked anybody? Your ex-wives, for instance? Or your ex-cat?"

  "Liked my ex-parakeet," Fortney said. "But he got eaten by my ex-cat, who my ex-wife accidentally ran over with my ex-car after her lawyer put me into poverty. Nowadays, people learn the word sue right after momma . And sue ain't a girl's name. For things that used to get you called moron, they now get you a lawyer's business card. You're not a moron, you're a plaintiff."

  "No wonder you're so cranky and bitter," Leeds said. "You're lawyer-whipped."

  "So when're you going?" Fortney wanted to know.

  "I ain't going nowhere."

  "Then why're you bitching about working Saturdays?"

  "Sometimes I like to hear a voice. You ever notice you don't open your mouth till you have your third cup of coffee? I might as well bring a karaoke machine to work. I could get more conversation outta Marcel Marceau." Fortney said nothing. Leeds nodded at him. "My point exactly ." Fortney thought maybe he could bear idle conversation after his second cup of coffee. There was no point in responding to Leeds's bitching. He knew that his young partner enjoyed the benefits of "yachting," which is what dry-land cops called the Harbor Unit's water patrol. Leeds just liked to babble and bitch, but after twenty years of police work older cops tended to talk less, and Fortney was no exception.

  On Sail Bay slanting light beaming through the low clouds had turned the bay into a glitter of silver spangles. Fortney started to call his partner's attention to it but gave up the idea when Leeds said, "It's dead out here. Let's go down to Coronado. See if that babe's still working lunch. What's her name, Lois Lane?"

  "That's Superman's squeeze. This one's Linda Lantz."

  "Yeah, that one. Wanna go see her?"

  "Remember last time we went there for our afternoon tea and cookies?"

  "Yeah," Leeds said. "I remember." One winter afternoon they'd decided to take a cruise down to San Diego harbor. The ocean was glassy when they'd left Mission Bay, but it had soon turned choppy. Leeds had spun his blue cap around backward and opened her up, getting them out past the kelp beds in minutes. The vast meadows of kelp discouraged frequent ru
ns back and forth between Mission Bay and San Diego harbor, but when the tide was high, small boats could cut their travel time by motoring between the shoreline and the kelp, On that day they'd had to circle it, cruising out on the ocean.

  Cloud shadow and whitecaps. Shafts of light set the whitcaps aflame. Fortney watched low, swirling puffs of cloud tear apart and re-form in a thousand wispy shapes. He would never voluntarily return to the streets.

  As they entered San Diego harbor a nuclear sub was cruising out from the sub base. A young officer on the conning tower gave the police boat a salute as they passed. Leeds , who'd never been in military service, returned it with a sharp, Bill Clinton-like gesture. Fortney just waved at the sub with his fingers.

  One of the home-port aircraft carriers was docked at the North Island Naval Air Station quay that afternoon. Fortney wanted to cruise close to see if it was the Constellation or the Kitty Hawk , but Leeds said, he needed to deliver his hungry body to a ham sandwich, coffee, and the size-forty bustline belonging to Linda Lantz, the smart-mouthed waitress who worked in an eatery by the ferry dock.

  That day she managed to keep the cops entertained longer than anticipated, and it was after 5:00 P.M. when they said good-bye. The sun had already dropped behind Point Loma and darkness was falling on the bay. And with darkness the pleasure-boat traffic in San Diego harbor had vanished.

  When the cops pulled away from the dock, they spotted boat activity under the Coronado bridge near one of the huge concrete piers. A pair of 32-foot boats belonging to the Harbor Police were up to something. The Harbor Policecalled "Harbor Ducks" by the San Diego copswas the port district force that patrolled San Diego harbor, but not Mission Bay.

  Despite Fortney's protests about minding their own business, Leeds drove under the blue-steel span that soared almost two hundred and fifty feet straight up, linking San Diego with Coronado. Every year about a half-dozen wretched souls would ignore the suicide hotline number on top of the bridge and end their lives in the cold waters of San Diego Bay. And one had done it twenty minutes before Leeds and Fortney approached in the Whaler.

  She had very long fair hair that fanned in the salt water, glinting in the glare of the police spotlight as the Harbor Police dragged her by the feet toward their boat. Even though she had reached terminal velocity before striking the water, she had not died on impact. Pink froth clogged her nose and mouth, caused by aspiration of air and salt water, the foam indicating pulmonary edema. That she'd lived for those few moments was extraordinary because when she'd struck the water she'd burst.

  When the Harbor Police lifted her into the boat, Fortney and Leeds could see her intestines spilling through a tear in her cheap cotton dress, and Fortney, who'd always feared dying in dark water, said, "Thank you very much, partner. Just what I needed before the liver and onions I'd planned to cook tonight. But which is now going to the neighbor's Airedale."

  Leeds looked around at the otherwise quiet harbor and said, "It's creepy out here at night. Let's go home."

  But when they were halfway out of the harbor and still half a mile from the tip of Point Loma, they heard a thundering roar aft. A black cigarette boat pounded past them in a throbbing, chugging blast of water. Then the driver trimmed his out-drives up and kicked rooster tails fifty feet in the air, hitting the cops like water cannons. Both cops got soaked, and Leeds turned on the blue light and throttled forward. But they had to give up the chase. The cigarette boat's twin 454 Chevy engines were doing sixty knots, and the Whaler's twin 120 Johnson outboards were no match. When the cigarette boat got past the jetty, it turned toward Imperial Beach and was gone.

  "Like a dachshund chasing a whippet," Fortney said.

  He got on the VHF to report the incident and make inquiries, later learning that the boat belonged to a daring drug smuggler who made five or six runs a year, usually much later at night. Sometimes he'd take his cigarette boat all the way into the Chula Vista marina. Twice the Harbor Police had pursued him, but their twin 455's couldn't keep up as he blasted across San Diego Bay. They thought he might be coming all the way from Mexican waters.

  On one occasion the smuggler had been clearly seen after being lit by a police searchlight. The driver was a tall, middle-aged white man in a golf cap, with what was described as a "goofy grin."

  Fortney had wondered why the hell the guy was so theatrical, using a cigarette boat to haul dope when he could just drive it across at the Tijuana port of entry like every other drug dealer in western America. But after hearing the description, he'd said to Leeds, "Wait a minute! Cigarette boat? Golf cap? Goofy grin? What's George Bush doing these days?"

  On this Saturday afternoon Fortney clearly recalled that winter day and the cigarette boat. But mostly he remembered the lonely corpse in the dark water. He said to Leeds, "Let's stay here in our quiet little bay, okay?"

  An hour later Fortney was knocked from the bow of another cigarette boat right into their quiet little bay.

  It happened when the cigarette boat, this one red with yellow stripes, came throbbing past Vacation Isle. A thirty-something bearded Saudi, wearing a marble-bag European bikini, was driving. And what a beard he had. Leeds, ever political, said it was dense enough to nest two pelicans and Clinton's diminutive adviser, George Stephanopoulos. And they figured the guy wasn't really rich by Saudi standards, which meant he could buy the Islandia hotel for cash but might have to get financing for the Hilton.

  As could be expected, he had four very young American babes, in bikinis even skimpier than his, cruising with him. They'd been having their own version of a floating rave party involving an imaginative mix of ecstasy, the trendy hallucinogen costing thirty bucks a tablet on the current market, and peyote. The Saudi was very annoyed to be stopped for speeding.

  Leeds rafted up to him and tied up to the cleat, asking for the guy's license and finding five pairs of eyeballs staring blankly at him.

  Leeds glanced back at Fortney, who shrugged. Which meant: Give him the attitude test.

  The Saudi flunked the test instantly. "I do not concern about your ticket!" he said to Leeds. "The peoples in my country receive more money in one day than you will have make in your life!"

  "Choosing between Iraqis and Saudis was like choosing between lawyers and insurance companies, wasn't it?" Leeds said to one of the gorgeous zombies.

  "I have not understood what you mean," the indignant Saudi said.

  "He just asked if you've ever heard of Rodney King," Fortney replied, as Leeds wrote down the driver's-license information,

  "Of course we have king!" The Saudi looked to his young companions for translation, but the soberest of the four was watching a weeping madonna in the boat's exhaust and she was smiling beatincally at the mother of God.

  Leeds climbed onto the bow of the cigarette boat and waved his hand before the eyes of the leggiest bimbette, the one with a coppery ponytail. She was toasting herself on her tummy, a black thong deliciously lost in the crack of her suntanned buns.

  "Don't that feel uncomfortable?" Leeds asked, "I mean, do you like giving yourself a Melvin all day long?" Fortney said with a sigh, "Barefoot girl with cheeks of tan. You could take her pulse with an hourglass."

  She couldn't care less what the cops said. She was scoping out a winged purple pony galloping across the Ingraham Street bridge. Waiting for the fucking horse to get sick of the car traffic and fly!

  "Whadda you wanna do," Leeds asked Fortney, "with this boatload of living dead?"

  "Ship of fools," Fortney said. "Brain-nuked. They'd need three weeks to come up with a message for an answering machine."

  Leeds sensed that Fortney was as indifferent and lazy as he was. "Wanna let em skate?"

  "Yeah, if Alli Baba here signs the ticket without further ado, he can put a Handi Wipe on his bean and offer thanks to Mecca."

  The Saudi scrawled his name across the citation and jumped back behind the wheel, gunning the engines the moment the cops were reboarding the patrol boat.

  Leeds made it. For
tney made it with one foot on the gunnel just as the hallucinating Arab dropped it into gear. The cigarette boat jerked the cleat right out.

  Fortney stayed where he was, but the cigarette boat roared from under his right foot. Leeds watched in astonishment as Fortney dropped straight down like an anchor until nothing was visible but his floating blue hat. Then the flotation jacket popped him up like a cork.

  An hour later the bimbettes were sobering up in the company of two happy lifeguards who came to the Harbor Unit's assistance. And the Saudi was on his way to jail for driving under the influence, with his boat impounded. Fortney eventually returned to the Harbor Unit office with blue lips, chattering teeth, and clammy underwear. The lifeguards couldn't have been jollier if they'd been hanging ten on the Banzai Pipeline. They were sick and tired of the cops dissing them with old Beach Boy songs whenever they motored by, so after they helped rescue Fortney and assisted in wrapping up the deadheads on the cigarette boat, they just had to drop by the Harbor Unit to check out Fortney's goosebumps.

  When the lifeguards entered, they found Fortney pushing a broom, wearing nothing but swimming trunks and a blanket. His dripping uniform was lying in a puddle on the floor and his holster and gun were draped over the back of a chair. He was sweeping up sand, seaweed, and assorted flotsam and jetsam that had oozed and slithered out of his clothes.

  "Whatcha doin', dude?" the older lifeguard asked cheerfully.

  "What's it look like?" Fortney croaked. "I'm practicing curling for the winter Olympics."

  The younger lifeguard said to the other one, "Dude, I am just unstoked and unvibed."

  "Whadda ya mean, dude?" his partner said with an evil eye aimed at the shivering cop.

  "I mean, like, we thought we wanted to raise a cop of good cheer? And whadda we end up with? A frozen copsicle!"

  "If my nine wasn't drying out," Fortney said to the lifeguards, "I'd blast you moondoggies right outta your flip-flops."