Silicon Beach
Page 33
The distraction gave the Judge time to consider. They were the real McCoy. They were definitely in a jam. With few options and a dwindling time frame. It was his country too. It wasn’t unreasonable of them to ask. He’d probably be okay if he was careful.
Katy, his new bride, eight and half months pregnant, would hit the roof if she knew he was playing spy. He wouldn’t tell her. It was guy stuff. She didn’t need to know.
The Judge looked up at Jackson, trying to catch his breath, and nodded his head. Jackson and Thompson let out sighs of relief together, tension lines lifting a little from their faces.
The Judge snared Annie with her leash and the four, three men and the quadruped, walked back toward the little interior beach house he and his wife had borrowed from her parents for a week. It was supposed to be a working vacation for the Judge. Apparently so it would be.
As they walked, Jackson filled the Judge in on the emergency password to use with Mr. X, showed the Judge a picture which he wasn’t allowed to keep, explained the drill for dropping the information on Fashion Island, and went over the scheduled timing three times, emphasizing the Judge’s timing had to be exact.
As the Judge’s vacation cottage came into view, Jackson and Thompson melted away into the fog, as though they’d never been.
Perhaps it had just been a bad dream, thought the Judge. He stuck his hand into his pocket and pulled out the card he’d been given. It read: Frank Jackson, Senior Supervisory Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
He thought about the last thing they’d said before they’d disappeared.
“What religious group is it? Is it the free-willed running water Baptists?” The Judge had asked.
“No.” Jackson had replied.
“A Mormon splinter group from Utah?”
“No.”
“Okay, what religious group, gentlemen?” The Judge figured he had a right to know.
Jackson had responded with a single word. A word that lay there between them, taking on a life of its own.
“Muslim.”
Chapter 2
Forty-five minutes later the little ferry creaked as the Judge drove his XKE Jaguar down the sloping board ramp and onto its flat deck. It was a drive on-drive off ferry, both ends low to the water so vehicles could drive on at Balboa and drive off on Balboa Island. It had been a fixture in Balboa Harbor forever, dutifully plying back and forth across the bay all day and most of the night. He had fifteen minutes before he was to ride back in the other direction, back to the Balboa Peninsula from Balboa Island, and bump into Mr. X.
It was still early. He was the only passenger. An old captain with a grizzled beard watched him from the tiny wheel house, admiring the Jag. A young college student with acne was the deck hand, perhaps all of 19, sliding blocks under the Jag’s wheels, then bringing the car gate down behind him.
The Jag was a convertible, racing green, vintage. The Judge was too tall and now too fat to look dignified in it. He stuck up above the windshield like a carrot top, his paunch pushing against the steering wheel. But he loved the car.
It had been tried and true since he bought it new in 1969. Except for the Lucas electrical system, which he overlooked, the way a proud parent overlooks a club foot. There had been a day when he’d felt swashbuckling in the car. He had been younger and thinner. Once. It was hard to remember those days now. Memories faded.
The Judge still felt he cut an imposing figure in his dark blue Blass jacket, tan slacks, soft blue shirt open at the collar. But only after getting out of the Jag. Damn near scraping the ground with his knees and throwing his enormous bulk skyward to free his frame from gravity and regain a standing posture from inches off the pavement in the Jag’s low seat.
He walked to the stern of the ferry to watch the mist folding around the wake, making the shore line indistinct. The Balboa Pavilion, framed by the motionless Ferris wheel and the moored boats, big and small, lost color and then some form as the mist closed in.
This was the Balboa Peninsula, separating the blue Pacific from Newport Harbor, a long narrow strip of land lined with mostly vacation homes, terminating in The Wedge, a famous surf break shared reluctantly by surfers, boogie boarders and body surfers. Triangulated between the rock jetty leading out to sea at the mouth of the bay and the shore.
The Judge and his new wife, Katy, had borrowed the little house here for a week’s working vacation. And the past four days had been great. The two had taken long walks along the beach at sunset, and sampled the fare of several famous Orange County restaurants in the evenings. Annie, their golden retriever, had come, racing around the beach in the early morning and as the last rays of the sun disappeared. Leash-less. Free. Chasing seagulls and daring the waves to get her wet.
He turned to look toward the ferry’s bow. He’d be coming back across the bay to Balboa in ten minutes, hopefully engaged in a casual conversation on this same spot. Currently the stern, his position would change to be the ferry’s bow when it reversed its course and headed back.
Balboa Island was rapidly approaching. Its color and form materializing out of the fog. A collection of roof tops, tied up boats, fuel dock and sand.
The ferry powered toward a point thirty feet up shore, compensating for a steep tide that would carry them diagonally into the ferry’s dock. The water was an green grey, white whirls showing up at the bow as the blunt ferry forced its hull toward shore. The Judge had a networking meeting to lead at the Balboa Bay Club, just the other side of Balboa Island on the mainland. He’d have to be a little late this morning, his new charge preempting his schedule. He’d get this over quickly and be done with it.
The young dock hand suddenly jumped up from his perch on the side rail near the bow, waving his hands frantically in the air. Screeching at the captain to stop. The Captain slammed the boat into reverse, almost knocking the Judge over, stopping all forward progress. Then moved to neutral, idling the engine. The ferry sat there in the middle bay, drifting seaward with the outflowing tide, perhaps fifty feet from shore.
The young man leaned over the low ramp that was the bow, arms disappearing into the water, screaming again over his shoulder, this time for help.
The Judge arrived first, leaning over to see the young man with a death grip on a single arm and hand he had hauled partly out of the water. The balance of the person submerged. The Judge knelt down and helped, finding the opposite shoulder just beneath the surface, and together they hoisted the man up and on to the deck, soaking the Judge’s suit in sea water in the process.
They stood there for seconds looking at their catch, the boat drifting to sea with the tide, the grizzled old captain rushing up to see.
“Son of a bitch,” muttered the captain.
The young dock hand made a dash for the lee side of the ferry. Losing most of his breakfast.
It was the body of a man. Dressed in a dark suit. Leeching water in all directions on the deck. He wore soggy black shoes, heavily polished, a white shirt, and a red silk tie with a yellow emblem in the middle, still around his neck but loose, in danger of slipping off.
There was only one thing missing.
The man had no head!
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Newport Bay will be available in the Fall of 2016.