Desperation Reef

25

On the bridge of the elegant Chris-Craft Cinnamon Girl, Brock stands beside bald, gray-bearded Dane Crockett, who eases back the throttle. Brock feels the big cabin cruiser slow and settle in the bright, late afternoon.

Dane is an irrigation supply wholesaler from Riverside who admittedly joined the Go Dogs for dangerous missions, not so much to help people out but for the rush.

It’s been three days since Todos Santos. All three of those days spent searching at sea.

But as of one hour ago, eureka!

Brock, Mahina, and the five-boat Go Dog flotilla have finally found and surrounded the pirates’ flagship. The rust-stained, blue-and-red steel-hulled trawler Empress II waits at anchor just off San Clemente Island.

Brock’s vengeful heart has been beating hard. His blood pressure is probably off the charts but he doesn’t care. Feels liberated by lying to Casey, such that like his brother’s guilt — and maybe even blood — will not be on his, Brock’s, hands. Besides, he’ll need something very important from Casey, down the line: his innocence.

They’ve had Empress II under watch, at a distance, easing in and keeping in touch by radio. She’s unaccompanied and possibly unmanned. If there are crew aboard, Brock thinks, they’ll have to swim the two hundred feet to San Clemente Island — rocky and current-blasted and forbidding as it is. The island is a bomb and artillery testing ground, for Christ’s sake. A few hundred Navy guys. They’ll drag the pirates ashore and ship them back to Pier 32 in National City. Maybe deport them, for all Brock knows.

The touchy part is boarding Empress II without getting shot, and before anyone can call in reinforcements.

Which means Brock and two of the Go Dogs on Cinnamon Girl will board the old trawler, which from here, through Brock’s binoculars, definitely looks unattended. Almost too good to be true, but it’s possible that the pirates are out on their smaller, faster crafts, patty-hopping for tuna and sharks. Where else would they be?

Brock continues his surveillance. Sees no movement anywhere on the trawler, just the nets neatly stowed and the tag lines swinging with the breeze. The swells are weak, on long intervals, and Empress II rides them heavily. Brock lowers his binoculars.

“Get us close, Dane,” says Brock. “We’ll hop these fuckers.”

Mahina mutters a prayer.

Brock and his vigilantes pull balaclavas over their heads — plain colors, no Go Dog logos on these, only their eyes showing.

“We’re good, hon,” he says. “No one home.”

Brock leans at the stern deck rail, a Smith.40 caliber autoloader jammed into the waistband of his jeans and a red plastic gas can at his feet. Go Dogs Keyshawn and Javier flank him, their weapons holstered.

When Dane gets them close, Brock hoists himself to the low stern gunwale and makes the jostling, wet jump onto Empress II.

Lands well and gets the rope thrown by Mahina, draws Cinnamon Girl tight and ties off.

Keyshawn slings the red gas can onto the trawler, then follows Javier aboard — steadied by Brock.

Pistols drawn and dangling at their sides, Brock leads them into the spacious galley, where Jimmy and Bette Wu had tried to force them into a short sale of the Barrel, and the lawyer with the gun in his briefcase had tried to broker the deal. Where the life vest stows are supposedly packed with fentanyl precursors and frozen shark fins. All locked now, he sees.

They clear the galley and the kitchen, the bridge and the foredeck, the captain’s quarters and the cabins. Check the johns and the showers, the bait and cargo holds, even the cold catch holds — every place a human being might fit.

Brock starts in the captain’s room, splashes the gas over the bed and desk and chairs, the little wall-mounted TV, the shelves and fridge, the tattered, braided oval rug.

Soaks the bridge, the radios, the navigation gear.

The nets and the worktables, the racks of gaffs and guns and finning knives.

The engine room.

The cabins and toilets.

Then the galley and kitchen.

Standing just outside the galley entrance, Brock tosses a lit matchbook onto the gas-soaked table at which Jimmy “King” Wu had sat and laughed and tried to rob his mother.

Flames swoosh and huff.

“You don’t do that kind of shit to people,” he says, the flames swirling. “The Breath of Life doesn’t fucking allow it.”

“Amen, Brother Brock,” says Javier.

They unhitch and scramble back aboard Cinnamon Girl.

Cinnamon Girl and the other four Go Dogs boats — a very old retired police patrol boat from San Pedro, a Boston Whaler, two Baja-style pangas with big Yamaha outboards — bob at rest around her.

They’re a quarter mile away when flames begin to dance atop the bridge and deck of Empress II.

Brock watches through his binoculars as Dane Crockett nimbly guides Cinnamon Girl northwest with the swell.

He hates to watch a seaworthy boat destroyed, but he knows he had to do this, and will have to do more to put things right. To help the victims. The needy and the bullied and abused. Ask not what people can do for you...

“She’s going to blow any second, Brock,” says Dane.

Which she does.

Empress II, an orange, firework-spitting inferno, rages on a blue-black sea.

Three days later, from Cinnamon Girl, Brock and Mahina glass the dark green Luhrs Stallion atop Pyramid Reef off San Clemente Island. The other Go Dog boats form a wavering string in the soft current.

Brock glasses a white man with red hair and a burly Mexican finning sharks in the thick morning fog. They’re working at a table set up on the long Luhrs foredeck, the cabin and convertible observation platform behind them. The windows are dark and Brock can’t see in.

The Go Dog boats drift off to surrounded Stallion, and Dane Crockett eases Cinnamon Girl toward the finners with his silent electric motor.

Brock’s got his phone on burst mode and the shutter muted, and after a quick selfie that he’ll use to open the next Breath of Life post, he points it at the men.

Who look up in surprised unison, knives in their hands. They curse, waving their blades, and Red tries to get something from the pocket of his yellow, bloody, waist-high slicker. But he suddenly sees Javier, leaning over the gunwale of his panga, now drifting motorless through the fog and silently upon him with a sawed-off shotgun.

Two knives and four hands go skyward, then Red swings back to Brock.

“You can’t hide in a mask. You blew up Empress.”

“You burned down the Barrel,” says Brock.

The big Mexican looks eagerly to the cabin but Brock sees no movement there, and the man’s cagey expression seems false.

Brock reads it, too. “Dump the fins.”

Red lowers his knife and his free hand to the cleaning table. “Two days of fishing, over the side? Thousands of dollars of fins?”

Brock nods at Mahina. Who fires a ten-gauge warning shot into a Stallion cabin window. The safety glass fragments into diamonds around a big hole.

With his knife still in hand, Red sweeps the pile of shark fins on the cleaning table into the ocean with his forearm. The Mexican does likewise.

“Empty the buckets,” says Brock, filming again.

Red reaches back and hurls the long, thin-bladed knife at Brock, who sees it pinwheeling toward him through the fog. He dodges it, blood drops smacking his shirt.

Red and the Mexican empty four buckets of shark fins, cursing with each heave. Brock shoots the silvery triangles glittering through the dark, clear Pacific.

Mahina blasts the electronics cluster on the bridge with her shotgun, then the big-game rods and reels lined up along the aft flank of the cabin.

Two fruitless days later, aboard Cinnamon Girl and acting on a tip from one of Casey’s many YouTube followers — Brock, Mahina, Dane, and the Go Dog flotilla jump Bushmaster. She’s one of King Jim Seafood’s sleek red Cigarette boats, thirteen miles off Crystal Cove near Laguna, in international waters. Where she rocks on the pale, breeze-scrubbed sea.

They glass it from an idling, near silent distance.

Darren Fang — Polo — is alone on board, downloading white boxes with “FROZEN FISH” stickers on them over the transom from a man in a white fiberglass panga with twin outboards.

Brock recognizes Danilo, the hapless gunman from the former flagship Empress II.

Who, feet spread, rocks in the stern, is passing up the boxes.

Thirty seconds later, Brock, Mahina, and the Dogs have surrounded them from the four cardinal points of the compass, guns drawn, cursing wildly and ordering their hands up, like furious cops.

Danilo looks up and into the short barrel of Mahina’s shotgun. Drops a box and raises his hands.

Fang — now clad like his boss in a black-and-white LA Kings warm-up suit — turns a half circle, staring silently at his tormentors, then drops the box and puts his hands on his hips like he’s had enough of these crazy California freaks.

As Mahina holds her 10-gauge steady on Darren Fang, Brock motions him onto Cinnamon Girl, then takes the man’s hand and pulls him aboard.

Same for Danilo from the panga.

Dane has already boarded the Cigarette boat and cut open one of the white “FROZEN FISH” boxes. Holds up a clear plastic bag heavy with gray pills.

“Fent?” Brock asks Fang.

Who shrugs and says nothing.

Brock watches Dane as he twists open the Cigarette’s fuel tank cap, then douses the entire boat from a red gas can.

Then clambers aboard the panga, unscrews the fuel line from its tank, then hefts the entire half-full thing over his head and empties it inside the bobbing panga — benches, bait and catch tanks, fore and aft decks, the center console, steering wheel, radio.

Soak it all, thinks Brock.

Dane drops the panga gas tank, throws his red gas can back to Mahina aboard Cinnamon Girl, who smothers it in her big arms like a rugby ball.

The Go Dogs clear out, except for Cinnamon Girl, piloted again by Dane, who nimbly guides his vessel to within twenty feet of the Cigarette.

Brock climbs to the crow’s nest with the flare gun in one hand, and when he stands on the platform sees what an easy shot this is going to be, what with his elevation and the low-slung Cigarette wide open below him.

The flare whooshes into the sleek red speedboat, clanging and caroming off the hull and the seats, spewing pink-black flames and smoke, a thrashing demon with his tail on fire.

Sparks jump into the breeze which carries them a few yards downwind and into the panga, where the gas fumes ignite with a loud thump.

Brock raises a fist to the inferno and steadies himself on the nest rails as Dane guides Cinnamon Girl away from harm.

Mahina watches her husband — a dreadlocked, tattooed figure washed in orange flames — and for a second sees a vengeful ocean god. A haole devil. Or maybe a different species of otherworldly being. She believes in such things. Would like to see a sea god one day. Welcome it into her heart to dwell within her Breath of Life. But as Brock climbs down from the nest, what Mahina decides she sees is just a man answering his calling, testing his limits, fueled, and now almost immolated by, his mysterious, bewildering anger.

A gift? she thinks.

A burden?

From his father?

A moment later, Brock is still in the crow’s nest, admiring his conflagration.

Dane eases Cinnamon Girl away from the Cigarette.

From a hundred yards out Brock watches Bushmaster explode, then slowly list into the sea, a gleaming, helpless former beauty.

Ten minutes later they’ve lowered their respective captives overboard, a hundred choppy feet from a rocky beach on San Clemente Island.

And thrown their cell phones into the ocean.