Finnegan's week

CHAPTER 25

It was nearly 11:00 P.M. by the time Nell’s car arrived back at the main gate of NAS North Island.

Before she parked, Fin said, “I was thinking about stopping someplace in Coronado for a nightcap. Anyone wanna join me?”

“Not me,” Nell said. “I’ve had enough for one evening.” She didn’t say enough of what.

“I’m a little tired,” Bobbie said.

“Okay, guess I’ll have to go it alone,” Fin said.

Almost in unison, both women started to indicate he shouldn’t drink alone. They both stopped, and Nell said, “You go ahead, Bobbie. I’ve really gotta run along.”

Bobbie said, “No, I just didn’t want Fin to have to be by himself. Why don’t you join him? I gotta wash my hair and do some ironing.”

“Well, I won’t be stopping,” Nell said.

“I gotta run along home,” Bobbie said.

Fin said, “All this indecision makes me wanna just go home and improve my mind. Maybe I’ll stop and buy that new book by our country’s greatest living naked author, Madonna.”

When Fin and Bobbie got out, Fin said, “We’ll all team up right here at noon on Monday, right? I’m sure we got enough to arrest Durazo and Pate based on the navy shoe on the severed foot. But I think somebody should positively identify that shoe as being from the stolen shipment. Okay, Bobbie?”

“That’ll be done first thing Monday morning,” Bobbie said. “I’ll go to the morgue myself.”

“After seeing Pate in action tonight, I’m more convinced than ever he’ll spill his guts,” Nell said. “The guy’s a complete psycho in addition to being a doper.”

“I can’t wait till Monday!” Bobbie said.

“But you will, won’t you?” Fin said.

“I’m not gonna go off and do something stupid,” Bobbie said, mischievously. “Like moseying back down to T.J. and staking out Durazo’s car to see what the gang was up to.”

“That’d be about as smart as Julius Caesar moseying on down to the Senate to see what Brutus and the gang was up to,” Fin said.

Bobbie said, “Don’t worry. I’m going straight home, Sherlock.”

“Okay, Watson,” Fin said. “See you Monday.”

Bobbie kissed Fin on the cheek and said, “I wanna be just like you when I grow up.”

He stood watching her drive off, when Nell interrupted his thoughts, saying, “Good night … Sherlock.”

“Give her a break, will ya?” Fin said. “She’s just a kid.”

Before she could stop herself, Nell blurted, “Why don’t you give her a break. She’s obviously ga-ga over the big-city detective. Or is it goo-goo at her age? Kee-rist, you’re old enough to be her …”

“Big brother.”

“Father.”

“I’m only … seventeen years older.”

“Like I said: father.”

Fin didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, “Forty-five is a real tough time for an actor, Nell. She just allows me to pretend I’m not over-the-hill. That’s all she does for me.”

While he was walking away, Nell said, “Still wanna have that drink?”

Four separate Border Patrol agents had a crack at Shelby Pate that night. Their questions varied slightly. His answers not at all, usually delivered in a monotone. The chase through the darkness had sobered him a lot, but he was still twitching and perspiring as he sat in the interrogation room.

The last agent to question him was almost as big as Shelby. He gave Shelby a can of Pepsi and said, “We’ve checked your record. You’ve been in jail a few times.”

“Not for running drugs over the border,” Shelby said. He tried to focus on his questioner’s eyes, but his own eyes kept leaping away of their own volition.

“That’s a nice watch you got.”

“My mother gave it to me.”

“You’re loaded on something, aren’t you?”

“Did some drinking early in the evening.”

“You’re loaded on something else.”

Shelby said, “I already told the other guys, a taxi driver offered to take me to a whorehouse up in the hills somewheres. And when I got there three Mexicans tried to mug me. See these cuts on my hands and legs? I was lucky to get away. I was lucky you guys found me.”

“And how’d you know where to get through the fence?”

“I jist followed the shadow.”

“What shadow?”

“Jist a little shadow that went through the tunnel.”

“What tunnel?”

“It turned out to be a hole in the fence. A little boy jist went through it.”

“And what happened to the little boy?”

“He got lost, I think.”

“Did you ever see him again?”

“I never did. I hope he found his way home, is all.”

“We think you were carrying a load of drugs and got ripped off passing through Deadman’s Canyon. That’s what we think.”

“Is that what you call that place?”

“It’s what the Mexicans call it. The Canyon of the Dead.”

“Then maybe it was a ghost that took me in the tunnel,” Shelby said, and his eyes popped wide. “I think maybe it was.”

“What tunnel? You mean the hole in the fence?”

“Yeah. I thought I was going into hell when I went in that tunnel.”

“Then why did you go?”

Shelby Pate said, “I thought I belonged in hell.”

The Border Patrol agent left him alone then, and later said to his supervisor, “The guy’s whacked out on drugs, but I don’t think we really have anything. He probably got burned trying to make a drug buy, and did have to run for his life. What’ll we do with him?”

“He’s sober enough now,” the supervisor said. “May as well cut him loose. He’s obviously a nut-case as well.”

Shelby Pate called a cab to pick him up at the Border Patrol station. When he was delivered by taxi to Hogs Wild, he was mildly surprised that nobody had stolen the helmet off his bike, a common occurrence at that time of night.

There were still a few bikers in the bar, and two mommas having last call. He recognized one of the bikers, a little guy with a scraggly fringe of red hair down to his shoulders. The biker was trying to persuade one of the mommas to ride home with him.

Shelby interrupted them by tossing a gold Rolex onto the bar. “Gimme an eightball and five hunnerd bucks and it’s yours,” he said.

The biker picked up the Rolex and took it over to the broken sconce next to a jukebox rocking with the thud of heavy metal. The biker examined the gold bracelet more carefully than he did the watch itself, then said, “It’s genuine.”

“Good call,” Shelby said. “Deal?”

The guy handed back the Rolex and said, “I can give you a teener and two-fifty. That’s all I got.”

“Deal,” Shelby said. “Gimme.”

Ten minutes later, Shelby’s bike was roaring toward the pier at Imperial Beach. And twenty minutes after that Shelby was lying on the sand, sweating and shivering. The methamphet-amine made the crashing surf sound like the roar of howitzers. Shelby burrowed into the sand to escape the explosions and to find some warmth. He spilled as much of the meth as he snorted. He lay on his belly and rooted, licking the meth and tasting sand in his mouth.

He was like a giant crab burrowing on his belly on a mist-free night, when a dagger of moonlight inflicted agony on his sensitive eyes.

The Coronado pub was full of Navy SEAL team members who were trying to drink the joint dry before closing time, those who weren’t busy trying to pick up one of several young women who were there to be picked up by the strapping young sailors.

Fin and Nell took a table in the corner after ordering a cognac.

He said, “Here I am, dying of a mid-life crisis, and I have to pick a joint where everyone thinks aging is like AIDS: It can only happen to people who aren’t careful.”

“Wonder if Bobbie comes here,” Nell said. Then, “She’s a pretty good kid, I guess.”

“You sure didn’t seem to like her much.”

“I don’t know who or what I like lately,” Nell said. “This is a cruddy age, isn’t it?”

“I gotta admit, I’ve had a good week though. Getting to know both of you.”

“Both of us?”

“I know you a lot better than I know Bobbie.”

“It didn’t look that way.”

“Was I giving her coy glances?”

“You looked more coy than Princess Di. Middle-aged men who want a woman their own age are so rare they could get on the next Geraldo.”

“Having a young girl pay attention to me made me a little goofy.”

“It’s a cruddy age,” Nell said, patting his hand.

“You just touched me!” he said.

“Does this mean I get to wear your class ring?”

“Wanna go to the beach tomorrow?”

“Why the beach?”

“I wanna see you in a bikini. Got one?”

“A woman my age wears a one-piece,” she said.

“Okay with me. Wanna go?”

“Whadda you look like in a swimsuit?”

“It ain’t pretty,” he said, “but I can build a mean sand castle. I got lots of experience building castles, most of them in the air.”

“Okay,” she said, “let’s go to the beach tomorrow.”

* * *

They were drifting and floating away from him, all the dark shadows holding flickering candles. They were leaving him and he was trying to scream: “NO! NO! I’M ALIVE!”

He couldn’t get the words out because the dry acrid dust of Mexico was in his mouth and in his nostrils. He was slowly suffocating in a grave under a tall tombstone with a portrait of a boy on it. The boy was Shelby Pate, ten years of age. It was his tombstone!

Then a shadow figure approached. It was a woman in a shawl. She might’ve been the mother of the boy with ringworm. She looked down at his grave, and he tried to scream: “DIG ME UP! I’M ALIVE.”

All she did was shriek at him. His ears were full of the dry dust of Mexico, and she shrieked inside his skull. The unearthly shrieking!

Gulls shrieked and screamed and wheeled above him. He opened his eyes and stared at a sky inflamed, at a dawn red as blood. The sound of surf thundered in his ears and he gagged on the sand in his throat. He whimpered and sniffled, and clawed his way out of a dune of drifting sand.

When he sat up his hair and face were white with sand. He didn’t know where he was. A gull hovered in the sky above him, like the Holy Ghost. Shelby covered his eyes and sobbed, swallowing back his terror. It wasn’t until he spotted the remains of his bag of meth lying beside him that the phantasmagoria retreated and he knew he was still alive.

By the time Shelby Pate had snorted enough cringe to get control, and by the time he’d located his bike parked in a vacant lot close to a coffee shop, it was nine o’clock Sunday morning.

He was a fearful sight, with his loose stringy hair full of sand, with dried blood on his hands and on his face, from thrashing through the fence at the international border. He shuffled toward the coffee shop, and a street person loitering outside took one look at him and went scuttling away. After three cups of coffee, Shelby thought he was ready to go home.

Bobbie went for a jog along Coronado Beach in her shorts and T-shirt on Sunday morning. There were lots of hardbodies out, both male and female. It was a dry morning in that a Santa Ana was blowing in from the desert.

Coronado was Bobbie’s favorite beach. She started her run along the sand beside the Coronado Shores high-rise condominiums, a.k.a. Taco Towers because so many wealthy Mexicans from Tijuana owned condos there. She ran north past the Hotel del Coronado, zigzagging through sand dunes tufted with ice plant. She ran north all the way to the Naval Air Station golf course, beside which dogs were permitted to run free on the beach and play in the surf with their owners.

She stopped to watch a dog catching a Frisbee, then paused again at the golf course. Although there were lots of navy personnel on the links that day, she didn’t spot anyone she knew. Then she stopped to say hello to the lone sentry on the beach, where public access was divided from the navy land. After that she turned and ran as hard as she could all the way back to the Towers.

It was a strenuous workout. She arrived home, showered, ate a bowl of cereal, and read the paper. It was very hard to concentrate on the boring election coverage. She went to her file folder and removed the copy of the San Diego police report she’d been given by Fin. Bobbie got out her county map book and pinpointed the addresses of Abel Durazo and Shelby Pate. She was dying to know if they’d come home after having driven off with the Mexican who no doubt was the fence for stolen goods.

Bobbie did not dare admit to Fin or to Nell what she still believed in her heart: that Jules Temple was involved. They’d just scoff, and keep repeating that a guy like Jules Temple would not be stealing navy shoes. Still, there was something about him that made her know he had something to hide.

Impulsively, she picked up the phone. If Abel Durazo answered she’d hang up. If anyone else answered, she’d wing it.

A child said, “Bueno?”

“Do you speak English?” Bobbie asked.

“Yes.”

“Is Abel Durazo there?”

“He’s not home.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is … somebody from his job. I need to talk to him. Did he come home last night?”

The child yelled something in Spanish, then came back and said, “My mother says no, he didn’t come home last night.”

“Thank you,” Bobbie said.

After she hung up, she thought about calling Fin, but of course he’d tell her to cool it till Monday. He’d make her feel like a rookie cop. Like a kid.

She picked up the phone and called Shelby Pate’s number. A woman answered.

“Excuse me,” Bobbie said. “Is this Shelby Pate’s residence?”

“No, this is my residence. Who’s this?”

“I have to speak to him. Is he home?”

“No!” the woman said. “He ain’t home! So he’s out fucking around on you too, huh? Are you one a the speed freaks from Hogs Wild?”

“Sorry,” Bobbie said, getting ready to hang up.

“If you see that scum sucker, tell him for me he’s outta here! Tell him I threw his fucking clothes out in the street at eight o’clock this morning!”

After the line went dead, Bobbie immediately called the Tijuana Police and talked to four different people to whom she gave the names of Abel Durazo and Shelby Pate. She got an English-speaking woman on the line, who said, “Who are you inquiring about?”

“Shelby Pate,” Bobbie said. “I’m a detective with the U.S. Navy. I’m just trying to find out if he’s in jail, or in the hospital or something.”

The woman said, “You gave another name. What was that name?”

“Durazo,” Bobbie said. “Abel Durazo.”

“One moment please,” the woman said.

When she came back on the line she said, “Do you have a pencil? I have another number for you to call.”

Bobbie was excited. Maybe they were in jail, and maybe it had to do with being caught selling two thousand pairs of shoes! When she rang the other number she was given over to a man who spoke nearly unaccented English. “This is Rojas,” he said. “Who do you wish to learn about?”

“Shelby Pate,” Bobbie said. “I’m a detective with the U.S. Navy at North Island. And also I wanna know about Abel Durazo. Are they in jail, or what?”

Rojas said, “I am with the state judicial police. Do you know Mister Durazo very well?”

“No,” Bobbie said. “I’m investigating his possible involvement in a large theft of navy shoes.”

The Mexican cop said, “We have a murder victim in our morgue with the name of Abel Durazo on his California driver’s license and on his pasaporte.”

“Good god!” Bobbie said. “How about Shelby Pate?”

“No, but another man was murdered. A man named Porfirio Velásquez Saavedra, better known to us as Juan Soltero.”

“Is he a receiver of stolen property, by any chance?”

“Yes, and other things. It appears that they killed each other. Durazo was stabbed, and then must have got off one shot before he died. A derringer pistol was found beside him.”

“Could you go to the home of the dead man and search for two thousand pairs of U.S. Navy shoes?” Bobbie asked, and then she had a long conversation with Rojas concerning her investigation.

After she hung up she dialed Fin’s number, but got his answering machine. She dialed Nell’s number and got another machine. She hung up and experienced the longest afternoon of her life. She called Fin and Nell no less than fifteen times, leaving several messages for each of them. The messages sounded progressively more impatient and more excited.

After spending three hours on Mission Beach, most of it under a beach umbrella, Fin and Nell decided to go to his apartment to shower and change for dinner.

“And to do what?” Nell asked, after he made the suggestion.

“Ride the roller coaster,” Fin said.

“I haven’t ridden a roller coaster in twenty years,” she said.

“I ride it every once in awhile. It’s very nostalgic for me. When I was a kid my sisters used to take me for rides with their boyfriends. I sat between them usually. The boyfriends hated my guts.”

They were lying under the umbrella when he’d asked her. He thought she had a terrific body, for a woman of a certain age. She thought he had pretty good buns, but ought to work on his tummy.

Late that afternoon, after eating a hot dog and a hamburger, Fin Finnegan and Nell Salter rode the Mission Beach vintage roller coaster, raising their hands in the air and screaming as they sped down the dips, losing themselves for a while in lovely memories of their lost youth.

When Shelby arrived home he found some of his clothes in the driveway. Some were in the street and some were on the little patch of grass in front of the house. He parked the Harley, jumped off and ran to the front door, discovering that his key no longer fit the lock.

He started banging on the door, yelling, “Bitch! You better open this fucker or it’s goin down!”

His next-door neighbor, the tweaker who’d interrupted him when he’d been trying to landscape the neighborhood, opened his window and yelled, “Hey, dude! Your old lady said to tell you she went home to her momma!”

“She changed the fuckin lock!” Shelby hollered.

The tweaker said, “She told me you ain’t got nothin in the house no more. She threw everything out. By the time she told me, there was people from down the street stealin everything. I got some a your stuff in my garage. You kin come get it.”

Shelby ran to the tweaker’s garage and jerked it open. His camouflage jacket was there, and his extra helmet. He ran inside his own garage and pulled things down from the shelf: every box, every tool, every auto part. The boots were gone!

He ran back outside and said to the neighbor, “My boots! I had some boots in the garage!”

“Didn’t see no boots,” the tweaker said. “I saved your shirts and some jeans and I got a bag full a your sox. Them greasers from down the block, they got your boots, I guess.”

The ox just gaped. Finally he said, “You shouldn’t never steal somebody’s shoes.”

“That’s cold, dude,” the tweaker agreed.

Shelby said, “Some Mexicans got the firin squad for takin a man’s shoes.”

“What firin squad?”

“They got shot.”

The tweaker said, “Dude, you shouldn’t be doin that crystal so early in the morning. You ain’t talkin sense.”

“You shouldn’t never steal somebody’s shoes,” Shelby Pate informed his neighbor. “It’s the worst mistake you can ever make.”

Bobbie Ann Doggett was beside herself with excitement. She thought about calling up the assistant director of security at North Island, but she knew he’d say what Fin would say: “It’ll all keep till tomorrow. Till you’re on duty and can work in a proper investigative environment.”

What could she do now anyway? Nobody was going anywhere. Abel Durazo was on ice, and so was his Tijuana contact, Soltero. Shelby Pate might also be lying in a Tijuana alley with a knife in his ample gut.

Jules Temple would be coming to his place of business tomorrow as usual, none the wiser as far as his employees’ fate was concerned. And how was she going to tie Jules Temple into all this? She wasn’t. Not unless Pate was still alive and willing to talk about it.

So far, everyone who’d come in contact with those navy shoes had ended up dead. Her boss would probably tell her that if she recovered the shoes, the navy ought to send them immediately to Saddam Hussein.

Bobbie sat and tried to read a magazine, cooling her heels until three o’clock. Then she rang up Fin and Nell once again. Bobbie was going bughouse.

After she hung up, she got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and strapped on her shoulder holster, concealing it under her most comfortable cardigan. Then she grabbed her purse and map book and headed for the house of Shelby Pate in National City.

She drove her Hyundai slowly through the ethnically mixed, working-class residential neighborhood, a district with lots of homeboy spider-script sprayed on all the walls. His house was easy to spot. It was the only one with the front door kicked off the hinges. The small yard was littered with articles of clothing, and a Harley hog sat menacingly in the driveway, aimed at the street.

A fleeting memory occurred to Bobbie. The director of security had once warned her that women in police work frequently take great risks because they don’t want to call for backup from the men until they’re sure they need it. But by then, it’s often too late. He’d warned that many female cops had been needlessly injured and even killed, for fear of seeming to be the damsel in distress.

He’d finished reading the paper, but found that he couldn’t concentrate on the Sunday talking-head shows blathering about Tuesday’s election as though everyone wasn’t already certain that George Bush was history. Jules had never cared anything about politics. He sat, channel grazing, when the phone rang.

“Hello,” he said, thinking it might be Lou Ross with details about the New York trip.

“It’s Shelby Pate, Mister Temple,” the voice said.

Jules was astonished. He caught his breath and said, “Yes?”

“I gotta talk to you today.”

“How’d you get my number?”

“Abel got it for me,” Shelby said, “a few days ago.”

“How’d he get it?”

“From Mary,” Shelby said. “He was fuckin her.”

“I see,” Jules said. “What do you wanna talk about?”

“Money,” Shelby said.

“I see,” Jules said.

“Want me to explain?”

“I don’t want you to explain on the telephone,” Jules said. “I’ll meet you somewhere.”

“Where?”

“At my office.”

“Be there at one,” Shelby said.

“I simply can’t,” Jules said. “I can be there by five-thirty. That’s the best I can do.”

“Okay,” Shelby said. “Five-thirty.”

“Will Durazo be with you?” Jules asked.

“He had an accident in T.J.,” Shelby said. “He ain’t never gonna be with me again.”

When Jules hung up, he was paralyzed with rage. His heart was pounding. His mouth was very dry but at least his hands didn’t shake. He was pleased that his hands didn’t shake. He’d always been able to control stress to a remarkable degree, hadn’t he? He was pleased that his mind had worked so quickly under fire. He’d told that pig to meet him at five-thirty because he knew instinctively that he’d be better off after dark. Whatever happened, it should happen after dark.

Jules hadn’t clearly formulated a plan yet, but Shelby Pate was forcing him. He wasn’t exactly making it up as he went along. He already had ideas, but they weren’t crystallized. Abel Durazo wasn’t coming back? That was great news. There was only Pate.

Jules looked at his watch. There was plenty of time to go to Green Earth and make preparations. Hazardous waste could be stored for a long time if he did it properly, and he certainly knew how to do that in order to sidestep government regulations. There was a stack of drums containing diesel fuel, and some containing etching acid that he’d been holding until he had a sufficient load. He’d put Shelby Pate into one of those drums.

Then it would be a matter of borrowing a boat from someone at the club. Maybe a runabout on a trailer. He could haul it to the yard and dolly the drum onto the boat; then he could launch the boat and dump the drum a mile offshore. He could do it as soon as Monday, or wait till the weekend. That might be best, doing it on the weekend. Then he could stay out and do some fishing just to prove something to himself: that Jules Temple did not panic. That Jules Temple was once again in control of his own destiny.

But he quickly dismissed that plan. The more mundane but less dangerous way would be to dump Pate’s body in the vicinity of a bikers’ bar like Hogs Wild, and let it be found. Let the police think he’d died as he’d lived, at the hands of some other lowlife scum.