coffees and mercifully, no donuts. I say mercifully, because it’s hard to keep donuts down when you’re looking at a bloated corpse recently hauled up from the bottom of the ocean.
Another twenty minutes later, and we were pulling up to the commercial fishing docks in Long Beach. There was a lot of commotion not too far from us. I suspected that a dead man was at the center of the commotion.
“ C’mon,” said Hansen. “We might as well get this over with.”
“ I thought cops were immune to seeing corpses. Part of the job and all that.”
“ Land corpses I can deal with. Floaters, not so much.”
The commotion was centered on something lying on the ground, something sitting in a pool of water and mostly covered by a whitish sheet. I say mostly, because a pale arm was sticking out akimbo. The arm was covered in red slashes and strange markings, and as I got closer I realized that much of the flesh was missing. Hansen saw it, too, and turned to me. He looked a little green.
“ Looks like the crabs got to him first.”
I nodded and felt bile rise up the back of my throat. I swallowed it back down and nodded again. I was pretty sure I had played it off.
“ This stuff doesn’t bother you?” asked Hansen.
“ He’s no deader than other bodies.”
“ But, Jesus…the crabs.”
“ It’s nature’s way.”
He looked back at me. “Nature’s way? Thank you, Jacques fucking Cousteau.”
Hansen held up his shiny badge and pushed through the crowd. The crowd, I noted, consisted mostly of sunburned fishermen wearing everything from shorts to yellow slickers. I noted the distinct aroma of rotting fish. And maybe something else rotting.
I swallowed hard.
Some uniforms were standing around, too, keeping the crowd back. They stepped aside and we got closer to the corpse. The smell of rotting meat hit me pretty hard and I made a small gagging motion. Luckily, no one seemed to notice my small gagging motion. Hansen, for his part, kept his cool, although I noted his complexion had turned considerably whiter.
Hansen met with who I assumed was the Long Beach homicide investigator in charge of the scene. They chatted a bit. Probably not about the Lakers’ chances this year. A moment later, Hansen motioned toward me. The Long Beach investigator squinted at me, then nodded. He was a tall guy with a beer gut. Hansen waved me over.
“ Knighthorse, this is Detective Brewer.”
I nodded. “Detective.”
He squinted at me some more. Although he was tall, I still had him by a few inches. I had most guys by a few inches. Any way you measured it. He said, “You the same Knighthorse who played for UCLA?”
“ You mean that fullback who plagued USC for three straight years?”
“ Yeah, that one.”
“ You got him.”
He looked at me some more. I think he decided he liked what he saw, since he might have grinned. “Your old man runs an agency in L.A. Worked with him on one or two cases.”
“ Sounds like him.”
My old man could kiss my ass. He had allowed key evidence to my mother’s murder to languish at the bottom of a moving box for two decades. Yeah, he could definitely kiss my ass.
Anyway, Brewer studied me a little more, then turned toward the body on the dock. “They fished him out about an hour ago. Came up with a load of mackerel.”
“ A haul of rockfish,” said Hansen.
“ A what?”
“ In fishing lingo, it’s called a haul. Not a load.”
“ Thanks for that fucking worthless piece of information,” said Brewer, shaking his head. “Anyway, fingerprints come back negative. So I scanned the missing person cases in the area and lo and behold, I get a redhead missing out of Huntington Beach. So here we are. You boys ready? It’s not pretty.”
Brewer reached down and took hold of one corner of the sheet. He wrinkled his nose a little, and lifted.
I took in some air. So did Hansen. The dead guy on the ground, not so much. He was badly bloated and it was extremely difficult to tell what we were looking at.
One thing was certain, the man had died by a gunshot wound to the chest, which sported a massive reddish hole. The hole had been nibbled and clawed at by the critters, and seeing the exposed meat was enough to make my stomach turn inside out. It took a lot of willpower to keep the gorge down.
Hansen lurched a little next to me. Something was coming up in the detective, and it took his own valiant effort to keep it down.
I had seen plenty of pictures in Hansen’s police report of Mitch Golden, but nothing looked like the mess I saw before me. With that said, there was no denying the fact that something had, at one point, been wrapped around the man’s ankle. Also, he was only wearing swimming trunks, which I found interesting since Mitch Golden had been last seen fully dressed at a bar.
Like Mitch Golden, the man did have red hair and his body was covered in what appeared to be freckles. But it was hard to be sure, because of the many hundreds of small animal wounds that covered his body.
Hansen shook his head. “We’ll have to run DNA. He could be anyone.”
“ Anyone with freckles and red hair,” I said.
Brewer mercifully dropped the corner of the sheet.
Hansen asked, “Where was he found?”
The tall Long Beach detective consulted his notes. His notes consisted of a few scribbles on a small, ringed notebook that might have had a happy face on the cover. Probably not police issued.
“ About twenty nautical miles offshore. Not too far from Catalina.”
“ And not too far from Huntington Beach, either,” I said.
Brewer nodded. “The way I see it, he was shot, weighed down with something, then tossed over board.”
“ He was supposed to disappear.”
We all thought about that. After a moment, I said, “He’s wearing swimming trunks.”
Brewer jutted a thumb toward me and looked at Hansen. “Your guy always this observant?”
“ Not always,” said Hansen. “Maybe he’s going somewhere with this.”
“ Maybe,” I said. “He was last officially seen at night at a bar in Belmont Shores. Wearing jeans and a jacket.”
“ So he goes home, sleeps it off, wakes up, puts on some swim trunks and heads out to the beach.”
“ Except he doesn’t go home,” I said. “He lives with his girlfriend.”
“ So he goes to another broad’s home, shacks up with her, then hits the beach,” said Brewer.
“ Maybe,” I said. “If so, then that means someone, somewhere, saw him at the beach.”
Brewer looked at me. “So what are you saying?” he asked.
“ I’m saying, someone at the beach saw him last.”
“ It’s a big beach,” said Hansen.
“ Then I suggest we get started.”
Chapter Eight
It was late and I was sitting alone on my balcony, drinking.
The wind was unusually blustery, with low clouds that seemed to glow faintly from within. It was a rare night in southern California that you couldn’t see the stars, the moon, or the occasional UFO.
I had spent the rest of the day canvassing Huntington Beach, handing out many hundreds of flyers with Mitch Golden’s picture, my name and my number. So far, no luck. And no calls.
