cost them their lives, made sure they never crossed the line.)
Boone and Dave pooled their cash to buy that first van, used it to go cruising the coast together looking for the best waves, and took turns on a Friday/Saturday-night rotation system for dates. The van died a natural death after two years (Johnny B opined that its suspension just gave up the will to live), and the boys sold it for scrap and used the money to buy scuba gear.
Diving, surfing, hogueing, chasing girls. Long days on the beach, long nights on the beach, it builds a friendship. You’re in the ocean with a guy, you learn to trust that guy, trust his character and his capabilities. You know he’s not going to jump your wave or do something kooky that would get you hurt or even killed. And you know—you
—that if you’re ever lost in the dark, deep water, that guy is coming to look for you, no matter what.
So Dave’s down there with a lantern, showing him the way up and out.
Boone swims toward the light, then sees the crack and squeezes through, pulling his catch behind him. Then he plunges up to the surface and gets a deep breath of beautiful air.
Dave comes up beside him.
“Nice catch.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“It’s been said.”
“Accurately,” Dave says. “We should head in.”
Because there’s blood in the water, and if there’s anything more attractive to a shark than a sea lion, it’s blood. If any sharks are within a hundred-yard radius, they’ll be coming. Best to be onshore when they do.
“Let me catch a little more air,” Boone says.
“Weak unit.”
Again, accurate, Boone thinks. He takes in a couple more lungfuls and then they swim to shore and climb out on a shelf of rock.
“Beautiful night,” Dave says.
Too true.
26
The three decapitated bodies lie in a drainage ditch.
Johnny Banzai shines a flashlight on them, fights off the urge to vomit, and slides down into the ditch. From the relative lack of blood he can tell that the men were killed somewhere else and dumped out here to be seen.
What happens to people who fuck with Don Cruz Iglesias.
Steve Harrington slaps the back of his hand to his forehead and says with a moan,
Funny guy, Harrington.
Johnny checks one of the dead men’s wrists for tattoos and finds just what he expected—a tattoo depicting a skull with wings coming out of each side. Los Angeles Muertos, the Death Angels, are an old-line Barrio Logan street gang who’ve been revived by hooking up with the Ortega drug cartel across the border. The Criminal Intelligence guys had given Homicide a heads up that the Ortegas had taken a shot at Cruz Iglesias yesterday and missed.
The decapitations are his response, Johnny thinks.
“Any ID on the Juan Does?” Harrington asks.
“Death Angels.”
“Well, they sure are now.”
Johnny’s no particular lover of gangbangers, but at the same time he’s not happy that the cartels’ war for Baja has spilled over into San Diego and threatens to start a full-blown gang war like they haven’t seen since the nineties. The Ortegas recruited the Death Angels, Iglesias signed up Los Ninos Locos, the Crazy Boys, and now it won’t be long before stupid kids and innocent bystanders start getting killed. So he’d just as soon the Mexican cartels kept their shit in Mexico.
The border, he thinks.
What border?
“I guess we’re going to have to start looking for the heads,” Harrington says.
Johnny says, “My guess is that they’re in dry ice and on their way to Luis Ortega in a UPS package.”
“What Brown can do for you.”
A gory, media-feeding triple is not what I need right now, Johnny thinks. Summer is the busy homicide season in San Diego. The heat shortens emotional fuses and then lights them. What would be arguments in the autumn become fights in the summer. What would have been simple assaults become murders. Johnny has a fatal stabbing over a disputed bottle of beer, a drive-by that happened after an argument at a taco stand, and a domestic killing that occurred in an apartment after the air-conditioning broke down.
Then there’s the Blasingame case headed for trial and Mary Lou all over his ass to make sure his “ducks are in a row.” Whose fucking ducks are ever in a row, anyway? Five eyewitnesses and little Corey clinging to his strong, silent type routine, Mary Lou should just relax. Then again, it’s not Mary Lou’s nature to relax.
I wouldn’t relax either, he admits, with Alan Burke on the other side.
He makes himself focus on the case at hand, even though he knows they’re never going to make an arrest on it. This was a professional hit, and the pros who did it are already down in Mexico, knocking back a few beers.
But we have to go through the motions, he thinks.
“Hey,” Harrington says, “what do you call three Mexican gangbangers with no heads?”
“What?” Johnny asks only because it’s required.
He already knows the tired punch line.
A good start.
27
Boone spreads some old newspaper out on the deck and lays the tuna down on it. Taking his fillet knife, kept honed to a fine edge, he slices down the underbelly. He pulls out the guts and throws them over the railing into the ocean. Then he slices up behind the gills on both sides, cuts off the head, and likewise gives it to the sea.
Then he takes the first two fillets he sliced and cuts them into thick steaks and washes them under a spigot. He goes into the kitchen, puts two of the steaks into a Ziploc plastic bag, and puts them in the freezer.
He takes the other two, sprinkles them with a little salt and pepper, rubs some olive oil on, and carries them outside to the little propane grill that is set beside the cottage. He turns the heat up high to get the fish a little crisp, then turns it down to low, goes back inside, and slices up some red onion and a lime, then comes back outside, squeezes some lime juice on the fish, turns it, cooks it for just another minute, then takes it off the grill and goes back inside. He slides each piece of the fish into a flour tortilla, adds a thick slice of red onion on the fish, goes back outside, and sits down in a deck chair beside Dave, handing him one of the tacos.
If, as Dave believes, free food tastes better; and if, as is Boone’s motto, “everything tastes better on a tortilla,” then free fish on a tortilla is out of this world. The truth is that if you’ve never eaten fish that has just been taken out of the ocean, you’ve never eaten.
Add a couple of ice-cold Dos Equis and two ravenous appetites to the mix and life doesn’t get any better. Throw in a soft summer night with a yellow moon and the stars so close you could hit them with a slingshot, and you might be in paradise. Toss a lifelong friendship into that mix, and take the “might” right out of it.
They both know it.
