Tropical Depression (22 page)

Ed pointed a finger at me and dropped his thumb:
Pow.
“Arkansas. Had a big spread up there to train for the survival of the pure white race.”

He turned and punched four digits into the telephone. I couldn’t hear what he said and he didn’t tell me. But a minute later a guy strolled over.

He was a very impressive-looking guy; about six-three, with the kind of silhouette you get only from a lifetime in the gym. He had a shaved head, an eyepatch, and a diamond in his left ear.

“Billy,” Ed said, “this is Detective Braun.”

I gave him my hand. He didn’t rip it off and eat it. But it throbbed for a while.

“Detective Braun here is our expert on the survival of the pure white race.” He showed Braun some teeth. “He don’t look Jewish, does he?”

“I was undercover last year,” Braun told me. He had a very soft, high voice. “You know the Stompers?”

I said I did. They were a bunch of smelly, overweight yahoos on Harleys. Even the other bikers avoided them.

“We got word they were in on a bank job. I hung out with them.”

I was impressed. I looked at him a little harder.

Braun smiled. “I washed since then.”

“Point is,” Ed cut in, “Stompers got down with Aryan Nations. Must of caught it in jail. So Detective Braun got to go to the convention.”

“The what?”

Braun nodded. “All the right-wing God-and-gun nuts get together every year. They swap guns and knives and books and pictures of Hitler. You get to see who’s coming up and what ideas are going around.”

“This guy called me Zog. Then he said I was a mud-boy.”

Braun nodded. “Aren’t we all. Zog is Z-O-G. Stands for Zionist Occupation Government. Means a fed, or a cop. They believe America—and the world—has been stolen away by the Jews and their puppets.”

Ed couldn’t let that go. “’Scuse me, boss, but could I borrow Montana?”

Braun ignored the interruption. So did I. “And mud-boy?”

He smiled. “That’s a little nastier. Anybody who isn’t one hundred percent pure Aryan has tainted blood. They’re mud-people, not really humans.”

“What about that keychain, Billy?” Ed asked me.

I nodded. “He had a sword on his keychain. It had an inscription.” I closed my eyes and pictured the sword. I’ve always had a good visual memory, and in a moment I could see it.
“Is thusa mo thua chatha,”
I said.

Braun whistled. Now he looked impressed. “This guy keeps fast company,” he said to Ed.

He turned back to me. “‘You will be my battle ax,’” he said. “It’s Gaelic, it’s the motto of the Brothers of the Righteous Sword.”

“Oh, my,” said Ed.

“Can I take it that the Brothers are not a fencing club?”

“And they ain’t
brothers,
neither,” Ed tossed in with a cackle. Braun turned his one good eye on me. I could see why the Stompers let him hang around. It was like looking into a cold dark well.

“Die Bruders
are an elite group of shock troopers. They call themselves Aryan Warriors. They’ve taken all these oaths to God about death before dishonor, defending the white race to the last drop of their pure white blood, and so on.”

“The usual shit,” I said.

“Nope,” Braun told me. “So far, these guys mean it. We never took one alive. And they always take down a couple of ZOGs when they go.”

“So how does Moss go from CSA to the Bruders?”

Braun smiled. He had a gold tooth in the front with a small diamond set into it. “There’s only so many of these guys to go around. The feds bust one bunch, the leaders go to jail, and the troopers need to find a new outfit.” He shrugged. “I’d bet most of the soldiers in Die Bruders were in two or three other groups before this one. It’s what they do. They’re professional racists.”

“My, my,” said Ed. “What you into now, Billy boy?”

“I don’t know. I’m just a mud-boy. What would this guy be doing hanging around that neighborhood?”

“These are not the kind of guys that go for a walk in the park,” said Braun. “If he was there, it was for a reason.”

“Bingo,” said Ed.

I shook my head. “We still don’t know what that reason is. Okay, he’s a member of a racist group—”

“A racist
paramilitary
group,” Ed butted in. “Which ought to make you feel better ’bout him cleaning out your ear. Man’s had some
training.”

Braun stood up. “One last tip on these guys,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked him.

He winked that single cold eye. “Don’t fuck with ’em.” He nodded to Ed and strolled away, back to his desk.

“All right,” I said. “So either this guy was following me—which is possible, considering how rusty I am. Meaning he picked me up when I was tailing Tanner. Or else—”

“Or else he was already there when you got there. Which means somebody in the neighborhood got a very unusual security system.”

“Or it’s a complete coincidence. The guy is a nut case, and he just happened to go off while I was around.”

Ed looked at me sadly. “Yeah, Billy. I think I could buy complete coincidence. You probably right, let’s go for a few beers. How ’bout those Dodgers, huh?”

I watched him look at me. Neither of us had anything much to say for a few moments, so we just stared.

Ed didn’t believe it was a coincidence. Neither did I, but I hadn’t believed it was going to be this easy, either. I realized I had been looking for a difficult task—no, a quest.

I needed a quest to redeem me—something tough and pure and close to impossible. If I could work through a long fight against overwhelming odds, it would help make all the heartache and night sweats mean something. It wouldn’t bring my family back—nothing would. But it might give some focus to a reason for going on, something beyond fishing.

And I realized, too, that fishing wasn’t enough anymore. After just a few days and one medium jolt of adrenaline, I realized I needed to do this. I needed the feelings that only this kind of work gave me.

But it had to mean something. And it had to be tough. I needed penance. I needed to work for it, work hard, not have some geek in a flowered shirt fall into my lap waving a pistol.

If it was too easy, it wouldn’t count.

I smiled at myself, at the games Billy played with Billy. Silly, yes, but true anyway. I had to do this, and—

And what? Hope it got harder?

Ed cleared his throat. He was just waiting for me. I wondered how much of this he had figured out.

I let out a long breath. I knew I wasn’t giving up. “Let’s take a look at who else lives in that neighborhood.”

Ed nodded, like that was all he was waiting for. He made a small note on a pad. “I can get that easy enough.”

I reached over and took the pad and pencil that had rolled up against his Out basket. “Here.” I sketched out the street as I remembered it. “I was parked here—Doyle’s house was here. So these five houses ought to do it.”

I pushed the paper across the desk at Ed. He glanced at it and nodded. “Okay, Billy. Meantime I’ll put out a BOLO for Moss.” He waved the paper at me. “This take me a couple of hours. Say this evening?”

“Sure, uh—” It suddenly dawned on me that today was Friday. And Friday night was my date with Nancy Hoffman. I tried to sound casual, knowing how good Ed’s radar was. “Make it easy on yourself. Let’s say tomorrow morning.”

It didn’t work. His eyes fastened onto me immediately, and the old Cheshire cat grin spread across his face. “How about I call you this evening?” he said, pretending innocence.

“I’ll call you in the morning, Ed,” I told him. I could feel a blush spreading across my face, like a teenager caught holding hands.

“Well, ain’t you something. In town three days and already dated up.”

I stood up. “I’ll call you,” I said, and turned to go.

“Don’t forget to use a condom, Billy,” he called after me.

I could hear him hooting with laughter almost all the way down to my car.

There’s an old L.A. joke that goes: What do Porsches and hemorrhoids have in common? Answer: Sooner or later every asshole in Marina del Rey has one.

There’s some truth to the joke. Marina del Rey is a ridiculously upscale area, loaded with single millionaire dentists and plastic surgeons, Saudi princes, retired drug dealers, and other playboys. A high percentage of them seem to enjoy roaring around in Porsches, gold chains flapping in the breeze.

No one knows why they decided to infest this particular area. It’s not centrally located, it’s not close to Beverly Hills or Melrose Avenue. Of course, it’s on the water, and that counts for something.

And there’s the marina itself. I grew up around boats, and a marina is a marina to me, no matter where it is, but Marina del Rey is not really a marina.

You might say there are boats, lots of them. Boats that would make anybody drool. But in the setting of Marina del Rey, they’re not boats so much as marks on a tally sheet for the big cribbage game of L.A.

Make no mistake. These are not really boats. In fact, there are no boats at all in Marina del Rey. They’re yachts, and that makes all the difference. A yacht is a boat with an attitude.

I didn’t care much for the attitude, but it was good to look at the yachts, and I could half-close my eyes and pretend they were only boats. Besides, when the smog has gone inland for the night, the area is pretty.

It’s also got some pretty good restaurants, and at eight o’clock that evening I found myself sitting in the bar of one of them, staring into Nancy Hoffman’s eyes over the rim of a margarita.

I have never read a whole lot of poetry, but the good stuff sticks with me, and I was trying to remember something about eyes being bottomless pools of light. I wasn’t having any luck remembering. Maybe it wasn’t really poetry. Maybe it was a cheap novel.

It didn’t seem to matter much since I was looking into the real thing. Nancy’s eyes were golden, unlike anything I had ever seen before, although the longer I looked the more sure I became that I had dreamed something similar many times.

We had been sitting for about twenty minutes and were on our second drinks. Through some horrible computer error, the management of the restaurant had somehow overlooked firing the bartender, who was over thirty, not particularly attractive, and knew how to make real margaritas instead of the canned kind you pour out of a blender.

The drinks tasted very good. They had a flavor of new love, old promise, and cool, elegant jazz. They were starting to remind me of all the things I had liked about Los Angeles before things got bad for me.

And it might have been the drinks, but Nancy Hoffman looked as good to me as anyone had ever looked. And she was making me remember what life had been like once upon a time.

I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with these feelings. But they felt so good, I didn’t care.

So I stared into Nancy’s bottomless pools of light—until she reminded me that just sitting and staring made me look like an idiot.

“Hello?” she said, and a moment later she repeated herself, “Hello?”

I shook my head and looked at her instead of through her. “What was that?”

“Echo,” she said. “I suddenly felt all alone.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“You looked like you were pretty far away.”

“Um, actually, I was maybe a little too much right here.”

She raised a perfect eyebrow. “Then where was I?”

“I couldn’t see you at all,” I said. “There was this goddess in the way.”

She nodded. “You’re going to hurt your neck, looking up at pedestals like that.” And then she smiled. It was a very good smile.

“I was just thinking how good you look,” I said.

She fanned herself with a hand, all mock southern belle. “Oh, la,” she said. “All this before dinner. You’ll turn a girl’s head.”

“I mean it.”

She reached a cool hand over and put it on top of mine. “I know you mean it, Billy. But I think you’ve been out of L.A. too long. People here don’t say what they mean. It’s embarrassing.” She gave my hand a light squeeze. I turned my hand over and held onto hers. My whole body tingled.

“Besides,” she said, “you’re not so bad yourself.”

The headwaiter called my name right then to tell me my table was ready. I guess it was just as well. The bartender probably didn’t perform weddings anyway.

It was a popular restaurant, and I wasn’t a millionaire dentist, so our table wasn’t right at the window. But we were only a tier away, on a raised level, so we had a pretty good view of a row of people with great teeth. Beyond them, out the window, were the water and the moonlight.

I really didn’t spend much time looking at the view anyway. Nancy even had to remind me to look at the menu.

Looking at the menu was a waste of time. I don’t remember what we ate. What I remember is the way Nancy looked when she turned her head to the left and the soft light played over the hollows in her shoulders and neck.

But I guess the food was pretty good, too. We ate all of it, and I didn’t try to sneak out without paying.

After I paid we walked out along the docks. They are very solid docks and go out a good long way. We went all the way.

We admired a number of the yachts in their slips. We stopped to look at one that impressed me. It was a fifty-foot sailboat, the
Warrior.
Hanging off its spars I could see every electronic device in the catalog, and some I could only guess at.

Nancy asked about them, and I explained the difference between GPS and Loran and what a waypoint was, and VHF and sideband, and what digital mapping and plotting were, and how radar was used on small boats, and how an autohelm worked. And I guess I was talking a lot more than I had been, and Nancy started to find it funny and then so did I, and the two of us stood on the dock by the
Warrior,
hooting like loons.

Two men came out from below and stood on the deck, looking at us. They were tan and very fit-looking.

As we stopped laughing for a moment, one of the men leaned forward and took a photograph of us. The flash nearly blinded me. Nancy thought it was pretty funny. I don’t think the two guys did. Anyhow, they didn’t laugh.

We did. But we moved on, stifling our laughter as we strolled to the end of the dock.