I sat on the guano-frosted concrete riprap jetty and field-stripped my. 45 and my cell phone. Either might save my life if my assailants had friends around. Shaking the water out of the gun and phone, drying off the. 45 cartridges and battery, took me less than five minutes, about as long as it took the L.A. County Sheriff's Department Harbor Patrol to show up with two fiberglass-hulled boats and a bright orange inflatable. Behind came the Coast Guard's forty-foot multipurpose rescue and fire-suppression vessel. County Fire Department trucks made their way along the jetty running between Ballona Creek and the Marina's main jetty.
The Coast Guard vessel technically wasn't supposed to respond to incidents here in the sheriff's jurisdiction inside the marina. But tonight, the sheriff had obviously requested assistance under their mutual aid pact. I knew this because I had spent more than twelve years as a reserve with the Sheriff's Search and Rescue team and almost as long with the Coast Guard Auxiliary. I didn't get paid for any of that, and in fact, equipping the Jambalaya to serve as a Coast Guard Auxiliary facility took a fair amount of my personal cash. But I didn't mind. I told most people it was my way of giving back to the community, which was mostly true. Only, I could never decide whether that counterbalanced the sheer fun of testing myself against the ocean when no sane person would be out on it (those being the ones we usually had to rescue) or dangling from a line beneath a helicopter to rescue the equivalent fools in the mountains.
I thought about this as I sat on the stinking rocks and watched the Jambalaya and the Cigarette boat melt into one crumpling mass of gasoline, diesel fuel, and burning fiberglass resin that had gone up far quicker than I had ever seen before. I guessed it was the enormous amount of gasoline in the Cigarette boat's tanks.
The Harbor Patrol and the Coast Guard spotlights supplemented the already ample light from private watercraft, blasting the scene with stark, flat illumination from so many directions it bleached out shadows and washed away colors with a blue-white gesso that made it look like a virgin paint-by-numbers canvas. I squinted into the light, grateful to see all three passengers aboard the Cigarette boat being pulled aboard other boats.
The Jambalaya's aluminum mast softened from the heat, then wilted, sending the masthead anemometer and other instruments plunging into the water.
The Coast Guard vessel maneuvered gingerly in close to the wreckage to allow the crew to spray fire-suppressing foam. Abruptly the two burning boats made a noise oddly reminiscent of a flushing toilet, then sank immediately, propelled to the bottom, no doubt, by the massive lead weight in the Jambalaya's finned, torpedo-shaped keel.
Watching the Jambalaya's rigging disappear beneath the water sucked me under my own surface for a moment. Like the individual frames of a motion picture flashing by too quickly to focus on any single one the images of what I had lost aboard the Jambalaya created a deep, unified sense of loss.
I stood up straight and tall and tried to shake off the sadness. I focused instead on the Coast Guard scattering foam to quell the remaining fire on the surface; I teased the scene apart with my eyes, desperate to spot someone thrashing about. But as one of the Harbor Patrol's inflatables made its way toward me, I grew increasingly comfortable that my assailant had not made it out before the burning mass sizzled beneath the waves.
"What in hell've you gotten yourself into this time, Doc?" I recognized sheriff's sergeant Vince Sloane's gruff Brooklyn accent before I actually recognized his face through the glare. "It looked like the freaking Fourth of July out there." He was a beefy, powerful man with no tolerance for BS and an amazing capacity to keep his temper under control. He was a perp's nightmare, hell on wheels with a heart for the innocent that knew no natural bounds.
Sloane knelt amidships as the helmsman feathered the throttle and brought the craft within inches of the jetty and kept it there without actually touching the riprap. That had to be Lexus Guzman. She was the only deputy with such a deft hand on the helm.
"Hell if I can figure it out," I replied to Sloane as I climbed aboard the inflatable.
"Doc, you smell like manure," Lexus said as she moved the inflatable away from the jetty.
"Good evening to you too, Lexus," I replied. Her real name was Carolina; she'd come from a well-to-do family with a vineyard down near Ensenada and had shown up for work the first day in a bright, shiny new Lexus convertible. And while she had gone on to newer and fancier cars, the nickname Lexus stuck.
We made our way north in the main channel and I filled them in. Overhead, a sheriff's helicopter passed us heading west, then settled into a rock-solid hover above the accident scene at the mouth of the harbor.
"I should give you this," I said as I tugged the Colt. 45 automatic from my Windbreaker, pulled out the magazine, and ejected the cartridge in the chamber. I held the. 45 upside down dangling with one finger in the trigger guard. Vince made a question with his face.
"I think when they finally pull the wreckage up, they're going to find three bodies and one of them is going to be carrying a slug from this."
Sloane frowned deeply as he took all this in. Even without pay, I served as a sworn peace officer, which meant I would be placed on administrative leave while Internal Affairs investigated this officer-involved shooting.
"Okay," Sloane said, his voice heavy with resignation. "Tell me everything before I have to write it down officially." He nodded to Lexus, who slowed the inflatable and made a broad, sweeping circle. As I began, a television helicopter thwacked past overhead, the station's call letters prominently illuminated on the tail for maximum marketing impact. The door was open with the cameraman strapped in the opening. Another TV chopper followed close on its tail as we made lazy circles in the channel. Soon, the sky above and around the harbor breakwater looked like an aerial parking lot for giant mechanical dragonflies.
Ignoring the circus in the sky, I spilled everything, especially the part about how I thought it had been a botched drug rip-off and how professional my assailants had been.
"But not professional enough for you, eh, Doc?" Sloane gave me the same curiously wary look he wore whenever my military service came up. He had seen my DD214, the official discharge document issued by the Department of Defense summarizing my military service. A lot of stuff was too classified to put on it. I didn't talk about it and Sloane was too smart to pry. Guzman steered the craft slowly to the sheriff's dock.
"Just lucky," I said, and shrugged.
"Lucky!" Sloane scoffed. "If you'd've been lucky, the bastards would've hit the right boat and not yours." He mumbled, "You have any idea how much freaking paperwork this is going to be? Not to mention that bozo season is here and I can't afford to lose a good reserve officer."
I was about to make a sarcastic wisecrack about how sorry I was for his terrible evening when my cell made a fuzzy buzzing sound. The wet speaker had a hard time with Robert's Johnson's "Crossroad Blues," which I used as my ring tone, but I was amazed the phone still worked.
I answered and froze at the sound of a full, melodic, and all too familiar voice.
"Mr. Stone?"
I checked my watch. "Jasmine?"
"It's me. My flight was one of those very rare creatures that arrived early."
"Oh, jeez!" I blurted. "No, don't…I didn't mean that the way it sounded. Its just…I've been…my boat's been in an accident and-"
"You okay?"
"For now. But there's going to be a lot of paperwork and the usual hassles."
"Okay. Look, I booked a room at the Crown Plaza right near LAX. Why don't I check in and call you in the morning?"
Guzman brought the inflatable to soft landing at the dock. Sloane grabbed the inflatable's bow line, jumped out, and tied it to the nearest cleat. He took the stern line from Guzman and did the same.
"Look, it's okay." Jasmine's voice was warm and confident, like her mother's. I'm not a tourist here."
I had once clipped a Newsweek article on Vanessa with a sidebar on Jasmine. She'd graduated from USC, then Stanford law school, clerked for a justice on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, then went to work with her mother in New York. When Vanessa moved to Mississippi, Jasmine stayed up North with a multimegaton Manhattan law firm. I manipulated the dates of the articles in my head and figured that Jasmine was in her midor maybe late thirties.
Then six months ago, after Vanessa's murder, Jasmine had come home to continue her mother's legacy at the Advocacy Foundation for Mississippi Justice, a Delta powerhouse inspired by Martha Bergmark's Mississippi Center for Justice down in Jackson.
"Still-" I stuttered.
"Still nothing. Take care of business and call me in the morning." The confidence and generosity in her voice amazed me and fooled me again into believing for an instant that I was talking to Vanessa. The daughter's genes had fallen right close the source, I thought, at least the DNA from Vanessa had. No one actually knew about the other half.
I stood there with the phone in my hand, thinking about the mystery of DNA and how it encapsulated the strong and independent thinking that had made Vanessa so incorruptibly autonomous. I wondered whether Jasmine had the same stuff.
Most of what I knew about both of them came from magazine and newspaper articles about Vanessa I had occasionally clipped and thrown into an expandable file. Some I had read and reread until the edges frayed and carried the smudges of my fingers.
When I married Camilla, I put the file in storage, a symbolic putting away of all others.
After the accident when we knew Camilla's coma had no end and I could no longer face the ghosts in our house, I took to living aboard the Jambalaya three or four nights a week and the rest at a cot in my office. I dragged Vanessa's old file down to the J ambalaya. At first, I'd sit belowdecks and simply touch the file. Every time I tried to open it, I'd see Camilla wasting away on her motorized hospital bed with the panoramic view of the Pacific, which no one could tell if she saw or not. Legally we remained husband and wife, but the coma had evicted the real Camilla from the body. Still, I remained faithful to the memory of Camilla, to the idea of who she had been. My nondecision to remain poised without action haunted every part of my life.
The day Vanessa was buried, my heart told me I could read her file without the spirits of adultery reaching out for me. From that cold winter day until this very morning, I'd sit aboard the Jambalaya- in the cockpit on warm sunny days and down below in the main cabin at night-and reread the pieces written about her. I was surprised at how complete a record I had collected, going back almost thirty years. Sometimes I felt guilty when I read the pieces, wondering at first, then knowing in my heart that Camilla had always been my second choice.
With Jasmine's voice echoing in my head, I remembered a New York Times article that emphasized that Jasmine had never met her father. She had been conceived during a one-night stand back in the licentious 1970s when Vanessa was a volunteer at a San Francisco law firm representing Native Americans arrested in the occupation of Alcatraz.
Vanessa's quote from the article struck me now as I listened to her daughter: "Good breeding material doesn't necessarily make for a good parent. Too damn many black children grow up with episodic and unreliable fathers who create expectations of love and trust that rank several steps below the family dog. I also didn't like the way abortion felt for me, so I raised her myself."
All of this hurtled through my mind as I struggled to say something intelligent to Vanessa's daughter. I came off inarticulate and banal, then said good-bye.
"Daughter of an old friend," I said to Sloane as he stood on the dock looking down at me. He raised the eyebrow that said he had questions that could wait. When he extended his hand, I accepted it.
"Thanks, Sarge."
He grunted something I took as a "You're welcome."
We walked toward the Coast Guard and sheriff's building, but it no longer felt familiar and secure to me. Now it loomed alien and full of unknown menace as we pushed through the doors and headed for the suspect-interview rooms where the doors locked from the outside.
Vince grabbed a first-aid kit on the way in. "Technically, we oughta have the paramedics look at this," he mumbled as he wiped at my earlobe with an alcohol pad, which burned worse than the original wound.
"Hell, that's not even big enough to put a Band-Aid on," Vince said.
He slapped me on the shoulder, then left me alone to wrestle with life, death, murder, and salvation. Little did I know that the enormity of what had just happened would pale into insignificance within just a few hours.