But can Casey keep it from happening to her?
She misses the vodka and knows that Ralphs, just a few blocks away, has the pepper Stoli she loves. What would a quart of that look like on this bar? Feel in her hand as she pours? On her lips, in her nose?
But she refuses to give in.
25
On the bridge of the elegant Chris-Craft Cinnamon Girl, Brock stands beside bald, gray-bearded Dane Crockett, who eases back the throttle. Brock feels the big cabin cruiser slow and settle in the bright, late afternoon.
Dane is an irrigation supply wholesaler from Riverside who admittedly joined the Go Dogs for dangerous missions, not so much to help people out but for the rush.
It’s been three days since Todos Santos. All three of those days spent searching at sea.
But as of one hour ago, eureka!
Brock, Mahina, and the five-boat Go Dog flotilla have finally found and surrounded the pirates’ flagship. The rust-stained, blue-and-red steel-hulled trawler Empress II waits at anchor just off San Clemente Island.
Brock’s vengeful heart has been beating hard. His blood pressure is probably off the charts but he doesn’t care. Feels liberated by lying to Casey, such that like his brother’s guilt — and maybe even blood — will not be on his, Brock’s, hands. Besides, he’ll need something very important from Casey, down the line: his innocence.
They’ve had Empress II under watch, at a distance, easing in and keeping in touch by radio. She’s unaccompanied and possibly unmanned. If there are crew aboard, Brock thinks, they’ll have to swim the two hundred feet to San Clemente Island — rocky and current-blasted and forbidding as it is. The island is a bomb and artillery testing ground, for Christ’s sake. A few hundred Navy guys. They’ll drag the pirates ashore and ship them back to Pier 32 in National City. Maybe deport them, for all Brock knows.
The touchy part is boarding Empress II without getting shot, and before anyone can call in reinforcements.
Which means Brock and two of the Go Dogs on Cinnamon Girl will board the old trawler, which from here, through Brock’s binoculars, definitely looks unattended. Almost too good to be true, but it’s possible that the pirates are out on their smaller, faster crafts, patty-hopping for tuna and sharks. Where else would they be?
Brock continues his surveillance. Sees no movement anywhere on the trawler, just the nets neatly stowed and the tag lines swinging with the breeze. The swells are weak, on long intervals, and Empress II rides them heavily. Brock lowers his binoculars.
“Get us close, Dane,” says Brock. “We’ll hop these fuckers.”
Mahina mutters a prayer.
Brock and his vigilantes pull balaclavas over their heads — plain colors, no Go Dog logos on these, only their eyes showing.
“We’re good, hon,” he says. “No one home.”
Brock leans at the stern deck rail, a Smith.40 caliber autoloader jammed into the waistband of his jeans and a red plastic gas can at his feet. Go Dogs Keyshawn and Javier flank him, their weapons holstered.
When Dane gets them close, Brock hoists himself to the low stern gunwale and makes the jostling, wet jump onto Empress II.
Lands well and gets the rope thrown by Mahina, draws Cinnamon Girl tight and ties off.
Keyshawn slings the red gas can onto the trawler, then follows Javier aboard — steadied by Brock.
Pistols drawn and dangling at their sides, Brock leads them into the spacious galley, where Jimmy and Bette Wu had tried to force them into a short sale of the Barrel, and the lawyer with the gun in his briefcase had tried to broker the deal. Where the life vest stows are supposedly packed with fentanyl precursors and frozen shark fins. All locked now, he sees.
They clear the galley and the kitchen, the bridge and the foredeck, the captain’s quarters and the cabins. Check the johns and the showers, the bait and cargo holds, even the cold catch holds — every place a human being might fit.
Brock starts in the captain’s room, splashes the gas over the bed and desk and chairs, the little wall-mounted TV, the shelves and fridge, the tattered, braided oval rug.
Soaks the bridge, the radios, the navigation gear.
The nets and the worktables, the racks of gaffs and guns and finning knives.
The engine room.
The cabins and toilets.
Then the galley and kitchen.
Standing just outside the galley entrance, Brock tosses a lit matchbook onto the gas-soaked table at which Jimmy “King” Wu had sat and laughed and tried to rob his mother.
Flames swoosh and huff.
“You don’t do that kind of shit to people,” he says, the flames swirling. “The Breath of Life doesn’t fucking allow it.”
“Amen, Brother Brock,” says Javier.
They unhitch and scramble back aboard Cinnamon Girl.
Cinnamon Girl and the other four Go Dogs boats — a very old retired police patrol boat from San Pedro, a Boston Whaler, two Baja-style pangas with big Yamaha outboards — bob at rest around her.
They’re a quarter mile away when flames begin to dance atop the bridge and deck of Empress II.
Brock watches through his binoculars as Dane Crockett nimbly guides Cinnamon Girl northwest with the swell.
He hates to watch a seaworthy boat destroyed, but he knows he had to do this, and will have to do more to put things right. To help the victims. The needy and the bullied and abused. Ask not what people can do for you...
“She’s going to blow any second, Brock,” says Dane.
Which she does.
Empress II, an orange, firework-spitting inferno, rages on a blue-black sea.
Three days later, from Cinnamon Girl, Brock and Mahina glass the dark green Luhrs Stallion atop Pyramid Reef off San Clemente Island. The other Go Dog boats form a wavering string in the soft current.
Brock glasses a white man with red hair and a burly Mexican finning sharks in the thick morning fog. They’re working at a table set up on the long Luhrs foredeck, the cabin and convertible observation platform behind them. The windows are dark and Brock can’t see in.
The Go Dog boats drift off to surrounded Stallion, and Dane Crockett eases Cinnamon Girl toward the finners with his silent electric motor.
Brock’s got his phone on burst mode and the shutter muted, and after a quick selfie that he’ll use to open the next Breath of Life post, he points it at the men.
Who look up in surprised unison, knives in their hands. They curse, waving their blades, and Red tries to get something from the pocket of his yellow, bloody, waist-high slicker. But he suddenly sees Javier, leaning over the gunwale of his panga, now drifting motorless through the fog and silently upon him with a sawed-off shotgun.
Two knives and four hands go skyward, then Red swings back to Brock.
“You can’t hide in a mask. You blew up Empress.”
“You burned down the Barrel,” says Brock.
The big Mexican looks eagerly to the cabin but Brock sees no movement there, and the man’s cagey expression seems false.
Brock reads it, too. “Dump the fins.”
Red lowers his knife and his free hand to the cleaning table. “Two days of fishing, over the side? Thousands of dollars of fins?”
Brock nods at Mahina. Who fires a ten-gauge warning shot into a Stallion cabin window. The safety glass fragments into diamonds around a big hole.