He paused and let a minivan turn into the McDonald’s driveway. He waved at the people inside. They didn’t wave back. The woman, I noticed, actually stepped on the gas, leaving God-or Jack-in the dust.
He crossed the baking heat of the parking lot, shuffling and limping and smiling. Little black, yellow-eyed birds appeared behind him and he opened his hands and something came out of both of them.
No way.
It had been bird seed.
He pushed through the front door, spotted me, waved and smiled brightly. I waved and smiled brightly back as he got in line in front of a cash register. A few minutes later, he sat opposite me holding a steaming cup of black coffee.
“ It’s been a while, Jim,” he said pleasantly.
“ I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
His eyes twinkled. “Sorry for what?”
“ For not coming in to see you sooner.”
“ Oh, I’m around more than you know.” And he winked.
Jack was a man of indeterminate age and race. He could have been anywhere from forty to seventy, and he could have passed for Caucasian, Latino or Native American. Hell, if he told me he was Polynesian, I might have believed him. Even his hair color and eyes were indeterminate, but with me that’s not saying much. Hair and eye color were generally lost on the severely colorblind, such as myself.
“ Still, I should have come see you sooner,” I said.
“ You should do whatever you want, Jim.”
“ It’s just that sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind when I talk to you.”
“ Then don’t talk. Just sit quietly.”
“ But I want to talk to you.”
He smiled at me serenely.
“ I know,” I said. “I should do what I want.”
He smiled again. “Always.”
I picked up my drink and said, “I know who killed my mother.”
“ You are a good detective, Jim. I’m not surprised.”
“ Does God ever get surprised?”
He winked. “Rarely.”
Just then a timid little girl suddenly appeared at our table, a finger hooked in one corner of her mouth. She couldn’t have been more than three, maybe younger. She wore a flower dress and shiny black shoes, and there was ketchup on the tip of her nose. She swayed a little as she stared at Jack. Jack smiled so warmly at her that I thought he must have surely known the little girl. The little girl removed her finger from her mouth and broke into a huge smile.
“ Your mother is looking for you, little one,” he said.
In that moment, the door to the jungle gym burst open. An hysterical woman scanned the room wildly, then spotted the little girl. She moved swiftly through the restaurant, took her daughter’s hand. As the little girl was led away, she looked back at Jack…and smiled.
When they were gone, I said, “She knew you.”
“ The little ones often do.”
“ And who are you?”
“ Who do you think I am?”
We often played this game. Jack was the master of the verbal parry. The spoken sidestep. Lexical double-speak. He would have made a fine politician, actually. God for President. Now there’s a slogan.
I said, “I haven’t been here for many months, perhaps as many as six. Yet, the moment I sit down with my fries and drink, you appear.”
“ And what do you think about that, Jim?”
“ I think it’s damn weird. Who else but God would know I was coming today? Who else but God would know the time and date of my arrival?”
“ Who else indeed?”
“ You tell me.”
He sat back a little. “You think of me as separate from you, Jim, but I’m not.”
“ What, exactly, does that mean?”
He leaned forward and placed his hand on my chest. He rarely touched me, and I was startled at first. His hand, I noted, smelled of dirt and asphalt. “God is in here, Jim.”
“ Yes, in my heart. I’ve heard all that before.”
“ For good reason, Jim.” He kept the flat of his palm on my chest; in fact, directly over my heart. Warmth radiated from his hand, seeped straight through my tee shirt and spread through me. “This is where I reside in everyone. I mean this literally, Jim.”
“ You literally reside within everyone?”
“ You are all not only sons and daughters of God, but you are a part of God. Do you understand this concept?”
“ In a Sunday school kind of way, maybe.”
“ A part of God lives in you. A part of me is you. The spark that gives you life comes from me. That spark lives in you always. I live in you always.”
“ Like a parasite?”
He chuckled. “Think of a flashlight, Jim. Think of all the components that make it work. I would be the battery residing within. A very, very powerful battery.”
I thought about this, wrapping my brain around the concept.
He went on, “You have the power of God living within you. Think on that.”
I did. “So we can access the power of God? Your power?”
He smiled, pleased. “You do so every day, Jim.”
“ How?”
“ With your imagination.”
“ I don’t understand.”
“ Your imagination summons the power of God. Your imagination is God at work.” He paused, letting me digest this. He went on a moment later. “As you imagine something, Jim, the full power of God is summoned to it.”
“ To anything?”
“ Anything.”
“ And what if I imagine a dragon flying over Orange County?”
“ You would not believe half the things that fly over Orange County, Jim.”
In fact, I recalled reading in the newspaper just last year of something black and winged flying over Brea.
“ C’mon, Jack,” I said. “A dragon? A real, honest-to-God dragon?”
“ Put it this way, Jim: something that matched your level of belief would eventually come into your existence.”
“ My level of belief? You mean, my dragon might actually be a balloon or a float parade.”
He nodded. “Now you’re getting it. If you truly believe that dragons don’t exist, then there is nothing that I can do to help you.”
“ But if I could get myself to believe…”
“ Ah,” said Jack, smiling and sitting back, “here be dragons.”
Chapter Seven
“ A local fishing boat caught something in their nets this morning,” said Detective Hansen over the phone.
“ Would that something happen to be Mitch Golden?” I asked.
“ Boy, you private dicks are uncanny. You want me to swing by and pick you up?”
“ Why not?” I said. “I was just thinking I haven’t thrown up yet this morning.”
Twenty minutes later, I was sitting with the detective in his sporty Ford Taurus. He had picked up two 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.”