Through the scintillating lights that dominated his vision now, Talmadge concentrated all his anger on the video camera. "Russians're tryin' y'own damn shit, ain't they?" he began. "Fucking mushroom story makes a damn good cover-up, huh? Huh! Well, it's a shitload bettuh than that fuckin' combat stress crap y'all trotted out after all those killin's at Ft. Bragg when the boys came home from Afghanistan." His anger and the electrical storm in his brain began to merge. "You limpdicked cocksuckuhs hung those boys out t'dry ovuh My Lai an' all those other times when it was th' fucking drugs, y'drugs, y'fuckin' drugs, y'fuckin' drugs, y'fuckin' drugs, fuggingdrugs! Fuggingdrugs!"
He raged at the camera until the arcing neon rainbow filled his vision and his mind, clutched at the deepest parts of his entrails, and squeezed the breath from his chest.
Then Darryl Talmadge buckled face-first to the floor.
CHAPTER 18
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.