The Detective & the Chinese High-Fin (19 page)

I disappeared into the woods, into the tall California pines. I ran for ten yards, fast, still zigzagging. I stopped, stuck my chest to a tree, the thickness of the trunk between me and Graves. I looked around it to find Graves. I caught a piece of him through the trees. He was on his feet, on the edge of the woods now, gun back in his hand. He was coming in. Coming after me.

Right then: Boom. The loudest crack yet. A bullet tore
through a tree to my left. The shot had come from the direction of the mountain. The same direction the other three had come from. The gunman.

I moved deeper into the woods, pushing toward the clearing. Both the gunman and Graves were going to have a tough time getting a good shot at me. Too many trees. Too many obstacles. And I was hidden by my clothes, and moving, always moving.

From tree to tree to tree. Telling myself, Get to the clearing, give Jim a chance.

I was close, fifteen yards out.

And then again: Boom.

Another crack, another bullet tearing through bark and tree leaves five feet away from my head. But this one . . . this one came from the direction opposite the mountain. Counting Graves, a third gunman. A third fucking gunman. I had one on each side of me in the woods, and Graves coming from the direction of the house.

Get to the clearing, John. Get to the clearing.

I pulled my Colt. I fired one shot in the direction of the gunman on the mountain side. Then I fired another shot in the direction of the gunman on the ocean side. Then I fired a third shot back at Graves, who had to be closing in now, using the trees just like I was.

Just keeping everyone honest.

I moved toward the clearing. Tree to tree to tree. I was five yards out now.

And then I fired shots in the same three directions as before.

Bam. Bam. Bam.

I got to the edge of the woods, to the clearing, and looked out. At a vast swath of undulating green land spotted with rocks, the mountain shooting up on the right side, the east side, the land slanting down on the left, the west side, falling in on itself as it made its way eventually to the ocean.

I pinned my Colt against my back and pulled my Sig.

Again I fired three shots. This time it was as much for location as for cover. Because I wasn't really going anywhere now. And I wanted these assholes to know where I was.

Okay, I thought, my throat tight, my breathing heavy. Here goes.

I moved out into the clearing, into the open, and looked toward the mountain. And I made one of the gunmen. It was the Mexican man, in full camouflage, pinned behind a tree, an assault rifle up to his eye. I moved back into the trees and fired at him with the Sig, just as he fired at me. We both missed. My shot, again, was mostly for cover. If I hit him, fine, but it was mostly to make him flinch, miss. My bullet tore through the branches above his head; his bullet flew by me, rocketing far down into the clearing.

I moved five yards back into the woods. My heart was pounding in my ears. I was sweating everywhere. I could feel it dripping down my back, my legs. I moved again, not deeper into the woods but instead along the edge of the clearing, away from the mountain. So I could pop back into the clearing in a slightly different location, in case either gunman was setting up on me.

I made another move out into the clearing, looking
first in the direction of the mountain, seeing nothing but firing one shot anyway. Then flipping around to look in the other direction, toward the ocean. I made the second gunman. A middle-aged white man with a trimmed white beard. I'd never seen him before. He was also in cammies, was wearing yellow shooting glasses, and had his assault rifle trained right at me. As I jerked back into the woods I shot two rounds with the Sig, knowing, because I didn't stay with my shots, that my rounds would in all likelihood miss. Cover. Again, cover.

I was back in the woods.

Graves. Where was he? Waiting, back in the woods by the house. Waiting for his men to do the job.

Okay, I thought again. The time is now. The move that Jim and I planned. The time is right now.

The taste instantly filled my throat. The battery acid. The balcony. The beach. Except this time it wasn't the fear of realizing that a path I could take, might even want to take, had to die. It was the fear that
I
might die. That whatever it is that is me might be blasted away forever. It was the other side, the more searing, sickening side, of the same coin. The death coin.

I holstered my Sig and pulled my Colt back out. Two rounds left.

I moved back out into the clearing. I looked in the direction of the mountain. Nothing. I fired one shot. Then I turned my head to look in the direction of the ocean. The gunman with the white beard and the yellow glasses moved out from behind a tree, rifle up. I held the Colt out in front of me and aimed, like I'd done so many times at the
Firing Line. Before he could pull the trigger, my bullet shot through the yellow glass in front of his open left eye, then through his head and out the back. He dropped the rifle, then his body dropped to the grass. Dead.

But now I was exposed in the clearing, my back to the mountain, to the other gunman, a sitting fucking duck. Part of the plan. Part of a very dangerous plan.

I whipped around to face the mountain. And there he was. The Mexican man, at the tail end of his move out into the clearing. Rifle now up, set, ready to fire. But, like me, exposed. I'd drawn him out fully. I looked at him. He looked at me. It was a split second that was also a universe of time. I stood there, defenseless. A dead man. But only a dead man if Jim missed.

The dice were rolling. I floated above myself for that endless split second and tasted and swallowed the battery acid and wondered, really wondered, if I would die, or if I'd already been killed. Standing there, floating, swallowing that rancid taste of death. And watching the scene. Watching very carefully, able to focus so clearly on the Mexican man's hand on the trigger, on his one closed eye, on the totality of his head as a bullet ripped through it and it exploded into a red firework of blood and brains and skull.

Down. Dead.

I got my binocs out of my jacket and scanned the mountain in the fading light until I found Jim. There he was, right where we'd decided he should be. He was behind a rock, his rifle resting on it for balance. He was still in the shooting position, his hands on the gun, his big head and face near it, just shy of where it would be if he were aiming and firing.

He wore a camouflage, baseball-style hat and, like the white-bearded man I'd killed, yellow shooting glasses. His gold necklace with the big gold cross hung down, suspended in the air. Smoke from his shot still lingered in front of his face. His expression was frozen, like he was in a trance. His mouth hung open a bit, his jaw loose, almost like it was detached. A superheightened state of concentration and connection with his body, like a professional athlete in the zone.

There he was, an image in my binoculars, an image I'd never forget. He'd delivered once again. He'd saved my life. In a different way than the way he'd saved it when I found him as a child, but he'd saved it just the same.

Jim Douglas.

He's always been there for me.

He taught me everything.

And he doesn't miss when it counts.

I pinned the Colt against my back and pulled my Sig again.

Graves. Now to find Graves.

I reentered the woods, moving again from tree to tree to tree, moving back toward the house.

Graves had wanted his men to do the job, but now he was going to have to face me and try to finish it himself.

I stopped, listened, looked for movement.

I was still pretty deep in the woods, twenty yards in, but I could see the yard now, and the ponds and the house. And then I heard movement to my right. Graves. I fired. Not to hit him. To once again cover myself. And to scare him. Right now, I wanted him alive.

I darted five yards in the direction of the noise. And
then I made him, caught the side of his body and his arm and his hand holding the Smith, all of it a blur moving behind a tree. He was forty feet away.

I put volume into my voice and said, “Graves. Drop your gun and show yourself.”

I heard a maniacal laugh echoing through the woods. And then he said, loudly, just like me, “You have no idea, Darvelle. You have no idea what you've done.”

“Your two men are dead. I shot them both. I know that. You want to join them? Come out. Let's talk. I'm not going to shoot you. And you're not going to shoot me.”

Jim wasn't coming down. But I didn't want Graves to know that. I didn't want Graves to know about Jim at all. And I don't think he did, given the mayhem of the bullets. No, I wanted Graves to believe that it was just me and him. And I wanted him to think he had a chance to take me down.

I pinned the Sig with the front of my belt and pulled both my hands out from behind the tree. “Here are my hands, Graves. Show me yours and step out. Let's talk.”

I kept my hands where they were and moved my head out from behind the tree. I saw Graves's face. He'd wiped the blood off, but remnants of it were smeared into his skin. His nose was an exploded mess, spread all over his face.

“Graves. Show me your hands. And step out. I want to talk to you. Do it, so you don't have to die.”

He showed me his hands. At the same time, we both stepped fully out, now facing each other, forty feet apart, with no trees between us. I could see Graves's gun strapped with the front of his belt, just like mine was. Instinctively, we both moved about five feet closer to each other.

“You have two choices, Graves. Let me cuff you and take you downtown. Or get shot, and then go downtown, if you're still alive.”

Graves gave me the maniacal laugh again. “I'm not going to prison, Darvelle.”

Prison, that's where he'd taken it. Did he mean he's not going to prison because the people he's working for would kill him before he got there, even if I did take him downtown? Or did he mean he's not going to prison because he's going to shoot me? I wasn't sure. He probably wasn't either.

I said to Graves, “Did you kill Keaton Fuller?”

He widened his eyes and pulled his lips back, giving me the skeleton smile once again. “I'll answer the way you answered when I called you out for having a gun on you. Of course. Of course I did. Of course I killed that idiot. You think a guy like that can pull the shit he pulls and get away with it when he's dealing with someone like me? And the people I work with? The guy was a dead man two weeks in.”

“Why, though? Why exactly? What did he do?”

“What did he do? What did he do? He got in the way. Just like you.”

He went for his gun, the Smith. I pulled my Sig and shot him in the arm that held it. The Smith fell to the ground. Then Graves ran in the direction of the house. I followed. I had him now.

Graves cleared the woods and made his way over to the strip of grass between the two ponds. He was now standing right where we'd started. He was bleeding badly from his right shoulder, wincing in pain.

I walked toward him. I wasn't going to kill him. I wanted him alive. Ott would want him alive too. We'd get more information out of him about Keaton, and then about the drug operation. He'd rat. I was sure of it. He'd rat. A lot of criminals do. No honor among thieves.

Graves dropped to his knees, the pain pulling him toward the earth.

And then, in another half second that seemed like an eternity, I realized what he was doing. The drama of dropping to his knees was a show. He'd left the gun from our initial struggle where I'd thrown it. Right at the edge of the pond with the high-fins in it. The gun he'd just dropped in the woods was his second gun. Same kind of Smith as his first one, same kind of Smith as the one that killed Keaton Fuller. The LAPD has a stock of these weapons. And so did Lee Graves.

Yes, Graves had a gun right there on that strip of grass—one more chance to put me down.

In one quick move he reached for it with his left hand, held it up, aimed it right at me. I shot him in the chest with the Sig.

Graves exploded backward and to his right, and went into the pond with the Chinese high-fins.

I walked over to the strip of grass, then over to the pond, and looked down into it. The water settled and I kneeled down, again putting my face up close to the surface. There was Graves, on the bottom, two feet down. His skeletal face and his destroyed nose and his bald head were enlarged by the water, and through it they looked whiter, paler. His eyes were open, and his now-magnified skeleton
smile was frozen on his face, permanently, the last time I'd ever see it. The blood from his chest and arm, pushed by a little ripple in the water, began to drift across his face.

And then the high-fins started moving in. Nipping at, eating, reveling in the blood of Lee Graves.

I sat down on the strip of grass. Darkness was coming fast as I dialed Detective Mike Ott.

W
hat we had now was a bit of a mess. Three dead men on a ranch in Calabasas, and a tropical fish business in Thousand Oaks that existed as a cover-up for a drug business run out of, at least in part, a farm in Pomona. As it turned out, Graves's hubris stung him even after his death, because he hadn't bothered to move the product out of the farmhouse.

Once I'd told Ott the story, start to finish, no details left out, standing right there on that same strip of grass between the ponds, he immediately set up a raid on the Pomona house. For that night. Well, technically the following morning, 4 a.m. Because now that Graves was dead, had been killed, Ott would not wait, could not wait, for
the people in Pomona or anyone else in the organization to hear about it and make a move, if they hadn't already—and they hadn't.

The LAPD ended up with a pretty large drug bust connected to a pretty large Mexican cartel. The night of the raid, they seized hundreds of pounds of liquid meth and more than thirty weapons. And they made two big arrests: They got the older man with the long gray hair, a man named Louis Delacorte, one of the top guys in the ring on this side of the border, who had a direct relationship with the leader of the family in Mexico. And they got another man who was at the house with Delacorte, a man named Rafael Rivera, the head of a street gang out of Pomona, the top runner of the gang, one of the men who actually physically sold the meth. Not to mention a longtime criminal who'd killed many people and who'd been making a shitload of money illegally for a long time.

Now, would these two give the police information in exchange for shorter sentences? Names of gang members here in L.A.? Names of members of the cartel, of the family, in Mexico? Who knows? My bet was that if Graves had survived, he would have ratted. Something about him. But these two? Who knows? And I guess the bigger question was, did this bust make a big difference in the overall Southern California drug war? Hardly. But it did keep many millions of dollars' worth of meth off the street. So it made a dent.

Which made Ott happy. After the raid, he was much, much less pissed off at me for setting up a possible shootout, which turned into an actual shootout, with Graves on my own.

As for Keaton Fuller, they closed the case on him. Gave me a polygraph that read clean when I said that Lee Graves confessed to me, in no uncertain terms, that he had killed Keaton. You combine my statement with the fact that Graves was part of a lethal drug organization—shit, there were two dead trained assassins on his property the night I called Ott—and the story tracked for everyone. Including Jackie and Phil Fuller.

So a few days later
I was at my office, sitting at my desk, now no longer working on an active case but instead kind of mulling over the case I'd just been on, the Keaton Fuller case. Anyway, one of the warehouse owners a few doors down, a cat by the name of Eddie Stanton, has an actual cat, a kitty cat, named Toast. Toast was named Toast because he had been badly burned in a house fire, and as a result, patches of his body have no fur, just charred skin. Toast walks with a wild, wobbly gait and has a bad right eyelid that bounces up and down, basically out of his control. Eddie Stanton often brings Toast with him when he visits his space. Eddie's got a few high-end motorcycles in his warehouse and likes to come look at them or sit on them or something. And when Eddie's doing whatever it is that he does, Toast often weeble-wobbles down to see me. Which I love. Because I love Toast. Talk about a fighter.

So that day, I had Toast right up on my desk. He was ramming his head into my hand as I scratched it. And I was thinking, Here you have this guy Keaton Fuller, who'd done so many people wrong personally, hurt them, disappointed them, let them down, insulted them—shit, men
tally abused them with stuff like Pig Hunt. Yeah, so many people. But—but—all the people who he had done this stuff to were essentially, in the most general terms, good people. Not perfect people, obviously. Flawed people, like most of us. Like all of us. But basically good people. People with hearts. So then, this guy Keaton Fuller gets involved with a group of people who also have hearts, but of a different kind. Black. Black hearts. And these people don't have this long history with Keaton. Don't have this knowledge of his family, or of his fine pedigree, to set against his shameful behavior. These people don't have the context to say: “Oh, that's just Keaton.” And even if they did, these people don't have it in them to be affected by his address or his lineage. They couldn't give two shits. So when he does maybe just one thing that's out of line, something similar perhaps to the things he'd done to a whole line of people before them, they popped him. Quickly. Heartlessly. Just like that. It wasn't connected to all his previous behavior, it wasn't any kind of punishment for his sins. And yet somehow it was. You know? He got it in the end. Not from the people who had all these reasons over all these years to hate him. To give it to him. But from making the entitled mistake of treating the fish people, the meth people, like he'd treated everyone else. Maybe only one time. Poetic justice essentially did him in.

Oftentimes in life, things make sense, work themselves out, but not in the linear way you think they should. That's true in my line too, in my cases. Things don't always come to me in a linear, logical way. Sometimes I'll have a revelation on a case, but it won't come from methodically
looking at or refining my case notes. Or from connecting puzzle pieces that I've laid out in their logical order. Sometimes it will—in fact, lots of times, which is why I do those things—but not always.

Yeah, sometimes I'll have an insightful thought, or I'll realize that my conclusions on something are wrong, totally wrong, while I'm just sitting at my desk scratching the head of a burned-up kitty cat. Or while I'm driving around doing the most mundane and pedestrian of errands.