Devil's Harbor by Alex Gilly Page B

he’d made.
    He felt irritated. He had a job to do, hadn’t he? It was too hot to call from this damn coffin. And anyway, there was nothing to talk about. Perez had shot at him and he had shot back and now one of them was dead and it wasn’t him.
    What more was there to say?
    *   *   *
    By the end of his shift, Finn was mentally drained. He’d been sweating for six hours. His clothes clung damply to his body. His eyes were tired. He’d forgotten to bring a bottle of water and now he was thirsty. He finished looking at the last container on his list, powered down the machine, and opened the door.
    It felt good to get some air. He climbed down the steps and walked off the dock. He’d arranged to meet Diego at Bonito’s, a bar in San Pedro, so that they could ask an informant about La Catrina . When he got to his truck, his phone rang.
    It was DMO Glenn’s secretary. “Hold the line for the DMO,” she said.
    The man’s too important to dial his own calls? thought Finn.
    â€œAgent Finn? I wanted to be the one to tell you that the Internal Affairs investigators have made their report. It’s not good, I’m afraid. Not good for you, I mean. They’re saying there’s insufficient evidence showing that Perez opened fire or even had a weapon when you discharged your weapon and killed him.”
    Finn rubbed his eyes. The pall over his soul darkened.
    â€œAgent Finn?” said Glenn.
    â€œI’m here.”
    â€œWell, I’m sorry, Agent Finn, but there’s really nothing I can do about it: they’re recommending the case for prosecution to the U.S. attorney.”

 
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    Bonito’s was a dim, narrow bar in a single-story block stretching back from a glass front on a barren patch of Harbor Boulevard, just across the Vincent Thomas Bridge from Terminal Island. Its glass front was painted black to chest height, the band of darkened glass above that stenciled long ago with the bar’s name, the lettering now flaking off. There was a little bell above the front door that jingled each time a patron walked through it.
    Diarmud Cutts, an Irishman actually from Ireland and the bar’s current owner, liked to tell that Bonito’s had been the local drinking place for the Japanese fishermen and cannery workers who had once lived on the island, but Finn, who had grown up around Long Beach, knew better: the island’s Japanese population had been interned after Pearl Harbor and had never returned, and anyway the Vincent Thomas Bridge, which connected the island to San Pedro, hadn’t been built until twenty years after the war.
    Cutts also liked to say that Bonito was Japanese for “tuna,” and most everyone let him say it, even the Spanish speakers. If anyone dared challenge his knowledge of all things nautical, Cutts would tell them how many years he’d been in the merchant marine before settling in Long Beach, and of all the seas he’d crossed. The numbers varied according to his mood and degree of sobriety.
    Among Bonito’s regulars were the tugboat crews, longshoremen, shipbuilders, marine surveyors, port police, and cruise-ship maintenance workers from Long Beach and Terminal Island, as well as the crews of the commercial fishing boats that docked in the port of San Pedro. Collectively, they knew more than anyone else about the hidden worlds of the nation’s busiest two ports, and what they didn’t know they could learn discreetly at Bonito’s. Cutts himself had the reputation of knowing everyone and everything. As a source on all matters relating to contraband, he was peerless.
    Finn had been a good customer before his marriage. But for the last year and a half, he had avoided Bonito’s and Cutts. The former was a dive, and the latter was patently a criminal and reminded him of his father and of the life that had killed him. Whenever goods that had plainly come out the back door