THE FOURTH WATCH (39 page)

“Be it ever so humble,” Walter said into the
empty room.

The bathroom was gross - the sink stained with
rust and chlorine - the toilet the same, but with additional stains
that circled the bowl like grease rings. The mirror was dotted with
toothpaste splatter. No wonder Tell Me had that winning
smile.

There were two bedrooms. The Great Man's had a
king size bed in the middle of it. There were mirrors on the
ceiling and walls, and a video camera was set on a tripod in one
corner and pointed at the bed. Walter chuckled to himself thinking
of Tell Me wearing out his bitches here, watching his performance
from every conceivable angle, and them reviewing it all later for
technical flaws. The bed was unmade. In the corner of the room
there was a pile of rancid clothes. There was a chest of drawers
against one wall with a shade-less lamp on top of it. The drawers
were crammed with the usual crap: underwear and socks in one, a
collection of logo T -shirts and wife-beaters in another, sweaters
and shorts in the others. The closet had shoes on the floor,
blankets and a pillow on the shelf, a couple of suits and dress
shirts hanging in the middle. Probably wore those to pimp
conventions and Arthur Miller classes, Walter thought. On the
outside wall there was a window with the shade pulled and on the
sill there was a crack pipe, a small quantity of rock in a baggie
and a kit of works.

The other bedroom had been made into kind of an
office. There was a desk with a half-shell Budweiser box full of
bills on one side. Walter was a little surprised by the bills.
There were the standards: light bill, oil heat, phones (no cell
bills though), cable, etc., but also college loans! Tell Me, it
seemed, was an educated man. The desk drawers contained office
supplies, including extra ink jet cartridges for a printer and
computer paper.

Huh, Walter thought.

He went back through the house and found no
computer. He went back into the second bedroom and put on the light
and he saw it. Someone had rubbed his hands around in the dust on
the desk to try to obscure where the monitor stand had left a
cylindrical imprint and had tried to foot-scruff the rug next to
the desk where the imprint of the power-tower was still visible.
Someone had lifted Tell Me's computer. It almost worked though.
Another few days in this dog kennel and you would have had a new
layer of dust on the desk and the rug would have sprung back and
you'd probably never figure that there was a computer here – if the
dumb shits hadn't left the paper and printer ink. What the hell did
it mean?

Except for the missing computer it looked like,
the last time he left his castle, Tell Me had planned on coming
back. Walter was starting to think that wasn't going to
happen.

He went back to Tell Me's bedroom and checked
the video camera. He popped it on and rewound it and watched Tell
Me bang one of his hookers until the screen went to gray. The date
in the viewfinder was five days before. There was nothing on the
film that would suggest where Tell Me had gone.

Walter went back to the kitchen and got a beer
and sat down in the recliner and drank it steadily down. He never
took off his gloves. When he was finished, he laid his
three-five-seven in his lap, safety on – you didn't want to shoot
your Johnson off - and dozed off. Tell Me never came home, and in
the morning, when Walter left, he suspected that someone had hit
the mute button on Othello Meehan.

27

Los Angeles, 1974

THE INCIDENT WITH
the Chinese pirates off the coast of Hermosa
Beach put a scare into Sal that he would not soon forget. He
complained furiously to the Major through his emissaries. Is this
how loyalty was repaid? Is this how he, and the organization that
he put in place, were shown appreciation? He was almost murdered by
men that the Major had sent! What was he supposed to think about
that? Did he have to protect himself from his friends
now?

The Major tried to mollify Sal with words of
apology and discounted dope, but Sal was scared and felt betrayed.
What the hell was his competition going to think when his own
partner's employees tried to take him out? What if they decided his
protection was thin? What if they suspected that the Major had even
sanctioned the move? He was assured that his protection was
inviolate, but Sal was still paranoid.

Just after the Chinese New Year, Sal was in
Chinatown picking up product. He had come to meet his contact at a
waterfront warehouse that received fish and fresh produce daily
under government license, and distributed it locally. It was four
o'clock in the morning, but the docks were lit brilliantly and
bustling with activity. Men were unloading nets, packing trucks and
filling orders for local shops. Sal had taken to traveling with
bodyguards most recently, and this morning Carlos, who had
recovered from his wounds, and a massive Mexican named Juan, were
with him. They stood together on the docks in the cold wind off the
ocean that smelled of salt and rotting kelp. Mr. Chee, a grizzled
old man with a leathery face, black eyes and yellow teeth came out
to meet them.

"You come see, heya?" He said, pointing at the
gaping doors of the dark warehouse behind him.

"No thanks," Sal told him, shaking his head and
pointing, "just give the stuff to Carlos."

"You come see. Plenty good. Present for
you."

Sal squinted at him suspiciously. "Why do I
have to go in there. Present from who?"

"You see, okay? Very special for you." The old
man took Sal's arm, ''you happy see!"

Sal yanked his arm away from the Chinaman and
said to Carlos: "Go check it out."

Carlos drew a large .45 caliber hand gun from
inside his waist jacket and held it at his side as he followed Mr.
Chee into the warehouse. He was back in a moment. ''Its all right.
It's just the old man. He's got some boxes, I don't know what's
in'um. I'm not worried, it's okay."

Reluctantly Sal followed Carlos, Juan and Mr.
Chee back inside. The warehouse was damp and dark and smelled of
mildew and fish guts. It was nearly empty and there was repair work
in process, although no one was working at that moment. Mr. Chee
shuffled across to a pallet with a few boxes on it. The sound of
his scraping feet echoed against the aluminum walls.

"So." Mr. Chee said, working open the top of a
box ''first present from Massa" and he pulled a severed head out of
the box. It was slimy with decay and bloodless gray. The eyes were
sunken and milky in their sockets. The mouth was open and full to
overflowing with a fat yellow tongue. Mr. Chee held it on display
by a white tail of hair and the head sagged under its own weight
against loose skin.

Sal jumped back. "What the fuck?"

Carlos gawked at it slack-jawed. "Jesus," he
said. Juan didn't move or change his expression.

Mr. Chee smiled broadly as he held the head on
display, as if showing off a prize chicken. He flung the head aside
and reached into a second box and produced a second head. It was
the head of a bald man, blue and misshapen, as if it bad been
pummeled before being removed from its shoulders. The lips were
peeled back off of the teeth and frozen in a sneer. One of the ears
had been cut away but Mr. Chee held it up for inspection like he
was holding a world globe. The old Chinaman roared with laughter at
their expressions. "Second present from Massa!"

When Sal had regained his composure he squatted
down on his haunches and looked at the first head as it lay on the
dirt floor. It was in better shape the last time he saw it,
sticking up over the rail of the fishing trawler off Hermosa Beach,
before he and Carlos had been ambushed. He looked at the other head
and realized that it was the younger, bigger pirate.

"Hey, Carlos, you recognize these guys?" Sal
called with a smile.

"Sorry," Mr. Chee told them, "boy dead already,
you shoot, no can find. In water

maybe, fish eat maybe." He shrugged at the
mystery of it all.

"One of these fuckers poked a hole in
you."

Mr. Chee said, "No more worry, heya? Massa say
he protec all the time Missa Sal! Okay now."

"Jesus," Carlos said.

*****

Los Angeles, 1976

THESE PAST FEW
years had been very good to Sal, but he knew that this was no
way to run a business. Things had to change. His time with the
pirates off Hermosa Beach were a recurring theme in his
dreams.

Sal was always captivated by the giant
container ships that plied Long Beach Harbor, and one day while
visiting the Spruce Goose museum,a clever idea began to germinate
in his mind. What if we could get a spot in a container? Not a
random thing, with different dummy names that might attract the
attention of Customs officials, but a legit spot with a big company
that consistently, week after week, month after month went through
Customs with bulk product?

Sal began to study the issue. It didn't take
him long to figure out that Customs officials had no chance of
checking even a fraction of the cargo that came into Long Beach.
The statistics were staggering. It took five customs officials,
armed with the latest high-tech sensing gear, three hours to
inspect one forty-foot container. Last year, Sal was able to
discover, more than half a million such containers entered the
Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles from international points of
embarkation. The vast majority of these came from Asia - and the
traffic was growing rapidly. It was clear that the Customs
Inspectors worked with their noses. They looked at stuff that stuck
out like a sore thumb. For example: lets say a new company that no
one ever heard of: gets a single container from Hong Kong allegedly
containing toys and educational materials. A check on the company
reveals that the company is a one-room shack on the waterfront
rented last month by a tenant at will. They'd swarm in with their
gear and search that container with a fine-tooth comb. Maybe they
find a pile of dope. Maybe they find a bunch of Hong Kong toys.
Either way, while they are at it, some lone customs official is
signing off on fifty containers of brake shoes from Taiwan destined
for Ford Motors. Fifty containers come in every other week for
Ford! How many times are you going to look at them?

The trick was going to be getting a spot on one
of those wave-by containers, getting the product into the container
on the other end and getting it out of the container after customs
was done with it on this end. Sal began to puzzle this all
over.

*****

SALINAS POWER EQUIPMENT
(or SPE as it was more commonly known) was a
company located south of San Francisco that provided industrial
mowers and irrigation equipment to wine vineyards and farms
throughout California and the rest of the western states. They were
doing a little better than seven hundred million in sales annually
and relied heavily on Taiwanese and Japanese manufactures to supply
various engine parts and printed circuit boards for assembly into
their stateside systems. They had also recently begun to ship
completed systems - modified for use in the rice fields - the other
way for distribution by their Asian partners. They were a big
enough operation to have several containers a month going back and
forth, and to be well known by the customs folks, but not so big
that they had their own layered security bureaucracy that would be
checking and double checking the stuff that the customs folks
couldn't. If customs passed the container, it went from the dock by
truck to incoming inspection at a warehouse in Long Beach, where
the parts were tested and inspected, and the rejects packaged for
return. The accepted product was then shipped to the companies
various manufacturing and/or distribution operations up and down
the coast.

Ironically the lead came to Sal from the Major,
who had recently become a Colonel. Sal had shared his idea with his
mentor who, while cautious, understood the potential benefits to
the plan. On his end there was a buyer for SPE named Mike Moranger.
Moranger had a great job. He was the buyer in charge of the
Taiwanese operations for SPE, with responsibility for buying and
ensuring the flow of product from the Orient to the States. He made
sure that the parts were ready to fill the containers, that the
containers were available and that he had the proper slots or the
right ships to satisfy the companies on time delivery requirements.
He had a nice family back home, and a beautiful Eurasian girlfriend
in Taiwan. When the girlfriend was not entertaining Moranger
however, she was a Flower of the Evening at a floating pleasure
parlor owned by one of the Colonel's underlings. The Colonel was
certain that he could arrange to have product planted in SPE
containers in Taiwan - if Sal could be certain to retrieve it on
his end.

Sal went right to work. He studied SPE's
operations and decided that the easiest and safest way to extract
the product would be if he could arrange to have someone on the
inside at the incoming inspection facility in Long Beach. If the
product cleared customs, and made it to that facility, where people
were rummaging through shipments in the normal course of business,
it would be a simple matter to have his insider remove the product
before the cargo was sorted, re-packaged and shipped to the various
plants throughout the State. The trick, in order to mitigate risk,
was to make sure that the insider was someone who wouldn't be
questioned about what he was doing with what. Sal, after much
deliberation, decided that that person was the site supervisor,
Stanley Mix.