Hail Mary Read online

  I nodded. “By saving innocent creatures, I could hurt an innocent family.”

  “So how do you come to terms with it, Knighthorse?”

  “Because it’s not really a paradox, since the innocent creatures have no choice.”

  “And the family does?”

  “The hunters do. The hunter does not have to mistreat the kill.”

  Sanchez drank some more beer and watched the scene below us. Without looking at me, he said. “You do realize we might be running for the border after this with the Federales on our asses?”

  I grinned. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “Shit,” he said.

  A few minutes later, with the second batch of chips nearly finished, a young man in a tank top came over to our table. The smell of rotting fish preceded him.

  I looked at Sanchez. “I think our escort has arrived.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  As far as black markets go, this wasn’t much.

  It was coming on evening, and a broad swath of gold rippled over the ocean. The golden swath led all the way to the setting sun. Beautiful. Except I wasn’t here for beauty.

  The rooftop market was high above prying eyes.

  Here, after being led away from the shinier streets of Ensenada, we found ourselves in a much dingier marina, in an area clearly not meant for tourists. Sanchez and I were next led up an exterior flight of stairs. And there, on the rooftop, I could appreciate the true decimation of our oceans. Lying on blankets, presumably to dry, were hundreds, if not thousands, of shark fins.

  The blankets were arranged in sections. Behind the blankets were men and women, all looking at Sanchez and I suspiciously. The stink up here was strong. But it wasn’t a fish stink. It was a meat stink. A flesh stink. Shark fins, apparently, did not smell much like rotting fish.

  Our young guide went over and spoke to a handful of people who had sort of shifted in our direction. He spoke urgently, nodding towards us, and finally one of the men nodded. Guards? Custodians of the fins? Perhaps the owners of the building? I didn’t know.

  Apparently we had been accepted, because he returned, smiling. Then he stood by our side and waited. Sanchez looked at me. Slow on the uptake, I finally fetched my wallet and slipped the man a twenty-dollar bill. He blinked at it, shrugged, and turned and left.

  Sanchez and I strolled the many rows of shark fins. Some of the fins were laid out on blankets. Others, I saw, were spread over wide tables. Most were dried, and others were drying.

  I understand there’s no love lost between man and sharks. We have a natural fear of the toothy bastards. But right is right, and wrong is wrong. Chopping up a living creature and letting it die an agonizing death is fucked up. Plain and simple.

  “You’re getting that look again,” Sanchez.

  “What look?”

  “Like you want to turn over these tables and start bashing skulls.”

  “Not a bad idea.”

  “Except most of these dudes are armed and they’re operating outside the law, and they would kill you before you moved on to the next table, or even bashed your first skull. Then, for sport, they’d probably plug me.”

  “You’re no fun anymore.”

  “Just stay here and try not to look like you’re gonna go nuclear on someone. Just relax and let me ask around about the La Bonita. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  I liked our odds. According to Joe Fossil of the California Fish and Game, Ensenada was the hot-bed for shark fin trafficking in this area. The Gulf of Mexico had an even bigger market, which was hard for me to fathom as I looked upon the rows and rows of inexpertly chopped-up fins.

  The La Bonita had to sell its fins somewhere, and this was the closest place to do it. Perhaps there was another shark market in town, but it was hard to imagine a bigger one than this.

  Like I said, I liked our odds.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sanchez talking with some people. He then moved on and talked to someone else. I stopped in front of a handsome young man who was watching me suspiciously. I pointed to the fins and asked him how much. He said something in Spanish. I know a little Spanish. And I know how to count fairly high in Spanish, too. The number he quoted me sounded suspiciously in the thousands and thousands of dollars.

  Sweet Jesus.

  The sharks didn’t stand a chance. Not with numbers that high.

  No wonder these guards are packing heat. There was a fucking fortune up here.

  Sanchez came back. “Let’s go.”

  I didn’t ask any questions. When one is undercover in a highly illegal environment and one’s partner says “let’s go,” you go. No questions asked.

  We were down the stairs and moving quickly toward the nearby docks when Sanchez finally spoke. “It was getting dicey up there.”

  “Too many questions?”

  He nodded. “That’s right. But I did learn one thing.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Where most of the shark hunters dock their boats.”

  “And where’s that?”

  He pointed toward the marina in front of us. “Dead ahead, matey.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  As far as I could tell, we hadn’t been followed.

  Here, the docks looked old, and there wasn’t a single Corona sign to be had anywhere. I decided to keep this last observation to myself.

  As late afternoon faded into evening, it was hard to get a feel for the place, but my perception was that this was a forgotten stretch of marina. Maybe it was a carefully cultivated look. Forgotten and ignored were helpful to those in the illicit trade of shark fins. Or the illicit trade of anything else, too.

  Seemingly forgotten boats that didn’t look entirely seaworthy bobbed and rocked near piers that looked shaky at best. Other boats were docked around the sturdier perimeter of the marina itself, which seemed like a better idea. Old boats were piled around the dock, some literally on top of others. More than anything, a heavy stink filled the air. A combination of rotting fish, rotting boats and rotting humanity.

  “You know what this boat looks like, right?” asked Sanchez.

  “I know,” I said, and described the forty-foot vessel that had been clearly modified to easily accommodate shark hunting. Such as, a removable bulwark where the hunters could haul up their catch and pull it easily onto the deck. I recalled the fisherman discarding the bleeding, dying hammerhead. They had simply pushed it off the boat.

  “Not to mention it says La Bonita on the stern,” said Sanchez.

  “That too,” I said.

  We split up, each covering one side of the decrepit marina, which was separated by about three long piers, all of which had listing boats tethered to them. Trash and other flotsam huddled around the foaming waterline. I would be shocked if anything was alive within two hundred square yards of this cesspool.

  After my perimeter sweep turned up nothing, I headed out onto the first floating dock. I sidestepped rotting fish and fish guts and other organic material that could have been anything. Human brain? Hard to know. I powered through the seagull crap since there was really no way of avoiding it.

  I examined every boat, dismissing only those that were clearly too small or big. I felt like Goldilocks...looking for the one that was just right. Goldilocks, of course, didn’t have shoulders wide enough to swing from.

  I read many a stern. Most were written in Spanish, although a few were in English. None said La Bonita.

  I continued on to the second floating pier. Sanchez, I saw, was still working his way down the pier closest to his side. Slacker. Water slapped the floating bridge, which swayed under my feet and created a general state of nausea in my stomach. Either that or I had eaten a bad batch of corn chips and salsa.

  I continued on, pushing through the nausea and the seagull crap, dismissing boat after boat until a sound reached me.

  I paused, listening hard.

  There it was again.

  The whining of a dog. Stray dogs in Mexico
are nothing new. Stray dogs whining several hundred feet out on a pier was something else entirely.

  I picked up my pace, following the sound. And the closer I got to it, the more emphatic the whining got. Someone shouted at the dog and the whining briefly stopped.

  Now I was running, feet pounding on the wobbling pier, which juked and jived with each step. My nausea was long forgotten. The pain in my bad leg was alarming. On the pier next to me, in my peripheral vision, I saw Sanchez turn toward me. Peripheral because I had to keep my eyes focused on the narrow pier. Wouldn’t do to take a wrong step and dive into the filthy muck. Without looking at him, I waved him over. Emphatically.

  He must have gotten the hint because he disappeared out of my vision. I picked up my pace.

  And there it was, just a few feet away. Son-of-a-bitch.

  It had to be it. The length and general size felt right, and the name on the stern said it all. La Bonita.

  The whining turned to yelping.

  Another shout, followed by the stomping of feet going up a wooden flight of stairs. The boat shook with each step. I leaped from the pier, over the bulwark and landed awkwardly on the deck, my bad leg nearly giving out.

  And what I found there, I would never forget.

  Ever.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  A man appeared from the lower cabin.

  The man, who hadn’t looked very happy to start with, blinked once. His mouth dropped open. He looked utterly perplexed to see a massive Caucasian standing in his boat. His perplexity might have been comical if he hadn’t been holding a very long carving knife.

  I couldn’t tell if he was the same guy who’d sported the neat part down the center of his head—since this guy’s hair was in current disarray—but if I was a betting man, I would bet that he was.

  Just as his shock turned to rage, he launched himself out of the lower cabin, bringing the knife up in a gutting motion. Unlike the helpless sharks he was used to carving up, I could fight back.

  And I wasn’t so helpless.

  Before the knife got very far, my fist flashed through the small space between us and hit him under his left eye. His head snapped back. His feet flew out from under him. Where the knife went, I didn’t know. One moment he was attacking me and the next, he was tumbling back down the stairs from whence he came.

  I followed him down, jumping down just behind him. The interior cabin was surprisingly big and roomy enough even for me. But that didn’t mean the place wasn’t trashed. It was. Disgustingly so. Cots lined one wall. The opposite had a small but filthy futon. A TV was in one corner. Trash was everywhere. Wadded-up, greasy tinfoils. Wadded up, greasy burger wrappers. Wadded up paper bags. Ironically, a trash can—apparently bolted to the floor—stood empty nearby. Somebody around here was a shitty shot.

  Still lying in the center of the floor, bleeding profusely from a humdinger of a cut under his eye, was a Grade-A asshole. Beyond, a woman peeked out at me from behind a cabin door. I motioned for her to get back into the room and she did, slamming the door shut.

  It was about then that Sanchez appeared behind me, breathing hard. He ducked his head into the cabin, saw the scene, and leaped down smoothly.

  “Is he the only one?” he asked, pointing to the dirt bag on the floor.

  “A woman’s in there,” I said, pointing.

  “That’s it?”

  “Far as I know. Boat isn’t that big.”

  Sanchez nodded once. “I’ll look around.”

  As Sanchez ducked away, the man lying on the floor began waking up. The boat rocked as Sanchez moved around above deck. The man on the floor groaned and sat up on an elbow.

  “Hola, motherfucker,” I said. “You speak English?”

  The man said nothing. His eyes still looked a little crossed. His hands, I saw, were crisscrossed with scars. Fishing lines? Shark bites? Zipper malfunctions?

  Sanchez appeared again.

  “Clean,” he said. “Except...”

  My friend looked away and pressed his teeth together. His jawline rippled.

  “Except what?”

  “I think you should see this.” He didn’t look at me.

  I reached down and grabbed the guy by the shoulders and pulled him up to his feet. He was bigger than I realized, easily over six feet. Paunchy around the middle. Muscular shoulders. He came willingly enough but there was still some fight in him. I shoved him in front of me, up the stairs, where Sanchez briefly took over, grabbing him from me.

  On the deck, Sanchez pointed to what had once been covered under a tarp. Now one corner of the tarp was pulled up.

  Something with bright, sad eyes was watching me from inside.

  Chapter Thirty

  Watching me...and whimpering.

  I knew it was there. I had heard it, after all. But seeing the little guy inside the cage, watching me, was a different story altogether.

  With Sanchez holding the shark hunter back, I slowly approached the cage. Once there, I knelt down, took one corner of the tarp...steeled myself...and lifted.

  There wasn’t much light in this godforsaken place, but there was enough for me to see the scruffy dog inside. It was a mutt through and through. Curly, entangled hair. Eye goop caked from the corner of its eyes all the way down its muzzle.

  Its muzzle. Oh, sweet Jesus.

  I leaned down closer toward the dog, and as I did so, the man behind me made a move, but Sanchez slammed him hard back against the cabin wall.

  The dog. Something was gleaming from his muzzle. Something metallic and curved and reddish. Then again, my eyes have always played tricks on me, at least when it came to color.

  But the smell that wafted up to me was unmistakable.

  The rotten fish was a given. Hell, the whole damn marina smelled like rotten fish. No, what I was smelling now was blood. Fresh blood. Coppery, sharp, pungent.

  I pulled the tarp all the way off. The mangy mutt shrank back. Or tried to. Something was wrong with his little paws. Something clank and even seemed to catch on the cage. Not its nails. No. Again, something metal. I was sure of it.

  The shark hunter continued to struggle with Sanchez, who promptly slammed him once more against the cabin’s exterior. This time, the entire boat shuddered with the impact. Water slapped the hull. I heard the woman crying from below deck.

  The mangy dog, which probably weighed about thirty pounds, shrank down into a small, tangled ball of fur. It shook violently. Its shaking vibrated down through the wooden deck. The metal cage shook, as well.

  I moved in closer. “It’s okay, boy.”

  Now I could smell the urine and see the piles of crap littering the cage. Much of the crap looked like diarrhea.

  Where the dog had once been standing were fresh paw prints. Bloody paw prints, and now I could clearly see why. Massive, rusted hooks protruded from its front paws. It made walking or standing for the creature not only torturous but nearly impossible. It huddled low, shaking uncontrollably, alternately whining and growling.

  There was, of course, another hook. And this was the one that threw me into a blind rage. Another hook, as big or bigger than the ones in its front paws, protruded through its upper lip, hanging down like a metallic mustache. The world’s sickest joke.

  Except this wasn’t a joke.

  This was real. This dog was bait. Plain and simple. Its suffering meant nothing to the shark hunter. I was tempted to reach in for the dog but I was certain of a few things. First, it was going to attack me, as the creature was nearly out of its mind with fear. And second, it needed to be sedated to remove the hooks.

  I stood slowly and turned, shaking nearly uncontrollably myself. I pointed to the shark hunter. “Let him go,” I said to Sanchez.

  But my friend shook his head. “You’ll kill him, man.”

  “Let him go.”

  But Sanchez shook his head. “I can’t do that, Jim. If I let him go, then you’ll never leave this country again.”

  “Fuck him.”

  “I agree
,” said Sanchez, who had placed his body between the man and myself. “But he’s not worth it, man. He’s just a shit bag. Shit bags aren’t worth going to jail for the rest of your life.”

  My frustration was nearly overwhelming. Frustration and anger. I stepped up to the guy currently pinned against the wall by Sanchez’s forearm. There was no fear in him; in fact, he was grinning at me. Although I doubted he recognized me, I was now certain he was the same piece of shit who had removed the hammerhead’s fins, the same piece of shit who had dumped the still-living and helpless shark back into the ocean. The same piece of shit who had grinned at me in much the same way.

  “Translate this for me,” I said to Sanchez. He nodded and I went on, speaking slowly enough that Sanchez wouldn’t miss a word. “If I ever see you within a hundred feet of a dog, cat, or fucking hamster, I will come for you. If I ever see you hunting sharks or even sardines, I will come for you. Do you understand, motherfucker?”

  He blinked, waiting for Sanchez to finish translating. Then he grinned again, wider, and hocked a nasty lugie straight into my face.

  “Okay, one punch,” said Sanchez, “and make it a good one.”

  He released the guy, who charged me instantly. One punch for every dog to have ever been thrown overboard to the sharks. One punch for every shark who’d been butchered alive.

  One punch didn’t settle the score.

  But it sure as hell felt good.

  I hit him just under his right eye, so hard that I heard his cheekbone shatter. His legs turned to rubber and he promptly sank to the deck where he lay unmoving.

  Breathing, but unmoving.

  Sanchez nodded, impressed. “Helluva punch.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  I gave my statement to the Ensenada police investigator in charge, a Detective Hermenio.

  I told Hermenio that I was a private investigator working on a murder case. I told him everything I knew, or thought he needed to know, and told him that my investigation had led me here to Mexico. Detective Hermenio, an older guy who spoke fluent English, asked if the guy on the boat was a suspect. I told him it was still early in the investigation.