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  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

  J. R. Rain

  Hail Mary

  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 move
d 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.

  Meaning, no.

  He let it drop, maybe because Sanchez was an investigator with the LAPD. Or maybe because he recognized a low-life scumbag when he saw one. Truth was, I had no business being on the shark hunter’s boat, who had every right to protect himself. Basically, I had assaulted a man defending his own property.

  A man who had caged and tortured a dog on his property.

  Sometimes cops look the other way. Sometimes laws fly out the window when something heinous has been committed. In Mexico, animal cruelty laws were vague. But they were in place, and the language of the law was simple: “no unnecessary suffering.” A bleeding and caged dog with hooks in its muzzles and paws certainly qualified.

  Not to mention, one didn’t need a law to see the extent of the cruelty.

  Right is right. Wrong is wrong.

  Sure, I had overstepped my bounds, and had Sanchez not been here, I could have very easily ended up in a Mexican jail. But I wasn’t in a jail.

  Instead, I was in a brightly-lit veterinarian’s waiting room in Ensenada, a twenty-four hour emergency clinic. After the police had cited Juan Trinidad for animal cruelty, he was taken away in an ambulance to treat his broken face. Next, they had carefully loaded the caged and terrified animal, and delivered it to the local vet.

  Which is where Sanchez and I were waiting now.

  My big, Latino friend was sitting back on the wooden bench, eyes closed, long legs s
tretched straight, crossed at the ankles. He looked asleep, but I knew he wasn’t. My friend had an uncanny ability to rest and be alert at the same time. We were alone in the small waiting room, which wasn’t much of a surprise since it was just a little past three in the morning.

  “ You got lucky,” said Sanchez without opening his eyes.

  “ I’ve been told that before.”

  “ I saved your ass.”

  “ That’s why I keep you around,” I said.

  We were silent some more. I heard someone talking urgently behind a closed door that led deeper into the facility. A plump woman with round cheeks sat behind a desk. She wore a powder blue uniform that seemed to be the mandatory uniform of vet assistants everywhere.

  “ Detective Hermenio says he’ll come down on the bastard as much as he can, but something like this only carries about a $30 fine.”

  “ So he’ll keep the boat?”

  “ No doubt.”

  “ And still hunt sharks.”

  “ I’m guessing yes.”

  “ So what did we accomplish?”

  “ You broke his face,” said Sanchez.

  “ That felt good,” I said.

  “ And saved a dog.”

  “ Yes,” I said. “I did.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Cindy and I were in my apartment in Huntington Beach.

  It was two days since my return from Mexico, and my life had taken an interesting turn. Mainly, I was now the proud owner of perhaps the world’s most damaged dog.

  Cindy was sitting at the marble-top counter, drinking wine. She seemed to be enjoying the wine. Go figure. Every now and then she would look off down the hallway where small, pitiful sounds occasionally emitted. Cindy had come over bearing tin dishes filled with veggie burritos, topped with cheese, guacamole, and sour cream.

  “ You didn’t have to order yourself a vegetable burrito,” I said. We were sitting next to each other at the counter. A half-full glass of Tecate was foaming comfortingly in front of me. I had taken to the stuff.