When I woke, the insistent alarm beeping, from a deep, dreamless sleep, I didn’t even make coffee. I didn’t even do anything. After I’d blinked a few times, and confident that the world hadn’t come to an end, I put on an old favorite pair of jeans, sneakers, and an old tattered oversized lifeguard hoodie that I’d kept for all those years, and that still fit. And I left my gun and holster, against all my best instincts, on the night table, as Willow had instructed me to do. I grabbed fish tacos and rice and beans at the stand next to the Sunshine, and when I was finished, stood up to see a procession of dozens of bobbing candle flames turning towards me from Sunset Cliffs Blvd. Willow and Hope had come through. I turned to look toward the seawall and saw six of Wilkes’ goons coming my way, but I just stood there. As the procession of dozens of people holding candles approached, I caught Willow’s eye, who was in the lead. She mouthed the words, “Get in line,” and I fell in behind.

It wasn’t difficult to find what we were looking for. In front of the two seedy two floor complexes a few blocks north on Bacon that were supposed to be homes for runaway girls, seven or eight of Wilkes’ goons were smoking, beers in hand. If it had been me alone, or just me and Seth, we never would have gotten by them. But the sea of candle-bearers froze them and we swarmed past like a wave breaching a sandcastle at high tide. One of them tried to get in my way as I mounted the stairs toward the lighted rooms on the second floor of the first building, and I decked him. I entered the door on my right, which wasn’t locked, and found, instead of a beach apartment, a large, open space where all the interior walls of the apartments had been knocked down. In front of me there were teenage girls in various states of undress playing video games and watching TV, but as I turned to my left, moving from south to north in the dilapidated old building, I saw beds, arranged dormitory style. By the first two beds I saw two naked girls giving two men blowjobs. I heard my old partner’s voice behind me yell “Jay! Wait!” And I ignored it. The first goon, his pants unzipped, pulled a gun from a shoulder holster, and I kicked it out of his hands, just missing the girl’s head, who was ducking. I then put my foot through his knee joint and dislocated the elbow of his friend who had pulled a gun from behind his waist. I heard more yelling behind me, so I broke his leg too, and he went down like a stuffed doll. I bent over and grabbed his gun from his now limp hand, no longer worried about the gun I’d left at home, or the wisdom of Willow's advice, and headed toward the doorway in front of me from where I could hear the muffled cries of a girl. I entered to see a bound and gagged girl of about thirteen being violated from behind by one of Wilkes’ goons, while a tall thin twenty something with a little goatee was filming it. I grabbed the thug, naked but for a black mask and gloves and side-kicked him in the ribs, the bones of his flabby body crackling under my foot, and punched him in the side of his head with my free hand as he went down. I then decked the cameraman with the back of my pistol, and moved on. In the adjoining room, moving north, I found nothing but a naked girl crying and another girl trying to console her. But the next one down, and this is what I was looking for, I found Wilkes. He was on the floor in the corner, wearing a bra, panties and lipstick, slowly masturbating. I turned and saw one of his goons with his fingers between a girl’s legs, her moans partially muffled by a ball gag. I instantly recognized the girl as someone I sometimes saw around town and shot Wilkes through and through, a non-fatal wound just below the right shoulder blade, then broke both the thug’s legs, first the left, then the right. I grabbed for his head as he went down, and bashed his chin into the window sill, several times, until he began spitting teeth onto the floor below the shuttered window. I moved over to Wilkes, and he was seconds away from losing his life when two FBI agents pulled me off of him.  “Forget it, Jay,” I heard Seth say, as I attempted to wrestle myself free from the two feds. “It’s Ocean Beach.”

And my mind went back for a moment to when we were teenagers. Chinatown was one of our favorite movies.

“It’s Chinatown,” I said to Seth.

“No, it’s Ocean Beach.”

“Yeah…Ocean Beach.”

That was hours ago.  Now I’m standing on the pier, and I can feel the haze beginning to burn off.  It will still be gray for a while, but at some point the sun will come out.  It almost always does in San Diego.  The vile stuff I’ve seen the past year – Wilkes and his crew of minions, this evil, this wasn’t the place I’d lived in, grown up in, spent my life in, this crazy little beach town, the surf, the pier, the cliffs, lifeguarding, the bikers, the hippies, the weirdos, me, Seth.  I remember an old-timer, a guy from Hawaii, telling me, seriously, that the cliffs were haunted, to watch out.  I was just a kid.  I ignored him.  Now…now I wondered.  And Hope.  They said she would be fine -- if she wanted to be. One of the people Seth still trusted on the force got to her, her living room bathed in pulsing blue, just as she’d severed her left artery, the blood spurting brown and purple against her glinting dagger in the rhythmic glow of the Christmas lights. She’d left a note. She’d never intended to live past the solving of her son’s death, her reason for living now gone.

Ms. Torres and her people found drugs, kiddie porn, and even snuff films. An aide to the mayor was caught trying to sneak away, and a powerful person from Sacramento had three naked girls, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, respectively, alone with him in a bed. And this time they wouldn’t be able to hush it up.

The sun is lifting over the east now, and I’m wondering what I’m going to do, and I’m thinking, as if somebody’s listening, but they’re not. It’s only me. The old Asian man, sitting fishing, just cracked his fourth or fifth beer and threw something back he’d reeled in. The big pelican spread its wings as if to leave, then thought better of it, looked in my direction curiously, and began lazily scanning the water again. In a few days, my tattoo will be healed enough to go back in the water. Ms. Torres offered me a job, and so did Seth. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe I’ll write this all down.

 

THE END