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  OUTSTANDING PRAISE FOR T. JEFFERSON PARKER’S

  PACIFIC BEAT

  “T. Jefferson Parker is a powerhouse writer.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “The kind of book you think about long after you have finished it … intelligent, sensitive, poignantly real … Parker emerges as one of our best novelists.”

  —Atlanta Journal & Constitution

  “A hothouse of full-bloomed characters and ripe emotions.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “T. Jefferson Parker is not the first to explore the peculiar psyche of Orange County—he’s simply the best.”

  —San Diego Union

  “Parker is a gifted writer … superb … a smart and compelling read.”

  —L.A. Style

  “T. Jefferson Parker makes the turf of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald his own with a novel steaming with atmosphere and taut with suspense.”

  —Literary Guild

  “An outstanding, memorable, and magnetic work!”

  —Library Journal

  “Parker is a robust storyteller who delights in bewildering reversals. He passionately describes the disappearing coastal culture while composing a tantalizing story of small-town politics.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  PACIFIC

  BEAT

  T. JEFFERSON PARKER

  PACIFIC BEAT

  All Rights Reserved © 1991 by T. Jefferson Parker

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by T. Jefferson Parker

  Originally published by St. Martin’s Press

  To Catherine Anne --

  With all the love that heaven will allow

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the following people for their generosity and their help. This book couldn’t have been written without them. Gail and Betty Bagley, Tom Bagley and Vilma Dunn, Sioux Herlihy, Peggy Darnell, Dorothy Glover, Lynn Cooper, Jeanne Sandifer, Julie Sedevic and Dana Blakemore. Special thanks, again, to Donald A. Stanwood.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  About the Author

  Connect with T. Jefferson Parker Online

  Other Books by T. Jefferson Parker

  CHAPTER 1

  THE MAIN THING HERE IS THE PACIFIC, IN THE LONG RUN, THE land and the people on it amount to only that. In the short run, a lot can happen.

  The Franciscans ruined the Indians, the Mexicans bounced the Spanish, the Anglos booted the Mexicans and named the town Newport Beach. Dredgers deepened the harbor, and the people lived off the sea. There was a commercial fleet, a good cannery, and men and women to work them. They were sturdy, independent people, uneducated but not stupid. Then the tuna disappeared, the nets rotted, and the fishermen succumbed to drink and lassitude. Two wars came and went. Tourists descended, John Wayne moved in, and property values went off the charts. Now there are more Porsches in Newport Beach than in the fatherland, and more cosmetic surgeons than in Beverly Hills. It is everything that Southern California is, in italics. There are 66,453 people here, and as in any other town, most of them are good.

  Jim Weir grew up on the Balboa Peninsula of Newport, in a bayfront home that, in one form or another, had been in his family for ninety years. The first Weir male to make it to the new world had fallen off the Mayflower at what is now Provincetown and drowned. Descendants of his pregnant wife later came west during the gold rush. Jim’s great grandfather worked with the Newport Harbor tuna fleet and died in comfort, if such a thing is really possible. His grandfather fished the waters when they were still abundant. Success had gone skinny by the time it trickled down to Jim’s mother, Virginia, who, with an air of stubborn efficiency, ran the café at Poon’s Locker. Weir’s father—Poon himself—died ten years ago of a stroke. His older brother was shot in the heart by a sniper at Nhuan Duc. His sister, Ann, operated a little day-care center two blocks from the home that the Weir kids grew up in, and slung cocktails at night.

  Jim was a salvager by trade, a diver. He had worked ten years for the Sheriff’s Department: one at the jail, two on the streets, five with the Harbor Patrol, two with Investigations. Then he quit to do local salvage work, and find an English pirate ship called the Black Pearl, which was sunk by Spanish warships off Mexico in 1781. So far as Jim knew, he hadn’t even come close. He had lived most of his adult life aboard Lady Luck, in slip B-420 of Newport Harbor.

  From his father, he had inherited a deep brow and dark hair, a humorless face, a frame that carried weight without announcing it, and an outward calm that could be mistaken for dullness. He had his mother’s pale blue eyes, big hands that had always looked ten years older than the rest of him, and a temper that lived uneasily beneath the calm. He was reserved in the odd way that born Californians can be—a kind of knowing reticence that amuses Easterners, and has little to do with beach beer commercials or the common parodies of cool. To be cool is to be ready. Jim was thirty-seven, strongly built, never married, and occasionally employed. In the ways that matter, he was still looking for his first big score.

  He stood on the ferry as it slid across the bay from Balboa Island to the peninsula. Lights wobbled on the black water and the bay rang with the pinging lanyards of sailboats. A May breeze came straight onshore, pressing its cool hands against Jim’s face. The Newport Beach police helicopter droned above, then banked away, trolling for crime by spotlight. Jim looked across to the houses clustered on the other side and almost smiled to himself: the old neighborhood. Awful good, he thought, to be home again.

  Weir had spent the last six months in Mexico diving for the Black Pearl and his last thirty-four days as a special guest of Mexican police in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, He had scratched the cell wall with his thumbnail each dawn when the roosters outside woke him in the stinking darkness. Jim had lost fifteen pounds, two thousand in cash, some very good dive and salvage gear, and his home, Lady Luck. The charges were drug-related, false, and, for reasons that Weir was not told—dropped. The policia clerks released him with his wristwatch, the clothes he was arrested in, and bus fare to San Diego. To the Zihuat cops, zero tolerance was a venerable tradition.

  The ferry groaned, slowed, then settled against the ramp. Jim stepped off, his legs unsteady: Beans and bad water take their toll on muscle tone. He moved down the sidewalk and wound through the tourists, breathing deeply the salt air, the fumes of cars idling in the ferry line, the smell of beached seaweed. The Fun Zone cast pink lights onto the sidewalk and someone screamed from atop the Ferris wheel. The tourist girls looked pretty as ever. Were they all getting younger or what? He listened to the sound of his boots on the cement, felt the jarring of his weakened legs with each step, and agai
n he almost smiled: Mom will be at the Whale’s Tale, having a glass of wine, and Ann will be there serving it to her. Raymond’s probably on patrol, working the night shift. Home, man, home.

  He was right. His sister, clad in a dumb sailorette outfit that showed off her legs, was standing beside a window booth, yakking it up with Virginia. His mother was huddled in the pale yellow windbreaker that matched her hair. Ann had her back to him. Jim walked up quickly, wrapped his hands around her waist, buried his nose in her pretty blond waves, and snorted like a hog. She elbowed him sharply, turned, and threw her arms around him. He hugged her and looked down at Virginia, who sipped her wine and offered him a rare smile.

  Ann spun him around and pushed him into Virginia’s booth. “Two months and not even a postcard? Did you find it? Why didn’t you write? God, you’re skinny. You all right? Does Ray know you’re back?”

  “Yes, no, jail, yes, no. Boy, I’m hungry.”

  “Jail? My God, Jim.” Ann felt his forehead like the mother she would never be. Jim could see the three dark spots in the blue of her left eye, which he had always thought of as islands in a sea. She was two years older than he, but looked five younger.

  Virginia placed one of her big gnarled hands against Jim’s ribs. “What happened, son?”

  “First can I have some food?”

  Ann’s jaw dropped in mock affront. “I spend six months worried sick about you, and you want some food. Here, eat this.” She dangled the navy blue napkin in front of him.

  “Frisky tonight, aren’t we?”

  “Oh gee, am I really? Then let me fulfill my life’s work and locate you some food.”

  “You look good, Annie. Your skin is rosy.” Jim noted without comment that she had lost some weight, that the fret lines between her eyes had deepened.

  “It’s just the Mop ’n Glow I use. But thank you ever so much. Excuse me, irritation calls from the corner four-top.”

  Jim ate some bread and clam chowder, more bread, a swordfish dinner, cheesecake for dessert, and drank most of a liter of house red. He recounted his Mexican misadventure in installments, whenever Ann could come by the table. He left out the beating he received on the night he was arrested, because it had hurt too much then to talk about now. Weir long ago had discovered that words make some things worse, that silence confuses the devil, that dumping misfortunes on loved ones is akin to using the pot without shutting the bathroom door first. To Jim, the true heartbreak in Mexico was not in failing to find the Black Pearl, or the beating, or the rank sickness in the Zihuat jail, but the fact that his boat—his home, and everything on it—was gone. Only now, back stateside, did the loss seem actual. Until now, fear had hogged the emotional road, but Jim was starting to just get pissed. Fuentes was right: A gringo in Mexico is euthanasia. By the time Jim finished his story, he had avenged himself in a dozen half-plotted, violent imaginings, but he was so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open.

  “You need some sleep, son. Stay with me in the big house. Your bed’s still made up and I ran your truck once a week like you wanted. Becky would like a call.”

  Ann bent over and hugged him. “You stay right where you are until my surprise gets here. And guess what? Ray and I are having a party on Friday. Be nice and I’ll invite you.”

  Jim asked about the occasion, but Ann was vague and coy, as she often was. A cup of coffee later, Jim looked up to see Ann’s husband, his oldest and finest friend, coming toward the table. Newport Beach Police Lieutenant Raymond Cruz walked across the floor with his usual graceful slowness, his gun, stick, radio, and assorted equipment neat around his waist, as systems-heavy as any cop on the beat. Jim felt a surge of happiness for which he wasn’t prepared. Ray smiled widely, threw open his arms—left hand low and right hand high—and caught Jim in a bear hug. Weir could feel the strength in Ray’s hands as they slapped against his back. It was an embrace of thankfulness. Raymond broke away first, and regarded Weir. “You look busted,” he said.

  Jim nodded. “You were right. They took it all.”

  A darkness passed through his eyes: Raymond’s first instinct would be to return there and take it all right back. He kissed Ann, bent down to peck Virginia, then turned again to Jim with a look of incomprehension. “How many times did I try to tell you?”

  “Too many. I don’t want to hear it again.”

  “You don’t want to listen, you don’t want to hear. My friend, dumb as a stick. How can it be so goddamned good to see you?” For a moment he stood there, reading Weir’s face with his bright, clear stare. Then he looked at Ann, who simply, for a moment, beamed.

  “Tell him,” she said.

  “You tell him, Ann.”

  She stepped forward, reached down, and placed Jim’s hand against her stomach. “How’s Uncle Jim sound?”

  For just a moment, Weir was speechless. Ann could not conceive. Armies of doctors had told her that, and twenty years of marriage had proven them right. And here, suddenly, what could not happen had happened—the simplicity of miracle showed plainly on her face.

  Then she was racing along with the details, using words that once had curdled her with jealousy: seven months to term, a December baby, sick this morning, got to get the house ready, still haven’t picked names.

  Jim saw that she already had entered that world where no man could follow, the parallel universe of motherhood. He had never seen such a thorough joy in her. Even Virginia had a sort of giddiness. Raymond’s posture had changed—head a little higher, neck a little straighter—and there was a new roundness to his trim Latin features.

  “Annie,” said Jim, “you’ll be the best—uh—second-best mom in the world. It was worth getting skunked in Mexico to come home and hear this.” For as long as he could remember in his adult life, Ann had wanted a child. She had kept the faith.

  Ann smiled freshly, as if realizing all over again the blessing that had befallen her. She caught herself, reigned in her joy and proposed breakfast in the morning at the big house, where Jim could “tell us what really happened” down in Mexico. This decided, Raymond kissed her lightly again, then checked his watch. “Back to the mean streets of Newport,” he said. “Glad you’re here, Jim. See you tomorrow.”

  He walked across the floor with a final turn back, a smile that was aimed at Jim but strayed quickly to his wife.

  Five minutes later, Weir felt the exhaustion hit him. He downed another half glass of wine and stood. “Don’t anybody wake me up before noon.”

  He labored wearily down the stairs and into the moist peninsula darkness. The fog was gathering low in the sky and the spring chill still clung to his bones.

  But Weir didn’t go to his mother’s house. Instead, he walked right past it, along the little bayfront homes and alleys that had comprised the geography of his youth. The neighborhood was quiet. Squat cottages conferred beneath overgrown hedges of oleander and bougainvillea; tiny yards sat with an air of preferred neglect. Half a block down was Poon’s Locker—the family business that had brought in enough money for Poon and Virginia to raise three kids. It sat solid and darkened, and Jim stopped for a moment to look through one of the double O’s of the neon sign that had hung in the window since 1963. He could see in bare outline the chairs and tables of the coffee shop, the postcard rack by the door—Wet Your Line at Poon’s Balboa!—the trophy fish hanging on the walls, the counter and cash register. With a little effort, he could have conjured Jake, running through the café on some obsessive mission, followed by the curses of Poon.

  Half a block farther, he came to Ann’s Kids, the day-care center run by his sister—in lieu of her own family, Jim had long ago concluded. Would she close it by December? It was a small old house with a six-foot chain-link fence around the grounds to keep the tykes in. The yard was concrete and Jim could see the trikes and building blocks stowed neatly beside the front door. It had the look of something soon to become history.

  Then past Ann and Raymond’s house—a dinky two-bedroom bungalow with a wooden porch. The veranda
was strung over with fishnetting festooned with starfish, abalone shells, sand dollars and cork floats. From the sidewalk, the objects seemed to hang midair, unattached. Ann, he thought, the collector of small treasures.

  He walked another three houses down, to where a tall hedge of white oleander formed a wall around the lot behind it. He stood for a minute, took a deep breath, and found the gate hidden in the foliage. He reached over the top, muted the brass bell with his hand, then slowly pushed it open. He stopped just inside. The yard was small and neatly kept, the air touched with the sweetness of the orange tree that blossomed near its center. Spring annuals nodded lazily from their pots. The walkway stones were even and swept. A cottage sat at the far end, lit from within. The wooden door was open but the screen door was shut and Jim could see her sitting in the dining room, back to him, her head tilting against her left hand, and her right holding a pencil to a notepad. Her light brown curls caught the light when she turned and looked in his direction, but the rest of her face remained in shadow. Jim became the oleander. He watched her stand and walk across the living room toward him, a pretty, full-bodied woman in a green silk robe. She stood at the screen door, hands on her hips, looking out. Weir’s desire was to step forward and say something, but he had no idea what it should be, and his legs refused to entertain the notion. From deep inside he breathed a sigh of relief, a sigh that he had not been able to muster for the six months he was in Mexico, a sigh that he had yearned for on each of the thirty-four days he had spent imagining this woman from his cell in the Zihuat jail. Then the porch light went out and the wooden door closed, and Jim could hear the dead bolt sliding into place.

  The first call woke him up at one in the morning. Jim lay in his old room, tossing in the penumbra of half sleep, sweating and clammy, his stomach in knots. For a moment, he couldn’t figure out where he was. It was Ray.

  “Jim, you and Ann catching up?”