Chapter 39
AT A QUARTER to nine that evening, the wind was coming hard out of the northwest, gusting to twenty knots, churning the Pacific off the Huntington Beach Pier into a roiling charcoal-colored beast that kept trying to rise up and snatch Del Rio and me.
We hung from linemen’s belts on opposing pylons, twelve feet above the crashing sea and two pylon rows back from the western edge of the pier. Below us, two Sea-Doo water sleds strained and pitched at ropes that moored them to the pylons. The Sea-Doos were the fastest, nimblest sea vessels money could buy. Del Rio had found them at a dealer a few miles from the pier. We’d launched them right at dusk and had been up on the pylons in the deep shadows ever since, wiping the spray from our goggles, peering out toward the electric halos of light shining down from the pier. No fishing lines dropped to the sea. The weather was just too rough.
We counted down the minutes listening to the minimal chatter on the channel used by the law enforcement lurking at the perimeters of the operation. Two sheriff’s helicopters were bucking the wind, moving in arcs two miles offshore, running with no lights, ready to respond. Two police helicopters were cruising at high altitude two miles inland.
Three high-speed boats, two from the sheriff’s detail at Marina Del Rey and one from the county’s Baywatch lifeguard unit, lurched in the swells about a mile out, ready to intercept any vessel trying to head to sea or run the coast.
“Chief’s on his way,” the Kid said in my earpiece. He was posted on the roof of a building across Highway 1 from the pier entrance.
“Nothing within five hundred yards,” said Bud Rankin, who was up on top of Ruby’s Diner, using an infrared scope to scan the surroundings.
My right leg was starting to cramp when I heard the chief say, “Almost to the diner.”
In my mind I could see Fescoe, head down into the wind, walking toward Rankin and Ruby’s Diner carrying two black dry bags, one on each shoulder.