Harbor Nocturne Read Free Page A

“These streaks’re what the sun does to hard-core kahunas that surf year-round.”
    “I didn’t mean to suggest anything untoward,” the sergeant apologized.
    Flotsam grunted and turned to Jetsam, saying, “Untoward?” Then, to their host: “If we work for you, Sarge, we might need a translator.”
    Sergeant Hawthorne, who was thinking exactly the same thing about them, said, “You can ask any of the night-watch vice officers about me. I’m a forgiving supervisor, and I’m easy to get along with. Maybe I don’t look or sound the part, but I’m a pretty good street copper as well.”
    Doubting that, Flotsam told his partner, “Dude, it could be nectar-neat to catch an occasional break from these bluesuits and, like, go all Mission Impossible for a night or two.”
    “Easy for you to say, bro,” Jetsam said. “You ain’t the one that’d have to get your mind into a ghoulish game of show-and-tell where some psycho pervert wants to hump your stump.”
    Sergeant Hawthorne said, “It’s not like that. Cozzo is basically a grifter with a rich foreign client who has a very strange Achilles’ heel, that’s all.”
    “If he ever decides to go the distance himself, the geek won’t even have a heel,” Jetsam reminded them with a perceptible sneer.
    “We could try it once and see how it goes,” the vice sergeant said. Then: “Whoops!” as another dollop of ketchup obliterated the a in ucla .
    Jetsam shook his head. “Sarge, your sweatshirt now just says UC, as in ‘undercover,’ with two blobs of red beside it. So you just managed to out yourself. Any denizens of the dark out there can read that you’re UC, and you did it with your own ketchup.”
    Sergeant Hawthorne managed an embarrassed smile and began wiping ketchup off the sweatshirt and off his face, until scraps of shredded napkin clung to his chin.
    Jetsam looked at the vice sergeant and said, “What’s the thread count on these things anyways? You got pieces of it hanging off your face.”
    Flotsam said, “Sarge, if we let you dial us in, you gotta learn how to eat a fucking hamburger. You’re making us, like, way nervous here.”

TWO
    “ T he first thing you gotta learn is, forget classroom Spanish. It’s not San Pay-dro. Around here everyone pronounces it San Pee-dro, or just Pee-dro most of the time.”
    Dinko Babich was conducting a late-morning tour for Tina Tomich, his mother’s first cousin, and her husband, Goran, who had arrived two days earlier for a brief visit to the Babich family home. Tina and Goran were in San Pedro to take one of the cruises to Hawaii being offered at Great Recession prices in the third summer of the Obama presidency. Dinko was conducting this private excursion at the request of his mother, Brigita, as a way to kill the last few hours until their ship was ready to board. All they had done since their arrival was sleep, eat, and gossip incessantly with Dinko’s mother, who’d said her good-byes to their Cleveland relations that morning while Dinko loaded his forest-green Jeep Grand Cherokee with their luggage.
    Dinko was still bloated from the food orgy of the last thirty-six hours. Of course, there was the inevitable mostaccioli and sauerkraut, staples of San Pedro Croatians, but his mother had worked for days prior to the visitors’ arrival and had prepared spicy pork meatballs and boiled Swiss chard with olive oil, garlic, and potatoes. And not just any olive oil, mind you, but Dalmatian olive oil. Dinko’s grandfather had always said that even a dish of sardines and mackerel tasted like Mary the Mother of God had prepared it, if you had Dalmatian olive oil and local, brick-oven French bread for the dipping.
    Dinko’s mother, whose parents had emigrated from a village near Dubrovnik, had apologized to Tina and Goran because she had no way to purchase Adriatic fish, which everyone in her family believed to be the best in the world. But she presented a main course of the Croatian version of shish