Private L.A. (Private 6)

I thought back and felt she was right. “Good thing Justine and Cruz are on their way there right now.”

Sci frowned. “They took the jet?”

“Yeah, so?” I asked.

“I never get to take the jet,” Kloppenberg said, openly pouting.

“Report it to a human rights commission,” I said. “And I want this same sort of report drawn up on Sanders, Bronson, and Graves.”

“Give us a couple of hours,” Mo-bot said.

My cell phone rang. Mickey Fescoe.

“Chief?” I said.

“Get down to the Huntington Pier ASAP,” Fescoe said. “I want you and Del Rio to see what we’re up against.”

Chapter 28

WEARING BLACK POLARIZED sunglasses despite the iron-gray sky, a floppy olive-drab fishing hat, flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt that read “Bass Pro Shops,” Nickerson picked up a bait bucket, saltwater rod, and tackle box and shuffled out onto the Huntington Beach Pier, where a breeze was building.

With the possible exception of the earbuds he wore and the fiber-optic camera hidden among the various lures stuck along the band of his hat, Nickerson looked no different from thirty or forty other men trying their fishing luck out on the pier.

At its far end, more than a quarter mile out into the Pacific, the pier widened into a large diamond shape dominated by a red-roofed diner called Ruby’s. Nickerson skirted left of the diner and took up a position along the rail where he could monitor the pier’s west end.

“That’ll do,” Cobb said in Nickerson’s ear.

“How long you figure?” Nickerson muttered as he squatted over his tackle box and bait bucket.

“Any time now,” Cobb said. “Get to work while you can.”

Nickerson settled in like a man certain of his craft, which he was. He removed lures that looked like pale-gray six-inch squid, with trailing tentacles. When he was positive no one was watching, he reached through the lower rails of the pier and pressed the lures up against a steel girder. The hooks had been magnetized, and soon the lures, six of them in all, were tucked up under the flange of the walkway. They were very close to the color of the girders and visible only from the sea, which meant only by surfers, lifeguards, or shore patrol, and only if they were studying the girders carefully with binoculars.

After rigging up a real lure and dropping his line over the side, Nickerson braced his pole, then crouched over his tackle box. This time he picked up what appeared to be a lead weight painted dull gray. It was about the size and shape of a matchbook, as thick as a cell phone. Hoops like the eyes of fishhooks stuck out at either end of the weight. He used brass snaps to attach steel leaders to each eye. He got two large fishhooks from the tackle box and fixed them to the unattached end of each steel leader.

“Mr. Hernandez just spotted Fescoe coming onto the pier,” Cobb said.

“He alone?” Nickerson asked, glancing around.

An old Vietnamese guy stood at the rail about twenty feet to his left, jigging his pole, looking down into the sea. To his right some fifteen feet, a dad and young son rigged poles.

“So far as I can tell.”

The old Vietnamese guy gave a cry. Nickerson’s attention shot to him. The second he realized the old man’s pole was bent hard, he swiveled his back to the windows of Ruby’s Diner and faced the sea, knowing that all eyes would be on the fight and the catch.

Nickerson twisted the hoops at either end of the metal weight, one toward him, one away. Then he stuck the entire rig under the railing, pressing the hooks into the plastic bellies of two of the squid lures, thus completing a circuit.

He stood up immediately and turned to see the old angler bring up a stout bottom fish, a fantail sole that wriggled and flapped, provoking murmurs and soft cries of appreciation from the other fishermen.

“Nice fish,” Nickerson said.

“Good eating, this one,” the old man said, grinning. His teeth were brown.

Nickerson nodded. But behind the polarized lenses, he was watching Chief Fescoe moving toward the westernmost tip of the pier and two men he hadn’t noticed before, one rangy and good-looking, the other shorter, stockier.

“Fescoe’s got friends,” Nickerson murmured, and adjusted his hat so the camera better faced the trio.

“I see them,” Cobb said.