Smugglers Rising

Chapter One
I cocked the Beretta, the sound reverberating through the warehouse.
He laughed at me. He writhed on the cold concrete floor in pain from the wound in his side and laughed at me with disgust and scorn and hate in the sound.
While I wondered if doing this would make me feel whole again.
As if that even mattered.
Three weeks earlier, the first of November had dawned dark and blustery in my window overlooking Lake Merritt, turning by noon into a cold drizzle that accompanied me to the cemetery. The politician they were burying that day was not as corrupt as some, but more dishonest than others. The storm paused for the grave-side ceremony, dark clouds boiling overhead awaiting the preacher’s last words to die in the wind. The crowd of city officials, business moguls, and assorted luminaries, befitting their class, wore dark overcoats over expensive suits or dresses, the women prudently huddled under umbrellas, paying somber respects to a wealthy man they mostly disliked or thought a buffoon. But he was one of theirs. The dead man had not played a prominent role in my life. I’d embarrassed him once by writing a front page story revealing his dubious investment in a tract of Oakland waterfront he had participated in re-zoning. No one much cared. I stayed well back of the throng, dressed less for success—jeans, hiking boots, battered trench coat.
I knew three quarters of the large turnout at the cemetery by name. In the recent past half would have called me an acquaintance, a handful friend, two had once whispered words of love and lust in my receptive ear. Now they mostly didn’t acknowledge my presence, a few quick nods here and there as they moved past to their proper places. The preacher called on the Lord Almighty to forgive and love one and all gathered together. I considered why part of me still wanted to be in the middle of this crowd, notebook in hand, acknowledged as a player if not beloved.
I looked forward to my next drink of the day.
As the first shovels of dirt fell on the casket, the crowd broke into small pieces and began moving off, mourners resuming their usual roles as power brokers and supplicants. The mayor and two congressmen gathered under umbrellas next to the tall obelisk marking the grave of a pioneer governor. Two corporate CEO’s and their brother the U.S. Senator bunched near the family mausoleum, where two judges, a mayor, another governor, and two newspaper publishers lay in their crypts. Receiving lines formed at the Widow, the Senator, the Mayor.
I watched two men detach themselves from the crowd and move up the hill, deep in conversation. The older man, ponderous in his bulk, thick white hair uncovered, an aged hand clutching the elbow of the other in a fatherly fashion, was Bertrand Buckington Baer, millionaire financier and eight term ex-Congressman, more influential than all of the others gathered around the cemetery combined. In business he ruthlessly pursued money, and in politics power, using one to get the other. People were pawns to manipulate or obstacles to be bulldozed. I’d experienced the bulldozer. The second man was unknown to me, blandishly handsome with a short brown $75 haircut, wearing a dark silk suit cloaked with a charcoal gray London Fog raincoat that fit well around his leather shoulder holster. A cop.
They paused on a grassy knoll, and turned back towards the crowd. Bertrand Buckington Baer stared not at the grave, but at me. A short sharp tug of animosity struck my bowels. But I was past blaming others for my own considerable sins. Or so I thought.
Turning to go, I was intercepted by a tall, patrician woman, Mrs. Mabel Addington, the one person I most wanted to avoid. Nine months ago she called me into her office at the Oakland Daily Telegraph, told me I was her best writer, her best investigator, but that I was too ethically challenged and insubordinate to work for her any longer. I told her as usual she was half right, half wrong, and half assed, took her severance check, and disappeared into a bottle of Jameson.
“You disappoint me, Jackson.” A 65-year old beauty, she gripped my forearm with a cool white hand veined with blue blood. I could feel the eyes of her brother the U.S. Senator boring into the back of my head.
“Mrs. Addington.” I held on to a bare civility.
“I never thought you would break so easily. That almost saved your job, my fear you would show me up.” Challenging me.
I wanted none of it. “I decided there had to be a better way to spend my adult years than working for people who destroy innocent men because the truth doesn’t fit their needs.”
“By painting that horrid set of canvases you displayed at that low rent gallery last year?” she scoffed, ignoring the deeper implications. Derwin Johnson would not be a topic she’d enjoy pursuing. “Badly rendered juvenile visions from a depressed mind? You’re not a painter.” She stepped close, her voice sharp. “You’re a tool for others to point and use. A damn good one.”
“It was nice to see you again, too, Mrs. Addington.” I attempted to pull away but her grip was fierce. The storm renewed its slow soaking of the earth.
“My boy, you’ve always stood in haughty judgment of everyone else. You never understood about money. Or power. Didn’t you ever stop to think maybe you could be wrong?” She considered me. “No, you thought you should Be Someone.”
“Someone like you?” I snapped. “Or your fellow mourners, who care only because of the size of someone’s bank account? I’m a little long in the tooth for role models, Mrs. Addington.”
“I’d hoped you might have spent some time in the past few months taking an accounting of your reality.” Her tone mocked me. “But I can see, dear, you still haven’t figured out why you’ve become, well…” She stopped. “Nothing.”
“I am someone, Mrs. Addington. Someone who won’t be your tool to point and use.”
“You’re a fool, Jackson Avery,” she said in a low, cutting voice. I knew that manipulative tone. My skin prickled. “People are made for certain roles. You threw yours away, Jackson Avery, but it’s there for you, still.” I turned my back on her, forcing the publisher of the Daily Telegraph to raise her voice to finish her message to me. “You’re wasting your talent. You’re wasting paint.”
I stalked blindly down the slope through the rain and wet gravestones to the cemetery gate. I didn’t care about her opinions about my paintings. Hell, she was right.
I was a journalist, without a platform. Nobody cared to pay me to report stories they didn’t want to hear about. And I refused to continue writing their version of unreality. But her words stung, tumbled about repeatedly in the synapses of my brain. Fortunately for me, a block away from the cemetery stood the Kona Club, all bamboo and torch light and tiki, with a bar stool I was intimate with...

San Antonio Burn

Chapter One
I brooded at my living room window, staring down on the panorama of Lake Merritt stretched out at my feet with downtown Oakland’s skyline silhouetted beyond, the stillness of deep night broken only by a solitary jogger laboring along the water’s edge. Behind me the existential angst of a ubiquitous TV police procedural flickered soundlessly, too prosaic and cutting too close to hold my attention. An inch of whiskey remained in the Jameson bottle perched next to an empty tumbler on the living room coffee table. My cell phone vibrated and Antonio Calabrese’s voice hurtled me back into the world.
“Jackson, David Ambrose has been shot. I need you here, at Highland.”
Antonio hung up, not explaining further or waiting for my reply. I tugged on a pair of light-weight hiking boots and threw on my black leather jacket, went out the door. Ten minutes later my boss and best friend threw a huge paw over my shoulder and pulled me into a corner of Highland Hospital’s dingy surgical waiting room.
I took in the peeling institutional green paint, the dirty walls, the worn- and cigarette-burned blond wood and orange cloth furniture scattered around the room. In the midst of a tight cluster of folks near the far door I recognized Mrs. Ambrose, crying loudly in the arms of a huge man in greasy overalls wearing a fierce but caged look on his face. The Right Rev. Wilfred Jenkins hovered over them, murmuring softly in prayer, flashing angry eyes at a knot of white police officers standing around uncomfortably in stiff blue uniforms. Bill Joplin, the sergeant who handled media relations for the Oakland Police Department, nodded distractedly at me in greeting.
Up close in the weirdly green light of the overhead fluorescents, Antonio’s dark bald skull glowed unhealthily, his gray walrus mustache drooping in a deep frown. Ugly lines etched a face that could only be described as haggard.
“What happened?” I tried to sound as though I could fix it.
“OPD shot David. In Clinton Square. There was an arson fire at the furniture factory David’s been organizing in the San Antonio.”
“The sweatshop with the undocumented workers?”
“OPD says David started it…”
“Bullshit.”
Antonio looked grim. “They say David was watching the flames when the fire trucks arrived, acting strange, threatened an officer with a weapon of some sort. Plain-clothes cop shot him in self-defense.”
Anger tightened my face. “How bad?”
“Two in the chest. He’s in surgery. I called you as soon as I got here.”
The last year had taken a toll on Antonio. In the nine months since he’d put me on the payroll of the Longshore Union newspaper, he’d negotiated two major contracts and waged a strike at a shipping company at the Port of Richmond. So far we were 3-and-0, but now Antonio was in the middle of a lockout with a large luxury cruise ship line that wanted their dockside workers to pay sixty per cent more for health coverage. With pressure ratcheting up, Antonio had been leaning on me more and more for trouble-shooting and less and less for article writing. From the feel of the room, I didn’t think I was going to see the keyboard of my laptop any time soon.
“What was David doing there this late?”
Antonio shook his head. “Edna,” he nodded to the weeping Mrs. Ambrose, “is in no shape to talk. David’s been meeting the factory committee after midnight in secret locations. They’re pretty cautious, worried the company gets wind, I.N.S. sweeps in.”
“Anybody else hurt?”
Antonio’s face crumpled in on itself. “There was a full graveyard shift.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Clear him.” Antonio looked at me hard. “Find who’s behind this.”
I turned on my heel and strode over to Sgt. Joplin. He separated slightly from the group of policemen, turned his body so we could talk privately.
“Bill,” I said evenly.
“A bad night, Jackson. Going to be worse before dawn I fear.”
“Your people okay?”
“I hear a couple of fireman got burned, nothing too serious.”
“The factory workers?”
The sergeant shook his head, downbeat, rubbed a weary hand over his pale face. The guy had always treated me right while I worked for the mainstream press, I thought Joplin a decent human being. It didn’t mean the next part of the conversation was going to go well for either of us.
“Who shot Ambrose?”
“I can’t tell you that, Jackson. Not right now. You know that.”
“I want the police report, first thing.”
“Not going to happen.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“Very definitely not going to happen.”
“Look, Sergeant. I know you’ve got a job to do, and you also know that if it was a white cop, in plain clothes, who shot Ambrose…” I let it hang. Joplin looked very uncomfortable. “A respected union organizer, a deacon in the largest black church in Oakland…” I stopped, applied pressure from a different angle. “The union lawyers are going to be all over your boss in the morning, anyway, but if you help now, early, so we can figure out what really happened, maybe they won’t start screaming to the press, too.”
Sgt. Joplin was shaking his head. “No, no, no. This one is going by the book. No special treatment.” He rallied. “And we know what happened. Ambrose torched the building, and resisted…”
“How long are you going to persist with that crap story?”
Joplin looked away towards the wall. I turned and watched the family. The Rev. Wilfred Jenkins was still scowling at the men in blue. He didn’t look on my white face with any favor either. “I’d think about that, Bill, I really would.” I eyed Sgt. Joplin carefully. “Something’s wrong here,” I said in a low voice. “You’re too defensive if you thought this was a righteous shoot.” I changed tactics again. “Who’s the scene commander?”
“Captain Wilson.”
I nodded, inwardly pleased. “Wilson’s good, fair. Call him, tell him I’m coming. Tell him to talk with me, let me look around. The press is already there anyway, right?”
Joplin looked at me finally. “Jackson, I wish I could…”
”Sergeant, you can. Tell him I’m acting under the authority of the union’s attorneys. I won’t mess the scene up.” If Joplin stonewalled me, I was going over anyway. But it would be nice if Wilson felt enough heat to not consider me a mosquito best swatted.
“Can the union keep Rev. Jenkins muzzled?”
“Honestly? No. But we’ll try. Mrs. Ambrose is a strong union member, too. She might be able to, at least in the beginning. Hopefully that’s all we’ll need.”
Joplin nodded once, pulled out his cell phone, and turned away from me. I headed for my car...

Appointment in San Rio

Chapter One
It was the first act Carsteens didn’t struggle over since, well, before all that other stuff began.
He pivoted back through the open doorway, strode through the broken glass littered across the linoleum floor of the dingy Chinese take out joint to his half-eaten dinner of lemon chicken over rice congealing in its Styrofoam container, reached under the pink-checked plastic table cloth covering the next table, and plucked the dead man’s slim leather briefcase out from under the sterile white plastic chair.
The ability to chart a daily course, let alone a life, had proven elusive. Debilitation was damn tiring, frankly, Carsteens thought. So instead of trudging down any of the desultory paths he'd ultimately feared were all that were left open to him, paths he’d waffled at taking for days, weeks, months, years, knowing none seemed likely to do him any good, instead Carsteens quick-stepped through this warp in the fabric of his existence.
Convinced, for the first time, that no matter what came, he would deserve it. And he wanted everything he deserved...