Joseph Wambaugh - Finnegan's week

Three months after the resolution of the strange and baffling warehouse theft conspiracy that led to the deaths of two Americans and four Mexicans-during the first weeks in office of the forty-second president of the United States-the new owner of Green Earth Hauling and Disposal received a communication from Sacramento inquiring about some waste that had been manifested from NAS North Island but had never arrived at a disposal site. The mid-level bureaucrat in Sacramento was informed by telephone that the load of waste had been stolen along with the waste handler’s copies of the manifests, and that the stolen load included a drum of Guthion from Southbay Agricultural Supply.

That same civil servant then telephoned Burl Ralston at Southbay Agricultural Supply to ask why in the hell he’d mailed them a donation to the American Red Cross, but not his manifest copy for the Guthion that later went with the stolen truck. Burl Ralston explained that his entire office had been disrupted by his secretary being off sick, and that he’d sent all sorts of documents to the wrong places and made a thousand stupid mistakes with paperwork. He guessed that his copy of the Guthion manifest had probably gone to the American Red Cross and was now lost forever.

Burl Ralston apologized, and told the civil servant that he was seventy-four years old, and was making so many mistakes he thought it was time to retire to a little place he was thinking about buying in Mexico, just south of Rosarito Beach. He told the bureaucrat that with the NAFTA agreement apparently a done deal, the Baja Peninsula might just end up being a kind of Mexican Riviera. And that any sharp American would be wise to take advantage of the Mexicans while he still could.