Joseph Wambaugh - Finnegan's week

“No,” Abel said. “Leetle marijuana sometime.”

“Second time I got busted, I was workin for a guy had a big tanker rig. He figured a way to tap in to this oil line that went from California to Utah. When the line started operatin he installed a spigot and hose. The stupid oil company thought the atmospheric conditions caused the oil drop and never did figure it out. I got in on it toward the end. I use to sell the oil to guys at truck stops. A helicopter finally spotted a big spill in the desert and got suspicious and that’s how it got shut down.”

“Joo was caught?” Abel asked.

“Not for that. Only for stealin a goddamn Harley hog. Shoulda stayed in the oil business, but no, I had to steal that bike. Hard for the cops to get serial numbers off crude oil, right, Flaco?”

The ox snorted like a horse at that one, pausing to hawk up a lunger and spit it out the window. The Mexican didn’t understand what he meant.

“Green Earth!” Abel shouted to a manifester in blue coveralls who was sitting on a pile of pallets beside the huge oiler at the quay wall.

“Okay,” the manifester said. “Guess your paperwork’s in the office.”

Shelby followed Abel Durazo and the manifester, trying to check the time on a stainless-steel wristwatch that wasn’t there anymore. On Saturday night in National City he’d traded it for some good crystal meth and bad black pussy. When he’d sobered up he began to worry about AIDS. She was a burned-out junkie, uglier than west Texas. Every time he looked at his wrist he thought about that junkie hose-bag and wondered if maybe he should get a blood test.

When he’d got to work on Monday and described his evening to a few of the guys, his foreman said, “Shelby, your cock takes you places I wouldn’t go with a gun !”

Inside the monster warehouse was a little office off to the right. In it was a metal desk, a chair, a phone. The manifester entered, made a notation or two, and handed Abel the paperwork, saying, “We put the two pallets inside. We never know if you guys’re gonna show this month or next.”

“Not our company,” Abel said. “We come on time.”

There were pallets, boxes and crates stacked twenty feet high from one wall to the other. Abel saw the ox read the stenciled content markings on the nearest mountain of boxes.

“Man, jist imagine what they gotta store for those aircraft carriers,” Shelby said. “Like, you gotta stash enough stuff for an army, right? I mean a navy. What’s in all them boxes?”

Shelby looked at Abel when he said it, and Abel wondered if the ox could read his mind.

“We’re loaded to the gunnels,” the manifester said. “Got some big ships coming into port and they’re taking on enough supplies to go out on the high seas for a ninety-day exercise. You got thousands of guys got to live a long time on all this, so we’re prestaging.”

“Uncle Sam takes care of his navy,” Shelby said to Abel.

Then the manifester said, “Damn, I’m late for a lunch date with a lady. You guys can use a forklift, can’t ya?”

“Use ’em all day long in our job,” Shelby said.

The manifester pointed to a pair of yellow forklifts and said, “Don’t take the one with the busted lift lever. The other one’s better.”

“Enjoy yourself,” Shelby said, baring his gap-toothed grin. “And remember what the chaplain says: Don’t take your most treasured possession and stick it in somethin that’d scare you to death if you was sober.”

The manifester gave a thumbs-up, turned, and strode off along the quay, leaving the waste haulers alone. Lunch break lasted from 11:30 to 1:00. The warehouse was theirs .

Neither trucker spoke for a minute. Then Abel said, “Buey, our job gone een two, three week. We got nada then.”

“And our boss is a cheap prick,” the ox said, working himself into it, sensing what was going to happen here. “And I ain’t paid in enough to be drawin much unemployment. I’m fucked!”

“I get the truck. You drive forkleeft down to the nex’ loading bay. We don’ take nothing from this bay.”

“Excellent!” the ox said. “That manifester logged us in at this one, but there’s dozens a truckers in and out a the rest a the bays all day long. The navy won’t even miss whatever it is we take. Matter a fact, we’re taxpayers, ain’t we? We bought em all this shit in the first place, right? We got it comin to us, right, dude?”

It took them less than ten minutes to load the four fifty-five-gallon drums full of the U.S. Navy’s contaminated fuel mixture that had been shipped from Guam. They dollied the drums into the back of the van next to the drum they’d picked up from Burl Ralston at Southbay Agricultural Supply. By the time Abel got the rig backed up to the next open bay, yet another tractor-trailer was already parking alongside the oiler.

More suspects , Shelby thought. There was no way the navy would ever know which truckers to blame. That is, if anybody noticed there’d been a theft in the first place. Shelby had the forks hooked into a pallet of boxes when Abel ran inside the second warehouse bay.

The ox was so excited he looked like he was wired on methamphetamine. “Flaco!” he said. “There’s some kinda computers and shit in these big boxes!”

“No,” Abel said. “No computer. Too hard to sell.”

Abel began running along the pallet stacks reading the military specifications on the boxes. Suddenly he stopped, took a knife from his pocket and cut open a box. He struggled for a moment, and pulled out a black, steel-toe, high-top, nonskid U.S. Navy flight-deck shoe. Then he grinned at Shelby.

“Leave that!” Shelby said. “There’s TVs in them other boxes!”

“No TV,” Abel said. “Serial number. Remember how you get caught before? These.” He held up the navy shoes.

“Shoes? Who the fuck wants shoes? ”

“Buey!” Abel said, grabbing the big man by his tattooed biceps. “I promise to you two thousand dollar! Today !”

“Today? How?”

“Get on forkleeft! Work, Buey!”

In less than twenty minutes the truckers had forklifted every pallet containing boxes marked “shoes” into the bobtail van. “They don’t mees them. They got so much they don’t mees the shoe,” Abel said, pronouncing it choo .

Nobody inspected their load when they wheeled back through the gate. No one had ever bothered to inspect a load, not in the thirteen months that Abel Durazo had been hauling toxic waste.

When they were driving beside the Silver Strand State Beach, away from Coronado, the ox exploded. “I must be a fuckin moron! Shoes! I let you talk me into takin a million pair a useless fuckin shoes !”

“Two thousand,” Abel said. He’d counted while Shelby had stacked. “We got two thousand. Más o menos .”

“Two thousand fuckin pair a shoes! Now what?”

“Joo going to see, Buey,” Abel said, confidently.

The ocean along the Silver Strand reflected coral and turquoise in the sparkling light. Abel drove carefully, knowing that Coronado P.D. motor cops patrolled the boulevard because of sailors who piled up their cars on that dog tooth of a highway, returning drunk from Tijuana.

When the bobtail van left the strand and turned toward 1–5, south toward Mexico, a flock of screaming gulls flew directly over them heading toward the Tijuana slough wildlife refuge that borders Imperial Beach on that southwestern tip of the United States. One of the reasons that geese, gulls, and other waterfowl frequented the estuary was because of the raw sewage that seeped into it from the Tijuana River that wound along the international border. Many a bird had plucked a morsel from the slough and died from it.