San Diego Noir

“You ready?” asks his buddy, Special Agent Brooks Fairley, who looks more like a surfer than a G-man.

“Born. Let’s kill this bitch.” Moses grins and their small army kicks in the door.

Instant chaos. It’s an abandoned house with a slim brownskinned woman on a dirty mattress and five others in black burkas handcuffed to a pipe. Moving Black Objects. Not real women to Teddy and his partners. It’s old military slang to dehumanize them in order to make it easier if you have to kill one of them.

Legacy is on top of the terrified girl on the filthy mattress and it’s being filmed by a fat guy with one hand simultaneously on his crotch. Multitasking. Teddy is in the corner laughing and chatting it up with some shady-looking guys in suits. Teddy’s an attractive man with curly black hair and classic Roman features. He’s almost prettier than handsome. Moses bets the guys in suits are spooks. The men scatter when the door is slammed open and Fairley’s men with their guns drawn come streaming in like a murder of crows. Through the confusion, Moses can hear Legacy yelp as Fairley throws him against a wall a little too roughly, and it warms his heart and he makes a mental note to buy Fairley a beer when this is over. Summer tends to the women.

Moses sees Teddy slip out the back and races after him.

Moses is fast for his age and size, but Teddy’s a younger guy by about a decade and he slips easily onto the crowded boardwalk. They push through fat and pale tourists. Teddy shoves a little girl to the ground and she starts crying. The reggae street band orchestrates the chase. “Ramble Tamble” is blasting out of Kojak’s. Moses can’t let him make it to the parking lot or Teddy will be out of his reach for good, so he steps it up, and in a last ditch effort, like throwing a TD pass from his football days, he hurls his attaché case at Teddy, who stumbles at the sudden impact. Moses grins in triumph and soon has Teddy in a headlock, moving back to the authorities.

“That bitch rat me out? You stop this operation of ours, American soldiers and American citizens will continue to get killed by the rag-heads!” Teddy gasps.

“Teddy, her name is Hope and she’s a smart girl who I’m going to help get a good job downtown. No, what screwed you is cheating on your taxes. Holding back on your 941s was cute since it’s the welfare of your employees, and not you, but the geeks in auditing caught it. You owe me thousands of dollars, asshole. You should have known that the IRS always gets their man. As a bonus, I get to see the Penters burn. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, it’s a great day to go to jail.”

PART IV

BOUNDARIES & BORDERS

THE ROADS

BY GABRIEL R. BARILLAS

Del Mar

Roads. That’s what everyone thinks about when you mention Southern California. The locals are obsessed by their roads and their epic traffic. Everyone has a shortcut and a hundred horror stories of hours spent crossing town on a rainy day. But during the summer, nobody minds if the beach roads are stopped. The cars and streets are filled with young beautiful people wearing not much at all.

San Diego is the most southern part of Southern California, but there aren’t that many roads. There’s Interstate 5, the long ribbon that runs the entire length of California’s farmland and great cities. The 5 effectively bottoms out in San Diego, where it hits Mexico. You get the picture. Not too many places to go when you get here. San Diego is a repository for detritus that falls off Interstate 5. Nobody is truly from San Diego. Everyone came from somewhere else.

The hundred-mile drive from L.A. to San Diego is beautiful. Halfway down from L.A. you hit Camp Pendleton and the Pacific Ocean appears as you pass the sprawl of San Clemente. I drove past ritzy towns like La Jolla, Rancho Santa Fe, and Del Mar, but after only a few days of living here, I noted one thing. Behind its slick and sunny veneer, San Diego can’t escape the fact that it’s a border town. I quickly learned that late night in downtown San Diego can be quite a grab bag of adventures. Drug cartel members take busman’s holidays here. Human traffickers set up bases and patiently wait for the time to be right so they can move their cargo north. Drunken sailors and marines litter the streets, on leave for the weekend, and in their wake follow the whores, both male and female, a tribute to the diversity of our military. The Gaslamp Quarter, the developed section of downtown and the pride of San Diego, rolls right into what some locals consider the seedy side of town. This was the San Diego that I came to call home.