When I got closer I could see that one held an old fishing rod and had hooked his line under Shamu’s large, welded pipe front bumper and was acting like he’d hooked a big one.
One of them said, “Give him line!” The fisherman acted like he was letting off the drag, then he jerked again like he was re-setting the hook and the fight was on again.
“It’s a big one, hombre. Looks like two tons!”
The fisherman said in a mock strained voice, “Captain, what kind of fish is it?”
The one who told him to give it line said, “It’s a guppy!”
I reached them and said, “Very funny.” They collapsed in hysterics. When they finally caught their breath I asked, “Have you seen the security tape of the car theft?”
They shook their heads no. The fisherman said, “They told us about it, but that’s all.”
“You have any idea which way that woman could have crawled from to get to the Firebird without being seen?”
They all pointed to the southwest corner of the lot. The fisherman said, “Had to be from there. Only place you can’t see real easy, and she could sneak by the wash rack there before she ducked down.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem. We got to have a little fun with Jaws here,” he patted the hood of my pickup.
“It’s not a shark, it’s a killer whale.”
The fisherman said, “It’s a truck, amigo. What kind of mushrooms you been eating?” They all thought that was a riot. He added, “Next time you come by, bring it in and we’ll wash it. Won’t cost you nothing.”
**
I drove toward the office and thought about the woman. From the few images I’d seen on the news tape and the one glimpse of her face on the security cameras, I agreed with Archie’s estimate of her being around nineteen or twenty.
Somebody that young and that good a thief and escape artist is rare. Odds were she had a record, so we might be able to find her through the LAPD or County Sheriff’s department. It was something Hondo and I could discuss.
The only problem with the Sheriff’s department was that we still owed our contact there. Sergeant Vick Best was as good as they come, but he was a bit testy with us right now.
I finally reached Venice, pulled into the gym parking lot, and found a space in front of our office. Hondo had the DVD of the news footage loaded in the player. He had two mugs of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee ready for us, along with a half-dozen donuts. I grabbed a donut and sat down. I said, “Have you watched it already?”
“Just once. I didn’t pick up anything, but I thought with both of us we might get lucky.”
I took a bite of donut and sipped some coffee, “Roll it when you’re ready.”
I ate three donuts and Hondo ate two as we watched the events three times.
I finished my second cup of coffee and said, “Let’s watch it once more.” Hondo started it again. This time I concentrated on another vehicle that the pickup passed after banging into the Firebird. It was a white stakebed truck hauling mirrors. The mirrors were strapped to the outside of the truck bed on racks. I caught a flash of a reflected face in profile as the pickup passed the stakebed. “Stop it and rewind a little bit,” I said.
Hondo did and I pointed the stakebed out to him as I filched the last donut. He stopped the film as the face came into the mirror.
It was blurry, but we could make out that it was a black man with a gunfighter’s moustache and a black cowboy hat that was shaped and curled and fit him like he was the real deal. Hondo inched the footage forward but we were at the end of the film and unable to make out anything else.
I popped the last of the donut into my mouth as he turned off the tape and looked in the donut box. “Didn’t you leave me half of that last one?”
I chewed and swallowed, “I thought you wanted me to eat it so it wouldn’t sit around and attract ants.”
“You ate four donuts.”
“I figured you probably had a couple when you bought these, sort of like an appetizer, and that was why you only had two.”
Hondo shook his head and poured us some more coffee. While we drank, I told him about visiting the car dealership.
Hondo said, “She’s about half ghost the way she can move around in broad daylight and nobody sees her.”