Sanchez and I were working out at the 24-Hour Fitness in Newport Beach.
Today was our “pull” day. That meant biceps, lats, abdominals and hamstrings. Like anyone who’s serious about getting bigger and stronger, we never work the same muscles two days in a row. Amateurish. Muscles need time to rebuild, especially when you hit them as hard as we hit them. Tomorrow would be our “push” day…any exercises that consist of a pushing motion, with bench presses being the obvious one.
Right now we were doing sets of old-school pull-ups on the horizontal bar. I was on pull-up number fourteen when Sanchez said, “Taking you long enough to do twenty pull-ups.”
I cranked out three more, then paused while hanging from my hands. “It’s my third set, asshole.”
“ And your skin’s all red and blotchy.”
“ Latinos sweat,” I said, resuming my pull-ups, grunting as I spoke. “Gringos blotch.”
Sanchez shook his head. “You gringos are weird.”
I finished my third set, and now Sanchez cranked out his own final set of pull-ups. I mentioned how he looked like a girl, with his legs curled up the way they were. He paused and said something about the unappealing lack of pigmentation in my skin, then finished his own third set.
Next, we hit the row machine hard, and by our second set, I had gotten him caught up on my current case. Sanchez, a homicide investigator with the LAPD and an ex-teammate at UCLA, was a good person to bounce cases off of, although I would never let him know that.
“ This guy, Trujillo…”
“ Is Latino,” I said.
“ What does being Latino have to do with anything?”
“ I thought we were finishing each others’ sentences.”
“ We ain’t fucking finishing each others’ sentences.”
“ See,” I said. “I could have finished that one for you.”
Sanchez shook his head and finished his third set of rows. He was wearing a tank top and his muscles bulged and rippled and I caught more than one woman admiring him. I didn’t need to tell him the women were admiring him. Sanchez noticed everything. Besides, his wife, Danielle, would have my head on a platter if she knew I had pointed out any women.
Sanchez said, “So why do we think this guy Trujillo plugs our golden boy and dumps him in the Long Beach Harbor?”
I was on the machine now, pulling the chromed bar back slowly and with near-perfect form. “Because Mitch Golden was giving him grief. Hurting business.”
“ Hurting business how?”
“ Exposing the shark finners for the shitbags they are. Helping the game wardens arrest his suppliers.”
“ So Trujillo is like, what, a shark fin kingpin? And his fishermen provide him the fins?”
“ Way to make it sound street,” I said. “But yeah.”
“ Street makes sense to me,” said Sanchez. “Shark fins don’t. There any money in fins?”
“ Enough to kill,” I said.
Sanchez stood and stretched and generally looked like a peacock parading around. He showed me his tan bicep. “See, no blotching. It’s brown and beautiful.”
“ And sweaty,” I said.
Sanchez shook his head, careful not to look at the women looking at him. He was afraid of his wife, too. As we all should be.
He said, “And they really use dogs?”
“ Some do. Not all of them.”
“ Ain’t right.”
“ Nope.”
We were silent as we caught our breaths. The gym wasn’t so silent. Music pumped. Machines clattered. People grunted.
Sanchez looked around. “Lots of splotchy people here.”
“ It’s Newport,” I said.
He looked at me. “You can’t save all the dogs, Knighthorse.”
“ I know.”
“ Or the damn sharks.”
“ I know that, too,” I said.
“ But you’re going to try, aren’t you?”
“ I’m going to do something.”
“ What about finding Mitch Golden’s murderer?”
“ That too,” I said.