Dawn Patrol (38 page)

“Sounds good,” Dan says. He wears his trademark outfit—black shirt, black jeans, black cowboy boots. “Take her and go.”

Tammy puts her arm around Luce’s shoulder and leads her from the clearing, through the path trodden in the reeds, toward the road.

Boone loses sight of them as they go into the reeds.

What he does see is Dan wait a second, then walk into the reeds behind them.

Sunny takes off.

She paddles hard, two more strokes that take her onto the lip of the wave; then she shifts to her knees, then smoothly into her squat as she—

Goes over the edge.

She’s strong in the wave, beautifully balanced; she’s picked the exact line, then—

A Jet Ski zooms in and swings Tim Mackie into the wave.

If Mackie sees Sunny, he doesn’t acknowledge it. He cuts right into her line.

Sunny has to pull up. She drops to her stomach on the board, but she’s off-line and it’s too late to paddle back over the crest of the wave. She tries to duck her nose up and under, but the wave won’t let her and it takes her backward.

Over the falls.

Her board squirts into the air as she falls headfirst.

Boone crashes through the reeds.

Toward the sound of footsteps.

He can’t really see them, just vague forms through the reeds. Then he gets a glimpse of Dan, who pulls his gun from the waistband of his jeans and looks around to pinpoint the sound of the footsteps coming at him.

“Run!” Boone yells.

Tammy pushes Luce in front of her, turns, and sees Dan. Then, with a dancer’s grace, she whirls, her long leg snaps up, and she places a kick into the back of Dan’s head.

It sends him reeling, but he stays on his feet.

“Run, Luce!” Tammy yells. “Run and don’t stop running!”

But Luce doesn’t run.

She won’t leave Tammy, not again.

Dan recovers the grip on his pistol and aims it at Tammy, who puts herself between him and the girl.

Boone’s almost there.

Tammy’s too close for Boone to risk a shot, especially on the run in the confused tangle of the reeds, so he just dives at Dan, who turns the gun away from Tammy and on Boone and fires just as Tammy kicks his hand.

Boone plows into him waist-high and drives him backward. Dan can’t get his hand turned to press the pistol into Boone, so he clubs him with the butt, slamming it into the back of Boone’s head and neck, again and again.

Boone feels a searing, burning pain.

The world turns red and he feels like he’s somersaulting.

A bad, bloody wipeout.

Remember when you were a kid in the swimming pool and you’d see how long you could hold your breath underwater?

This isn’t that.

Getting caught in the impact zone is different from holding your breath in a swimming pool. For one thing, you can’t come up; you’re being rolled over the bottom—bounced, somersaulted, slammed, and twisted. The ocean is filling your nasal cavities and sinuses with freezing salt water. And it isn’t a matter of how long you can hold your breath; it’s a
matter of
whether
you can hold your breath long enough for the wave to let you up, because if you can’t—

You drown.

And that’s just the beginning of your problems, because waves don’t come to the party alone; they usually bring a crew. Waves tend to come in sets, usually three, but sometimes four, and a really fecund mother of a set might bring a litter of six.

So even if you make it through the first wave, you might have time to take a gasp of air before the next wave hits you, and the next, and so on and so forth until you drown.

The rule of thumb is that if you don’t manage to extricate yourself from the impact zone by the third wave, your friends will be doing a paddle-out for you in the next week or so. They’ll be out there in a circle on their boards, saying nice things about you, maybe singing a song or two, definitely tossing a flower lei out onto the wave, and it’s very cool, but you won’t be there to enjoy any of it because you’ll be dead.

Sunny’s in the Washing Machine, and it rolls her, tumbles her, somersaults her until she doesn’t know up from down. Which is another one of the dangers of the impact zone: You lose track of which way is up and which way is down. So when the wave finally lets you up, you budget that last bit of air for the plunge to the sweet surface, only to hit rock or sand instead. Then, unless you’re a really experienced waterman, you just give up and breathe in the water. Or there’s already another wave on top of you.

Either way, you’re pretty much screwed.

Keep your head, Sunny tells herself as she plummets. Keep your head and you live. You’ve trained for this moment all your life. You’re a
waterman
.

All those mornings, those early evenings, training with Boone and Dave and High Tide and Johnny. Walking underwater, clutching big rocks. Diving down to lobster pots and holding on to the line until you felt your lungs were going to burst, then holding on a little longer. While those assholes grinned at you—waiting for the girlie to give up.

Except you didn’t give up.

She feels a jerk upward and realizes that her board has popped to the surface.

“Headstoned,” in surf jargon.

Dave will be out there already, watching for the board to pop up. He’s on his way now. She forces herself to do a crunch, not to release the leash but so that if she does hit bottom, she’ll take the blow on her shoulders and not on her head, snapping her neck.

She hits all right, hard, but on her shoulders. The wave somersaults her three or four times—she loses count—but then it lets go of her and she pushes up, punches to the surface, and takes a deep breath of beautiful air.

Boone gets his arms around Dan’s arms and pins them to his side. Dan still has his gun in his hand, but he can’t raise it to shoot.

Dan slams three hard knee strikes into Boone’s ribs, driving the breath from Boone’s body. Boone gasps but doesn’t let go. To let go is to die, and he’s not ready for that yet. He can feel his own blood, hot and sticky, running down his face.

He pivots on one hip, turning Dan around toward the river. Then he starts walking, holding tightly to Dan, pushing him toward the water. Dan tries to dig and fight, but Boone has the momentum. Dan rears his neck back, then slams it forward, head-butting Boone on the bridge of the nose.

Boone’s nose breaks and blood gushes out.

But he holds on and pushes Dan toward the bank of the river. He plants his feet, pivots again, and crashes into the muddy water on top of Dan. Boone releases his grip, finds Dan’s chest, and pushes him down. He can feel Dan’s back hit the muddy bottom. Then Boone holds on and pushes. It’s a matter now of who can hold his breath the longest, and he figures that’s a contest he can win.

But he’s losing blood fast, and with the blood, his strength.

He feels Dan wrap a leg around him and he tries to fight it, but Dan doesn’t panic under the water and gets his leg locked around Boone’s. Then Dan turns his own hips and spins. Boone’s too weak to counter it,
and Dan flips him under. Then Dan sits up, on top of Boone, grabs him around the throat, and pushes down hard.

Boone arches his back and tries to buck Dan off him, but he can’t do it. He feels weak, and tired, and then very sleepy. His lungs scream at him to open his mouth and gasp. Take a nice deep breath of anything, even if it’s water.

His brain tells him to give up. Go to sleep, end the pain.

In his mind, he’s in the ocean.

A giant wave, a mountain, curls over his head.

Suspends in time for a second.

Hangs there, as if deciding.

Then it breaks on him.

Ka-boom.

Johnny Banzai charges into the clearing.

His badge is clipped to his jacket, his service revolver in his hand.

Harrington and the county people are right behind him, but Johnny has demanded he go in first.

Family fucking honor.

He goes in hard and fast, unconcerned with safety. He heard a gunshot in the distance and doesn’t know what the hell is going on, but he hits the clearing ready for whatever it is.

Some of the men are already running. Others stand there looking startled and confused. Johnny doesn’t care about the
mojados
—he sees three younger guys, better dressed, running away toward a line of trees, and young girls, looking around, milling in confusion.

Then he hears another gunshot.

It sounds like it’s coming from the other side of the reeds, down along the river.

Johnny calls for an ambulance and sprints toward the sound.

Boone feels Dan’s grip loosen, then let go; then Dan’s body slides off him into the water. A slough of blood pillows around Boone’s face. He pushes to the surface and sees, like a weird dream, an old Japanese man standing at the edge of the river.

A shotgun in his trembling hands.

In the distance, Boone hears yelling, sirens … but maybe it’s his head playing games with him.

He crawls to the riverbank and pulls himself up.

Then he hears something else.

A woman crying.

A howl of ineffable pain.

Sunny looks up and sees that she’s going to have to take another wave or two on her head, but it’s okay, because she’s in a good spot, close to the base of the waves, away from the point of maximum impact. But now she does release her leash, because the board is going to go in with the wave and she doesn’t want to go with it.

She takes the two waves, then the set ends and Dave pulls her onto the Jet Ski.

“That kook,” Dave says, “jumped in on you.”

“I saw.”

He takes her onto the shore.

People are running up the beach, including some lifeguards with medical equipment. She waves them off. “I’m okay. I’m good.”

But Dave is already striding over to where Tim Mackie is running his pie hole to his entourage and some surf press.

“Yo, kook,” Dave says. “Yeah,
you
. I’m talking to you.”

“You got a problem, brah?” Mackie asks. He looks surprised. Like, People do not have problems with Tim Mackie.

“No, you have a problem,” Dave says. “You could have killed her.”

“Didn’t see her, bro.”

High Tide steps into it. “You should get your eyesight checked, then,
bruddah
.”

“You don’t do that shit on my beach,” Dave says.

“This is your beach?”

“That’s right,” Dave says. He moves in, ready to separate Mackie’s head from his body. But Tide steps in front of him. Sunny steps in front of both of them and pushes the boys aside.

“I can take care of myself. Thanks, but I don’t need you to big-brother me.”

“I’d do the same,” Dave says, “if it was Boone or—”

“I can take care of myself.”

Great, she thinks as the crowd stares at her. I wanted the wave of the day; instead, I got the wipeout of the day and a hassle with golden boy Tim Mackie.

“That wasn’t cool,” she says.

“Sorry,” Mackie says. “My bad.”

But he has this smirk on his face.

“A-hole,” she says.

He laughs at her.

There’s only one response to that. She picks up her board and starts back down the beach, to the point where she can paddle out again. She can hear the crowd murmuring words to that effect. “She’s going out again. Do you believe it? After that? The chick’s going back out there.”

Damn right, she thinks, the chick is going back out there.

Going back out there to take the biggest wave.

Johnny Banzai runs.

It’s tough going through the heavy reeds, which cut his face and slice at his arms as he tries to beat them back in front of him.

Then he hears, as if from a far distance, a woman’s keening.

Luce lies in Tammy’s lap.

Tammy strokes the little girl’s hair and sobs. Her hands are hot and sticky with the girl’s blood, which runs from the little hole in her neck.

“Stop it,” Tammy says. “Stop it now.”

Tammy presses her hand on Luce’s neck, but the blood bubbles around it. She feels stupid, and weak, and dizzy and there’s pain somewhere in her body, but she can’t figure out where, and Luce’s eyes are wide and she can’t hear her breath and the bleeding just won’t stop. She hears a man’s voice saying, “I’ve got her.”

She looks up and Daniels is there, trying to take Luce from her. Tammy holds her tighter.

“I’ve got her,” Boone says.

“She’s dead.”

“No, she’s not.”

Not yet, Boone thinks. The girl is in really bad shape—she’s bleeding out, going into shock—but she’s still alive.

It’s like a dream in the waking moments, part real, part illusion. Everything is still at a distance, as if from the wrong end of a telescope, and he feels as if he’s wrapped in cotton, but he knows he has to keep moving if the girl is going to live.

The old Japanese man is already taking his jacket off.

Boone takes it and wraps it around Luce. Then he kneels beside her, runs his hand up her neck, finds the little entrance wound, and presses his thumb into it. He picks her up with the other arm, cradles her against his chest, and starts to move back through the reeds, toward the road, where an ambulance can reach them.

“Stay with us, Luce,” he says. “Stay with us.”

But the girl’s eyes are glassy.

Her eyelids flutter.

Sunny wipes the spray from her eyes and looks again.

She saw what she saw.

About fifty yards out but coming fast.

Waves generally come in sets of three, and they’ve done the three. But every once in a while, a set has a fourth. This bonus wave is a freak—bigger, stronger, meaner.

A mutant.

Known among waterman as the “Oh My God Wave.”

Which is what Sunny says as she sees it.

“Oh … my … God.”

The wave of a lifetime.

My
lifetime, Sunny thinks. My shot at the life I want, barreling right at me. I’m in the perfect spot at the perfect time. She rises up on her hips to look around and see what the Jet Ski crews are doing. They’re lying out on the shoulder, waiting for the next set.