Fear Nothing (19 page)

Bobby inherited the cottage.

This development astonished Bobby. We had both known Corky Collins since we were eleven and first ventured to the end of the horn with board racks on our bikes. He was mentor to every surf rat who was ravenous for experience and eager to master the point break. He didn’t act like the point was his, but everyone respected Corky as much as if he actually owned the beach from Santa Barbara all the way to Santa Cruz. He was impatient with any gyrospaz who ripped and slashed up a good wave, ruining it for everyone, and he had only disdain for freeway surfers and wish-wases of all types, but he was a friend and an inspiration to all of us who were in love with the sea and in sync with its rhythms. Corky had legions of friends and admirers, some of whom he had known for more than three decades, so we were baffled as to why he had bequeathed all his worldly possessions to Bobby, whom he had known only eight years.

As explanation, the executor of the estate presented to Bobby a letter from Corky that was a masterpiece of succinctness:

Bobby,

What most people find important, you do not. This is wisdom.

To what you believe is important, you are ready to give your mind, heart, and soul. This is grace.

We have only the sea, love, and time. God gave you the sea. By your own actions you will find love always. So I give you time.

Corky saw in Bobby someone who had an innate understanding, from boyhood, of those truths that Corky himself had not learned until he was thirty-seven. He wanted to honor and encourage that understanding. God bless him for it.

The summer following his freshman year at Ashdon College, when Bobby inherited, after taxes, the house and a modest sum of cash, he dropped out of school. This infuriated his parents. He was able to shrug off their fury, however, because the beach and the sea and the future were his.

Besides, his folks have been furious about one thing or another all their lives, and Bobby is inured to it. They own and edit the town newspaper, and they fancy themselves tireless crusaders for enlightened public policy, which means they think most citizens are either too selfish to do the right thing or too stupid to know what is best for them. They expected Bobby to share what they called their “passion for the great issues of our time,” but Bobby wanted to escape from his family’s loudly announced idealism—and from all the poorly concealed envy, rancor, and egotism that was a part of it. All Bobby wanted was peace. His folks wanted peace, too, for the entire planet, peace in every corner of Spaceship Earth, but they weren’t capable of providing it within the walls of their own home.

With the cottage and the seed money to launch the business that now supported him, Bobby found peace.

The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every timepiece with a digital readout blinks us toward implosion. Time is so precious that it can’t be purchased. What Corky had given Bobby was not time, really, but the chance to live without clocks, without an awareness of clocks, which seems to make time pass more gently, with less shearing fury.

My parents tried to give the same thing to me. Because of my XP, however, I occasionally hear ticking. Maybe Bobby occasionally hears it, too. Maybe there’s no way any of us can entirely escape an awareness of clocks.

In fact, Orson’s night of despair, when he had regarded the stars with such despondency and had refused all my efforts to comfort him, might have been caused by an awareness of his own days ticking away. We are told that the simple minds of animals are not capable of encompassing the concept of their own mortality. Yet every animal possesses a survival instinct and recognizes danger. If it struggles to survive, it understands death, no matter what the scientists and the philosophers might say.

This is not New Age sentimentalism. This is simply common sense.

Now, in Bobby’s shower, as I scrubbed the soot off Orson, he continued to shiver. The water was warm. The shivers had nothing to do with the bath.

By the time I blotted the dog with several towels and fluffed him with a hair dryer that Pia Klick had left behind, his shakes had passed. While I dressed in a pair of Bobby’s blue jeans and a long-sleeve, blue cotton sweater, Orson glanced at the frosted window a few times, as if leery of whoever might be out there in the night, but his confidence appeared to be returning.

With paper towels, I wiped off my leather jacket and my cap. They still smelled of smoke, the cap more than the jacket.

In the dim light, I could barely read the words above the bill:
Mystery Train.
I rubbed the ball of my thumb across the embroidered letters, recalling the windowless concrete room where I’d found the cap, in one of the more peculiar abandoned precincts of Fort Wyvern.

Angela Ferryman’s words came back to me, her response to my statement that Wyvern had been closed for a year and a half:
Some things don’t die. Can’t die. No matter how much we wish them dead.

I had another flashback to the bathroom at Angela’s house: a mental image of her death-startled eyes and the silent surprised
oh
of her mouth. Again, I was gripped by the conviction that I had overlooked an important detail regarding the condition of her body, and as before, when I tried to summon a more vivid memory of her blood-spattered face, it grew not clearer in my mind but fuzzier.

We’re screwing it up, Chris…bigger than we’ve ever screwed up before…and already there’s no way…to undo what’s been done.

The tacos—packed with shredded chicken, lettuce, cheese, and salsa—were delicious. We sat at the kitchen table to eat, instead of leaning over the sink, and we washed down the food with beer.

Although Sasha had fed him earlier, Orson cadged a few bits of chicken, but he couldn’t charm me into giving him another Heineken.

Bobby had turned on the radio, and it was tuned to Sasha’s show, which had just come on the air. Midnight had arrived. She didn’t mention me or introduce the song with a dedication, but she played “Heart Shaped World” by Chris Isaak, because it’s a favorite of mine.

Enormously condensing the events of the evening, I told Bobby about the incident in the hospital garage, the scene in Kirk’s crematorium, and the platoon of faceless men who pursued me through the hills behind the funeral home.

Throughout all of this, he only said, “Tabasco?”

“What?”

“To hotten up the salsa.”

“No,” I said. “This is killer just the way it is.”

He got a bottle of Tabasco sauce from the refrigerator and sprinkled it into his half-eaten first taco.

Now Sasha was playing “Two Hearts” by Chris Isaak.

For a while I repeatedly glanced through the window beside the table, wondering whether anyone outside was watching us. At first I didn’t think Bobby shared my concern, but then I realized that from time to time, he glanced intently, though with seeming casualness, at the blackness out there.

“Lower the blind?” I suggested.

“No. They might think I cared.”

We were pretending not to be intimidated.

“Who are they?”

He was silent, but I outwaited him, and at last he said, “I’m not sure.”

That wasn’t an honest answer, but I relented.

When I continued my story, rather than risk Bobby’s scorn, I didn’t mention the cat that led me to the culvert in the hills, but I described the skull collection arranged on the final two steps of the spillway. I told him about Chief Stevenson talking to the bald guy with the earring and about finding the pistol on my bed.

“Bitchin’ gun,” he said, admiring the Glock.

“Dad opted for laser sighting.”

“Sweet.”

Sometimes Bobby is as self-possessed as a rock, so calm that you have to wonder if he is actually listening to you. As a boy, he was occasionally like this, but the older he has gotten, the more that this uncanny composure has settled over him. I had just brought him astonishing news of bizarre adventures, and he reacted as if he were listening to basketball scores.

Glancing at the darkness beyond the window, I wondered if anyone out there had me in a gun sight, maybe in the cross hairs of a night scope. Then I figured that if they had meant to shoot us, they would have cut us down when we were out in the dunes.

I told Bobby everything that had happened at Angela Ferryman’s house.

He grimaced. “Apricot brandy.”

“I didn’t drink much.”

He said, “Two glasses of that crap, you’ll be talking to the seals,” which was surfer lingo for vomiting.

By the time I had told him about Jesse Pinn terrorizing Father Tom at the church, we had gone through three tacos each. He built another pair and brought them to the table.

Sasha was playing “Graduation Day.”

Bobby said, “It’s a regular Chris Isaak festival.”

“She’s playing it for me.”

“Yeah, I didn’t figure Chris Isaak was at the station holding a gun to her head.”

Neither of us said anything more until we finished the final round of tacos.

When at last Bobby asked a question, the only thing he wanted to know about was something that Angela had said: “So she told you it was a monkey and it wasn’t.”

“Her exact words, as I recall, were…‘It appeared to be a monkey. And it was a monkey. Was and wasn’t. And that’s what was wrong with it.’”

“She seem totally zipped up to you?”

“She was in distress, scared, way scared, but she wasn’t kooked out. Besides, somebody killed her to shut her up, so there must have been something to what she said.”

He nodded and drank some beer.

He was silent for so long that I finally said, “Now what?”

“You’re asking me?”

“I wasn’t talking to the dog,” I said.

“Drop it,” he said.

“What?”

“Forget about it, get on with life.”

“I knew you’d say that,” I admitted.

“Then why ask me?”

“Bobby, maybe my mom’s death wasn’t an accident.”

“Sounds like more than a maybe.”

“And maybe there was more to my dad’s cancer than just cancer.”

“So you’re gonna hit the vengeance trail?”

“These people can’t get away with murder.”

“Sure they can. People get away with murder all the time.”

“Well, they shouldn’t.”

“I didn’t say they should. I only said they do.”

“You know, Bobby, maybe life isn’t just surf, sex, food, and beer.”

“I never said it was. I only said it should be.”

“Well,” I said, studying the darkness beyond the window,
“I’m
not hairing out.”

Bobby sighed and leaned back in his chair. “If you’re waiting to catch a wave, and conditions are epic, really big smokers honing up the coast, and along comes a set of twenty-footers, and they’re pushing your limit but you know you can stretch to handle them, yet you sit in the lineup, just being a buoy through the whole set, then you’re hairing out. But say, instead, what comes along all of a sudden is a long set of thirty-footers, massive pumping mackers that are going to totally prosecute you, that are going to blast you off the board and hold you down and make you suck kelp and pray to Jesus. If your choice is to be snuffed or be a buoy, then you’re not hairing out if you sit in the lineup and soak through the whole set. You’re exhibiting mature judgment. Even a total surf rebel needs a little of that. And the dude who tries the wave even though he knows he’s going over the falls, knows he’s going to be totally quashed—well, he’s an asshole.”

I was touched by the length of his speech, because it meant that he was deeply worried about me.

“So,” I said, “you’re calling me an asshole.”

“Not yet. Depends on what you do about this.”

“So I’m an asshole waiting to happen.”

“Let’s just say that your asshole potential is off the Richter.”

I shook my head. “Well, from where I sit, this doesn’t look like a thirty-footer.”

“Maybe a forty.”

“It looks like a twenty max.”

He rolled his eyes up into his head, as if to say that the only place he was going to see any common sense was inside his own skull. “From what Angela said, this all goes back to some project at Fort Wyvern.”

“She went upstairs to get something she wanted to show me—some sort of proof, I guess, something her husband must have squirreled away. Whatever it was, it was destroyed in the fire.”

“Fort Wyvern. The Army. The military.”

“So?”

“We’re talking about the government here,” Bobby said. “Bro, the government isn’t even a thirty-footer. It’s a hundred. It’s a tsunami.”

“This is America.”

“It used to be.”

“I have a duty here.”

“What duty?”

“A moral duty.”

Beetling his brow, pinching the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, as though listening to me had given him a headache, he said, “I guess if you turn on the evening news and hear there’s a comet going to destroy the earth, you pull on your tights and cape and fly into outer space to deflect that sucker toward the other end of the galaxy.”

“Unless the cape is at the dry cleaner.”

“Asshole.”

“Asshole.”

20

“Look here,” Bobby said. “Data coming down right now. This is from a British government weather satellite. Process it, and you can measure the height of any wave, anywhere in the world, to within a few centimeters.”

He had not turned on any lights in his office. The oversize video displays at the various computer workstations provided enough illumination for him and more than enough for me. Colorful bar graphs, maps, enhanced satellite photos, and flow charts of dynamic weather situations moved on the screens.

I have not embraced the computer age and never will. With UV-proof sunglasses, I can’t easily read what’s on a video display, and I can’t risk spending hours in front of even a filtered screen with all those UV rays pumping out at me. They are low-level emissions to you, but considering cumulative damage, a few hours at a computer would be a lightstorm to me. I do my writing by hand in legal tablets: the occasional article, the best-selling book that resulted in the long
Time
magazine article about me and XP.

This computer-packed room is the heart of Surfcast, Bobby’s surf-forecasting service, which provides daily predictions by fax to subscribers all over the world, maintains a Web site, and has a 900 number for surf information. Four employees work out of offices in Moonlight Bay, networked with this room, but Bobby himself does the final data analysis and surf predictions.

Along the shores of the world’s oceans, approximately six million surfers regularly ride the waves, and about five and a half million of these are content with waves that have faces—measured from trough to crest—of six or eight feet. Ocean swells hide their power below the surface, extending down as much as one thousand feet, and they are not waves until they shoal up and break to the shore; consequently, there was no way, until the late 1980s, to predict with any reliability even where and when six-foot humpers could be found. Surf junkies could spend days at the beach, waiting through surf that was mushy or soft or even flat, while a few hundred miles up or down the coast, plunging breakers were macking to shore, corduroy to the horizon. A significant percentage of those five and a half million boardheads would rather pay Bobby a few bucks to learn where the action will or won’t be than rely strictly on the goodwill of Kahuna, the god of all surf.

A few bucks. The 900 number alone draws eight hundred thousand calls each year, at two dollars a pop. Ironically, Bobby the slacker and surf rebel has probably become the wealthiest person in Moonlight Bay—although no one realizes this and although he gives away most of it.

“Here,” he said, dropping into a chair in front of one of the computers. “Before you rush off to save the world and get your brains blown out, think about this.” As Orson cocked his head to watch the screen, Bobby hammered the keyboard, calling up new data.

Most of the remaining half million of those six million surfers sit out waves above, say, fifteen feet, and probably fewer than ten thousand can ride twenty-footers, but although these more awesomely skilled and ballsy types are fewer in number, a higher percentage of them want Bobby’s forecasts. They live and die for the ride; to miss a session of epic monsters, especially in their neighborhood, would be nothing less than Shakespearean tragedy with sand.

“Sunday,” Bobby said, still tapping the keyboard.

“This Sunday?”

“Two nights from now, you’ll want to be here. Rather than be dead, I mean.”

“Big surf coming?”

“It’s gonna be sacred.”

Perhaps three hundred or four hundred surfers on the planet have the experience, talent, and
cojones
to mount waves above twenty feet, and a handful of them pay Bobby well to track truly giant surf, even though it is treacherous and likely to kill them. A few of these maniacs are wealthy men who will fly anywhere in the world to challenge storm waves, thirty- and even forty-foot behemoths, into which they are frequently towed by a helper on a Jet Ski, because catching such huge monoliths in the usual fashion is difficult and often impossible. Worldwide, you can find well-formed, ride-worthy waves thirty feet and higher no more than thirty days a year, and often they come to shore in exotic places. Using maps, satellite photos, and weather data from numerous sources, Bobby can provide two- or three-day warnings, and his predictions are so trustworthy that these most demanding of all clients have never complained.

“There.” Bobby pointed to a wave profile on the computer. Orson took a closer look at the screen as Bobby said, “Moonlight Bay, point-break surf. It’s going to be classic Sunday afternoon, evening, all the way until Monday dawn—fully pumping mackers.”

I blinked at the video display. “Am I seeing twelve-footers?”

“Ten to twelve feet, with a possibility of some sets as high as fourteen. They’re hitting Hawaii soon…then us.”

“That’ll be
live.
”

“Entirely live. Coming off a big, slow-moving storm north of Tahiti. There’s going to be an offshore wind, too, so these monsters are going to give you more dry, insanely hollow barrels than you’ve seen in your dreams.”

“Cool.”

He swiveled in his chair to look up at me. “So what do you want to ride—the Sunday-night surf rolling out of Tahiti or the tsunami pipeline of death rolling out of Wyvern?”

“Both.”

“Kamikaze,” he said scornfully.

“Duck,” I called him, with a smile—which is the same as saying
buoy,
meaning one who sits in the lineup and never has the guts to take a wave.

Orson turned his head from one of us to the other, back and forth, as if watching a tennis match.

“Geek,” Bobby said.

“Decoy,” I said, which is the same as saying
duck.

“Asshole,” he said, which has identical definitions in surfer lingo and standard English.

“I take it you’re not with me on this.”

Getting up from the chair, he said, “You can’t go to the cops. You can’t go to the FBI. They’re all paid by the other side. What can you possibly hope to learn about some way-secret project at Wyvern?”

“I’ve already uncovered a little.”

“Yeah, and the next thing you learn is the thing that’ll get you killed. Listen, Chris, you aren’t Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. At best, you’re Nancy Drew.”

“Nancy Drew had an unreal rate of case closure,” I reminded him. “She nailed one hundred percent of the bastards she went after. I’d be honored to be considered the equal of a kick-ass crime fighter like Ms. Nancy Drew.”

“Kamikaze.”

“Duck.”

“Geek.”

“Decoy.”

Laughing softly, shaking his head, scratching his beard stubble, Bobby said, “You make me sick.”

“Likewise.”

The telephone rang, and Bobby answered it. “Hey, gorgeous, I totally get off on the new format—all Chris Isaak, all the time. Play ‘Dancin’’ for me, okay?” He passed the handset to me. “It’s for you, Nancy.”

I like Sasha’s disc-jockey voice. It’s only subtly different from her real-world voice, marginally deeper and softer and silkier, but the effect is profound. When I hear Sasha the deejay, I want to curl up in bed with her. I want to curl up in bed with her anyway, as often as possible, but when she’s using her radio voice, I want to curl up in bed with her
urgently.
The voice comes over her from the moment she enters the studio, and it’s with her even when she is off-mike, until she leaves work.

“This tune ends in about a minute, I’ve got to do some patter between cuts,” she told me, “so I’ll be quick. Somebody came around here at the station a little while ago, trying to get in touch with you. Says it’s life or death.”

“Who?”

“I can’t use the name on the phone. Promised I wouldn’t. When I said you were probably at Bobby’s…this person didn’t want to call you there or come there to see you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why exactly. But…this person was really nervous, Chris. ‘I have been one acquainted with the night.’ Do you know who I mean?”

I have been one acquainted with the night.

It was a line from a poem by Robert Frost.

My dad had instilled in me his passion for poetry. I had infected Sasha.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I know who you mean.”

“Wants to see you as soon as possible. Says it’s life or death. What’s going on, Chris?”

“Big surf coming in Sunday afternoon,” I said.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know. Tell you the rest later.”

“Big surf. Can I handle it?”

“Twelve-footers.”

“I think I’ll just Gidget-out and beach party.”

“Love your voice,” I said.

“Smooth as the bay.”

She hung up, and so did I.

Although he had only heard my half of the conversation, Bobby relied on his uncanny intuition to figure out the tone and intent of Sasha’s call. “What’re you walking into?”

“Just Nancy stuff,” I said. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

As Bobby and I led a still-uneasy Orson onto the front porch, the radio in the kitchen began to swing with “Dancin’” by Chris Isaak.

“Sasha is an awesome woman,” Bobby said.

“Unreal,” I agreed.

“You can’t be with her if you’re dead. She’s not that kinky.”

“Point taken.”

“You have your sunglasses?”

I patted my shirt pocket. “Yeah.”

“Did you use some of my sunscreen?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Geek.”

I said, “I’ve been thinking….”

“It’s about time you started.”

“I’ve been working on the new book.”

“Finally got your lazy ass in gear.”

“It’s about friendship.”

“Am I in it?”

“Amazingly, yes.”

“You’re not using my real name, are you?”

“I’m calling you Igor. The thing is…I’m afraid readers might not relate to what I have to say, because you and I—all my friends—we live such different lives.”

Stopping at the head of the porch steps, regarding me with his patented look of scorn, Bobby said, “I thought you had to be smart to write books.”

“It’s not a federal law.”

“Obviously not. Even the literary equivalent of a gyrospaz ought to know that every last one of us leads a different life.”

“Yeah? Maria Cortez leads a different life?”

Maria is Manuel Ramirez’s younger sister, twenty-eight like Bobby and me. She is a beautician, and her husband works as a car mechanic. They have two children, one cat, and a small tract house with a big mortgage.

Bobby said, “She doesn’t live her life in the beauty shop, doing someone’s hair—or in her house, vacuuming the carpet. She lives her life between her ears. There’s a
world
inside her skull, and probably way stranger and more bitchin’ than you or I, with our shallow brain pans, can imagine. Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside—some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me—we aren’t so special, bro.”

I was briefly speechless. Then I fingered the sleeve of his parrot-and-palm-frond shirt and said, “I didn’t realize you were such a philosopher.”

He shrugged. “That little gem of wisdom? Hell, that was just something I got in a fortune cookie.”

“Must’ve been a big honker of a cookie.”

“Hey, it was a huge monolith, dude,” he said, giving me a sly smile.

The great wall of moonlit fog loomed half a mile from the shore, no closer or farther away than it had been earlier. The night air was as still as that in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital.

As we descended the porch steps, no one shot at us. No one issued that loonlike cry, either.

They were still out there, however, hiding in the dunes or below the crest of the slope that fell to the beach. I could feel their attention like the dangerous energy pending release in the coils of a motionless, strike-poised rattlesnake.

Although Bobby had left his shotgun inside, he was vigilant. Surveying the night as he accompanied me to my bike, he began to reveal more interest in my story than he had admitted earlier: “This monkey Angela mentioned…”

“What about it?”

“What was it like?”

“Monkeylike.”

“Like a chimpanzee, an orangutan, or what?”

Gripping the handlebars of my bicycle and turning it around to walk it through the soft sand, I said, “It was a rhesus monkey. Didn’t I say?”

“How big?”

“She said two feet high, maybe twenty-five pounds.”

Gazing across the dunes, he said, “I’ve seen a couple myself.”

Surprised, leaning the bike against the porch railing again, I said, “Rhesus monkeys? Out here?”

“Some kind of monkeys, about that size.”

There is, of course, no species of monkey native to California. The only primates in its woods and fields are human beings.

Bobby said, “Caught one looking in a window at me one night. Went outside, and it was gone.”

“When was this?”

“Maybe three months ago.”

Orson moved between us, as if for comfort.

I said, “You’ve seen them since?”

“Six or seven times. Always at night. They’re secretive. But they’re also bolder lately. They travel in a troop.”