“Let me guess,” says Bette. “You are on the speaker with your mother and brother and his wife.”
“Yes, I am. Is Mae alright?”
“Yes, and hello, everybody! I have read so much about all of you. A family of celebrity American surfers!”
Brock leans into the phone and whispers a profane curse.
“I recognize that voice and ’tude, Brother Brock! I love the Breath of Life Rescue Mission. People need anger. And comedy.”
Jen crowds close: “Don’t hurt Mae, you conniving bitch.”
“Mae’s fine, Jen. No worries! But there is now another small wrinkle.”
“No more of those,” says Casey.
“Very easy and simple, though,” says Bette. “Jen, we have business to discuss. So you come with Casey to deliver the money. See? Easy wrinkle! Casey, Jen, and the money. In Casey’s truck. We see any police, any car that is not your truck — then Mae goes overboard. We see Brock or Mahina, or the Go Dogs van, then maybe Mae runs away and we can’t find her. We find guns or phones on you... well, you know what happens. Okey dokey?”
Casey pictures Bette from last night in his bar. He’s never felt real anger before, at least nothing like this. Bette Wu has more wickedness in her than anyone he’s ever met. His first brush with evil. She seems to be made of it. To enjoy it.
“Mae misses you so much,” she says. “We will be watching for you, Casey and Jen!”
She rings off.
11
Casey steers his pickup out of Laguna Canyon toward the toll road, headed south for San Diego, Jen beside him, the cash-stuffed pack on the cab’s back floor.
Over the Pier 32 National City Marina, skies are blue, and a brisk breeze pings the lanyards and halyards of the pleasure yachts.
Empress II sits heavy and workmanlike in slip 41-B, with her fading blue and red paint, well-used outriggers, and her tag lines swaying loosely in the wind. The coiffed motor yachts seem to ignore her.
Casey hoists the pack and strolls toward the vessel, his mother beside him. He’s dressed as he almost always dresses, and it’s perfect for the role of ocean-bound young adventurer that he’s now suggesting: tan corduroy board shorts, flip-flops, a black hoodie with Day-Glo orange draw cords, and wide-temple sunglasses.
Jen’s got on shorts, a T-shirt, a windbreaker, ankle-high trekking shoes, her orange bowl of hair partially contained in a black-and-green paisley bandana.
Casey sees Bette Wu standing atop the hold, phone to her ear. Mae stands beside her, tail wagging, her aging eyes recognizing Casey at this distance. Casey feels his eyes tearing up, feels like his heart is trying to get out and run to her.
Smoker, whom Casey had jettisoned just yesterday, a cigarette in his mouth and a pistol in his waistband, holds open the lower boarding gate with a bored stare. Casey starts up the ramp, Jen behind him. He looks up to see Mae propped up on the gunwale, looking down at him, smiling between barks with that big open smile Labs get.
Now aboard, Casey kneels and gets a mauling from Mae, kissing her forehead and kneading her ear joints. Mae howls emotionally. Jen kneels too and just about gets knocked over.
Bette, dressed in snug black tactical garb and red mid-ankle Air Jordans, leads them down a short steel gangway and into the cigarette-smoke- and incense-infused galley. The ship seems bigger than Casey remembers from his initial search for Mae. There’s a row of portholes along the port and starboard sides, the thick plexiglass bearing the scars of years. Through which Casey sees the gently swaying blue-green bay, a ketch coming into its slip, the marina ships bobbing at dock. Hears the Empress II generators moaning away, their vibrations coming through his flip-flops. Keeping their catch frozen, he thinks, and their lights on.
Seated at the head of a heavily shellacked table is the Kings fan his mother described — Bette’s alleged father. To his right sits a handsome Latino in a trim suit, a leather briefcase open on the table just a short reach away. Casey notes the black grip of a stainless-steel pistol peeking out from under the fastener file folders, and a yellow legal pad bristling with handwriting.
Bette pulls out a chair and sits to the left of her father, who is hatless now, but again clad in black-and-white Kings hockey team warm-ups, with a jungle of gold around his thick neck.
He offers a half smile, nodding to Jen and Casey. “As you know, I am Jimmy Wu, Bette’s father. I have many interests. Such as King Jim Seafood. All the very best seafood, always fresh. I am famous in seafood distribution in Southern California. I have big social following. I have YouTube. I have ads on TV late at night. My colorful trucks are all over the place. This is my attorney, Octavio Benitez. Mergers and acquisitions. Octavio.”
Benitez rises as Jimmy completes the introductions, but sits without shaking Casey’s offered hand. “A pleasure to meet you both.”
They sit and Benitez fixes first Jen, then Casey, with dark, amused eyes.
“I know of your many accomplishments and awards and medals. I saw you, Mrs. Stonebreaker, announcing the Olympic water polo competition on TV not long ago. Very insightful commentary.”
“Why thank you.”
“Mr. Stonebreaker, I’ve followed your big-wave conquests through the streaming coverage of the Monsters of Mavericks... what is it now, canceled three of the last five years?”
“No,” says Casey. “Two of the last ten. They say climate change is making the waves bigger now. The next Monsters could be more like when Dad died. Huge.”
Jen’s heart drops at this, but the lawyer smirks.
“Casey, I saw video of you as a seventeen-year-old, in your first big-wave competition at Mavericks.”
“I didn’t exactly tear it up.”
“But you survived.”
“You don’t get a lot of points for survival,” says Casey, reaching down to pet Mae, who has laid down on his feet. Casey feels her warmth on his skin. “You have to bring more than survival to the ride. You need a special thing to win.”
“Yes!” says Jimmy Wu. “You need style, and cool, and the attitude that you own the wave and it does not own you. If your legs are shaking, or your eyes are wide, you don’t win points!”
Casey remembers his first big waves, not so much the fear itself, but his fear of fear, of choking. He didn’t choke but his legs trembled on the bottom turns and when he looked at the footage the next day he was surprised and embarrassed by his expressions: wide-eyed dread, grim determination, nerve-jangled relief as he flew like a trapeze artist over the tops of the waves, kicking out, then falling down into the marginal safety of a furious ocean between waves.
“And I am also aware of your wonderful Barrel restaurant, Mrs. Stonebreaker,” says the lawyer. “But I get ahead. Mr. Wu, you should count the money.”
“Bette?”
“Danilo!” Bette calls out.
Smoker comes in, takes the backpack from Casey, and sets it on the far end of the table. Zips it open, then retreats to lean against the kitchen bulkhead, one foot up against the peeling white steel, pistol in place behind his waistband.
Bette goes to the pack, unbands and counts each thousand-dollar pack with careful patience, setting the completed stacks aside and apart.
She looks up at Casey after each one. “...nine hundred eighty, eight thousand.”
A few minutes later she announces, “Money’s all here. I didn’t think Stonebreaker would cheat us. He is much too good and innocent.”
Casey breaks eye contact with her for lack of an apt response. He can’t tell if she’s being complimentary or contemptuous. Doesn’t really care. Notes that her father gives Bette a hostile stare.
He stands, looks at the lawyer, then at the briefcase in which the gun waits, then to the table with his and his mom’s $25,000 in it. Lawyers, guns, and money, he thinks. He was singing that song in the shower just a few days ago, scrubbing down with a stiff brush and strong soap, trying to get the smell of bluefin tuna fish off his hands.