Fear Nothing (25 page)

“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.”