by Don Winslow
And when he does, I’ll be there to put the cuffs on him.
A good way to go out.
Because now it’s personal.
He clamps down on the cigar.
Neal Carey realizes that he’s happy.
Perched on a rooftop from which he can see every exit from the Longboard, he realizes that he’s perfectly content just watching, doing the basically nothing that is part and parcel of a stakeout, the tedium of which used to drive him batshit crazy.
But that was a long time ago.
Neal hasn’t done this kind of work, in what, thirty years?
It isn’t like he wants to go back to doing it again. He likes the classroom, likes teaching, especially likes doing the research for his scholarly books that nobody reads. Even Karen just pretends to read them, but he knows that she really skims so that she can come up with a few complimentary comments. No, he’s happy with his career choices.
But now he has to admit to himself that this is kind of fun, that he’s missed the excitement of the chase (What “chase”? he thinks. You’re standing around a rooftop), the suspense, the adolescent thrill of the illicit.
The rooftop is just more fun than the faculty lounge.
The phone rings, and it’s Duke. “You okay?”
“I’m great.”
“You don’t have to piss?” Duke asks.
“Amazingly, no.”
“That girl you talked to,” Duke says, “Sandra Sartini. She went in and pressed charges. So I guess you haven’t lost your touch. Anyway, I’ll get someone up there to relieve you.”
“Take your time, I’m good.”
“You’re having fun, aren’t you, Professor?” Duke asks.
“I am,” Neal says.
“Like old times.”
“A little.”
“Yeah, well, enjoy,” Duke says. “It isn’t going to last forever.”
Neal clicks off.
A pickup truck with a surfboard in the back pulls in to the narrow parking space behind the Longboard. A guy—in his fifties, Neal thinks—gets out of the driver’s door, looks around, jams his hands into his pockets and walks into the bar.
Neal has seen the nervous look, the stiff walk a thousand times. He’d bet the advance on his next book, all two hundred bucks, that the guy is holding.
And that Terry Maddux is about to get well.
Duke throws a net around the Longboard.
He doesn’t bother to disguise it—he wants Shafe and Maddux to know that they’re out there, like Indians around the wagon train in those old movies. Duke, he’s conspicuous in his Cadillac parked out in front on Bayard. Dave is in Boone’s disreputable van out on Thomas, High Tide in his truck in the parking lot out back. Carey has steadfastly refused to leave his rooftop, only taking a quick break to use the bathroom and get more coffee.
Duke made Daniels stay home.
Two cracked ribs, severe contusions, and the doctor is a little worried about internal bleeding. Boone said he’d be fine with a couple of Tylenol and an ice pack, but Duke ordered him to stand down.
Now it’s the waiting game.
They’ve been there all damn day and will be there all damn night if that’s what it takes. Which it might, now that—if Carey is right—Shafe brought Terry his get-well fix. Duke’s always simultaneously touched and saddened by what people will do for love or loyalty. Love and loyalty trump the law, personal morals, belief systems, sometimes personal well-being. I don’t know, Duke thinks, maybe it’s a good thing.
It’s the best and worst of human nature, but he’s seen a lot of both over the years.
He wonders if he’ll miss it.
Anyway, it’s a shame Shafe got Terry his fix, because it will only prolong the inevitable.
Duke knows that what his people have going for them is patience and discipline, qualities that are in short supply among chronic criminals, or they wouldn’t be chronic criminals. Mooks like Maddux are restless by nature. They don’t have the patience or discipline to wait something out. And Terry is as addicted to adrenaline as he is to heroin, so he’ll force the action. They won’t have to close the net around him, he’ll swim into it.
On the other hand, Duke thinks as he turns on his car radio and tunes it to 88.3 FM, the jazz station, he has his own adrenaline junkies to handle. Boone’s surfer buddies—Dave and Tide—like action themselves, and they’re running hot right now, pissed off about their buddy getting beaten up and stomped.
Every hour or so, Duke has gotten a call from one or the other of them, saying basically, “Fuck it, let’s go in and get him.”
Even though they know this means a fight with Shafe and his crew, who’ve been drifting in all day long, too, against just such a confrontation. Duke worries that his guys don’t want to go in despite this but because of it. They want payback for their boy. He gets it, but he can’t allow it.
Patience and discipline.
He’s pleased when the deejay puts on Nat King Cole’s “Jam-bo,” which he recorded with the Stan Kenton Orchestra. Maynard Ferguson and Shorty Rogers on trumpet, Bud Shank and Art Pepper on alto sax.
Capitol Records, 1950.
The sun is starting to set.
Duke wishes he were on his deck.
Boone lies on his couch and watches the sun sink behind the horizon.
Normally this time of day, he’d be out on his porch grilling fish for tacos, but he’s too sore to do that.
So he just looks out the window.
And listens to music.
Dick Dale and the Dale Tones.
Boone would lie on the couch and watch television, except he doesn’t own one.
He doesn’t see any reason he should.
“What about the weather?” Hang Twelve, the neo-hippie, acid victim, soul-surfer member of the Dawn Patrol has asked him. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”
“If I want to know what the weather is, I step outside,” Boone said. “That’s what the weather is.”
“But don’t you want to know what it’s going to be?” Hang asked. “The . . . what do you call it, the forecast?”
“It’s San Diego,” Boone said.
The forecast is always the same, depending on the time of year. It rains a little in the winter, it’s overcast in the spring, what the locals call “May Gray,” followed by “June Gloom,” and then it’s sunny and warm the rest of the year. Sometimes the cloudy marine layer hangs in until about eleven in the morning, freaking out the tourists who’ve laid out big bucks for Sunny California, but it burns off and then everyone settles down and has a good time.
The television weather folks do do a surf report, but Boone gets a better one off the internet, and anyway, he lives on Crystal Pier, so if he wants to know what the waves are like, he does what he’s doing now—he looks out the window.
Also, he can feel the surf, literally beneath him.
The big northern winter swell is coming in, full and heavy, pregnant with power. By morning it will be rolling under the pier like a freight train, and the surfers will be out in force. The Dawn Patrol will be there, of course.
But without you, he tells himself.
You’re a weak unit who gets himself beaten up, and there’s no way you can paddle into those waves with your stupid cracked ribs. Hell, right now you couldn’t even lift your board without whimpering.
But Hang will be out there, and Johnny.
And Dave and Tide if this Maddux thing is taken care of tonight.
It will be, he thinks.
Terry is waiting for the sun to go down, waiting for darkness, maybe some rain to obscure vision, if he’s really lucky a little fog.
Then he’ll try to bust out.
But to where? Even if he makes it through Duke’s net, which is doubtful, where is he going to go?
Wherever it is, he can’t escape himself.
Boone’s been surfing his whole life—literally before he was born, in his mother’s belly—and the one thing he’s learned is that there�
��s no wave that takes you anywhere but back to who you are.
Terry Maddux sits in the storeroom of the Longboard with his back against cases of Jack Daniel’s and his legs straight out in front of him.
The pleasant haze of his last fix is starting to wear off.
He doesn’t know if it’s night or day out there—there are no windows in the storeroom, just the bay of fluorescent lights on the ceiling—or really how long he’s been in there.
Terry does know he can’t be in there much longer.
For one thing, they’ll be coming in to drag him out—either Duke Kasmajian’s storm troopers or the cops. For another, he knows he’s wearing out his welcome, even with Shafe, because Terry is an expert at wearing out his welcome.
For a third, he’s going nuts.
Especially as the high declines.
He has to move.
He has to smell the ocean.
He has to get high again.
The door opens.
It’s Shafe.
“How you doing?” Shafe asks.
Terry shrugs. “I could use another fix.”
“I can’t get you another one,” Shafe says. “Duke’s guys are all over me.”
Terry waits for the other shoe to drop, Shafe telling him he has to get out of here. But Shafe doesn’t say that. What he says is, “They’re all around the block, they’ve been there all day.”
Terry smiles. “I guess Duke wants his fucking money.”
“You have friends,” Shafe says. “They’re not going to get past us.”
Yes, they are, Terry thinks. If the cops come in, they are definitely going to get past a bunch of middle-aged surf dudes. And if Boone Daniels is working for Duke, that means his crew is, too—that guy Dave and the huge Samoan.
They wouldn’t be easy to stop.
Terry wishes Shafe and his guys hadn’t stomped Daniels.
Boone’s a good guy, Terry thinks. He’s done a lot for me. But he shouldn’t have stuck his nose in this. A veteran like Daniels should have known that you have to stay off other people’s waves.
“I have to get out of here,” Terry says.
“You can stay as long as you want,” Shafe says.
But Terry can hear the relief in his voice, knows that Shafe wants him out of here, too. Oh, Shafe would go to the wall, but he doesn’t want to, and who can blame him, not wanting to get thrown in jail himself for “harboring a fugitive.” Shit, if the cops found someone in the storeroom with a shooting kit, they could yank Shafe’s liquor license.
No, there’s no question it’s time to go.
The question is how?
I’m trapped, he thinks.
Yeah, but you’ve been trapped before.
You were trapped yesterday along the tracks, and then that train came and you weren’t trapped anymore.
You were trapped at Mavericks when you went in to get Shafe, but you found the seam in the wave and sped through it and you weren’t trapped anymore.
Now you’re trapped in this building with enemies all around you.
You have to find the chance and take it.
And if you can’t find the chance, you have to make one.
There’s almost always a way out of a wave if you can hold your breath long enough to find it.
And if there isn’t . . .
Well, you die.
Neal pulls the collar of his leather jacket up around his neck and jams his Yankees cap onto his head. It gets cold in San Diego on a winter’s night, and it’s damp, too, threatening to rain. A brisk wind is coming off the ocean.
He looks at his watch.
9:17.
He’s been up here for over twelve hours.
It’s not fun anymore. He remembers exactly why he doesn’t do this kind of work, but he’s not going to punk out on Duke now. Plus, he’s getting stubborn, pissed off at this Maddux guy, and wants to see it through.
He sure as hell doesn’t want to admit that he’s too old for this.
Duke doesn’t mind. He calls Neal and says exactly that. “We’re getting too old for this shit.”
“Speak for yourself,” Neal says.
“This is when you separate the boys from the men,” Duke says. “The boys stay, the men go home.”
“You want to call it a night?” Neal asks, somewhat hopefully.
“Hell no,” Duke says. Then, “You?”
“Hell no.”
They both laugh.
“What would Lou say if he saw us out here?” Duke asks.
“He’d say we’re assholes,” Neal says. “And he’d be right.”
“Maddux is coming out soon,” Duke says. “I can feel it.”
Neal thinks he’s right.
Because he can feel it, too.
They call it “climbing the leash.”
If you’re buried under a wave, sometimes you literally don’t know which way is up, so you grab the leash and pull yourself toward the buoyant surfboard, which has usually bounced up to the surface.
Most often it works, unless the leash has snapped, in which case you’re fucked.
Now Terry climbs.
Not the leash, because unfortunately he’s not in the water, but an air shaft. He presses the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet against the metal sides as he pushes his way up. It’s grueling, and it would have been a lot easier if he were younger and not strung out, but Terry is pretty sure he can make it up the shaft to the roof.
It’s his only choice anyway.
The assholes are expecting him to come out the front or the back door and make a run for it. They’ll be looking for him to come out, not up, and if he can make it to the roof of the Longboard, he can jump to the next building and then the next and be outside Duke’s fucking net before he comes down.
Disappear into the tube and come out the other side.
He’s running out of breath, though.
His arm and leg muscles burning.
Getting old is a bitch, he thinks.
But it beats the alternative.
He stops, takes two deep breaths, and starts to climb again.
Neal sees him come out of the air shaft.
Calls Duke. “He’s on the roof.”
“What?! You sure it’s him?”
“If it’s not, it’s a hell of a coincidence,” Neal says. He watches Maddux hunch over, catching his breath.
“Well, he still has to come down,” Duke says.
True enough, Neal thinks. But what is Maddux thinking? He knows they have the building covered. Is he hoping to come down the fire escape and slip off?
Uhhh, apparently not.
Because Maddux straightens up, pulls himself to his full height and then sprints toward Neal, right off the roof of the Longboard.
Terry has gone face-first off longboards before, and from a lot higher than two stories, but at least now there’s not a wall of water about to come down on him either. All he has to do is clear a few feet of air and land on the next roof.
Then catch his breath, get his legs under him again, and do it one more time.
He feels free in the air.
Live, die, what-the-fuck-ever.
It feels good, like old times.
Peahi, Teahupoo, Tombstones—he rode them all.
He lands and rolls.
Comes up to see a guy about ten feet away, in a black leather jacket and a Yankees cap, looking at him.
Neal was always a shitty fighter.
Even back in the day, when he was doing this for a living, Neal Carey was renowned for his lack of boxing skills as well as his unabashed lack of interest in acquiring any. He had mostly ascribed to the theory that if you couldn’t talk your way out of a problem, you had probably already screwed up and, as a backup, to the fighting philosophy taught to him by his mentor, the one-armed leprechaun Joe Graham: “As soon as you can, pick up something hard and heavy and hit the guy with it.”
Unfortunately, there’s nothing hard and heavy at hand, the potential for an obsce
ne joke notwithstanding.
He says into the phone, “He’s on the roof with me.”
“What?”
“What do you want, subtitles?”
“Back off him, Neal,” Duke says. “Let him do what he’s going to do.”
“He’s going to get away, Duke,” Neal says.
“Then let him get away,” Duke says.
His chest feels tight.
His teeth bite through the cigar, and it falls to the car floor.
Duke doesn’t want another friend getting hurt, and now his friend is up on a roof with this junkie mutt, and who knows what could happen? Getting out of the car, he speed-dials Dave and tells him, “He’s on the roof next door. Go up the fire escape.”
“You got it.”
Duke eases his bulk out of the car.
He’d go up the fire escape himself, except he knows his knees won’t.
All he can do is wait and hope that Neal doesn’t get stupid.
“Nobody has to get hurt here,” Neal says, putting his hands out in front of him.
“You do,” Terry says, “if you don’t get the fuck out of my way.”
“See, I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
It’s a good question, Neal thinks. For which he has no rational answer. Actually, the rational answer is that he can absolutely do that, he absolutely should wave his arm like a maître d’ who’s just been tipped a century and let Terry Maddux do whatever he wants to do.
You’re sixty-five years old, he tells himself.
On the other hand . . .
Rationality has its limits. You also have to consider, as Boswell might have put it—
“I don’t have a lot of time here,” Terry says. “Are you going to get out of my way or am I going to have to beat the shit out of you?”
“I guess you’re going to have to beat the shit out of me.” He drops his head and charges. Smacks into Maddux’s midsection, and Maddux, surprised, falls onto his back.
He’s no more surprised than Neal, who tries to put all his weight, or lack thereof, centered on Maddux’s chest with the aim of keeping him down. He’s not trying to win the battle, just fight a holding action until the cavalry arrives.
He’s seen a few rodeos with Karen. The idea is you stay on the bull for eight seconds and then other cowboys ride in and haul you off.