by Don Winslow
Maddux has a different idea.
He gets his arms free, pounds Neal in the back of the head, loops one foot around Neal’s ankle, bucks and rolls over, pinning Neal under him. Holding Neal down with his left forearm, he slams two rights to his face, then pushes from his feet like he’s getting up on a board.
Neal sees Maddux run for the edge of the roof. For reasons that he can’t articulate, he gets to his feet and runs after him.
Duke looks up and sees Terry Maddux flying in the air above him.
Then he sees Neal Carey flying in the air above him.
And what he thinks is, What’ll I tell Karen?
Neal lands hard.
He’s just grateful he landed at all, on the roof and not in the alley two floors below. Because, you know, what would he tell Karen?
Maddux is standing there, hunched over. He sees Neal and says, “Fuck. Really?”
Apparently, Neal thinks. He heads toward him to catch another beating, but this time Maddux turns and runs for the fire escape. Neal takes two big steps and then dives, grabs Maddux by the pant leg with his right hand and holds on.
Maddux drags him and kicks back like a mule, trying to shake him off.
Neal’s phone rings.
Seriously, Duke. Seriously.
Maddux’s next kick shakes off Neal’s hand and lands square in his face. Neal reaches out with his left hand and grabs Terry’s other leg as Maddux reaches the top of the fire escape and turns to climb down.
Maddux’s ankle twists. “Goddamn it!”
He grabs the railing, kicks the hand off and heads down.
Duke is going crazy. “Where is he?”
Dave stands on the roof and looks around. “I don’t see either of them.”
Duke feels like he did when they first got Marie’s diagnosis.
Scared.
Terry hobbles down Reed Avenue toward the beach.
His ankle hurts like crazy, a high sprain. He can barely put any weight on it.
Crossing Mission, he turns his head and sees that the crazy motherfucker is behind him, talking on the phone.
Neal wipes the blood off his face with his wrist as he talks into the phone. “He’s headed west on Reed, crossing Mission. . . . I’m maybe twenty feet behind. . . .”
“Let him go,” Duke says.
“Fuck that,” Neal says. He follows Maddux across Mission. He hadn’t realized that it’s started raining.
The pavement glistens silver under the streetlights.
Across Mission, Maddux turns and stops.
“I didn’t want to do this,” he says, reaching into his jacket. “I didn’t want to do this, but you made me.”
He points the pistol at Neal.
And pulls the trigger.
Neal sees the muzzle flash a violent, angry red.
He feels as if someone smacked him in the chest with a baseball bat.
Then he’s lying on his back on the sidewalk, looking up at the light as the rain hits him in the face.
It’s cold.
Terry limps on the sand.
But it’s good to be on the beach, at the ocean.
It’s where he needs to be.
He knows where he’s going now, what he needs to do.
The doorbell rings.
“One second!” Boone yells from the couch. He gets up slowly—his ribs angry at the effort—and walks toward the door.
It’s probably Dave, or Tide, or even Duke here to tell him that they got Maddux.
He opens the door.
It’s Terry.
Dave gets there first, which is a very good thing because as a lifeguard he’s also a certified EMT.
Kneeling beside Carey, he sees the entrance wound in the front of his jacket, gently rolls him and doesn’t see an exit wound. He checks Neal’s pulse at the carotid artery. It’s weak, going out, and the man is unconscious.
Then Tide is standing over him, calling 911.
Dave starts to give CPR.
Terry sits down in the chair and holds the gun on Boone. “I need one last favor.”
“I’m not driving you to Mexico,” Boone says.
“Didn’t ask you to,” Terry says.
“Then what do you want?”
Terry looks like shit. He’s soaked, he was limping, and his hand is shaking, whether from cold or from withdrawal, Boone can’t tell.
“I just killed someone,” Terry says.
Boone feels a jolt of alarm. Was it Dave? Tide? Duke? “Who? Who did you kill?”
“I don’t know,” Terry says. “Some guy. Salt-and-pepper hair. A goatee. Yankees fan. What difference does it make?”
Sounds like Carey, Boone thinks, ashamed he feels relief.
“I mean, how did it get to that?” Terry asks. “All I ever wanted was to ride the biggest waves, you know? How did I get from that to killing someone?”
Boone hears a siren scream down Mission.
“I was your hero once, wasn’t I?” Terry asks.
“Yeah.”
“But not anymore.”
“No,” Boone says.
“No,” Terry says. “Now I wish I was you. I mean, look at me. I’m a junkie, I can barely walk, I don’t have a nickel to my name, and I’m trapped. They’re right behind me, Boone. I’m not getting out of this wave, and I’m going to spend the rest of my pathetic life in prison.”
“You want me to feel sorry for you, Terry?” Boone asks. “Because I don’t. How many people have to get hurt for you?”
“Here’s what I want,” Terry says. “I want to borrow one of your boards one last time.”
“You going to paddle to Mexico, Terry?”
“No,” Terry says. “I’m just going to paddle out.”
“Jesus, Terry.”
“It won’t jam you up,” Terry says. “I had a gun, I forced you to give me a board. Do this for me, Daniels.”
“You took a person’s life,” Boone says. “An innocent, good person. You should stand trial, you should be punished.”
“Noble Boone Daniels on his white horse,” Terry says. “I had a trial on the beach, I found myself guilty. Now I want to execute the sentence. Give me the board or I’ll shoot you in the fucking face. You got a longboard in your quiver? It’s heavy out there.”
“A nine-three Balty.”
“That’ll do.”
“It’s my favorite board.”
“It’ll drift back.”
Boone hobbles over to the far wall, unzips the cover and wrestles the board out. “Here you go.”
Terry gets up. “Thanks, huh?”
“Hey, Terry?” Boone says. “If I hear about someone who looks like you hanging out around Todos—or anywhere—I’ll come kill you myself.”
“That’s fair, I guess,” Terry says. “You don’t have a drink around here, do you? Some scotch or bourbon or something, warm me up a little?”
“I don’t know,” Boone says. “Look in the cabinet over the sink. There might be something.”
Terry finds a pint of Crown Royal someone must have left from a party. He pours three fingers into a glass and jacks it down. “God, that feels good.”
He sets the glass down, walks over, picks up the board, tucks it under his arm and nods for Boone to open the door. Terry walks out past him onto the pier, balances the board on the railing, looks out and says, “I was good, though, wasn’t I? I mean, in my day. I was the best, right?”
Boone doesn’t answer.
“Yeah, all right,” Terry says. “I get it. You’re mad at me. It’s okay.”
He tips the board over, and Boone sees it crash into the water and bob up.
It’s a beautiful board, and he loves it.
Terry climbs up on the railing, turns, gives Boone the shaka sign, grins and says, “Surf on, dude.”
Then he jumps, swims to the board and climbs on.
Boone watches him paddle out over the swell, beyond the pier lights, into the dark.
A jogger running with his dog finds Terry’s
body on Windansea Beach four days later.
Boone’s board never makes it back.
Karen Carey is neither a willing nor a gracious nursemaid.
That their bedroom is on the second floor doesn’t help her mood as she goes up and down with the meals, drinks, books, articles—whatever her foolish, childish (she rejects the alternative description of “charmingly boyish”), idiotic husband needs during his recuperation from getting shot in the chest.
Or “getting himself shot in the chest,” as she prefers to phrase it.
Neal has admitted that his wife’s reaction is “totally justified,” which touched off an extended debate at Thursday-night poker, which had been moved from the dining room to what Karen refers to as his “deathbed.”
“I don’t think,” Lou said, “that you can use a modifier with ‘justified.’ Either something is justified or it isn’t.”
“There are no degrees of justification?” Duke asked.
“It’s an absolute,” Lou said. “You can weigh the pros and cons on justification, but once the decision is made, it’s simply justified or it isn’t.”
“I wasn’t using ‘totally’ as a modifier,” Neal said, “but as an enhancer to emphasize the correctness of her justification.”
“An enhancer is a modifier,” Lou said, sticking to his rhetorical guns to keep the fun going.
“Deal the damn cards,” Karen said.
Now she sits down on the bed next to Neal, although not as gently as she has, because he’s healing. Although it might someday serve as a good cocktail story, she’s still not amused by the irony that it was a book that probably saved her professor-of-literature husband’s life, that the dog-eared paperback of Roderick Random tucked into his jacket pocket had slowed the bullet that would otherwise have killed him.
“So,” she says, “was that it as far as a midlife crisis, or can I expect hang-gliding, or mixed martial arts, or a Harley appearing in the driveway?”
“I could have had an affair,” he jokes.
“Yeah, right,” she laughs. Neal is as loyal as a golden retriever.
He says, a little sheepishly, “It was kind of fun.”
“You’re not thinking about going back to it.”
“Nooooo, I’m good.” He sets down his book, turns over and reaches for her.
“Yeah?” she asks.
“Unless you’d rather I get a Harley catalogue.”
Outside, the sun is going down.
But it’s not down yet, he thinks.
Boone flips the fish over on the grill and admires the light show going on over the ocean.
Reds, yellows, oranges, the narrowing sky a shade of blue that he can’t name but can only wonder at.
The rain is over for another day or so, but the swell still surges under the pier.
He’ll paddle out in the morning with the Dawn Patrol but without his favorite board. Terry Maddux took that from him, along with his last sense of hero worship, along with a piece of his soul. None of those things are coming back, not with the surge, not with the tide, not with the sunrise.
He slips a piece of the yellowtail into a tortilla and hands it to Dave.
It’s a ritual, done more evenings than not, Boone cooking for his friends on the deck outside his cottage as they watch the sun go down.
Dave is there, and Tide, Johnny Banzai and Hang Twelve.
Sunny Day isn’t.
She’s off somewhere on the pro tour.
He misses her, they all do.
But she’ll come back.
Boone feeds his friends and himself, then takes the last piece of fish, puts it in a tortilla, and tosses it over the railing into the sea.
“You think he’s hungry?” Dave asks.
“Aren’t we all?” Boone says.
They sit and eat and watch the sun set.
Chewing on his unlit cigar, Duke Kasmajian sits on his deck and looks out at the ocean.
He’s done now, it’s over.
Absent an unlikely rescue from the legislature, his business is dead. He took the money he saved from the Maddux bond and cut it up among his employees. Then he handed out cash bonuses. It won’t last them forever, but it will hold them over until they find something else.
Adriana has a pension and says she’s going to retire.
Duke wonders how long that will last.
The sunset tonight is nothing short of magnificent, the scotch tonight is particularly smoky and warm, the music—Harold Land’s rich tenor sax playing “Time After Time” with the Curtis Counce Group—especially beautiful.
He wishes Marie were here, that’s all.
No one who hasn’t missed a beloved spouse will ever know the literal meaning of the word “heartache.”
Getting cold, he stands up—his knees protest the effort—takes Marie’s glass of red, and slowly pours it onto the bushes below.
It’s sunset.
Paradise
Being the Intermediate Adventures of Ben, Chon and O
* * *
Hawaii, 2008
Fuck everyone.
* * *
Pretty much what O is thinking as she lies on the beach in Hanalei Bay.
Fuck everyone, I’m on vacation.
Vacation from what is a different question, because when she isn’t on vacation, O does basically
Nothing.
Twenty-three years old, unemployed, uneducated, she lives on an allowance from her South Orange County (read affluent) mother’s money—
—that would be “Paqu”
(The Passive-Aggressive Queen of the Universe)—
plus her share of the proceeds from the multimillion-dollar premium hydro cannabis business she helped start with her two lifelong friends and lovers Ben and Chon.
(“Chon” being the then-five-year-old O’s pronunciation of “John,” which stuck.)
O (short for “Ophelia”—yes, her mother named her after a girl who drowned herself) is a petite creature.
Five-five in her bare feet—which she is, of course, on the beach—blond hair cut Peter Pan short (in Ben and Chon she has her own mini-set of the Lost Boys but positively refuses to play the boring, mother role of Wendy) and unbuxom (despite Paqu’s attempts to “gift” her with breast implants), she is now contemplating getting a tattoo—a large one on her shoulder—maybe of a dolphin.
Not everyone is going to like it, she thinks.
They don’t have to, she thinks.
Only I do.
Fuck everyone.
* * *
Ben picked Hanalei for a vacation because he wants to do business here.
He got the idea from Peter, Paul and Mary.
(His parents were hippies.)
Ben explained this to O back in Laguna.
“Peter, Paul and Mary,” he repeated to her uncomprehending expression.
“Jesus’s parents,” O said.
“Yeah, not really,” Ben said, unsurprised that O would think that Jesus had multiple fathers. “Peter, Paul and Mary were a sixties folk-singing group.”
Chon grunted. He has always taken sort of a John Belushi/Bluto attitude toward folk music. (Animal House. If you haven’t seen it . . . well, I don’t know what to say.)
Ben went on his computer and pulled up a song.
“We used this to interrogate Taliban,” Chon said, then sang a few bars from “Puff the Magic Dragon.” He served numerous tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, came home wounded and discharged. “They gave it all up after the first verse.”
“Be quiet,” O said, totally into the song. She cried when Puff died. “He no longer went to play along the cherry lane?”
“I’m afraid not,” Ben said.
“Because Jackie came no more?”
“There you go.”
“But Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff,” O said. “He bought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.”
“The living will envy the dead,” said Chon. “So why are we listening to this shit?”
“How so?” Chon asked.
“‘Puff the Magic Dragon’?” asked Ben. He paused for effect, then said, “Puff the magic drag in.”
He replayed the song.
“So a sixties song is about drugs,” Chon said. “You find that unique somehow?”
“I find it interesting,” Ben said. “Right now we create all our product in grow houses. It’s expensive, and I worry about the ecological impact of all the electricity and water we use.”
“So . . .”
“‘A land called Honahlee,’” Ben said. “I did some research. Hanalei, Hawaii, gets forty-three inches of rain a year. Average temperature is from seventy-seven to eighty-four Fahrenheit. Between six and eight hours of sunlight a day, UV index between seven and twelve. Rich ferrous soil.”
“Sativa,” Chon says.
“Bingo,” says Ben. “Plus, we don’t currently market much in Hawaii. We could kill two birds with one stone. Find a marketing partner and acquire land for a grow operation. When the shit becomes legal—as it will—we’ll be in place.”
“Three birds,” O said.
“What’s the third bird?” Ben asked.
“Vacation,” said O.
* * *
Standing on a cliff at the northern edge of Hanalei Bay, surfboard in hand, Chon watches the best surfer he’s ever seen.
Chon has always thought of himself as pretty good on a wave, but now he realizes that he’s not.
Compared to this kid.
The waves at the break known as Lone Pine are big and autumnal heavy, and this guy is carving them like Michelangelo on crack. He cuts back into an off-the-lip top turn and tail-slides back down, then does a Superman, flipping into the air and grabbing the board with both hands, then back down into a closeout reentry.
“Jesus Christ,” Chon says.
“Close,” says a guy who comes up behind him. He’s Hawaiian, brownskinned and big, his long black hair tied up into a man-bun. “That’s Kit.”
“Who?”
“Kit Karsen,” the guy says, as if it’s obvious. “K2.”
Like the mountain, Chon thinks.
Which fits.
It’s hard to judge from a distance, but Karsen looks like he goes about six-four, with wide shoulders, a narrow waist, lean and muscled from endless hours in the ocean, long hair bleached by the sun. He’d be Tarzan, Chon thinks, if Tarzan were younger, better-looking and a stronger swimmer.