“That’s right.”
“Tell you what, Kai. Maybe someday, if you can catch that SOB when he isn’t drunk, you should ask him where that aloha spirit was when the best young woman surfer ever to come out of these parts wanted to compete against the men and he wouldn’t allow it.”
“Why didn’t you just go to other surfing competitions?” Kai asked.
“Because when it came to women surfers back then, the competitions were few and far between. I didn’t have the means to travel down to the mid-Atlantic states. And forget about Florida. That might as well have been on the other side of the world. But if I could have competed here, maybe I would have gotten a mention in a magazine, or a local sponsor—anything that might have helped me get going. But that son of a bitch wouldn’t even let me take the first step.”
“Did you ever ask him why?” Kai asked.
“About a thousand times,” Teddy said, and started brushing on the gloss coat again.
“What’d he say?” Kai asked.
“Why don’t you go ask him?”
“Okay, I will. But you know what’s going to happen in the meantime? He’s gonna lose everything he has. You know they broke into his shed and took his best boards. Now they’re gonna destroy all the rest. They’re just grinding him down into nothing.”
“Good … Damn it!” Teddy put the brush down and sighted down the board again. A tiny drop of resin had collected on the rail. “Now look what you made me do.”
Kai waited silently while she fixed the mistake and finished applying the gloss coat. Even though Teddy said nothing and hardly even looked at him, he had a feeling she appreciated being left unbothered while she finished the job.
“Nice,” Kai finally said. He knew she was finished when she dipped the brush into a jar of acetone.
Teddy turned to him. “Why are you still here? What do you expect me to do?”
“Curtis says that once he’s gone, there’ll be no place for surfers to stay. All the breaks around here will just be for rich people who can afford the fancy hotels and expensive restaurants. People like you and me won’t be able to surf here anymore.”
“And you think saving Curtis’s butt will stop that?” Teddy asked.
“At least slow it down,” Kai said. “Be honest, Teddy. You know it’s not right. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”
“Says who?”
“I don’t know,” Kai said. “Me, I guess.”
Teddy put her hands on her hips and gazed at him. “You are a strange one.”
The workshop grew quiet. Kai wondered what she was thinking. He thought about what must have been happening at Curtis’s. Board after board being destroyed. “Look,” he finally said. “You do a lot of work for Buzzy. He’s got a lot of say in this town. Couldn’t you just speak to him?”
Teddy pointed at the board she’d just finished gloss coating. “Know who this is for?”
“Buzzy?” Kai said.
“That’s right. Two thirds of the jobs I get come from Buzzy Frank. Without him, I can’t make a living. Why would I do anything to jeopardize that?”
“Because maybe some things are more important than money,” Kai said.
Teddy gave him a bittersweet smile. “Correction, my young and very naive friend. Maybe some things were more important than money. But that was a long time ago.”
“So you really don’t care if they destroy all those boards?” Kai asked. “Even though some of them were probably the first boards you ever shaped? Like number forty-three?”
“That piece of junk?” Teddy said.
“A piece of junk that practically saved me from going crazy last month and that right now is being ridden by a girl I know who’ll probably never be a competitor but is loving it just the same.”
Teddy bristled and her faced reddened. Kai wondered if he’d gone too far. He half expected her to tell him to get the hell out of the workshop and never come back. Then something in her face softened.
“From what I’ve heard, ninety-nine percent of them are busted, dinged, pieces of crap that weren’t worth saving in the first place,” she said.
“Maybe to you and me, but not to Curtis,” Kai said.
Teddy twisted her lips into an expression Kai couldn’t read. “Know what? You are a royal pain in the ass.” There was actually something affectionate in the way she said it.
“But you’ll see if you can stop them?” Kai asked.
“Maybe,” Teddy said. “And maybe it’s time you got the hell out of here and stopped distracting me from my work.”
“With pleasure.” Kai turned to go.
“Wait,” Teddy called.
Kai stopped.
“If I do decide to do something, you don’t tell a soul, you hear? Not your friends, not Curtis, not a single living soul. Understood?”
Kai forced himself not to smile. “Understood.”
Twenty-four
The T-shirt shop had a new look. Fewer shirts hung on the racks, and fewer transfers were displayed on the walls and in the display cases. Instead there were now large hand-lettered signs on the walls that said DON’T SEE WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR? JUST ASK.
When Kai got to the store, his father was talking to a young woman with two little kids in a double stroller. Laid out on the counter were two child-size, light blue T-shirts and two small rainbow transfers.
“We’ll make matching rainbow shirts,” the Alien Frog Beast was saying. “And the names again?”
“Jake and Jack,” the mom said. Kai took a closer look at the kids in the stroller. They were twin boys.
“Okay.” Pat opened the display. Inside were some small plain black-vinyl letters. Pat took a few out and laid them over the shirts to show the mom what they’d look like. The mom pursed her lips with disapproval. Kai knew why The black letters looked awful on the light blue shirts, especially with the rainbows.
“Do you have letters in any other colors?” the mom asked.
“Let me see what I have in the back,” Pat said, and went through the door into the back room. Suddenly Kai realized what was going on. It was the oldest con in the book: bait and switch.
Pat came back with a flat plastic case filled with larger letters in all colors. “Would any of these work for you?”
“Oh, yes, they’re much better,” the young mother said. “Could you even use a variety so they matched the colors of the rainbow?”
“Of course,” Pat replied. “I just have to warn you that these letters are a bit more expensive.”
“I understand,” said the mother.
Kai doubted she really did.
Pat laid the large colorful letters on the shirts. Then he pretended to frown and rub his jaw thoughtfully. “Gee, now those rainbows look awful small.”
“Do you have any larger ones?” the mother asked.
“Hey, Sean,” Pat called across the store. “Would you go check in the back and see if there are any more of those big nice rainbows?”
“The deluxe color-bright ones?” Sean asked. “! thought we sold out of those.”
“There might be a few left,” Kai’s father said. “Go check, okay?”
“Oh, I hope you have a few left,” the woman said anxiously. It was amazing. Pat had already sold her on the larger rainbows even though she hadn’t seen them yet and had no idea of the outrageous price he would ask.
Sean stayed in the back for a long time. Kai could imagine what the young mother was picturing in her head: Sean searching through boxes and boxes for the highly desirable and no doubt very expensive deluxe color-bright rainbows. Pat was truly brilliant in an utterly demented way. If the law stated that he had to put price tags on everything he displayed, the answer was to keep a lot of stuff in the back, where it wasn’t displayed. Then he didn’t have to put a price tag on it, and he could still charge whatever he wanted.
Finally Sean came out with two rainbow transfers. “Would you believe it? We had two left.”
“Oh! That’s wonderful!” The
mother gasped as if it was a miracle. Kai had no doubt that if he went into the back room, he’d find dozens of rainbow transfers in that size.
Ten minutes later, the young mother left the store with two matching personalized rainbow shirts. By the time Pat added up the colorful letters, deluxe rainbows, new special sparkle treatment and color guard, each shirt cost thirty-nine ninety-five. Before tax.
“Christ on crutches,” Pat groaned once the woman was gone. He threw his arms down on the glass display case and laid his head on them as if exhausted. Finally he looked up and glanced around, as if expecting Kai or Sean to ask what was wrong. When neither asked, he took it upon himself to explain anyway. “You see how much work that took? I have to do that on every sale, I’ll have a heart attack.”
Kai looked at his watch. The entire transaction probably took twenty minutes. The total, including the tax Pat would never pay, came to around eighty-seven dollars. Most people worked a lot harder for a lot less.
Pat fixed on Kai. “You’re late again.”
“Something came up,” Kai said.
“Things have been coming up a lot lately. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you had a garden or something.” Pat smiled to himself, then turned to Sean. “Get it? A garden? Where things come up?”
Sean frowned and shook his head.
“Aw, for Christ’s sake.” Pat shook his head wearily and asked Kai, “So’d you ever come up with that logo?”
“I had a few ideas,” Kai said.
“Where are they?”
“In my notebook back at the motel.”
Pat looked out the window. Outside, sunlight glinted off car windshields. People passed wearing bathing suits, flip flops, and hats and carrying beach chairs, umbrellas, and coolers. It was another hot, bright, clear day and most people were headed for the beach. The store was empty.
“Go get it,” Pat said. “I want to see what you’ve got.”
To Kai, any reason to leave the store was a good one. He left fast, before his father had time to change his mind, and headed down the sidewalk. The sun was a yellow fiery ball in the sky, and Kai wished he had a baseball cap or something. A shiny new black hearse pulled alongside the curb. Bean, wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie, black hat, and sunglasses, was in the driver’s seat. He brought down the window.
“’Sup?” Kai asked.
“Get in,” Bean said.
“Why?”
“I gotta show you something.”
Kai hesitated and squinted into the windows in the back of the hearse. This wasn’t the old one he carried his boards around in. In the back, instead of boards, there was a dark brown casket. “Don’t you have someplace to go?”
“So do you,” Bean said. “Get in, dude. I mean it.”
Twenty-five
Kai went around to the passenger side of the hearse and got in. “Where’re we going?”
“Belle Harbor.”
Belle Harbor was the next town east of Sun Haven. Where to the west Fairport was mostly middle-class residential houses, and Sun Haven was trying to be an upscale, fancy, family resort town, Belle Harbor was known for being a place where only really rich people lived.
“Why are we going there?” Kai asked.
“I’m going there because I got a stiff to deliver,” Bean said, making a screeching illegal U-turn in the middle of Main Street. “You’re going there because five minutes ago that was the direction a certain red Jeep was going.”
“Being driven by a guy with yellow dreads?” Kai guessed.
“You got it.”
They got out of Sun Haven. Main Street became Seaside Drive again. Bean had blues playing on the sound system.
“Who’s that?” Kai asked.
“Buddy Guy”
“Sounds good”
“Of course.”
Kai glanced into the back of the hearse. The shiny dark brown casket had fancy-looking brass handles. “There really a dead body in there?”
“Indeed,” Bean answered.
“How come you’re taking it to Belle Harbor?”
“People have this strange way of dying unexpectedly” Bean said. “Sometimes one funeral home has more stiffs than it knows what to do with, while the funeral home in the next town is pretty quiet. So the busy one’ll farm a few bodies out. Belle Harbor got busy this week so they asked us if we could dress this guy for them.”
“Dress?”
“Drain ’em, embalm ’em, make ’em up, dress ’em up in their Sunday best.”
Kai was suddenly glad he hadn’t had much for breakfast. “How’d this one die?”
Bean shrugged. “You got me. All I know is, whenever it gets really hot out, the old ones start dropping like flies. Happens every summer. And Belle Harbors got plenty of old ones.”
“Weird.”
“Not really. Just life.”
“You mean, death.”
“Death is part of life,” Bean said. “Only its one of the parts no one likes to think about.”
“So how do you know Goldilocks was going to Belle Harbor?” Kai asked.
“I don’t,” answered Bean. “But there ain’t much after Belle Harbor so I figure it’s worth a look. In fact, speak of the devil …”
Bean slowed the hearse down. Kai instantly saw why. Up ahead, the red Jeep was pulling out of the parking lot of a big barnlike club called 88s that advertised live music nightly.
“Am I good?” Bean asked. “I mean, am I good or what?”
“You’re great,” Kai said without enthusiasm.
“What’s wrong?” Bean asked. “I thought you’d be totally stoked to find this guy.”
“I am, Bean, really. I appreciate this. Only now that we’ve found him, what are we gonna do?”
“Follow him.”
“In a hearse?”
Bean turned to Kai and blinked. “You mean, you think he might notice?”
Kai rolled his eyes toward the hearses ceiling. “Yeah, Bean, I mean, I think most people tend to notice when a hearse is following them.”
Bean started to slow down. “Then I’ll back off. We can follow from a couple of cars behind. Its not like we’re gonna lose him in traffic around here.”
Some cars passed the hearse and then Bean accelerated back up to the speed limit. They could see the red Jeep ahead of them. Just before they got to the town of Belle Harbor, the Jeep turned off down a road lined with tall green hedges. Bean followed. Kai tried to see what was behind the hedges. He caught a glimpse of a tall brick mansion at the end of a white pebble driveway. The mansion was so big that he didn’t even have time to count all the chimneys before they’d passed.
Ahead of them, the red Jeep stopped at the entrance to a driveway. Bean pulled the hearse to the side of the road. The driveway was blocked by a tall black iron gate with gold points. Goldilocks leaned out and said something into a small intercom box. A moment later the gate opened and he drove through.
“Now what?” Kai asked, remembering that Pat thought he’d gone back to the motel to get his logo sketches, which should have taken about five minutes.
“We wait,” Bean said.
“What if that’s where he lives?” Kai said. “We could wait a long time.”
“He doesn’t live there,” Bean said.
“How do you know that?” Kai asked.
“People who live in Belle Harbor get special beach stickers for the town beaches. He doesn’t have one on his bumper. Also, he had to talk into the intercom. If he lived there, the gate would have opened automatically. Same technology they use for garage door openers.
Kai gave him a look. “Amateur detective?”
Bean reached to the glove compartment in front of Kai and pulled it open. Inside were half a dozen paperbacks with curling covers and well-worn pages. “Mysteries,” Bean said. “When you drive a hearse you spend a lot of time sitting and waiting. So I read.”
“Okay, so maybe he doesn’t live there,” Kai said. “Maybe he’s just visiting. Could be a long
visit.”
“Let’s wait a little while and see.”
Kai jerked his head toward the casket in the back of the hearse. “What about your passenger?”
“He’s not going anywhere,” Bean replied.
Ahead of them the black gate swung open and the red Jeep pulled out.
“Short visit,” Bean said.
The Jeep made a left and headed back up the road toward them.
“Duck,” Bean grunted. He and Kai ducked under the dashboard and waited. The vent from the hearse’s air conditioner blew cool air into Kai’s face. Bean slowly lifted his head and looked in the rearview mirror. “Let’s go.” He quickly sat up, turned the hearse around, and headed back up the road. By now the Jeep was at least a quarter mile ahead of them and turning onto the main road into Belle Harbor.
The Jeep made two more stops. One at the hardware store in the town of Belle Harbor, and the next at the service entrance to the Belle Harbor Golf and Tennis Club. While they waited, Kai gazed at the perfect fairways and greens, the pristine white sand traps, and the large, old gray clubhouse with its navy blue awnings, each one embossed with a gold seal. It had been hot and dry for the past few weeks, and some lawns in Sun Haven had begun to turn yellow from lack of water. Kai could only imagine that the water bill for this golf club must have rivaled the entire economy of certain smaller third world countries.
It wasn’t long before the red Jeep pulled out of the club’s service entrance and headed down another tree-lined road.
“Goldilocks is a busy guy,” Bean said as he started to follow him again.
“Listen,” Kai said. “I really appreciate your enthusiasm, Bean, but how much longer are we going to follow him while he runs his errands?”
“Let’s just see where he goes next,” Bean said. “One more stop.”
Wherever Goldilocks was going next, he was going there fast. Bean had to keep a heavy foot on the accelerator to stay close behind him and several times the hearse took curves so fast the casket in the back thumped loudly and the handles rattled.
“Your friend back there is getting bounced around pretty good,” Kai said.
“We’ll straighten him up later,” Bean replied, leaning forward in the driver’s seat as if to see better, his hands gripping the steering wheel tightly.
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