I clicked on the Suburban’s lights. My one wiper was wearing out, and I could barely see. It had been raining hard all day. A system a couple hundred miles off the coast was upgrading itself into tropical-storm status. No one expected it to be a big deal—even though every surfer in west-coast Mexico was praying for a weather catastrophe that would bring big waves but spare the women and children.
Chuy hefted the hammer. “I like this hammer.”
“It’s a good one,” I said.
“Can I have it?” Chuy asked.
“Sure.”
It wasn’t like the cops were going to dust it for prints.
“So, what did this guy do, anyway?” Chuy asked.
“He owned that Wave of the Day place. It used to be called the Closeout?”
“To get hit with this hammer is what I meant.”
“Some mom didn’t like all the attention Winsor was paying to her thirteen-year-old.”
“He was a creep?”
“And the family surf coach.”
I could see that Chuy considered that to be a betrayal of surfers and groms everywhere.
“She caught him and one of her kids with their pants down,” I said. “The guy died with a boner.”
“I have that same dream,” Chuy said. “But if it was my kid, this hammer’s the nicest thing that happen to him. Is the kid okay?”
“He will be, I think,” I said. But I decided against getting into too many details.
“God will make sure,” Chuy said, and crossed himself.
I bowed my head for a split second and then nodded at the board bag. “Do we take Winsor to the dump? Toss him into the pile that’s always on fire there?”
“That’s too good a board bag, Pirata. If you don’t want it, I’ll take it.”
“It’s going to stink, Chuy. I’ll get you a new one.”
“It’s a ridículo waste.”
Throwing things away was a luxury Mexico couldn’t afford up until very recently. It’s why there’s so much trash around. A leather water jug would last for a couple of generations, and then when it finally wore out, its leather would be made into sandals. But what do you do with the millions of plastic water bottles that replaced the leather jugs?
Chuy was like this—anything I wanted to throw out, he took home. He was using an old HP OfficeJet printer I tried to toss in the trash as a footstool.
“And those dump dogs would just drag him back into town before he burned up.”
“Okay. So let’s just bury him,” I said.
“The wild pigs will smell him out,” Chuy said, shaking his head. “It’s why they have those flat noses. We got to cut him up.”
“What?”
My instinct is always to play dumb when the going gets weird.
“Into pieces,” he said. “Then it’s easier.”
“I have to draw the line at dismemberment,” I said, in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from somebody else.
“You never slaughtered a cow?”
“It’s not something I learned in shop class,” I said. “But—just for the sake of argument—what would we do with the pieces?”
“We throw them out the window. Cartel style—up and down el Carretera Pacífico.”
Which was what hard-core Mexicans still called Highway 200.
“In plastic bags or just in big chunks?”
“Probably chunks,” Chuy said. “That way, they don’t hang around.”
I looked over at Chuy, gagging like a guy who skips over the Surgery Channel.
“We need to backtrack,” I said. “Maybe we should go to the police.”
“That’s funny, Pirata.”
“I mean it,” I said.
“It’s not just your decision no more,” Chuy said. “I’m in this now. You get deported. I go to jail.”
“I shouldn’t have gotten you involved, Chuy,” I said, exactly like one of those gringos I hate. “I’m a yo-yo.”
“You go to the cops, you’re a tampón.” Chuy laughed. “Tranquilo, Pirata. I’ll get mi primo José.”
“Who?”
“My cousin,” he said. “The guy is an expert on trouble.”
16
Chuy’s primo was an old-school Mexican fisherman, and probably the best boatman in the region. José López captained a twenty-two-foot panga that basically looked like a giant rowboat with a seventy-five-horsepower Yamaha outboard. The boat didn’t come with life preservers or a Bimini top.
Three bench seats spanned the gunnels. A dirty plastic cooler sat open at midship, half-full of rotting fish chum. A homemade anchor was wrapped in a rusted chain on a small deck at the bow.
It was a bitch to push this boat off the beach and into the water. It was still raining pretty good, and the wet sand wasn’t making it any easier. There were only the three of us, but even at that I was flipping out. This whole deal was becoming way too big a party.
“This is how you get caught,” I said to Chuy. “No one can keep secrets—it’s impossible.”
“I can,” Chuy said. “And José is familia.”
“But he’s not mine,” I said. “He doesn’t have a dog in this fight.”
I was talking about José as if he wasn’t there, which was pretty rude, but I figured it was okay because I was speaking English.
Every cop show I have ever seen told me that most bad guys get caught because of some idiot confidant opening his yap. The crime-busting formulas are pretty simple, and a big ingredient is regret turning to panic. It’s what the guys on CSI look for, and where I was heading. It made sense to me that the Mexican cops would follow similar investigative principles. They probably watched a lot of the same American TV.
“If this shit gets out, just watch,” I said. “It’s the gringo who’ll get coughed up.”
“Dude, it’s your dead body,” Chuy said. “We’re just trying to help.”
“I should have just left him in the cooler,” I said to myself.
“And let that gringa get caught for this?” Chuy laughed. “If you can’t close the deal with her now, it won’t get easier when she’s in jail.”
“That’s not what this is about, amigo.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, and laughed again.
After a chain gang of gut-busting heave-hos, we finally got the panga down the sand and into the water. The bow of the boat caught a wave and rose up. After it steadied, I jumped in. Chuy and José did the same, except that they didn’t bang their knee on a broken oarlock.
Four or five fishing rods of various weights and lengths were lashed to the only working oar. There were two buckets full of nets, one for bait and one for real fish. Another bucket contained a coiled longline festooned with about a hundred hooks.
There was also a .357 Magnum bang stick propped against the transom.
I sat on the forward bench. José was throttling the Yamaha up and down as he maneuvered the panga through the breakers. Chuy was unbagging Winsor.
We were heading out to sea. The rocky wedge of Punta de Sabanita was to our left. The lights of town were directly behind us. It was raining like hell, and the wind was picking up. There was a lot of chop and white-water spray, and every minute or two I could feel the surge of storm swell.
It was very dark—except when lightning spiderwebbed across the sky, crackling like skeletons fucking on cookie tins and right on top of us. It wasn’t necessary to count the seconds.
I was scared shitless.
“I think maybe we should turn back,” I said all of a sudden and way too shrill.
Chuy laughed, and then I heard him say something to José about tormenta y gringos.
José laughed.
“I’m not trying to be funny,” I said.
“Too late, Pirata,” Chuy said. “We’re going to Bin Laden this pervertido.”
I had never said a word to José. He didn’t talk to gringos. But I was frightened enough to try to change that.
“José, ¿su opinionato?” I said. “Su de experto.”
“My opinion is, you should shut the fuck up until you can speak Spanish,” he said to me in perfect English.
I’d no idea José spoke English. My mangled Spanish insulted him, and it should have. I had just talked down to him like some turista clod who’s still afraid to drink Mexican tap water.
“I’m sorry, José,” I said. “I’m the idiot here, I know.”
But he just glared into the darkness.
Chuy had tugged pretty much all of Winsor out of the board bag and had him splayed across the middle bench, basically face up with his mouth wide open. He ripped off what was left of Winsor’s clothes and tossed them overboard. There was a yellow Livestrong bracelet on Winsor’s swollen wrist, but Chuy couldn’t yank it off.
“Give me something to cut this with,” Chuy said.
“But then it’s no good,” José said. “Fuck it.”
Chuy dropped the wrist.
It was pounding rain. Winsor was being bathed.
“Do you want to say anything to Osama?” Chuy asked me.
“Let’s just get this over with,” I said.
We had passed Punta de Sabanita and were heading south. Chuy pointed at some standing waves that I could make out in the lightning flash. They were fifteen feet tall, from the backside and crashing onto shore.
Chuy grinned, and nodded at Palmitos—the left point break just off the edge of town. It was where Chuy had saved my life—and the reason I considered him my savior, instead of the devil’s advocate he was playing now.
I’d had no business paddling into Palmitos on a big day. I’m a crappy backside surfer, and the wave generally eats up longboarders unless they’re exceptional.
I’m not.
Chuy is.
He had told me it was a dumb idea to paddle out, but I had begged him.
“Eddie would go,” I’d said, trading on the name of a revered big-wave surfer—and forgetting for a moment that Eddie Aikau had been lost at sea.
“Only kooks say shit like that,” Chuy said.
I should have known better.
Palmitos is a locals-only break, and I’d been desperate to be recognized as a low-cal in the lineup. I was new, and it was my first time at Palmitos. But it’ll never happen. I can be an amigo, but never a local.
I’d kept moving farther and farther to the inside of the peak at Palmitos to show the locals that I had balls big enough for this wave—and that I was just waiting for the right one. I’d feinted for a few, turning up my nose at the last second as if the wave wasn’t up to my standard. But the reality was that when I looked over the lip, I was scared.
“Go or no,” Chuy had called out. “Don’t go and then no.”
He’d been right. To surf waves as big as these, you had to commit and power down the face. If you picked a wave that was too big or if you started paddling too late or too early, you’d either slide off the back or pearl into the pit, and the whole wave would close out on top of you.
I pearled.
I’d gotten tired of hearing fuckin’ kook, so I paddled blind down the face of a bomb, buried the board’s nose, and catapulted heavily into the pit as twenty-four pounds of Red Fin smashed me in the head.
I was sucked up—triple overhead and flailing—and somersaulted over the falls. Then the wave hammered me to the bottom, and its churning energy bowled me across the ocean floor. I could feel the Red Fin tombstoning at the surface, ominously pointing toward the sky as I dragged at the other end of the leash below—until the leash snapped and I spun down even deeper, bashing against the reef. I clawed for the surface, but the water was so aerated with whirlpools and froth that there was nothing to claw against.
When I finally bobbed up, I was ready to drown—and looking forward to it.
I was only ten yards from the beach, but I was too exhausted to swim. I could barely float. I was being pummeled by the shore break.
I was going to die. I had no doubt.
Until Chuy grabbed me by my hair and shouted at me to breathe. I gasped and choked. He had ditched his board and was somehow able to paddle with one arm and still keep me afloat until the monstrous turbulence of the next wave sucked us up and launched us onto shore.
We hit the rocky beach hard, but Chuy held me close as we cartwheeled into a tide pool and I finally came to a stop, flat on my back. The tide pool’s shallow water was cool, probably because of all the rain. It felt good. I didn’t drown. Thank you, Jesus.
“You remember how crazy your first time was, Pirata?” Chuy said, still grinning about Palmitos. “The fucking wave you paddled for. I never seen bigger here.”
“But I didn’t make the wave,” I said. “I was faking it.”
“You can’t fake that shit, man.”
And no matter how many times I have told Chuy that my afternoon at Palmitos was less than honorable, he always gives me my props.
“Dude, I was there,” Chuy said. “You paddled for it. That’s all that counts.”
José cut the engine. The panga lurched down the back of a wave and nearly swamped.
Chuy and I looked at him.
“Dios mío,” José said.
A hair-standing bolt of lightning lit up the entire bay.
And we could see that Winsor’s eyes were open.
17
“I thought this motherfucker was dead,” José said, impressing me even more with his command of the English language.
“He is dead,” I said.
“He’s waking up,” Chuy said.
“He’s not waking up,” I said.
“The fuck he isn’t,” Chuy screamed. “It’s this lightning—that can do it.”
“Only in the movies,” I said. “Cálmate.”
I switched bench seats so I was the closest to the body. Winsor’s mouth was still wide open, and it was filled with rainwater. His eyes were bloodshot and blank, but his eyes were always sort of bloodshot and blank.
“You never heard of pennies on a dead man’s eyes?” I asked.
It felt like we were sitting around a campfire and it was my turn to tell a scary story.
“No,” Chuy said. But he didn’t sound like he wanted to hear the story.
“Sometimes the eyes of dead people would open up,” I said. “And it would freak everyone out at the funeral parlor.” I was fumbling in my pockets for a couple of ten-peso coins. “So they would put pennies on the eyes to keep the lids down.”
I found two coins. I closed Winsor’s eyes and placed a coin on each lid.
“That’s a total shit story,” José said. “That’s not even close to why.”
He pulled the Yamaha’s start cord. The outboard fired to life, and the coins skidded off Winsor’s face.
“It was Charon’s payment,” José said. “That boatman in Hades who took the dead souls across the river of pain.”
“Did you go to college, José?” I asked.
I was trying not to sound patronizing, but José didn’t answer. He just moved toward Winsor and snatched up my twenty pesos.
I looked at the water pooling in Winsor’s mouth. It was still raining.
Then Winsor choked.
And his eyes fluttered open again.
Then he coughed the water out of his mouth.
I couldn’t see whether Winsor was actually breathing, but it sure looked like he was coming back to life.
Fuck.
We’ve all heard stories about people snapping out of really deep comas, or some stiff who sits up in his coffin just before the undertaker closes the lid. But I doubt that too many of those recovering dead guys recently had two inches of framing hammer claws embedded in their heads.
I mean, if Winsor wasn’t totally dead in the technical sense, he was probably very brain-dead in the intellectual sense. I was already starting to plea bargain with myself. But Winsor wasn’t going to help me out. He puked and groaned. I panicked.
“We have to take this man to a hospital,” I said, squealing a little.
“That sounds like a way to
get into a lot of trouble,” Chuy said.
“I’ll take full responsibility.”
“You’re just a fucking gringo, man. Nothing happens to you,” Chuy said. “I told you that already.”
“I’ll bribe the doctors,” I said, “to keep you guys out of this.”
“This fucking pendejo’s got it backward, amigo,” José said to Chuy. “He needs to bribe us.”
“Winsor is a human being.” I was pleading.
“He fucks kids,” José said. “I ain’t helping him.”
“That’s the rumor,” I said. “But if he’s not dead, we have to call the policía.”
“That fucking rumor’s why I’m out here with a fucking zombie,” Chuy said. “You asked me for help. I’m giving it.”
“We can’t be the judge and jury, Chuy,” I said. “It was different when he was dead. We were just getting rid of a body. But now we have to do the right thing.”
The hypocrite in me was trying to parse what little I knew about the Hippocratic Oath.
“First, do no harm,” I said.
“To your family and your amigos,” José said. “Yeah, that’s right, don’t harm them.”
And then José simply picked up the bang stick and jammed it down on Winsor’s chest, just above the heart. The .357 Magnum discharged, powering a short spear deeply into Winsor’s sternum, arching him grotesquely as its razor-sharp tip exited his back and chipped the wooden bench. Winsor squirmed once and went still.
“Jesús Cristo,” Chuy whispered.
José twisted the spearhead out of Winsor’s chest.
“Okay,” he said. “Now I’m the biggest dog in this fight.”
Winsor’s body slipped off the bench seat.
“Which makes us murderers, genius,” I said. “Instead of accessories after the fact.”
José glared at me. It was a warning.
“This isn’t murder, Pirata,” Chuy said. “It’s just killing a dead guy.”
“And you remember that if you ever feel like telling anybody about this,” José said.
He hefted the bang stick. It was something he kept on board for sharks, but, as I’d just seen, he apparently had no qualms about using it on people. Gringos, specifically.
José knew that if this thing blew up, he’d be in deeper shit than I’d be. I’d get tossed out of Mexico, probably. But he’d go to jail. He had more reasons to worry about me than I had to worry about him—which exposed me some. I was a cómplice. But also a loose end.
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