“Sometimes I’m at the surface where I’m supposed to be, and sometimes I get all mixed up. So I swim for the top. I can tell it’s there and I can see the sunlight. Then I’m running out of air and ready to hit the surface but I’m at the bottom instead. I swim up, but go down. Sometimes I’m watching myself go through it. Or I’m watching someone who looks a lot like me. Like me, but longer hair. Sometimes I’m just dreaming and I wake up standing there looking down at the bed.”
“Interesting, Chuck. It sounds like a new disease. A combination of vertigo and claustrophobia.”
“Can you name it after me?”
Redken tossed the folder to the cabinet and crossed his arms. “Chuck, you have been living with a great deal of anxiety about this. You didn’t know you were all right. My advice is to go easy, to get your confidence back one wave at a time. Come in next week and we’ll talk again. And for heaven’s sake, don’t go out in the hurricane surf that’s coming. That’s enough to shake up anybody.”
Frye pondered the irony of not knowing he was all right. “Can do, Doc.” He slid off the table and stood.
Redken clicked his pen shut and slid it into his pocket. “Chuck, tell me something. Have you been thinking of Debbie recently? More than … usual?”
Frye nodded.
“Her birthday is this month?”
He nodded again.
“There was nothing you could have done,” he said quietly.
“I know.” There was. Something.
Redken sighed. “Let go, Chuck.”
“I try.”
Redken forced a nod. “It’s tragic about Bennett’s wife. Any … positive developments at all?”
“They’ve got a suspect but can’t find him.”
“I suppose that’s a start. Your entire family has my support.” Redken hesitated, pursed his lips, and shook his head. “I miss your boxing articles. You’re one of the few writers who refused to portray prizefighters as idiots.”
“Write my ex-publisher. Ronald Billingham. Tell him if I don’t get my job back you’re going to die of depression. From a leading doctor in Laguna, it could mean a lot.”
Redken checked his watch. “Are you going to the big MIA rally at Main Beach today?”
“Hadn’t thought about it.”
“You should. You should donate a little money, too, if you can spare it. Yesterday at the Laguna Chapter meeting, Lucia Parsons implied she has proof that some MIAs are alive. She stopped short of saying what exactly it is, but said she would show solid evidence by Thursday of this week. That woman is powerful/and practical too. She gets people to believe. That’s a gift, in times as cynical as ours.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Frye counted out sixty-eight dollars for the receptionist, who said she could bill him. He said next month he’d probably be broke. She took the cash with offended dignity, gingerly as a specimen, and placed it in a drawer.
He stepped outside and into the languid morning optics of summertime Laguna. Dunce was waiting where Frye had left him. Downtown, things seemed muted, slightly airborne. As Frye walked down Forest Avenue, shoppers floated by on a radiant sidewalk, mouthing silences, dazed by the harsh economics of looking for bargains in a town where none exist, burying their woes in two-dollar ice-cream cones, dreaming of air conditioners, Bloody Marys, naps. The traffic had already slowed to a crawl, and the tourists weaved slowly between the overheating cars as if protected by force fields. A mother stopped her stroller in front of an idling Mercedes and adjusted her baby’s bonnet. Her husband waited in another dimension, ice cream melting down his wrists, gazing to the Pacific with some unfocused longing. Paying customers, Frye thought, endure them. He dumped the envelopes in a mail box.
A fresh batch of MIA Committee posters had sprung up around town—on the trees, the storefronts, the lamp posts. Frye could see the crowd starting to gather on Main Beach.
Organize, he thought. Organize all this, just like a newspaper piece. The inverted pyramid. Who, what, where, when, how, and why?
Eddie leaves early.
Li gets kidnapped.
One gunman has muddy shoes and bracelets on his wrists—gifts of Stanley Smith.
They get away in a blue Celica, Eddie’s car.
They vanish in Saigon Plaza with people everywhere.
I get a tape with DeCord paying off Nguyen Hy.
DeCord shows up with Minh.
Minh finds Li’s bloody, muddy clothes in Eddie’s garage. Or says he did.
The tape of DeCord and Nguyen gets taken by Eddie’s rivals, the Dark Men. They total my place. More muddy shoes, in the middle of August.
The whats and the whens. But not enough whos, or hows … and no whys.
And who knew I had that tape, besides Bennett?
Maybe I can find out—tonight.
He headed down Coast Highway, bought a Times, then took a deep breath before ducking into the Mega-Shop to see Bill Antioch. There was a sense of duty here, because Bill had been his partner for eight years in the only venture at which Frye had been even mildly successful.
It smells the same, he thought—rubber wetsuits; new cotton shirts; leather MegaSandals; fresh resin on new boards; the sweet, sexy smell of MegaWax, concocted with essence of coconut and an expensive dash of musk.
He took visual stock. Plenty of boards left, sandal boxes scattered around the floor, wetsuits stuffed onto hangers, MegaSkates stacked in a corner, MegaLeashes dangling everywhere, posters fading on the walls, and all of it covered with the same sad coat of dust that had settled here months ago and never left, like some new product that refused to move.
“Don’t say it, Frye. You wanna know why this is, like, a total dive, just ask yourself why you don’t give a shit anymore.”
Antioch sat behind the counter, reading Guitar Player, slurping a health shake of some description. Tanned perfectly, a properly faded Hawaiian shirt, a shell necklace around his neck just low enough to flirt with his golden chest hair. Bill. Frye smiled, regarding the unsold lumps of MegaWax still displayed with the warping Sign: MEGAGREAT STOCKING STUFFERS! STOKE YOUR SURFER THIS CHRISTMAS!
“Hello, Bill. How’s business?”
“Radically bad.”
“Thought I’d check in.”
“You checked out from around here a year ago, man.”
“I’m on a rebound.”
“Glad to hear it, Chuck, but if you want to rebound this place you got a throbbin’ long way to jump.”
Frye turned to assay his shop again, and the closer he looked the worse it got. Windows blighted with dirt, carpet littered, stacks of magazines piled behind the counter, product marked down to giveaway prices but still unmoved in almost a year. And the goddamned dust. Dunce nosed a three-hundred-dollar surfboard with some curiosity and lifted a leg. Frye cuffed him and the dog looked up woefully. “Well, I’m ready to try, Bill, Either that or sell the whole thing. What can we do?”
Bill’s eyes glimmered for a moment, the spirit of free enterprise still kicking. “First, you owe the help for last week.”
Frye counted out three hundred and fifty dollars and handed it over. Simple arithmetic suggested that his life’s savings were now right at one hundred and eighty-two dollars, plus change. Maybe Billingham will go for a freelance piece on Li’s kidnapping. Maybe the Times would pay better.
“Thanks, Chuck. Money well spent. Now like I’ve told you before, we got to do like four things before this place can throb again. First is the women’s wear. Bikinis, one-pieces, shorts, shirts, the whole deal. We still get half a dozen chicks a day—superior-looking chicks too—asking for Mega. I tell them we have no Mega for women, as such. So they head right down to Stussy or Gotcha. Gotcha? Those South Africans are killing us, right here on our native shore, and Chuck, that hurts.” Bill sucked on his straw, gaining momentum. “Second is we gotta go with kneebusters. I know they’re buttugly, but they’re big now. Supply and demand. Then I’ve got to get off my ass—I’m not blaming this whole mess o
n you, not even. Fourth, bro, is you gotta get back in the contests and dust off your name. The buying public is a fickle animal, and if you’re not out there in the water, at the parties and surf films, they just forget about Mega. You gotta get visible, man. Frye, the last thing you did public was when you dressed like the ape at your party and chased the chick through the bushes and got your picture in the paper. Great photo. Great stunt, but you gotta follow up. You gotta be apparent. Hell, Chuck, you gotta surf.”
Frye nodded, considering this four-point plan. Bill was contagious in his own way.
“You forget how to surf or something, Chuck?”
“No.”
“Good. Getting fired from the paper was the best thing that could’ve happened for Mega. Now you can win contests again and put us back on top. In fact, I just entered you in the Huntington Masters Invitational next month. Great exposure. All the Aussies and Hawaiians will be there and you can blow them out of the water. Totally.”
Frye wondered if drowning in a contest would boost sales.
“And one more thing, Chuck. Your hair. I mean, it’s like way too long. Kids now got it kinda fifties-like, you know, Tab Hunter or something. Modernize, Chuck.”
“I like my hair okay.”
“You’re a chop.”
“And I don’t know the first thing about bikinis.”
Antioch choked down more shake. “You don’t have to! We just get a designer. You didn’t know anything about sandals either, did you? But look how they sold! Two years ago everybody on earth had those things on. Who else can say they sent the president a free pair of MegaSandals to wear at the White House Beach Boys Concert?” Bill’s countenance fell; he grew pensive. “You know, we made ’em too good. I still get people in here wearing MegaSandals from years back. They don’t ever wear out. Bikinis, Chuck. The future is a string bikini. MegaKini. There you are. It’s all out there for the taking.”
Frye tried to reconcile the kidnapping of Li, the death of his marriage, and his fear of the water with a future of string bikinis. He thought, something has to give. Haven’t I known that for too long? He looked at Dunce, asleep now in a rhombus of sunlight inside the door. He watched the cars on Coast Highway, droning past the bleak windows. Back in the old days, this was quite the place. Parties. Linda. Profit. A little attention was all she needed. Like everything else, there comes a point when you put up or get out. How come it took me so long to realize that if you do nothing, things fall apart? “Okay, Bill. Let’s get this place going again. Find a designer for women’s wear and I’ll get back on the surf circuit. We’ll make it work.”
Bill finished his shake with a last desperate slurp, then swung out his hand, smiling. “We can get back on top, Chuck, I swear. We’ll kick everybody’s ass, like totally. You miss the contests anyway, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Linda?”
“She split.”
“What a drag. There was a girl in here looking for you yesterday. Real nectar. Cristobel Something or Other. Matter of fact, she had a dog with her, just like that one.”
Frye regarded the brute, body bent and one leg up now in the patch of sun, chasing a flea around his balls with a fervent snorting and clicking of teeth.
She came here looking for me, he thought. This could be the start of something long and beautiful. Erotic in unprecedented ways. Eventually a family of adoring children, all with genius IQs. I will teach my son to surf. Maybe she changed her mind about my offer. On the other hand, maybe she just came by to tell me I’m an asshole. “She leave a message?”
“Here’s her number.”
“Okay, Bill. Clean up this dust, will ya? Mega is on the comeback trail.”
Antioch eyed Frye’s stitches. “Radical face. What happened?”
“Shaving accident.”
“What with, dude, a chainsaw? Hey Frye, you mind if I close the shop for an hour today? I wanna go see that MIA rally. Every time I look at Lucia Parsons, my prick gets hard as a surfboard.”
“Do what you feel is best, Bill.”
Frye called Cristobel Something or Other’s number. Her voice was kind of low and she sounded tired. He explained that he had found her dog. She gave him her address—on Coast Highway, just two blocks from the MegaShop—and asked him to bring him back.
Outside, he found an empty bench and opened the Register to the Orange County section. Eddie Vo’s face stared back at him, sullen, dark and inward, GANG LEADER SOUGHT IN KIDNAPPING. The piece said that “articles belonging to the kidnapped woman were found in Vo’s rented Westminster home.” Vo was “at large,” and the cops were looking all over the county.
Li smiled in the photo beside him, serene, goddesslike.
Below the fold was a shot of Ground Zero Records, little more than a black cavern now, gutted by fire. The caption posited that a rival gang may have set the blaze.
The rival gang that took Bennett’s tape.
And broke into my house, wrecked my stuff, strung my room with Christmas lights and generally shit in my mess kit. While I was out helping Eddie Vo get away.
CHAPTER 10
CRISTOBEL’S PLACE WAS A WASHED-OUT, once-blue, and now rickety apartment just past Fahrenheit 451 Books. The dog, sensing home turf, led Frye down a walkway. The buildings seemed to slouch in lazy angles, a patternless surrender to time and gravity.
He stood on a big patio, surrounded on three sides by railing. Dunce nosed the door to Number Seven. Through the Dutch door, Frye could see her sitting with her back to him, shoulders forward, head down a little, right elbow held outward.
For a moment he watched as she worked a big pair of scissors through some material, her left hand spreading it flat. Through the picture window she worked behind, Frye noted the blue glitter of the Pacific and the sun high in a flawless sky. Her reflection rode across the water, mingled with the sun—a truly special effect, Frye concluded. He moved closer.
Dunce barked and jumped at the door, and Frye watched Cristobel turn. He was getting a smile ready when a dark shape suddenly blotted her out and he found himself looking at a large black man who wiped out the ocean and sun: no shirt, muscles bunching and sweat glistening off his chest, his hair planed flat in the manner of Carl Lewis, a not very friendly look on his face. The man moved from the window and the door swung open. Dunce slipped inside with a series of whimpers that told of abduction, torture, escape. The black man offered his hand. “Jim Strauss,” he said.
“Chuck Frye.”
“Find our dog?”
“He kinda found me.”
Frye stepped in, aware of the commotion at the far end of the room—woman and dog in a homecoming scene. Dunce barked at him. Cristobel turned. Same face, he thought—full, pale skin, good mouth. Dark eyes, light hair. Off the charts. She gave him a contraceptive glare.
“Well, hello, Mr. Frye.”
“Hello, Miss …”
“Strauss.”
He forced a smile at both of them. “Oh, you two are … great, super.”
Jim smiled at him without mirth.
“Cristobel will do,” she said. “Blaster latch onto you?”
“He did.”
“He’s like that. A social animal.” She looked at Frye, shaking back her hair, hands on her hips and fingers spread against her jeans.
“Good to meet you,” said Jim. “Thanks for bringing back our dog.” Frye watched him disappear into a hallway. A door closed, music started up.
“He’s not rude,” she said. “He’s just working out.”
“Olympics?”
“Model. Everything has to be perfect.”
“Looks like he’s getting there.” Blaster’s head slipped under his hand. “I was putting a note on your dog’s scarf last night and he followed me to my car. I was in a hurry and he just sorta jumped in. The note said I was sorry for a bad opening line and wanted a proper introduction. Anyway, I apologize for what I said, and I’m sorry I kidnapped your dog.”
“That was a crappy thin
g to say to a girl you don’t even know.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t really expect me to say yes, did you?”
“No.”
“You Southern California guys are so damned arrogant sometimes. You think it’s cool. Some women must like that, but it just makes me think you’re a bunch of narcissistic queebs.”
“If you’ve got a blindfold and rifle, I’ll shoot myself.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “Okay. Truce. Beer?”
“Sure.” He watched her go to the kitchen with an adulterous guilt, very much tuned in to the way she filled her jeans. Full-bodied but light on her feet, a gold chain around her ankle. He glanced toward Jim’s room, from which a series of odd huffing noises came, timed roughly to the music. When she came back, he was looking at the material she’d been cutting. It was a light blue background with yellow slices of moon on it. “Nice.”
“Kind of a sun dress,” she said. She held up a swatch of cloth. “Good silk. I liked those little moons.”
Frye sat on the couch and Cristobel took a chair. He looked out to the sand, the sun, the ocean glittering like a tossed handful of diamonds. “Nice place here.”
“Thanks. We rented it a year ago. Cheap and a good view. Hard to find in Laguna. What happened to your head?”
“A cop hit me with his gun.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“Not exactly.”
“I’ve been following the story about Li. She’s been missing since Sunday, right? Any suspects?”
“There’s a suspect but I’m not so sure he’s solid. The cops think so.”
“My experience with cops is you get good treatment if you’re high-priority, and bad treatment if you’re not. I’d think that Li Frye is pretty high.”
Frye wondered just what this experience with the cops was, but it didn’t seem time to press it. He looked at Cristobel, feeling a sour regret that she was married, that he was married—technically, at least—that he had put his worst foot forward, kidnapped her dog, and now sat here with his pecker coming up like a garden gopher while he drank her beer.
“Don’t get discouraged,” she said. “They’ll find her.”
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