Fear Nothing

18

The cottage is the ideal residence for a boardhead like Bobby. It stands on the southern horn of the bay, far out on the point, the sole structure within three-quarters of a mile. Point-break surf surrounds it.

From town, the lights of Bobby Halloway’s house appear to be so far from the lights along the inner curve of the bay that tourists assume they are seeing a boat anchored in the channel beyond our sheltered waters. To longtime residents, the cottage is a landmark.

The place was constructed forty-five years ago, before many restrictions were placed on coastal building, and it never acquired neighbors because, in those days, there was an abundance of cheap land along the shore, where the wind and the weather were more accommodating than on the point, and where there were streets and convenient utility hookups. By the time the shore lots — then the hills behind them — filled up, regulations issued by the California Coastal Commission had made building on the bay horns impossible.

Long before the house came into Bobby’s possession, a grandfather clause in the law preserved its existence. Bobby intended to die in this singular place, he said, shrouded in the sound of breaking surf — but not until well past the middle of the first century of the new millennium.

No paved or graveled road leads along the horn, only a wide rock track flanked by low dunes precariously held in place by tall, sparse shore grass.

The horns that embrace the bay are natural formations, curving peninsulas: They are the remnants of the rim of a massive extinct volcano. The bay itself is a volcanic crater layered with sand by thousands of years of tides. Near shore, the southern horn is three to four hundred feet wide, but it narrows to a hundred at the point.

When I was two-thirds of the way to Bobby’s house, I had to get off my bike and walk it. Soft drifts of sand, less than a foot deep, sloped across the rock trail. They would pose no obstacle to Bobby’s four-wheel-drive Jeep wagon, but they made pedaling difficult.

This walk was usually peaceful, encouraging meditation. Tonight the horn was serene, but it seemed as alien as a spine of rock on the moon, and I kept glancing back, expecting to see someone pursuing me.

The one-story cottage is of teak, with a cedar-shingle roof. Weathered to a lustrous silver-gray, the wood takes the caress of moonlight as a woman’s body receives a lover’s touch. Encircling three sides of the house is a deep porch furnished with rocking chairs and gliders.

There are no trees. The landscaping consists only of sand and wild shore grass. Anyway, the eye is impatient with the nearer view and favors the sky, the sea, and the shimmering lights of Moonlight Bay, which look more distant than three-quarters of a mile.

Buying time to settle my nerves, I leaned my bike against the front porch railing and walked past the cottage, to the end of the point. There, I stood with Orson at the top of a slope that dropped thirty feet to the beach.

The surf was so slow that you would have to work hard to catch a wave, and the ride wouldn’t last long. It was almost a neap tide, though this was the fourth quarter of the moon. The surf was a little sloppy, too, because of the onshore wind, which was blustery enough to cause some chop out here, even though it was all but dead in town.

Offshore wind is best, smoothing the ocean surface. It blows spray from the crest of the waves, makes them hold up longer, and causes them to hollow out before they break.

Bobby and I have been surfing since we were eleven: him by day, both of us by night. Lots of surfers hit the waves by moonlight, fewer when the moon is down, but Bobby and I like it best in storm waves without even stars.

We were grommets together, totally annoying surf mongrels, but we graduated to surf nazis before we were fourteen, and we were mature boardheads by the time Bobby graduated high school and I took my equivalency degree for home education. Bobby is more than just a boardhead now; he’s a surf mensch, and people all over the world turn to him to find out where the big waves will be breaking next.

God, I love the sea at night. It is darkness distilled into a liquid, and nowhere in this world do I feel more at home than in these black swells. The only light that ever arises in the ocean is from bioluminescent plankton, which become radiant when disturbed, and although they can make an entire wave glow an intense lime green, their brightness is friendly to my eyes. The night sea contains nothing from which I must hide or from which I must even look away.

By the time I walked back to the cottage, Bobby was standing in the open front door. Because of our friendship, all the lights in his house are on rheostats; now he had dimmed them to the level of candlelight.

I haven’t a clue as to how he knew that I had arrived. Neither I nor Orson had made a sound. Bobby just always knows.

He was barefoot, even in March, but he was wearing jeans instead of swim trunks or shorts. His shirt was Hawaiian — he owns no other style — but he had made a concession to the season by wearing a long-sleeve, crewneck, white cotton sweater under the short-sleeve shirt, which featured bright quizzical parrots and lush palm fronds.

As I climbed the steps to the porch, Bobby gave me a shaka, the surfer hand signal that’s easier to make than the sign they exchange on Star Trek, which is probably based on the shaka. Fold your middle three fingers to your palm, extend your thumb and little finger, and lazily waggle your hand. It means a lot of things — hello, what’s up, hang loose, great ride — all friendly, and it will never be taken as an insult unless you wave it at someone who isn’t a surfer, such as an L.A. gang member, in which case it might get you shot dead.

I was eager to tell him about everything that had transpired since sundown, but Bobby values a laid-back approach to life. If he were any more laid back, he’d be dead. Except when riding a wave, he values tranquility. Treasures it. If you’re going to be a friend of Bobby Halloway’s, you have to learn to accept his view of life: Nothing that happens farther than half a mile from the beach is of sufficient importance to worry about, and no event is solemn enough or stylish enough to justify the wearing of a necktie. He responds to languid conversation better than to chatter, to indirection better than to direct statements.

“Flow me a beer?” I asked.

Bobby said, “Corona, Heineken, Löwenbräu?”

“Corona for me.”

Leading the way across the living room, Bobby said, “Is the one with the tail drinking tonight?”

“He’ll have a Heinie.”

“Light or dark?”

“Dark,” I said.

“Must’ve been a rough night for dogs.”

“Full-on gnarly.”

The cottage consists of a large living room, an office where Bobby tracks waves worldwide, a bedroom, a kitchen, and one bath. The walls are well-oiled teak, dark and rich, the windows are big, the floors are slate, and the furniture is comfortable.

Ornamentation — other than the natural setting — is limited to eight astonishing watercolors by Pia Klick, a woman whom Bobby still loves, though she left him to spend time in Waimea Bay, on the north shore of Oahu. He wanted to go with her, but she said she needed to be alone in Waimea, which she calls her spiritual home; the harmony and beauty of the place are supposed to give her the peace of mind she requires in order to decide whether or not to live with her fate. I don’t know what that means. Neither does Bobby. Pia said she’d be gone a month or two. That was almost three years ago. The swell at Waimea comes out of extremely deep water. The waves are high, wall-like. Pia says they are the green of translucent jade. Some days I dream of walking that shore and hearing the thunder of those breakers. Once a month, Bobby calls Pia or she calls him. Sometimes they talk for a few minutes, sometimes for hours. She isn’t with another man, and she does love Bobby. Pia is one of the kindest, gentlest, smartest people I have ever known. I don’t understand why she’s doing this. Neither does Bobby. The days go by. He waits.

In the kitchen, Bobby plucked a bottle of Corona from the refrigerator and handed it to me.

I twisted off the cap and took a swallow. No lime, no salt, no pretension.

He opened a Heineken for Orson. “Half or all?”

I said, “It’s a radical night.” In spite of my dire news, I was deep in the tropical rhythms of Bobbyland.

He emptied the bottle into a deep, enameled-metal bowl on the floor, which he keeps for Orson. On the bowl he has painted ROSEBUD in block letters, a reference to the child’s sled in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.

I have no intention of inducing my canine companion to become an alcoholic. He doesn’t get beer every day, and usually he splits a bottle with me. Nevertheless, he has his pleasures, and I don’t intend to deny him what he enjoys. Considering his formidable body weight, he doesn’t become inebriated on a single beer. Dare to give him two, however, and he redefines the term party animal.

As Orson noisily lapped up the Heineken, Bobby opened a Corona for himself and leaned against the refrigerator.

I leaned against the counter near the sink. There was a table with chairs, but in the kitchen, Bobby and I tend to be leaners.

We are alike in many ways. We’re the same height, virtually the same weight, and the same body type. Although he has very dark brown hair and eyes so raven-black that they seem to have blue highlights, we have been mistaken for brothers.

We both have a collection of surf bumps, too, and as he leaned against the refrigerator, Bobby was absent-mindedly using the bottom of one bare foot to rub the bumps on the top of the other. These are knotty calcium deposits that develop from constant pressure against a surfboard; you get them on your toes and the tops of your feet from paddling while in a prone position. We have them on our knees, as well, and Bobby has them on his bottom ribs.

I am not tanned, of course, as Bobby is. He’s beyond tanned. He’s a maximum brown sun god, year round, and in summer he’s well-buttered toast. He does the mambo with melanoma, and maybe one day we’ll die of the same sun that he courts and I reject.

“There were some unreal zippers out there today,” he said. “Six-footers, perfect shape.”

“Looks way slow now.”

“Yeah. Mellowed out around sunset.”

We sucked at our beers. Orson happily licked his chops.

“So,” Bobby said, “your dad died.”

I nodded. Sasha must have called him.

“Good,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Bobby is not cruel or insensitive. He meant it was good that the suffering was over for my father.

Between us, we often say a lot with a few words. People have mistaken us for brothers not merely because we are the same height, weight, and body type..

“You got to the hospital in time. So it was cool.”

“It was.”

He didn’t ask me how I was handling it. He knew.

“So after the hospital,” he said, “you sang a couple numbers in a minstrel show.”

I touched one sooty hand to my sooty face. “Someone killed Angela Ferryman, set her house on fire to cover it. I almost caught the great onaula-loa in the sky.”

“Who’s the someone?”

“Wish I knew. Same people stole Dad’s body.”

Bobby drank some beer and said nothing.

“They killed a drifter, swapped his body for Dad’s. You might not want to know about this.”

For a while, he weighed the wisdom of ignorance against the pull of curiosity. “I can always forget I heard it, if that seems smart.”

Orson belched. Beer makes him gaseous.

When the dog wagged his tail and looked up beseechingly, Bobby said, “No more for you, fur face.”

“I’m hungry,” I said.

“You’re filthy, too. Catch a shower, take some of my clothes. I’ll throw together some clucking tacos.”

“Thought I’d clean up with a swim.”

“It’s nipple out there.”

“Feels about sixty degrees.”

“I’m talking water temp. Believe me, the nip factor is high. Shower’s better.”

“Orson needs a makeover, too.”

“Take him in the shower with you. There’re plenty of towels.”

“Very broly of you,” I said. Broly meaning “brotherly.”

“Yeah, I’m so Christian, I don’t ride the waves anymore — I just walk on them.”

After a few minutes in Bobbyland, I was relaxed and willing to ease into my news. Bobby’s more than a beloved friend. He’s a tranquilizer.

Suddenly he stood away from the refrigerator and cocked his head, listening.

“Something?” I asked.

“Someone.”

I hadn’t heard anything but the steadily diminishing voice of the wind. With the windows closed and the surf so slow, I couldn’t even hear the sea, but I noticed that Orson was alert, too.

Bobby headed out of the kitchen to see who the visitor might be, and I said, “Bro,” and offered him the Glock.

He stared dubiously at the pistol, then at me. “Stay casual.”

“That drifter. They cut out his eyes.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Because they could?”

For a moment Bobby considered what I’d said. Then he took a key from a pocket of his jeans and unlocked a broom closet, which to the best of my recollection had never featured a lock before. From the narrow closet, he took a pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun.

“That’s new,” I said.

“Goon repellent.”

This was not life as usual in Bobbyland. I couldn’t resist: “Stay casual.”

Orson and I followed Bobby across the living room and onto the front porch. The onshore flow smelled faintly of kelp.

The cottage faced north. No boats were on the bay — or at least none with running lights. To the east, the town twinkled along the shore and up the hills.

Surrounding the cottage, the end of the horn featured low dunes and shore grass frosted with moonlight. No one was in sight.

Orson moved to the top of the steps and stood rigid, his head raised and thrust forward, sniffing the air and catching a scent more interesting than kelp.

Relying perhaps on a sixth sense, Bobby didn’t even look at the dog to confirm his own suspicion. “Stay here. If I flush anyone out, tell him he can’t leave till we validate his parking ticket.”

Barefoot, he descended the steps and crossed the dunes to look down the steep incline to the beach. Someone could have been lying on that slope, watching the cottage from concealment.

Bobby walked along the crest of the embankment, heading toward the point, studying the slope and the beach below, turning every few steps to survey the territory between him and the house. He held the shotgun ready in both hands and conducted the search with military methodicalness.

Obviously, he had been through this routine more than once before. He hadn’t told me that he was being harassed by anyone or troubled by intruders. Ordinarily, if he was having a serious problem, he would have shared it with me.

I wondered what secret he was keeping.

19

Having turned away from the steps and pushed his snout between a pair of balusters at the east end of the porch, Orson was looking not west toward Bobby but back along the horn toward town. He growled deep in his throat.

I followed the direction of his gaze. Even in the fullness of the moon, which the snarled rags of cloud didn’t currently obscure, I was unable to see anyone.

With the steadiness of a grumbling motor, the dog’s low growl continued uninterrupted.

To the west, Bobby had reached the point, still moving along the crest of the embankment. Although I could see him, he was little more than a gray shape against the stark-black backdrop of sea and sky.

While I had been looking the other way, someone could have cut Bobby down so suddenly and violently that he had been unable to cry out, and I wouldn’t have known. Now, rounding the point and beginning to approach the house along the southern flank of the horn, this blurry gray figure could have been anyone.

To the growling dog, I said, “You’re spooking me.”

Although I strained my eyes, I still couldn’t discern anyone or any threat to the east, where Orson’s attention remained fixed. The only movement was the flutter of the tall, sparse grass. The fading wind wasn’t even strong enough to blow sand off the well-compacted dunes.

Orson stopped grumbling and thumped down the porch steps, as though in pursuit of quarry. Instead, he scampered into the sand only a few feet to the left of the steps, where he raised one hind leg and emptied his bladder.

When he returned to the porch, visible tremors were passing through his flanks. Looking eastward again, he didn’t resume his growling; instead, he whined nervously.

This change in him disturbed me more than if he had begun to bark furiously.

I sidled across the porch to the western corner of the cottage, trying to watch the sandy front yard but also wanting to keep Bobby — if, indeed, it was Bobby — in sight as long as possible. Soon, however, still edging along the southern embankment, he disappeared behind the house.

When I realized that Orson had stopped whining, I turned toward him and discovered he was gone.

I thought he must have chased after something in the night, though it was remarkable that he had sprinted off so soundlessly. Anxiously moving back the way I had come, across the porch toward the steps, I couldn’t see the dog anywhere out there among the moonlit dunes.

Then I found him at the open front door, peering out warily. He had retreated into the living room, just inside the threshold. His ears were flattened against his skull. His head was lowered. His hackles bristled as if he had sustained an electrical shock. He was neither growling nor whining, but tremors passed through his flanks.

Orson is many things — not least of all, strange — but he is not cowardly or stupid. Whatever he was retreating from must have been worthy of his fear.

“What’s the problem, pal?”

Failing to acknowledge me with even as little as a quick glance, the dog continued to obsess on the barren landscape beyond the porch. Although he drew his black lips away from his teeth, no snarl came from him. Clearly he no longer harbored any aggressive intent; rather, his bared teeth appeared to express extreme distaste, repulsion.

As I turned to scan the night, I glimpsed movement from the corner of my eye: the fuzzy impression of a man running in a half crouch, passing the cottage from east to west, progressing swiftly with long fluid strides through the last rank of dunes that marked the top of the slope to the beach, about forty feet away from me.

I swung around, bringing up the Glock. The running man had either gone to ground or had been a phantom.

Briefly I wondered if it was Pinn. No. Orson would not have been fearful of Jesse Pinn or of any man like him.

I crossed the porch, descended the three wooden steps, and stood in the sand, taking a closer look at the surrounding dunes. Scattered sprays of tall grass undulated in the breeze. Some of the shore lights shimmered across the lapping waters of the bay. Nothing else moved.

Like a tattered bandage unraveling from the dry white face of a mummified pharaoh, a long narrow cloud wound away from the chin of the moon.

Perhaps the running man was merely a cloud shadow. Perhaps. But I didn’t think so.

I glanced back toward the open door of the cottage. Orson had retreated farther from the threshold, deeper into the front room. For once, he was not at home in the night.

I didn’t feel entirely at home, either.

Stars. Moon. Sand. Grass. And a feeling of being watched.

From the slope that dropped to the beach or from a shallow swale between dunes, through a screen of grass, someone was watching me. A gaze can have weight, and this one was coming at me like a series of waves, not like slow surf but like fully macking double overheads, hammering at me.

Now the dog wasn’t the only one whose hackles rose.

Just when I began to worry that Bobby was taking a mortally long time, he appeared around the east end of the cottage. As he approached, sand pluming around his bare feet, he never looked at me but let his gaze travel ceaselessly from dune to dune.

I said, “Orson haired out.”

“Don’t believe it,” Bobby said.

“Totally haired out. He’s never done that before. He’s pure guts, that dog.”

“Well, if he did,” Bobby said, “I don’t blame him. Almost haired out myself.”

“Someone’s out there.”

“More than one.”

“Who?”

Bobby didn’t reply. He adjusted his grip on the shotgun but continued to hold it at the ready while he studied the surrounding night.

“They’ve been here before,” I guessed.

“Yeah.”

“Why? What do they want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who are they?” I asked again.

As before, he didn’t answer.

“Bobby?” I pressed.

A great pale mass, a few hundred feet high, gradually resolved out of the darkness over the ocean to the west: A fog bank, revealed in lunar whitewash, extended far to the north and the south. Whether it came to land or hung offshore all night, the fog pushed a quieting pressure ahead of it. On silent wings, a formation of pelicans flew low over the peninsula and vanished across the black waters of the bay. As the remaining onshore breeze faded, the long grass drooped and was still, and I could better hear the slow surf breaking along the bay shore, although the sound was less a rumble than a lulling hushaby.

From out at the point, a cry as eerie as the call of a loon carved this deepening silence. An answering cry, equally sharp and chilling, arose from the dunes nearer the house.

I was reminded of those old Western movies in which the Indians call to one another in the night, imitating birds and coyotes, to coordinate their moves immediately before attacking the circled wagons of the homesteaders.

Bobby fired the shotgun into a nearby mound of sand, startling me so much that I nearly blew an aortic valve.

When echoes of the crash rebounded from the bay and receded again, when the last reverberations were absorbed by the vast pillow of fog in the west, I said, “Why’d you do that?”

Instead of answering me at once, Bobby chambered another shell and listened to the night.

I remembered Pinn firing the handgun into the ceiling of the church basement to punctuate the threat that he had leveled against Father Tom Eliot.

Finally, when no more loonlike cries arose, Bobby said, almost as if talking to himself, “Probably isn’t necessary, but once in a while it doesn’t hurt to float the idea of buckshot past them.”

“Who? Who are you warning off?”

I had known him to be mysterious in the past, but never quite so enigmatic as this.

The dunes continued to command his attention, and another minute of mental hang time passed before Bobby suddenly looked at me as if he had forgotten that I was standing beside him. “Let’s go inside. You scrub off the bad Denzel Washington disguise, and I’ll slam together some killer tacos.”

I knew better than to press the issue any further. He was being mysterious either to stoke my curiosity and enhance his treasured reputation for weirdness or because he had good reason to keep this secret even from me. In either case, he was in that special Bobby place, where he’s as inaccessible as if he were on his board, halfway through a tube radical, in an insanely hollow wave.

As I followed him into the house, I was still aware of being watched. The attention of the unknown observer prickled my back, like hermit-crab tracks on a surf-smoothed beach. Before closing the front door, I scanned the night once more, but our visitors remained well hidden.

The bathroom is large and luxurious: an absolute-black granite floor, matching countertops, handsome teak cabinetry, and acres of beveled-edge mirrors. The huge shower stall can accommodate four people, which makes it ideal for dog grooming.

Corky Collins — who built Bobby’s fine house long before Bobby’s birth — was an unpretentious guy, but he indulged in amenities. Like the four-person, marble-lined spa in the corner diagonally across the room from the shower. Maybe Corky — whose name had been Toshiro Tagawa before he changed it — fantasized about orgies with three beach girls or maybe he just liked to be totally, awesomely clean.

As a young man — a prodigy fresh out of law school in 1941, at the age of only twenty-one — Toshiro had been interred in Manzanar, the camp where loyal Japanese Americans remained imprisoned throughout World War II. Following the war, angered and humiliated, he became an activist, committed to securing justice for the oppressed. After five years, he lost faith in the possibility of equal justice and also came to believe that most of the oppressed, given a chance, would become enthusiastic oppressors in their own right.

He switched to personal-injury law. Because his learning curve was as steep as the huge monoliths macking in from a South Pacific typhoon, he rapidly became the most successful personal-injury attorney in the San Francisco area.

In another four years, having banked some serious cash, he walked away from his law practice. In 1956, at the age of thirty-six, he built this house on the southern horn of Moonlight Bay, bringing in underground power, water, and phone lines at considerable expense. With a dry sense of humor that prevented his cynicism from becoming bitterness, Toshiro Tagawa legally changed his name to Corky Collins on the day he moved into the cottage, and he dedicated every day of the rest of his life to the beach and the ocean.

He grew surf bumps on the tops of his toes and feet, below his kneecaps, and on his bottom ribs. Out of a desire to hear the unobstructed thunder of the waves, Corky didn’t always use earplugs when he surfed, so he developed an exostosis; the channel to the inner ear constricts when filled with cold water, and because of repeated abuse, a benign bony tumor narrows the ear canal. By the time he was fifty, Corky was intermittently deaf in his left ear. Every surfer experiences faucet nose after a thrashing skim session, when your sinuses empty explosively, pouring forth all the seawater forced up your nostrils during wipeouts; this grossness usually happens when you’re talking to an outrageously fine girl who’s wearing a bun-floss bikini. After twenty years of epic hammering and subsequent nostril Niagaras, Corky developed an exostosis in his sinus passages, requiring surgery to alleviate headaches and to restore proper drainage. On every anniversary of this operation, he had thrown a Proper Drainage Party. From years of exposure to the glaring sun and the salt water, Corky was also afflicted with surfer’s eye — pterygium — a winglike thickening of the conjunctiva over the white of the eye, eventually extending across the cornea. His vision gradually deteriorated.

Nine years ago, he was spared ophthalmological surgery when he was killed — not by melanoma, not by a shark, but by Big Mama herself, the ocean. Though Corky was sixty-nine at the time, he went out in monster storm waves, twenty-foot behemoths, quakers, rolling thunder that most surfers a third his age wouldn’t have tried, and according to witnesses, he was a party of one, hooting with joy, repeatedly almost airborne, racing the lip, carving truly sacred rail slashes, repeatedly getting barreled — until he wiped out big time and was held down by a breaking wave. Monsters that size can weigh thousands of tons, which is a lot of water, too much to struggle against, and even a strong swimmer can be held on the bottom half a minute or longer, maybe a lot longer, before he can get air. Worse, Corky surfaced at the wrong moment, just in time to be hammered deep by the next wave in the set, and he drowned in a two-wave hold-down.

Surfers from one end of California to the other shared the opinion that Corky Collins had led the perfect life and had died the perfect death. Exostosis of the ear, exostosis of the sinuses, pterygium in both eyes — none of that meant shit to Corky, and all of it was better than boredom or heart disease, better than a fat pension check that had to be earned by spending a lifetime in an office. Life was surf, death was surf, the power of nature vast and enfolding, and the heart stirred at the thought of Corky’s enviably sweet passage through a world that was so much trouble for so many others.

Bobby inherited the cottage.

This development astonished Bobby. We had both known Corky Collins since we were eleven and first ventured to the end of the horn with board racks on our bikes. He was mentor to every surf rat who was ravenous for experience and eager to master the point break. He didn’t act like the point was his, but everyone respected Corky as much as if he actually owned the beach from Santa Barbara all the way to Santa Cruz. He was impatient with any gyrospaz who ripped and slashed up a good wave, ruining it for everyone, and he had only disdain for freeway surfers and wish-wases of all types, but he was a friend and an inspiration to all of us who were in love with the sea and in sync with its rhythms. Corky had legions of friends and admirers, some of whom he had known for more than three decades, so we were baffled as to why he had bequeathed all his worldly possessions to Bobby, whom he had known only eight years.

As explanation, the executor of the estate presented to Bobby a letter from Corky that was a masterpiece of succinctness:

Corky saw in Bobby someone who had an innate understanding, from boyhood, of those truths that Corky himself had not learned until he was thirty-seven. He wanted to honor and encourage that understanding. God bless him for it.

The summer following his freshman year at Ashdon College, when Bobby inherited, after taxes, the house and a modest sum of cash, he dropped out of school. This infuriated his parents. He was able to shrug off their fury, however, because the beach and the sea and the future were his.

Besides, his folks have been furious about one thing or another all their lives, and Bobby is inured to it. They own and edit the town newspaper, and they fancy themselves tireless crusaders for enlightened public policy, which means they think most citizens are either too selfish to do the right thing or too stupid to know what is best for them. They expected Bobby to share what they called their “passion for the great issues of our time,” but Bobby wanted to escape from his family’s loudly announced idealism — and from all the poorly concealed envy, rancor, and egotism that was a part of it. All Bobby wanted was peace. His folks wanted peace, too, for the entire planet, peace in every corner of Spaceship Earth, but they weren’t capable of providing it within the walls of their own home.

With the cottage and the seed money to launch the business that now supported him, Bobby found peace.

The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every timepiece with a digital readout blinks us toward implosion. Time is so precious that it can’t be purchased. What Corky had given Bobby was not time, really, but the chance to live without clocks, without an awareness of clocks, which seems to make time pass more gently, with less shearing fury.

My parents tried to give the same thing to me. Because of my XP, however, I occasionally hear ticking. Maybe Bobby occasionally hears it, too. Maybe there’s no way any of us can entirely escape an awareness of clocks.

In fact, Orson’s night of despair, when he had regarded the stars with such despondency and had refused all my efforts to comfort him, might have been caused by an awareness of his own days ticking away. We are told that the simple minds of animals are not capable of encompassing the concept of their own mortality. Yet every animal possesses a survival instinct and recognizes danger. If it struggles to survive, it understands death, no matter what the scientists and the philosophers might say.

This is not New Age sentimentalism. This is simply common sense.

Now, in Bobby’s shower, as I scrubbed the soot off Orson, he continued to shiver. The water was warm. The shivers had nothing to do with the bath.

By the time I blotted the dog with several towels and fluffed him with a hair dryer that Pia Klick had left behind, his shakes had passed. While I dressed in a pair of Bobby’s blue jeans and a long-sleeve, blue cotton sweater, Orson glanced at the frosted window a few times, as if leery of whoever might be out there in the night, but his confidence appeared to be returning.

With paper towels, I wiped off my leather jacket and my cap. They still smelled of smoke, the cap more than the jacket.

In the dim light, I could barely read the words above the bill: Mystery Train. I rubbed the ball of my thumb across the embroidered letters, recalling the windowless concrete room where I’d found the cap, in one of the more peculiar abandoned precincts of Fort Wyvern.

Angela Ferryman’s words came back to me, her response to my statement that Wyvern had been closed for a year and a half: Some things don’t die. Can’t die. No matter how much we wish them dead.

I had another flashback to the bathroom at Angela’s house: a mental image of her death-startled eyes and the silent surprised oh of her mouth. Again, I was gripped by the conviction that I had overlooked an important detail regarding the condition of her body, and as before, when I tried to summon a more vivid memory of her blood-spattered face, it grew not clearer in my mind but fuzzier.

We’re screwing it up, Chris…bigger than we’ve ever screwed up before…and already there’s no way…to undo what’s been done.

The tacos — packed with shredded chicken, lettuce, cheese, and salsa — were delicious. We sat at the kitchen table to eat, instead of leaning over the sink, and we washed down the food with beer.

Although Sasha had fed him earlier, Orson cadged a few bits of chicken, but he couldn’t charm me into giving him another Heineken.

Bobby had turned on the radio, and it was tuned to Sasha’s show, which had just come on the air. Midnight had arrived. She didn’t mention me or introduce the song with a dedication, but she played “Heart Shaped World” by Chris Isaak, because it’s a favorite of mine.

Enormously condensing the events of the evening, I told Bobby about the incident in the hospital garage, the scene in Kirk’s crematorium, and the platoon of faceless men who pursued me through the hills behind the funeral home.

Throughout all of this, he only said, “Tabasco?”

“What?”

“To hotten up the salsa.”

“No,” I said. “This is killer just the way it is.”

He got a bottle of Tabasco sauce from the refrigerator and sprinkled it into his half-eaten first taco.

Now Sasha was playing “Two Hearts” by Chris Isaak.

For a while I repeatedly glanced through the window beside the table, wondering whether anyone outside was watching us. At first I didn’t think Bobby shared my concern, but then I realized that from time to time, he glanced intently, though with seeming casualness, at the blackness out there.

“Lower the blind?” I suggested.

“No. They might think I cared.”

We were pretending not to be intimidated.

“Who are they?”

He was silent, but I outwaited him, and at last he said, “I’m not sure.”

That wasn’t an honest answer, but I relented.

When I continued my story, rather than risk Bobby’s scorn, I didn’t mention the cat that led me to the culvert in the hills, but I described the skull collection arranged on the final two steps of the spillway. I told him about Chief Stevenson talking to the bald guy with the earring and about finding the pistol on my bed.

“Bitchin’ gun,” he said, admiring the Glock.

“Dad opted for laser sighting.”

“Sweet.”

Sometimes Bobby is as self-possessed as a rock, so calm that you have to wonder if he is actually listening to you. As a boy, he was occasionally like this, but the older he has gotten, the more that this uncanny composure has settled over him. I had just brought him astonishing news of bizarre adventures, and he reacted as if he were listening to basketball scores.

Glancing at the darkness beyond the window, I wondered if anyone out there had me in a gun sight, maybe in the cross hairs of a night scope. Then I figured that if they had meant to shoot us, they would have cut us down when we were out in the dunes.

I told Bobby everything that had happened at Angela Ferryman’s house.

He grimaced. “Apricot brandy.”

“I didn’t drink much.”

He said, “Two glasses of that crap, you’ll be talking to the seals,” which was surfer lingo for vomiting.

By the time I had told him about Jesse Pinn terrorizing Father Tom at the church, we had gone through three tacos each. He built another pair and brought them to the table.

Sasha was playing “Graduation Day.”

Bobby said, “It’s a regular Chris Isaak festival.”

“She’s playing it for me.”

“Yeah, I didn’t figure Chris Isaak was at the station holding a gun to her head.”

Neither of us said anything more until we finished the final round of tacos.

When at last Bobby asked a question, the only thing he wanted to know about was something that Angela had said: “So she told you it was a monkey and it wasn’t.”

“Her exact words, as I recall, were…‘It appeared to be a monkey. And it was a monkey. Was and wasn’t. And that’s what was wrong with it.’”

“She seem totally zipped up to you?”

“She was in distress, scared, way scared, but she wasn’t kooked out. Besides, somebody killed her to shut her up, so there must have been something to what she said.”

He nodded and drank some beer.

He was silent for so long that I finally said, “Now what?”

“You’re asking me?”

“I wasn’t talking to the dog,” I said.

“Drop it,” he said.

“What?”

“Forget about it, get on with life.”

“I knew you’d say that,” I admitted.

“Then why ask me?”

“Bobby, maybe my mom’s death wasn’t an accident.”

“Sounds like more than a maybe.”

“And maybe there was more to my dad’s cancer than just cancer.”

“So you’re gonna hit the vengeance trail?”

“These people can’t get away with murder.”

“Sure they can. People get away with murder all the time.”

“Well, they shouldn’t.”

“I didn’t say they should. I only said they do.”

“You know, Bobby, maybe life isn’t just surf, sex, food, and beer.”

“I never said it was. I only said it should be.”

“Well,” I said, studying the darkness beyond the window, “I’m not hairing out.”

Bobby sighed and leaned back in his chair. “If you’re waiting to catch a wave, and conditions are epic, really big smokers honing up the coast, and along comes a set of twenty-footers, and they’re pushing your limit but you know you can stretch to handle them, yet you sit in the lineup, just being a buoy through the whole set, then you’re hairing out. But say, instead, what comes along all of a sudden is a long set of thirty-footers, massive pumping mackers that are going to totally prosecute you, that are going to blast you off the board and hold you down and make you suck kelp and pray to Jesus. If your choice is to be snuffed or be a buoy, then you’re not hairing out if you sit in the lineup and soak through the whole set. You’re exhibiting mature judgment. Even a total surf rebel needs a little of that. And the dude who tries the wave even though he knows he’s going over the falls, knows he’s going to be totally quashed — well, he’s an asshole.”

I was touched by the length of his speech, because it meant that he was deeply worried about me.

“So,” I said, “you’re calling me an asshole.”

“Not yet. Depends on what you do about this.”

“So I’m an asshole waiting to happen.”

“Let’s just say that your asshole potential is off the Richter.”

I shook my head. “Well, from where I sit, this doesn’t look like a thirty-footer.”

“Maybe a forty.”

“It looks like a twenty max.”

He rolled his eyes up into his head, as if to say that the only place he was going to see any common sense was inside his own skull. “From what Angela said, this all goes back to some project at Fort Wyvern.”

“She went upstairs to get something she wanted to show me — some sort of proof, I guess, something her husband must have squirreled away. Whatever it was, it was destroyed in the fire.”

“Fort Wyvern. The Army. The military.”

“So?”

“We’re talking about the government here,” Bobby said. “Bro, the government isn’t even a thirty-footer. It’s a hundred. It’s a tsunami.”

“This is America.”

“It used to be.”

“I have a duty here.”

“What duty?”

“A moral duty.”

Beetling his brow, pinching the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, as though listening to me had given him a headache, he said, “I guess if you turn on the evening news and hear there’s a comet going to destroy the earth, you pull on your tights and cape and fly into outer space to deflect that sucker toward the other end of the galaxy.”

“Unless the cape is at the dry cleaner.”

“Asshole.”

“Asshole.”

20

“Look here,” Bobby said. “Data coming down right now. This is from a British government weather satellite. Process it, and you can measure the height of any wave, anywhere in the world, to within a few centimeters.”

He had not turned on any lights in his office. The oversize video displays at the various computer workstations provided enough illumination for him and more than enough for me. Colorful bar graphs, maps, enhanced satellite photos, and flow charts of dynamic weather situations moved on the screens.

I have not embraced the computer age and never will. With UV-proof sunglasses, I can’t easily read what’s on a video display, and I can’t risk spending hours in front of even a filtered screen with all those UV rays pumping out at me. They are low-level emissions to you, but considering cumulative damage, a few hours at a computer would be a lightstorm to me. I do my writing by hand in legal tablets: the occasional article, the best-selling book that resulted in the long Time magazine article about me and XP.

This computer-packed room is the heart of Surfcast, Bobby’s surf-forecasting service, which provides daily predictions by fax to subscribers all over the world, maintains a Web site, and has a 900 number for surf information. Four employees work out of offices in Moonlight Bay, networked with this room, but Bobby himself does the final data analysis and surf predictions.

Along the shores of the world’s oceans, approximately six million surfers regularly ride the waves, and about five and a half million of these are content with waves that have faces — measured from trough to crest — of six or eight feet. Ocean swells hide their power below the surface, extending down as much as one thousand feet, and they are not waves until they shoal up and break to the shore; consequently, there was no way, until the late 1980s, to predict with any reliability even where and when six-foot humpers could be found. Surf junkies could spend days at the beach, waiting through surf that was mushy or soft or even flat, while a few hundred miles up or down the coast, plunging breakers were macking to shore, corduroy to the horizon. A significant percentage of those five and a half million boardheads would rather pay Bobby a few bucks to learn where the action will or won’t be than rely strictly on the goodwill of Kahuna, the god of all surf.

A few bucks. The 900 number alone draws eight hundred thousand calls each year, at two dollars a pop. Ironically, Bobby the slacker and surf rebel has probably become the wealthiest person in Moonlight Bay — although no one realizes this and although he gives away most of it.

“Here,” he said, dropping into a chair in front of one of the computers. “Before you rush off to save the world and get your brains blown out, think about this.” As Orson cocked his head to watch the screen, Bobby hammered the keyboard, calling up new data.

Most of the remaining half million of those six million surfers sit out waves above, say, fifteen feet, and probably fewer than ten thousand can ride twenty-footers, but although these more awesomely skilled and ballsy types are fewer in number, a higher percentage of them want Bobby’s forecasts. They live and die for the ride; to miss a session of epic monsters, especially in their neighborhood, would be nothing less than Shakespearean tragedy with sand.

“Sunday,” Bobby said, still tapping the keyboard.

“This Sunday?”

“Two nights from now, you’ll want to be here. Rather than be dead, I mean.”

“Big surf coming?”

“It’s gonna be sacred.”

Perhaps three hundred or four hundred surfers on the planet have the experience, talent, and cojones to mount waves above twenty feet, and a handful of them pay Bobby well to track truly giant surf, even though it is treacherous and likely to kill them. A few of these maniacs are wealthy men who will fly anywhere in the world to challenge storm waves, thirty- and even forty-foot behemoths, into which they are frequently towed by a helper on a Jet Ski, because catching such huge monoliths in the usual fashion is difficult and often impossible. Worldwide, you can find well-formed, ride-worthy waves thirty feet and higher no more than thirty days a year, and often they come to shore in exotic places. Using maps, satellite photos, and weather data from numerous sources, Bobby can provide two- or three-day warnings, and his predictions are so trustworthy that these most demanding of all clients have never complained.

“There.” Bobby pointed to a wave profile on the computer. Orson took a closer look at the screen as Bobby said, “Moonlight Bay, point-break surf. It’s going to be classic Sunday afternoon, evening, all the way until Monday dawn — fully pumping mackers.”

I blinked at the video display. “Am I seeing twelve-footers?”

“Ten to twelve feet, with a possibility of some sets as high as fourteen. They’re hitting Hawaii soon…then us.”

“That’ll be live.”

“Entirely live. Coming off a big, slow-moving storm north of Tahiti. There’s going to be an offshore wind, too, so these monsters are going to give you more dry, insanely hollow barrels than you’ve seen in your dreams.”

“Cool.”

He swiveled in his chair to look up at me. “So what do you want to ride — the Sunday-night surf rolling out of Tahiti or the tsunami pipeline of death rolling out of Wyvern?”

“Both.”

“Kamikaze,” he said scornfully.

“Duck,” I called him, with a smile — which is the same as saying buoy, meaning one who sits in the lineup and never has the guts to take a wave.

Orson turned his head from one of us to the other, back and forth, as if watching a tennis match.

“Geek,” Bobby said.

“Decoy,” I said, which is the same as saying duck.

“Asshole,” he said, which has identical definitions in surfer lingo and standard English.

“I take it you’re not with me on this.”

Getting up from the chair, he said, “You can’t go to the cops. You can’t go to the FBI. They’re all paid by the other side. What can you possibly hope to learn about some way-secret project at Wyvern?”

“I’ve already uncovered a little.”

“Yeah, and the next thing you learn is the thing that’ll get you killed. Listen, Chris, you aren’t Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. At best, you’re Nancy Drew.”

“Nancy Drew had an unreal rate of case closure,” I reminded him. “She nailed one hundred percent of the bastards she went after. I’d be honored to be considered the equal of a kick-ass crime fighter like Ms. Nancy Drew.”

“Kamikaze.”

“Duck.”

“Geek.”

“Decoy.”

Laughing softly, shaking his head, scratching his beard stubble, Bobby said, “You make me sick.”

“Likewise.”

The telephone rang, and Bobby answered it. “Hey, gorgeous, I totally get off on the new format — all Chris Isaak, all the time. Play ‘Dancin’’ for me, okay?” He passed the handset to me. “It’s for you, Nancy.”

I like Sasha’s disc-jockey voice. It’s only subtly different from her real-world voice, marginally deeper and softer and silkier, but the effect is profound. When I hear Sasha the deejay, I want to curl up in bed with her. I want to curl up in bed with her anyway, as often as possible, but when she’s using her radio voice, I want to curl up in bed with her urgently. The voice comes over her from the moment she enters the studio, and it’s with her even when she is off-mike, until she leaves work.

“This tune ends in about a minute, I’ve got to do some patter between cuts,” she told me, “so I’ll be quick. Somebody came around here at the station a little while ago, trying to get in touch with you. Says it’s life or death.”

“Who?”

“I can’t use the name on the phone. Promised I wouldn’t. When I said you were probably at Bobby’s…this person didn’t want to call you there or come there to see you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why exactly. But…this person was really nervous, Chris. ‘I have been one acquainted with the night.’ Do you know who I mean?”

I have been one acquainted with the night.

It was a line from a poem by Robert Frost.

My dad had instilled in me his passion for poetry. I had infected Sasha.

“Yes,” I said. “I think I know who you mean.”

“Wants to see you as soon as possible. Says it’s life or death. What’s going on, Chris?”

“Big surf coming in Sunday afternoon,” I said.

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know. Tell you the rest later.”

“Big surf. Can I handle it?”

“Twelve-footers.”

“I think I’ll just Gidget-out and beach party.”

“Love your voice,” I said.

“Smooth as the bay.”

She hung up, and so did I.

Although he had only heard my half of the conversation, Bobby relied on his uncanny intuition to figure out the tone and intent of Sasha’s call. “What’re you walking into?”

“Just Nancy stuff,” I said. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

As Bobby and I led a still-uneasy Orson onto the front porch, the radio in the kitchen began to swing with “Dancin’” by Chris Isaak.

“Sasha is an awesome woman,” Bobby said.

“Unreal,” I agreed.

“You can’t be with her if you’re dead. She’s not that kinky.”

“Point taken.”

“You have your sunglasses?”

I patted my shirt pocket. “Yeah.”

“Did you use some of my sunscreen?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Geek.”

I said, “I’ve been thinking….”

“It’s about time you started.”

“I’ve been working on the new book.”

“Finally got your lazy ass in gear.”

“It’s about friendship.”

“Am I in it?”

“Amazingly, yes.”

“You’re not using my real name, are you?”

“I’m calling you Igor. The thing is…I’m afraid readers might not relate to what I have to say, because you and I — all my friends — we live such different lives.”

Stopping at the head of the porch steps, regarding me with his patented look of scorn, Bobby said, “I thought you had to be smart to write books.”

“It’s not a federal law.”

“Obviously not. Even the literary equivalent of a gyrospaz ought to know that every last one of us leads a different life.”

“Yeah? Maria Cortez leads a different life?”

Maria is Manuel Ramirez’s younger sister, twenty-eight like Bobby and me. She is a beautician, and her husband works as a car mechanic. They have two children, one cat, and a small tract house with a big mortgage.

Bobby said, “She doesn’t live her life in the beauty shop, doing someone’s hair — or in her house, vacuuming the carpet. She lives her life between her ears. There’s a world inside her skull, and probably way stranger and more bitchin’ than you or I, with our shallow brain pans, can imagine. Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside — some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me — we aren’t so special, bro.”

I was briefly speechless. Then I fingered the sleeve of his parrot-and-palm-frond shirt and said, “I didn’t realize you were such a philosopher.”

He shrugged. “That little gem of wisdom? Hell, that was just something I got in a fortune cookie.”

“Must’ve been a big honker of a cookie.”

“Hey, it was a huge monolith, dude,” he said, giving me a sly smile.

The great wall of moonlit fog loomed half a mile from the shore, no closer or farther away than it had been earlier. The night air was as still as that in the cold-holding room at Mercy Hospital.

As we descended the porch steps, no one shot at us. No one issued that loonlike cry, either.

They were still out there, however, hiding in the dunes or below the crest of the slope that fell to the beach. I could feel their attention like the dangerous energy pending release in the coils of a motionless, strike-poised rattlesnake.

Although Bobby had left his shotgun inside, he was vigilant. Surveying the night as he accompanied me to my bike, he began to reveal more interest in my story than he had admitted earlier: “This monkey Angela mentioned…”

“What about it?”

“What was it like?”

“Monkeylike.”

“Like a chimpanzee, an orangutan, or what?”

Gripping the handlebars of my bicycle and turning it around to walk it through the soft sand, I said, “It was a rhesus monkey. Didn’t I say?”

“How big?”

“She said two feet high, maybe twenty-five pounds.”

Gazing across the dunes, he said, “I’ve seen a couple myself.”

Surprised, leaning the bike against the porch railing again, I said, “Rhesus monkeys? Out here?”

“Some kind of monkeys, about that size.”

There is, of course, no species of monkey native to California. The only primates in its woods and fields are human beings.

Bobby said, “Caught one looking in a window at me one night. Went outside, and it was gone.”

“When was this?”

“Maybe three months ago.”

Orson moved between us, as if for comfort.

I said, “You’ve seen them since?”

“Six or seven times. Always at night. They’re secretive. But they’re also bolder lately. They travel in a troop.”

“Troop?”

“Wolves travel in a pack. Horses in a herd. With monkeys, it’s called a troop.”

“You’ve been doing research. How come you haven’t told me about this?”

He was silent, watching the dunes.

I was watching them, too. “Is that what’s out there now?”

“Maybe.”

“How many in this troop?”

“Don’t know. Maybe six or eight. Just a guess.”

“You bought a shotgun. You think they’re dangerous?”

“Maybe.”

“Have you reported them to anyone? Like animal control?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Instead of answering me, he hesitated and then said, “Pia’s driving me nuts.”

Pia Klick. Out there in Waimea for a month or two, going on three years.

I didn’t understand how Pia related to Bobby’s failure to report the monkeys to animal-control officers, but I sensed that he would make the connection for me.

“She says she’s discovered that she’s the reincarnation of Kaha Huna,” Bobby said.

Kaha Huna is the mythical Hawaiian goddess of surfing, who was never actually incarnate in the first place and, therefore, incapable of being re.

Considering that Pia was not a kamaaina, a native of Hawaii, but a haole who had been born in Oskaloosa, Kansas, and raised there until she left home at seventeen, she seemed an unlikely candidate to be a mythological uber wahine.

I said, “She lacks some credentials.”

“She’s dead-solid serious about this.”

“Well, she’s way pretty enough to be Kaha Huna. Or any other goddess, for that matter.”

Standing beside Bobby, I couldn’t see his eyes too well, but his face was bleak. I had never seen him bleak before. I hadn’t even realized that bleakness was an option for him.

Bobby said, “She’s trying to decide whether being Kaha Huna requires her to be celibate.”

“Ouch.”

“She thinks she probably shouldn’t ever live with an ordinary dude, meaning a mortal man. Somehow that would be a blasphemous rejection of her fate.”

“Brutal,” I said sympathetically.

“But it would be cool for her to shack up with the current reincarnation of Kahuna.”

Kahuna is the mythical god of surfing. He is largely a creation of modern surfers who extrapolate his legend from the life of an ancient Hawaiian witch doctor.

I said, “And you aren’t the reincarnation of Kahuna.”

“I refuse to be.”

From that response, I inferred that Pia was trying to convince him that he was, indeed, the god of surfing.

With audible misery and confusion, Bobby said, “She’s so smart, so talented.”

Pia had graduated summa cum laude from UCLA. She had paid her way through school by painting portraits; now her hyperrealist works sold for impressive prices, as quickly as she cared to produce them.

“How can she be so smart and talented,” Bobby demanded, “and then…this?”

“Maybe you are Kahuna,” I said.

“This isn’t funny,” he said, which was a striking statement, because to one degree or another, everything was funny to Bobby.

In the moonlight, the dune grass drooped, no blade so much as trembling in the now windless night. The soft rhythm of the surf, rising from the beach below, was like the murmured chanting of a distant, prayerful crowd.

This Pia business was fascinating, but understandably, I was more interested in the monkeys.

“These last few years,” Bobby said, “with this New Age stuff from Pia…well, sometimes it’s okay, but sometimes it’s like spending days in radical churly-churly.”

Churly-churly is badly churned-up surf heavy with sand and pea gravel, which smacks you in the face when you walk into it. This is not a pleasant surf condition.

“Sometimes,” Bobby said, “when I get off the phone with her, I’m so messed up, missing her, wanting to be with her…I could almost convince myself she is Kaha Huna. She’s so sincere. And she doesn’t rave on about it, you know. It’s this quiet thing with her, which makes it even more disturbing.”

“I didn’t know you got disturbed.”

“I didn’t know it, either.” Sighing, scuffing at the sand with one bare foot, he began to make the connection between Pia and the monkeys: “When I saw the monkey at the window the first time, it was cool, made me laugh. I figured it was someone’s pet that got loose…but the second time I saw more than one. And it was as weird as all this Kaha Huna shit, because they weren’t behaving at all like monkeys.”

“What do you mean?”

“Monkeys are playful, goofing around. These guys…they weren’t playful. Purposeful, solemn, creepy little geeks. Watching me and studying the house, not out of curiosity but with some agenda.”

“What agenda?”

Bobby shrugged. “They were so strange….”

Words seemed to fail him, so I borrowed one from H. P. Lovecraft, for whose stories we’d had such enthusiasm when we were thirteen: “Eldritch.”

“Yeah. They were eldritch to the max. I knew no one was going to believe me. I almost felt I was hallucinating. I grabbed a camera but couldn’t get a picture. You know why?”

“Thumb over the lens?”

“They didn’t want to be photographed. First sight of the camera, they ran for cover, and they’re insanely fast.” He glanced at me, reading my reaction, then looked to the dunes again. “They knew what the camera was.”

I couldn’t resist: “Hey, you’re not anthropomorphizing them, are you? You know — ascribing human attributes and attitudes to animals?”

Ignoring me, he said, “After that night, I didn’t put the camera away in the closet. I kept it on a kitchen counter, close at hand. If they showed up again, I figured I might get a snapshot before they realized what was happening. One night about six weeks ago, it was pumping eight-footers with a good offshore, barrel after barrel, so even though it was way nipple out there, I put on my wet suit and spent a couple of hours totally tucked away. I didn’t take the camera down to the beach with me.”

“Why not?”

“I hadn’t seen the damn monkeys in a week. I figured maybe I’d never see them again. Anyway, when I came back to the house, I stripped out of the neoprene, went into the kitchen, and got a beer. When I turned away from the fridge, there were monkeys at two windows, hanging on the frames outside, looking in at me. So I reached for my camera — and it was gone.”

“You misplaced it.”

“No. It’s gone for good. I left the door unlocked when I went to the beach that night. I don’t leave it unlocked anymore.”

“You’re telling me the monkeys took it?”

He said, “The next day I bought a disposable camera. Put it on the counter by the oven again. That night I left the lights on, locked up, and took my stick down to the beach.”

“Good surf?”

“Slow. But I wanted to give them a chance. And they took it. While I was gone, they broke a pane, unlocked the window, and stole the disposable camera. Nothing else. Just the camera.”

Now I knew why the shotgun was kept in a locked broom closet.

This cottage on the horn, without neighbors, had always appealed to me as a fine retreat. At night, when the surfers left, the sky and the sea formed a sphere in which the house stood like a diorama in one of those glass paperweights that fills with whirling snow when you shake it, though instead of a blizzard there were deep peace and a glorious solitude. Now, however, the nurturing solitude had become an unnerving isolation. Rather than offering a sense of peace, the night was thick and still with expectation.

“And they left me a warning,” Bobby said.

I pictured a threatening note laboriously printed in crude block letters — WATCH YOUR ASS. Signed, THE MONKEYS.

They were too clever to leave a paper trail, however, and even more direct. Bobby said, “One of them crapped on my bed.”

“Oh, nice.”

“They’re secretive, like I said. I’ve decided not even to try to photograph them. If I managed to get a flash shot of them some night…I think they’d be way pissed.”

“You’re afraid of them. I didn’t know you got disturbed, and I didn’t know you were ever afraid. I’m learning a lot about you tonight, bro.”

He didn’t admit to feeling fear.

“You bought the shotgun,” I pressed.

“Because I think it’s good to challenge them from time to time, good to show the little bastards that I’m territorial, and that this is, by God, my territory. But I’m not afraid, really. They’re just monkeys.”

“And then again — they’re not.”

Bobby said, “Some days I wonder if I’ve picked up some New Age virus over the telephone line from Pia, all the way from Waimea — and now while she’s obsessed with being Kaha Huna, I’m obsessed with the monkeys of the new millennium. I suspect that’s what the tabloids would call them, don’t you?”

“The millennium monkeys. Has a ring to it.”

“That’s why I haven’t reported them. I’m not going to make myself a target of the press or anyone. I’m not going to be the geek who saw Bigfoot or extraterrestrials in a spaceship shaped like a four-slice toaster. Life wouldn’t ever be the same for me after that, would it?”

“You’d be a freak like me.”

“Exactly.”

My awareness of being watched became more intense. I almost borrowed a trick from Orson, almost growled low in my throat.

The dog, still standing between Bobby and me, remained alert and quiet, his head raised and one ear pricked. He was no longer shaking, but he was clearly respectful of whatever was observing us from the surrounding night.

“Now that I’ve told you about Angela, you know the monkeys have something to do with what was going on out at Fort Wyvern,” I said. “This isn’t just a tabloid fantasy anymore. This is real, this is totally live, and we can do something about it.”

“Still going on,” he said.

“What?”

“From what Angela told you, Wyvern’s not entirely shut down.”

“But it was abandoned eighteen months ago. If there were still personnel staffing any operations at all out there, we’d know about it. Even if they lived on base, they’d come into town to shop, to go to a movie.”

“You said Angela called this Armageddon. It’s the end of the world, she said.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So maybe if you’re busily working on a project to destroy the world, you don’t have time to come into town for a movie. Anyway, like I said, this is a tsunami, Chris. This is the government. There’s no way to surf these waters and survive.”

I gripped the handlebars of my bike and stood it upright again. “In spite of these monkeys and what you’ve seen, you’re going to just lay back?”

He nodded. “If I stay cool, it’s possible they’ll eventually go away. They’re not here every night, anyway. Once or twice a week. If I wait them out…I might get my life back like it was.”

“Yeah, but maybe Angela wasn’t just smoking something. Maybe there’s no chance, ever again, that anything will be like it was.”

“Then why put on your tights and cape if it’s a lost cause?”

“To XP-Man,” I said with mock solemnity, “there are no lost causes.”

“Kamikaze.”

“Duck.”

“Geek.”

“Decoy,” I said affectionately and walked the bicycle away from the house, through the soft sand.

Orson let out a thin whine of protest as we left the comparative safety of the cottage behind us, but he didn’t try to hold back. He stayed close to me, sniffing the night air as we headed inland.

We’d gone about thirty feet when Bobby, kicking up small clouds of sand, sprinted in front of us and blocked the way. “You know what your problem is?”

I said, “My choice of friends?”

“Your problem is you want to make a mark on the world. You want to leave something behind that says, I was here.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“Bullshit.”

“Watch your language. There’s a dog present.”

“That’s why you write the articles, the books,” he said. “To leave a mark.”

“I write because I enjoy writing.”

“You’re always bitching about it.”

“Because it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s also rewarding.”

“You know why it’s so hard? Because it’s unnatural.”

“Maybe to people who can’t read and write.”

“We’re not here to leave a mark, bro. Monuments, legacies, marks — that’s where we always go wrong. We’re here to revel in the world, to soak in the awesomeness of it, to enjoy the ride.”

“Orson, look, it’s Philosopher Bob again.”

“The world’s maximum perfect as it is, beauty from horizon to horizon. Any mark any of us tries to leave — hell, it’s only graffiti. Nothing can improve on the world we’ve been given. Any mark anyone leaves is no better than vandalism.”

I said, “The music of Mozart.”

“Vandalism,” Bobby said.

“The art of Michelangelo.”

“Graffiti.”

“Renoir,” I said.

“Graffiti.”

“Bach, the Beatles.”

“Aural graffiti,” he said fiercely.

As he followed our conversation, Orson was getting whiplash.

“Matisse, Beethoven, Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare.”

“Vandals, hooligans.”

“Dick Dale,” I said, dropping the sacred name of the King of the Surf Guitar, the father of all surf music.

Bobby blinked but said, “Graffiti.”

“You are a sick man.”

“I’m the healthiest person you know. Drop this insanely useless crusade, Chris.”

“I must really be swimming in a school of slackers when a little curiosity is seen as a crusade.”

“Live life. Soak it up. Enjoy. That’s what you’re here to do.”

“I’m having fun in my own way,” I assured him. “Don’t worry — I’m just as big a bum and jerk-off as you are.”

“You wish.”

When I tried to walk the bike around him, he sidestepped into my path again.

“Okay,” he said resignedly. “All right. But walk the bike with one hand and keep the Glock in the other until you’re back on hard ground and can ride again. Then ride fast.”

I patted my jacket pocket, which sagged with the weight of the pistol. One round fired accidentally at Angela’s. Nine left in the magazine. “But they’re just monkeys,” I said, echoing Bobby himself.

“And they’re not.”

Searching his dark eyes, I said, “You have something else that I should know?”

He chewed on his lower lip. Finally: “Maybe I am Kahuna.”

“That’s not what you were about to tell me.”

“No, but it’s not as fully nutball as what I was going to say.” His gaze traveled over the dunes. “The leader of the troop…I’ve only glimpsed him at a distance, in the darkness, hardly more than a shadow. He’s bigger than the rest.”

“How big?”

His eyes met mine. “I think he’s a dude about my size.”

Earlier, as I had stood on the porch waiting for Bobby to return from his search of the beach scarp, I had glimpsed movement from the corner of my eye: the fuzzy impression of a man loping through the dunes with long fluid strides. When I’d swung around with the Glock, no one had been there.

“A man?” I said. “Running with the millennium monkeys, leading the troop? Our own Moonlight Bay Tarzan?”

“Well, I hope it’s a man.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Breaking eye contact, Bobby shrugged. “I’m just saying there aren’t only the monkeys I’ve seen. There’s someone or something big out there with them.”

I looked toward the lights of Moonlight Bay. “Feels like there’s a clock ticking somewhere, a bomb clock, and the whole town’s sitting on explosives.”

“That’s my point, bro. Stay out of the blast zone.”

Holding the bike with one hand, I drew the Glock from my jacket pocket.

“As you go about your perilous and foolish adventures, XP-Man,” Bobby said, “here’s something to keep in mind.”

“More boardhead wisdom.”

“Whatever was going on out there at Wyvern — and might still be going on — a big troop of scientists must have been involved. Hugely educated dudes with foreheads higher than your whole face. Government and military types, too, and lots of them. The elite of the system. Movers and shakers. You know why they were part of this before it all went wrong?”

“Bills to pay, families to support?”

“Every last one of them wanted to leave his mark.”

I said, “This isn’t about ambition. I just want to know why my mom and dad had to die.”

“Your head’s as hard as an oyster shell.”

“Yeah, but there’s a pearl inside.”

“It’s not a pearl,” he assured me. “It’s a fossilized seagull dropping.”

“You’ve got a way with words. You should write a book.”

He squeezed out a sneer as thin as a shaving of lemon peel. “I’d rather screw a cactus.”

“That’s pretty much what it’s like. But rewarding.”

“This wave is going to put you through the rinse cycle and then down the drain.”

“Maybe. But it’ll be a totally cool ride. And aren’t you the one who said we’re here to enjoy the ride?”

Finally defeated, he stepped out of my way, raised his right hand, and made the shaka sign.

I held the bike with my gun hand long enough to make the Star Trek sign.

In response, he gave me the finger.

With Orson at my side, I walked the bike eastward through the sand, heading toward the rockier part of the peninsula. Before I’d gone far, I heard Bobby say something behind me, but I couldn’t catch his words.

I stopped, turned, and saw him heading back toward the cottage. “What’d you say?”

“Here comes the fog,” he repeated.

Looking beyond him, I saw towering white masses descending out of the west, an avalanche of churning vapor patinaed with moonlight. Like some silently toppling wall of doom in a dream.

The lights of town seemed to be a continent away.