The Kings Of Cool

163

John paddles out with what’s left of Doc’s friends at Brooks Street, paddles out and joins the circle they form with their boards. The guys look at each other guiltily, not wanting to read each other’s eyes because they know what they’re going to see there.

Relief.

Pretty much the same emotion that permeated the funeral.

Everyone sat there on wooden folding chairs and stared at a closed casket with this smiling photo of Doc staring back at them while some minister intoned some bullshit that Doc didn’t believe in and felt guilty relief that

(a) they didn’t have to deal with Doc anymore, and

(b) they didn’t have to do what they were thinking about doing because

(c) Doc did it for them.

“I just can’t believe that Doc killed himself,” Diane said at one point.

Hard not to believe, though-the cops found Doc in his car with a pistol in his hand and most of his brains on the window.

“Did he leave a note?” Diane asked. “Give a reason?”

“Cocaine is its own reason,” Stan said.

But as they were leaving he pulled John aside and asked, “Did he really kill himself?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to,” John said. “He killed himself. Leave it at that.”

Everyone will feel better if we — leave it at that.

Especially me.

Same thing at the paddle-out.

Some surfer-cum-minister says some lame shit and then they each float wreaths out onto the tide.

Aloha, Doc.

Surf on, dude.

John looks back to the shore and there’s cops standing on the stairway.

Cops taking pictures like it’s the Godfather wedding or something.

An Association family portrait.

Thanks, Doc.

Time to shut it down for a while, John thinks. Let the cops get bored and move on to the next thing. He has enough money stored up, enough investments to go into hibernation for a while, manage the rental properties, sell the restaurant.

Live the life of a quiet, successful young businessman. Let the rest of these boys figure out who’s going to be the next King.

The crown is a cop magnet.

Three weeks after the paddle-out John and Taylor have a small service at the gazebo overlooking Divers Cove. A few friends-most of them Taylor’s-come, and they have a reception back at the house before flying off to honeymoon in Tahiti.

They stay for a month, and when they come back John sells the house on Moss Bay and moves to more modest but still comfortable digs up in Bluebird Canyon. He keeps the Porsches in the garage and drives a BMW instead.

Good thing he does.

It takes the cops about six months before they roll up the Association like an old carpet. Turns out Doc gave them a lot of names before he couldn’t take the guilt and “killed himself.”

Bobby, always the smartest one, took off and vanished, leaving behind only a legend.

But Mike, Duane, Ron-one by one they go off to double-digit sentences in federal lockups.

Not Stan, not Diane.

Not Kim.

John and Taylor clean up their act. Taylor gets off the blow and their baby is born healthy.

They name him John.

He’s three months old when the feds indict John for drug trafficking.