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, “
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.”
