Seize the Night

with the same posture and at the same pace; I think this is because we have spent so much time surfing, in sync with the sea. Sasha insists we have “catlike grace,” which I think flatters us too much, but however catlike we may or may not be, neither of us drinks milk from a saucer or prefers a litter box to a bathroom.

I went to the passenger side, grabbed the roll bar, and swung into the Jeep without opening the low door. I had to work my feet around a small Styrofoam cooler on the floor in front of the seat.

Bobby was wearing khakis, a long-sleeve white cotton pullover, and a Hawaiian shirt — he owns no other style — over the thin sweater.

He was drinking a Heineken.

Although I had never seen Bobby drunk, I said, “Hope you’re not too mellow.”

Without looking away from the street, he said, “Mellow isn’t like dumb or ugly,” meaning the word too should never be used to modify it.

The night was pleasantly cool but not crisp, so I said, “Flow me a Heinie?”

“Go for it.”

I fished a bottle out of the ice in the cooler and twisted off the cap. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was. The beer washed the lingering bitterness out of my mouth.

Bobby glanced at the rearview mirror for a moment, then returned his attention to the street in front of us.

Braced between the seats, aimed toward the rear of the Jeep, was a pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun.

“Beer and guns,” I said, shaking my head.

“We’re obviously not Amish.”

“You come in by the river like I said?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you drive through the fence?”

“Cut the hole bigger.”

“I expected you to walk in.”

“Too hard to carry the cooler.”

“I guess we might need the speed,” I conceded, considering the size of the area to be searched.

He said, “You smell maximum real, bro.”

“Worked at it.”

From the rearview mirror dangled a bright-yellow air freshener shaped like a banana. Bobby slipped it off the mirror and hung it from my left ear.

Sometimes he is too funny for his own good. I wouldn’t reward him with a laugh.

“It’s a banana,” I said, “but it smells like a pine tree.”

“That old American ingenuity.”

“Nothing like it.”

“We put men on the moon.”

“We invented chocolate-flavored breakfast cereal.”

“Don’t forget plastic vomit.”

“Funniest gag ever,” I said.

Bobby and I solemnly clinked bottles in a patriotic toast and took long swallows of beer.

Although I was, on one level, frantic to find Orson and Jimmy, on the surface I fell into the languid tempo by which Bobby lives. He is so laid back that if he visited someone in a hospital, the nurses might mistake him for a patient in a coma, shuck him out of his Hawaiian shirt, and slide him into a backless bed gown before he could correct their misapprehension. Except when he’s rocking through epic surf, getting totally barreled in an insanely hollow wave, Bobby values tranquility. He responds better to easy and indirect conversation than to any expression of urgency. During our seventeen-year friendship, I’ve learned to value this relaxed approach, even if it doesn’t come naturally to me. Calm is essential to prudent action. Because Bobby acts only after contemplation, I’ve never known him to be blindsided by anyone or anything. He may look relaxed, even sleepy at times, but like a Zen master, he is able to make the flow of time slow down while he considers how best to deal with the latest crisis.

“Bitchin’ shirt,” I said.

He was wearing one of his favorite antique shirts: a brown Asian landscape design. He has a couple hundred in his collection, and he knows every detail of their histories.

Before he could reply, I said, “Made by Kahala about 1950. Silk with coconut-shell buttons. Same shirt John Wayne wore in Big Jim McLain.”

He was silent long enough for me to have repeated all the shirt data, but I knew he’d heard me.

He took another pull at his bottle of beer. Finally: “Have you for real developed an interest in aloha threads, or are you just mocking me?”

“Just mocking you.”

“Enjoy yourself.”

As he studied the rearview mirror again, I said, “What’s that in your lap?”

“I’m just way happy to see you,” he said. Then he held up a serious handgun. “Smith & Wesson Model 29.”

“This is definitely not a barn raising.”

“Exactly what is it?”

“Somebody took Lilly Wing’s boy.”

“Who?”

“Some abb,” I said, meaning an abnormal type, a sleazeball.

“Woofy,” he said, which is Australian surfer lingo for waves contaminated by a sewage spill, but which has evolved other, related meanings, none positive.

I said, “Boosted Jimmy right out of his bedroom, through a window.”

“So Lilly called you?”

“I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, biking by right after the abb did the deed.”

“How’d you get from there to here?”

“Orson’s nose.”

I told him about the abb, the kidnapper, whom I’d encountered under the warehouse.

He frowned. “You said yellow eyes?”

“Yellow-brown, I guess.”

“Shine-in-the-dark yellow?”

“No. Brownish yellow, burnt amber, but the natural color.”

Recently, we’d encountered a couple of men in whom radical genetic changes had occurred, guys in the process of becoming something more or less than human, who appeared for the most part normal but whose otherness was betrayed by brief but detectable flashes of animal eyeshine. These people are driven by strange, hateful needs, and they are capable of extreme violence. If Jimmy was in the hands of one of these, then the list of outrages to which he might be subjected was even longer than the savageries that a standard-issue sociopath might have in mind.

“You recognize this abb?” I asked Bobby.

“You say about thirty, black hair, yellow eyes, built like a fireplug?”

“Neat little baby teeth.”

“Not my type.”

“I never saw him before, either,” I said.

“Twelve thousand people in town.”

“And this isn’t a dude who’s a beachhead,” I said, meaning we wouldn’t have seen him hanging out with surfers. “So he could still be local and we wouldn’t know.”

For the first time all night, a breeze sprang up, a gentle onshore flow that brought to us a faint but bracing scent of the sea. In the park across the street, the oaks became conspiratorial, plotting together in whispers.

Bobby said, “Why did this abb bring Jimmy here of all places?”

“Maybe privacy. To do his thing.”

“I’d like to do my thing, Cuisinart the creep.”