Hear Jen scream.

Jen Stonebreaker, that is, hollering over the whine of her jet ski, towing her husband into a wave taller than a four-story building.

“For you, John — it’s all yours!”

She’s twenty-one years old, stout and well-muscled, with a cute face, a freckled nose, and an inverted bowl of thick orange hair she’s had since she was ten.

She’s a versatile young woman, too — the high school swim, water polo, and surf team captain. The class valedictorian. A former Miss Laguna Beach. With a UC Irvine degree in creative journalism from the School of Humanities, honors, of course.

Right now, though, Jen is bucking an eight-hundred-pound jet ski on the rising shoulder of a fifty-foot wave, her surf-star husband, John, trailing a hundred feet behind her on his signature orange and black “gun” surfboard, rope handle tied to the rescue sled, which skitters and slaps behind her.

Welcome to Mavericks, a winter break in the cold waters just south of San Francisco, with occasionally gigantic waves, sometimes beautifully formed, but always potentially lethal. These things charge in and hit Mavericks’ shallow reef like monsters from the deep. A surfer can’t just paddle into one; he or she has to be towed in by a jet ski or a helicopter. One of the scariest breaks on Earth. Ask any of the very few people who ride places like this. Not only the jagged, shallow rocks, but sharks, too, and water so cold you can barely feel your feet through neoprene boots.

Mavericks has taken the lives of professional, skilled, big-wave riders.

Riders not unlike the Stonebreakers, Jen now gunning her jet ski across the rising wave, looking for smooth water to deliver John into the steepening face of it, where he will toss the rope and — if all goes well and the gods are smiling — drop onto this wall and try to stay on his board, well ahead of the breaking barrel that, if it gets its chance, will crush him to the rocky bottom like a bathtub toy.

He throws aside the tow rope.

Jen guns her two-hundred-fifty horses, roaring and smoking, up and over the wave’s huge back, and lands momentarily beyond its reach, the rescue sled bobbing behind her.

She’s got a good angle to watch John and help him if he wipes out.

She feels the tremendous tonnage of water trying to suck her back onto the wave and over the falls.

Thinks: Nope.

Throttles hard and away.

Steadies herself on the bucking machine, off to the side and safely out of the way of the monsters, where she can watch John do his thing.

The next wave lumbers in — she’s always startled by how fast they are — and she sees John astride his big board, racing down the smooth blue face of his wave, legs staunch but vibrating, feet locked in the thick rubber straps glued to his board. He carves out ahead of the lip then rises, backing up into the barrel, casually trailing a hand on the cylinder as he streams along just ahead of the crushing lip — John’s signature move; he’s one of the few guys who does this daredevil-in-the-barrel thing, looking cool on a fifty-footer. He’s twenty-six years old, one of the top ten big-wave riders in the world.

Jen hears the barrel roaring closed behind him. Like a freight train or a stretched-out thunderclap.

Jen smiles.

Jen and John. John and Jen.

Look at him, she thinks. This is it. This is why we do it. Nothing we’ll ever do will match it. Not love. Not sex. Not being a mother or a father. Not seeing God. Not mountains of money. Nothing. Nothing can touch this speed, this perilous grace, this joy, this high.

Then it all goes wrong.

The thick lip lunges forward like a leopard, taking him by the head and off his board.

The sharp orange-and-black gun hangs in the air above him, the leash still fastened to John’s ankle, then the fins catch and the board spears past John, missing him by inches.

He’s lifted high above the ribs of the wave, then pitched over the falls, pulled down by his board, into the raging impact zone.

Jen checks the next wave — well fuck, it’s bigger than this one — then steers the jet ski closer to the wall of whitewater that owns her husband.

A bright red rescue helicopter swoops down, close enough to tear foam off the crest of that wave.

Two rescue skis cut wide semicircles around the impact zone, their drivers looking for a way in.

And two more of the tow ski drivers, bucking the chop in search of John.

The seconds zip by but John doesn’t surface. His broken board launches from the whitewater, just two halves hinged by fiberglass. No leash attached. Which, in spite of John’s quick-release coupling, could mean the absolute worst for him — the damned leash is still fastened to his ankle, virtually unbreakable, easily caught on the sharp reef boulders lurking just feet below the surface.

Jen watches for any flash of shape or color, his black trunks, his orange helmet — anything that’s not whitewater, swirling sand, and rocks. Anything...

She knows with the wave closing fast behind her it’s time to plunge into the mayhem.

Feels the monster pull of it drawing her up.

Circling tightly, checking the rescue sled, getting ready to go in, she pauses one fraction of a second and thinks — among darker thoughts: I love you more than anything in the world...

And in that split second, the next wave lifts her from behind and Jen feels the terrible vertigo of a coming fall while clinging to an eight-hundred-pound personal watercraft.

Her personal deathtrap.

She cranks the ski throttle full open, digs a hard U-turn into the face of the wave. Jumps the lip and flies over.

She’s midair again on the smoking contraption. Below her, no John in sight. Just his shattered board bouncing in the foam on its way to shore.

She lands behind the wave and speeds a wide arc to something like safety. Rooster-tails to near where John went down. Can’t get all that close.

She’s lost precious time. Precious seconds. A lot of them.

She grinds through the whitewater as best she can, crisscrossing the worst of it. A surge of heavy foam catches the jet ski broadside and flips it.

She keeps hold, lets another wall of whitewater crash over her before she can find the handles, right the beast, and continue searching her blinding world of foam and spray.

Smacked by the chop and wind, she clamps her teeth and grimaces to draw air instead of brine.

In shallower water, she searches the rocks below. Hears the scream of the other watercrafts around her, voices calling out. The big-wave people mostly look out for each other; they’re loose-knit and competitive but most of them will lose contests and miss waves to help someone in trouble — even of his own making, even some reckless trust-funder wannabe big-wave king with his own helicopter to tow him in and pro videographers to make him famous.

It’s what watermen and waterwomen do.

Jen keeps waiting to feel him behind her, climbing aboard the rescue sled. She knows it’s possible: John has trained himself to hold his breath for up to three minutes underwater.

But not being pounded like this...

As the minutes pass, hope and fear fight like dogs inside her — a battle that will guide the rest of her life.

We are small and brief.

We are the human passion to stay alive, made simple.

She helps work John’s body out of the rocks.

They filmed the deadly 1999 Monsters of Mavericks, and they wrote about it and talked about it, but they never got deep into the barrel of what happened, and why.

How could they? Fifteen dead in Columbine. War in Kosovo. Bill Clinton impeached. Y2K, when the world’s computers would crash and the economy along with them.

The world was a busy place then, but crazy surfers riding giant waves weren’t exactly a crucial part of it.

That day, there was a shifting cast of fifty or so people near or in the water for the spectacle of a freakishly large northwest swell: contestants and their tow partners, boatloads of reporters, photographers, videographers, and a famous novelist, all trying to do their jobs but keep out of the impact zone, where the waves break; also rescue teams, and three contest “officials” in a helicopter circling overhead.

There were a few hundred spectators up on the cliffs above Ross Point, using binoculars and giant-lensed cameras for a view of the action.

The day was cold and bright, and the visibility excellent except for the impact zone, which was a churning cauldron of whitewater overhung with a dense cloud of sea spray.

So, there are many accounts of the same sequence of events, many points of view of how and why what happened, happened. Much video and many pictures.

There is some truth in most of them. So why should I add another voice, twenty-five years later?

I’ve taken questions from various media, but never answered beyond what was asked, never gone into detail.

From the beginning there was a lot of speculation, some by investigators and reporters, some by family and friends, some by strangers and opportunists telling half-truths and lies in those early days of the Internet.

Why not write about all this until now? After all, I learned how to do this in college. How to put words down. It’s much easier than riding a fifty-foot wave. Or raising two sons. It isn’t rocket science, to write a firsthand report of an event you were a part of.

But my husband’s death was too sudden and too unlikely for me — his twenty-one-year-old wife — to understand at that time.

I did not understand.

I understood his broken bones and fractured skull and the seawater in his lungs, and the leash caught on the rocks and still strapped to his ankle.

But I did not understand the why of it.

I’m forty-six, and that is what I am hoping to do now.

Jen’s son Casey speeds across Desperation Reef off San Diego, headed home for Laguna, Moondance riding high, slicing through the gently rolling swell. Desperation Reef is Casey’s prime tuna spot this time of year, though it’s also popular with the charter fishermen.

Today, he’s got his bluefin tuna in the ice hold, a one-hundred-pounder, dragged, drained, filleted, and ready for the pricey sashimi specials at his mother’s restaurant.

Mae, a chocolate Labrador, sits on a bench in the cabin beside Casey, facing the sea, tongue trailing, an aging, curious dog without a mean bone in her body.

White clouds seem fixed in the blue October sky and the surface of the sea is dark and supple.

Casey is a big man at twenty-four, all muscle and bushy yellow hair, built much like John Stonebreaker, the father he never met. He’s got the same knee knobs and foot bumps, the same pale blue eyes under dark brows. Without sunglasses, the only parts of Casey’s face not tanned to darkness are the strips of skin between his eyes and his ears. He’s wearing a pendant he had made of sterling silver — a sharp-tailed “gun” surfboard with an oval orange Spessartite garnet embedded lengthwise on the deck. It’s the orange of his father’s signature big-wave guns, and the orange of his mother’s hair.

He sees the commercial trawler bobbing out ahead of him and by the time he gets closer something looks, well, wrong. Pulls near enough for binoculars, throttles down and banks to a sweeping stop. Moondance, an angler’s dream at thirty-two feet, sleek and powerful, rides the swells high and lightly.

Casey two-hands the Leicas, rolling with his boat, keeping the trawler in his field of vision as best he can. It’s a shabby thing, predominately blue with red trim, outriggers swaying empty and no fishing lines out that Casey can see. A rust-stained hull. A ragged black sunscreen flapping over the stern deck.

Two men and a woman stand hard at work at tables heaped high with fish, some big. Black rubber boots and aprons. Blades flashing. Seabirds wheel and dive. A shirtless, muscled guy in red shorts and a flat-brimmed black cowboy hat with silver coins on its band leans against the stern railing, and trains his binoculars on Casey.

“What do you think of that, Mae?”

Mae’s native curiosity has already kicked in and she steadies herself on all fours, attentive to the trawler and, of course, the birds.

Casey gets his phone from the steering wheel cabinet, unzips the sandwich bag and pulls it out. Goes to video, reverses the direction, and holds the phone at arm’s length.

Casey is Casey’s favorite subject, star, and director.

So he checks his look: very tan. Hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. Got on the big straw, high-domed Stetson that he wears all the time — fishing or not — which makes him look, at six foot two, tall indeed and not a little funny in his board shorts and shearling boots and the brazenly colored T-shirts he personally designs for his fledgling surf-clothing company, CaseyWear.

In other words, perfect.

Unmistakably Casey Stonebreaker, number ten big-wave surfer and currently number eighteen on the World Surf Tour.

He gives himself and his followers his right-hand shaka — the universal surfers’ hang-loose sign that his brother, Brock, says is idiotic and is always trying to get him to stop flashing.

“Here are Mae and I on our way home from Desperation Reef. We got one of the best bluefin tuna I’ve ever caught, best sushi on Earth, all ready for dinner specials tonight at the Barrel in Laguna Beach. You all know the Barrel. Reservations, please!”

Casey gives himself his coolest smile, then kneels down and gets video of him kissing Mae on the nose. She wipes her tongue up his stubbly cheek. Casey switches the camera direction back to normal, stands and points it at the vessel.

“And what do we find here on this beautiful sea off the California coast? Well, at least four people — three men and a girl — on a commercial fishing vessel, cleaning their catch. See, they’ve got some big ones up on the tables. But why does this look wrong to me? Because the fish look like sharks, that’s why. I’m not so sure these people are playing by the rules out here. Maybe Fish and Wildlife — hi, Craig, hi, Charmaine — would like some video and a CF number. Maybe my brothers and sisters at the Shark Stewards — hi, Booker, hi, Trish! — would like some video, too. So Mae and I are going in for a closer look.”

From a hundred feet away it’s clear to Casey that these model citizens are finning sharks. Not legal, not humane, but very profitable. Black Hat still has his binoculars on him and the cleaning crew is really hustling now, slicing the fins — dorsal, sides, and tail — off the club-stunned sharks, sweeping the bloody-edged silver-blue-black triangles into a bait well and heaving the finless sharks back into the ocean.

Moondance rocks on the chop while Casey shoots video. He notes his GPU location.

“Oh fudge!” he narrates as he resumes shooting. “See this! Those fish will either bleed to death or get eaten by their cousins. Man, there’s threshers and blues and leopards and even a baby great white! See this baby Jaws! And you know where all the fins end up? In soup! In restaurants from California all the way to China! A whole shark sliced up and thrown out to die. Shark fins are the most valuable thing in the sea except for sunken treasure. Shark-finning is illegal and ugly, brothers and sisters. See this! This is a sin against nature!”

The swell rolls Moondance closer to the trawler, Empress II, and Casey gets its CF numbers. Black Hat lowers his binoculars, raises a hand, and flips Casey off. Mae thumps her tail on the padded bench back.

Pulling broadside to the trawler, Casey keeps shooting.

“Good afternoon!”

“Fuck you and die!” shouts Black Hat.

“How much do you get for a pound of thresher fin?”

“No sharks. No fins. This is all legal. License paid.”

“Well, that’s quite a fantasy, Mr. Hat. What port are you out of?”

“Don’t you take video.”

He’s Asian looking, but it’s hard to tell with the hat shading his face. Young, ripped chest like he works out.

The finners keep slicing away and throwing mutilated sharks overboard, barely looking up.

“How can you do that to living things for money?” Casey asks. And considers the dark parallels between what they’re all doing out here. I’m fishing, too, he notes.

“Feed family,” says Black Hat. “Buy American dream. No video. No Fish and Wildlifes to come after us.”

Casey has more than enough video to post. He can edit it down and shoot a sign-off later at home. Post tonight after dinner, PST, a perfect time here, though not so perfect for the East Coast. He lowers his phone, takes another clip of Mae’s trusting face. He’s got, like, tons of posts across his platforms, containing more videos of Mae, probably, than any other creature than himself.

“This is majorly uncool,” he says. “You should think about what you’re doing,” he says. “There are other ways to make a living out here. She’s generous, this ocean.”

“Shut up. Go.”

“I’ll report you to Fish and Wildlife and the Shark Stewards if I see you out here again.”

The finners are still cutting and dropping the bloody black fish into the deep blue water. Pink contrails descend. The finners are laughing now, looking down at Casey. One waves a knife at him.

Casey sets his phone back in the steering cabinet, guns Moondance into a wide one-eighty, and away.

In the lull before the Barrel happy hour, Casey sits at his bar with Mae at his feet, editing and posting his pirate video across all his platforms. He does a more thorough introduction right here at the bar, with his phone up on a tripod. Makes sure his hair is perfect and there’s no food between his teeth. The art directors for his advertising shoots always want that messy Casey Stonebreaker hair and the killer smile. Pecs and buns for sure. He’d rather look brooding and serious, as a daredevil big-wave rider should, but, hey, whatever pays the bills, Casey believes: Basically, he’s a happy dude, so why not smile?

He sends private messages to his friends at Shark Stewards and California Fish and Wildlife. They will make life miserable for the crew of Empress II if they can find her. Pretty big “if,” Casey knows: even Coast Guard cutters and copters can only do so much reconnaissance of a functionally infinite ocean.

The shark-finning clips are gruesome and saddening. All that pain and death of living things so men get their dicks up, Casey thinks. The CF numbers on Empress II are clear, though probably counterfeit. Hits and follows and likes are pouring in.

He also sends video to Craig Lockabie at CFW whose Special Operations Unit makes busts on Southern California’s open ocean, harbors, and marinas. They used to surf against each other in contests up and down the coast.

Craig — BOLO for nine armed, shark-finning pirates down around Desperation Reef. Throw the book at ’em, brah.

Lockabie calls right back, gets the GPU coordinates where Casey spotted Empress II, tells Casey he’ll hit Desperation Reef and the rest of San Clemente Island tomorrow. Casey hears him keyboarding in his suspect descriptions.

“We’ve heard of Empress II and the finning, Casey. You’re our second witness. Appreciate the tip.”

“They’re armed to their teeth,” says Casey, picturing the bullets zipping into the water as his phone sank into approximately a hundred and fifty feet of ocean. He’s still nervy about that. Actually, more like creeped out and jittery. Funny, he thinks now, that his first fear when the shooting started was for innocent, curious Mae.

“I’ve only got one cruiser and two patrol boats,” says Lockabie. “But we’ll do what we can.”

“Good luck, brah.”

“You might want to stay off that water until we round up these people.”

“No chance of that! The Barrel needs its catch of the day.” But even as Casey says this, he feels a tug of dread about being back on the water after having outed these pirates on his socials. His guts feel bunched up. He could borrow a gun from Brock but he hasn’t fired one since he was a boy — a BB gun.

“Casey. I have a serious question now.”

“My man.”

“How are you looking for the Monsters of Mavericks?”

“Top shape and ready. I surfed Todos Santos on that freak south last month. Forty feet but basically blown-out mush-burgers. I’ll do good at Mavericks if the waves show up.”

“And Jen and Brock?”

“Can’t speak for Brock. He’s been pretty busy saving the world. Mom’s ready, though. She’s a monster on that jet ski of hers. And her surfing looks real good.”

“She’s, what, forty?”

“Forty-six. Tons of training though. Great shape.”

A pause.

“Good luck to you all.”

“We will need waves.”

“December’s the month,” says Lockabie.

Beneath a billowing gray sky pocked with red embers, Brock Stonebreaker and his wife and his Go Dogs — in a motley battalion of pickups, utility vehicles, and vans — have encamped within the eye-burning haze that chokes the Feather Fire evacuation center on the Mendocino College soccer field.

The hills surrounding them are limned in wind-driven flames that launch embers into the sky like fireworks.

The fire was zero percent contained when Brock, Mahina, and the Go Dogs got here two hours ago, and it’s zero percent contained now.

The Go Dogs are the activist wing of Brock’s Breath of Life Rescue Mission in Aguanga, California, a sprawling, state-licensed and accredited house of worship. The buildings and acreage are gifts from the Random Access Foundation, run by a young Silicon Valley billionaire and her husband. The foundation continues to make modest monthly contributions, mostly earmarked for the Go Dogs rescue operations in the US and in Mexico.

Now sheriffs, police, and an alphabet soup of fire department vehicles prowl the perimeter field with their headlights and searchlights, as if looking for something more to do than keep their eye on the flaming, not-very-distant, timber-studded, tinder-dry hills around them.

Brock drips sweat. The tattoos all over his sinewy body are black, slick, and island themed. Got his first one at age twelve, much to his mother’s annoyance, which was half the point. The other half was he liked sea turtles like the ones they’d see surfing on Maui. He’s dark-skinned for a man of his ancestry — some Black Irish way back, his mother told him — your great-grandfather Devon Byrne had that, and blue eyes like yours. Brock’s dreads are short and tightly woven. He’s stripped to the waist because of the record-busting October heat wave, and he’s drawing foul breaths through one of the two hundred cheap “tactical” gas masks donated to the Dogs by a manufacturer down in Orange County.

He’s handing off forty-bottle flats of donated water to thirsty evacuees, many of whom have lost their homes or are losing them this very moment, losing almost everything they love, basically — houses and horses and dogs and gardens — as they tear open the bottles of fresh warm water for their children first, then themselves, quaffing then pouring it onto their upturned, smoke-blackened faces to quench the ember stings and the fires in their terrified eyes.

These are people who have lost it all, Brock thinks. And there will be no regaining what is gone. Only substitution.

He leans into the back of his flagship Go Dogs van, an old black Econoline with the goofy-looking dachshund emblazoned on the sides in Day-Glo green.

Mahina, whose name means “moon” in her native language, is all the way inside, hefting the flats into Brock’s waiting hands two at a time. She’s Hawaiian big, strong and imposing. When they first met, Brock had to really work to beat her at arm wrestling, and she was a stronger, more buoyant, and better swimmer than him. Good surfer, too. She looks like a post-apocalyptic Pacific Island warrior with her hair up in a tight bun, her XXL Day-Glo green and black Go Dogs T-shirt, the gas mask, and goggles. She posts and blogs like crazy for the Breath of Life Rescue Mission. Doesn’t say much out loud, but when she does, her words count.

“We need more water,” she mouths from within the mask.

“Another run to Ukiah,” says Brock. Their third run of the day.

“Thank the gods for Ukiah,” she says.

Ukiah and its roads have so far been spared by a change of wind direction. The Feather Fire — the experts were saying, like so many of the new “super fires” — was so big and so hot it was making its own weather. One expert said the change of wind was a miracle. Another said that the super fires were spawned by the megadrought, which was caused by global warming, which was caused by greenhouse gases.

“The gods have nothing to do with it,” says Brock, who does not believe that a god — and certainly not some cabal of them — in any way intervenes on behalf of the human beings of Earth. He’s always berating his brother for Casey’s self-promoting, Christian notions of divine intervention through prayer. Much better in Brock’s mind is Mahina’s worship of nature — gods who openly help and sometimes destroy their mortals.

The Breath of Life is what Brock would pray to if he prayed at all.

Instead, he worships actions, forged by the heat of the real.

Forged in the absolute belief that people can change the world.

You can just watch, Brock says in his “sermons.” Or you can act. Join the battle.

That’s the foundation of the Breath of Life Rescue Mission, and of every angry sermon and call to action that Brock has issued from his pulpit on the Aguanga compound over the last year. And ranted from his media platforms.

God(s) or not, in Brock’s mind, the Red Cross simply made it to Ukiah because they made it to Ukiah, and — with typical NGO caution — wouldn’t risk getting close enough to the danger to give away their ample supplies of water, food, clothing, blankets, diapers, pet food, battery-powered lanterns, generators, coffee and coffee makers, generators, motel vouchers, and, oddly, twelve pallets of canned beets! There are twenty-four twelve-ounce cans per plastic-wrapped bundle. Though none have pull tops, and not one manual can opener is in sight.

Which is the kind of thing that drives Brock Stonebreaker crazy — always has — when people get ninety percent of the job done but don’t close it off with the final ten. Then blame it on a god’s will, or a rule or a law, or a forecast, or a tarot reading, or global fucking warming.

Which is why he created the Go Dogs, and why he only accepts people who will not hesitate to go that last ten percent, or more, to get it done. And called them the Go Dogs because a dog understands that last ten percent without ever being taught it, or even bothering to think about it.

You see. You go. You do it until it’s done.

You take off on that wave and you are committed.

On a huge wave, the last ten percent is fear. Brock dwells on that a lot in his rants. Fear is hesitation and hesitation is death on a sixty-foot wave.

Hell, thinks Brock: a twenty-foot wave. He saw a boyhood friend killed by a wicked-thick eighteen-foot demon at Sunset Beach on Oahu.

A friend.

Brock was a teenager himself then, and he’d gotten Glenn to shore as fast as he could and CPR’d him until the paramedics came running across the beach with their boxes and stretcher, and they let Brock ride in the back of the truck to the hospital under colors and a loudly optimistic siren.

Brock had prayed to God in that bumpy, wailing truck, just like his grandpa — Pastor Mike Stonebreaker — had taught him to.

Pressing his forehead to Glenn’s bouncing chest, praying hard and clear and rationally, offering all he had, making a hundred promises if He would just keep Glenn’s heart beating.

Well, He didn’t.

Which is another reason Brock created the Go Dogs within his Breath of Life Rescue Mission. To help people who are too bad off to help themselves.

Brock wasn’t going to be fooled twice.

Two hours later they make Ukiah, where they load the ash-encrusted Go Dogs Econoline with more Red Cross survival provisions, and find gas.

Mahina squeegees the filthy windshield while Brock tries to post a call for reinforcements on his heavily attended socials. His phone has only two bars out here, but he writes anyway, his orders as separate posts, like bullets:

He and Mahina watch the ash-caked screen as Brock’s posts are slowly, one-at-a-time delivered.

On their way back up the highway to the evacuation center they stop at a checkpoint, where a hefty, bearded man in a black Right Fight T-shirt, a matching trucker’s hat, and an AR-15 slung over his shoulder comes to Brock’s window.

Brock knows him: Kasper Aamon — former Laguna Beach High School jock, former member in Brock’s grandfather’s Hillview Chapel, founder of Right Fight — a group of violent, anti-immigrant haters masquerading as conservatives. They’ve been having an extended, online, obscenity-ridden “debate” lately, Kasper claiming that Brock’s church was a “godless slum/front for a devil-worshipping surfer and a tax-dodging tech billionaire.”

Brock can’t reconcile Kasper, the skinny, ectomorphic high school football player who always seemed so focused on his game, with this hate-fueled thug he is now. Can’t quite believe that his body size and type have evolved so dramatically. Pastor Mike told Brock years ago that his prodigal black sheep Kasper would return to his fold someday. Because people can change. And they do.

Of course, both Brock’s and Aamon’s followers flooded the message chains, accelerating the heated arguments. There’s so much shit flying Brock can’t even keep up with it. Mahina has taken over most of the postings as well as getting out the weekly Breath of Life videos of Brock’s rambling, sometimes hours-long sermons, which he calls “rants.”

Aamon shines a flashlight into Brock’s weary eyes. Brock rolls down his window to a blast of hot wind. There’s a big white Tahoe with an after-market light bar squatting partially across both lanes of the highway, bringing drivers to a stop.

“I heard you heathens would be up here, agitating,” he says.

“Glad you’re following us, Kasper,” says Brock. “Man, that’s one fucked-up hat you have on.”

With a quick glance, Brock sees Mahina with her phone up, taking pictures of the man.

“Hey, wahine, why don’t you put that camera down?” Kasper Aamon chortles then breaks into a smile. “Yo, fighters! Look what came up in the net. Weird Brock Stonebreaker, our favorite preacher!”

Brock sees other Right Fighters approaching his van in the smoky darkness. There’s one at Mahina’s window now, eyes curiously wide, his light beam refracting through the glass. A woman behind him. Two more men join the first guy, and in the sideview mirror Brock sees another woman stopping to read the Go Dogs emblem and steadying herself against the wind. All variously armed, all wearing black Right Fight T-shirts with blue stars and red stripes, and the trucker hats that make their heads look huge.

Aamon gives Brock a sidelong stare. “The man with the church who doesn’t even believe in God.”

“Not in past gods, Aamon. But they’ve got a new one out now. We call it the Breath of Life. I’ve explained this to you before.”

“We’ve made it simple,” says Mahina. “The Breath of Life is a god.”

“’Zat right? Then what’s this new god stand for?”

“Life,” says Brock.

Aamon looks puzzled and affronted at the same time. “Ain’t that kind of circular? Can’t you be more specific?”

“Look around you.”

Aamon shakes his head. “What horseshit. Out of the vehicle, you little demon,” he says.

“Nope.”

“What’s inside?” Aamon asks, shifting the flashlight from Brock’s face to the back of the van.

“Provisions for the fire victims.”

“They turned us away at the evacuation center because we’re armed. We carry open, which, as you might know, is now legal in most parts of California.”

“We leave our guns in our cars,” says Brock. “So we can get people food and water and shelter. Help them, instead of just strutting around, playing Army man, like you fools. What good are you really doing?”

“I’m going to ask you, again, to step out of the vehicle.”

“Same answer.”

Kasper Aamon’s eyes bug as he shifts his light beam to Mahina, who has set down the phone and hefted her pistol-gripped, combat 12-gauge from the darkness at her feet. She goes nowhere without it. The man at her window springs away and Aamon takes a step back, too, trying to unsling his tightly strapped gun.

Brock swings open the van door, catching Aamon just right and knocking him to the asphalt. Then he stomps the gas and slams the door.

Engine whining under him, Brock doesn’t think these people will actually open fire on him, but his heart is racing and he hunches down behind the wheel in anticipation of small arms fire, his right hand on Mahina’s big shoulder, trying to scrunch her down, too, but she wrenches herself away and points her shotgun out the window.

“No!” yells Brock. “Mahina, no!”

She drops the gun back into the darkness.

There’s a tense few seconds as the Ford’s engine screams and upshifts, and the flats of water and soft drinks behind them topple and crash to the floor. Mahina mutters lowly to herself.

Brock waits for the bullets to slam into them, but by the time he realizes that nobody’s shooting, he’s around a bend and temporarily out of range.

One problem solved, but the next question is — will Right Fight come after them?

They’ve gone less than a mile when Brock sees in the sideview mirror not one, but three sets of headlights aligned behind him, running three abreast and gaining easily on the old van.

Mahina has taken up her phone again, holding it out the window to document their pursuers.

A red, searchlight-festooned Suburban pulls up on Brock’s side, as an old two-tone white-and-aqua Chevy pickup appears just a few feet from Mahina’s open window.

Brock can’t go right or left without hitting one of them, and when he looks up the straight, narrow highway ahead of him he sees distant headlights topping a rise. The pines that line the highway thrash, and a cloud of ash paints his windshield. Brock can hardly see. He hits the wipers, which help little. The trucks on either side of him are honking now, and the red Suburban has its remote rooftop floodlights trained on his face.

Brock squints and glances left a split second, just enough time to see the face of burly Kasper Aamon.

“Brakes, babe! Hold on!”

Mahina tries to work her big body down into the seat.

Brock presses his foot down, hard and steady, but not too hard; the old van’s brakes were never terrific and the antilock system is weak.

The tires bite and the Econoline hunches down. Brock feels the rear end shimmy, meaning crazy swerves if he pushes any harder.

Both vehicles roar past as Mahina shoots them on her phone, the drivers screaming and laughing as they merge into the right lane.

He lightens the pressure then reapplies force and the van slows back into control. As Brock stays to the right of his lane, the oncoming cars honk and speed past.

Up ahead Brock sees the Red Suburban and the two-tone Chevy at a northbound pullout, awaiting him.

He hits the accelerator and barrels past them anyway, both he and Mahina flipping them off as horns and “Born in the USA” wail from the pickup. Brock hates it when idiots misunderstand this song.

Mahina rolls up her window, lifts the shotgun to her lap, and goes to work on her phone.

A half mile farther up the road, Brock watches in his sideview mirror as the Suburban and the Chevy bounce onto the highway and head back toward Ukiah.

The following day, alone in the ocean at first light, Jen glides into a glittering Brooks Street wave.

She’s standing up on her paddleboard, guiding herself across the glassy shoulder, wielding her paddle as a rudder. The daily stand-up paddleboard session is one of her training tools — a fun way to build the muscle mass, cardio strength, and endurance when the waves aren’t big. Of course, there are also daily weights to be lifted in her garage gym; a two-mile run and a mile ocean swim most afternoons; high-speed, bone-crunching, open-ocean sprints in the jet ski three times a week — the rougher the sea the better; and her daily breath-holding sessions in the high school pool, where, as a celebrated alumnus, Jen is welcome pretty much anytime she wants. At yesterday’s pool session, Jen held her breath for one minute and thirty-four seconds before pushing off hard from the deep-end bottom, breaking the surface with a full-body gasp, her eyes bursting with stars. That’s enough time to survive the legendary back-to-back hold-downs at Mavericks, Jen knows — so long as the waves that have sent you to the rocky bottom haven’t first crushed the air from your body or snapped your neck. It’s a lot different in a pool than in a furious ocean trying to kill you, John used to say, and he always focused hard on his breath training.

Thus, at forty-six years old Jen is not in the best shape of her life, but near it. Her running and swimming speeds aren’t quite what they were twenty-five years ago, and she’s not as limber, and her knees creak when she gets out of bed in the dark every morning to hit Brooks Street. But her jet ski skills and underwater breath control are better.

The biggest question is, how good is she at riding enormous, fast, lethal waves in fifty-degree water over jagged rocks?

Well, Jen knows she’s not quite as good as she was back then, in the thick of it with John.

But this coming December, less than two months from now, she’ll be ready to surf the Monsters of Mavericks, women’s division.

And to tow Casey. And Brock, if he wants her to. Though Brock’s wife, Mahina, wants that honor and, as his wife, Jen knows she deserves it. And she knows Mahina is good, but good enough? No room for error, she thinks, and all that.

A blunt fear eddies inside Jen as she considers towing either or both of her sons in the waves that killed their father. But they’ve trained hard and they’re ranked among the top twenty big-wave riders in the world.

This fear is part of the larger fear of riding those waves herself. After witnessing what Mavericks did to John, she has lived and relived and dreamed what they can do to you.

Just the idea of being on the water at Mavericks again terrifies her. More than the towing in and the riding of the waves. The wild soul of nature lives there, without conscience or remorse.

Her husband taught her how to face it.

And for John, she’s going to complete the journey she began with him.

Now, Jen’s thoughts boomerang back here to Brooks Street, and she drops into another nice right, a smooth five-footer with a steep, smooth shoulder to work with. She banks the big heavy SUP off the upper face, dragging her paddle along the ribs of the barrel as she heads for the bottom turn. Then straightens and rises up the face, her bowl of orange hair matching her paddleboard and wetsuit — orange and black, John’s colors for his wetsuits and big-wave guns — and then she’s inside this gin-clear barrel, and her colors quiver and fragment within it. This would be a beautiful sight for an onlooker but there is none at first light.

Just Jen Stonebreaker, here alone. Alone since John made his early earthly exit.

She had ridden her first big waves with John when she was eighteen and he was twenty-three. The waves inspired a primal fear in both of them, a fear that kept them respectful, alert and — until that day — alive.

Jen had towed John into a Mavericks monster on her jet ski for the first time two months after her eighteenth birthday.

Married him on the beach at Sleepy Hollow in Laguna six months later.

Partnered with him in big-wave contests all over the world: Jen towing John into the men’s heats, and John towing her into the women’s. Winning a little prize money. Sponsorships. Earning some respect. Even as middle-class haoles from small-wave, big-money Laguna Beach. Even from the Hawaiians on the big-wave tour.

Jen buried her husband up in Newport Beach when she was twenty-one.

Gave birth to his sons, Casey and Brock, nine months later.

Not a day goes by that Jen doesn’t think of him, usually not an hour.

Mostly, she thinks of how she failed him.

In the privacy of her Laguna Canyon home, and her office in the Barrel, she talks to John. Answers for him in a voice that even sounds a little like his.

John had meant almost everything to her. She gave herself to him, heart and body, and there was practically nothing that she wouldn’t do for him. Practically nothing she hadn’t done for him.

Loved him and listened to him; cooked his meals and did his laundry; handled the money and paid the bills; endured his hangovers and his surprising, petty violence. Saved his life one brooding evening at Todos Santos with a jet ski and a rescue sled.

Their dizzying, smoky hours of pleasure in the little cottage on Victory Walk.

Not an endless summer at all. A brief one, but crammed with life.

But since that day at Mavericks twenty-five years ago — excepting the careful, focused raising of her two sons — Jen Stonebreaker has felt few moments of joy. Her life since John’s death has been over two decades of dedication to motherhood and the Barrel. Two decades of thinking she might try to ride the big waves that terrify her.

She hasn’t ridden a big wave since that day, but that’s about to change.

During her waking hours, she can imagine those monsters, can see herself making that drop, carving that turn, riding the thing with her own particular strength and grace. Yeah, babe, she thinks: you can still do that.

But in her dreams, she feels the enormous mountains, lifting her higher and higher, carrying her toward land faster and faster, then heaving her toward the world of rocks and whitewater so far below. From up there, she sees the pale sharks gliding over the reef. Sees John’s body, leashed to the rocks, surging peacefully back and forth like kelp.

The wave takes her down and down and down.

She wakes up, gasping, heart pounding, sweating out the vodka and Xanax that bear her off to sleep every night.

And she thinks about the Monsters of Mavericks coming soon, regretting that she agreed to compete in a big-wave contest for the first time in twenty-five years.

In spite of the terrible fear.

Because of her terrible fear.

Fear of the waves, fear of failing John on her jet ski, fear of the casual, supernatural power of Mavericks.

She’s going to beat that fear.

She has to beat it.

The Monsters of Mavericks is not a dream.

The next morning Casey hooks a 102-pound bluefin tuna — the largest and most delicious tuna in the world — on Desperation Reef. The reef is a not-so-secret hot spot for sportfishermen, and the prized bluefin hit it hard in summer and fall. Just a few hundred yards outside Desperation Reef lies San Clemente Island, owned by the Navy and used as an amphibious training base and bomb/rocket/missile proving ground. Not even the wild goats are welcome. Occasionally, Navy patrol boats will stop Casey, board Moondance, check his bait and refrigerated holds. They’re pretty cool guys, Casey has found, and some of them recognize him from the surf journals and the many YouTube videos of him riding gigantic waves around the world.

Today, this tuna fights him so long and hard, dragging Moondance across the heavy chop, that the anglers on the nearby charter, Buenisima, cheer and hoot as Casey finally completes his gaff-free landing of the beautiful, scintillating silver-blue missile.

Paws on the gunwale, Mae barks for most of this grueling forty-minute battle, the tuna sounding and taking line off Casey’s Penn reel in heated screams. She only barks at big fish.

Breathing heavily, Casey finally tail-ropes the tuna to a stern cleat, and sets the engine low to drag the fish slowly east, cooling the tuna’s internal temperature after its hard battle. Casey watches it through dark blue water shot with pipes of sunlight, the fish losing strength, gills slowing. Casey knows something of how it feels, having held the very last of his breath on long hold-downs by huge waves.

The swell is too heavy and the chop too high for cleaning the fish at sea, so Casey lowers his catch to the ice blocks in the hold, and hightails Moondance to Oceanside Harbor.

Where, an hour and fifteen minutes later, he ties off his boat and clomps up the launch ramp, leaving Mae to guard the catch, per usual. Casey gets his keys from the waders’ pouch, then climbs into the truck and backs the trailer down the ramp.

The truck cab is warm in the early afternoon sun, and Casey feels the post-adrenal peace that comes from a big fish well hunted, well fought, and well caught. He feels dreamy but clear-headed. He still understands that he’s killed this animal for nourishment and profit. And he knows that he will someday be killed against his will as well. He doesn’t romanticize himself enough to believe that he’ll end up killed and eaten by something further up the food chain. This fish has become a victim in a way that he — the human Stonebreaker — will almost certainly not be. Which in Casey’s mind means he and the fish were put on Earth for different purposes. He doesn’t believe that the fish has a soul like his. A different kind of soul — maybe. What they do have in common though, is creation by, and eventually absorption by, the same God. Thus, sharing relation, even brotherhood.

Casey knows the Barrel will turn this fish into food for people, and approximately ten thousand dollars of revenue for the restaurant’s owners and workers. Bluefin tuna — kuro maguro in Japanese — is not only the world’s largest and most delicious tuna fish, it’s the most expensive by far. Casey as a child was astonished to be told by his mother that a bluefin tuna weighing 489 pounds had been recently caught and sold for $1.8 million in Japan’s Tsukiji fish market. In that instant young Casey — a good Laguna shore angler for bass and halibut — decided to hunt kuro maguro in his own backyard ocean, which was getting to be a real possibility down off San Clemente Island and its nearby Desperation Reef. Catch a fish. Make a million dollars.

When he backs down the ramp Casey swings his right arm over his seat back and turns for a full view of his target.

Moondance is fast to her ties, but Mae is not keeping vigil atop the ice-cooled hold as usual.

Which of course happens occasionally, sociable Lab that Mae is.

Casey cleans the magnificent fish at one of the marina basins, drawing a crowd.

“Come to the Barrel in Laguna, people,” he tells them. “This’ll be some of the best sashimi you’ve ever had.”

“My dad caught one bigger,” says a boy.

“Your dad is a great fisherman,” says Casey.

“I saw you surf giant waves on YouTube. You didn’t look scared.”

“I’m not scared. I’m hardcore, brah. Core doesn’t scare.”

Casey glasses Empress II at her slip at the National City Marina. Through the Leicas, he sees a man half reclining on a chaise lounge, smoking. Casey thinks he was one of the gunners aboard the Luhrs that day, but he’s not sure. Empress II’s tables and nets have been stowed, but she’s still just a peeling blue-and-red commercial trawler berthed way out at the end of a crowded landing, as if trying to hide within the gleaming motor yachts and elegant sailboats. Her boarding ramp is down.

Casey wonders how Bette Wu and her multinational, occasionally felonious crew can afford this big vessel, its slip fee here in National City, and the green Luhrs, the white Bayliner, and the swanky Dragon his mom told him about, all by supplying fish and shark fins to Southern California restaurants.

Just not feelin’ it, he thinks. Maybe they’re in some other business, too?

He stops at the ramp gate and the smoking man stands up. He’s short, with ropy arms and a scrawny torso. Filipino, Casey guesses.

“I came to get my dog,” says Casey.

“No dog.”

“Everybody at the harbor saw Bette stealing her.”

“No Bette. Not here.”

“Where, then?”

Smoker flips his cigarette butt into the bay and shakes his head.

“Fine, then,” says Casey. “Permission to come aboard requested. So I can look for Mae.”

“No. No dog here. No Bette here. Out selling to restaurants. All legal and good money so you go now.”

Casey throws the latch and knees open the ramp gate and Smoker meets him halfway up, crouching into a boxer’s stance, fists up. Casey — six feet, two inches tall, two hundred and twenty pounds of youthful muscle, plus years of immense waves pounding him around like a pool toy, years of gym workouts, and some truly evil Hapkido training with Brock — springs in and pushes Smoker hard, but not too hard, over the railing and into the bay.

“Sorry, sir. I’ll be just a minute!”

Which is less than it takes him to check belowdecks for Mae, or Bette, or whoever else might be aboard this fish-reeking, cigarette-smoke-steeped trawler. He scribbles his number onto a Tsingtao coaster.

“Mae! Mae!”

But no Mae, and back on deck Casey sees Smoker, fully drenched and lurching up the ramp toward the boarding gate.

“Tell Bette she owes me a chocolate Lab named Mae.”

“You should take down video. Going viral. Bad for business.”

“Soon as I get my dog back. And I want enough money for a good phone. You tell her that.”

He presses the coaster into the man’s cold wet hand. “I’m sorry if I hurt you. But I do expect her call.”

Casey distractedly fills drink orders and tries to yak with his customers while checking his balances. His thoughts are spinning and he can’t slow them down. Tessie and Aurora have stayed late. Tessie asks after Mae, who is often on her pad in the Barrel lobby, leashed to the ankle of the bronze statue of Casey’s dad.

“She’s at home, resting,” he says. “Worn out from the fishing today.”

Tessie looks at him doubtfully. “You okay tonight, Case?”

“Worn out, too, I guess. That was a big fish.”

“I’m ready for that surfing lesson whenever you are!”

“You got it, Tess. Maybe next week.”

Keeping track on the back of a bar check, he logs in the $648 in his checking account down at Wells Fargo, easily gettable in the morning. It’s mostly from tips and his small bartender’s hourly.

There’s another account with various sponsorship and endorsement money in it, about $4,000.

And $10,000 in CDs he opened with signing bonuses from a hip young clothing company and a start-up watchmaker. It will cost him an early withdrawal penalty of who knows what, but he thinks he can get most of that money tomorrow because the bank manager likes him.

Subtotaling $14,648, exactly $10,352 short.

“Fudge,” Casey mutters.

He’s got $1,500 in a savings account. And about a thousand in undeclared tips safe under the towels in a bathroom cabinet at home.

He adds it all up and writes the new $171,480 total excitedly, then takes a breath of deep relief. Checks his addition to find he’s slipped in an extra zero so the correct amount should be $17,148.

Still almost $8,000 to go.

Fudge me.

He knows what his tax returns say about gross income — just under $35,000 — annually, for his last few years at the Barrel.

Also knows he has plenty of new sponsor merch but it’s not like the pirates are going to want surfboards, XL wetsuits, trunks, beach shorts, T-shirts, hoodies, leather flip-flops, surf-inspired jewelry made of shells, beads, and sea glass. Certainly not organic sunscreen, Day-Glo nose-coats, CBD lip-savers, or blocks of scented surfboard wax. Maybe the Seiko Waterman watches, he thinks. He’s already given most of them to friends, but he’s got six of them with different-colored dials, still in their boxes, worth five hundred bucks a throw, though technically he’s not allowed to sell them.

“Casey! Another margarita! And a couple of Bohemias!”

A bank loan?

Or maybe money from Mom or Brock?

But Casey knows that Brock’s funding for the Breath of Life Rescue Mission isn’t steady, and he’s got Mahina depending on him. Plus, Brock blows money like crazy, getting the Go Dogs to the latest disaster with generous donations, but many of the life-saving supplies are covered by his always meager personal funds.

His mom has eight grand, though how much she can put her hands on, quickly, he doesn’t know. The idea of borrowing from your mom at age twenty-four doesn’t seem right.

Makes Casey feel like the dumbass that Brock and everybody else have always told him he is.

Casey steers his pickup out of Laguna Canyon toward the toll road, headed south for San Diego, Jen beside him, the cash-stuffed pack on the cab’s back floor.

Over the Pier 32 National City Marina, skies are blue, and a brisk breeze pings the lanyards and halyards of the pleasure yachts.

Empress II sits heavy and workmanlike in slip 41-B, with her fading blue and red paint, well-used outriggers, and her tag lines swaying loosely in the wind. The coiffed motor yachts seem to ignore her.

Casey hoists the pack and strolls toward the vessel, his mother beside him. He’s dressed as he almost always dresses, and it’s perfect for the role of ocean-bound young adventurer that he’s now suggesting: tan corduroy board shorts, flip-flops, a black hoodie with Day-Glo orange draw cords, and wide-temple sunglasses.

Jen’s got on shorts, a T-shirt, a windbreaker, ankle-high trekking shoes, her orange bowl of hair partially contained in a black-and-green paisley bandana.

Casey sees Bette Wu standing atop the hold, phone to her ear. Mae stands beside her, tail wagging, her aging eyes recognizing Casey at this distance. Casey feels his eyes tearing up, feels like his heart is trying to get out and run to her.

Smoker, whom Casey had jettisoned just yesterday, a cigarette in his mouth and a pistol in his waistband, holds open the lower boarding gate with a bored stare. Casey starts up the ramp, Jen behind him. He looks up to see Mae propped up on the gunwale, looking down at him, smiling between barks with that big open smile Labs get.

Now aboard, Casey kneels and gets a mauling from Mae, kissing her forehead and kneading her ear joints. Mae howls emotionally. Jen kneels too and just about gets knocked over.

Bette, dressed in snug black tactical garb and red mid-ankle Air Jordans, leads them down a short steel gangway and into the cigarette-smoke- and incense-infused galley. The ship seems bigger than Casey remembers from his initial search for Mae. There’s a row of portholes along the port and starboard sides, the thick plexiglass bearing the scars of years. Through which Casey sees the gently swaying blue-green bay, a ketch coming into its slip, the marina ships bobbing at dock. Hears the Empress II generators moaning away, their vibrations coming through his flip-flops. Keeping their catch frozen, he thinks, and their lights on.

Seated at the head of a heavily shellacked table is the Kings fan his mother described — Bette’s alleged father. To his right sits a handsome Latino in a trim suit, a leather briefcase open on the table just a short reach away. Casey notes the black grip of a stainless-steel pistol peeking out from under the fastener file folders, and a yellow legal pad bristling with handwriting.

Bette pulls out a chair and sits to the left of her father, who is hatless now, but again clad in black-and-white Kings hockey team warm-ups, with a jungle of gold around his thick neck.

He offers a half smile, nodding to Jen and Casey. “As you know, I am Jimmy Wu, Bette’s father. I have many interests. Such as King Jim Seafood. All the very best seafood, always fresh. I am famous in seafood distribution in Southern California. I have big social following. I have YouTube. I have ads on TV late at night. My colorful trucks are all over the place. This is my attorney, Octavio Benitez. Mergers and acquisitions. Octavio.”

Benitez rises as Jimmy completes the introductions, but sits without shaking Casey’s offered hand. “A pleasure to meet you both.”

They sit and Benitez fixes first Jen, then Casey, with dark, amused eyes.

“I know of your many accomplishments and awards and medals. I saw you, Mrs. Stonebreaker, announcing the Olympic water polo competition on TV not long ago. Very insightful commentary.”

“Why thank you.”

“Mr. Stonebreaker, I’ve followed your big-wave conquests through the streaming coverage of the Monsters of Mavericks... what is it now, canceled three of the last five years?”

“No,” says Casey. “Two of the last ten. They say climate change is making the waves bigger now. The next Monsters could be more like when Dad died. Huge.”

Jen’s heart drops at this, but the lawyer smirks.

“Casey, I saw video of you as a seventeen-year-old, in your first big-wave competition at Mavericks.”

“I didn’t exactly tear it up.”

“But you survived.”

“You don’t get a lot of points for survival,” says Casey, reaching down to pet Mae, who has laid down on his feet. Casey feels her warmth on his skin. “You have to bring more than survival to the ride. You need a special thing to win.”

“Yes!” says Jimmy Wu. “You need style, and cool, and the attitude that you own the wave and it does not own you. If your legs are shaking, or your eyes are wide, you don’t win points!”

Casey remembers his first big waves, not so much the fear itself, but his fear of fear, of choking. He didn’t choke but his legs trembled on the bottom turns and when he looked at the footage the next day he was surprised and embarrassed by his expressions: wide-eyed dread, grim determination, nerve-jangled relief as he flew like a trapeze artist over the tops of the waves, kicking out, then falling down into the marginal safety of a furious ocean between waves.

“And I am also aware of your wonderful Barrel restaurant, Mrs. Stonebreaker,” says the lawyer. “But I get ahead. Mr. Wu, you should count the money.”

“Bette?”

“Danilo!” Bette calls out.

Smoker comes in, takes the backpack from Casey, and sets it on the far end of the table. Zips it open, then retreats to lean against the kitchen bulkhead, one foot up against the peeling white steel, pistol in place behind his waistband.

Bette goes to the pack, unbands and counts each thousand-dollar pack with careful patience, setting the completed stacks aside and apart.

She looks up at Casey after each one. “...nine hundred eighty, eight thousand.”

A few minutes later she announces, “Money’s all here. I didn’t think Stonebreaker would cheat us. He is much too good and innocent.”

Casey breaks eye contact with her for lack of an apt response. He can’t tell if she’s being complimentary or contemptuous. Doesn’t really care. Notes that her father gives Bette a hostile stare.

He stands, looks at the lawyer, then at the briefcase in which the gun waits, then to the table with his and his mom’s $25,000 in it. Lawyers, guns, and money, he thinks. He was singing that song in the shower just a few days ago, scrubbing down with a stiff brush and strong soap, trying to get the smell of bluefin tuna fish off his hands.

Through one of the portholes, Casey sees the green Luhrs and the white Bayliner that corralled him a few days ago now approaching just two hundred feet off the trawler’s starboard flank.

“I’m gonna, like, take my dog and go,” he says. “I’ll be honest. I think you people suck. You broke nature’s law by slaughtering those sharks for their fins. For your dang soups. But you take Mae and threaten to let her drown? Then steal twenty-five thousand of ours for ransom? Even greedy, small-minded people like you should be ashamed of that. But you’re not. You don’t know anything. You are toys in the devil’s hands.”

“You’re not a moron,” says Bette. “You don’t really think we’d hurt your dog, do you?”

“You said you would.”

“You are naïve. That’s ridiculous. To you, we’re just evil Chinese who brought the plague to the world. And communism.”

“You’re pirates who threatened to kill my dog. Come on, Mae. Mom — we’re leaving now.”

“Sit down, Casey,” says Bette. “My father has a very interesting offer for you.”

Danilo steps away from the bulkhead, crossing his hands before him, spreading his feet.

Casey sits and Jen follows suit. Mae stands, tail wagging, looking toward the galley exit.

“An offer for what?” asks Jen.

Jimmy Wu purses his lips and glances at Benitez. Then back at Jen. “Okay, now you listen. Simple offer. We supply restaurants but we want a restaurant where there is much money. We want to buy the Barrel in Laguna. It is, very actually, the best restaurant location in Laguna Beach, and Laguna Beach is the best coastal city in California. This is very true and factual. My partners back home are very wealthy businessmen and hungry to invest in a very championship location. Mr. Benitez expert in dining and hospitality. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School. He has written the contract for you to sell to us. We keep the name the Barrel. You still manage the Barrel. Casey is still the bartender and assistant manager. You both get a big salary from me — more than what we estimate you declared to IRS last year. Very generous.”

Benitez takes a file from his briefcase and opens it, thumbing the metal clasp at the top.

“Ninety-six thousand dollars annually for Jen Stonebreaker. Sixty-eight for Casey, with raises determined by the Wu family. Hourly staff and contractors will get what they’re getting now, and whatever increases they have been promised in writing.”

“How much for my restaurant?” asks Jen.

Jimmy smiles. “It brings me pleasure to offer two million dollars. One half is cash, in the bait tank, fifty feet away from you right now. It is bundled and, of course, we have a good scale. The other half will be wire-transferred from First Taiwan Bank into whatever secure and private account you wish. Swiss, I would suggest, or Grand Cayman. And, if you sign right now, we return to you the twenty-five thousand for your idiot dog. Quite a nice payday for you!”

Jen does not smile back. “Two million? That’s what a small house costs in Laguna. The Barrel lot alone is worth three times that. The structure adds another two million, and the established business even more. My answer is no. And if you came up with ten million dollars I’d still say no. Twenty million I’d say no again. The Barrel is my life. My family. I’d set it on fire before I’d sell it to you.”

“Jen Stonebreaker! We think so much alike!” says Wu with a jolly smile. “Oh, funny, funny, when I say Barrel and you say fire!”

Casey meets the incredulous look on his mother’s face with one of his own.

They stand again, as if helping each other up with their locked eyes. Mae heads for the galley door as before.

Casey looks at the piles of money on the table, thinks about the gun in the lawyer’s briefcase, and Danilo’s gun, and he can’t imagine how he can get his money out of here without getting himself and his mother and maybe Mae shot.

Through a rusty porthole he sees that the Luhrs and the Bayliner have eased closer. Through another he sees two red Cigarette boats, Dragon and Bushmaster. Remembers Lieutenant Tim’s description of the pirate fleet. The speedboats are center consoles, and Casey sees two men in each, standing and focused on Empress II.

Jimmy smiles, as if he’s hearing Casey’s anxious thoughts.

Benitez collects another folder from his briefcase and offers it to Jen.

“You should sign this offer now,” he says pleasantly. “Casey is your witness. I will notarize. The offer is fair and reasonable in this current real estate market. You will not lose the Barrel or your history there. You will still be a part of it, and it of you. You will gain two million dollars and who knows? Retire? Open another restaurant? Somewhere other than Laguna Beach, of course.”

“Go to hell, counselor.”

“Many years from now, I hope. Casey?”

Casey shakes his head and backs toward the door. He senses Danilo’s movement behind him.

“No, thank you. No.”

“Ask your mother to sign this,” says the lawyer. “You can then leave here with good money for an aging restaurant, a wonderful dog, and your twenty-five thousand in ransom — a gift from the Wu family. Bette would also like to give you an additional twelve hundred dollars for a new phone. To replace the one you threw into the ocean.”

“Never,” snaps Jen, striding toward the exit behind Mae and ahead of her son. Stops and turns. “You people don’t scare me one bit. If I see you anywhere near the Barrel I’ll set you on fire.”

Before following his mother out, Casey hesitates and studies Bette Wu. “God forgives you.”

“I don’t care, but thanks for putting in a good word for me.”

Casey can’t tell if Bette is scowling or amused. He senses in her face something beyond the wickedness that surrounded her on Moondance and had just minutes ago seemed so obvious here. Now there’s something more, something alien and difficult to know. Something not him.

“Casey, you are a beautiful, weak man,” says Bette Wu. “Be strong about our offer. You and I would be partners. We can discuss details and I can point out the many benefits of partnership with us.”

“Nothing to discuss or point out,” says Casey.

“You’re missing a great opportunity.”

“To be swindled. I’m not stupid, you know.”

Bette gives him an assessing look. “You’re very smart, in fact. So, two million. Think. And good luck at Mavericks. I think you will win.”

“I think my brother will.”

Suddenly, through the galley door stumbles a small man in white Polo warm-ups, his long black hair wrapped around one of Brock Stonebreaker’s big knuckled, tattooed fists. Brock’s other hand holds a big pistol firmly to the man’s temple. Brock’s dreadlocks sprout from his head, dark little stacks. Casey thinks he looks kind of evil but knows he’s not.

“The lawyer’s got a gun, Brock!” Jen yells.

Danilo draws his pistol but Brock already has his gun trained on the man’s chest. Danilo drops his sidearm and looks at Brock with frank hatred. Then raises his hands.

Polo struggles but Brock clenches the knot of black hair and the man yelps.

A big Asian woman barges in next, hands apparently tied behind her, the even bigger Mahina with the pistol-grip, short-barreled scattergun inches from her back.

Brock and Mahina point their guns deliberately and patiently at Jimmy, Bette, Danilo, and Benitez.

“Be calm, everybody,” says Brock. “Lawyer man, you go for that briefcase, they’ll have to clean your brains off the bulkhead.”

Mahina plunks down her shotgun near the money, gives her captive a baleful glare, then palms big handfuls of cash back into the pack and zips it shut.

“This money is not yours,” she says, Brock covering her, pistol in one hand and Polo’s hair still clenched in the other.

“These people think they can steal the Barrel from us,” says Jen. “For two million dollars.”

“Cute,” says Brock. “Where’s that two million going to come from? Not shark-finning.”

Wu’s smile is gone, replaced by a stony, affronted glare. Casey can tell that Wu wants respect, wants to be seen as dangerous.

Wu raises his hands and gets up from the table. In his Kings warm-ups and heavy gold, he moves purposefully across the galley to the life-jacket stowage cabinets. They’re well-marked with images of life vests, and text in English.

Facing his audience, Wu gestures to the nearest drawer.

“Behind this lock? New precursor for fentanyl, headed to Mexico. Very hard to get. Norfentanyl. Four-AP, and 1-boc-4-AP. Over six million dollars in there. Every cartel wants this. They bid up price.”

“Fresh from China,” says Brock.

“The best,” says Jimmy Wu. “And these.”

He signals another cabinet with his upturned palm. Casts a theatrical frown at Jen and opens it. Fog billows into the dank galley but Casey can’t make out what’s inside.

“Frozen shark fins,” Wu says. “More valuable than lobster or crab. Make happy boys and girls.”

Wu’s frown upshifts to a smile, and he won’t shut up:

“In other boats we have grass for San Francisco, Colombian cocaine for San Diego, NATO seven-six-two and five-five-six ammunition for Los Mochis. We have ghost guns, no serial number, private made in California. We have best bluefin tuna for Los Angeles, and fresh shark fins for the restaurants. And cash! So much you can’t believe. More in LA and San Diego. This is how the money comes to us. We can buy the Barrel easy, you bet! And my partners in Taiwan have much more!”

An odd moment of silence then as Bette Wu stares at Jen, and Polo finally stops struggling.

Casey sees men on the decks of the Luhrs and the Bayliner looking down on them. Same guys who shot up his phone. Guns scare him like a sixty-foot wave never could.

In the middle distance, the Cigarettes lurch like bulls in a chute.

He wonders where his God is right now, why He isn’t down here acting on behalf of the upright against the soldiers of Satan.

“Pirates, smugglers, shark finners, lawyers — you really are a fun crew,” says Brock. “Let’s do this again sometime.”

Brock underhands the backpack to Casey, and marches Polo to the door, followed by Mahina and her captive, then Jen and Casey.

All the while he’s got his gun on Wu, Danilo, or Benitez, alternately. Waits for his family to clear the galley, then releases the hostage and backpedals up the gangway to the deck.

Soon as Casey’s back in his truck and moving, Jen calls 911 and describes what she’s just seen at slip 41-B in the National City Marina.

In the rearview mirror Casey sees Bette, Jimmy, Benitez, and their outmaneuvered crew milling around on the deck of Empress II, apparently without a plan.

Jimmy shakes a fist, gold chains glinting in the bright San Diego sun.

Casey falls in behind his mother’s VW Beetle, top down, and follows it to the freeway, Brock driving and Mahina waving a big brown paw at him, her profuse, black island hair blowing in the wind.

No more little surfer-girl crushes on John Stonebreaker. No more “Beach Blanket Bingo.”

No more gazing at him from five houses away at Top of the World, no more spying on him in the hippie van.

John Stonebreaker pulled me into his world that day at Imperial Beach like a riptide that has you before you know it, and you can’t really fight it until it lets you go.

The stats:

Five to seven feet.

Slight offshores.

Top-to-bottom barrels, over fast.

Short shoulders and hard crashes.

By the time we got out of the water at nine o’clock, I was so cold and weak I could barely get my wetsuit off. I stood there for a while with the neoprene pulled down to my waist and a black sweatshirt on, letting the sun thaw my skin and muscles.

I looked beyond the metal border fence to Tijuana, its shanties climbing the steep hills, smoke rising, the smell of burning trash, just a half-mile distant across the river.

I crashed butt first onto a towel in the slightly warm sand, still half-clad in my wetsuit, a hoodie zipped tight, hugging my knees, my hands brine-soaked and wrinkled, eyes closed and heart slowing. The sun warmed my eyelids and I saw the ornery, orange-burnished waves I’d just tried to surf in all their speed and sudden caprice. I missed at least a dozen, just couldn’t paddle fast enough. Quickly fell off a dozen more — they were much steeper and faster than I’d been riding up in Orange County. Crashed another ten or twelve times on the bottom turns — my legs weren’t strong enough. I caught four short, fast waves that I couldn’t outrace, and ended in nasty wipeouts. But what I saw most clearly on the orange-tinted big screen in my head were the three barrels I got into, and belched out of, with what seemed like the velocity of a motorcycle. These beautiful, ribbed, roaring cylinders held me close, then set me free.

And those moments you know why you do this and you believe that there is no other thing on Earth so personal and so good.

It was my introduction to big surf — yes, sir, yes, ma’am — please accept my wipeouts as bows and curtsies.

“You did good out there,” said John.

I stayed in my burnished orange world, eyes closed. Saw a five-foot section opening up for me like a gift, looked down to see my feet on the board and the leg-throbbing bottom snap to beat that crashing lip. Saw from the corner of my vision the collapsing wall of whitewater that took me out by surprise.

“Thanks, John.”

“You took a beating, too.”

“Nothing broken or cut.”

“Imperial’s a devil and you handled it.”

“I got to get stronger.”

“All your swim and polo training is great. You just need more waves. And bigger ones. You feel it, don’t you?”

“What.”

Some time went by as John thought. I felt the sun easing into my muscles and bones. Sleep knocked.

“How important this is. How it doesn’t matter but it means everything.”

“What exact everything does it mean, John?”

“Freedom. That if you go fast enough, time stops. The barrel is the moment but the moment is eternal. And you are free. Dad says that surfing can lead to God. I say, surfing is God.”

I opened my eyes and looked up at him. Saw that same older-than-his-years expression he had in the tiki light the night before. Saw the same boy’s glitter in his eyes. The child in his man’s body.

“That’s a bit much for me to believe, preacher son. But we never went to church, so what do I know?”

“I want someone to do this with, Jen. Don’t say anything. Just think about it. It would be our world. Our strength.”

“To ride waves?”

“Big waves. The biggest you can. There are these computerized programs that forecast waves all over the Earth. They crunch the wind and storm power and direction, the swell size and frequency, factor in bottoms and tides. They’re discovering big waves — enormous waves — that nobody knew about. The old Hawaiians say you can’t catch a wave over thirty feet by paddling into it. There’s talk about jet skis and fast boats and helicopters. That’s where I want to be. That’s what I want to ride. Dad’s got his church, and huge waves are going to be mine. I want a partner. Don’t say anything, Jen. I’m asking you not to say anything.”

“Are you asking me to be that partner?”

“Damn, I told you not to say anything.”

“It’s a pretty important question, John. I just turned eighteen. I’m kicking butt in all my sports and hauling down a four-point-two GPA. I’m looking good for the Creative Journalism Department at UC Irvine. I have a little tiny bit of talent. A life and a future. The world’s going on out there, John. They caught the Unabomber. That spooky bin Laden has declared war on America! I’m not so sure that surfing gigantic waves is the way I want to spend my time. Medium waves, maybe. Part of life, you know, but not a religion.”

“You wouldn’t lose anything. You’d get a bigger life. Think about it, Jen.”

“Why me?”

“You’re the best chick I know.”

“What about all your twenty-and-more-year-olds? They’ve got more to offer than I do.”

“You surf better than any of them. I see you at twenty-two, and thirty-two and forty-two and, based on today, you’ll still have them all beat. You’ve got something rare, Jen Byrne. You got all your mom’s fight and win, win, win. And your dad’s big heart. He really cares about the people needing protection. You’re a tough package to beat.”

I was still sitting upright, feet on the blanket and arms resting on my knees.

“Well, John, I thought I was going surfing today. Not getting buried in a life plan.”

“I know what I want. For now, we’ll surf together every chance we get. There’s this place called Cortes Bank a hundred miles off San Diego. It breaks on an undersea mountain range just below the surface! They say they’re the biggest rideable waves discovered so far. Only a few people even know about it. I’ve seen the secret pictures.”

“Secret pictures of waves? That’s funny.”

“It’s not funny at all. They’re obviously huge. We just can’t tell how huge because there’s only a distant buoy to compare them to. Could be fifty feet. Could be eighty. As partners, we’ll be there. Our life will be the biggest waves on Earth. The biggest we can handle. See the whole world! I’ve got decent pay and flex hours with UPS, and free rent at home when I’m not on the road surfing. I know you, Jen Byrne. And you know me. I can tell by the way you look at me that you know exactly who I am.”

“You’re blowing my mind, John.”

“We can do it.”

“I can think about it.”

“If you’re in for Cortes Bank, we’re headed out Friday evening. I’m fixing some straps to my gun to hold me on. Gonna be rough and cold. But you won’t miss a day of school. You can stay on that honor roll. Pick you up at six.”

That smile of his. That face. The boy in the man, the man in the boy.

I was roiling with an eighteen-year-old’s emotions, suddenly too dense to untangle and name. I knew that life, in the form of John Stonebreaker, had offered me a path. But it felt like looking down into the Grand Canyon when I was ten, and getting that queasy clench in my gut as my breath caught and my head went light.

I wanted no part of that canyon.

And wasn’t sure I wanted John’s path. But I didn’t want him on it without me.

Jen makes her two o’clock with Dr. Penelope Parker, a Berkeley-educated psychiatrist whom Jen has been seeing for almost twenty years.

In Dr. Parker’s ocean-view office on Park Avenue, they have talked about Jen, the girl, the water polo and surf teams’ captain, class valedictorian, and Miss Laguna. Jen, the just-off-the-podium Montreal Games freestyler, backstroker, and butterflyer. Talked much about Jen and John, surfing the world together in love, crazy love that Jen has called the best hours of her life. Talked big-wave competition, big-wave fame, her need to win, a gift from Mom, her need to protect and serve, a gift from Dad. Talked of her striving to love John perfectly. Of John’s death. Of Jen, the sudden, grieving widow at twenty-one. Of Prozac, vodka, and Xanax. Being a mom, raising her sons, and them leaving home. The sadness. The failed men since John — her pretty boys of summer, dead to her eyes. Jen the published journalist, loneliness and aloneness, Mom and Dad aging. Quitting big waves after John died, surfing small waves only until the boys turned pro. And they’ve talked of riding big waves again — soon, just a few weeks away now, depending on this winter’s storms — in the Monsters of Mavericks.

Penelope knows her as well as her family does.

“How was your week?” asks the doctor.

“Hairy,” says Jen. “Casey and I got into a scrape with pirates down in San Diego. Pirates, if you can believe that. Worse. They made my skin crawl.”

“I’ve read about them. Poachers and smugglers, into all sorts of illegal things. Difficult to catch out on the high seas. Underfunded agencies and overlapping jurisdictions.”

“They dognapped Casey’s Labrador, Mae. We got her back.”

A beat then, because Penelope Parker knows by now when Jen is evading.

“You’d rather not talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“You certainly know our frontal attack by now, Jen.”

“I do.”

“Then I’ll pivot: Did the pirate encounter leave you afraid?”

“No. I’m not afraid of anything but big waves with me or my sons on them. The pirates threatened to burn down the Barrel.”

“Have you filed a police report?”

“Yesterday. A sergeant, Bickle, said he can’t do much but step up patrol. He calls it increased visibility. Which means an extra pass or two per shift. He doesn’t think it’s anything but a wild threat. These people claim to be into some ugly stuff. They bragged about all the contraband they buy and sell. The cops recommended private security but I’ve already got that. I’m going to move into the apartment over the Barrel. It’s a good-sized two-bedroom. Brock and Mahina are moving in, too. Which means Stonebreakers at the Barrel twenty-four, seven. Plus Casey, who’s in the bar almost every day. You can see the restaurant from the back deck of the apartment. I’ve got a three-fifty-seven Magnum that Brock gave me for my fortieth and taught me to shoot. Kicks like a mule. I go to the range once a month. I don’t think I’d have the courage to ever use it.”

Silence but for the cars heading up and down Park and the thrum of Coast Highway.

“I don’t recommend you living at the Barrel with a gun, Jen. You know all the stats on gun owners.”

“It’s not my gun I’m worried about.”

Penelope adjusts herself on her big leather wing chair, scribbles in her notebook. She’s tall, with a pleasant face, a bushy brown ponytail, big hands and feet. Twenty-something years older than Jen, and old-school regarding laptops or tablets. Today’s reading glasses are blue.

“I don’t recommend you living at the Barrel. Let the police handle the pirates.”

“I did hear you the first time, Doctor.”

“I’m here to help my patients lead fuller, happier lives. Which does not include gunplay and death by firearms.”

“I do appreciate that. I’d be careful. Can we talk about the Monsters? As I told you last month, I’ve begun having the dreams again. Almost every night. Very vivid and believable.”

“Describe your most recent.”

“The one where I drop in and make the wave and the lip crashes into my back. I don’t see it coming. I’m on my board, down at the bottom, and there’s fifty feet of water behind me, over me; I don’t see it, either. I think I’m going to make that bottom turn, then I’m flat down on the rocks holding on like John did and everything looks infrared, then I wake up. Sweaty and hot and my heart beating fast.”

The scratch of pen on paper.

“One of your three near-death scenarios.”

Jen adds nothing to that.

“We can increase the Xanax and suppress the dreams. Though I don’t recommend it.”

“It actually seems to be encouraging them lately.”

“Then we can decrease, or stop that medication altogether and see what happens. Try another mild sedative. Even an over-the-counter sleeping aid.”

“That backfired years ago.”

“And you’ve been having these same three dreams since the very year we began therapy.”

“You sound accusatory,” says Jen. “I don’t control my dreams.”

“Not an accusation. Rather, I’d like to suggest a new modality for reducing the emotional negativity of the dream, or even finding a pathway for allowing these dreams to help you.”

Jen feels a jab of impatience. “Doctor, I respect your judgment very much, but that backfired before, too.”

“We can consider a just-approved anti-anxiety medication. Stronger than the Xanax.”

“I don’t want the heavy stuff.”

“The recent literature is promising.”

And now, along with the impatience, disappointment.

“Am I that big a nutcase?”

“Just frightened,” says the doctor.

“Nothing scares me but those waves and these dreams. But okay. I’ll think about it.”

“There’s another attack we can try, not involving medications at all.”

“Lay it on me,” says Jen.

“Maybe you should reconsider. Don’t surf the Monsters. Don’t tow in Casey on your jet. With that adjustment, I think there’s a very good chance that those dreams will recede again, as they did for so many years. Before your decision to compete.”

“I don’t look on them as a warning.”

“Maybe you should. They are damaging your emotional strength, and could hinder your performance in the contest.”

“So just quit? Isn’t that, like, a ruptured appendix infecting my stomach, and you remove the stomach? You know me better than that, Doctor Parker.”

“Consider it.”

“You don’t understand, I have to beat the fear of the big waves. Not just avoid them. I have to get back on the horses that threw me. And threw John. And might throw my boys. I’m tired of running and hiding, Doctor. I need to confront the past. I need to find my courage. I need to win. I need to finally beat these fucking monsters.”

“But, Jen, fear is one of the many things that keeps us alive. It has helped through the ages. It allows courage but discourages death. Allows fight and flight. We wouldn’t be here without it. You told me that John respected those potentially deadly waves. That he was always prepared and always cautious.”

“But he was never afraid of them!”

“Do you think, possibly, that he should have been?”

Because I had his back, Jen thinks. That was my character and my love and my calling. Protect and serve. She looks at the tissue box on the end table beside her, decides not to, just lets the damned tears roll down her freckled cheeks.

“Jen, after John’s death, you experienced these fearful dreams over years. But you gave up the alcohol and didn’t require the sedatives. You listened to your subconscious, and you decided to stay away from things that can harm you. Or worse. Now, you’ve chosen to ignore yourself by entering the contest that killed John. The dreams are back, and you are depending on alcohol and Xanax for sleep again. What’s taking you back to Mavericks? Why now?”

“Six months ago I decided to tell the truth about John and myself and what happened. Tell all. The truth, from start to finish.”

“Was there an inciting incident? Some moment or event?”

“No. Just twenty-five years of evasion and silence. On my part. I need to tell, Doctor. I need to write it down.”

A long pause from the doctor, pen poised over the notebook.

“You’ve been telling me the truth for twenty years, haven’t you?”

“Mostly. But I mean publicly. For the world. To write it.”

“Well, I read your first installment in the Surf Tribe Magazine. It was touching and beautifully sad. I learned a lot I didn’t know about you and John. I’m sure the writing is cathartic for you. And I encourage you to continue the series.”

“I think I’m done, Penelope.”

“I suppose that’s between you and your editor. But it’s absolutely your decision to make.”

Another long beat, then Jen snatches a tissue from the box and wipes her face.

“We have four minutes.”

“I think I’m done with this, I mean. You have helped me so much. I love you, Dr. Parker. Thank you.”

The doctor looks over her blue glasses at Jen, writes something in her notebook, then sets the readers on her table and stands.

They meet halfway across the Persian rug and hug a long time. Jen can feel their heartbeats.

“I think we should continue here together for a few more sessions,” says the doctor. “I think you should discontinue the Xanax and really put your foot down on the alcohol.”

In Jen’s silence, the doctor considers her with pursed lips and sympathetic eyes.

“These narratives that you’ve been piecing together with me over the years, Jen,” says Dr. Parker. “Are they complete? Is there more?”

“There’s more. That’s what I’m writing. I’m so tired of falling. I’m ready to fly, Penelope.”

“You don’t seem ready to fly at all. More like a young bird, crouched on the lip of its nest, terrified.”

“I’m going to make those waves at Mavericks. I’m going to help my boys survive and compete. If I dream at night, so be it. Well, thank you again.”

“I’m disappointed. But I’ll be reading every word you write. I know you’ll find your way. I’ll leave this two o’clock open for a few weeks, in case you change your mind. And remember — sometimes fear is a friend, and caution a teacher. Tell your whole truth, Jen Stonebreaker. Confess it to the world and yourself. And for heaven’s sake, don’t move into the Barrel upstairs and try to guard the place with a gun.”

Jen feels like she’s been punched in the stomach by Mike Tyson.

Confess it...

Nods and hugs Dr. Parker again, then breaks free and walks out.

Heart pounding, stomach aching, knees uncertain.

Jen tracks Belle Becket to the beach behind the Laguna Hotel. Belle moves her business around a bit. This is Jen’s monthly three o’clock and she’s as faithful to it as she’s been to Dr. Parker — until ten minutes ago.

Belle sits at her flimsy card table in the shade of the old hotel, just outside the roped-off section of beach reserved for guests. A small yellow batik tablecloth is held down at all four corners and in the middle by big abalone shells brimming with smaller shells. Sea-glass necklaces and earrings dangle from driftwood hangers. Jen thinks of John every time she sees sea glass. Just one of those memories in the legions of memories that don’t go away.

Belle’s sign is written in her small, graceful calligraphic hand, on a brown paper Ralphs bag inverted over a shadeless brass lampstand with no cord:

“Hey, hey, Belle!”

“Jen?”

A good sign, thinks Jen, because Belle doesn’t always remember her.

Belle gets up, plants her bare feet on the sand, and gives Jen a brief hug. Brief is okay with Jen because Belle doesn’t bathe often. She does try to keep her limited wardrobe clean. Dries her clothes over the painted psychedelic sea wall running south along the cliff from here, a depiction of John Stonebreaker riding a bright, melodramatically perfect wave meant to be Brooks Street. Jen remembers the day she first saw it completed, fresh and psychedelically vibrant. Laguna commissions mural art all over the city, often inspired by or dedicated to local heroes. She stops for a moment, as always, feeling the familiar longing and regret.

Jen sits facing her long-ago best friend and the glittering Main Beach breakers beyond.

Belle’s wearing an old-fashioned hippie tie-dye dress, and of course a sea-glass necklace and earrings. Her dark brown hair is long, tangled, and stiff with sea salt. Gray eyes. Her face is dark and lined, her mouth a nest of wrinkles and ruined teeth.

“You look worried, Jen.”

“I just fired Dr. Parker.”

“Maybe it was time.”

“Apparently.”

Jen introduced Belle Becket to her shrink almost twenty years ago, when Belle began hitting the crack, living in flops, then the downtown alleys, then in the Laguna Canyon brush, really letting go. Belle had seen the psychiatrist, irregularly, for a year, on Jen’s dime, then vanished from Laguna without a word. Five years later she was back, panhandling on the Main Beach boardwalk, scrounging food from the Coast Highway cafes and fast-food joints and dumpsters, marginally cleaning herself up in the tourist rinse-off showers.

Belle Becket, an incorrigible beauty, a once loyal — if troubled — friend, a hot surfer, had returned home a hollowed shell.

Not unlike the scoured abalone halves on the table here, Jen thinks, lifting an all-green sea-glass bracelet from one. She gets five twenties from the wallet in her shoulder bag, sets them in the mason jar.

“Short or long?” The standard opening.

“Do what you do, Belle. Look at me and tell me what you see.”

To Jen, the most surprising part of this arrangement — this crust of a friendship going back to when Jen and Belle were ten years old, in fourth grade together at Top of the World Elementary — is that they still understand each other, still get what makes the other tick.

She wonders how fifteen-plus years of silence, Belle’s mental illness, and brief monthly visits have allowed them to know each other this well. Or, Jen thinks now, as she has thought many times before: Is it just each other’s limits we know so well?

Perhaps not surprisingly, Belle Becket is a very good fortune-teller. She can read a mood in a second, and creep into the future on it.

She moves the lamp for room and takes Jen’s hands in her rough and dirty ones. Stares at Jen with her dark, heavily made-up racoon-style eyes.

“I see your waves, of course. Always waves.”

“The Monsters of Mavericks is coming up.”

“I feel something different is happening inside you. Your mind is cluttered and your blood is unsettled. Does this have to do with the contest?”

“Yeah. I’m competing for the first time since John.”

“Oh, girl. When did you decide this?”

“Six months ago.”

“Why?”

“I’m trying to whup the fear. About what happened. There’s anger, too. And regret. They’re all mixed up and stormy.”

“Like those big waves.”

Silence then, Belle’s rough hands warm on Jen’s on the table in the sun.

“I see a picture now,” says Belle. “A still picture of a future day. Dark mountains of water. A gray sky with rain. I see you on a large wave. Your orange-and-black wetsuit and helmet. Your orange-and-black board. You have just let go of the tow rope and Casey is speeding away on the jet ski. You must see this picture often—”

“Almost every night. I don’t know what happens. If I make the wave or not.”

“You will make the wave if you can see it happen. You will ride that wave only if you let it break in your mind.”

“Will I wipe out on the rocks?”

“Show us. Close your eyes, Jen. Open yourself to this dream, this day that hasn’t happened yet. It is real. Be there. Let Casey tow you. Watch it happen. Give me a film, Jen, not a picture. See.”

“I see black. Nothing beyond.”

“You don’t want to see beyond. Let the black go.”

For a long moment Jen can’t free the wave from its black wrapper.

But then, the black wave turns into blue-green ocean, with a sleek speedboat bobbing at rest.

“Jen, what is this? Something disturbing happened on the water. Not far from here. Recently, but not a wave.”

Jen pictures Jimmy Wu and Polo in their gleaming Cigarette boat.

“Pirates,” she says. “They threatened to kill Casey’s dog. They threatened to burn down the Barrel.”

“They will not kill Casey’s dog,” whispers Belle. “They will try to burn down the Barrel. I see the Barrel bar now, just as you do. A woman argues with Casey. I don’t think they know each other.”

“Bette Wu.”

“Yes, Bette. I saw this Bette Wu on the beach here in Laguna,” says Belle. “Below Heisler Park. Posing in fashion clothes. Reclining on the rocks. Sleek like a seal, glossy black hair.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, Jen. But you know me, and you know my cosmic reality — tomorrow, yesterday, today — all the same.”

Jen opens her eyes and Belle does likewise. Her racoon eyes are sloppily drawn and the exhaustion Jen sees in them always follows a psychic excursion into their pasts, presents, and futures.

“I know this is hard work for you,” says Jen. She pulls her hand from Belle’s, patting the sun-wrinkled skin lightly.

“It’s always been,” says Belle. “Other people’s emotions and thoughts get mixed into my own. It frightens me when I can’t tell them apart. Even someone I’ve never met. But especially someone I’ve known so well and so long, who has powerful vibrations. Your past haunts and confuses me.”

“Have you ever been betrayed, Belle?”

Belle studies Jen sidelong and hard, a suspicious racoon.

“Never. I’ve felt love and loyalty from my friends and family all my life. They’ve been angry and afraid of me. Ashamed and confused. But they never betrayed me. Have you been?”

“No, the same.”

Belle points a jagged-nailed forefinger into the air between them. “I see your words here in the space between us — ‘no, the same.’ They’re bright, lemon yellow. They wobble and fade. This is the color of a lie.”

Which Jen continues. “If I was betrayed I didn’t know it.”

“So much happens to us that we never see. Or admit to seeing.”

Jen holds Belle’s gaze again, detects a lack of sanity in her flat gray eyes, her botched makeup, her mane of filthy hair. Replaces all that with the memory of the beautiful girl she’d known and loved and hugged and argued and rode waves with. Nothing kicks you harder than time, she thinks.

“There I am,” says Belle. “As you see me.”

Another long look shared, eye to eye.

“Jen? I don’t see your latest friend. Mark.”

Which of course brings Mark to Jen’s mind, duly intercepted by Belle.

“Ah,” she says. “Where has he been?”

“We didn’t work out.”

“Why? You were so interested in him the last time we talked.”

“He’s a little too loose and a little too young. NMR.”

“No man required, hmmm. After all these years, that’s where we end up. Your mom and dad good?”

“Dad’s retired. Playing golf and kind of bored. Mom’s still hyperactive, running the girls’ watersports programs at the high school.”

“I always loved those two.”

“And yours?”

“They’re still in Montana when it’s warm. Dad’s thinking of selling his practice and retiring.”

Jen comes around the little table and hugs Belle. Wonders for the millionth time if this is really good for either of them.

“I’ll see you later, Belle.”

“But which me will you see?”

Belle’s old joke from when they were kids.

Still flush with adrenaline from beating down on King Jim and his pirates, Brock stalks a sidewalk in downtown San Diego, pulling a wheeled cart of naloxone, clanking oxygen cylinders, and bottled water. He’s posted to all his Rescue Mission followers, and is hoping to get a little participation here. He’s got on a black-and-green Go Dogs T-shirt with the snarling dachshund mascot, and cargo shorts loaded with granola bars and vitamin packets. He and Mahina are looking for anyone struggling to breathe.

He knows there will be some customers, just up ahead in the shadows of the towering Central Library. There are Right Fighters and cops around, giving Brock hard looks and occasional nods of recognition.

One of the Right Fighters waves at them.

“Guns on the left, clowns to the right,” says Mahina.

It’s late afternoon and the streets around the library are crowded with tents and strung tarps and shopping carts stuffed with clothes and blankets and random items from boom boxes to swim fins, a beaten guitar, boxed wine, donated greens wilting in plastic bags, dog kibble, a trike, an American flag on a tilting pole. People everywhere, tucked into the shadows, some moving and others still as statues on this breezeless day. A dog, a parrot atop a tent, a pet rat on a man’s shoulder.

Just behind him, Mahina tugs a cooler filled with chopped, chilled pineapple and watermelon.

“You, bro, you’re looking puny to me,” Brock says, kneeling next to a heavyset man in a wheelchair.

“Hard to breathe, got ’can?”

“You don’t get Narcan yet,” says Mahina, offering him a cube of watermelon. “You just dose?”

“No, no, this morning.”

“Narcan’ll keep you alive but mess up your brain. You’re not overdosing. You need air, man. Oxygen. Breath of Life.”

Brock gets the pulse oximeter onto the guy’s cuss finger. The guy is sweating but his cheeks are cold.

He and Mahina have trained sixteen hours to do this. They pay for the oxygen cylinders, naloxone, food, and water out of the unsteady Breath of Life Rescue Mission bank account.

“You’re all over the place, man,” Brock says.

“The ’can keeps me high.”

Mahina has the cylinder out, and she fixes the breathing mask to the top. Brock takes off the oximeter and holds down the big man’s arms as his wife presses the mask to his face and toggles open the valve.

The big man inhales deeply, then again. Brock and Mahina lock eyes briefly and he sees not just compassion in her but forbearance — the same things he feels.

Sometimes he hugs these sufferers; sometimes he wants to slap them silly.

“You just breathe in big, mister,” Mahina says. “Take in the breath. Take in the life.”

Brock notes that one of the Right Fighters is videoing him from across the trashy, fast-food-wrapper-strewn street. Mahina walks toward them, her own phone brandished like the weapon it is.

“You a Jesus nut?” he warbles through the mask.

“I’m a life nut. I want you alive. I want you alive enough to get up and help these beat-up souls around you.”

“I gots Petey to take care of. My dog. He’s got a soul, too.”

“You bet,” says Brock. “I’m going to let go your arms now, so don’t be thrashing around. I’m going to get you some cold fruit and water. Keep breathing, bro.”

Brock and Mahina’s next client is face up on the sidewalk on a sleeping bag, and she’s completely stopped breathing.

In seconds, Brock has the Narcan out and sprays the full four-milliliter dose into one nostril.

All Brock and Mahina can do is wait two minutes before administering a second dose, but they know that every second of not breathing means brain cells dying off fast. They’ve heard dozens of times from friends and family that when some naloxone revivals come to and revive, they’re not the same person ever again.

But just thirty seconds later this young woman gasps and tries to dig her fingernails into the sidewalk, and is soon gulping air as deeply as she can.

Mahina has the oxygen cylinder on her, mask snug and valve open.

The woman sits up, crossing her bruised and dirty legs. “Thanks. Thanks.”

Breathing deeply still, she looks at Mahina then Brock with what looks like gratitude and suspicion.

“What’s your name, woman?” asks Mahina.

“Gail.”

Brock fetches a cold bottled water from his cart, breaks it open, and hands it to her. She brings it to her lips, hands shaking.

“It’s going to get bad when the ’can wears off,” says Gail.

“Don’t get high again too soon,” says Mahina. “You’re just going to be doing this again. Unless you just overdose, up and die.”

“I don’t want to die.”

Gail pulls on the oxygen for another three minutes. Eats some melon and pineapple and downs another bottle of water.

“Help me up?”

With both big hands, Mahina pulls her upright. Gail manages to pick up her sleeping bag.

“Thanks again.”

She drags the ragged red nylon sleeping bag to the library wall, underhands it into a blue dome tent among other dome tents and lean-tos, then waves back at them, stoops, and crawls in.

When she’s inside, Brock looks at Mahina, shakes his head with weariness, and turns to see the Right Fighters shooting video of him again.

“You’re saving the wrong people, Stonebreaker!” one calls out, raising his phone high.

Brock feels the anger and takes off toward them, mayhem in mind.

“Thanks for the invite, Saint Brock! We’ll see you again!”

They sprint off in different directions.

Brock brakes and watches them go, heart pounding, bile rising.

Next afternoon Casey is on time for his Travel & Adventure Magazine interview and photo shoot up in Hollywood. A cover, no less. Last month it was Gal Gadot.

He’s standing on a small stage in nothing but swim trunks, his back to a ceiling-high black backdrop blanched bright by a blinding forest of lights. It’s hot, even with the fans turned up high to make Casey’s yellow-blond hair stand up and lean back with apparent velocity.

T&A is what Casey calls this mag, aware that his A is part of what they’re after here. The magazine contract requires one backside image to include “minimally and tastefully exposed buttocks, mutually acceptable by both parties.”

“Minimally” isn’t precisely spelled out, and Casey is definitely concerned about this picture, given his reputation as a privileged, vain, self-hyped pretty-boy Jesus freak who surfs big waves more for fame and money than the actual thrill of surfing. This being the general drift of the small, loose-knit, and very opinionated big-wave surfing scene — the writers, photographers, and filmmakers — and even some of the surfers themselves. There’s been some ugly backstabbing that Casey doesn’t dig, mostly from the tough-ass Santa Cruz guys, things like, Casey’s a Ken doll on a surfboard, Casey’s a rich Laguna boy, Casey’s chasing the legend of his father, John, who was surfing the Monsters of Mavericks the day he died.

Casey was surprised when he started hearing things like that, some years ago, when he first began making very big waves at Sunset, Jaws, Teahupo’o, Todos Santos, and Mavericks — and riding them pretty well for a young gun. Didn’t understand why how he looked and where he came from were such negatives. It wasn’t like Laird and Buzzy and some other guys didn’t do some modeling to make money. You had to make it somehow. There wasn’t a big-wave surfer on Earth — and might never be — who could make a decent living without sponsorships and modeling and product pitching. Heck, the biggest first-place big-wave contest purse for risking your life was, thus far, a whopping $50,000. How long could you live on that? And travel the world, chasing the biggest waves on the planet? Just the airfares and lodging were a fortune.

There have been digs on Jen, too. Not published or recorded, but rumors about what she didn’t do the day her husband died, how she could have gotten to the impact zone faster, should have used a more powerful jet ski, how she once said that she was never great on a jet ski to begin with.

Of course, Casey had read every word published about that day, and seen the video and film, and talked to everybody he could find who was in the water, and not one of them would say anything about Jen Stonebreaker being in any way at fault.

But still, he’s heard and overheard the rumors and innuendo, always attributed to someone who was there, someone who of course, to Casey’s face, denies all. His brother, Brock, punched out a flippant photographer who’d “insulted Mom” at the annual World Surfing Awards banquet not long ago, clips viral, assault charges pressed, a no-contest plea and ten days in Los Angeles County Jail and a $15,000 medical-damages bill for Brock.

Casey’s take on all this is he’s got a billion followers and fans who like and respect him and his family, and he’s not going to let the rumor mill distract him. It’s hard to put their wishes for bad karma out of his mind, but Casey does. Sure, they sneak in once in a while but Casey turns his heroic chin the other way, just like the good book says.

With the photo shoot done, Casey puts his shirt and jeans and flip-flops back on, then pulls up a director’s chair in front of the writer. The stage is dark and the fans turned to low.

He talks and talks.

Interviews are easy now. He used to get excited and wig out talking about surfing and lose his train of thought, but at twenty-four he’s so used to talking about himself — how he does what he does, and what’s the biggest wave, scariest break, most dangerous wipeout, most terror-struck moment in the water he’s ever experienced — that he can answer without really thinking. He knows what a sound bite is.

But sometimes, an interviewer wants to get the really choice, heavy-duty stuff, which is what this writer asks now:

“So, Mr. Stonebreaker, why do you ride waves so big they can easily kill you? Give the why of it.”

This isn’t a simple answer, but Casey doesn’t have to think about it.

“I feel God when I’m on a big wave. He’s closest to me then. I’m His creation and He loves me.”

A moment of silence while the writer nods and looks down at his tape recorder.

“What about the rest of the time?”

“Oh, for reals, man. But not as strong. I went to the interactive van Gogh a couple of years ago, and felt God there. Yeah. In every one of those pixels.”

Keneally clears his throat.

“Where do you think Jesus Christ fits into all this?”

“He’s a part of everything, like we all are.”

“Even the wicked?”

“Maybe less so them,” says Casey. “I’m not sure how it all works.”

Mae seems to have sensed that things might be winding down here. Aging and slow, she lumbers to Casey’s side and lies beside his chair.

He leans over and scratches behind one ear, runs his finger along her graying muzzle.

“Good luck at the Monsters of Mavericks,” says the writer.

“Thanks, man. I’ll be ready.”

“Some of the contest people up in Half Moon Bay say all the contestants have a chance, but don’t say you’re a contender. Your brother, but not you. Thoughts on that?”

Which hurts Casey’s feelings, on top of his rep as a privileged, semi-talented, money-mad, pretty-boy action doll.

“I hope Brock wins,” he says.

“Instead of you?”

“Heck yeah.”

“When does he find time to surf and train, with all those rescue missions he does — the fires and floods and hurricanes, or taking those vaccines to people who couldn’t leave their homes or tents or encampments?”

“Brock has the energy of ten men,” says Casey. “And doesn’t even train that much for contests,” says Casey. “He’s a total natural.”

Casey thinks of Brock robbing the Wu pirates at gunpoint just days ago. Robbing the pirates back. It’s no wonder that Brock thinks he’s in a good enough place to win at Mavericks. He also thinks he’s invented a new God to replace the old, burnt-out, useless ones. Brock is Brock because he believes: the Breath of Life! Go Dogs! Get off your asses and help! It’s not what the world can do for you.

While I tan my butt for a T&A cover story.

“Thanks for your time, Casey Stonebreaker. Lots of good stuff to work with here. Don’t miss that great billboard right out front.”

When the writer leaves, Casey stays in the director’s chair, posts some pictures of himself and Mae here in the now-empty studio. Dashes off a quick CaseyGram on how he thinks his brother will win the Monsters if they get the waves this year. He gets a lot of responses to that post, most of his followers saying, no, “YOU’RE GOING TO WIN IT!”

He loves his fans. The confidence they bring him. The trust he tries very hard to deserve.

He’s also always liked being an underdog. Makes him feel hyper-depressurized, like nothing can go wrong. Well, in the case of sixty-foot waves, like less can go wrong.

Late that night, wired on coffee and NoDoz, Brock and Mahina leave sleeping Casey in the apartment above the Barrel, then head out for their church in Aguanga.

He drives pretty much as fast as the old Go Dogs Econoline will go to retrieve the supplies they might need if crazy Jimmy Wu tries to burn down the Barrel. Mahina naps with her head against the window, her crown of dark hair for a pillow.

Brock thought that Laguna Police sergeant Bickle was a nice guy, but awfully damned nonchalant for a cop, and no expert at threat assessment.

One of the things Brock learned years ago, in the messy business of illegal grass, is that you take threats at full face value. Just ask the seven Laotians recently murdered on a big grow not a mile from Aguanga. Sheriff investigators still have no firm motive nor suspects but Brock does: New Generation cartel soldiers from Tijuana suggesting that the poor, overworked, if not enslaved, Laotians vacate the greater Anza Valley dope industry and get back to cleaning rooms and washing dishes in LA and San Diego. What those Laotians needed was proaction, Brock reasons. Proaction, like, yesterday, dude. Do it now! Which goes against his laid-back surf upbringing — courtesy of his mother and his grandpa, the pastor Mike Stonebreaker.

And something else he learned, in Ukraine — alongside some of the Go Dogs’ finest — was that fools and showoffs like Jimmy Wu are dangerous, especially when armed and in charge. He’d seen the volunteer mercenaries outside Kyiv, swaggering and self-assured to the point of foolhardiness, even martyrdom.

And, from his aging Belfast relatives, Brock had absorbed the bloody tales of his forebearers and noted the important fact that families were the fiercest but also the most vulnerable fighting units on Earth. There was just no stopping them once they joined the battle, not until every last one of them was gone. Then you have the sons and daughters. And theirs. Irish, Chinese, Californian, Brock realized — it didn’t matter.

Now Highway 371 leads him higher in elevation, and in his headlight beams the rolling grasslands give way to boulder-strewn hills bristling with manzanita, wild buckwheat, and mallow. Brock saw a mountain lion right about here at the old Bergman Museum just last month, standing on the highway shoulder, looking at him steadily as he sped by.

Just past the tiny village of Aguanga — really just a US Post Office and a small market run by a soft-spoken Cahuilla Indian named Bill — Brock brakes, hits his brights, and follows a well-kept dirt road that descends along a creek, through sycamores and high cottonwoods shivering in the quarter moonlight.

“Not as beautiful as O’ahu,” says Mahina, straightening in her seat.

Brock comes to the gate, locked by a chain of heavy padlocks to which Mahina, Jen, Casey, and Mike and Marilyn Stonebreaker have keys. As do most of the Go Dogs, and the Breath of Life Rescue Mission elders.

Brock locks the gate behind him and drives onward, the Econoline’s rear tires skittering on the hard gravel.

The Breath of Life Rescue Mission compound is a mile in, past a cattail-ringed lake, built into the feet of the steep hills. Most of it went up in the fifties.

The chapel is cinderblock, charmless but huge. It’s got small windows, an aluminum roof, and a cavernous fireplace inside.

The ranch house and some of the outbuildings are white plaster, with terracotta barrel roofing, deep-set windows framed with Spanish tiles, and heavy wooden doors.

The redwood barn and stucco guest cottages are in decent repair, recently stripped and repainted in Go Dog bright green, with matte black trim. The buildings would be a shock to the locals, but they’re invisible from the highway and to the few, very distant, neighbors.

Brock could care less. When you see it, the Breath of Life Rescue Mission should wake your lazy ass up, is how Brock thinks of the jarring green-and-black color scheme.

Brock parks and steps out, hears the frogs down in the pond, and smells the fresh scent of sage. Sees the dark thicket of manzanita down by the creek. Loves this land. Checks that moon again. A quarter. Stands there for a moment, a grown man in shorts and a dumbass dachshund logo T-shirt, with tattoos of waves and suns and moons and fish and birds all over him — “Mom” inked on one shoulder and “Mahina” on the other — arms raised as he listens to his wife climbing the front porch steps, unlocking the security screen door, and banging into their home.

The house is a small two-bedroom built in 1915 by locals. River rock walls, heavily cemented, a newish aluminum roof. Vaguely Craftsman in design, with a peaked front porch under the roof extension and staunch beam caissons.

Brock and Mahina have furnished it in secondhand, mostly Pacific Island furniture — bamboo and rattan, bright floral padding, a glass tabletop on coconut-tree stumps, Hawaiian carvings of turtles and fish. White bamboo bookshelves. Masks. A humble tiki bar.

Inside, Mahina hands him a very cold Bohemia. They touch bottles and sip.

“We did good work today, Brock. We maybe saved Gail’s life.”

He nods. Imagines the sidewalks of tents and tarps, the slow-motion citizens eyeing them suspiciously, caught in squalor.

“And we got Mae back,” she says. “What do we need from here, for the Barrel?”

“Fire extinguishers, guns, and night-vision goggles.”

“Are you worried?”

“Yes.”

“That’s why you’re still alive.”

Brock looks through the windows facing east. Hidden down there are twenty-six trailers, some small and some large, most of them older. Last he checked, there were eighty-seven people housed there, including twelve children — six home-schooled and six who catch the bus at the Aguanga post office for the public schools in Anza Valley.

The Breath of Life Rescue Mission charges no rent, and supplies the electricity, propane, and water pumped in at some expense by the county. Random Access Foundation, which bought and donated the property four years back, chips in a little every month.

All the Breath of Life Rescue Mission asks of its once-homeless citizens is that they help each other as they help themselves, keep up the grounds and pick up after their dogs, obey state and county laws, attend Breath of Life services on Friday mornings when possible, help clear the brush, level the ground and pour the cement pads needed for more trailers. No recreational drugs except for marijuana.

Brock sets his empty bottle on the kitchen counter and looks out the window. Considers the faint shapes of new trailer pads being cleared, which is tough work in the tall, dense, iron-tough manzanita that thrives throughout the church property.

Back outside, they load the gear they’ll need if Jimmy Wu and his rough crew actually try to burn down the Barrel.

Brock sees a minivan parked across the big parking area in front of the big cinderblock church. He notes the crippled slouch of the van, and a stuffed, tarp-clenched luggage rack on top.

They crunch across the lot toward the church, pale in the moonlight. Brock likes the stout, secular, no-nonsense air of the church. No meddlesome gods there. It’s the opposite of spiritual. It’s functional: serving as chapel, schoolhouse, meeting room, kitchen and dining hall, concert theater and auditorium, and a half-court basketball venue when it rains. Plus an indestructible concrete floor, and a fireplace big enough to keep the whole thing almost warm on the cold, high-desert nights.

It was built in the 1950s by a San Diego utopian cult as a meeting hall, complete with a steel-reinforced basement bomb shelter. There have been various owners, squatters, and vandals since then. The entire property was purchased then gifted to the Breath of Life church just after Brock and Mahina founded it. Brock was just twenty-two, Mahina thirty. The gift was an unpublicized donation.

Brock and Mahina and their scant new “congregation” reroofed the building, cleaned out the massive stone fireplace, broomed away the lizards and field mice, rebuilt and refurnished the industrial-sized kitchen, bought enough folding chairs for a small army, and set up a good PA system so Brock could be heard.

Now, the congregation varies on any given Friday morning between ten and seventy worshippers. Brock chose Fridays for worship to distance the Breath of Life from the other churches, gods, and saints.

But he’s not at all sure this hasn’t hurt attendance, given that lots of people work on Fridays.

His very first Friday morning congregation?

One: Juana Flores, a young Cahuilla Indian woman who was living in one of the caves in the rough hills behind the compound, selling her handmade baskets and carved wild gourds from a blanket on the shoulder of Highway 371.

Juana listened to Brock haranguing about this Breath of Life, this new god that he had discovered after being rag-dolled underwater so long at Nazaré that Mahina had to mouth-to-mouth him back to consciousness, and, when Brock came to, there was his god: Breath. Life. Breath of Life.

From Mahina.

Brock had talked on and on about that day.

Breath of Life, show us what to do.

He explained to Juana that the Breath of Life was stronger, angrier, but more generous than the old, jealous, self-inflated gods of the past. Brock admitted to having a temper, alright, because anger gets things done, and never turn the other cheek. Life is a fight. The Breath of Life has just one fundamental, nonnegotiable law: Give it up for your brothers and sisters. Love and protect and serve each other, especially those short on love and without protection. People like you, Juana. Find them and help them. Make them better. Breathe life into them just as Mahina breathed life back into me. The Breath of Life is awesome.

Juana dozed through the sermon in the back row, ate half the box of donuts, and drank a lot of coffee.

Casey, sleeping as always like the dead, suddenly wakes up to a loud bop!

Sounds like one of those M-80s he used to buy in Ensenada as a kid. Or maybe a gun.

It’s 3:17 in the morning by the apartment clock. He feels the covers for Mae then remembers she’s with his mom.

Gets his white robe with black lettering on the back — “Muhammad Ali” — over his boxers, and the checked red-and-white slip-on sneakers. Heads out the front door to see the first-floor kitchen side entrance of the Barrel on fire. It’s a Santa Ana wind-blown orange demon, devouring the redwood siding in a widening circle.

He gets the fire extinguisher and a set of restaurant keys from the apartment, slips his phone into the robe pocket, and hustles down the stairs, past the Barrel’s ocean-front deck toward the fire. But another explosion rattles the night, blowing a hole in the deck from underneath, plank splinters shooting up next to a four-top with its umbrella collapsed for the night. Flames jump through the hole, leaning seaward in the offshore wind, chewing at the umbrella fabric. Casey stops right there, not sure if he should dial 911, or leap the banister and climb the deck railing to engage this new threat, or haul butt to the ground floor and fight the kitchen-wall fire, which has grown substantially.

He jumps the banister, drops six feet to the entryway pavers, lands heavy but balanced, like dropping in on a twelve-foot wave at Makaha. Runs to the burning kitchen side entrance, dials 911, drops the phone into his robe pocket — they use GPS to find the caller, don’t they? — yanks the extinguisher pin and triggers the white, pressured retardant into the fire.

Swings the device in a big circle, clockwise, trying to corral the swooshing, growing flames, and he hears another explosion to his right — on the north side of the building, then a fourth from the west, between Casey and the beach.

Still spraying, Casey turns reflexively when an engine revs high behind him on almost-empty Coast Highway. Sees a black Mercedes Sprinter van screeching away from the curb right out front of the Barrel, headed south on Coast Highway. It has some kind of decal or emblem on the side but he can’t make out what. A white oval with a dark something and hot orange writing on it.

He really wants to know where that damned thing is going in such a hurry while his restaurant burns, but he can’t abandon his post.

Turns back to the flames, circling them tighter and tighter, the foam converting them into rising tendrils of eye-burning smoke. The wind helps, blowing the retardant directly into the diminishing fire.

Which is finally out, but so is the home-sized, compact extinguisher.

A smoke alarm wails inside the restaurant.

Casey keys open the restaurant front-entrance door, knows the nearest fire extinguisher is behind the welcome/cash register desk, a curving mahogany beauty just steps away.

He dials 911 again and hangs on forever, letting the burglar alarm deactivation time run out. Finally:

“Fire at the Barrel in Laguna! Coast Highway! Fire at the Barrel!”

The burglar alarms join the smoke alarms in a harmonic chaos as Casey grabs the front-desk extinguisher.

He climbs the stairs four at a time to the second-story deck, jumps the banister, and scales the deck railing, almost drops the extinguisher but gathers it back like a nearly fumbled football and brakes just short of the flaming gap in the deck.

This extinguisher is twice the size of the first and its pink foam throttles the lapping flames, then shuts them down. The wind lashes at his back. Casey is not stoked by how big the burned-out hole is. Sirens now, and the station is barely half a mile away. But he fully can’t believe it when another explosion rips away, somewhere down near the front entrance.

This is like hell, he thinks.

When the deck fire is mostly out he unlocks the door to the restaurant proper, flies down the stairs, across the dining room, past his bar and into the lobby, which is swirling with flames. Through one of the big picture windows he sees the beautiful outside waiting-area benches made by John Seeman burning, too, and the palm trees in the planters, and the privacy fence, and the wave-shaped wooden pedestal on which stands the bronze statue of his father.

Where I just was, Casey thinks: Are they firebombing us?

In the lobby heat Casey plants his feet and fires away with the extinguisher. He can’t get too close because of the heat, and he can’t find a good target — it’s all burning — the walls and the fantastic Wyland whale paintings, and the awesome sculptures by Nick Hernandez, even the old barn hardwood floors.

Did they put, like, napalm in the bombs?

He snatches another extinguisher from the kitchen and lets go with it in the dining room, hoping to save the vintage surfboards and the hand-tooled chairs and tables from Taxco and the massively poetic Barbour and Severson photographs, but he can’t keep up with the fire’s advance and the second extinguisher coughs and dies and he can’t get back into the kitchen, which has really gone up, so by the time he returns from the utility closet by the restroom with another cylinder there’s hardly anything in the dining room that isn’t burning.

He’s light in the head and his hair and Muhammad Ali bathrobe are taking on tiny embers, and fudge if that doesn’t hurt.

He retreats past the restrooms to the rear emergency exit, shoulders through the door and into the Santa Anas howling in his face.

When he rounds the building, a Laguna Fire Department engine has already claimed the prime Coast Highway parking slots right out front, and the firefighters are arching water high over the sidewalk and the embankment and onto the Barrel. A fire truck, its red flank throbbing, settles longwise — half onto the curb and half off — and its search lights illuminate the throbbing, windblown water cascading through the dark sky, into the face of the restaurant and the third-floor apartment and its roof.

Casey just stands there for a moment, feels the heat of the Barrel’s wooden walls and the warm fury of the Santa Ana wind blasting down the canyon to the sea. Embers rise and fall through the smoky night. Brushes tiny sparks off his robe.

Help us, God.

Calls his mom, who’s heading in on Laguna Canyon Road, traffic already backing up in both directions. If she can’t get onto Coast Highway she’ll use the Art Festival parking lot and run to the Barrel.

Calls Brock.

But the call drops just as two Laguna Beach patrolmen order him off the property, and when Casey hesitates, they each take an arm and guide him to the steps leading down to the sidewalk.

“Okay, man,” he says, shrugging them off. “I’m going.”

“Sorry, Casey,” one says. “You’re in danger here.”

Casey joins the growing batch of spectators cordoned off behind a police barricade. Sees the helicopter tilting in from the east, another circling high.

Remember “Adios,” the Linda Ronstadt song about running away from home when she was seventeen to be with some man on the California coast?

That was me but I had a year on Linda.

I said yes to Cortes Bank.

Which John said was the biggest surfable wave on Earth.

Said it was rough and cold out there.

Rough and cold indeed.

We arrived near Cortes Bank at sunrise, after a punishing journey in a small cabin cruiser, the twenty-two-foot Skipjack, the sky dark with clouds, a biting, six-knot wind out of the northwest.

The boat bobbed like a toy on the swells mounding and passing under us. A few hundred feet from us, the peak of the undersea mountain unleashed the waves in a succession of enormous peaks breaking right. Out on Cortes Bank you’re a hundred miles from shore. There’s no land in sight, nothing to gauge the size of the waves, or the boat you’re on, or even your own speck of a body struggling for balance on the wet deck.

Watching and hearing the waves breaking, I remembered the stories and lore that had surrounded the Cortes Bank for centuries: accounts of when this now-submerged mountain range was an island stretching north toward Catalina, where warriors and fishermen had drowned when their canoes capsized; and later of the wooden galleons and trading ships that had wrecked and sunk with all onboard, of sharks large enough to swallow a man whole, of yard-long lobsters hugging the rocks just below the surface, of compasses sent awhirl and radios jammed by atmospheric anomalies that seemed to arrive on the backs of the monstrous surf.

Nobody onboard Skipjack — there were only five of us — had ever ridden a wave there.

John and I wrestled the jet ski off its home-welded rack and into the heaving sea. He jumped in and climbed on and started it up with a burst of white noxious smoke. Revved the engine against the roar of a wave breaking fifty yards away, a plume of white tearing off its crest as the lip curled over and the face stood upright.

Thirty feet? Forty?

The seasick photographer shot.

The captain kept his pitching boat from being pulled into the waves.

Randy Payne — who had read the centuries-old charts and ship’s logs, and volumes of Navy archives and diaries to pinpoint the location of once mythical Cortes Bank — jumped into this cauldron with a rigid smile and his eight-foot gun, and paddled to the ski. I watched him, bobbing on his board like a praying mantis blown into a rushing river, praying the shark stories weren’t true.

John eased the jet ski into place and threw Randy the handled nylon waterski rope.

They were off in a bark of engine and a billow of smoke, semicircling away from the break. They came to a stop, below and well to the left of the incoming peaks. I could see them through the smoky wave spray, watching the set, and hear their voices yelling back and forth.

Then John eased his jet ski onto the forming shoulder of a giant, turning to see Randy, who threw the rope and dropped onto the face of a wave that looked to be six times his height.

We three witnesses stood mute, silenced by fear, and by a fierce, almost paralyzing hope as Randy bounced down the wave, his legs bent at the knees, his feet locked into straps improvised from wetsuit neoprene fastened to the board’s deck with plastic bolt sleeves and fiberglass.

He rode a smaller wave, then, after a blue-lipped cup of instant coffee back on board, during which he tried to explain through chattering teeth what it had all felt like, Randy looked at John.

“Your turn.”

John’s first wave was the size of Randy’s, but choppier in the growing wind. Randy towed him in flawlessly.

John dropped into the thing, all his cool gone, nothing but survival on his mind. Crouched, arms out, feet locked into his homemade straps. He was too far away for me to see his expression but I guessed it was one I’d never seen.

He caught two more before the wind came up hard and the lumbering behemoths of Cortes Bank were blown out and unrideable.

When I helped get him back aboard, his face was pale and almost expressionless but his blue eyes brimmed with light.

“He was there, Jen. He was there.”

On that rough run back to land I tried to knead the cold from his back and shoulders. We hardly said a thing.

Hours later, by the time we got into his truck in San Diego and cranked up the heater, I looked at myself from above and saw an eighteen-year-old girl in the front seat of a pickup truck, leaning uncomfortably over the center console to put her hand on the shoulder of the young man driving.

But when I looked inside me, I saw that he was mine and his journey was mine. We were us, one wave at a time. Maybe for a week. Maybe for years.

He had seen what he was looking for, and so had I.

Three days after the burning of the Barrel, Brock and Casey cruise King Jim Seafood in the Port of Long Beach in Casey’s pickup, surfboards bagged in the bed.

The main reason they’re here is to case King Jim Seafood with an eye for action.

An eye for an eye, Brock calls it. But Casey’s not so sure.

Jimmy Wu’s HQ is a low brick building huddled among others in a small business park beneath towering container ships, and rows of terminal cranes swinging containers through the sky to the docks and trucks below. The port is in constant motion, a heaving jungle of steel and concrete, chain link and railroad tracks. Skinny palms sway.

“What a place for smugglers,” says Brock. “A port that handles the entire Pacific Ocean and every country near it. And once the goods are here, thousands of trucks and trains to the rest of the Western Hemisphere. After that, you refill your containers with what the Eastern Hemisphere needs, crane them onto those freighters, and send them back.”

“Like they could have done to Mae,” says Casey. “Bette Wu is a liar. She said they wouldn’t have done that. Then she comes up to LA and tries to buy the Barrel out from under Mom and chats me up while they, like, burn it down. I could slap her for that. Not literally, I mean.”

Brock marvels, again, at his minutes-older brother’s gullibility and general innocence. A trusting heart is a liability on Earth, Brock believes. And very strongly does not believe in turning the other cheek, and most of the other Bible babble that the world — led by ministers like grandpa Pastor Mike Stonebreaker who, bless his heart — takes as, well, the gospel truth. Don’t tell the victims of fire, flood, cold, heat, starvation, war, betrayal, and disease to turn their cheeks. Help them not to turn their cheeks. Help them fight back. Help them win.

“I shouldn’t have conked in Mom’s apartment, Brock. It’s my bad and I own it. It was two o’clock by the time I locked the Barrel and went upstairs. I had some tea but still fell asleep.”

“You did what you could, Casey. You fought. You’ve got the burns that prove it.”

Brock looks at his brother’s face and arms, the backs of his hands. Small, painful, slow-to-heal burns.

“I can’t believe they put the fire bombs in Amazon Prime boxes,” says Casey. “With the logos and the black tape with the smiling whatever it is on them. You know, that squiggly, wormy thing? I guess it’s supposed to be a smile but it reminds me of an axolotl. The Japanese love axolotls. They have whole stores dedicated to axolotls. I did a Seiko shoot in Tokyo and went in one.”

“It was smart and simple,” says Brock. “A driver and a delivery guy in those matching golf shirts. A black Sprinter that any shipper might use. Easy to rent. Amazon boxes that everybody’s used to seeing. Delivered to the Barrel on a late, dark night, long after it’s closed and empty. Boxes filled with plastic bottles of gasoline, gunpowder, and cell signal detonators.”

“But I might have recognized the delivery guy from the security tape. Even with his cap pulled down low. He looked like one of the shark finners that was on the Empress II.”

“Might doesn’t count, Casey.”

Brock — with his teenage experience growing and smuggling pot in Riverside and Laguna, and later, his months as a volunteer fighter in Ukraine — is impressed by Jimmy Wu’s crafty arson.

“Then they set them off by phone,” he says. “Waited a minute to enjoy the show. That’s when you saw them scream off.”

“Sergeant Bickle said it was one of the ballsiest arsons he’d ever seen,” says Casey.

Brock agrees. “Nobody can ID them from the security video, including you, Case. It’s what security video almost always is — too fucked up to tell anything for sure. Smeared and jerky and useless.”

“Like me, falling asleep at Mom’s.”

“Let it go, bro. Fight again.”

Casey parks his truck in a cracked and weed-sprung parking zone, as far from King Jim Seafood as he can get.

Brock raises his Nikon binoculars, and Casey the trusty Leicas he uses to spot fish from Moondance.

To Casey, King Jim Seafood looks quiet today. There are no lights on behind the security screen door or wrought-iron window rods, no cars parked out front. Beyond the King Jim building, huge blue cranes lower Maersk and Hanjin and Cosco containers to the docks.

“It would be hard to burn down a brick building,” says Casey. “Wouldn’t it?”

“Right. They’ve got iron window screens so you can’t throw anything through. You’d need to get inside and use a lot of accelerant. But you’d probably get caught. Look at all the people here on this dock, twenty-four, seven. More law enforcement and fire and rescue than you can count. A pro could pull it off. Maybe.”

“They have pro arsonists now?”

“They always have. They’re generally insane.”

“Rad you know all this stuff.”

“Most of it’s just common sense.”

“You sure you want to do this?”

“Kick their asses out of business like they did to us? You bet I do. If you’re not up for it, Case, okay. Stay in Laguna and let me handle it. In my world, no one does what these people did to Mom and doesn’t pay a whopping price.”

“That other-cheek thing you’re always haranguing about.”

“That very thing.”

“I don’t agree with the philosophy behind this,” says Casey. “It’s, like, revenge for material things. But in this case, because of Mom, I’m going to bend my rules.”

“Thank you.”

“But it seems like we need a better way to do this.”

“Give me your thoughts, Casey.”

“Well, if the purpose is to put the Wus out of business like they did to us, and their brick building is a fortress in plain sight, then maybe we should go after something else. Like, what they use for business. Same as they went after the Barrel. How about their boats? The Empress II, the red Cigarettes, the Luhrs, and the Bayliner?”

Casey lowers his binoculars to find Brock staring at him point-blank. “What.”

“I like it, Casey. But the Wu boats aren’t worth what the Barrel was, especially with Mom being way underinsured.”

“Might be enough to run them out of business, Brock.”

“I want more.”

“You maybe should consult your Breath of Life God on that.”

“It’s nothing to do with God, Casey. It’s a thing in the human heart.”

“You can’t remask justice into vengeance and call it justice.”

“‘Remask’ isn’t a fucking word, Casey. Maybe you’d be singing a different song if they’d dropped Mae into the Pacific.”

“You’re not saying I love Mae more than Momster, are you?”

“You’re so dumb.”

“I know.”

“I’m saying stand up for your family.”

“And don’t ask what people can do for me?” asks Casey. He’s paraphrasing his brother’s paraphrase of John F. Kennedy from last week’s Breath of Life sermon. Kasper Aamon had gone viral by saying that Kennedy was a dark-state socialist president shot down by his own operatives, and that Brock was a “lice-ridden dope fiend running a fake church.”

“Exactly, Casey. Stand up for your family and anyone else who needs help.”

“See, there’s that old-fashioned Bible stuff sneaking in past your defense,” Casey says.

“Grandpa’s fault. I can’t help it sometimes.”

Casey smiles. He likes it when Brock drops his hard-guy act and shows that he’s, like, good.

“After all, Gramps inspired you to start a new church with a new God.”

“He made me start a new church.”

Both brothers raise their binoculars when a windowless white Sprinter parks out front of King Jim. It’s got the King Jim Seafood logo along the sides: a stylized, bright red lobster with a bib around its neck, eyes bulging, pinchers raised, clamping a fork and knife.

“That’s not the logo I saw,” says Casey.

“No,” says Brock. “You wouldn’t send out fire-starters in one of the company vans.”

Casey watches the driver and one passenger spill out. The driver is the big woman Mahina strong-armed aboard Empress II, when they all went to get Mae. The passenger is Polo — Jimmy Wu’s sidekick from the Cigarette boat — dressed in a red warm-up suit with the King Jim lobster logo on the back.

“Darren Fang,” says Brock.

“How do you know who he is?” asks Casey. Who knows how Brock knows things? Casey figures the Go Dogs must have an intelligence network of some kind. Something coded in their messages, maybe.

Brock ignores the question.

Darren stops and looks in their direction. Casey hopes the noses of their surfboards don’t catch his eye. Apparently not, as Fang swings open the back of the Sprinter, bounces a hand truck to the pavement, and loads on four big boxes with “Frozen Meat — Refrigerate Upon Arrival” stickers on each side. They look heavy.

“Meat and dry ice,” says Brock.

“Shark fins, man.”

The brothers watch as the door opens and Fang reverses the hand truck to pull it inside. The big woman scans the lot and follows him in, and the metal security door slams shut with a clang.

Against his own will, Casey pictures Bette Wu in the Sunset Boulevard sunset, feels that evil tongue of hers in his ear, smells the tropical-cinnamon perfume coming off her. Sees Mae smelling her white pumps.

He pushes those thoughts back into the empty room in his mind, closes the door. Temptation is sneaky.

“Casey, exactly how many King Jim pirates did you see that first day, when Bette Wu boarded your ship with a gun and the two boats came up and blasted your phone?”

“Nine. Not counting hands belowdecks, or sailors behind blackout glass in the consoles.”

“Add at least three,” says Brock. “Then, there’s Jimmy himself, and Darren Fang, and the woman there, and Danilo and the lawyer who packs.”

“And two more on the second red Cigarette when Jimmy and Fang threatened Mom off Laguna,” says Casey, lowering his binoculars to count on his fingers. “So that’s nineteen, minimum. And five ships. What are you thinking, Brock, like, we’re going to need a bigger boat?”

“No,” snaps Brock. “More boats. We’ve got Moondance, and Mom’s old panga in her garage. Three of my local Go Dogs are deep-sea fishermen with some really sweet watercraft. We take down King Jim and his fleet, one vessel at a time.”

“We don’t kill anybody, do we?”

“No. We wreck their livelihood, like they wrecked Mom’s.”

“Maybe we should just call the police.”

“You’ll recall that we already have, Casey. And look what good it did. No arrests, no suspects, no witnesses. Just hearsay from us, useless security video, and a ten-million-dollar restaurant that’s burnt to shit and underinsured.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Are you in or not, Casey? You don’t have to be, but answer me, right now.”

Casey tries to balance the enormous weights shifting around inside him. Like Mavericks is mounding up in there, he thinks. He knows his innocent mother has been greatly wronged, that her life has been badly damaged. As if she hasn’t had enough suffering, with Dad. But what will destroying a bunch of boats do to make Mom better? Isn’t the point to make her better? Or is the point to bring justice into a violent world of fire, narcotics, guns, and bloody, finned sharks? With more violence?

“I don’t want to kill anybody.”

“We’ll try not to.”

“I’m serious, Brock. You can’t kill people for burning down a restaurant. Even Mom’s.”

“I agree.”

Casey lets the binoculars dangle around his neck, looks at the track marks of fire sparks on his suntanned skin.

Brock does, too.

“I don’t believe this is right,” Casey says. “You forgive and turn the other cheek. I’m still not exactly sure where you turn it or why, but count me out, bro. I hope you out-pirate the pirates, though. Could be epic.”

“I’ll count you out, Case. You’re not cut out for that kind of thing.”

“Makes me sound like a grommet.”

“To each according to his abilities,” says Brock. “You showed plenty of balls trying to save the Barrel.”

A beat. “Yeah. Tried.”

Hollister Ranch is a private fourteen thousand acres for a select few millionaires and billionaires who have homes on hundred-acre parcels, and sole land access to some of the best waves in California. James Cameron. Jackson Browne. Yvon Chouinard.

Casey and Brock have met them and they’re all nice guys if you ask Casey. They’re creative, liberal, and corporately responsible. Jackson writes great songs. He and Yvon surf. Brock’s not a fan.

The ranch break at Cojo Point, an hour and a half north of LA, is picture-perfect that afternoon — four to seven feet, big-shouldered, and uncrowded.

“Extraglassive,” says Casey.

“That’s not a word, either, Casey.”

“Should be.”

Casey and Brock carve it up on their small-wave boards, making things look easy. The locals watch and cheer — which, Casey knows, without the Stonebreaker brothers’ surf pedigree and celebrity — wouldn’t happen in a million years.

Casey makes the drops with muscular precision, slashes the bottom turns up and off the lips, rides the barrels until the crests eat him alive, stays invisible in the white chaos, then comes charging out like the six-foot-two, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound sculpture he is, all corded neck and shoulders, water-resistant and built for strength.

He gets caught inside on a bigger set, which lets him watch Brock full frontal, Brock at his casual best, rising and stalling deep into the tubes, then blasting out with a spit of spray, with one hand patting the faces lightly, casually, like the pictures of their dad. Unlike Casey and their dad, Brock is rangy, flexible, and ropelike. Darker skin, and the brown dreads. He has the reflexes of a boxer, and the tattoos swirling over his body gives him — Casey thinks — unintended menace. But he’s not a menace. He’s too busy helping people in need.

Watching his brother shredding a fast Cojo Point right, Casey prays, asking that he win the Monsters.

Him — Brock.

Jen stands in the reeking lobby of the Barrel, Mae sitting at her feet.

She’s looking at a $400,000 replacement rebuild, of which $150,000 is covered by insurance. She hasn’t upped her policy since remodeling the Barrel eighteen years ago. Her bank is considering the loan. Her annual personal income is $10,000 from freelance magazine and newspaper writing, and occasional consulting work for television.

She’s got $75,000 in her savings account.

She draws a $75,000 yearly salary from the Barrel.

There’s a lot of demo to be done. Jen’s remodel was conventional construction — wood frame, Sheetrock, and expensive redwood siding. The wood flooring, walnut dark and streaked with blond — Jen always loved how it greeted her in the morning, buffed up clean the night before — has been destroyed. The raised foundation is still good.

Adding to those costs is the fact that the furniture, art, lighting, plumbing, electrical, sound system, ovens, stoves, warmers, and appliances were all high-grade commercial and expensive. Much of it has been damaged thoroughly by flame and smoke, some of it irreplaceable. The surfboard collection is almost totaled. The paintings are ruined. The high-end projection screens on which the surf videos played are now melted around the edges.

Laguna Beach fire trucks had gotten there less than twelve minutes after Casey’s first 911 call. But four crude fire bombs — casually staged as deliveries just outside the lobby, the back door, the side kitchen entrance, and the upstairs apartment deck — had already exploded, accelerant and high winds spreading the flames rapidly. Remote fuses, the arson investigator said.

His team found a fifth bomb under the north floor of the dining room — placed through a crawl space under the raised foundation. The access screen had been snipped off. No north-wall security cameras because of the inaccessible sandstone drop-off and chain-link fence heavy with mandevilla. The flames ate up through the framing timbers and into the room, swiftly.

According to Jen’s contractor, she’s looking at spring of next year. Which means a five-month wait, if the City of Laguna Planning and Building Department and the California Coastal Commission sign off promptly, and the supply chains hold. He says the price of his materials have doubled in two years and the union wages he pays are out of sight.

Mae follows her into the dining room where Jen kneels and touches one of the classic Hawaiian redwood surfboards that caught flame and finally came crashing down from its ceiling mounts. It’s a hundred years old and badly burned. Most of the other boards were made of foam and fiberglass, which of course ignites viciously and melts when swarmed by flames. Some are John’s. Some belonged to the greats: Kahanamoku, Noll, Weber, Dora, Young, Nuuhiwa, Lopez, Andersen, Tomson, Irons, Slater, Clark, Bethany, Parsons, Laird, McNamara. There are twenty-six of them, Jen knows — one for each year of John’s life. Some of which, blackened and disfigured, are still hanging on the walls.

She stands, pats Mae’s soft round head, feels like crying or kicking Jimmy Wu hard as she can in the nuts, but she’s not much of a crier and Jimmy’s a bit out of range.

Since the Barrel burned up and cooled down Jen has thrown herself into the cleanup — and into her training for the Monsters of Mavericks — with her usual ferocious energy.

And now, with a $175,000 shortfall for rebuilding her love and livelihood, she’s even more inspired to win the Monsters.

Which is a long shot, she knows, at forty-six, and not having ridden big waves in twenty-five years, according to the Surfline.com rankings and the surf contest handicappers on BetUS Sportsbook.

Not that she isn’t training and working her ass off: in between her sunrise stand-up paddleboarding, surfing whichever SoCal break is going off best, weight lifting, and striding underwater along the bottom of LBHS pool with dumbbells in her hands and weights on her ankles — Jen still reports to work exactly as she has for eighteen years.

But now she’s demolishing the ruins rather than running the most popular restaurant in Laguna Beach. She’s got help from Mom and Dad and Pastor Mike, from Casey and Brock when they’re not surfing — god bless them — but they’re still not done yanking out the now-toxic drywall. Or scrubbing the smoke stains off the flame-scorched ovens and stainless walls and backboard in the kitchen. All this and more, instead of making sure that Casey’s catch of the day is being properly prepared, greeting and seating her friends and loyal local customers, tweaking the menu, touching up the paint, polishing the now destroyed floors, making sure the surfboards and framed photos and paintings are one hundred percent dust free and glittering like jewels in the sunlight shooting through windows.

The smell is awful but face masks make her dizzy. People out on the sidewalk stop and stare at her through the opaque plastic sheeting hung to keep the curious out and the ash and stink in. Every ten minutes she takes Mae around back to the deck facing the Pacific, lets the dependable onshore wind fill their lungs.

Her task today is to scour the ash, extinguisher stains, and carbonized burns off the life-sized bronze statue of John in what was once the lobby. She has to tend to every inch of him, faithfully rendered by the artist: face, neck, chest, those beautiful arms, the six-pack stomach, the butt inside the surf trunks, his thighs, calves, knees, and knobby feet. The statue doesn’t feel or smell human, doesn’t sound anything like a person when Jen accidentally bangs it with the handle of her brush, or pings the bronze with the wedding ring that she’s never stopped wearing. There’s still something painful and intimate about touching this statue. Makes her wish she could touch the real, living him; reminds her that she never will.

Mae seems to sense this, watching Jen fretfully, forehead furrowed.

Scrubbing away at her bronze husband’s forehead, Jen is reminded again — for what, the ten thousandth time? — that her hardwired instinct to protect and serve had failed most spectacularly in John’s death. If ever there was a test, that was it. Her cop father understands this better than her coach/athlete mother.

As she works on John’s eye with a toothbrush and cleaning paste, whispering, “I won’t hurt you, John, I won’t hurt you,” Jen thinks of those nights just after his drowning, sitting up late with Mom and Dad in their hillside house in South Laguna, staring at the fire but talking little.

What was left to say?

She had failed to protect and serve the love of her life.

And now, the Barrel.

Todos Santos is thirty feet of chaos, and one hundred percent on.

The quake-driven waves march in fast and crowded together, like they’re in a race, partially blotting out the sky as Jen looks up from the cabin of the charter boat Magdalena. The impact zone is a mist-shrouded valley and looks as if it’s boiling.

Israel, the captain, has pulled up well away from the spectacle. Tells them in broken English he’s not going to die in there.

To Jen the waves look rideable, just barely. They’re rapid shape-changers, sections forming and closing out, towering A-frames offering lefts and rights that form, then suddenly collapse. Some gruesome wipeouts. Jen spots Jamie Mitchell and Jojo Roper and Greg Long out in the lineup, all expected to ride the Monsters in a few short weeks.

Casey and Brock have driven the jet skis across the deceptively glassy quarter mile from shore, and they’re waiting a hundred feet from Magdalena, skis belching white smoke and whining with pent-up horsepower.

Jen and Mahina plop overboard one at a time with the brothers’ boards, the water a cold shock on Jen’s face and down her neck and chest as it cuts under her wetsuit. She paddles hard through the chop to her idling ski, trades places with Casey, who has a smile on his face as he sits on his board and fastens the leash to one ankle. Her heart pounds like a dryer with a bowling ball in it.

“Gonna do this, Mom, gonna do this,” he says. “Thirty feet of God’s love, marching in to hold us!”

“The rights are better, Case,” she says, noting that the right-breaking waves are clean, but the lefts are sloppy. “Never seen waves this fast!”

She steers the jet ski in a wide semicircle, checking back to make sure Casey has the tow rope and his balance on the eight-four gun before she accelerates and pulls him into the lineup.

Waits now, bobbing on the heavy jet ski. High-fives Roper, who high-fives back. The BetUS Sportsbook has good odds and lines on him for the Monsters, she knows. Just behind Brock, who’s just behind Casey, are the big, big boys — Hawaiian and Australian — and that truly miraculous Tom Tyler out of Santa Cruz.

Anybody’s game, she thinks.

Will come down to wave choice, and luck.

Now Mahina cuts out front of a towering peak, towing Brock behind.

Jen watches as Mahina speeds along the forming shoulder and Brock swings high into the wave, well in front of the massive crest. Where he drops the handle, and Mahina, after looking behind at him, speeds up and over thirty feet of still-forming wave.

Brock drops into the deep blue wave as if his board were a gallows trapdoor.

The crest is thick and shifty, rudely cleaving a left and a right, but the right is where he is and Brock rockets across the face of it. Then a blast of speed into a carving bottom turn as he banks and lets the face have him, brakes against it with that reckless cool of his, letting the maw have him as if he’s daring it to. Comes out of it leaning back a little, like he’s bored. Rides the elegant shoulder in sweeping, beautifully composed turns.

John all the way, Jen thinks — John in his last couple of years, when his instinct guided his body and his control submitted to grace.

Brock kicks out, and Mahina glides in.

And, minutes later, when Jen tows Casey into a similar, speeding, near forty-foot wall of water, she watches her firstborn son drop powerfully down that rising face, his legs like shivering pistons, crouched, arms out and flexed, and his bull’s neck clenched, and his big-jawed, heavy-browed face locked in an expression of undefeatable concentration.

John again, Jen thinks. In his early big-wave days, when surfing was survival. A battle of will over fear, of body over mind.

Casey bullies his way along, powers into the barrel and out like a man fired from a cannon.

Rides the smooth shoulder with his arms up in praise — Jen knows, always Casey and his God — then kicks out in a fists-raised victory leap, cartwheeling over the roaring wave.

Jen delivers him into another.

Mahina and Brock again.

Casey.

The waves are pushing forty feet by the time they get back to Magdalena for lunch.

Jen, wrapped in a blanket, still unusually cold, finishes her burrito and looks at the waves, her throat dry, her heart slamming away again, that awful, dark, 3 A.M. fear taking her over. Listens to the booms of the waves, the screams of the jet skis.

Sometimes fear is a friend, and caution a teacher, she hears Dr. Penelope Parker say.

“Mom?” asks Casey. “Ready?”

The words hurt when they leave her mouth. She feels as if a thousand eyes, both living and dead, are on her.

“You know, Case. I’m going to sit this one out. I’m not feeling it.”

“Yeah, Mom,” he says. “And you have to feel it because Mavericks could be fifty, sixty feet. Thicker, meaner, and colder. You have to commit. Or, you know... you could get hurt.”

“I understand that perfectly.”

She sees the looks that Casey and Brock exchange.

“This is a good decision, Mom,” says Brock.

“I’ll pray with you right now for help,” says Casey. “He’ll answer us, Mom. He always does.”

“Shut up, Casey,” says Brock.

Casey looks down at the spark burns on his hands. He’s sitting spread-legged on the bench in his bright orange-and-black wetsuit, his thick hair matted, and Jen sees him at age six, this towheaded first-grader in a Waimea Bay T-shirt with a Batman lunch box, boarding the bus for El Morro Elementary.

Now Casey looks up and gives her a look that makes her feel like she’s being forgiven. It both angers her and makes her want to cry.

“Totally right on, Mom,” he says. “You don’t need to surf today. Brock’s right.”

Jen looks out at Todos Santos Island, the curve of the bay, the blue water, black rocks, and tawny hills.

But what she sees is her husband taking off on the final wave of his life.

“I’ll be ready for the Monsters,” she says. “Ready to win it. And tow you in. Don’t you worry about that.”

On the bridge of the elegant Chris-Craft Cinnamon Girl, Brock stands beside bald, gray-bearded Dane Crockett, who eases back the throttle. Brock feels the big cabin cruiser slow and settle in the bright, late afternoon.

Dane is an irrigation supply wholesaler from Riverside who admittedly joined the Go Dogs for dangerous missions, not so much to help people out but for the rush.

It’s been three days since Todos Santos. All three of those days spent searching at sea.

But as of one hour ago, eureka!

The next afternoon, Brock, Casey, and Mahina await San Diego Sheriff detective Bob Temple in Laguna’s Marine Room, a locals hangout with good views of Coast Highway and Main Beach.

They’ve got a table by a window and tequila sunrises, Casey’s and Mahina’s virgin, and Brock’s not.

“I want you to do the talking today, Casey,” Brock says quietly. “All you have to do is tell the truth. You did not burn up any boats. You have a good alibi because it’s true. You are innocent of this, and you know that we are, too.”

“Totally,” says Casey.

Of course, Casey isn’t at all totally sure of Brock’s innocence. Whether or not Brock had that big lion dream where hero Casey as a white tiger saves the day, or maybe just made it up so he — Casey — can testify to the cops about Brock’s innocence. But, the fact of the matter is Casey hasn’t seen or heard one shred of evidence that Brock has done anything against the Wu pirates or their boats. Except that such a thing is exactly what his brother would do. Dream or not.

A minute later, Temple comes in, goes to the bar, then carries a cup of coffee their way. He’s long-haired and rangy, in jeans and a brown sport coat that doesn’t quite hide his gun. He sits and sets a thin deck of photographs on the table.

“Thanks for meeting me on short notice,” he says.

“Thanks for coming up our way,” says Casey. “Must be important.”

“I believe so.”

Temple fans out the photos, which show Empress II, Stallion, the white panga, and the sleek red Cigarette boat Bushmaster. All are in varying states of destruction from fire and bullets.

He also snaps down four more photographs of four different boats, long-distance shots from a cell phone, Casey surmises. The crew is hard to make out, for the ski masks.

Casey catches the hard expression on the detective’s face, and he’s glad he doesn’t have to lie to this guy. He’s never been a good liar, pretty much gave up trying by the time he was twelve.

It’s three days since somebody set Empress II ablaze, two days since they blew up the Stallion, and just yesterday destroyed the sleek red Cigarette Bushmaster, and a panga. And dumped their crewmen onto the rocky beach of San Clemente Island.

Brock glances at the pictures, then gets up and goes to a window looking out on Ocean Avenue, his back to the detective, boredom personified.

“I’m talking to all of you, Brock Stonebreaker. You might want to listen up,” Temple says.

“I hear you just fine.”

“Jimmy Wu told me you three — and unidentified others — took out these boats. He values them at four million dollars. Says they’re all owned by King Jim Seafood of Long Beach, their family business.”

“We didn’t burn their boats,” says Casey. “They torched the Barrel but we didn’t burn the boats.”

“Wu denies burning the Barrel,” says Temple.

“I’m sure they did it, Detective Temple,” says Casey. “But we didn’t burn up their boats.”

Temple looks at Casey with amusement.

“And Brock, how do you weigh in on Empress II?” he asks.

“I wouldn’t waste a good match on that piece of shit. And I haven’t seen it in over a week. None of those other boats, either.”

Temple nods, consults his phone, then sets it down. “I’m sure you have tight alibis for the afternoon the Empress II exploded. I mean, you can lawyer up if you want, but if you give me some straight answers here we can save a lot of time. No recording. No notes.”

Casey tells Temple the simple truth as alibi: he was helping his mom rebuild the Barrel.

Brock and Mahina claim to have been way out in Aguanga the last few days, and they’ve got half a dozen “rescue missionaries” to corroborate.

“So that’s not you up in the crow’s nest with the flare gun?”

Brock gives the cop a derisive shake of his head.

“Do you have another witness, Casey?” asks Temple. “Someone not family?”

“Just me and Mom and Grandma, and sometimes Grandpa Don,” says Casey. “We’ve been there for, like, weeks. The air in the Barrel is totally foul; Mom bought some new KN95s for us but I still had a headache every day.”

Temple nods, dubiously. “Did you make or receive any calls or messages while you were there?”

“Sure,” says Casey. “I’m always doing that.”

A beat of silence then while Casey tries to gauge how much the detective suspects his alibi, which is fundamentally true. And that of his brother and Mahina, which, technically, Casey can neither confirm nor dispute.

A tough face to read, he thinks. Cops must practice that.

“Did you shoot any pictures or video that afternoon at the Barrel?” Temple asks. “A time-and-date stamp would be nice.”

“None those three days,” says Casey. “But lots before. We just worked and went outside every half hour for fresh air.”

Temple nods.

“Mr. Temple,” says Casey. “I’d like to know if you guys are going to nail the Wus for torching the Barrel.”

“Not my jurisdiction. Laguna PD is in charge of that.”

“Why don’t they arrest them?”

Brock gives Casey another sharp look. Casey looks down at his hands, rubs the pinpoint burn scabs.

“Casey, these people are hiding on or near the world’s second largest ocean. The Empress II was a speck. The Cigarette boats, the Luhrs, and the Bayliner are specks. Even to choppers and search planes, specks. Laguna Police don’t even have a patrol boat. Orange County Sheriffs has six single-engine patrol boats for harbor and shallow-water work. And some helicopters. A lot of Wu’s organization lives up in San Gabriel. You’re lucky to have found them at all, if in fact...”

“Exactly,” says Brock. “We didn’t.”

“I wish I could believe your brother on that.”

Casey hears the condescension in the detective’s voice. Hates it. Has always hated it when people talk to him like he’s a child, or a moron.

“Plus,” says Temple. “There are fifty public marinas between Ensenada and San Francisco. Dry docks, too. Hell, Wu and his flotilla can stay on the high seas — if they’re outside the twenty-four-mile line — only the military can touch them.”

“DEA can find anybody,” says Casey.

“Too busy with big-time fentanyl at the border,” says Temple. “Jimmy’s small-time.”

“They aren’t even going to look?” asks Casey.

“Eventually,” says Temple. “You guys found Empress II, Stallion, and Bushmaster. According to Jimmy, that is.”

“I told you we didn’t do anything to those boats,” says Casey.

“You don’t have to tell him again,” says Brock. “He gets it by now.”

Casey knows that lots of people think he’s dumb, but Brock was the first. The only people who have ever told him right to his face that he’s smart are his mother and, weirdly enough, Bette Wu.

“Casey, Brock? I’d understand it if you guys blew up those boats. Because of what you say Jimmy Wu did to the Barrel. I’ve eaten at the Barrel. I know what a great place it was.”

“We didn’t blow up those boats, Detective,” Casey says firmly.

“I’m just saying I could understand it, if you felt like it.”

“Well, sure, I felt like it.”

“Please shut up, Casey,” says Brock.

“Let’s talk again soon,” says Temple. He finishes his coffee, stands, and drops a twenty on the Marine Room counter. “I’d like you three down San Diego way.”

“Yeah, sure,” says Casey.

“Just one of you at a time, though. Like to start with you, Casey.”

“I know a good lawyer,” says Brock.

A day later, Casey’s shaping a board in his backyard on Woodland.

He’s trying to relax, go with the flow of karma, but the heat is on and the heat wants answers.

Detective Temple grilled his mom earlier today, trying to poke holes in his alibi, she said. Then went ahead and set up an interview with Casey at the Oceanside Sheriffs’ substation for tomorrow morning. No Brock this time. Casey’s bringing a lawyer.

Not only that, but state Fish and Wildlife senior investigators have arrived, all the way from Sacramento.

Even Coast Guard lieutenant Kopf, who has opened his own investigation of the fire aboard Empress II, says that “new witnesses” have reported seeing a five- or six-boat flotilla motoring toward the old trawler just an hour before arsonists set her on fire. He’s got digital images that don’t show much, but he says one of the boats looks like it could be Moondance.

Casey feels like the whole world is after him. But he feels safe here in his backyard in Dodge City in his yellow hibiscus shorts and flip-flops, surrounded by all his bushes and plants and trees, his surfboards, and Jack Johnson on his Dot.

Casey’s house is clapboard, small and uninsulated, built in the 1950s when this then-poor Laguna Canyon neighborhood was home to artists and musicians, many of them Black, and a growing cadre of weird young surfers.

The neighborhood of narrow streets and dirt walkways was nicknamed Dodge City in the late sixties for the shoot-’em-up busts of the drug dealers, artists, and surfers who congregated there for the cheap rent, plentiful drugs, and a sense of security against the invading cops, narcs, even the FBI.

Dodge was peace and love, psychedelic music and weed smoke in the air, surfboards leaned up against the houses and decks. Kids and dogs everywhere you looked.

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love founder, John Griggs, lived here, his home the unofficial BEL headquarters for their worldwide hash- and LSD-smuggling network.

Tim Leary dropped by now and then. Got himself busted here.

Casey likes the lore and vibe of Dodge. Thinks its outlaw reputation gives him street cred, even though he himself is a non-doping, barely drinking, health-food-eating, body-building, Bible-reading environmentalist. And, a semi-ashamed virgin except for the woman his friends embarrassingly rented for him at his twenty-first birthday party. He regretted it before he even did it. Apologized. What a downer. But it was hard in his always-looking-for-answers mind to say exactly why.

Casey prays at least three times a day — before getting out of bed, before his afternoon siesta, and after lights-out at night — but often prays for special requests, too.

He’s a man who has never really cussed, fought, or said uncool things about people even behind their backs.

So, living in Dodge makes him feel his part in the surf-outlaw tradition that started in Hawaii and spread to California and Australia, then the world. Part of something old and wild and dangerous. Something that makes you feel like nothing else makes you feel: real, authentic surfing. Not commercialized surfing, though he does love the excitement of the contests. Here in his Dodge City living room he’s got a really cool picture of the old surf star David Nuuhiwa in Dodge in 1968 — just a couple of houses down from here — talking with BEL heavyweight Johnny Gale, surrounded by surfboards.

Grandpa Don had stories about Dodge in the late sixties when he was one of the Laguna cops chasing around the drug dealers and the “general no-good-niks,” as he called them.

But with affection. Casey always thought Grandpa Don was too nice to be a cop. Too permissive. Grandpa Don let him surf when Casey was five. Grandpa Don let him and Brock keep a baby alligator they’d bought from a reptile store in Huntington Beach. In their extra bathroom’s tub ’til Grandma said no. Let them have chocolate milk with their meals when they visited.

For sure, Grandpa Don saw some crazy things in Dodge back then, some funny and others not. Casey remembers hearing about the time that Grandpa was one of the officers raiding a South Laguna home back in ’67 and one of the cops — not Grandpa Don — shot, in the back, and to death, a suspected Brotherhood of Eternal Love drug dealer, Pete Amaranthus. That name stuck in Casey’s head because it seemed wondrous and beautiful. And tragic. Pete was twenty-two. He was well-liked, and Grandpa Don knew the family. Casey’s mom told him that Grandpa stayed up alone late the night they killed Pete, got himself drunk on bourbon. Grandpa Don was not a drinker.

Now Casey leans down and gets his cheek against the rail of the board, gauging the rocker it will require to handle Mavericks’ four-story waves moving as fast as freight trains. Too much upsweep in the rocker and the board will slow, trying to displace water; too little rocker and you dig a rail and it’s wipeout time.

Down you go.

Hard.

Escorted by fifty tons of fifty-degree water, which is quite a bit harder than warmer water. It’s like the difference between hitting the surface of a warm lake, or a frozen interstate. Then the tumble cycle and the hold-down that just might be your last.

Mae rises from her shady spot under a brightly blooming yellow hibiscus and lumbers through the open slider into the house. Probably hears the mail lady, who always has treats.

Casey straightens and takes a moment to appreciate his dog, and another to note with gratitude all the plants and shrubs and trees on his lot, from the fruit on the tangerine tree, to the pink trumpet vine, to the purple bougainvillea smothering the old grape stake fence in scintillant violet bracts. And the birds-of-paradise with all their orange-blue plumage, the white-flowered plumeria, and the red lantana alive with butterflies and moths.

Pretty awesome.

Now from the house here comes Mae, head up and tail wagging, trotting ahead of Bette Wu as if showing her to her table.

Casey’s heart bucks.

She strides midway into his little backyard, then stops and stands there, looking at him as if she’s just walked onstage in scene one. Mae licks her free hand. Bette’s dressed in a black knit suit with gold buttons. Black-and-gold pumps, plum lipstick and nails. Hair up, bangs down, and a brushed aluminum Halliburton briefcase in one hand.

She steps up and sets it on the blue-tiled, wave-patterned bistro table. Leans forward on both hands, right into Casey’s grill. Up this close her face is the size of a billboard.

“My family had nothing to do with the Barrel,” she whispers. “I swear it. And I have proof.”

“Jimmy made a threat that day on Empress II. I heard it with my own ears.”

“My father is a clown. Sometimes worse. I expect to be free from him soon.”

“But who else would set the fire? I got burned, you know.”

She softly touches the back of his free hand. “I do know. It hurts me.”

Then she straightens, looking down at him with a hard expression.

“I’ll tell you exactly who set the Barrel on fire. The same people who burned our boats. Monterey 9 — a criminal tong spin-off settled in Los Angeles County. They’ve been enemies of the Wus going back fifty years. They were ruthless then and ruthless now. We were just fishermen and — women. One of their businesses is Imperial Fresh Seafood. They knew of our offer to buy the Barrel. They want rich Orange County to themselves. So, destroying our fleet was the next logical step toward ruining us completely. Luckily, we have a paid informant in Monterey 9.”

Casey less than half believes this story, but wonders if it could be true. Remembers the black Sprinter with the logo speeding off from the Barrel. Why not Monterey 9, destroying Jimmy Wu’s future assets? And maybe — just maybe — Brock and Mahina and the Go Dogs declined to torch the Wu family fleet after all. Just as Brock had said he would.

“Excuse me,” he says to Bette, as he googles “Imperial Fresh Seafood” and finds pictures of their delivery fleet. Yep, he sees: Sprinters. The same as Laguna Detective Brian Pittman’s, gray, not black, and their logo is a smiling great white shark wearing a red robe, dancing on the ocean on its tail. Like Imperial Fresh is trying to out-logo King Jim, Casey thinks. What kooks.

But it’s not much like the logo he saw that night.

Which he tells Bette and shows her his screen. She shrugs and fixes him with a who-gives-a-shit look.

Casey remembers the pirates that first day, bloody knives and dying sharks, their rusty guns and eagerness to use them. Like, if they’d do that, why wouldn’t their enemies do likewise? Destroy assets? Like a chess game but the moves are sudden and violent, and there’s lots of money at stake.

“See?” Bette says. “Mae likes me. She’s forgiven my little prank. I hope you do.”

“Get lost, Ms. Wu.”

“Where are your manners?”

“They’ve left the building. So you leave, too. I get nothing but bad actions and bad karma from you.”

“Not so fast, Casey. I have gifts for you and Mae. Who I would never hurt in any way.”

“Yeah, well, what about throwing her overboard or smuggling her somewhere far away?”

“A joke. An ugly little joke. I apologize. And Casey?”

Again she leans into seated Casey, face to face. Up this close her eyes look like black lakes and within the scents of plumeria and tangerine he smells that smell from Sunset.

“Do not blame my family for the Barrel,” says Bette. “Do not blame me.”

Knowing Bette Wu as he thinks he does, everything she says sounds like a threat. Or an excuse.

But what if she’s telling the truth?

She sits across from him at the bistro table. Gives him a softened expression, then looks down.

“What are you doing here?” he asks. “What do you want?”

“An Arnold Palmer, thank you.”

“I’m asking you to go. Mae is asking you to go.”

“But why?”

“We don’t trust you.”

“Someday you will.”

Bette gets into her Halliburton, pulls out a colorful foil pouch, and hands a salmon-and-pumpkin treat to Mae. One of her favorites from a boutique pet store.

“I have some ideas for you,” says Bette. “Please make me that drink. I’m very thirsty.”

Arnold Palmers are one of Casey’s favorite drinks, and fun to make. Here at home, he uses mint from his garden and lemons from his tree.

Through his kitchen window he watches Bette and Mae in the backyard, Bette giving his dog another treat from the briefcase, Mae sitting at attention with her usual food lust. Feels wrong to leave them together and alone. So he keeps an eye on both of them.

He cuts the lemons and dices the mint, his emotions writhing inside like eels. Bette Wu is his enemy. She’s kidnapped his dog, tried to swindle his family, and almost certainly helped burn down his mother’s restaurant. He has never felt hatred for another person but Bette Wu is near the top of his don’t-like list. Maybe even at the top, considering the Barrel, which he swears he can smell now, gutted by fire, stronger than the mint he’s using.

But part of him is attracted to her, fully against his will, but attractions don’t wait for invites — they just barge in. He’s especially attracted to her non-pirate side. He likes her general attitude, energy, and her blunt language. Her manner. Her poise, her clothes, her sophistication and looks. She’s really pretty. And let’s face it, he thinks: I like the way she kissed my ear on Sunset Boulevard. He thinks her mystery might be the best part of Bette Wu. Like, how can a shark-finning pirate sit out there in my backyard in a suit and feed my dog treats from a Halliburton? Who, really, actually, is this chick, anyway?

He has a brief thought of being in bed with her, or better yet, on a beach blanket just after dark in a private cove he knows near Sunset on Oahu. Such notions he has rarely followed up. When he has, they’ve proven disappointing, and screwed up friendships, and led to misunderstandings and frustrations.

Right now, frankly, his desires aren’t bothering him, though other things are:

Such as betraying his mother with a woman whose family probably destroyed her restaurant.

Such as Mae, whom Bette has threatened to dump overboard at sea. Jokingly?

And the $25,000 she tried to get in ransom.

The eels writhe as he looks at her through the window.

It’s hard not to be attracted to a pretty woman who has given him probably the most bitchin’ compliment he’s ever received from anyone except from his mom and Grandpa Don: Bette called him smart.

Still at the kitchen window, he chops and drops the mint leaves, quickly and deftly as he would in the Barrel, his domain since he was a thirteen-year-old dishwasher. He takes a bartender’s pride in his drinks.

Be very careful, Casey thinks.

He sets down the glasses and sits across from her.

“This is like the Garden of Eden,” says Bette. “The flowers and the smells. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil would be the tangerine. Right?”

“It’s not like the Garden of Eden,” says Casey. He’s always thought his yard is his Eden. Always took extra good care of it to make it perfect and sinless. Tangerine juice is his favorite thing to drink in the whole world, and he’s had gallons of it, right from this tree. Hard to attribute any evil to it at all.

“I was raised Christian,” says Bette. “My dad is an atheist but Mom was converted by LA Methodists. So, every Sunday off to church. Bible school in summer. Such terrible boredom. At church school I tried to read Dad’s action comics, but they took them away. So I’d look out the window and imagine scenes from the Chinese action movies he always watched. I loved the boat and ocean scenes the most. Casey, I think you understand more about what you see than you let on.”

Casey shrugs and looks away. Lets that observation sit warmly inside. Wonders if she’s just stroking him now. And why.

“Just hours ago, my father retracted his statement against you and your brother and his wife, accusing you of destroying our boats,” she says. “He knows you didn’t do it, but he’s still furious at you for the postings. Humiliated.”

“I removed them.”

“But the world saw his pirates finning sharks.”

“Well, that’s what they were doing.”

Bette sighs, cuts Casey a hard look. “Monterey 9 are violent people. Make us look like Girl Scouts. The cops are familiar with them. We’ve talked to Los Angeles County investigators and filed this new report.”

“Well, we didn’t burn your boats,” says Casey, feeling the flush of truth on his cheeks. “We did not.”

He’s inwardly proud that this is at least partially because of him. Causing Brock’s dream of him as a tiger by not condoning his brother’s violence. By turning his other cheek — and Brock’s, too.

“I know you didn’t!” says Bette. “I know, Casey. From now on, let’s believe each other. Maybe even trust each other, even if only a little, so we can proceed honestly.”

Bette pulls a set of stapled papers from the briefcase. Smiles at Mae and gives her another dog treat. Hands the papers to Casey.

“This is a copy of our statement regarding Monterey 9, to the San Diego and Los Angeles County Sheriffs. Jimmy has admitted his misguided assumptions about who did what to our ships. It’s a peace pipe, Casey. So the Stonebreakers and the Wus can work together, not against each other.”

“I doubt that, Bette,” he says quietly.

She looks disappointed. “That’s the first time you’ve used my name.”

Casey wonders again if she’s just stroking him. Thinks of the manipulating women he’s known, or known of.

“I always thought Bette Davis was scary,” he says. “Those old movies where she’s the insane bad woman.”

“My dad’s kind of woman,” says Bette. “He asked me to apologize to you for him falsely accusing you and Brock and Mahina. Do you accept?”

Casey considers this. Sees that it might well be an apology based on a convenience.

“An apology? Okay, I guess.”

“Thank goodness! You can keep this copy, as a reminder, you know. Something in writing.”

Casey leafs through it. Lots of names, companies, addresses, excerpted courtroom documents, police reports, several newspaper accounts focusing on a tong offshoot called Monterey 9. Also a Los Angeles Times story on the competitive world of fish and seafood fishermen supplying high-end Southern California restaurants. A smiling Jimmy Wu is pictured, wearing a Kings windbreaker at what appears to be a Kings game.

“I’d like to have something comparable from you, of course.”

“You mean something written?”

“Yes, just saying you don’t think we burned down the Barrel. Because, Casey — we did not.”

“I’d have to talk to Mom and Brock.”

“I’m asking you because you’re the most reasonable.”

“But they would have to agree.”

“Will you try, Casey?”

“Why do you ask for this? Are the Laguna cops closing in on you for the Barrel?”

“Do not say that! Absolutely not. They’ve been respectful. Maybe a little frustrated that there’s not one speck of evidence against us. Everything points to the Monterey 9 and Imperial Fresh Seafoods.”

Casey takes a long moment to consider. Bette’s tale of the Monterey 9 sounds possibly believable.

Laguna PD detective Pittman has asked about them, indicated that they are of interest to his investigation of the Barrel arson. He’s already sent Casey a useless photograph of an Imperial Fresh delivery van with the dancing shark on it.

Pittman has also asked Casey about the infamous Laguna arsonist Timothy Stanton Orchard, who Casey’s mom wrote an article about years ago. Shown him pictures.

But Casey hasn’t even thought about — let alone seen this weirdo — in years.

“I’ll talk to my family is all I can say. About something written.”

“Wonderful, Casey. Totally rad, as you might say.”

She pats the back of his hand lightly with hers. Which pricks his burns but also sends a zing of pleasure through him. Same as when she kissed his ear on Sunset.

“I brought something to make you respect me more,” she says.

Bette gives Mae another treat, then pulls a small trophy from the Halliburton and hands it to Casey. It’s a brass surfer girl on a wooden stand, a brass wave behind her. Nice little two-footer, Casey sees.

“I got third in the under-twelves at Huntington one year,” she says. “The waves were big, and Bethany Hamilton gave this trophy to me.”

“Sweet,” says Casey.

“You can have it to put with yours.”

“No, you should keep it.”

He sets it back in the briefcase and he sees the hurt on her face. Remembers that Bette told him she was an actor and film school graduate, too. Out here in the cool autumn sun, Bette’s face looks pale and luminescent as a pearl. And her hair black and shiny as obsidian.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” says Casey.

“You can’t. The other reason I came is because I want to talk to you about a business arrangement. I want to help manage you.”

“Manage me?”

“Your business, your money, your happiness, your life.”

“But I’m already doing that.”

“Casey? Let me be honest and caring. You’re not doing a very good job of it.”

“In exactly what way?”

“Hear me out.”

She gives him a hard, matter-of-fact look. He can’t exactly hear her wheels turning, but he’s sure they are.

From the Halliburton she gives Mae another treat, then hands Casey a sheaf of papers with a fastener at the top. It looks like the purchase offer for the Barrel that the lawyer had in his briefcase, not quite hiding his gun.

He’s expecting some kind of proposal about management, but as he scans through the pages he sees copies of his contracts with sponsors and contest organizers, endorsement deals, pay schedules for modeling contracts, commission agreements with an agent for the book he’s writing, a Hollywood studio option for his life’s story, even his first surfboard endorsement with a small Laguna Beach surfboard maker when Casey was fourteen: Lagunatic Surfboards.

Deep in the pages, Casey sees offers and proposals he hasn’t had time to deal with. Or, usually, has had the time, but not the energy. Business makes him sleepy.

“These are some of my deals,” he says. “How did you get all this?”

“Public records, Internet searches. A good private investigator is a friend, and a sharp LA lawyer is a Wu. By marriage.”

“Well, now you know what I’m worth.”

“That’s right, and it isn’t much.”

“I’d say eight thousand bucks for fourth at the Pipe Masters is pretty sweet. And the twelve grand from the Locomotive Watch company for three photo shoots. And the dough from Dream Coast Clothes and World Statement Denim and Ripley’s Organic Bakery isn’t bad.”

“But it’s not good, Casey. Your non-Barrel income adds up to an average annual twenty-five thousand dollars for the last three years. Your own CaseyWear clothing line actually loses money. Without your paycheck and tips from the Barrel, you couldn’t afford to surf the world. You could barely afford to live.”

“No, I’m living fine. See?”

“Have you been audited?”

Casey’s not-so-dormant suspicions of Bette Wu sting him like a bee. Everything a threat. She wouldn’t rat him to the IRS, would she?

“Bartenders never declare all their tips. Do you?”

Casey has always been uneasy about this, but Jen and the Barrel managers and the other waitstaff have all told him that he should only declare ten percent of his tips. Max. The Feds expect it. Tips that he works hard for, in his opinion.

“You should answer me.”

“Half.”

“Oh, Casey. That’s so like you.”

He shrugs, feels dumb. “It still keeps me in a low tax bracket. I hardly pay any taxes. I get refunds sometimes.”

“Who negotiates these deals for you?”

“I do. The companies like dealing with the actual surfers.”

“You bet they do!”

Casey sets the financial history of his life on the table.

“Do you own this place, Casey?”

“I rent. The owner’s cool so it’s two grand a month, plus utilities. My truck’s paid for.”

“How many miles, driving that pickup truck from here to Oceanside three mornings a week to hunt down the catch of the day?”

“Two hundred forty thousand, but I change the oil every three. Those Toyotas last forever. I told them I’d love to pitch their trucks on TV or something but they never got back.”

“Who did you talk to? Some guy at a dealership?”

“The sales manager.”

Bette Wu clears her throat. Then slips out from the table bench and walks over to the centerpiece tangerine tree, loaded with late October fruit. “May I?” she asks, hand raised.

“Go for it.”

“You, too?”

“For sure.”

“How many?”

“One.”

Bette takes her time, reaching up, fingering one tangerine after another. Casey pushes his suspicions of her as far away from his brain as he can get them. Enjoys a long, beautiful minute during which she has nothing to do with shark-finning, or dognapping, or real estate hustles, or arson, or trying to snake her way into his meager fortune. For that minute, doesn’t even try to derail his attention away from her.

Finally she’s back, sets four perfect tangerines on the table between them, and sits.

“You don’t ask for as much as you should. Because you are polite and thankful. Considerate and shy. And that’s why you need me as manager. To get what you are worth.”

He peels a piece of the fruit, smells that unmistakable, sweet, heavy scent. They’re seedless so he eats it in two bites. His favorite, ever since he was a kid and Grandpa Mike picked him and Brock tangerines off his tree up in Bluebird Canyon. They used to collect and juice them with Jen’s blender, and sell them at the pullout on Laguna Canyon Road where the tourists got traffic-jammed on their way out of town in summer. Set up their card table near Rashad, the Persian rug dealer who sold from his van, and Libby, the Protea girl. Made some good coin.

“Casey? I want you to listen to me now. There is a very large difference between your income and your income potential. You’re tenth overall in the world in men’s surfing. Ninth in big-wave surfing. You’re only twenty-four. You have seven hundred thousand fans on TikTok. Fifty-five thousand followers on Facebook — I mean followers, not just likes. You’re up over forty thousand on Twitter, and forty thousand subscribers to your YouTube content. Subscribers, not hits. Then, the CaseyGrams and blogs on your web page, which gets more traffic every week. And the Surf Nation podcasts. You are an influencer, big time.”

“I know there’s a way to get money for all that, but I’m not sure how. A little confusing.”

“Which is why you need me. Then, there’s the non-social media — your television ads and billboards — your handsome face and perfect body, your magazine covers, everywhere people look, there you are. Casey, you need Seiko, not Locomotive! You need J.Crew, not Dream Coast Clothing. You need Lucky Jeans, not World Statement Denim. You don’t need Ripley’s Organic Bakery, you need Dunkin’ Donuts — life-sized posters of you in every store in your surf trunks drinking coffee! You need to make money on CaseyWear, not lose money. And please, change the name.”

“What’s wrong with CaseyWear?”

“It’s boring and too on the nose.”

He shrugs. Doesn’t really mind the CaseyWear handle at all.

“Look, Casey, I took film and business, and I know people in the industry, so I know how it works. Based on my Books into Film class, you should have gotten five times that advance for your book, twenty times the biopic option. Someone has to make these people feel lucky to pay what you’re worth — and not just in today’s dollars, but tomorrow’s. That someone is me. If you win the Monsters of Mavericks, I will renegotiate your contracts. Bring you to the table with the heavy hitters. It would move you into second place on the World Surf Tour, and first in big-wave riding. Too busy surfing and fishing to manage all this? Too shy? Too cool? I understand. That’s where I come in. I’m good at this kind of thing. Better call Bette. I always get what I want. I’ll get what you deserve, Casey. And I’ll take fifteen percent of everything you earn. Not counting the Barrel, of course.”

Casey’s brain whizzes with all this information, speculation, and what sounds like real opportunity. Makes him want to take a siesta. The five-thousand-dollar biopic option on his unwritten The Legend of Casey Stonebreaker has always seemed kind of low.

“Here,” says Bette.

She draws another document from the briefcase, this a much shorter, stapled Agency Agreement Form from Bette Wu and Associates, an LLC with a Long Beach address that Casey recognizes as that of King Jim Seafood.

“Please do read it. If you have questions, I have answers.”

“No, Bette, I’m not going to sign this.”

“But then I wouldn’t be your agent.”

“I still don’t trust you. Mae. The Barrel. A week ago you were finning sharks and now you want to run my life.”

“I was not finning. I have never finned a shark or been cruel to any animal except the fish I catch for food. I do other things that are illegal, but never cruel. I try to survive. Maybe I’ll explain them to you someday.”

Casey takes a moment to look at Bette Wu, let his thumping heart settle some.

“I’m not going to sign, Bette. I like what you say about me being better at business, and I could use some help. But I don’t want you as a manager. I still don’t trust you all the way, and your family not one bit.”

Bette cups a cool soft hand over his. “I didn’t think you would sign with me. I’m hurt that you don’t trust me or believe that Monterey 9 torched your restaurant and our boats. I don’t blame you. Maybe you’ll believe me when the arrests are made and you see them on the news.”

“Well, maybe then, I guess.”

She gives Mae another salmon-and-pumpkin treat, then collects her papers — including Casey’s copy of Jimmy Wu’s statement against Monterey 9 — sets them in the briefcase, and latches it.

Bette gets up from the table and looks down at Casey.

“We could be a great team,” she says. “Maybe someday. Maybe I can earn your trust. Maybe you will be able to see through my bluffs and my acting and fantasies to the brave, good woman inside.”

Casey stands. Walks Bette in silence to his backyard gate nearly invisible in the bougainvillea, takes Mae by her collar, and pushes open the door for Bette Wu.

“Casey, I have planted the seed of truth in you. And you have not seen the last of me.”

“You can’t keep showing up whenever you want.”

She smiles.

He nods and closes the gate.

But something more than just Bette Wu is bugging Casey. It’s like a little present in his head, trying to give itself to him.

At his backyard picnic table, he tries to draw the black Sprinter he saw leaving the Barrel as it burned. As he sketches in the van, the unclear logo partially resolves itself in his memory and appears on the paper: a towering, white-capped mountain. Orange script at the bottom.

Nothing to do with seafood or fish.

Meaning what?

Not King Jim?

Not Imperial Fresh?

He’s pretty good with pen and paper, having spent half his K–12 classroom hours sketching waves and little stick boys and girls riding them.

He completes a decent image, based on his night-vision, fire-addled, scared-to-shit memory of that night.

Casey clickety-clacks in his flip-flops down Broadway to Forest, the Laguna Beach cop house a short half mile from his Dodge City cottage, and for the second time this week lucks into Detective Brian Pittman in his cubicle.

“Interesting,” says Pittman. He’s an older guy, tall and slender, with thinning white hair and the suntanned, sun-lined face of a fisherman. Casey’s pretty sure that Detective Pittman grew up here in Laguna. Grandpa Don said he was cool.

Friday morning Brock stands behind the pulpit of his Breath of Life Rescue Mission and looks out at his congregation. Sparse, as it often is. Twenty-six people. Only one Go Dog is here.

Brock is wearing his standard preaching uniform: red-and-green flannel pants, a yellow pineapple Aloha shirt over a long-sleeved black T-shirt, and shearling-lined boots.

The pulpit, waist-high and curving, is from a secondhand furniture store in San Bernardino. It’s got a signature Brock Stonebreaker eight-foot Day-Glo green surfboard bolted upright over the aluminum cross, the arms of which peek out on either side of the gun like rays of light.

That light signifies the Breath of Life, in fact, Brock tells his motley crowd, his voice well amplified in the big cinderblock room.

“The life in my wife’s breath when she brought me back from death to life, and I was blind but later saw!”

A faint murmur rises from some of the worshippers. Most of them are seated near the enormous river-rock fireplace, in the back, on Salvation Army couches and folding metal chairs. Some doze. The fire licks their faces with orange tongues. The pots on the stove bubble with venison stew, and the chafing dishes on a long picnic table offer up the smell of bacon, eggs, and potatoes, and Brother Brock knows full well that the food is a much bigger draw here on Friday mornings than he is.

As it should be.

Now he directly addresses Mahina, standing mid-room at the video and PA control board. She’s in charge of sending his sermons out live to his YouTube subscribers, who number a modest 955, Brock knows.

Hoping his Internet audience is a little more aroused than these twenty-six live wires, he reads from “The Second Coming” by Yeats, then asks his followers to join him in a silent prayer, asking the Breath of Life to shine on them and inspire them to go into the world and help those in need, wherever they might be, however sick, poor, tired, cursed, hated, cold, wet, burned, hungry, wounded, or beaten down they might be. Bring them food and water and shelter and medicine. Bring them service and protection. Bring them money and love. Bring them action and energy. Bring them the Breath of Life. Bring them something! Our path on Earth is the Earth, and all the people on it!

Brock shouts out passages from Psalms, drops the Bible to his altar.

Picks up the Talmud and reads in his forceful baritone.

Slaps down the Talmud and quotes Muhammad from the Quran.

Which he sets on the stack but the holy books topple to the floor and Brock stares down at them for a moment as if unsure what to do.

He picks them up one at a time and brushes them clean on his Aloha shirt, and sets them carefully atop the altar, squaring them off for balance.

Then Brock nods to Mahina at the console, who cues up a Scottish bagpipe dirge that fills the big room with sweet, weary notes.

Which is when Right Fight leader Kasper Aamon quietly enters the church. Even with his trucker’s hat in hand and his Right Fight windbreaker, he still looks to Brock like a bearded, pot-bellied bear. He’s followed by six not much smaller bears, three female and three male — same jackets, caps in hand, too. They carry holstered sidearms, some up high at the belt, some low-slung and tied off like gunslingers from another century. Three of them have carbines slung over their shoulders.

Aamon nods at Brock, moves past six folding chairs not far from him, and sits.

“Welcome, dullards! What can we offer you?”

“Peace on Earth, Brother Brock,” says Aamon.

“Not on the Earth I know. But welcome to the Breath of Life Rescue Mission, Aamon.”

Aamon crosses one thick leg over the other, settles back into the spindly metal chair but says nothing.

Brock has Mahina cue up another Scottish bagpipe dirge, closes his eyes, and stands still behind his pulpit, letting the full, eerie notes fill the room.

Stirred by the pipes and inspired by these intruders, Brock sermonizes on the value of helping others, friends and family, for sure, but especially people you don’t even know. Whoever needs. Whoever has little or nothing. Equal-opportunity rescue. Your heart turned to action, not pity, not disgust. He thinks it’s a particularly good message for the visitors, these equal-opportunity complainers who hate their brothers and sisters of this world, hate the people who were on this land before them, hate their own government.

He feels like the Boss up there, by whom Brock’s endless performances — some go on for nearly three hours — are inspired. He used to sing along and play air guitar to Grandpa Stonebreaker’s Springsteen CDs.

With such hideous actors as Kasper Aamon and his thick-necked henchmen and — women in his audience, this morning Brock continues on for well over three hours.

At Brother Brock’s invitation, most of his congregants head for the chow, fragrant and steaming hot on the scorched commercial ten-burner range donated by his mother in the recent overhaul of the torched Barrel kitchen. He asks them to keep down the noise so he can finish.

Kasper Aamon looks up at Brock, shakes his head and smiles.

Just after noon, founding member of the Breath of Life Rescue Mission Juana Flores takes her handmade Cahuilla basket from person to person, most of whom set down their paper plates and dig into their pockets.

Brock eyes the few wadded bills as Juana sets the offering on the Day-Glo green-and-black altar.

Of course, Bette Wu does show up whenever she wants, in this case just after sunrise at Oceanside Harbor where Casey is backing Moondance down the ramp into the bay.

A dockhand aboard Moondance reverses her into deeper water and swings the boat toward the loading docks, where Casey and Mae can board.

Casey punches his truck up the ramp and heads for his parking spot, fully surprised by Bette, the pirate/dognapper/failed extortionist/possible arsonist/amateur actor/wannabe filmmaker and business partner, standing in his usual parking place up by the cleaning sinks and tables.

She’s got a laptop cradled on one hip and a fist balled on the other. Back in her pirate uniform, he sees, the black nylon cargo pants and the windbreaker she was wearing when she boarded Moondance, the yellow gaiter around her neck. No gun. Barefoot again.

Casey honks her out of his way, pulls into his spot, and gets out.

“I doubt you’ve seen this,” she says.

She sets her laptop on the cleaning table and swings open the touch screen. Scrolls down.

“Today’s Los Angeles Times,” she says. “Back in the California section.”

Casey peers at the page as Bette taps a story and it fills the screen.

Casey’s a slow but thorough reader. He glances at Bette, who has come in close to read along, then back down to the article. She taps a long, slender finger on the names Glen Lee and Roy Song.

“Imperial Fresh Seafood — backed by Monterey 9. Just as I said.”

Finishing the article, Casey feels big emotions surging up against each other inside him. Surprise. Doubt. Relief. Suspicion. Joy?

He says, “Woah, this is heavy.”

“I told you we were innocent. My dad. King Jim Seafood. All of us. Me!”

“I still don’t see why these guys would burn up the Barrel.”

“To punish enemies,” says Bette. “The old way of the underworld. Of gangs and tongs and blood feuds.”

She kneels and hugs Mae. “And I would never hurt your dog. And our offer to buy the Barrel was honest and sincere. Low? Yes, low. But we doubled to four million. We negotiate in good faith. Generous terms for your family and all employees. You have us wrong, Casey. One huge mistake.”

She draws a salmon-and-pumpkin treat from her windbreaker pocket and Mae snatches it with a snort.

Bette rises and gives him a frank look. Even barefoot, she’s not a lot shorter than six-two Casey. He wonders if she played basketball for UCLA. In this damp, early morning light, her skin is smooth and moist and her black bangs hang thick above her ebony eyes. Not a scar, Casey thinks. Not a mole or a blemish.

Not that that means what you are inside.

And not a line on her face, until she smiles.

“I thought you’d be happy to know who burned your restaurant.” She brushes a lock of Casey’s thick blond hair off his forehead. “And maybe if I present myself better, you might let me help you with your businesses and finance. Maybe become your partner someday. Maybe become a friend.”

Suddenly, Casey feels... empty.

Because everything he thought about Bette and her pirates, and her father, was wrong. Probably wrong. The pirates were shark finners, for sure. Ugly stuff. But not Bette, right? The pirates shot up his burner phone and scared the shit out of him but Bette never drew her gun, and it was right there on her hip. Yes, Bette tried to leverage Mae into their offer for the Barrel, but she never laid a finger on her. Jimmy tried to buy the Barrel cheap, but he didn’t burn it up.

Empty, when what you think is true is actually not.

But he feels weirdly... filled up, too.

With total positivity. Bette a friend? Who helps me figure out how to increase my “earning potential”?

This woman isn’t really a shark finner, a Mae-napper, a real-estate hustler, or arsonist? Isn’t a major criminal at all? She’s a choice woman who kissed my ear on Sunset and said she thinks I’m smart?

Slam the door on her?

Gulls keen overhead. Mae sits and looks up at them.

Bette has already shown him the LA sheriff’s report filed by her father, accusing rival Imperial Fresh of torching his fleet. She has told him that she believes him, that the Stonebreakers did no such thing. Suspects the Monterey 9 of escalating their attack on the Wu family and King Jim Seafood.

Logical enough, thinks Casey, but the facts weigh heavily on him, and on his morals and honesty. They’re both lying. Two big fudging lies, but can he spill his?

Out of the question, not on the table.

His guts tighten but he’s keeping his secret. For now. He was against the dang King Jim boat attacks anyway but he’s got his family and Brock’s Go Dogs to protect.

“Your words sound good, Bette. You tempt me with how smart and beautiful you are.”

She blushes slightly, a pink undercurrent swelling up beneath her perfect white skin. He wonders if she can do this on cue. The acting classes.

“I don’t want to tempt. I want to help.”

“But I still don’t want a manager now,” he says. “Signing those papers. That whole fifteen percent commission thing. No.”

“Then let the whole thing go!”

“Maybe if, like...”

“Seriously, Casey.”

She spreads her arms, hands balled tightly, then closes her eyes and opens her fists. “I let it go. There it goes. You should, too. Now.”

“Okay.”

Lowers her arms, opens her eyes and studies him. “I didn’t know how you would react to this news. But I’m glad you don’t hate me. The first step toward trust.”

He pulls his phone from his shorts pocket, leaves text messages for Jen and Brock. See the California section in today’s LA Times. Looks like we might have made a mistake.

Mae looks out at Moondance tied to the loading dock.

“I’ll be seeing you, Casey.”

Casey feels a nervy little rush, something forbidden but good, then:

“The bluefin are still in. Interested?”

In late December, a long-expected but devious winter swell bypassed Half Moon Bay and landed south.

Postponing the Monsters of Mavericks left fifty of us surfers huddled under tents in the rain at the Pillar Point landing, teeth chattering, all suited up but nowhere to go.

I counted twelve boats tied up and waiting in the water, ten trailered jet skis waiting to be unleashed, a bevy of photogs and videographers, writers and rescue teams. Lots of terse jokes and forced optimism. I can feel her turning around, John said, meaning the fugitive swell, but making me think of the miscarriage. Luckily, another storm-generated swell was forming — a potentially stronger one at this point — up on latitude 38, full of silence and possible fury.

ETA at Mavericks: twelve days.

Christmas Eve, sitting with John in his father’s impressive, new Hillview Chapel in Laguna Hills, I listened to the hymns and Christmas standards, watched the procession to the manger with real sheep and costumed shepherds, all part of Pastor Mike’s quaint and scented Christmas Eve service, which drew sellout crowds every year.

I sat in the pew with my reindeer scarf still around my neck, a bit of a cold since the Mavericks false alarm, one hand on John’s knee. I sang the hymn lyrics projected alongside the stained-glass windows that flanked Pastor Mike’s stately mahogany and mother-of-pearl pulpit. He was in great form, expansive and filled with the inner light that looked so good through him, especially on video. When we closed our eyes in prayer and Pastor Mike thanked the Lord for His blessings and asked Him to help us use them wisely, I asked the God of whom I was skeptical to give me once again the child who visited and left me, like a ghost.

This from Brawn, the latest far-right social platform that Brock figures will be out of business in a year:

Brock sits at one end of a gray-and-blue plaid Salvation Army couch in the mild morning sunlight outside his Breath of Life chapel. He’s got his phone out, trading punches with his enemies. Months ago, he got tired of the Right Fight and other creeps hounding him on his website and Twitter page so he dove right into the sewer with them on Brawn, where he can always find a fight if he’s in the mood.

He’s also got a tablet beside him, with live Mavericks cameras on Surfline.com. Right now the surf is flat, gray, no swell, just windy chop and pelicans diving into a school of anchovies. But FreakZilla — freakishly early for sure — is forming more strongly now, its speed and width growing, but its path still open to interpretation. Brock studies the NOAA Data Center maps: impressive. Surfline is bullish on the swell hitting Half Moon Bay; NOAA cautious. Brock’s gut tells him it’s going to be big, very big. Possible ETA at Half Moon Bay is 120 hours: five days from now. A key reading of the Southeast Papa buoy in Oregon currently has a twenty-six-foot, nineteen-second swell. A swell that big, with a nineteen-second interval, Brock knows, means very large, once-in-a-decade surf — if it stays on course.

Storms upon storms, Brock thinks.

Mahina’s at the other end of the sofa with the current weekend edition of USA Today.

Brock looks at Kasper Aamon’s very swollen face on the Brawn feed. It looks plenty painful but Brock’s heart doesn’t exactly go out to Kasper. Fucking Nazis trying to hurt my people, he thinks: Kristallnacht ’38.

Brock looks at Wardblock214’s picture. He’s a hairy, glaring guy in a plaid flannel, an iron cross pendant peeking out below his beard. Looks something like Kasper. Brock likes the Brawn graphics because they’re big, and he can clearly see the faces of his critics. Sometimes the faces match the message. But sometimes the posters look nothing like what they say.

Such as this sweet-faced blonde behind big, flame-red glasses:

Brock considers Kittybitch’s sullen face, her storm of red hair. Doesn’t know what to say back.

He checks Arizona Wildfire, figuring it’s going to take him and Mahina six and a half hours to make Flagstaff. The Go Dog Econoline is packed to the rafters with supplies, and its tank is full. The latest containment numbers are eight hundred acres, zero percent contained.

Brock watches both Kupchiks, checking the tires and changing the oil in his battered, black-and-green Go Dog van.

Closes the laptop and sets a big dark hand on Mahina’s warm shoulder.

He’s got the mission but he hates to leave.

Breath of Life.

Protect and serve.

“I’m going to get some Go Dogs out here while we’re gone,” he says.

“Kasper?” asks Mahina.

“Yeah. Kasper. I need to take better care of our people.”

“It’s why we are,” says Mahina, setting her big paw on his. “But we might miss the Monsters.”

“Flagstaff is more important. I love you,” he says.

“Aloha wau ia ‘oe, Stonebreaker.”

Stan Kupchik, his body curved like a question mark, drops the heavy little hood of the Econoline and waves.

Juana Flores and a passel of children — the new Kupchiks among them — come down the road from the trailers, one of the older ones kicking a soccer ball against three determined, smaller opponents. Some are on bikes or trikes. The compound dogs bound and circle and zigzag along with them, all headed for the reservoir, led by Juana.

Three days later, Jen, Casey, Brock, and Mahina huddle around a table in Barbara’s Fish Trap, Half Moon Bay’s most popular restaurant. It’s cold inside, but packed with customers, the waitstaff bustling between the tiny kitchen and the dining room.

Jen’s mother and father — Eve and Don — are there. As are Pastor Mike and Marilyn Stonebreaker, who flew into Half Moon Bay just an hour ago and drove to the Ritz-Carlton.

FreakZilla is arriving tomorrow, as predicted by NOAA, Surfline, the National Weather Service, and other big-wave prophets around the globe. The heart of it, with the biggest surf, is expected for late morning the day after. There’s no doubt the swell is coming. The question is how big and exactly when. NOAA says it’s a thirty-foot swell, which means fifty-foot faces, with clean-up waves possibly bigger. The biggest worry now is not the waves, but the wind.

Barbara’s is packed with Monsters surfers eager to compete. Jen knows at least half of them. Both the men and women wear their big-wave, cold-weather uniforms — beanies and hoodies or puffer jackets with fur, thermal shirts, flannel lounge or ski pants, and shearling boots.

Jen looks out a window toward the bay, where a firm, cold breeze drives little whitecaps toward shore. If it whips up strong and doesn’t change direction, she thinks, it’ll blow out the waves and it’s adios, Monsters.

But none of this wave worry has rocked Jen Stonebreaker’s soul as hard as the arrival of Bette Wu, now being seated by Casey, who holds out the chair opposite his mother. Bette’s dressed like the surfers — in a Rasta beanie, an orange CaseyWear hoodie, snug black pants, and boots with puffs of shearling below her knees.

Before sitting, Bette waves and looks at each person around the table, then slings her purse over the seat back.

“Hi, everybody,” she says. “I’m Bette Wu, Casey’s friend and business associate.”

Jen barely hears it, but half the crowd cheers, and there’s a few hearty whoops. The other diners are silent, having seen Casey’s videos — now taken down from his feeds — that show this Bette Wu working with shark finners, and illegal fishermen and — women, and maybe having something to do with Casey’s dog disappearing. And that suspicion about her family burning down the restaurant.

Jen knows she should just get up and walk out, or maybe — just maybe reach across the narrow table and shake her hand. But she can’t move. Just like she couldn’t move her hand on the jet ski throttle for the split second she took that day twenty-five years ago, when she paused to tell John that she loved him.

Is this a waking nightmare? Is this really her naïve and beautiful son Casey, bringing a criminal into his life? Into hers?

She looks at him in numb disbelief. Sees the shame on his face.

Fact is: Jen doesn’t view the arrests of the Monterey 9 arson suspects as a vindication of Jimmy Wu. Not by a long shot. Jimmy might not have lit up the Barrel but he definitely tried to buy it for a pittance, to extort her acceptance by threatening her son’s fucking dog. And who knows — what if the Monterey 9 guys were hired by “rival” Jimmy? Or even framed by him?

And Jen sure didn’t view Bette’s threats against Mae as forgiven, just because Casey vouched, very emotionally, for Bette’s “misunderstood intentions” and “saying things she didn’t mean.” Casey, god bless him, actually had tears in his beautiful ice-blue eyes.

Now she’s his friend?

Not on my watch.

She stares at Casey but he won’t meet her eyes. Bette gives her a humble, lips-pursed kind of look, which Jen does not answer.

Brock looks amused. He stands and nods, reaches across the table, and shakes Bette’s hand. Jen takes his betrayal almost as hard as she does Casey’s. A smile parts his dark, hard face and his locs sprout and glisten.

“So we meet again,” says Brock.

“A lot has happened.”

Jen knows she should do the same, just shake the pirate’s hand, make peace long enough for her sons to fully and wholly compete with the immense, now-inevitable FreakZilla.

Pastor Mike stands and clears his throat. “May we bow our heads in a prayer of thanks, for guidance and great waves, and for the wonderful food we are about to receive?”

The spirited din of the dining room respectfully lessens as many of the customers recognize Pastor Mike from his streaming Hillview Chapel show on Hulu, his ubiquitous freeway billboards and online vids.

“Bless this food to thy service, Lord, and welcome Bette to our lives. Show us your way forward, that we may follow and learn, and make amends. Our thanks to you, Lord. Amen.”

Jen hears the smattering of “amens” that follows. Could almost puke. She’s way too rattled to say an amen of her own, not at all feeling thankful or like making amends with Bette Wu.

Pastor Mike sits.

The dining room noise hasn’t returned since his prayer, but there’s a steady buzz — customers sensing something important at hand.

Casey pulls out her chair and Bette stands. Jen is silently disgusted by this, but she can’t take her eyes off of tall, beautiful Bette Wu, suddenly holding sway over her son, her world.

Casey, standing beside Bette with a small smile, suddenly sits.

Bette nods to him, then considers the room with a serious face, drawing them in, before focusing for a brief moment on the eight people at her table. Clears her throat and swings a strand of shining black hair back under her beanie.

Silence settles over the crowd, broken only by kitchen clamor and the sound of the waitstaff serving and clearing.

“Thank you for allowing me to be here. I love surfing even though I’m no good at it. I admire so many of you big-wave riders. You are brave and beautiful.”

This gets them going again, hooting and cheering, glasses raised.

“I was born in the United States. But because my family is of Chinese ancestors, there have been hateful, racist suggestions made in news and social media, mostly from the extreme right. My socials are filled with hate. We are taunted on the streets where we live. Our old people sometimes get hit and kicked. We get blamed for disease, communism, and a bad economy. For yellow skin. These are some of the prejudices that led to rape, beatings, and murders of my ancestors, as far back as the California Gold Rush. I, my father, and some of our associates have been interviewed by the Laguna Beach Police, the LA Sheriff’s Department, and the FBI. They found no evidence that anyone in my family or in King Jim Seafood is even related to the fire that destroyed Jen Stonebreaker’s beautiful restaurant. On the opposite, arrests have been made and charges filed against two individuals tied to the Monterey 9 criminal organization in LA. So, I thank you from my heart for letting me sit with you tonight, and see the wonderful contest. Thank you, thank you. Casey?”

Jen watches her son stand. He’s taller than Bette Wu but not by much. His face is flushed.

Bette’s serious words have hushed the crowd, and the waitstaff have paused to listen. Jen stews in the relative silence. The only sounds in Barbara’s Fish Trap are the distant banging in the kitchen, the slow cars out on Capistrano Road, and the raindrops hitting the windows.

Jen dreads what her son is about to say, whatever it might be. Wishes she could cradle him in her arms and carry him away. Maybe elbow Bette in the face on their way out. By the way he looks at Bette, Jen sees that she has overrun him, body and heart.

Casey: “So now you know that Bette’s family didn’t burn the Barrel. I want you all to know that. Welcome her to the Monsters, maybe be, like, cool to her. She’s really great.”

Casey drops back into his chair like a kid who’s being stared at. Looks at Jen with the same dashed expression he got when he was six and asked her if she would marry him someday and she told him no, it doesn’t work that way, son.

The Oceano lobby is empty this late. Jen and Casey sit near the fire in heavy silence.

“Mahina’s getting some rest,” says Brock, setting down the drinks. “She’s exhausted.”

Brock looks exhausted, too, from three days at the Flagstaff fire. “Where’s Bette?”

“She’s got a room here somewhere,” says Casey. “Not with me.”

“Your friend and business associate, Casey?” asks Jen. “What are you thinking?”

Casey nods and swallows hard. Takes a sip of orange juice.

“She’s really good at business, Mom. You just gotta realize she didn’t burn down the Barrel. She didn’t hurt Mae. She helped her nutty dad try to buy your restaurant at a really insultingly stupid price. They’re big talkers, Mom. But Bette asked to come here to help me stay relaxed and not have to drive ten hours and have to deal with reservations and all that. Just concentrate on the surfing. Let it flow, man. Let it be. You’ll see her different when you get to know her. But if you can’t or won’t, then I ask you to at least trust me and my judgment. At least be nice to her. She really wanted you to take that money, Mom.”

“What’s her cut as your business associate?” asks Brock.

“We earlier talked about fifteen percent but that’s on hold for now. There’s no money in this for her.”

Jen listens to this, feeling as if her cheeks must be red but the rest of her face white. The red is how much she loves Casey in all his naïve goodness right now; the white is her anger at Bette for conniving her way into Casey’s life. In Jen’s mind, Bette is a fast-talking, sharp-dressing, maybe Hollywood-connected, lowlife smuggler and shark finner, no matter what she’s got Casey believing.

Although, to be fair, thinks Jen, even though I don’t want to be fair — Bette Wu never handled a knife in any of Casey’s postings, never touched a shark.

“I like her,” says Brock. “As a fan of unusual women. Trust? Hmmm... But I wish you’d have taken the money, Mom. That much money would put the Barrel back on the map in no time.”

“She said she’ll get another check if you want, Mom,” says Casey.

“Absolutely not. She can’t buy me. But I guess she’s bought you two.”

“That’s harsh,” says Casey. “She’s a business associate and a friend. Not a slave owner.”

“Heaven help you, Casey,” says Jen. “With Bette Wu’s hands in your pockets. And wherever else they might be.”

“It’s not like that, Mom.”

“You’re a stupido if you don’t think she’ll try,” says Brock.

Casey slumps a little, crosses his arms, and shakes his head. Stares at the floor.

“Bette says I’m smart,” he says quietly. “Not like Fredo in The Godfather.”

“You gotta be realistic about this, bro. You gotta look things right directly in the eye. She might be a good friend and want the best for you. She’s definitely hot. But she’s trying to buy the Barrel. And us, too.”

Casey’s still staring at the floor. “She wants to manage more than just my business. My happiness and my family someday, when I have one. You know, like, the future and stuff.”

“Bro,” says Brock. “The best advice I can give you is to use a condom that Bette Wu hasn’t poked a hole in.”

Casey shrugs. “That’s pretty gross, Brock. To say about her.”

“He’s right,” says Jen.

Who wants to slap Casey’s face.

Instead she comes over and hugs him and tells him she loves him, that he’s going to shred this Monsters contest tomorrow, and she’s going to be there to tow him in and get him to the rescue sled if he needs it, but you won’t need it, because you’re going to tie for first place with Brock and you’ll have to split the money and saw the trophy in half and we’ll put both halves in the lobby of the new Barrel by John’s bronze.

John, she thinks, feeling Casey’s face warm and wet with her tears.

John, whom she had promised to love and protect all those years ago, back when she truly believed she could.

Sunrise without sun.

Jen powers Thunder from the Pillar Point launch toward the breakwater and Mavericks beyond, Casey seated behind her. Brock and Mahina are out ahead of them, a plume of ski spray rising in their widening wake.

The sky above is gunmetal gray, and the water here in the harbor is the same color, but shiny. Up on the bluff the old Air Force tracking station globe presides over the harbor, a World War II relic.

Behind Jen trails the rescue sled. When she speeds past the breakwater into the open ocean, she hears Casey’s ritual war-whoop invocation behind her: “God save us all!”

The sea is rougher outside the second breakwater. Thunder bucks into the chop, her engine whining with the dips and drops. Jen cuts diagonally to lessen the impact, half of her attention already on the waves that she can see coming in a half a mile northwest. They’re very big — thirty-foot faces breaking right — nicely formed and spaced at lazy intervals, crowned by twenty-foot plumes of spray suspended by a light offshore breeze. Jen’s last Surfline forecast this morning had the brunt of FreakZilla hitting Mavericks between 10 and 11 A.M., carrying forty-foot waves with sixty-foot faces. Surfers measure waves from the behind, she knows — a Hawaiian tradition — and faces from the front. Two helicopters — a red San Mateo County rescue chopper and a black-and-white ESPN machine — weave high above, awaiting action.

Aboard Amiga, Jen helps Casey choose his board. Brock and Mahina are trying to sleep in the little cabin, still pounded by three days at the Flagstaff fire, which claimed two lives. Reno holds his boat steady in the current and swell, chattering away about his new granddaughter, but his eyes keen on the waves, which here at Mavericks are prone to sudden changes of size and shift of direction when they hit the reef below.

Jen watches her son waxing his board — an eight-foot-ten, orange-and-black thruster with three of the five available fins deployed. Casey moves like his father, she thinks, deliberately and calmly, on his knees, pushing the wax block across the deck with one hand, rocking with the swell.

He looks up at her. “Hey, Mom.”

“These are good waves, Casey.”

“These are beautiful waves.”

“Don’t try to win this thing on the first one.”

“Never. Easy does it.”

“You have to make it. Then on the next one you do more.”

Jen sounds just like her mother, always the coach.

“You sound like Grandma,” Casey notes with a smile.

With his thick yellow hair tousled Casey of course reminds her of John. More than reminds her. Is John, in one of those rare, exact genetic handoffs from father to son.

“I’ll be there if you need me.”

“I know, Mom. I got this.”

Sitting on the deck, he zips on his booties, pulls on his hood and gloves. Clamps the leash to his right ankle, takes up his gun, stands, and slips overboard.

Jen climbs down Amiga’s folding ladder and onto Thunder, which starts up with a throaty blast of white smoke.

Casey hits the lineup — first heat, six men. Jen joins the other five tow skis, buzzing around like noisy wasps, all keeping well away from the big walls of water marching in. Pipedream, the judges’ boat, rocks steadily inside, allowing good binocular views of the rides. The ESPN chopper drifts low, while the county rescue copter stays higher for the macro view.

Through the raunchy smoke of the outboards and ten jet skis — four of them for rescue — Jen tows Casey into his first wave.

It’s a twenty-five-foot beauty queen with a smooth face, a thick lip, and an inviting right shoulder. Casey drops the rope and Jen makes a quick escape, circling out wide so she can see him.

Casey drops in and makes the bottom turn easily, tucks into the barrel, runs his right hand along the cylinder, then accelerates up to the lip again from where he drives a straight fast line out ahead, then launches his board and himself into the sky and over the mounding wave to safety.

Jen watches with a hitch in her breath and a smile on her face, Thunder rocking under her. She picks up Casey on the lee side of the wave, hears the boom of it over her snarling ski. She steadies Thunder while Casey straps his board to the sled and climbs on.

They’re back in the lineup a minute later. Casey sits behind her on the ski, for elevation, his still-leashed board stowed for now in the rescue sled.

“Beautiful work back there,” she says.

“Perfect tow, Mom, but I need bigger.”

“You’ll get it.”

But, as if a switch has been thrown, the morning goes small. Jen watches the breakers come in, like five-foot Little Leaguers wanting their pictures taken.

“This fully sucks,” notes Casey.

But if the Surfline oceanographers and meteorologists and wave prophets are right, Jen thinks, those first sets were just a preview. The main attraction is still to come.

“They’re on their way, Case.”

“That first one will get me good points, but Tom Tyler’s was better.”

“Be calm.”

“I know, because Dad was always calm. I think Brock got tired in the fire.”

“He looks pretty whupped,” says Jen.

“But he’s got that energy in him, like, when you least expect it.”

She sits astride the ski, holding in gentle water, clapping her gloved hands together to break the cold. Watches the men in the lineup, some sitting on their boards and others seated behind their drivers. Even through the ski noise, their voices carry across the water. Occasional nervous laughter — nervous because the sets are only an hour and fifteen minutes for your best five rides. There are ten boats in the water, including Pipedream. Plus the four rescue skis, hired by the contest organizers. All bobbing in separate, uneasy syncopation. When the big waves come marching in and towering up, all the watercraft and the people on them look like a tiny village perched at the foot of a moving mountain. We’re all so small, Jen has always thought. A band of tiny crazies. “Start Me Up” and “Iron Man” slug it out from boats bobbing at opposite ends of the lineup.

Abruptly, the breeze changes direction and gains force, coming from the northwest now, with the swell. Jen shoots an energy drink and it’s kicking in. She angles for view, trying to gauge wave direction and speed, trading observations with her son.

Everybody watches and waits as a couple of nice fifteen-footers lope in and break, breeze lifting spray off their backs. The waves are more temperamental now, the lips pouting and collapsing earlier.

The fifteen-footers become twenty feet, then twenty-five. Like they’re just warming up, Jen thinks. She’s seen this before on the big open-ocean breaks, where a mid-set wave jumps up much higher than the others, suddenly, and for no apparent reason.

Tom Tyler, the favored nineteen-year-old phenom from Santa Cruz, ditches his tow rope and paddles into a twenty-five-foot wave that lurches to almost forty just as he’s trying to launch. Tyler is thick and strong, and Jen watches him dig for all he’s worth to catch this wave as it towers up and starts to break over him. Tyler makes a miracle drop — heavy as an anvil, so vertical and fast is his descent — then jams on the brakes with a knee-rattling bottom turn, sprints through the massing whitewater, then races up the face, over the top and out.

Jen and Casey holler for Tyler, and offer up neoprene-muffled applause.

“Big points, Mom.”

“Focus on yourself, son. Focus on the job.”

Pure Mom again, thinks Jen. At forty-six she knows she’ll never outgrow her mother’s indomitable will to win.

Jen rocks on her jet ski, well to the side of the Pit, the Cauldron, and the Boneyard — three of the most lethal rock formations at Mavericks. They’re impossible to locate precisely until the waves inhale and rise up, suddenly exposing the rocks just a few feet under the cold, clear water. Jen glimpses the Cauldron — an undersea grotto — just before a furious six-foot wall of whitewater crashes over it.

A hideous place. Where John went down.

She glances at Casey, a blade of fear cutting through her.

“He’s all around us, Mom.”

“He always is.”

The waves arrive bunched closer now, eager as bulls entering a ring. Thirty-foot faces, Jen figures, as she watches a local fisherman — Sal Stragola, tall, thick, and barrel-chested — being towed into a wave six times taller than he is. He makes the drop but not the turn, has to surrender to the whitewater, then prone out on his gun. The wave crests and crashes over him with a stout boom. Sal broncos along in the wall of suds and sand, clambering his way inside, holding on with all he’s got. This bailout will keep him from getting held down by any of the next five waves of the set, which might save his life but will probably cost him the heat, scored by judges on Pipedream. Jen sees that Stragola is in water too heavy for a jet ski, so by the time he waits out the set and gets back in the lineup, he’ll have lost a waveless twenty minutes.

The next wave is Casey’s, a wobbly thirty-footer that puffs out early and leaves him with a frothy short shoulder and an easy exit. No points for this one.

Tom Tyler is towed into a forty-foot wave. No sooner has he dropped the rope when the lip splinters ahead and knocks Tyler off his board, then grabs the boy by the neck from behind and takes him down.

Jen hears the shouts and cries, and joins the jet ski fleet making the big semicircle to water that’s safe, but as close as they can get to where Tyler went down.

No sign of him. Her stomach tightens.

Engines whine and blast smoke into the air.

A driver she doesn’t know gets in too close to climb over the wall of whitewater, which hurls his ski across the water. He crashes, holds on with both hands as his machine lurches in tight circles, sputtering exhaust and seawater into the air. He manages to climb back on, right the ski, and close in on Tom Tyler, who has surfaced just out of the impact zone, holding on to half his board for flotation.

“No worries!” he yells.

Rene Carrasco gets pitched from a twenty-five-foot wave that jumps suddenly, shaking him off like a flea. Jen sees him dive, his tethered board plopping out in front of him. Carrasco’s tow partner circles out after him.

Flip Garrison shreds a clean, thirty-five-footer that barrels over him mid-wave and leaves the man hidden inside the tube for three full seconds — only the tip of his gun showing — before Garrison, crouched, shoots out like a ball from a cannon. Clean exit.

Wave of the day so far, Jen thinks.

Ted Kaiawalu purls on his takeoff and flies, arms out, his board midair above him. He lands hard, scrambles, disappearing under six feet of whitewater churning with pieces of driftwood and shreds of kelp.

Jen watches the ESPN helicopter hovering out in front of the impact zone, and the rescue chopper below it — so low its blades whirl just above the breaking waves. Looks like one could jump up and grab it, she thinks. The skis slash and the boats scramble for safer water in the heaving sea.

Over the din: “Outside, Mom!”

Jen guns seaward for the next wave, a lumbering forty-footer. She swerves out and away from the still-forming crest, and onto the rising flank.

From where she looks back at Casey, his rope in both hands, lining up with the forming peak, pointing his big board down for the drop.

At once: the wave stops forward motion, and it’s face rises up — fills from below — the same reverse hydrology Jen has seen at Jaws and Cortes Bank, when wave and bottom hold still while the wave swells higher, as if taking a huge breath — the strange stall of time when a big wave decides to become a very big wave.

Casey lets go of the rope and drops in.

Elbow down, Jen flogs the throttle and grinds Thunder far along the rising shoulder, then over it, getting air before landing on the kinder backside sea.

She swings down and around to the edge of the impact zone to see Casey make the drop, body and board vertical, arms out, head cocked calmly, measured and methodical like John would be.

Fifty feet, thinks Jen. Sixty? It’s the biggest wave she’s seen anyone ride and her son is on it, and she’s towed him into it. She’s bone-deep scared, for everything that can happen, for everything that has.

Casey makes the bottom turn, his legs strong and true as pistons, and the wave breaks top to bottom over him with a concussive finality.

He’s gone.

Three seconds. Four. Five.

In Jen’s mind, even the jet skis and outboards and helicopters seem to have gone silent, but she isn’t thinking about that, she’s watching the four-story cement mixer in which Casey’s future is being formed, and plotting the best way to get down and around to the impact zone if this wave won’t let go of him.

Casey bursts out of the barrel, already aiming for the top of the wave, toward which he climbs with calm deliberation. The wave coughs a cloud of spray after him, as if trying to knock him down, then follows with another.

Jen watches her son bank the lip and hold high for a horizontal glide, then tuck in for a fast run back down the wave face. Fast indeed.

A beautifully carved bottom turn.

Then a graceful, arms-relaxed, palms-out, head-cocked, leaning-back-at-the-waist glide up onto the shoulder. Where Jen feels his joy, and, smiling, watches Casey shoot over the black wave and into the sky, disappearing into the windblown spray on his orange-and-black magic carpet.

The klaxon for the women’s heat blares just after noon.

The waves are the biggest of the day — routine forty-five-foot faces — staggering in, deranged and urgent.

There’s a brief, bucking huddle around Pipedream, during which the contest organizers offer to postpone the women due to wave size. They greet the idea with curses and raised middle fingers.

Jen’s up against five surfers she doesn’t know, all younger by at least one decade, all ranked in the World Surfing Tour ratings, with much better odds to win, place, and show here at the Monsters of Mavericks. She’s a walk-on, a big-wave footnote hanging on by her now ancient reputation. And, of course, John Stonebreaker’s long-reaching legend.

She plops overboard, last in the lineup, unties her board from the rescue sled.

“You can do this, Mom,” says Casey. “God Himself is going to be there with you. So’s Dad. Listen to them.”

“Got it, Case,” she says, sitting on her board now, lifted by a rising swell. “I like what I’m seeing out there.”

“I’ll get you where you need to be.”

She watches the first woman, Ruby Peralta, drop into a marauding forty-foot face. She free-falls and lands staunchly mid-wave, but digs her rail. With the nose of her board trapped vertically, the wave shrugs forward, flipping Ruby into the air, where she’s already swimming as the whitewater plants her.

The four rescue sleds scream in, boiling around the impact zone, their drivers calibrating rescue and disaster. A capsized jet ski is a deadly thing. Jen watches Ruby’s board — leash attached — hurtling toward one of the rescue skis. The driver ducks and guns his craft toward Ruby, now aloft in the whitewater, stroking hard, head up, helmet long gone. She lunges for the pausing sled, grabs and hangs on as the driver carves a wide arc away from the zone.

Jen watches her climb onto the sled and raise a fist.

“Oh, Mom, look at this!”

Casey nimbly tows her in, waits for her to drop the rope, then guns Thunder to safety.

Jen’s first wave unfolds in front of her. She makes it, glances at the three-story drop in front of her, then focuses on a narrow section of it — the upwelling flank down which she must slice. The world reduced to this. Lets her feet obey her eyes, feels the wild slide of her board as she flies across the face and down, ankles chattering, feet locked in the straps.

The g-force of her bottom turn tries to telescope her legs, but Jen hasn’t been carrying iron weights in the Laguna Beach High School swimming pool just for the fun of it. She feels the change of direction shuddering up into her back and shoulders as she leans forward, pivots, and makes the turn into the first section.

Which is already starting to break, high above and well ahead of her, a heavy, black-and-white lip, wavering with menace and ready to pitch.

Terrible news.

She can’t outrun it from down here, so she races up the face, banks into its power, crouches, hangs high, and holds on for her life as the barrel takes her.

The sound is like nothing else, a percussive roar she feels in her bones.

Two. Three. Four and...

Out she blasts, an orange-and-black comet in a dark sky.

Cranks up and off the lip, down and across, speeds through a long section without Brock’s dillydallying shtick, then up the face, over and off.

Midair, Jen reaches out both arms and screams as hard as she can.

No words, no thoughts, just the wail of fear banished, of a soul in joy.

Casey bucks through the chop like a bull rider, and picks her up — his smile like the one he had as a four-year-old, looking at his very own first surfboard in the Castle Rock living room twenty years ago, Christmas day.

Back in the lineup, helmet and hood off, Jen chomps an Abba-Zaba, feeling the warm seawater slowly oozing from her ears.

Casey can’t shut up: “...you killed it, Mom! I saw the photog boat right out in front of you, so they got some awesome vids and shots. Off that lip, oh man, that was rad! This is, like, the best day of my life.”

She watches Phyllis Kaiawalu — Ted’s sister — shred a thirty-five-foot face with the grace of a figure skater, and make a clean exit.

Maya Abeliera rides a beautifully formed forty-foot face in a straight, hundred-yard sprint that brings her to the faltering crest that knocks her off her board. Maya dives like a seal and dolphin-kicks herself back into the wave, dropping a shoulder and bodysurfing the slowing giant. Her board trails along behind her, like part of her pod.

Jen watches her surface, where she whoops twice, then yells with the breeze: “Don’t try that at home!”

Jen’s second wave is a thick-necked peak. She barely makes it, rides the elevator down, manages the bottom turn, then goes rocket-woman and zooms up the uprising face as the lip breaks behind her. When she glances back and up, it seems to be snarling.

She works the section back down, sees her exit route as the wave seems to snag on the rocks, climbs fast as she can for the soft spot and launches high for the other side.

She lands with a splat on the heavy black water. It’s like wet asphalt, and she hears the crack of her helmet and the wrench of her neck. Gets tangled in the leash for a moment but struggles out and climbs back onto her board and paddles hard for Casey.

Who makes a perilous pickup look easy, Jen climbing onto the rescue sled, reeling up her board with the leash. She looks down into the hideous Cauldron again — why does it keep me coming back, she thinks — then she feels Thunder’s power as Casey pulls her away.

They join the lineup, from the relative safety of which Jen sees the next set coming in, a dark, horizon-blotting platoon of killers. It’s like they’re looking for her. The ten-minute klaxon warning blasts across the water.

“You don’t have to ride another one, Mom,” says Casey. “You’ll get the women’s wave of the day, for sure. That’s, like, two thousand clams and a cool trophy.”

“I want to win the whole thing, Case.”

Jen hardly recognizes her own voice. It’s not the one she’s been speaking in for all these years, the one driven by fear and hung on regret. Right now, with the almost warm sunlight on her face, she feels that she is a different being. She’s grown. Evolved. Time to move into the world again, she thinks.

Hasn’t felt that way in twenty-five years.

John, that sun feels good, doesn’t it?

“You know what Grandma Eve would say about winning,” says Casey.

“Yeah — it isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!”

“Mom, remember why we do this. Or the Breath of Life, as Brock calls Him.”

“All metaphor, Casey. I want to win. It’s just the way I am.”

“This set is big, Mom. Real big.”

Jen watches Odile Bertran, pitched off her board before she can even stand up. The barrel takes her down and the rescue skis scream into action.

“They’re huge and fast, Mom. I’m going to put you way high up, so you gotta be fast.”

Odile pops up on the edge of the Pit and climbs into her tow partner’s sled just as he guns it away, Odile dragged through the exploding whitewater.

Maya Abeliera holds the tow rope, looks down, and lets the charging wave go past her.

Holly Blair makes the wave and carves an impossible bottom turn, only to be crushed by the suddenly collapsing peak. The wave elevators her back up, high, then slams her down again, her board tombstoning on its leash.

Jet skis throw up wakes and exhaust.

Jen watches the photographers’ boat rollicking just outside the impact zone, and the two helicopters hovering close together, their blades whirling not twenty feet from a breaking fifty-foot face.

Holly pops up in the whitewater, trapped in its churning fury, whirling and flailing, board trailing, snapped in half. It looks to Jen like she’s slugging the water with her fists.

Then, as a voice squawks down, she strokes hard for the red life buoy dangled by the rescue chopper.

“Swim left, Holly! Swim to your left!”

Jen’s third and likely final wave of the contest is her biggest. It’s the cleanup, nothing behind it but a waveless, heaving ocean.

She nods at Casey, whose expression is uncharacteristically puzzled. Feels Thunder’s torque and strength.

Throws the rope and drops onto a galloping, fifty-foot thoroughbred that suddenly raises his great head behind her.

The breeze lifts a white plume but Jen can’t look up or back, only down, half-blinded by the spray, letting her feet obey her eyes, trusting her stung vision to take her where she needs to go.

Too vertical and she’ll unfasten.

Too horizontal and she’ll get pitched.

Two one-way tickets into the impact zone. To the Cauldron, the Pit, or the Boneyard.

She’s all in because there is no choice.

Rarely on a drop, the nose of a surfer’s gun pops off the surface for a split second — a small rise or a hidden dip — and the speeding board takes a gulp of air. At forty miles an hour, the nose rides up, and the body of the board follows, lifting off and away from the wave until the board is vertical. Physics and velocity push the tail out and away, and the surfer comes off the wave and descends — head down, feet above, and arms out — her board behind her like a cross on which she is crucified upside down.

Which is Jen Stonebreaker, an orange-and-black figure falling headfirst into the violent whiteout of the impact zone.

The county helicopter lowers for her, Holly Blair safely aboard and the life buoy still dangling. The rescue skis all go banshee toward Jen, with Casey, Brock, and Mahina out ahead of them already.

The wave drives Jen to the bottom, mashing her against the reef, the tonnage of water holding her down. She clamps her hands over the rocks to keep from being dragged, feels the pull of the leash on her ankle as the wave takes her board toward the surface.

Lifting Jen off the rocks, and into the fury of whitewater.

Rag-dolled and tumbling, eyes closed, she pulls three of her inflation-vest pull tags. Nothing happens. Yanks the fourth, and feels the loop come off in her hand.

Is this my sentence for John?

Her terror peaks and tries to flood out of her, but it can’t get out. She’s got it trapped in there and she feels the nerve-curdling fingers of panic up high in her throat.

She’s got breath left, but can’t believe so much of it is gone after only a few seconds. The cold weight of the water, and ten feet of pressure here near the bottom, are wringing the air right out of her.

And the wave won’t let her go. Like it knows there’s no backup wave behind it. Like it’s going to eat her here and now. Like Jen belongs to it and it alone.

She thinks she’s facing shore. Pulls herself along by the rocks, but the wave lifts her feet and flips her over, then presses down hard again. She’s pinned on her back, eyes open now to the dim underwater twilight of Mavericks, while sharp white flashes shoot through her vision. Her leash goes slack.

She rights herself, the wave shoving her head against a boulder. The rocks around her creak and scrape. She feels the spined urchins and limpets slicing through her hood. Clamps the rocks again, draws her knees to her chest, and pushes off with all her might.

Then the whitewater claims her again, rushing fast.

Toward land, one quarter mile away.

She’s dizzy now from lack of oxygen and near panic. Not sure what’s up or down, really, just clawing her way toward her next breath.

Breaks the surface and swills the miracle of air — which turns out not to be air at all, but a mouthful of brine that scalds her throat and sinuses and lungs.

And turns her world white, as the ocean folds her under, splayed across the reef, faceup again.

God help...

Breath of...

She struggles over and gets her feet under her again.

Takes hours, while the rocks creak and scrape.

Jen takes a breath — it’s reflex and she can’t fight it — and shoves off for the surface. Reaches up and pulls her outstretched arms down as hard as she can. Then again. She has to make that bright white light. Has to get the air that’s in it.

But she’s not going up; she’s tumbling again, pounded by the rocks. Hears them laughing.

Thinks:

John, Casey, Brock...

Mom, Dad...

Brightwhitelight

Kickagain

Breatheagain

Kick!

Then sudden black, and only black.

The next evening Jen attends the Monsters of Mavericks awards dinner in the Oceano Bar and Grill.

Her bruises and cuts pulse dully, her neck aches, and her wheelchair is cold steel. Can’t quite get warm. Her right eardrum is broken, but no bones. A miracle, they said. Her balance is way off when she’s standing or getting out of the chair. She’s still a bit hazy on what happened, but the doctors in San Francisco say her traumatic, short-term memory loss will probably return. Bed rest. Set your alarm or have someone wake you up once every hour. Oxycodone if you need it. You’re one tough woman, Jen — you’re the Monster of Mavericks.

She picks at the rice and teriyaki chicken, half listens to the MC — actor Robin McKenna from the streaming drama Legends of the Wave. She’s in a short silver dress with a bow across her breasts, looks like a present to be opened. There’s a huge screen behind her, vivid with film and video:

Stupendous waves that look even bigger through telephoto lenses.

Off-the-lips, barrel burials, bottom turns.

Wipeouts.

The old seventies Five Summer Stories music plays beneath the amplified boom of the waves.

“Let’s start off with the awards that hurt!” Robin McKenna announces. “But we have happy endings here! The women’s worst wipeout — no surprise — goes to Jen Stonebreaker!”

Casey, his reef-scraped forehead almost hidden under his thick yellow hair, wheels her to the stage but there’s no ramp so Robin McKenna slinks down the steps and hands Jen an acrylic-and-gold-look trophy shaped like a wave. Her wipeout unfolds in slow motion on the screen. A ripple of cold numbness wobbles through her. She watches it intently, with little recall of the event.

The actor pecks Jen with a brief kiss, plants a longer one on Casey, then offers Jen the microphone and a white envelope with blue foil trim.

Jen waves away the mike and takes the envelope; Casey turns her chair around and Jen smiles to the cheering audience.

“There’s five hundred dollars in that envelope, Jen,” says Robin. “And some fantastic shops right across the alley. And an open bar ’til midnight! Enjoy! Wow, we’re glad you’re still here!”

Back at the table Jen lets her vision drift from Casey and Brock and Mahina, to her mother and father, Pastor Mike and Marilyn, and Bette Wu.

They look different to her. She’s never seen them in this way before, never been stolen from them, then returned. Plucked from their world, then drop-shipped back.

Casey’s to her left; she touches his face. Brock to her right, likewise.

Funny how they’re all looking at me the same way right now, she thinks. Eve Byrne wipes her eyes, and Jen’s tough, good-hearted former police chief dad sets a hand over his wife’s far shoulder and squeezes. Looks at Jen as if he’s the happiest man in the world.

She settles on Bette Wu’s pale face. Gets a small smile, no teeth, just a cupid upturn of her lips. Bette’s wearing the same seafoam-green leather pantsuit that Jen noted the first time she saw her, in the Barrel bar with her pirate crew, trying to get Casey’s attention. Funny, Jen thinks, how easily that moment comes to mind — weeks old — when wiping out on a fifty-foot wave face just yesterday is only a dark, gloomy snippet.

“...the worst men’s wipeout goes to Tom Tyler... we’re all real stoked to have you with us, Tommy!”

Jen watches nineteen-year-old Tom Tyler bounce up to the stage in his plaid flannels, shearling boots, and red sequined tails, throwing punches like a boxer. Blond hair to his shoulders. He’s about the cutest boy she’s ever seen, right behind her own. Wants to adopt him.

The next time Jen looks for Bette, she’s not there. Then Jen feels a hand on her shoulder and hears Bette’s voice behind her. Jen tries to turn to her but her pain-frozen neck won’t let her.

“I know you hate me but I’m happy you’re still alive,” Bette says. “That wave will haunt my dreams.”

“Mine, too.”

The MC asks the next winners to stay put until all the awards have been announced. Starts to read from an Oceano bar napkin, holding it close:

Ruby Kaiawalu and Tom Tyler get best rides.

The crowd goes bonkers. Someone raises a beer pitcher to his mouth but drops it. Explodes when it hits the floor. Shrieks. Rene Carrasco slides through the glassy beer in his Ugg boots, arms out, knees bent.

Flip Garrison gets big-wave rookie of the year.

Bonkers again, and loud: “Flip! Flip! Flip!”

Maya gets women’s first place and the $50,000 that goes with it. Then Ruby Peralta and Connie Arnett.

Jen doesn’t podium. Doesn’t care. Knows she couldn’t have surfed any better, and she had the luck — until the wipeout, at least — well, enough luck to live through it.

She’s survived what even her most private dreams had promised would kill her.

Everyone’s standing and hooting, bottoms up and shots down. Jen feels like she’s in a dazed version of high school again, when she won everything in sight and everybody adored her and she was falling in love with John. Before she grew up. Before their blissful Garden and his terrible end. Happy in this moment, as she was then. Blessed by life and smart enough to know it.

Jen is so lost in her memory she zones through the men’s second- and third-place winners, then:

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, girls and dudes, masters and grommets, kooks and locals — it’s time for the winner of Monsters of Mavericks men’s overall. As you all know, it’s based on three waves, judged on points for maneuvers, degrees of difficulty, and style. Style, baby!”

Jen watches Robin take a patient swallow of what looks like a sponsored Pacifico longneck, which brings a horny roar from the crowd.

“Men’s overall — Casey Stonebreaker! This year’s monster man!”

Casey and Brock each take a wheelchair handle and push Jen through the bodies to the base of the stage again. Mahina and Bette and the moms and dads are already there. The other winners and most of the audience flood in, hamming it up for the cameras, selfies galore, “Wipeout” twanging and thumping loud from the PA.

After the awards dinner, Casey and Bette Wu walk the quiet streets to Pillar Point Harbor. It’s cold and still, the moon a distant egg in a nest of fog.

They pass Mavericks Surf Company, owned by Jeff Clark, a local who surfed Mavericks for nearly fifteen years before it was “discovered” back in the early nineties. The first guy to really ride it. Alone, because nobody else would dare. Clark is one of Casey’s idols, and the coolest of dudes, too. Tight with his dad. Introduced Casey around Half Moon Bay. Took him out at Mavericks when Casey was fourteen, on a medium-wicked, paddle-in day. Warned him that Mavericks has no conscience.

Casey looks through a window at the handsome Clark boards racked along one wall. Simple and clean, no adorning colors. Above the cash register hangs a blown-up photo of their maker, carving a bottom turn on a fifty-foot face.

“You are him now,” says Bette.

“No, just me.”

“You’re better. I’ve studied all the films and videos. Yours and his.”

“He did it first. I just watched and learned.”

“You’re faster and stronger and more intuitive. A better wave reader. You showed yesterday what you are. You have the royal blood of your mother and father. You are a king. We need to inflate your ego, Casey. We need to make you proud to be the best in the world. Better than Laird. Better than Garrett. Better than all of them.”

“I’m only the best for now. Just at Mavericks. But somebody else will be here next year. Maybe looking through this window. I’m chill with that. It’s all good.”

“More famous. More rich. The best. When they say the best big-wave surfer in the world, ever — it is going to be you.”

Casey turns and smiles at her. “That would be pretty choice, Bette.”

“It is your choice, Mr. Stonebreaker.”

She smiles back. She’s got a seafoam-green beanie pulled over her ears, and matching duster against the cold. Does a funny little skip, ducks a shoulder under his, and presses an arm to his back. They walk on, passing the rental bikes and paddleboards chained up for the night, and the commercial fishing boats cut into planes and shadows by the dock lights. The bait boat crews are already arriving in this early morning dark. A lanyard pings on a sailboat mast.

“You don’t feel so tense when I touch you,” says Bette.

“I’m getting used to you. I’m liking on you.”

He feels her arm tightening against his back and a gloved hand squeezing his elbow. Feels her head on his shoulder and smells that perfume she wore on Sunset, the one that feels sweet and warm in his lungs, puts his sex drive in gear.

“We will be very good, Casey.”

“Totally.”

Bette’s grip goes tight on his arm as a big silver SUV eases into the harbor from Pillar Point Harbor Boulevard. He senses her attention as she slows their walk.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

She rubs his back as if in encouragement, resuming their pace.

“Nothing.”

But as the SUV comes toward them, she firmly adjusts their direction away from it and toward the boulevard. Her hand tightens on his arm again.

The Yukon’s headlights go off and it comes forward and stops, pointed right at them, fifty feet away. No front plate.

Bette stops.

Casey watches all four doors open and four people get out. In the meek interior light he recognizes two of the shark-finning women from his first brush with Empress II — one white, the other Mexican. The other two are Asian women, one big and husky, the other smaller and slender.

“Not in the script,” says Bette. “I have to go.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Back to your room, Casey. I’ll call.”

“These are pirates.”

“I know who they are. This shouldn’t take long.”

“What shouldn’t? What are you going to do? What are they going to do?”

Bette walks briskly to the big woman and gives her a brief look before climbing into the middle row of seats.

Casey watches the doors slam, hears the pirates arguing inside. He’s thumbing on his video when the Yukon lights blast on, and the vehicle charges right at him. He dives, hits, and rolls.

“Fudge!”

Up on one knee he tries to vid the rear plates but they’re blacked out with something, tape, maybe; he can’t tell.

So he runs with all his strength for the Yukon, which bumps from the marina onto the empty boulevard, speeding for downtown and the exits from Half Moon Bay.

Casey races down the middle of the empty boulevard after Bette, but in shearling boots and a goose-down tube jacket and the slim-fit Dream Coast jeans he’s contracted to wear to all World Surf Federation — sanctioned events, racing isn’t easy.

He catches a toe on an orange reflector, goes down, rolls, and is back up again as the Yukon bends south along the beach and out of sight.

After twenty-five years it’s time for me to do my job and tell the truth.

The great writer Susan Casey once called Mavericks a portal to the dark side.

She certainly got that right, especially the wave that John caught late in his final heat: a fifty-foot blue-black peak breaking top to bottom, leaving a barrel five times taller than the man trying to ride it.

Onto which I towed John, then sped along and over the shoulder to safety, the rescue sled gliding behind me on its braided nylon rope.

From there I watched him drop into the wave, legs vibrating, feet locked in the straps, like a vertical arrow, John fastened to the pointed, narrow, big-wave gun, headed down fast, his arms out for control and balance.

He made the bottom turn, carving deep, leveling off, and backing into the barrel forming over him, raking his fingertips along the cylinder. In that moment, John was a daredevil in the barrel, somehow managing to look casual within a rifled, two-story tube.

I smiled to myself despite the danger he had chosen.

This is why we do this, I thought. Nothing we’ll ever do will match it. Not sex, not love, not being a mother or a father, which I know we will be someday. Not seeing God. Not making money. Nothing but this moment of freedom and velocity, this rush of nature of which we are a part. This mastery of power unimaginable. This pure, terrifying joy.

Then the heavy lip lunged, took John by the back of his neck like a blue-black leopard, and wrenched him off his board.

Leaving him suspended in midair, turning, head down and feet up, his board above, aimed down at him like a spear, its leash wobbling between them.

From my perilous angle — the jet ski rocking hugely on the building crest of the next wave, the rescue sled shifting with its own contrapuntal weight — I watched John vanish into the white avalanche of the kill zone.

I saw my opening, my moment to get there and help him.

But I didn’t crank the throttle, because I had something to tell John first.

And I did, firmly:

“I know you betrayed me.”

In that fraction of a moment, I hated him.

And in that half second I felt the wave bearing me up, as if I were an offering and I knew that there was no way I could get to him in time. I had missed my moment.

So now you know our secret.

My sons, Casey and Brock, were born just minutes apart, almost nine months later.

Belle Becket has her fortune-teller’s table set up near the sea wall just south of the Laguna Hotel. The wall has the painting of John Stonebreaker banking off a comically perfect wave at Brooks Street — just a few blocks south of here. For the first time, the painting shows its age to Jen: the gray cement divots, the weakening colors, John’s hair fading from yellow to white.

Belle has on the same tie-dye hippie dress she was wearing last month. Her hair is its usual tangled mess, her gray eyes piercing, the racoon makeup lurid.

The November day is sunny and blustery, and the breeze wobbles her sign. Jen notes that Belle has raised her prices. Now the short future forecast is five dollars and the long one ten.

Belle comes around and Jen hugs her gingerly, tries not to breathe. Since almost drowning she dares not hold her breath. Sends a panic through her — her body just won’t do it. She breathes in Belle’s sharp, wild-gourd scent.

Belle steps back, taking one of Jen’s hands in both of hers. Gives Jen an alarmed look.

“I’m sorry about the Barrel! I’m so glad they arrested Jimmy Wu! Good police work.”

With a lot of help from Bette, Jen thinks.

“I walk past it every day,” says Belle. “The rehab is going faster and faster.”

“I got the loan and the builders are good.”

“I see a beautiful Barrel there by summer.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I’m always right. Short or long today?”

Jen has five twenties balled up in the pocket of her jeans. Pushes them into Belle’s almost-empty mason jar.

“Long, Belle. Tell me what you see.”

“Sit.”

Belle moves the shadeless lamp that holds her handwritten grocery-bag sign, then takes Jen’s hands and stares at her as Jen closes her eyes.

Then Belle.

“Now I’m underwater with you, Jen. Seeing through you. Feeling what you feel. You are frightened and alone and rolling over a reef. You hit a rock but your helmet stays on.”

“It was terrible, Belle. I almost died.”

“I read your story.”

A long silence. Jen knew that Belle would read her piece. That was one of the reasons she wrote it.

“You push off the rocks for the surface. You break into the light. You gasp for air but the whitewater hits your face and mouth.”

Jen concentrates on this. It’s another memory that has stolen back into her. It’s like seeing it happen for the first time. She feels the terror again, those cold, bony fingers trying to take hold of her.

“Now I see nothing but black,” says Belle. “You have stopped seeing.”

Black indeed. Thoughtless silence, forever.

But now Jen opens her eyes to the breezy gray light of Laguna. Colliding with death has changed her. She can face the memories of it, and feel the fear — but she can also banish them from her inner eye. Replace them with the bright, living world around her.

“The black can’t hold me down anymore, Belle. I can make it. Make it to the surface and breathe.”

“It is the euphoria of survival. And congratulations on Casey winning. You must be proud. Your mother, too.”

They share a look over Eve Byrne’s invincible will to win. Especially for her surf and swim and water polo teams, of which Jen and Belle were once a part.

A long silence.

Belle opens her eyes and folds Jen’s hands to the tabletop, palms down. Pulls her tie-dye scarf snug around her neck. Crosses her arms and fixes Jen with a serious look.

“In your article, the New Year’s Eve party scene in Laguna Canyon was a real bummer. I could feel your heart breaking when you were in that bathroom.”

Jen’s imagination arcs back to that night. Over twenty-five years ago, in a flash. She closes her eyes again, lets the memory play.

“I saw and heard you in the words,” says Belle. “The people making love in an upstairs bedroom. You recognizing a voice. And a familiar moan. You, hiding in a bathroom and the door is cracked and the light is off. You waiting. John walks past. Moving with purpose. Then Ronna Dean. Your school friend, the singer.”

“I wasn’t planning on revisiting that today,” Jen lies. “It still hurts like the night it happened.”

“But why did you write it this way, Jen?”

“What way, Belle? What do you mean?”

Belle’s eyes are steel gray and unblinking, framed by the heavy black-and-white makeup. The breeze blows a tangled strand of hair across her forehead.

“You lied,” she says. “Right there in Surf Tribe.”

“Yes, I did.”

“You saw me. Belle Becket. Not some make-believe Ronna Dean.”

Jen stands and walks away from the table. Regards the silver ocean mirroring the gray sky, the tiny waves forming and breaking. Pictures exactly where she’d be if she were just one foot tall on an eight-inch surfboard, riding a little monster like that. She’s been doing this for forty years now, since Mom and Dad started taking her to this very beach.

Then she turns and considers the sea wall, where fading John rides a fading wave as a fading sun shines down.

Belle joins her. Stands a good six feet to one side, pushes some sand with a dirty foot.

“I didn’t know you knew,” she says. “That’s how I was able to keep doing this. This thing with you. I wondered but I didn’t know. Sure didn’t see you when I walked past that bathroom. Did you hate me then?”

“Oh yes.”

“Now?”

“Not now.”

“No one knows, Jen. And now that you’ve blamed it on a phantom, nobody’s ever going to. But what if someone remembers that party and asks about the singer?”

“I never went to a New Year’s Eve party in Laguna Canyon. The one with you and me and John was... well, you know where it was.”

“The rich old people in Newport. What if your magazine finds out you created a character to cover up a truth?”

“To protect another truth.”

“Why all these years? Of this, with me?”

Jen has asked herself this for over twenty years, the anger and the pity fighting inside her like alley cats.

“I saw what happened to you. Your... coming apart. I believed some of it was what you did with John. Guilt and maybe shame. And that you felt responsible for what happened to him — in some way. Distracted him, maybe. Confused him. I wanted to help you. Not totally lose a terrific friend, who surfed with me, and made me laugh, and made me happy to be around.”

“You pitied the pathetic, filthy crackhead who slept with your husband.”

“You weren’t that then. You’re not that now.”

Belle watches her foot in the sand.

“It wasn’t John that did me in, Jen. It was my guilt. My greedy heart. It was him drowning up there in the cold. Hundreds of miles away. After that, it was just the pipe, taking over. One puff at a time. Throw in some schnapps. Some bad company.”

“More than that one time with John?”

“A few.”

“Did you love him?”

“Did I ever. I’d been loving on him since I was twelve, just like you. I lost his baby. Not on purpose. Two months after he died.”

Jen has wondered about this, and how she would react. Wondered if there might be someone walking the earth now, about Casey and Brock’s age, someone with John’s looks and his direct, seeking spirit, maybe Belle Becket’s gray eyes, loopy humor, and desire to get high.

“Did he talk about leaving me?”

“No. He was in love with you. But I was... present and persistent.”

“Fuck, Belle. Such loss. All that for this.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.”

“Thanks for protecting me and my good reputation,” says Belle. “I hope no one puts two and two together, after that article.”

“Too many stoned and drunk people at too many New Year’s parties. Twenty-five years ago. I think we’re safe. Walk, Belle?”

“My jar!”

Belle trudges to her table, stuffs the mason jar money into a tattered bead purse and hikes it over her shoulder. They head north.

“I’ve gotten lots of emails and letters for that last article,” Jen says. “Mostly sympathetic, but some people said he’d be alive if not for me. And I should take full responsibility.”

“You did that.”

“I thought so.”

“What did Casey and Brock say?”

Jen watches a young family, bundled against the cool day, pants hiked above their knees. A boy and a girl run ankles deep in and out of the water, screaming in the breeze. Mom and Dad watch closely.

“Casey said, don’t feel bad, Mom, you didn’t really hate him. Brock said John would have died whether I’d stopped to curse him or not. They look at me differently, Belle. More curiosity. They’re asking more questions about their dad. And me. It’s like the article freed us somehow — John and me. Made us more... real? The boys’ socials have been lighting up with this. Everybody’s got an opinion about me.”

“I saw Casey last week but we didn’t talk. How is he?”

“Tied up with a woman I don’t much like. She’s using him.”

“Let me guess. For his good looks, talent, and sweet heart? And Brock? How is your dark missionary?”

“Driven as always.”

“It’s so strange that Brock got his grandfather Mike’s religious pep, not Casey. Maybe something to do with him almost dying, like his dad did.”

“I’ve thought about that. Casey wants to believe. Brock wants to be believed.”

“What about you? Since almost drowning?”

“Religious pep? No. None for me. I’m just a protect-and-serve kind of girl — because of Dad.”

“Such good boys. Do they still call you Momster behind your back?”

“Face to face now. I take it as a compliment.”

The women stop to watch the waves crash in at Rockpile.

“Where we first saw him,” says Jen.

“We were lucky, Jen. But John was, too.”

Heading back for the fortune-telling table, Belle has a customer waiting. He’s a cool-looking surf dude with a board propped in the sand and a leashed Malinois sitting attentively at his feet.

Belle stops and whirls and gives Jen an exaggerated, big-eyed racoon stare. Fusses with her hair.

“How do I look?”

“Convincing.”

Jen kisses her cheek.

“I’m still up on Castle Rock in the canyon, Belle, if you ever want to shower or crash awhile.”

Not for the first time, Jen takes an awful gut punch at the idea of Belle and John in her bed at home on Castle Rock. Will probably never ask that. The truth may set you free, but right now she doesn’t want to be that free.

“Careful what you wish for, Jen.”

“I mean it.”

As if on cue, they both look back at the John painting on the sea wall.

“I’ll be seeing you around, Belle.”

“You’re awesome, Jen. John said that all the time.”

Late that afternoon Casey and Bette sit in the backyard of his Dodge City cottage on Woodland. Mae lies at their feet under the bistro table near the tangerine tree.

The waning day is clear but cool. Even this far into fall, the tangerine tree blossoms sweetly and the plumeria throws off a spicy scent. The birds-of-paradise stand proudly orange and blue, and the bougainvillea is a purple wall.

He shoots some pictures of the flowers, posts them as a CaseyGram along with a haiku that just popped into his mind:

Bougainvillea bracts

White stars in the middle, like,

A purple riot

Ms. Paige up at Thurston Middle School taught his class the 5–7–5 formula, and Casey really dug how cool the rhythm was, though the best he could get out of seventh-grade English was a C-plus because he was such a slow reader and spent class time sketching waves.

This is the sixth afternoon in a row they’ve been here. Bette wears Casey’s heavy Navajo-print robe and fleece slippers, as she has all week. That first day back from Mavericks, she slept for twenty-plus hours in the guest room, aided by a space heater and her pain pills. Casey sat bedside, guzzling coffee, waking her up every few hours to Bette’s woozy annoyance.

Of these six days, Detective Pittman has been here four long mornings, with his questions and voice recorder and video camera. He’s methodical and patient, asking the same questions again and again, checking dates and times, exact locations, exact words spoken, expressions, tones of voice, background, background, and more background.

Casey waits on them like good customers in his bar, checking on their coffees and drinks, making them snacks, eavesdropping. In between Bette’s recorded conversations with her father, Mr. Fang, and other principals in King Jim Seafood, Casey overhears “unindicted coconspirator,” “plea bargain,” “immunity from prosecution,” “testimony,” and “court time.” He also hears Bette tell the detective that she’s thinking of “getting as far away from him as I can get when this is over.”

“He’ll be in prison when this is over,” said the detective.

Now in the dimming light Casey considers the stitches in Bette Wu’s eyebrow. And the plum-purple bruises around her eyes, fading to orange. The bruises on her cheeks are lighter, too. The two small stitches keeping the edges of her lips aligned as they heal — taken by Casey’s surfing doctor friend in Half Moon Bay — should be ready to remove in two days.

They sit side by side to view the sunset. Bette drinks wine through a straw; Casey a virgin version of the Barrel Scorpion, heavy on his seedless tangerine juice, which he uses instead of orange juice. Her phone is on the table and she keeps looking at it.

He refills her glass.

“I like to drink wine more than I used to,” she says.

“It’s good for you, Pop.”

“I love that scene.”

They’ve watched a lot of movies this past week.

“I’ll cut back the wine when my face doesn’t hurt.”

“Hang in there.”

“I have a question for you, Casey. I believe that Brock and Mahina and the Go Dogs set our boats on fire. I’m almost certain that you did not. Am I right?”

Casey feels that big ugly surge of confusion/anxiety/stupidity rack his brain as he contemplates his answer. Lie or not? Simple but so... complex.

“I didn’t set the fires because I didn’t think it was right.”

Casey studies her eyes, the black pupils set in garnet orange and bruise purple, like the pendant around his neck. It hurts him just to look at them. How do you let them do this to your own girl?

“And I’ve got a question for you,” he says. “How did you frame Monterey 9 for the Barrel?”

She studies him blankly, finally nods. Takes another drink.

“Early morning, after we set the fire, we broke into an Imperial Fresh Seafood Sprinter in their Monterey Park lot. Loaded in some canisters of gasoline, and the cell signal timers, the wires, batteries, everything. And a detailed plot drawing of the Barrel, small x’s where the bombs had been planted. Fang placed the anonymous tip to LA police, who patrol Monterey, named two of the Imperial Fresh Seafood pirates we’ve been fighting with for decades. We’d put the bomb stuff in their garages. The frame might not have been strong enough to fool a good defense, but it was enough for the cops to make the arrests and get them off our backs.”

“What about the Sierra Sports Sprinter?”

“Our van. Our people. Forged plates. A Sierra Sports emblem one of our people found in a thrift store.”

Casey tries to follow the consequences. Tries to think like Brock would think.

“So, if you hadn’t told Detective Pittman about all that, the two framed suspects might have been convicted. And the people who torched the Barrel would be free.”

“Yes.”

In his mind’s eye, he sees the flames lashing the walls of the Barrel, melting the surfboards, eating the paintings and the furnishings and the hardwood floor.

And the Empress II boiling over with flames. And Bushmaster and Stallion and the panga...

Which is when Casey admits to himself who set Jimmy Wu’s boats on fire.

“Who are the real Barrel fire setters?” he asks.

“Fang and Danilo.”

Casey tries to reconcile their faces with the security camera video. Can’t make firm connections, and wonders how a jury could. Again, it’s Bette who can identify them. Convict them.

“You’ve sacrificed a lot for us. Turned in your father. His business. Your coworkers.”

Your face, he thinks.

She shakes her head and looks up at him, a quizzical smile on that battered face.

“And I did it for me, too, Casey.”

His heart swelling for her, he takes off his surfboard pendant with the orange Mandarin Spessartite garnet embedded on the deck. It’s the orange of his father’s famous big-wave gun, and the orange of his mother’s hair.

Years ago, he hired the aunt of one of the Barrel waiters to make this pendant. She was a well-known Taxco jewelry maker. Sent her pictures, dozens of them, so she could get the shape of the gun right, especially that wicked narrow tail. This was before he had any money. So he borrowed from his mom against his busboy wages: two thousand dollars, because the Mandarin Spessartite was so rare. It took him a year to pay her back.

Bette eyes it. Casey likes that he can’t tell what she’s thinking.

Now he stands before her and spreads the heavy silver chain, setting the necklace over Bette Wu’s head and onto her fine pale neck.

“Thank you,” he says.

She stands and lifts a lock of hair off Casey’s forehead, managing a half smile. Softly runs a finger along his reef-cut scab.

Casey gets that funny little jolt he gets when she touches him.

Mae looks up at him like she’s felt it, too.

The phone buzzes and Bette checks the caller.

“I’ve got something for you, too,” she says.

Accepts the call and walks out of earshot to the sliding glass door. Then raises a stop-sign palm to Casey, turns, and goes into the house. Mae sits and watches.

Bette talks a thousand times a day, quietly, almost always from somewhere Casey can’t quite hear.

Through the slider screen he watches Bette, now heading out the front door. He sidles up to the fence, pokes an opening through the thorny purple bougainvillea, and peers through it as a matte-black Tesla glides to the curb.

Bette gets in, sweeping the belt of his robe inside as she shuts the door.

The car doesn’t move.

Casey doesn’t like this one bit. Knows that Bette is in no shape physically or mentally to defend herself. What is she doing? She’s not running away, is she?

He can’t see inside through the blackout window glass.

A moment later she steps out, holding a Tiffany’s shopping bag with black tissue paper waving out the top.

He strides back to where he was so she won’t catch him spying.

She comes through the house, kneeling a moment to pet Mae’s ear.

She gives Casey a pained half smile and sets the bag on the table. Lifts the tissue paper with a magician’s flourish and Casey looks inside.

At the neat stacks of twenties bundled with bright yellow rubber bands.

“My eight grand from the sportsbook. For betting on you, mister! Half for you, and I’m going to bank the rest and maybe get myself some new clothes.”

“I don’t want half. It’s yours. Buy the stuff you need!”

Which, Casey knows, as an eyewitness, is quite a lot.

A few nights back, he helped pack up her furnished San Gabriel apartment, and was much surprised to see how little she had: a portable turntable and amp with detachable speakers and some vinyl. Some college textbooks and a few novels, a dated collection of DVDs — mostly Chinese action movies. She had bulk Costco toiletries, health and beauty products, cosmetics. Only a few really sweet rags: the black knit suit with the brass buttons she wore the day she bombed into his house in Dodge City, the white linen outfit she wore on Sunset Boulevard. The seafoam-green leather outfit she’d worn to the Barrel months ago and, later, to the Monsters awards banquet, was by then at the Canyon Cleaners in Laguna, where Mr. Kim had told Casey he’d do his best to remove the bloodstains and restore the leather. Bette had a few hats and pairs of shoes. Some jeans, sweatshirts, and T-shirts. Her ocean-going “pirate couture” as she called it was lost in the Empress II fire. As was her pistol, which she confessed to having never once fired. When she stopped a moment to study her framed UCLA diploma — but left it hanging — Casey asked why.

“I didn’t quite graduate,” she’d told him. “Didn’t get the algebra at all, and I liked being a pirate better. That’s a fake I had made, just like the check I gave your mother.”

By noon, the Breath of Life Thanksgiving Feast has drawn a hundred people to Brock’s behemoth cinderblock church in Aguanga.

The day is sullen and gray, with an unusually configured storm expected to hit late in the afternoon: an Alaskan system coming down from the northwest, set to meet an atmospheric river of warm tropical moisture streaming over the California Coast from San Francisco to Mexico. NOAA says the merging fronts are ripe for a bomb cyclone, a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure that can bring extraordinary amounts of rain in a very short time. The atmospheric river will be carrying five times the flow of the Mississippi. Snow above seven thousand feet. Tornados possible along the coast and inland valleys. Very unusual this early in the year. Yet another example of climate change from greenhouse gases, they say. Man-made calamity. The new normal.

Brock’s buddies at Surfline are tracking the storm, of course, telling him that it won’t hit Aguanga until late afternoon or evening, but it’s going to be “nuclear.” They’ve nicknamed it the Pineapple Bomb Express.

Brock has flooded his media and the church web page with Thanksgiving Feast invitations to anyone who is “hungry, ready for the breath of life, ready to help those who need help.” Roughly a thousand people claimed to be coming. But the enthused “we’ll be there” messages from California, Oregon, Texas, Arizona, and Nevada haven’t panned out.

He’s planned to feed five hundred souls, but more like a fifth of that are here. The storm, he thinks. But shit, if it rains we’ll just go inside.

Where the church stoves and rented kitchen ovens are turning out pots of stews and vegan casseroles of rice, broccoli, cauliflower, and corn; ham and bean soup; chili, both spicy and mild. Go Dogs — some wearing their operational black-and-Day-Glo green T-shirts — serve with long-handled spoons onto outstretched paper plates and bowls, many of them doubled up for quantity.

Outside in the gravel churchyard, Brock, Jen, Juana, and some of the Go Dogs have set up a hundred folding chairs around ten rented tables.

A shuffling crowd of thanksgivers serve themselves from the chafing dishes — carne asada, fried chicken, a tuna casserole, vegan kabobs, and five enormous roasted turkeys carved by Mahina.

There are food trucks semicircled in the churchyard — Teddy the Greek, Taco Motion, Wok On, Curry in a Hurry, Thai Guys — but the lines are short.

Since midmorning, Brock has been watching the vehicles coming into the big dirt parking lot just beyond the churchyard, their windshields and tires caked with dust. And the three-wheelers, travel trailers, and dirt bikes. Bicyclists. And a motorcycle club of old guys on growling Harleys.

Anza Valley locals on foot.

A small multitude of people in:

Jeans and sweatshirts, athletic shoes and work boots.

Cowboy hats and western wear.

Bright sports merch: MLB, NFL, NBA, FIFA.

Dickies and flannels.

A family in faux deerskin tops, moccasins, and feathered headbands.

A family dressed as pilgrims.

My motley congregation, thinks Brock.

From his surfboard pulpit — set up on a raised stage facing the churchyard audience and food trucks — Brock looks on with minor satisfaction. Maybe closer to two hundred people, but still, his best crowd ever. He and the Dogs can take the leftovers down to the San Diego homeless shelters. It’s taken a good hunk of money to finance all this — the Random Access Foundation declining to sponsor a Thanksgiving extravaganza — citing the tech downturn and early European mistreatment of indigenous New World peoples.

But that’s what money is for, he thinks: to feed the hungry, serve the poor.

From the pulpit he waves to Mahina, shooting video from a ladder in the churchyard, surrounded by the still growing crowd. Waves to Jen and Casey and Bette Wu, standing near the ladder. It’s the closest he’s seen his mother and Bette get. Mae, at Casey’s feet, of course. And both sets of grandparents: Pastor Mike and Marilyn Stonebreaker; Don and Eve Byrne.

Brock almost feels happiness. Feels it trying to shoulder its way past his native anger and his urgent need to act. His need to take off on a huge fast wave, to fight with his fists, to kick whatever ass needs kicking. To protect and serve, in his own heavy, dutiful, crusading, Brock Stonebreaker kind of way.

He feels something like peace right now. A foreign thing. Barely recognizes it. Surprises him.

Brock briefly welcomes and addresses his possibly two-hundred-plus guests. His PA system is good but many of the people only momentarily look up from their heaping plates, nod in Brock’s direction, then resume their conversations, raising plastic forks and spoons.

“Eat and be thankful!” he concludes. “And when you’re ready, go out and help the people of this world. They need you. Breath of life, baby — breathe it in and breathe it out!”

He windmills a chord of air guitar, looking out to his flock, who clap and cheer a little.

Which is when four whining black-and-yellow dune buggies — American flags flying — slide to sudden stops at the churchyard’s edge.

Dust rises and engines sputter out, and the Breath of Life compound goes quiet.

All eyes on big Kasper Aamon and his passenger, dismounting first. Followed by six others — one man and one woman per buggy.

Brock’s heart upshifts into a higher gear, his nerves bristling as he stares at the yellow-and-black bumblebees. He’s furious at himself for allowing this to happen again. Could have posted guards. But he didn’t expect Aamon to invade a Thanksgiving celebration. Brock feels that eager, pre-engagement hyperfocus he felt in Bakhmut, Ukraine.

Aamon ambles through the churchyard, leading his Right Fighters militia — all heavily armed, all in Right Fight trucker hats and black windbreakers with “RF” in tall yellow letters on the backs.

Aamon is strapped with what looks to Brock like a homemade flamethrower: two red canisters strapped to his back and hose-linked to a dual-handled gun holstered on his side. Kasper’s shaved face is still slightly swollen from Brock’s knockout hook.

Mae greets him, tail wagging; Aamon gives her a disgusted glance.

The food truck people scramble and close down fast. Curry in a Hurry is first to crunch out of the lot and onto the road.

Kasper and his troopers fan out and wend around the tables, toward Brock. Some with their phones up, shooting video.

Brock watches from his scaffold as they approach. Feels the crackle of violence in the air. Feels his control vanishing, and a terrible fate pressing down on them from the heavy gray sky above.

Many of the celebrants drift away from the parking lot, uncertain and probably afraid, some headed for the church, others for their trailers, hidden in the arroyo nearby. Some stay where they are, staring, defiant or maybe just confused — Brock can’t figure which. He’s got a pistol fixed to the back of the pulpit surfboard, one of several just-in-case guns he once hid in his pot grows. Pulls it free and kneels behind the surfboard, jamming the gun into the waistband of his cargo pants. Then rises, pulling his bongo-drum-and-hula-girl Hawaiian shirt over it.

Casey, Jen, and Juana hustle for the church. Brock’s grandparents and three Go Dogs follow. Mahina barrels through the crowd and joins Brock on the stage, where Kasper and the Right Fighters now stop twenty feet short.

“Why bring a flamethrower to a rain storm?” Brock asks.

“Those forecasts are never right. Man-made this. Man-made that. Man-made bullshit.”

“You’re not welcome here anymore, Kasper. Leave, or I’ll call the police.”

Kasper Aamon raises his big head, sniffs the air.

“Food smells good,” he says. His voice strains through his clenched jaws.

“I have to hand it to you, Kasper. You can take a punch.”

“I’ll attack first next time, and you’ll see how it feels to get cold-cocked. I saw you put the gun in your waistband, by the way.”

Brock nods, gets a thought. More than a thought: an idea that floats in on Aamon’s air of violence, mixing with the smells of the food trucks.

“Why exactly are you here?”

“Let’s just say we’re here to shoot video for the Riverside County Sheriffs. To help them close this slum down. We’ve done our due diligence with the clerk’s office. You got no permits for those ratty homemade septic tanks. You got no current registration for half of those trailers. You got no legal camping facilities, which means these tent people can’t be living here — county rules, check ’em. Your electrical isn’t to code, the well is old and illegal, the propane tanks are rusted and dangerous. You house filthy illegals here. You got women fornicating and giving birth in unsanitary conditions. Venereal disease. A crummy clinic and not even a nurse. You’re behind on the property tax. You got no handicapped access anywhere. You don’t even have any hydrants in case of fire. Very dangerous, Brother Brock — no fire prep.”

Brock nods, looking down from the scaffold, considering the flamethrower. “That’s bullshit. Nobody’s given birth here. We have a nurse in the clinic, full-time.”

“Abortionist?”

“No. So at least get your facts straight.”

“You’re housing third-world breeders, Brock. Fleas, lice, and a free ride in America.”

Four Go Dogs march from the church, squaring off with Aamon and his crew not twenty feet away. One carries a carbine pointed at the sky, the other an AR knock-off. Four more Dogs come in from the parking lot. They draw and kneel, guns pointed at the dirt.

Brock senses the violence to come as he watches most of the last of his Thanksgiving congregants hurry past the Right Fight dune buggies, down the dirt road toward the highway, parents carrying children, a woman in a wheelchair that skids and slides as the big man pushing it tries to get up some speed.

He knows he should have prevented this. Knows his belief that Kasper Aamon would stop short of an armed invasion was wishful thinking. Born of some ancient idea that men could change, better themselves, pass on the breath of life instead of the breath of death. Born of holy men like Jesus and Pastor Mike.

Not surprisingly to Brock, he feels fully energized by his long odds here. By the notion that he can nudge Kasper and his Right Fighters off course.

Surprise and redirect them.

Show them they can change.

Even if just a little.

“Kasper, you hungry?”

Mahina gives Brock a disappointed scowl, then climbs down the stage stairs and stalks toward the church.

Brock hops offstage, sticks the landing. Hears his canvas slip-ons hit the gravel, then the metallic clicks and clacks of safeties going off and rounds being chambered. His scalp tingles and he notes the exact location of his gun, and he feels that cool surge of adrenaline that he gets taking off on a big wave, a surge that washes his vision clear and makes him feel strong enough to fly.

Aamon stares at him silently. Looks like he’s expecting Brock to leap ten feet and punch him again. He turns to his fighters on either side. Some nod, others shake their heads.

“Gentlemen,” says Brock. “Please be seated. I’ll be right back.”

He hustles into the chapel and the door clunks shut.

Two minutes later he’s back, with a heaping plate of food in each hand. He offers a plate to Kasper, who looks at him, then to his fighters, knowing he’ll have to take one hand off the flamethrower to accept it.

Which he does. Standing there with a flamethrower in one hand and a plate of turkey in the other, Kasper looks like a grizzly confounded by a bear-proof dumpster. He’s just not sure what to do. So he cautiously sets the plate on the nearest table and takes a full grip on the flamethrower handle again.

Mahina comes from the church, big plates of food on one arm, and her pistol-grip shotgun slung over one shoulder. Gives Brock a look that assures him she’s doing this for him, against her better judgment. Thus the shotgun. In her loose hibiscus-print muumuu she looks to Brock — not for the first time — like some island goddess of war.

She’s a genius, Brock thinks. A scary genius.

Next Casey comes from the chapel with two big doubled-up paper plates of chow in each hand, and two more balanced on one forearm, his years of serving food in the Barrel coming in handy here.

Holds out an offering to one of the Right Fighters, a stout woman in a Right Fight trucker’s hat and a blond ponytail coming through the back.

She rests her carbine over one shoulder, then Casey places a platter in her right hand.

“Have a seat,” says Casey.

“I’ll stand.”

“Cool, totally.”

Casey gets two refusals, then one more taker who holsters his pistol to take a plate.

Bette gets one taker, offers her second plate to another Right Fighter.

“Who’s the China girl?” Aamon asks Brock.

“A friend of my brother’s,” he says, noting the calm resentment on Bette’s face.

“Hmpf. Covid and communism.”

Casey looks Aamon’s way as he passes off another Thanksgiving plate. This time to a heavyset man with short red curls sprouting from under his trucker’s hat.

“Much obliged,” he says.

“Aloha.”

Jen and Juana come out next, each with one hand on a rope-handled plastic tub of sports drinks and sodas. Heft it onto a table with a rattle of ice cubes.

The Stonebreakers carry water.

The Byrnes bring beer.

Aamon tries to sit but the backpack flamethrower won’t let him. He straightens and shrugs off the backpack, carries it and the gun to the wall of the church, and props them under the awning.

Hefting himself into his wobbly folding chair, he gives Brock a look.

“I’ve broken bread with demons before,” he says. “Helps me measure what I’m up against.”

He glances at his plate, then looks again at Brock. “Just now getting to where I can chew regular.”

Brock goes to the church wall, draws his sidearm from beneath his Hawaiian shirt, and sets it near the flamethrower.

Comes back and sits across from Kasper Aamon, leaning back and crossing his arms.

No words between Brock and Kasper as they watch the Go Dogs and the Right Fighters crunch off and lean their long guns against the wall. Carefully set their holstered handguns on the ground. Go Dogs guns on one side of the flamethrower; Right Fight’s on the other.

They return to their tables and sit.

Time passes in a muted, near silence. Eyes watch them from the thick manzanita. Children’s laughter comes through the open windows of the chapel. The Kupchiks and their son bring plates of food to one of the far tables. They wave. Brock notes how much better the boy looks, his respiratory infection handled pro bono by an Anza Valley doctor. They’ve decided to stay awhile rather than head off to Tulsa.

Brock sees that some of the Breath of Life parishioners have crept back from their trailers; some of the earlier guests have left their cars and reappeared for the Thanksgiving feast.

Brock spots two drones easing in low from the north — Riverside Sheriffs is his guess, sent in response to the 911 calls no doubt called in by his frightened congregation.

Kasper Aamon takes a long look at them, too, then turns to Brock.

“So your brother won the surfing contest,” he says, trying to saw off a bite of white meat with the tiny plastic knife. Which snaps in half. Kasper leans left a little, almost tipping over his chair, then deploys a big hunting knife to cut the turkey. “I watched on ESPN 3. Drank beer through a straw.”

“Mom won best wipeout. That’s her down at the end.”

Aamon calls to Jen: “I saw your wipeout! You’re weird people to do stuff like that just for fun!”

Jen lifts an energy drink to him. “It’s in our blood!”

Another wordless pause, suddenly broken by the rough clatter of two helicopters descending from the south. Brock sees the green-and-white of Border Patrol, and the black-and-white of the sheriffs.

The drones close in, buzzing like big mosquitoes.

Then Kasper to Brock: “What it comes down to is, we don’t have much to say to each other. We have different beliefs, different convictions.”

“Yeah, well, people can change, too.”

“Don’t give me some shit about agreeing to disagree. We believe in different gods, too. And that’s where I draw the line.”

Brock nods. “Try this: the only god I believe in is the Breath of Life.”

“No. The first rule is: there’s only one.”

“You don’t know that, Kasper. You can’t.”

“I’m absolutely positive.”

Brock shrugs. “Look around you. Your god could use some help. That’s what we do. Help.”

Aamon gives Brock a long look, something like amusement on his face.

“So, just one question, Brother Brock. What’s with the hair? You trying to be a Black guy or something?”

“I like it this way. Feels right.”

“Hmpf.”

The drones vanish into the blue. The helicopters spiral down in a loose helix to hover like tremendous dragonflies over a pond. Sand swirls, plates and cups jump into the air. Some of the celebrants hold their hats.

Brock stands, raises both hands and flips them off. Aamon next, then the Go Dogs and the Right Fighters. Raised fingers and drowned-out “fuck-yous!” Most of the others have their faces down now, holding on to their hats, protecting their eyes. Mae barks and wags her tail, her voice hardly audible against the whirlybirds.

Children spill from the church. One of the boys points a yellow squirt gun at the choppers, and another launches a rubber-tipped arrow from a tiny bow. A girl has a small Dalmatian puppy by its middle, legs paddling air, hugging it to her chest.

Brock foresees a terrible massacre about to unfold, remembers all the cops who’ve mistaken cell phones for guns, kiddie toys for the real thing.

He and Mahina start toward them, but the swift kids are almost to their table by then. Mahina sits back down and shelters the girl and her puppy on her spacious lap. Brock snatches away the boys’ weapons and plops them into the rickety folding chairs.

The helicopters nose in closer, their mechanized roar lowering over him. Brock can hardly see through the blowing sand and dust.

Then, the choppers suddenly rise, back off from each other, and bank away into the sky.

Their terrifying voices fade, then vanish. Like a storm switched off, thinks Brock. Or a killer swell at Mavericks retreating to the deep.

As the dust settles, he looks to the Right Fighters and the Go Dogs — some still flipping off the government warships, some smiling, but none moving toward their guns under the awning.

He takes the puppy from Mahina’s lap.

Even with the adrenaline coursing through him, Brock has never felt this exhausted in his life — not from fire or flood or being rag-dolled across reefs by monstrous waves all over the planet.

But he feels the breath of life in him, going out and coming in.

Kasper Aamon is looking at him. “Want to join us, Stonebreaker? Fight for the right stuff? You just saw your government at work for you.”

“You’re a hypocrite, Aamon. You want to rat out my church to the government you say you hate. It’s their power you crave. We’ll never join you. We like the people you hate.”

Brock reaches out and one-hands the puppy across the table and into Kasper Aamon’s big paws. Another wordless moment as the Dalmatian licks Aamon’s broken jaw.

Kasper sets the dog on his lap.

“Stonebreaker,” he says, gesturing with both hands to the churchyard and the people. “Are you willing to die for what you believe?”

“Yes, but I’d rather die in my sleep.”

Aamon considers the pup, petting its head as he gives Brock an assessing glare. “First you break my jaw. Now you try to break my will to hate you. With food? You think we’re your Thanksgiving savages? Quaint. But I’ll admit I’m finding it difficult to hate you personally. Much as I hate the people you harbor here in this fine country. Which does not belong to them. So, thanks for the grub. We’ll say our goodbyes now, and get to shooting that video we need to shut down this heathen slum.”

A hawk keens high up in the heavy dark sky. Scrub jays bicker on the aluminum roof of the church. Faint music from the trailers.

Pastor Mike stands. “First, I’d like to offer up a prayer of thanks.”

Brock is still standing from the puppy pass-off.

“I’ll say the prayer, Grandpop,” he says.

“Go then, Brock.”

Mike sits and Brock looks to the people. Absorbs their attention and bows his head, loc spikes raised like antennae. His voice is rough and resonant:

“Breath of life,

Hear our voices,

We breathe you in, and breathe you out,

Breath of life,

Give us life,

Give us the strength to love. Hallelujah and amen.”

This evening, Casey and Jen sit side by side at the Barrel bar, Mae napping at their feet.

They’re tracking the five wall-mounted big screens tuned to network and cable news. The summer light burnishes the room in a warm orange glow.

Their restaurant is rebuilt and remodeled and set for a gala reopening next week, on the Fourth of July.

Tonight’s get-together is just family and a few friends.

Casey goes through the bar-top lift door, mixes up two more Arnold Palmers, sets them up, and sits again next to his mother.

The new Barrel is a nearly literal version of the old place: same windows and white walls, same walnut hardwood floors streaked with blond, and island-looking teak furniture, same surfing videos playing nonstop when news and sports aren’t on.

Same bronze John Stonebreaker standing in the lobby with one arm on his surfboard and his optimistic, wave-tuned expression which, technically, is focused on the cars creeping along Coast Highway a few yards in front of him rather than the waves breaking along the Laguna shoreline just a few hundred feet behind him.

The damaged big-wave gun surfboards have been restored and refinished and rehung.

The ruined ones have been replaced by equally authentic boards happily donated by the Stonebreaker family’s many well-wishers in the surfing “community.”

Duke Kahanamoku’s redwood twelve-footer, ridden at Sunset Beach, circa 1915.

One of Jeff Clark’s classic plain-wrap guns for Mavericks, shaped by Clark in 1999.

A fresh Laird Hamilton ridden at Jaws.

A Maya Gabeira from Todos Santos and a Mike Parsons ridden on Cortes Bank just last winter.

A Garrett McNamara from Nazaré.

A Kevin Naughton ridden in Ireland, prominently positioned because Kevin’s been a Laguna friend and mentor since Jen was a girl.

Jen has replaced the burnt-up tiki torches with black wrought-iron wall sconces that give the restaurant a candle-lit, slightly old-world touch.

The local news snippet that Laguna Beach detective Pittman tipped them about earlier today hits CNN first:

In which a reporter from the Orange County Superior Courthouse announces that “colorful” LA seafood distributor Jimmy “King” Wu has been sentenced to serve six years in prison and pay $2 million in restitution for last year’s arson fire that gutted the popular Barrel Restaurant in Laguna Beach. She says Wu had attempted to buy the restaurant but was rebuffed by its longtime owner. Wu then ordered the arson as retribution, attempting to blame business competitors for the blaze. The reporter then quotes the Barrel owner, Jen Stonebreaker, saying she’s satisfied with the sentence and will reopen her restaurant next week, on the Fourth of July.

“You look great on TV, Mom.”

I looked great a long time ago, she thinks, aware again, as always, of how strenuously she clings to her past, her gone best years, when John was alive and the world belonged to them.

“Thank you, Casey,” she says. “I’m feeling better now. After the Monsters. And the fear. And the confession I wrote.”

“It’s good to tell the truth and move on,” says Casey. “You’re only forty-seven.”

They watch similar clips on NBC and Fox, Casey turning often to the lobby windows through which he can see people drifting by, some stopping to press their hands and faces to the glass, checking out the restaurant about to rise from its ashes.

“How goes your movie?” Jen asks.

“They’re editing now. The winter footage was fantastic. Oh, man — Nazaré and Cortes Bank were supernatural. All the scientists are saying climate change is making bigger waves. Some of those things at Nazaré were scary.”

“HBO Max, right?”

“But we’re the producers and we’ve got creative control. Some. There’s going to be lots of you and Dad in it. They want to call it Desperation Reef.”

Jen nods and Casey waits. The eight-hundred-pound gorilla is still in the room whenever Casey’s various business ventures come up.

“Bette’s done good on your contracts and projects,” says Jen.

“Thanks, Mom. She works hard at it.”

“How about her towing skills?”

“She’s good. Not as good as you. We practice a lot.”

“But you haven’t tried her out in big waves yet.”

“It’s the usual slow summer for big waves. But there’s a nice south swell coming in tomorrow at the River Jetty. Five to seven feet, says Surfline.”

Another awkward beat. “I wish you liked her better, Mom.”

“I know you’re together a lot.”

“I want to invite her to something like this. You know, maybe next time.”

“I know. I also know that both of you better watch your butts when Jimmy gets out of prison. Hell, watch your butts now, for that matter.”

“His pirates pretty much jumped ship.”

“But it’s Bette who nailed him. Just saying.”

Through the front door glass Casey sees Grandpa Don and Grandma Eve coming up the steps to the entrance, first to arrive. They wear their summer clothes — shorts and sandals and bright Aloha shirts. Behind them are Mike and Marilyn Stonebreaker — Mike in his white preacher’s suit and Marilyn in a long, peach-colored dress, her hair up, wayfarers on.

A moment later, Brock and Mahina, and Juana and Dane from the Breath of Life Church.

Mae has moved to the lobby, where she stands wagging her tail, as if she’s wanting to seat them.

Casey hops off the barstool and heads for the door.

The Santa Ana River Jetty up in Newport is a glassy eight feet the next morning, an unseasonal south swell of warm water and beautifully shaped waves.

Casey watches the perfect A-frames marching in, growing to full height, their bodies windlessly smooth, the white spray of the peaks finally breaking, dividing the waves into left and right shoulders that rise invitingly.

It’s first light as Bette idles her jet ski — a three-hundred-horsepower Kawasaki two-stroke she’s named Wanda, after her sister in New York. The 850-pound beast was endorsed by Jen, who ordered her to service it and check every line, valve, and injector, and all connections, before towing her son into big surf.

Casey sits snugly behind her in his half-john wetsuit, arms around Bette’s middle, his surfboard and tow line behind them on the rescue sled.

“Set me up on that last left,” he says, over the idling gurgle of the jet ski. He smells her hair and feels her warm ear on his cold nose, hugs her big strong body.

“You got it,” she says, half turned so he can hear.

Bobbing a safe distance in front of, and away from, the incoming waves, Casey watches that third left taking shape outside. It’s the clean-up wave of the set, the last, and the biggest local wave he’s seen this spring or summer. He squeezes Bette’s middle again, pulling himself up against her, comforted and thrilled by the seaworthy strength and beauty that he can feel even through her wetsuit.

We’re like pirates in arms, he thinks, letting go of her and sliding into the ocean, stroking back to the rescue sled and his tow rope and board.

A moment later, Bette turns and catches his right-hand shaka sign, the one Brock can’t stand, then she eases her machine into a brisk trot and picks her way along and behind the breaking wave. She sidles west, parallel as the wave rises in front of her, gunning Wanda faster now toward the peaking crest. She feels the weight of Casey behind her.

Loves the power of the ski, the power of her own strong body in control of all those horses. Like Casey’s.

Swerves ahead and around the cresting wave, then speeds along the left-breaking shoulder. When she feels Casey drop the tow rope she looks back to make sure he’s dropped it, then opens up the ski and blasts up the steepening face of the breaker and over it, into the sky, engine screaming, Bette getting off this wave as fast as she can so Casey, behind her, can inherit it.

She crashes down into the smooth dark water, cuts hard left, safely behind the wave now, and sees the back of Casey’s yellow head cutting along in front of the breaking lip, the rest of him a faint speeding shadow in a wall of blue-green water. Same yellow head she watched so intently in the Barrel bar not quite a year ago when she dressed her best and tried to catch his eye but he never once looked over.

Casey trims along the shoulder, ducks into a quick clean tube, lets it spit him back out to carve the face. Up and down and up and down, what a joyful wave she is, proud but generous and truly, fully stoke-worthy.

Shoots across this living animal, traces a hand along her flank, dips to the bottom and shoots back to the top, where he launches his board.

Flies high, bending into free fall, arms spread and eyes on the gray-blue sky.

My introduction to the literature of surfing was the hundreds of Surfer magazines I read and reread as an adolescent. I didn’t just read Surfer; I memorized it. I loved the sassy writing, the exotic datelines, hip lingo, and its single-minded passion for riding waves. That writing, and of course the photographs, drove me to hours in high school classes, ignoring the teachers, while sketching romanticized waves in my notebooks. It drove me to Newport Beach where I began my own short wave-riding career, bodysurfing 15th Street — a stout beach break with hollow tubes — makeable with nothing but Birdwell Beach Britches and a pair of Duck Feet.

That said, much of the recent nonfiction surf lit is, in my opinion, even better, especially with regards to big-wave surfing and tow-in surfing, which changed the sport dramatically.

These books informed, delighted, and often thrilled me:

The Wave by Susan Casey

Maverick’s: The Story of Big-Wave Surfing by Matt Warshaw

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (winner of the Pulitzer Prize)

Ghost Wave: The Discovery of Cortes Bank and the Biggest Wave on Earth by Chris Dixon

Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast by Daniel Duane

Women on Waves by Jim Kempton

“Surf noir” is a literary subgenre that I’ve enjoyed since Kem Nunn’s wonderful Tapping the Source pretty much put surf noir on the map. His Tijuana Straits and The Dogs of Winter are wonderful, too.

Don Winslow’s novellas Sunset and Paradise — part of Broken — are powerful stories, steeped in surfing life and death.

Thank you, writers, you inspire.

Thank you, waves, you seduce and sometimes terrify.

Thank you, champion agents, Mark and Robert Gottlieb of Trident Media Group, and my wise and exacting editor at Forge, Kristin Sevick, for helping me make the paddle out and the drop into Desperation Reef.

And thank you, Rita, for life, love, and laughter.