white shirt, and red bow tie. In an army uniform and an officer’s caphis
rank not easy to determine, perhaps a captain delacroix was the
definition of pride.
ments.
“Audiotape cassette, ” I told Bobby.
“A little death music? ”
“Probably his last testament.” In ordinary times, before a slow-motion
Armageddon was unleashed in Wyvern’s labs, I would have called the cops
to report finding a dead body. I would not have removed anything from
the scene, even though the death had every appearance of being a suicide
rather than a homicide.
These are not ordinary times.
As I rose to my feet, I slipped the envelope and tapeinto an inside
jacket pocket.
Bobby’s attention snapped to the ceiling, and he took a two-hand grip on
the shotgun.
I followed his gaze with the flashlight.
The cocoons appeared unchanged, so I said, “What? ”
“Did you hear something? ”
“Like? ” He listened. Finally he said, “Must’ve been in my head.”
“What did you hear? ”
“Me, ” he said cryptically, and without further explanation, he moved
toward the dining-room door.
I felt bad about leaving the late Leland Delacroix here, especially as I
wasn’t sure that I would report his suicide to the authorities even
anonymously. On the other hand, this was where he had wanted to be.
On the way across the dining room, Bobby said, “This baby’s eleven feet
long.” Overhead, the clustered cocoons remained quiescent.
“What baby? ” I asked.
“My new surfboard.” Even a longboard is rarely more than nine feet.
An eleven-foot monster with cool airbrush art was usually a wall hanger,
produced to lend atmosphere to a theme restaurant.
“Decor? ” I asked. I “No. It’s a tandem board.” In the living room, the
cocoons were as we had last seen them.
Bobby cast wary glances upward as he went to the front door.
“Twenty-five inches wide, five inches thick, ” he said.
Maneuvering a surfboard that size, even with two hundred fifty or three
hundred pounds aboard, required talent, coordination, and belief in a
benign, ordered universe.
“Tandem? ” I said, switching off the flashlight as we crossed the front
porch. “Since when have you traded wave thrashing for cab driving?”
“Since never. But a little tandem might be sweet.” If he was going to do
some tandem riding, he must have a partner in mind, a particular wahine.
Yet the only woman he loves is a surfer and painter named Pia Klick, who
has been meditating in Waimea Bay, Hawaii, trying to find herself, for
almost three years, since leaving Bobby’s bed one night for a walk on
the beach. Bobby didn’t know she was lost until she called from an
airliner on her way to Waimea to say the search for herself had begun.
She is as kind, gentle, and intelligent as anyone I have ever known, a
talented and successful artist. Yet she believes that Waimea Bay is her
spiritual home not Oskaloosa, Kansas, where she was born and raised, not
Moonlight Bay, where she fell in love with Bobbyand lately she claims
that she is the incarnation of Kaha Huna, the goddess of surfing.
These were strange times even before the catastrophe in the Wyvern labs.
We stopped at the foot of the porch steps and took slow deep breaths to
purge ourselves of the reek of death, which seemed to have permeated us
as though it were a marinade in which we had been steeping. We also took
advantage of the moment to survey the night before venturing farther
into it, looking for Big Head, the troop, or a new threat that even I,
in full hyperdrive of the imagination, could not envision.
Rolling off the loom of the Pacific, two strata of cross-woven clouds,
as twilled as gabardine, now dressed more than half the sky.
“Could get a boat, ” Bobby said.
“What kind of boat? ”
“We could afford whatever.”
“And? ”
“Stay at sea.”
“Extreme solution, bro.”
“Sail by day, party by night. Drop anchor off deserted beaches, catch
some tasty tropical waves.”
“You, me, Sasha, and Orson? ”
“Pick up Pia at Waimea Bay.”
“Kaha Huna.”
“Won’t hurt to have a sea goddess aboard, ” he said.