Relying perhaps on a sixth sense, Bobby didn’t even look at the dog to confirm his own suspicion. “Stay here. If I flush anyone out, tell him he can’t leave till we validate his parking ticket.”
Barefoot, he descended the steps and crossed the dunes to look down the steep incline to the beach. Someone could have been lying on that slope, watching the cottage from concealment.
Bobby walked along the crest of the embankment, heading toward the point, studying the slope and the beach below, turning every few steps to survey the territory between him and the house. He held the shotgun ready in both hands and conducted the search with military methodicalness.
Obviously, he had been through this routine more than once before. He hadn’t told me that he was being harassed by anyone or troubled by intruders. Ordinarily, if he was having a serious problem, he would have shared it with me.
I wondered what secret he was keeping.
19
Having turned away from the steps and pushed his snout between a pair of balusters at the east end of the porch, Orson was looking not west toward Bobby but back along the horn toward town. He growled deep in his throat.
I followed the direction of his gaze. Even in the fullness of the moon, which the snarled rags of cloud didn’t currently obscure, I was unable to see anyone.
With the steadiness of a grumbling motor, the dog’s low growl continued uninterrupted.
To the west, Bobby had reached the point, still moving along the crest of the embankment. Although I could see him, he was little more than a gray shape against the stark-black backdrop of sea and sky.
While I had been looking the other way, someone could have cut Bobby down so suddenly and violently that he had been unable to cry out, and I wouldn’t have known. Now, rounding the point and beginning to approach the house along the southern flank of the horn, this blurry gray figure could have been anyone.
To the growling dog, I said, “You’re spooking me.”
Although I strained my eyes, I still couldn’t discern anyone or any threat to the east, where Orson’s attention remained fixed. The only movement was the flutter of the tall, sparse grass. The fading wind wasn’t even strong enough to blow sand off the well-compacted dunes.
Orson stopped grumbling and thumped down the porch steps, as though in pursuit of quarry. Instead, he scampered into the sand only a few feet to the left of the steps, where he raised one hind leg and emptied his bladder.
When he returned to the porch, visible tremors were passing through his flanks. Looking eastward again, he didn’t resume his growling; instead, he whined nervously.
This change in him disturbed me more than if he had begun to bark furiously.
I sidled across the porch to the western corner of the cottage, trying to watch the sandy front yard but also wanting to keep Bobby—if, indeed, it was Bobby—in sight as long as possible. Soon, however, still edging along the southern embankment, he disappeared behind the house.
When I realized that Orson had stopped whining, I turned toward him and discovered he was gone.
I thought he must have chased after something in the night, though it was remarkable that he had sprinted off so soundlessly. Anxiously moving back the way I had come, across the porch toward the steps, I couldn’t see the dog anywhere out there among the moonlit dunes.
Then I found him at the open front door, peering out warily. He had retreated into the living room, just inside the threshold. His ears were flattened against his skull. His head was lowered. His hackles bristled as if he had sustained an electrical shock. He was neither growling nor whining, but tremors passed through his flanks.
Orson is many things—not least of all, strange—but he is not cowardly or stupid. Whatever he was retreating from must have been worthy of his fear.
“What’s the problem, pal?”
Failing to acknowledge me with even as little as a quick glance, the dog continued to obsess on the barren landscape beyond the porch. Although he drew his black lips away from his teeth, no snarl came from him. Clearly he no longer harbored any aggressive intent; rather, his bared teeth appeared to express extreme distaste, repulsion.
As I turned to scan the night, I glimpsed movement from the corner of my eye: the fuzzy impression of a man running in a half crouch, passing the cottage from east to west, progressing swiftly with long fluid strides through the last rank of dunes that marked the top of the slope to the beach, about forty feet away from me.
I swung around, bringing up the Glock. The running man had either gone to ground or had been a phantom.
Briefly I wondered if it was Pinn. No. Orson would not have been fearful of Jesse Pinn or of any man like him.
I crossed the porch, descended the three wooden steps, and stood in the sand, taking a closer look at the surrounding dunes. Scattered sprays of tall grass undulated in the breeze. Some of the shore lights shimmered across the lapping waters of the bay. Nothing else moved.
Like a tattered bandage unraveling from the dry white face of a mummified pharaoh, a long narrow cloud wound away from the chin of the moon.
Perhaps the running man was merely a cloud shadow. Perhaps. But I didn’t think so.
I glanced back toward the open door of the cottage. Orson had retreated farther from the threshold, deeper into the front room. For once, he was not at home in the night.
I didn’t feel entirely at home, either.
Stars. Moon. Sand. Grass. And a feeling of being watched.
From the slope that dropped to the beach or from a shallow swale between dunes, through a screen of grass, someone was watching me. A gaze can have weight, and this one was coming at me like a series of waves, not like slow surf but like fully macking double overheads, hammering at me.
Now the dog wasn’t the only one whose hackles rose.
Just when I began to worry that Bobby was taking a mortally long time, he appeared around the east end of the cottage. As he approached, sand pluming around his bare feet, he never looked at me but let his gaze travel ceaselessly from dune to dune.
I said, “Orson haired out.”
“Don’t believe it,” Bobby said.
“Totally haired out. He’s never done that before. He’s pure guts, that dog.”
“Well, if he did,” Bobby said, “I don’t blame him. Almost haired out myself.”
“Someone’s out there.”
“More than one.”
“Who?”
Bobby didn’t reply. He adjusted his grip on the shotgun but continued to hold it at the ready while he studied the surrounding night.
“They’ve been here before,” I guessed.
“Yeah.”
“Why? What do they want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who are they?” I asked again.
As before, he didn’t answer.
“Bobby?” I pressed.
A great pale mass, a few hundred feet high, gradually resolved out of the darkness over the ocean to the west: A fog bank, revealed in lunar whitewash, extended far to the north and the south. Whether it came to land or hung offshore all night, the fog pushed a quieting pressure ahead of it. On silent wings, a formation of pelicans flew low over the peninsula and vanished across the black waters of the bay. As the remaining onshore breeze faded, the long grass drooped and was still, and I could better hear the slow surf breaking along the bay shore, although the sound was less a rumble than a lulling hushaby.
From out at the point, a cry as eerie as the call of a loon carved this deepening silence. An answering cry, equally sharp and chilling, arose from the dunes nearer the house.
I was reminded of those old Western movies in which the Indians call to one another in the night, imitating birds and coyotes, to coordinate their moves immediately before attacking the circled wagons of the homesteaders.
Bobby fired the shotgun into a nearby mound of sand, startling me so much that I nearly blew an aortic valve.
When echoes of the crash rebounded from the bay and receded again, when the last reverberations were absorbed by the vast pillow of fog in the west, I said, “Why’d you do that?”
Instead of answering me at once, Bobby chambered another shell and listened to the night.
I remembered Pinn firing the handgun into the ceiling of the church basement to punctuate the threat that he had leveled against Father Tom Eliot.
Finally, when no more loonlike cries arose, Bobby said, almost as if talking to himself, “Probably isn’t necessary, but once in a while it doesn’t hurt to float the idea of buckshot past them.”
“Who? Who are you warning off?”
I had known him to be mysterious in the past, but never quite so enigmatic as this.
The dunes continued to command his attention, and another minute of mental hang time passed before Bobby suddenly looked at me as if he had forgotten that I was standing beside him. “Let’s go inside. You scrub off the bad Denzel Washington disguise, and I’ll slam together some killer tacos.”
I knew better than to press the issue any further. He was being mysterious either to stoke my curiosity and enhance his treasured reputation for weirdness or because he had good reason to keep this secret even from me. In either case, he was in that special Bobby place, where he’s as inaccessible as if he were on his board, halfway through a tube radical, in an insanely hollow wave.
As I followed him into the house, I was still aware of being watched. The attention of the unknown observer prickled my back, like hermit-crab tracks on a surf-smoothed beach. Before closing the front door, I scanned the night once more, but our visitors remained well hidden.
The bathroom is large and luxurious: an absolute-black granite floor, matching countertops, handsome teak cabinetry, and acres of beveled-edge mirrors. The huge shower stall can accommodate four people, which makes it ideal for dog grooming.
Corky Collins—who built Bobby’s fine house long before Bobby’s birth—was an unpretentious guy, but he indulged in amenities. Like the four-person, marble-lined spa in the corner diagonally across the room from the shower. Maybe Corky—whose name had been Toshiro Tagawa before he changed it—fantasized about orgies with three beach girls or maybe he just liked to be totally, awesomely clean.
As a young man—a prodigy fresh out of law school in 1941, at the age of only twenty-one—Toshiro had been interred in Manzanar, the camp where loyal Japanese Americans remained imprisoned throughout World War II. Following the war, angered and humiliated, he became an activist, committed to securing justice for the oppressed. After five years, he lost faith in the possibility of equal justice and also came to believe that most of the oppressed, given a chance, would become enthusiastic oppressors in their own right.
He switched to personal-injury law. Because his learning curve was as steep as the huge monoliths macking in from a South Pacific typhoon, he rapidly became the most successful personal-injury attorney in the San Francisco area.
In another four years, having banked some serious cash, he walked away from his law practice. In 1956, at the age of thirty-six, he built this house on the southern horn of Moonlight Bay, bringing in underground power, water, and phone lines at considerable expense. With a dry sense of humor that prevented his cynicism from becoming bitterness, Toshiro Tagawa legally changed his name to Corky Collins on the day he moved into the cottage, and he dedicated every day of the rest of his life to the beach and the ocean.
He grew surf bumps on the tops of his toes and feet, below his kneecaps, and on his bottom ribs. Out of a desire to hear the unobstructed thunder of the waves, Corky didn’t always use earplugs when he surfed, so he developed an exostosis; the channel to the inner ear constricts when filled with cold water, and because of repeated abuse, a benign bony tumor narrows the ear canal. By the time he was fifty, Corky was intermittently deaf in his left ear. Every surfer experiences faucet nose after a thrashing skim session, when your sinuses empty explosively, pouring forth all the seawater forced up your nostrils during wipeouts; this grossness usually happens when you’re talking to an outrageously fine girl who’s wearing a bun-floss bikini. After twenty years of epic hammering and subsequent nostril Niagaras, Corky developed an exostosis in his sinus passages, requiring surgery to alleviate headaches and to restore proper drainage. On every anniversary of this operation, he had thrown a Proper Drainage Party. From years of exposure to the glaring sun and the salt water, Corky was also afflicted with surfer’s eye—pterygium—a winglike thickening of the conjunctiva over the white of the eye, eventually extending across the cornea. His vision gradually deteriorated.
Nine years ago, he was spared ophthalmological surgery when he was killed—not by melanoma, not by a shark, but by Big Mama herself, the ocean. Though Corky was sixty-nine at the time, he went out in monster storm waves, twenty-foot behemoths, quakers, rolling thunder that most surfers a third his age wouldn’t have tried, and according to witnesses, he was a party of one, hooting with joy, repeatedly almost airborne, racing the lip, carving truly sacred rail slashes, repeatedly getting barreled—until he wiped out big time and was held down by a breaking wave. Monsters that size can weigh thousands of tons, which is a lot of water, too much to struggle against, and even a strong swimmer can be held on the bottom half a minute or longer, maybe a lot longer, before he can get air. Worse, Corky surfaced at the wrong moment, just in time to be hammered deep by the next wave in the set, and he drowned in a two-wave hold-down.
Surfers from one end of California to the other shared the opinion that Corky Collins had led the perfect life and had died the perfect death. Exostosis of the ear, exostosis of the sinuses, pterygium in both eyes—none of that meant shit to Corky, and all of it was better than boredom or heart disease, better than a fat pension check that had to be earned by spending a lifetime in an office. Life was surf, death was surf, the power of nature vast and enfolding, and the heart stirred at the thought of Corky’s enviably sweet passage through a world that was so much trouble for so many others.
Bobby inherited the cottage.
This development astonished Bobby. We had both known Corky Collins since we were eleven and first ventured to the end of the horn with board racks on our bikes. He was mentor to every surf rat who was ravenous for experience and eager to master the point break. He didn’t act like the point was his, but everyone respected Corky as much as if he actually owned the beach from Santa Barbara all the way to Santa Cruz. He was impatient with any gyrospaz who ripped and slashed up a good wave, ruining it for everyone, and he had only disdain for freeway surfers and wish-wases of all types, but he was a friend and an inspiration to all of us who were in love with the sea and in sync with its rhythms. Corky had legions of friends and admirers, some of whom he had known for more than three decades, so we were baffled as to why he had bequeathed all his worldly possessions to Bobby, whom he had known only eight years.