I told Bobby everything that had happened at Angela Ferryman’s house.
He grimaced. “Apricot brandy.”
“I didn’t drink much.”
He said, “Two glasses of that crap, you’ll be talking to the seals,” which was surfer lingo for vomiting.
By the time I had told him about Jesse Pinn terrorizing Father Tom at the church, we had gone through three tacos each. He built another pair and brought them to the table.
Sasha was playing “Graduation Day.”
Bobby said, “It’s a regular Chris Isaak festival.”
“She’s playing it for me.”
“Yeah, I didn’t figure Chris Isaak was at the station holding a gun to her head.”
Neither of us said anything more until we finished the final round of tacos.
When at last Bobby asked a question, the only thing he wanted to know about was something that Angela had said: “So she told you it was a monkey and it wasn’t.”
“Her exact words, as I recall, were…‘It appeared to be a monkey. And it was a monkey. Was and wasn’t. And that’s what was wrong with it.’”
“She seem totally zipped up to you?”
“She was in distress, scared, way scared, but she wasn’t kooked out. Besides, somebody killed her to shut her up, so there must have been something to what she said.”
He nodded and drank some beer.
He was silent for so long that I finally said, “Now what?”
“You’re asking me?”
“I wasn’t talking to the dog,” I said.
“Drop it,” he said.
“What?”
“Forget about it, get on with life.”
“I knew you’d say that,” I admitted.
“Then why ask me?”
“Bobby, maybe my mom’s death wasn’t an accident.”
“Sounds like more than a maybe.”
“And maybe there was more to my dad’s cancer than just cancer.”
“So you’re gonna hit the vengeance trail?”
“These people can’t get away with murder.”
“Sure they can. People get away with murder all the time.”
“Well, they shouldn’t.”
“I didn’t say they should. I only said they do.”
“You know, Bobby, maybe life isn’t just surf, sex, food, and beer.”
“I never said it was. I only said it should be.”
“Well,” I said, studying the darkness beyond the window, “I’m not hairing out.”
Bobby sighed and leaned back in his chair. “If you’re waiting to catch a wave, and conditions are epic, really big smokers honing up the coast, and along comes a set of twenty-footers, and they’re pushing your limit but you know you can stretch to handle them, yet you sit in the lineup, just being a buoy through the whole set, then you’re hairing out. But say, instead, what comes along all of a sudden is a long set of thirty-footers, massive pumping mackers that are going to totally prosecute you, that are going to blast you off the board and hold you down and make you suck kelp and pray to Jesus. If your choice is to be snuffed or be a buoy, then you’re not hairing out if you sit in the lineup and soak through the whole set. You’re exhibiting mature judgment. Even a total surf rebel needs a little of that. And the dude who tries the wave even though he knows he’s going over the falls, knows he’s going to be totally quashed—well, he’s an asshole.”
I was touched by the length of his speech, because it meant that he was deeply worried about me.
“So,” I said, “you’re calling me an asshole.”
“Not yet. Depends on what you do about this.”
“So I’m an asshole waiting to happen.”
“Let’s just say that your asshole potential is off the Richter.”
I shook my head. “Well, from where I sit, this doesn’t look like a thirty-footer.”
“Maybe a forty.”
“It looks like a twenty max.”
He rolled his eyes up into his head, as if to say that the only place he was going to see any common sense was inside his own skull. “From what Angela said, this all goes back to some project at Fort Wyvern.”
“She went upstairs to get something she wanted to show me—some sort of proof, I guess, something her husband must have squirreled away. Whatever it was, it was destroyed in the fire.”
“Fort Wyvern. The Army. The military.”
“So?”
“We’re talking about the government here,” Bobby said. “Bro, the government isn’t even a thirty-footer. It’s a hundred. It’s a tsunami.”
“This is America.”
“It used to be.”
“I have a duty here.”
“What duty?”
“A moral duty.”
Beetling his brow, pinching the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, as though listening to me had given him a headache, he said, “I guess if you turn on the evening news and hear there’s a comet going to destroy the earth, you pull on your tights