Desperation Reef

“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.

29

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.

“You fish for the Barrel catch-of-the-day specials, don’t you?” Pittman asks.

Casey nods. Studies Detective Pittman’s steady gray eyes as they look down at the Sprinter sketch.

“How far away was it?” he asks.

“Hundred and fifty feet, maybe.”

“Three A.M. But the streetlights there are good.”

“I wouldn’t have looked if it hadn’t burned rubber.”

Pittman nods. “Good thing you did. The security video is pretty bad.”

He considers the sketch thoughtfully. Taps on his desktop keyboard and waits. Taps and waits more. Then turns the monitor toward Casey.

Where Casey sees a black Sprinter with a decal of a dramatic snow-capped mountain on the driver’s side, tiny skiers gliding down it, and the words, in vivid orange lettering at the bottom:

SIERRA SPORTS

MAMMOTH LAKES CALIFORNIA

Casey’s questioning blue eyes meet Pittman’s questioning gray.

“What’d you get on Google?” asks Casey.

“Zip. No such place.”

“Out of business?”

“Five years ago.”

“What’s that mean to us?”

“It’s a nice little whiff to send dogs like us down the wrong trail.”

“Did you talk to that fire setter? Orchard, that Mom wrote about?”

“No,” says Pittman. “He’s in the wind, where he likes it.”

30

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.