“He’s a criminal, too.”
Casey keeps abreast of fast-walking Bette, but puts plenty of distance between them. Her perfume is tropical with cinnamon, and fully stoke-worthy. Two big Teslas and a Rivian truck go by so quietly that Casey can hear his flip-flops on the sidewalk.
“Exactly what I want is for you to be able, someday, to trust me, Casey.”
“I’ll never do that.”
“Let me reintroduce myself. I am Bette Elizabeth Wu. My father and mother named me after Bette Davis and Elizabeth Taylor because they love old American movies. I am twenty-seven. I am smart and loyal to my family and my crew and anyone I choose. Such as you. I want you to be my partner. I want us to run the Barrel under King Wu ownership. I want you to talk your wonderful mother into selling to us. Not two million like before. That’s an insult. Now, four million. Four million. And higher salaries for you and Jen and all the employees, from the top down, as my father said. Profit-sharing plans. We want a contemporary redesign. No more surfboards and the endless wave videos that all look the same. No more tikis and lame specialty drinks. Something sleek and elegant, a California-Asia fusion that will define the future. A more creative menu, built around the best sustainable fish and seafood we can get. Farm-to-table California crops. And today’s music! No more ukuleles and pedal steel guitars! Your mother is a great woman and a great restaurateur, but she’s old. No more Beach Boys. No Jan and Dean.”
Casey tries to picture all this, his head swimming with images brought forth by Bette Wu.
“Why not just open your own restaurant?”
“Location. The Barrel sits on the best restaurant location on Coast Highway in Laguna Beach. There is none better, and the Wu family wants to have the best.”
“Would you play Jack Johnson music?”
“Okay, Casey. Sure. For you. Are you leaning into this now?”
“No. Leaning pretty far away.”
“Lots of money for your family. Some control and income from the restaurant.”
“Mom can prove even four million isn’t anywhere near what the Barrel is worth.”
“Four million is lots of money for your family. As a friend and partner, I can show you how to invest your share. I’m good at business and finance. And you wouldn’t have to go out fishing alone for the daily catch. You could retire and surf all day.”
“I like fishing. But us together as partners is totally never going to happen, Bette. You stole the best dog I’ve ever had. You tried to extort money for her life. You tried to steal my mom’s restaurant.”
“You can still play with your hot surf babes.”
“They’re good, honest friends. And I don’t play with them.”
“Maybe you should. Those ones lined up at your bar sure looked ready.”
Casey shrugs.
“I want you to convince Jen to sell. It will be a new foundation for us all.”
Casey’s brain feels crowded and directionless, like a raft full of refugees without paddles. So much ocean. He tries to consider things one at a time, and he’s good that way—one thing at a time—but there’s too many here right now.
They come to the traffic light at Horn, cross Sunset, and reverse course.
A long silence as they walk side-by-side but apart back toward the parking garage.
“We can stay just like this,” says Bette Wu. “Together but separate. Partners in a thriving, beautiful, very profitable business.”
“No. No, thank you. Partners is never gonna happen.”
“Well, damn, I tried.”
Bette stops him, pulls him to her by his shirt collar, and kisses his left ear. Lip-clamps and shakes it gently before letting go and stepping back.
Then reaches up and snaps his earlobe with a lacquered middle fingernail. Snick!
And walks away, hand up, finger raised.
18
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.
