Lockabie calls right back, gets the GPU coordinates where Casey spotted Empress II, tells Casey he’ll hit Desperation Reef and the rest of San Clemente Island tomorrow. Casey hears him keyboarding in his suspect descriptions.
“We’ve heard of Empress II and the finning, Casey. You’re our second witness. Appreciate the tip.”
“They’re armed to their teeth,” says Casey, picturing the bullets zipping into the water as his phone sank into approximately a hundred and fifty feet of ocean. He’s still nervy about that. Actually, more like creeped out and jittery. Funny, he thinks now, that his first fear when the shooting started was for innocent, curious Mae.
“I’ve only got one cruiser and two patrol boats,” says Lockabie. “But we’ll do what we can.”
“Good luck, brah.”
“You might want to stay off that water until we round up these people.”
“No chance of that! The Barrel needs its catch of the day.” But even as Casey says this, he feels a tug of dread about being back on the water after having outed these pirates on his socials. His guts feel bunched up. He could borrow a gun from Brock but he hasn’t fired one since he was a boy—a BB gun.
“Casey. I have a serious question now.”
“My man.”
“How are you looking for the Monsters of Mavericks?”
“Top shape and ready. I surfed Todos Santos on that freak south last month. Forty feet but basically blown-out mush-burgers. I’ll do good at Mavericks if the waves show up.”
“And Jen and Brock?”
“Can’t speak for Brock. He’s been pretty busy saving the world. Mom’s ready, though. She’s a monster on that jet ski of hers. And her surfing looks real good.”
“She’s, what, forty?”
“Forty-six. Tons of training though. Great shape.”
A pause.
“Good luck to you all.”
“We will need waves.”
“December’s the month,” says Lockabie.
It’s another evening crush at the Barrel.
His mom is in a red sleeveless dress and white sneakers, greeting guests, checking in at tables, bustling between the kitchen and the bar and the front desk. Beyond the second-floor deck, the Pacific advances to shore in small waves that fizzle to whitewater.
From his bar, Casey can see the life-sized bronze sculpture of his father standing in the lobby, one arm around his sharp-nosed gun surfboard.
Inside the Barrel, the surfboards on the walls—each one with a history and a plaque—shimmer in the lights. The big-screen surfing videos provide nonstop rides, drop-ins, bottom turns, and wipeouts on some of the biggest waves ever ridden.
The videos are paeans to chaos: a yellow helicopter hovers over an impact zone at the Jaws break on Maui, marking a flailing, board-less surfer while a wave towers behind the chopper. Jet skis swing surfers into rising fifty-foot waves at Nazaré in Portugal, then speed for the exits and into the sky. Helmeted, buoyancy-vested men are pitched from four-story heights into mountains of whitewater at Mavericks. Boards spiral and shoot and break into pieces like breadsticks.
Casey likes the photographs better, especially the older ones:
Dewey Weber at Makaha.
Greg Noll at Pipeline.
Margo Oberg at Sunset.
Jeff Clark and Jay Moriarity at Mavericks.
Mark Foo at Sunset.
Laird Hamilton at Jaws.
Mike Parsons at Cortes Bank.
John Stonebreaker at Mavericks.
John Stonebreaker at Teahupo’o.
Maya Gabeira at Todos Santos.
Jen Stonebreaker at Mavericks.
Garrett McNamara at Nazaré.
Casey has met most of them: his human pantheon, almost gods.
Casey looks up for a moment at the picture of his father dropping into a fifty-foot wave at Mavericks twenty-five Decembers ago. He’s beautiful in the air, arms up, legs extended, feet locked into the straps on the deck of his orange-and-black board. Of course Casey wasn’t even born yet but he knows his dad made that wave, got massive points for it. His father looks confident, firm in his destiny. Or is it fate? God’s will? These are large considerations, and not yet settled in Casey Stonebreaker’s twenty-four-year-old mind. He’s looked at this picture thousands of times. Sometimes it’s a celebration, sometimes a headstone, knowing what happened just a day later.
“Nail those pirates, Craig,” says Casey. “They must have killed fifty sharks today. Beautiful threshers and blues, everything. Even a baby white. Threw them all back in to die.”
