Jeff Shelby - Killer Swell

He stretched out his legs, the bottom half of his six-foot-nine body unfurling like a damp straw wrapper. His bleached white hair glowed in the dark room, his black eyes shining against his tan skin. The white T-shirt said DO ME in big black letters, and long red shorts hung loosely to his knees. His size-sixteen feet were bare, his sandals most likely buried somewhere beneath the tornado of crap he had created on my sofa.

He lifted a paper plate in my direction. “Nachos?”

“No thanks,” I said, tossing my keys on the kitchen counter. I walked to the fridge, pulled out a Red Trolley, ripped the cap off, and drank half of it.

Carter let out a low whistle. “Dude, if I had known we were gonna be drinking, I would’ve waited for you.”

“We’re not drinking,” I mumbled, staring out the back door. The whitecaps in the ocean did nosedives under the moonlight.

I felt Carter’s eyes on my back. “You alright?”

“No, not really.”

“Gonna tell me?”

“Not now.”

“Cool. You wanna hit the water?”

I watched the ocean shiver and shake a hundred yards away, empty and navy blue in the dark. I knew that some time on my board trying to decipher and outsmart the waves might temporarily salve my wounds.

I finished the beer and set the empty bottle on the counter.

I turned to Carter. “Let’s go.”

There is something mystical about surfing between the darkness of the ocean and the glow of the evening moonlight. It isn’t just that you feel dwarfed by the planet in the quiet of the night, but more like you have found the edge of the world and could dive off if you wanted to.

That edge was where I learned to hide when I was growing up.

When I was nine years old, a family down the street was moving out of town and they gave me an eight-foot board that was dinged up and otherwise headed for the trash. I took it down to Mission Bay that afternoon and spent three hours learning to stand on it in the calm, flat water. The next afternoon I took the bus down to Law Street and watched the locals tear up the waves, sucking in their movements and committing to memory how they maneuvered their boards so easily through the water. I waited until about sunset, when everyone else had gone, and paddled out.

On the ninth try, I managed to get myself up long enough to feel like a surfer.

After that ninth try in my ninth year, the ocean became my real home, much calmer than the house in Bay Park. There was no drunken mother passed out on the shoreline, no unknown father haunting me below the surface of the water. I grew up on three-foot, left-breaking sets that you could bounce all the way in to the shore.

The ocean and its waves raised me and I was better for it.

Carter and I rode for forty-five minutes, carving our boards into the black mass of the waves as they rhythmically approached and then left us. In the quiet darkness, the noise of the boards cutting the water was magnified, like the sound of two large hands rubbing together.

We were straddling our boards out beyond the break. People who don’t surf tend to look at this act as some sort of Zen-like activity that surfers do, trying to become one with the ocean or something like that. In actuality, we sit on our boards because we are too exhausted to paddle in.

“So,” Carter said, running his hands through his soaked hair. “You gonna tell me what the problemo is?”

He looked like a giant buoy sticking straight out of the ocean.

I wiped the water from my eyes. “Remember Kate Crier?”

He pretended to think about it. “Vaguely. She was that girl that you wasted an entire year on, dumped your ass right before she left for college because her parents thought you were trash, and you’ve pined intermittently for over the years.” He paused. “Yeah, Noah. I remember Kate.”

“I found her today. Dead.”

He cupped his hands, dipped them into the water, and brought them up to his mouth. Carter is the only human I’ve ever run across who enjoys the taste of saltwater. He swished the water around for a moment like it was mouthwash, then spit it onto his board.

“Well, that’s not so hot,” he said.

I glanced at the dots of light along the shore. “No.”

“You found her?”

I detailed Marilyn’s visit and how I had come upon Kate.

Carter nodded in the dark, his enormous head moving slowly against the backdrop of the moon. “I’m sorry.”

I shrugged, listening to the waves die up ahead of us. “Her dad wants me to find out what happened.”

“Same guy that banned your car from his driveway because it looked like it might leak oil?”

“Same guy.”

Carter snorted. “I hope you told him to fornicate solo.”

I chuckled softly, shaking my head.

“But of course you didn’t,” Carter said, knowing the answer.

I leaned back on the board, my head floating on the surface of the water. The sky looked like a black piece of crepe paper that had been poked with several needles, bright beacons of light streaming through the holes. I hadn’t seen Kate in over eleven years, but now I felt as if a piece of me had disappeared.

“Well, at least they’ve got money,” Carter mumbled, patting the top of the water with his baseball glove-like hands. “So we know we’ll get paid.”

“We?” I asked.

He leaned forward and flattened himself onto his board, his long arms looking like small windmills as he began to paddle away. “Well, hell, I can’t have you sulking like one of my ex-girlfriends until you figure it out. I’ll be Hutch to your Starsky.”

I sat up and smiled. “Awesome.”

“Yeah, I am,” he said over his shoulder as he moved toward the shore. “Plus, Kate was my friend too at one time.”

I nodded to myself and wished that she were still alive to hear Carter say that.

I crawled out of bed early after our late-night surfing expedition, nursed my small hangover with a glass of orange juice, and headed out in the early morning traffic.

I took I-5 up to the eastern edge of La Jolla and then went east on Highway 52, a concrete artery that bisected San Diego County through the narrow, brush-lined canyons of University City and Clairemont Mesa. The highway had been nothing more than a dirt valley when I was growing up, but as people moved farther and farther to the east in order to still call San Diego home, the 52 became the newest freeway to connect the outer reaches of the county to the coast.

The medical examiner’s office was out in the wasteland of business parks known as Kearney Mesa. A triangular area surrounded by three different freeways, the region had slowly transformed itself over a period of about ten years from dusty vacant lots to low-slung white and gray buildings that housed every conceivable type of industry and business. It was nearly the geographical heart of San Diego, but seemed devoid of life or character.

The ME’s building was off Ruffin Road, and I parked in the lot out front. The office smelled like lemon, and I wrinkled my nose as the glass doors swung closed behind me. The area was small and compact-a chest-high counter, two desks, couple of filing cabinets, a radio on top of a television and VCR in the corner. A hallway disappeared off the back of the windowless room.

I rang the metal bell on the desk and fifteen seconds later James Minton emerged from the back hall and made a face like I’d forgotten to put pants on.

“Fuck you want, Braddock?” he asked, his voice a mixture of gravel and whine.

“Good to see you, too, James.”

The face remained. “No it ain’t. What the fuck you want?” He held up his pudgy hand before I could respond. “Know what? Don’t care what you want. Go away.”