Desperation Reef

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.

Brock locks the gate behind him and drives onward, the Econoline’s rear tires skittering on the hard gravel.

The Breath of Life Rescue Mission compound is a mile in, past a cattail-ringed lake, built into the feet of the steep hills. Most of it went up in the fifties.

The chapel is cinderblock, charmless but huge. It’s got small windows, an aluminum roof, and a cavernous fireplace inside.

The ranch house and some of the outbuildings are white plaster, with terracotta barrel roofing, deep-set windows framed with Spanish tiles, and heavy wooden doors.

The redwood barn and stucco guest cottages are in decent repair, recently stripped and repainted in Go Dog bright green, with matte black trim. The buildings would be a shock to the locals, but they’re invisible from the highway and to the few, very distant, neighbors.

Brock could care less. When you see it, the Breath of Life Rescue Mission should wake your lazy ass up, is how Brock thinks of the jarring green-and-black color scheme.