Desperation Reef

Years ago, he hired the aunt of one of the Barrel waiters to make this pendant. She was a well-known Taxco jewelry maker. Sent her pictures, dozens of them, so she could get the shape of the gun right, especially that wicked narrow tail. This was before he had any money. So he borrowed from his mom against his busboy wages: two thousand dollars, because the Mandarin Spessartite was so rare. It took him a year to pay her back.

Bette eyes it. Casey likes that he can’t tell what she’s thinking.

Now he stands before her and spreads the heavy silver chain, setting the necklace over Bette Wu’s head and onto her fine pale neck.

“Thank you,” he says.

She stands and lifts a lock of hair off Casey’s forehead, managing a half smile. Softly runs a finger along his reef-cut scab.

Casey gets that funny little jolt he gets when she touches him.

Mae looks up at him like she’s felt it, too.

The phone buzzes and Bette checks the caller.

“I’ve got something for you, too,” she says.

Accepts the call and walks out of earshot to the sliding glass door. Then raises a stop-sign palm to Casey, turns, and goes into the house. Mae sits and watches.

Bette talks a thousand times a day, quietly, almost always from somewhere Casey can’t quite hear.

Through the slider screen he watches Bette, now heading out the front door. He sidles up to the fence, pokes an opening through the thorny purple bougainvillea, and peers through it as a matte-black Tesla glides to the curb.

Bette gets in, sweeping the belt of his robe inside as she shuts the door.

The car doesn’t move.

Casey doesn’t like this one bit. Knows that Bette is in no shape physically or mentally to defend herself. What is she doing? She’s not running away, is she?

He can’t see inside through the blackout window glass.

A moment later she steps out, holding a Tiffany’s shopping bag with black tissue paper waving out the top.

He strides back to where he was so she won’t catch him spying.

She comes through the house, kneeling a moment to pet Mae’s ear.

She gives Casey a pained half smile and sets the bag on the table. Lifts the tissue paper with a magician’s flourish and Casey looks inside.

At the neat stacks of twenties bundled with bright yellow rubber bands.

“My eight grand from the sportsbook. For betting on you, mister! Half for you, and I’m going to bank the rest and maybe get myself some new clothes.”

“I don’t want half. It’s yours. Buy the stuff you need!”

Which, Casey knows, as an eyewitness, is quite a lot.

A few nights back, he helped pack up her furnished San Gabriel apartment, and was much surprised to see how little she had: a portable turntable and amp with detachable speakers and some vinyl. Some college textbooks and a few novels, a dated collection of DVDs — mostly Chinese action movies. She had bulk Costco toiletries, health and beauty products, cosmetics. Only a few really sweet rags: the black knit suit with the brass buttons she wore the day she bombed into his house in Dodge City, the white linen outfit she wore on Sunset Boulevard. The seafoam-green leather outfit she’d worn to the Barrel months ago and, later, to the Monsters awards banquet, was by then at the Canyon Cleaners in Laguna, where Mr. Kim had told Casey he’d do his best to remove the bloodstains and restore the leather. Bette had a few hats and pairs of shoes. Some jeans, sweatshirts, and T-shirts. Her ocean-going “pirate couture” as she called it was lost in the Empress II fire. As was her pistol, which she confessed to having never once fired. When she stopped a moment to study her framed UCLA diploma — but left it hanging — Casey asked why.

“I didn’t quite graduate,” she’d told him. “Didn’t get the algebra at all, and I liked being a pirate better. That’s a fake I had made, just like the check I gave your mother.”

Now here in Laguna Canyon with her $8,000 on the table, she sits again and takes a long, slow sip of the wine. Sets a hand on Casey’s.

“I’ve been talking to your studio people,” she says. “Introduced myself as a friend and business associate, then called bullshit on their biopic purchase price. Told them this year’s winner of the Monsters of Mavericks will not grant an option renewal next month.”

“But those guys are cool.”

“Yeah, so cool they’re going to up the purchase price by four hundred thousand dollars. More important, they’ve got a writer interested. A-list, Oscar nominee, hot dude — or so they say.”

“So if they make it—”

“You get half a million dollars and genuine back end. No Hollywood accounting, I told them.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“You’re the best in the world, Casey. You deserve it.”

“You’re a good partner.”

“When I’m not getting beat up!”

“You look better, Bette. Get the stitches out and let the bruises heal. You’ll be pretty again. Extra pretty.”

She squeezes his hand. “I’m not pretty now?”

“No, I meant—”

She cuts him off with a soft laugh. “I know what you meant.”

Casey’s embarrassed, of course. Always ready to say something dumb, he thinks. Should get a trophy for that, too.