are twisted twice around my hand so I can handle the weight of the three empty pistols that I checked and double-checked to ensure they weren’t hot. I lower the duffel onto the concrete and stare down at the water, holding my phone flat out over the railing to read the water’s depth—twenty-five feet. Nobody fishes here anymore. Ocean acidification killed off the sea life: coral bleached and died; polychaete worms, crustaceans, and mollusks that once lived in the soft sediment are mostly gone; and, except for a few straggling species not worth a fisherman’s time, there’s little chance of snagging a firearm.
When I crouch down and unzip the bag, the moon gives the gunmetal a silky luster, so the blued steel almost appears radioactive. I remove the first weapon and finger the trident embossed on the pistol’s black grip. It’s hefty in my hand—Jax’s standard-issue Beretta M9. With the safety on, I stand and point the gun at the water, check the magazine and chamber one last time, and, when I see that they’re clear, I extend my arm over the rail, open my fingers, and let go—splunge!
Next is Jax’s SIG Sauer P232, double-action, 9mm short. I lock my elbows out over the railing and tighten my hands around the grip. Aiming down at the water, I close my eyes and run my mind back to when I’m twelve—the day after Jax comes home from a six-month mission on the Arabian Sea. I’m standing with him and this very weapon in the indoor firing bay at the Coyote Gun Club, red earmuffs huge on my head, watching the white shark target he and I hand painted in bright blue tempera whiz down the target holder’s motorized assembly and lock in place twenty-five yards down the range.
“Deep breath,” Jax says over my shoulder. “On your own time. The fish won’t swim away.”
I’m aware of my heart and the sweat on my palms. I focus, my finger resting on the trigger: a three-two-one countdown, kickback, and a ferocious pang that returns a ringing shockwave off the concrete.
“Kill shot!” Jax shouts, gloating to the beefy range officer, who shares his amusement. “Smack in the gills!”
The odor of gunpowder wizzles up my nose, and I smile a jittery smile, searching for Jax’s approval, the pistol’s crazy raw power making me think twice about ever firing a gun again.
I open my eyes and let my fingers go loose. The Sig drops thirty feet into the channel, but this time with a dictionary plunk!
Finally, the most stunning weapon of all, a silver Browning HP Renaissance exquisitely engraved by the Turkish company Tug˘ra Gravür. I know this because Jax made a big deal out of it when he brought the Browning home from a gun show. “Art on steel,” he told Mom and me in the kitchen while we faked interest and repaired a broken Chinese blue-and-white vase he bought for her in Hong Kong. “Two years, it triples in value.” The frame and slide are decorated in a floral pattern with leafy tendrils so intricate even a gun hater would appreciate it. No, seriously, this thing should be in a museum. Jax said he would never fire it because the value would drop into the toilet, so I waffle, my ear catching a distant buoy bell, my conscience urging me not to send it to the water below. I take a last glance across the black sheet of the Bay and the wobbly lights of Naval Air Station North Island, and return to the Charger with the duffel strapped over my shoulder. I open the trunk and hide the Browning behind the carpet in the rear driver-side wheel well. It’s late, and I think it’s best that I put some sleep and a few waves behind me. Then I’ll reconsider its fate.
12
Everyone in the courtroom can see the word liar in chunky letters on my orange jumpsuit as I’m ushered out in handcuffs by two blocky correctional officers, one trailing behind with a loaded shotgun at the back of my head, the other suggesting in a hard tone that I move it along. My hands are over my ears, trying like heck to kill the gospel choir howling and clapping in the jury box to some righteous song about truth and justice. Stiff in my face is Kimberly Masters’ accusatory finger, her blue Aussie eyes on fire, her words drenched in contempt. Doper, she hisses. No waves for dopers! I turn for one last look. My heart falls when I see my surfboards in the middle of the courtroom, stacked in a bonfire pyramid about to be sent up in flames. The judge, her hair flash-white, shakes the last few drops from a can of gasoline and pulls a cigarette lighter from her gown. “For Christ’s sake!” Jax yells from the gallery. “Not her boards! Don’t torch her boards!” And just as she flicks the lighter and sets them ablaze, I wake up short of breath, my heart going wild.
The waves sucked this morning.
After two hours in Sisyphus (again), I finish out the afternoon with a ninety-minute session of yoga and drive over to Jax’s to say good-bye before Bomb swings by and we hop a shuttle for the airport.
Six o’clock.
Jax is in the backyard in his red satin boxing shorts and a Navy tee soaked through with sweat, popping jabs into a brown leather heavy bag that’s held together with duct tape, its surface worn by a million punches.
He rigged the bag to hang from a ship’s winch arm, which is fixed into a concrete pad in the middle of the yard. This place is in desperate need of a facelift: the surrounding fence has met up with termites, the boxwoods in the planter boxes against the house are brittle brown, the grass has gone yellow, and there’s a mishmash of old yacht parts, used scuba regulators, cans of marine paint, and cardboard boxes stuffed with the Chinese-made pneumatic spear guns he imported with a big scheme to wholesale them to a local Austrian buyer before the guy was crushed to death by a forklift—all of it wasting away in an aluminum shed that’s sure to collapse in the next big earthquake. But I don’t press Jax, because as long as he’s stable, that’s all I care about; and boxing, with its endorphin highs and stress-killing power, is just what he needs to stay steady.
From inside the house I watch Jax rip a left hook into the bag, rattling its mounting chain. He doesn’t see me sneak out the back door or hear me from behind his earbuds, so I scoot to the bag’s opposite side and bob and weave with my dukes up, pretending to be his opponent. He plays along, snapping and feinting, then steps back, stuffs his glove under his arm, and tugs to free his hand. He slips off his other glove, tosses them onto the patio table, and plucks out his earbuds.
“Just came to say good-bye,” I say, my face peekabooing from behind the bag. Jax’s chest heaves. Sweat pours down his face and scorpion arm tattoos. For a man of fifty-six, even with the added weight from drinking, his frame still has the vestiges of a middleweight in training.
“So this is it for a while,” he says, swiping sweat off his brow with his forearm.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll be back in three weeks for a day or two to repack, and then it’s off for another two weeks before the Games begin to the beaches in southwestern France, where we’ll compete.” What I don’t tell him is that the main reason I’m coming home and not heading straight to Paris for the Olympics is that Bomb told me—between the words, fuck, damn, and assholes—that we have to face a USADA review board to see if they have strong enough doping evidence to charge me. I know it’s a total made-up stupid lie, and couldn’t my agent have stalled, taken the full ten days to respond, so I wouldn’t be in this heap of crap? The whole idea sucks the happy right from my face.
“You OK, peanut?”
“Yeah, perfect,” I say, masking my anxiety with a white lie. “Just bummed ’cause I’ll miss you.”
“Ah, hell, little girl. You’ve got work to do. Rip up those Aussie waves. Kill ’em and show ’em who’s who.”
Jax rests his hands on my shoulders. I feel the heat coming through his hand wraps and meet his eyes, which are serious and doting.
“Don’t worry about me,” he says. “I’ll behave.” Somehow I believe him, but just to be sure, I pull my head back to see if he’s wearing his bio-band. Jax lifts his wrist, crisscrossed with a boxer’s hand wrap, his fingers poking through, swelled and red, before I get a word in.
“It’s under here. I’ll wear it, take my meds. Promise. On your mother.”
“Right that, Skipper. I’ll be watching,” I say, waving my phone in his face. “And no drinking.”