Last Light

1 Look but Don’t Touch

When Makani Hisoka-O’Brien met the murderer, she thought he was a nice guy, perhaps just the one with whom she might want to share her life.

That warm Wednesday in August, the Southern California sky was as wide as the universe, as deep as infinity, as blue as Makani’s eyes, and she could no more resist the call of the ocean than she could switch off her compulsion to breathe.

Her mother, Kiku, insisted that Makani had been born in the ocean, even though in fact she had been born on the island of Oahu, in a Honolulu hospital. What her sweet mahuakine meant was that Makani had been conceived in the sea, in the gently breaking surf, on a deserted and moonlit beach. Makani had pieced this saucy truth together from a series of little things her parents had said over the years and from looks they exchanged and meaningful smiles they shared. Although she was a native Hawaiian, Kiku had been taught reserve and discretion by her traditionalist Japanese mother; she would not speak of lovemaking in any but the most oblique fashion. Heeding the call of the surf, the bed of her conception, Makani drove her street rod, a glossy black ’54 Chevrolet Bel Air that had been chopped and shaved and peaked and frenched and sparkled, to Balboa Peninsula, the land mass that shielded Newport Harbor from the open sea. The Chevy purred like a panther, because she had dropped into it a GM Performance Parts high-output 383ci small-block V-8. She wasn’t a street racer, but if California was ever plagued by road bandits, she would be able to outrun them all.

She parked in a residential neighborhood half a block from the peninsula-point park, in the shade of an ancient podocarpus. Her surfboard hung in a custom sling in the backseat, safer than she was in a driver’s shoulder harness. She zippered open the vinyl, freed the board, and set off for the beach.

In a bikini, she was a flame that drew young men as surely as a porch lamp at night enchanted moths, but this day was not about boys. This day was about the sea and its power, its beauty, its challenge. In medium-length boardshorts, a sports bra, and a white T-shirt, Makani presented herself as a dedicated boardhead, warning off the testosterone crowd.

One of the most famous surfing destinations in the world was the Wedge, formed by a pristine beach and the breakwater of stacked boulders that protected the entrance channel to Newport Harbor. On other days, when the waves were behemoths, smoking in from a South Pacific storm a few thousand miles away, surfers were in danger of being driven onto the rocks. Some had died there.

Makani walked the wet, compacted sand up-peninsula for about a hundred fifty yards, giving the Wedge the respect it deserved. The waves were maybe eight to nine feet, glassy, pumping nicely, in sets of four and five, with calmer conditions between. She waited for the sea to slack off briefly before she paddled out to the lineup. Other surfers straddled their boards, anticipating the next swell, all of them guys and good citizens who kept their distance from one another and were unlikely to snake someone else’s wave. One surfer, one wave was a natural law.

She had to wait through two sets before her turn came with the third. She caught one of the largest swells she had yet seen, rising from two knees to one and then to her feet. She executed a floater off the curling lip, and as she slanted down the face, she realized the breaker was big enough and had sufficient energy to hollow out.

She walked the board in a crouch as the tube formed around her, and she was in the greenhouse, the glasshouse, which glowed with verdant sunlight fractured by the flowing lens of water into kaleidoscopic fragments.

Riding the tube was the greatest thrill in surfing. There could have been no better start to the session. As usually happened when the swells formed high, she found herself deep in the thrall of the Pacific, all sense of time washed away. As the hours passed, she spoke to no one, communed only with the sea, in a kind of pleasant trance.

On two different occasions, she became aware of a man standing on the shore, beside his board, taking a break from the action. Tall and tan, with sculpted muscles and a thatch of sun-bleached hair, he appeared as radiant as a demigod. The first time she saw him, she thought he might be watching her. The second time, she was sure of it. But the sea proved more powerful and more alluring than a demigod, and she forgot him as successive swells gradually moved her down-peninsula toward the Wedge.

When she considered calling it a day, wading out of the foaming breakers with her board, she checked her GPS surf watch, expecting the time to be about 3:30, but it was 5:15. Her legs should have been aching, but they were not. No weariness attended her, though she was famished.

Back at her ’54 Chevy, the westering sun slanted through the limbs of the podocarpus and projected spiral galaxies of somber light on the deep-space black of the car’s hood. She stowed her board in the sling bag. Because her hair was wet and her clothes were damp, she retrieved a beach towel from the trunk, intending to drape it over the driver’s seat. When she closed the lid of the trunk, the demigod was standing on the sidewalk, only a few feet away, watching her.

He said, “Hey, you were amazing out there. Totally stylin’.”

Close-up, the guy was beyond gorgeous, but he didn’t play the moment as if he were a hunk. He didn’t use his physical perfection. He had pulled on a T-shirt with the Volcom TRUE TO THIS slogan and wore over it an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt with a pattern of surfing penguins. He had a disarming boyish quality.

“I was just in the zone,” she said. “It happens every great once in a while.”

“That wasn’t just a good day. That was serious skill. You ever compete?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Only with myself.”

“You should maybe go pro. You’d rock it.”

He wasn’t her type. With one exception, she had found that guys who were knockout handsome were so into themselves that their primary romance would always be with a mirror.

She said, “Go pro and have to travel the circuit? I’m happy here.”

“What’s not to like about Newport, huh? I’m Rainer Sparks.”

When he didn’t offer his hand, she was relieved. She didn’t touch just anyone. She had her reasons.

“I’m Makani.”

“Gotta tell you, Makani, this car is radical. A real beauty.”

“Built it myself. Well, me and my guys. My employees. I have a custom hot-rod shop.”

He grinned and shook his head. Even his teeth were perfect. “So you ride the waves like Kaha Huna, build hot rods, look the way you look…”

Kaha Huna was the Hawaiian goddess of surfing. Makani liked being compared to Kaha Huna. She’d been desperate to escape Hawaii, but she was proud of her heritage.

He said, “You should have a reality TV show. Except you’re too real for that.”

If he was making a move on her — and he was — he had an agreeable way of doing it.

She wasn’t a virgin, but she wasn’t easy. She believed an ideal man existed out there somewhere, her destiny, and the worst way to find him would be to try every bozo who winked at her. She had been alone for more than a year, however, and “Lonely Surfer” definitely wasn’t her favorite song.

“Hey, the way you were slashing those waves, you must’ve worked up a monster appetite. Maybe I could take you to dinner?” When she hesitated, he said, “I know, I know, a million guys must be always hitting on you. I sympathize. Guys are always hitting on me, too, and it’s so boring.”

Damn, he was also amusing. “It’s not that,” she said. “I’m a mess and not in a mood to go home and prettify.”

“Me, too,” he said, though he looked as if he had stepped out of a glamour spread in Foam Symmetry magazine. “We just go now, the way we are. You know Sharkin’?”

Sharkin’ was boardhead lingo for surfing, but it was also the name of a funky restaurant in the vicinity of the nearer of the peninsula’s two piers, a casual place where barefoot customers in beachwear were welcome.

As the lyrics of “Lonely Surfer” rose in memory, Makani could not justify saying no, so she said yes.

Rainer reacted as if he were a teenage boy who couldn’t believe his luck. He nodded repeatedly. “All right, okay, cool, so then…see you at Sharkin’.” And he pumped one fist. “I’ll leave now. I’ll get there first. Snare a table.” He dashed across the narrow street to a white Mercedes SUV, a big GL550, and called back to her, “Don’t stand me up. I’d get drunk if you did, and throw myself off the end of the pier. To my death.”

“I wouldn’t want that.”

“No, you wouldn’t. ’Cause I’d haunt you.”

She watched him drive away before draping the beach towel over the driver’s seat of her Chevy.

The Mercedes had helped her overcome any lingering doubt about having dinner with him. She didn’t care all that much about money, because she lived simply and had a bit-more-than-modest trust fund from her maternal grandfather, which she had come into when she turned twenty, almost six years earlier. Already, only five years after she opened for business, the customized cars that came out of her shop were legendary among hot-rodders; she could book as much work as she wanted. Rainer Sparks’s Mercedes SUV mattered only because it seemed to be proof that he wasn’t one of those boardheads who bunked with five other surf bums in a dilapidated house trailer, subsisting off government disability payments that he fraudulently obtained, living only to ride the waves. Makani loved the surfer culture, the community, but it had its share of wankers, and falling in love with one of them would be no less self-destructive than going for a long swim in the cooling pond at a nuclear power plant.

Getting behind the steering wheel, pulling the door shut, starting the engine, she smiled at the memory of his boyish reaction to her acceptance of his invitation. He was tall, buffed, gorgeous, funny, sweet, and apparently successful. Maybe he was, at last, the One.

When they first touched, she might know in that instant whether Rainer Sparks was her future or not. What else she learned upon making contact, skin to skin, was the one remaining cloud over a lovely dinner date.