Last Light

8 Named for the Wind

Two miles from her home, Makani pulled into the parking lot at a strip shopping center. She opened the Chevy’s trunk, and then the suitcase. The plastic-wrapped bricks of money were still where she had put them. If Sparks knew about the cash, he chose to let her keep it, which meant that he was confident of finding her regardless of how far away she fled.

She would probably be able to get farther than he imagined she could in what time he had given her. Speed was in her name. Her parents had intended to name her Makani ‘Olu‘olu, which meant fair wind, but after she’d been born and they had seen her, they called her Makani Miomio, which meant swift wind. Makani Miomio Hisoka-O’Brien, bearing both her mother’s maiden and married names, had been hard enough to catch when she was a crawler and then a toddler, but once she could walk, she was as fleet as a deer. She loved to run and won every race, 5Ks and marathons. Likewise, each time she caught a wave, she was promptly off her knees and onto her feet, nimble in the takeoff, quick with her maneuvers, arrowing up the face to snap-turn off the curling lip, then rocketing down again; always with bullet velocity she rode the hollow tube behind the cascading curl, shot into open air before she could be clamshelled by the collapsing wave.

Behind the wheel again, on Coast Highway, she headed south. She didn’t think she would go on the run, after all. There was no point to it. Besides, if she couldn’t have Hawaii and the extended family that she loved, Newport Beach was her next-best home, where she had put down roots and had cautiously made friendships for more than five years. If she were harried away from this place out of fear, there would never be another home for her, only a village here, a hamlet there, city after city en route to nowhere.

So she would leave Newport only temporarily and go no farther than Laguna Beach, the next town along the sparkling coast, where that magnificent canine specimen, Bob, was on a brief holiday with a friend of hers named Pogo. The friend’s official name, per his birth certificate and driver’s license, had three parts followed by a Roman numeral, but since childhood he had answered to nothing but Pogo, which was the only name by which most in the surfer community knew him. Except, he’d once said, for those who call me “loser” or “jackass,” which in Makani’s experience was no one.

She wouldn’t have trusted Bob to anyone else’s care. For all of Pogo’s carefully tended image as a slacker who lived only to surf and loaf and pursue the perfect case of melanoma, he was the epitome of responsibility. People trusted him with everything from their children to their money, and never with regret. He worked part-time in a surf shop named Pet the Cat, and lived with three other self-described surf bums in an apartment above a thrift shop in nearby Costa Mesa. Currently he was house-sitting a classic beachside “cottage” for an owner who so loved his jewel-box residence that he couldn’t go on vacation if he left the place unoccupied and, in his mind, vulnerable to countless catastrophes ranging from spontaneous combustion to an invasion by a gang of droogs straight out of A Clockwork Orange.

As the sun sank toward the horizon and briefly balanced there, as the long sunset spread faux fire across the shore and hills, the heavy summer traffic seemed to beget more of its kind, mile by mile, glasswork adance with reflections, paint and brightwork glimmering as if wet, a great mass of vehicles schooling south as if toward some spawning pool.

By the time Makani arrived in Laguna Beach, the sun had gone away to brighten another hemisphere, and the stars had come out, more numerous over the ocean than to the east, where the lights of human habitation dimmed them.

Because she had called ahead with her smartphone, Pogo was waiting for her in the open front door, good Bob at his side, the two of them rendered almost equally black by backlighting.

After parking at the curb and locking the car, Makani hurried along a walkway of herringbone-pattern brick. On the threshold, she hugged Pogo and kissed him on the cheek. Eager for his turn at the well of love, Bob cha-chaed backward in the foyer with unrestrained delight.

Makani loved Pogo, but most of the time she wouldn’t allow herself to think of it as being more than the paler shade of love called friendship. She had touched him often, and for the last two years, she had touched him always without apprehension. She’d never read in him a word of envy or conceit, never a line of ill will toward anyone, no truly dark secret that tormented him. His secrets were at their darkest pale gray. If he was not the only contented human being in the world, she had yet to find one of the others.

And if you liked lean, muscled types, he was so nice to touch, not as tall as Rainer Sparks, but every bit as well put together. If anything, he was even better looking than the murderer. Pogo was the one knockout-handsome guy that Makani had ever met who wasn’t into himself, who in fact seemed oblivious of the appeal he had to women, even though they signaled their interest so boldly that they might as well have announced their availability with megaphones.

Makani and Pogo had never gone to bed together, and she doubted they ever would. She didn’t believe that he could love her as more than a good friend. There was another girl, right here in Orange County, whom he adored far too much to put her second among women. Ironically, the object of his adoration was someone whom he could never have. And some said that Shakespeare had no contemporary relevance.

In the foyer, as Pogo closed the door, Makani dropped to her knees to assure Bob that he was the great love of her life. Four years old, no longer puppy enough to forget his manners and leap up to put his paws on her shoulders, he pressed his big head into her hands, whimpering with pleasure as she stroked his face and then rubbed behind his ears. She cooed to him and said his name—“Bob, my lovely Bob, sweet Bobby”—and took the forepaw he offered, squeezing it affectionately.

By touch, from this dog or any other, Makani received only a general — though sometimes intense — sense of its emotional state. At the moment, Bob overflowed with loving devotion and delight and relief that she hadn’t gone away forever.

“We’ve had an awesome time,” Pogo said.

“He’s got big energy. He can be crazy sometimes.”

“Not the Bobster. He’s a mellow dude.”

Wanting to smell her hair, Bob thrust his quivering black nose into it and sniffed noisily, probably because her hair was the best record of her day and was scented with the sea, the sun, beer, and God knew what else. To dogs, there were no bad smells.

Abruptly, the Labrador scampered out of the foyer and along the hall, toward the back of the house, most likely to retrieve one of his squeaky tennis balls and present it to her as a gift.

“Catch some good waves?” Pogo asked.

“There were more top-to-bottom barrels today than anyone could ride.”

“Sweet. You want a beer or somethin’?”

She was surprised to hear herself say, “Just so you don’t throw it in my face,” because that comment led inevitably to his question.

“Why would I throw it in your face?”

She was even more surprised to hear herself say, in a tremulous voice, “Man, I’m in really big trouble, I’m going over the falls, and I don’t know what to do,” because she had never spoken of her gift with him or with anyone but Rainer Sparks.

Putting a hand on her shoulder, he said, “There’s no trouble here, O’Brien. This is a safe zone. You want to talk?”

She was having second thoughts. “I don’t want to get you killed.”

“I thank you for that.”

“I’m serious, Pogo. It’s that bad.”

His eyes were a different shade of blue from hers, but meeting his stare, she felt somehow that she was looking into a reflection of herself. She knew that telling him everything would in no way damage their relationship or put her at risk.

When still Makani hesitated, Pogo said, “I won’t be as easy to kill as you seem to think, O’Brien. Whether you want to talk about it or not, I want to talk about it. So don’t make me force it out of you with thumbscrews and a cattle prod, okay?”

Her mouth trembled under the weight of a worried smile. “Okay.”

“Let’s go to the kitchen. I was having coffee and punishing myself with Kerouac. The coffee’s good and makes perfect sense.”