Robbie was the first one up, which didn’t happen very often. “C’mon, it starts at eight.”
“It’s seven,” Leila yawned. “And it’s the only day I get to sleep in.”
Leila owned a very popular bakery, and most weekdays she was in the shop at four a.m. so that succulent-smelling goodies were ready for the downtown professionals when they arrived at their offices. By eight a.m., Leila’s place was standing room only, and that’s what people did. They stood, talked story, and had a sticky bun or warm malassada or two with their lattes. She loved sleeping in on the weekends.
Storm poured coffee into mugs while Hamlin got the milk and sugar out.
“Uh oh, ants in the sugar,” he said, and poked at the open box. He leaned against the countertop in a way that told Storm his leg bothered him again. He’d hate it if she said anything about it, though.
“Slam it on the counter a few times and they’ll run away,” Storm said. “Then transfer it to a jar with a lid. Ants are always in beach houses.”
Leila poured cereal into a bowl and handed it to Robbie. “Mister, you don’t go anywhere until you eat breakfast.”
“Don’t worry,” Storm reassured him. “You’ve got time. What heat are Nahoa and Ben surfing?”
“Nahoa’s in the last heat, but Goober’s in the first,” Robbie said. “Ben’s in the next-to-last heat. We’ve got to hurry—it’s already the semi-finals.”
“Four guys in a heat, right?” Hamlin asked.
“Yeah,” Robbie said. “The first and second guys in the heats are the only ones to make the finals.” He gulped his cereal down.
“Has anyone checked the surf report?” Storm asked. They could all hear the ocean breaking a hundred yards from the front door, and it sounded louder than it had yesterday. It had wakened Storm a couple of times during the night, though she hadn’t had the dream. Maybe the surf session yesterday had helped alleviate her fear of helplessness in the water.
Sunset Beach wasn’t a long drive, but Kamehameha Highway moved like the Ala Moana Shopping Center parking lot on Christmas Eve. It not only took almost an hour to drive about eight miles, they had to park the car a half-mile from the meet. By the time they got to Sunset Beach, it was the middle of the third heat and Robbie was desperate to see how his new surf buddies were doing.
“There’s Goober.” The unusual turtle tattoo made him easy to pick out in the crowd. He stood a hundred yards away, holding binoculars on the four surfers nearly a half-mile out in the water.
“If you’ll take Robbie to find out what’s happening, I’ll find a spot in the shade,” Leila said, “or we’re going to be charbroiled by the end of the day.” She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, but freckles were already popping out across the bridge of her nose and cheeks.
“I’ll stay with Leila. You guys can give us a report,” Hamlin said.
“We’ll be back as soon as we know what’s happening.” Storm and Robbie made their way through the spectators toward Goober, but Storm looked back when she thought Hamlin wouldn’t notice. Yes, he was limping more than he had been yesterday. He’d curtailed his physical therapy three weeks earlier than his doctors had recommended, and Storm worried because he pushed himself harder than the physical therapists had. He’d already increased his daily walks from one mile to three.
A too-familiar surge of regret flushed through Storm. She and Hamlin had been the lucky ones in the incident that brought down the once-austere law firm of Hamasaki, Cunningham, Wang, and Wo. Miles Hamasaki, her guardian and mentor, had been murdered, another of his partners died, one went to jail, and one retired in alcoholic shame. Months later, Hamlin struggled to recover from the assault that nearly killed Storm and him.
Robbie’s shout to Goober lifted Storm from her unhappy recollection. Robbie had his hand in the air, waving, but Goober looked over his shoulder at them and walked away.
Robbie stopped dead in the sand and frowned at Storm. “Why’d he do that?”
“He’s being a jerk,” said a voluptuous young woman, who had lowered her binoculars to observe Goober’s reaction. She was small and stood between two tall, athletic women.
“No kidding,” said one of the taller women, a brunette, in a wry tone. “He needs to grow up.”
“Aw, Dede, you’re being hard on him,” a tall blonde said.
Dede rolled her eyes. “Everyone loses sometime, Sunny. You know that. It’s how you handle it.”
“No one’s taught Goober that yet.”
“You want to?” Sunny asked with a grin. The sunlight glinted off the half-dozen earrings she wore, from colored stones to tiny hoops.
“No thanks,” the dark-haired girl said with a chuckle, and the three women sauntered away.
Robbie watched them go. The brunette who’d criticized Goober wore a thong bikini, the kind Storm and Leila called anal floss. Storm grabbed Robbie’s arm before he walked into the back of the person in front of him.
“Let’s see if there’s a scoreboard.”
They wove their way to some umbrellas and a phalanx of cameras that showed above the observers’ heads.
Robbie squinted at the tiny figures in the water. “Can you tell who’s who?”
“We should have brought binoculars.”
“Ben had on yellow flowered board shorts yesterday. Someone’s wearing yellow out there.”
A spectator turned to them. “Yeah, that’s Ben Barstow. He and Gabe Watson are only three points apart.”
“Who’s ahead?” Robbie asked.
“Right now, Gabe is. But Ben’s—yeah! Did you see that aerial cutback? What a ride!”
Robbie and Storm watched the figures, spellbound by their maneuvers. Fifteen minutes later, Ben’s teeth flashed white against his tan as he walked up the sand. He tossed water out of his hair and reached out a hand to a fellow surfer waiting on the beach. The young man clasped Ben in a hug.
“He’s made the finals, no sweat,” the spectator said to Robbie. “Look at that grin. He and Gabe are neck and neck.”
“What about Nahoa?” Robbie asked.
“He’s going out now. It’s the last heat.” The fellow squinted into the sun. “Here, want to use my glasses?”
He handed Robbie a set of binoculars, which Robbie stared through for a few moments, then handed to Storm. The four men in the final heat were lining up.
“Nahoa’s top seed for this meet, isn’t he?” Storm asked, and handed the glasses back to the spectator.
“Yeah, you know him?”
“He’s her cousin,” Robbie said.
“Cool.” The guy stared through the binocs for several minutes. “He’s a real athlete. Has a reputation for doing what he needs to do to get his points.”
Robbie looked at Storm, who shrugged. The comment sounded like a compliment, but she wasn’t sure.
“Here, take a look. Each surfer is allowed ten rides per heat, so he’ll be out there soon.” The guy handed the binoculars to Robbie again.
“How’re the heats judged?” Storm asked.
“Kind of like diving or gymnastics. Each wave a surfer rides is scored from zero to ten, then the highest and lowest scores are eliminated so the judges get an arithmetic mean.”
“You know a lot about this.”
The young man smiled. “I’m working on it. I compete, but I really want to be a judge.”
Robbie jerked the binoculars a few inches to his left, which attracted both Storm’s and the commentator’s attention. He watched several moments without even appearing to blink. One of the surfers, in black shorts and a black rash guard, finished a nice backhand cutback and headed for the leading curl of the wave.
“Is Nahoa wearing the red and white shorts?” she asked Robbie.
“Yeah, you can tell it’s Nahoa because he’s goofy, remember? His right foot is forward.”
Their new friend looked over at Robbie. “Hey, you’re right. This is a right-hand break, though, which puts him at a slight disadvantage.”
Robbie looked at him with concern, then back through the binoculars. “He hasn’t gone yet. I think he’s waiting for the guy on the wave.” Robbie pointed without bothering to lower the glasses, then gasped.
Storm could see what happened without the binoculars. The black-clad surfer had misjudged the leading edge of the fourteen foot wave, and the curl slapped him from his board as if he were a mosquito. The guy bounced twice before the wave closed out on him and swallowed him in its salty spume.
Spectators murmured nervously and stood on tiptoe to catch sight of a tiny person on the vast plain of foam. Storm held her breath. “You see him yet?”
Robbie kept the glasses to his eyes and merely gave his head a quick shake.
“Lemme take a look, okay?” The spectator reached for his glasses. Storm’s hands were balled so tightly that her nails dug into her palms. It seemed like minutes before the young man said, “There he is. Probably in the green room for a while.”
He handed the binocs back to Robbie. “There, it looks like Nahoa Pi‛ilani is taking off.”
Storm swallowed hard and unclenched her fists. The green room. That’s what people called the underwater space where either a wave shoved a surfer or where she dived to escape the crush of tons of churning water. Storm had been there; she’d been buffeted in the tumult like a dead fish, disoriented to the point that she couldn’t tell up from down. Even with her eyes open, there was no sensation of direction. Everything was green.
A roar from the crowd brought Storm’s awareness back to the surfer on his rocketing board. The wave was huge, and its thunder dwarfed the excited hum of the spectators. Red and white shorts plunged into a steep takeoff, hung for a moment in a gravity-defying stall, then cut back up the face of the wave. Nahoa launched himself into an aerial and the crowd gasped again in mute admiration, then broke into a throaty cheer. Nahoa landed in a deep crouch and plummeted down the face, leaned way out, and spun his board in a one-eighty. Lifting his body in a move worthy of a ballet dancer, he shot back to the top of the wave and faced the rising curl of the monster. There, he hovered for a breathtaking second, and crouched.
The crowd hushed. This was the move that the last surfer had blown. Fifteen feet above him, opalescent blue water curved in a fat wall. With a purpose that Storm would have sworn bordered on suicidal lunacy, Nahoa headed into a tunnel that moved with the velocity and mass of a freight train.
Seconds passed, and no one moved. For Storm, time stood still. Her lungs burned and her eyes teared with the effort of searching for a tiny speck of a person, either against a wall of water or in the acres of white foam on the heaving horizon. She recalled Ken Matsumoto, the surfer who had recently died, and for whom this meet had been postponed.
Suddenly, a tiny figure in red and white shorts squirted from under a blue curtain on the shoulder of the wave. The spectators went crazy. Storm and Robbie threw their arms around each other, and it was a few moments before they realized that their friend with the binoculars was hugging them, too.
“What’d I tell ya? He does what he has to,” the young man shouted. “He’s the best.”
Storm wanted to sit down in relief. Her legs were weak, and she looked over her shoulder to see if she could find Hamlin and Leila in the surge of people. It was a comfort to see Hamlin standing only about six feet behind her.
He looked around at the surging tumult of surf enthusiasts, who cheered with the elation of watching a fellow human cheat a haughty and all-powerful Mother Nature of possible death. “Was that an amazing ride or what?”
“Totally,” Robbie said.
“Absolutely,” Storm said, and her voice shook a little.
“Leila and I found a spot down the beach a bit, but we have a pretty good view,” Hamlin said. “We weren’t sure you’d find us in this crowd, so I came after you.”
He led them back by walking parallel to the water, near the clusters of camera operators and media announcers. A fellow with hair that didn’t move in the breeze, though his expensive silk aloha shirt billowed around him, smiled into a camera.
“Nahoa Pi‛ilani leads the finalists!” The reporter’s voice was filled with the jubilation of an announcer at a football game after a touchdown. “A combination of innovative and radical maneuvers in the most critical sections of the rides Pi‛ilani selected showed the style, power, and speed this surfer is known for. Ben Barstow and Gabe Watson are neck and neck, though they are probably competing for second place. It’s doubtful that anyone can overtake Pi‛ilani, though up-and-comer Kimo Hitashi, in third place, could still upset Barstow or Watson for the second spot.”
The announcer’s face glistened in the sun, and he held up his hand to stop the camera, then waved over a young woman in very tight, very low white jeans and a tube top that showed a wide expanse of brown midriff and a slew of belly-button rings. She dusted him with a big, puffy makeup brush. Two seconds later, he gave the cameraman a nod and continued with the commentary.
“The rising tide is changing the shape of the waves, so be with us at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, when some of the best surfers in the world face off at one of the toughest breaks on the planet.”
He broke off and turned to a couple of casually dressed men who hung in the background. They each pumped his hand.
Storm watched the three interact for a moment, as the two talking to the announcer were certainly VIPs, maybe the meet directors. They looked like aging beach boys, though one was tall and had a paunch while the other was short and wiry and wore wrap-around mirrored shades. The tall one shook the announcer’s hand again, and gave off an aura of relief.
Hamlin led them away from the media groupies, back into the shade of trees that lined the beach. The roofs of expensive beachfront homes peeked above the palms, and people drifted from the hot sand to the shelter of the exclusive refuges.
Leila waved from under a cluster of ironwood trees. “Too bad we can’t stay for the finals. Nahoa was terrific, wasn’t he?”
“Ben, too,” Robbie said. “Can’t we stay, Mom, please?”
“No, dear. Tomorrow’s Monday. You’ve got school and I’ve got work.”
“I’ve got an eight o’clock deposition,” Hamlin said.
“And I’ve got…well, I’ve got to see what I’ve got,” Storm said.
“You have a client and you’ve only been open a week,” Hamlin said. “That’s not bad.”
“More people will be coming in this week,” Leila said.
“I need to look into some things for Stephanie Barstow,” Storm said. “It’ll give me a great excuse to call her tomorrow and find out how Ben and Nahoa did in the finals.”
Hamlin drove back into town, and all four spent the hour and a half talking about whether Ben or Gabe Watson would come in second and claim the $13,000 purse. They were certain that Nahoa had the $25,000 first place in his pocket, and Storm sat back and contemplated how happy Rochelle must be for her adventuresome son. It came with a price, though. She’d seen the worry on Stephanie’s face.