Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(120)

People came there for the food, which was good, but as much for the atmosphere, which was saturated with the romance of California as it had once been and, sadly, would likely never be again. Pax had not eaten breakfast, and both he and Pogo had missed lunch. They sat in a corner booth, in the welcome quiet before the dinner rush.

The waitress who brought menus was in synch with the intensity of the décor, if not with its theme. A well-tanned Amazon with a blond pageboy haircut, she stood nearly six feet tall, a fortyish looker who was a version of Nicole Kidman writ large. Her eyes appeared to be blue or green or maybe blue-gray depending on the angle at which she regarded you. Uniforms weren’t required of the wait staff, and this woman—her badge identified her as KANANI, which was Hawaiian for a beauty—was dressed in white slacks and a white blouse accessorized with a red-silk sash worn as a belt and a red-and-gold silk scarf at her throat. Elaborate dangling gold earrings. Flashy bracelets. Eight diamond finger rings. She might have worn ten rings, except that she had only eight fingers. Ironically, on each hand, she was missing the ring finger, which was next to the pinkie.

Kanani smiled and seemed pleasant enough, but there was a remote quality to her, a sense that she held the truest part of herself in reserve, letting the world make of her what it would, which likely had little to do with who she really was.

After she had taken their orders for beer and had gone, Pogo said, “Beebs is fascinated with Kanani. I figure she’ll put her in a book someday.”

“What happened to the fingers?”

“Nobody knows. Someone asked her once—and wished he hadn’t. I wasn’t here when it happened, so I don’t know if he was a smart-ass about it or just asking the question was enough to set her off, but Kanani decked him, knocked him out cold.”

“And wasn’t fired?”

“She’s a good waitress. Besides, Wayland Zuckerman—he’s the owner—is either head-over-heels in love with her or terrified of her. Nobody can quite figure out which.”

When Kanani brought two bottles of Corona, two glasses, and napkins, she proved as dexterous as any ten-fingered waitress and more so than many.

Pax and Pogo ordered fish tacos plus a plate of enchiladas suizas with black beans and rice to be split between them.

“Where’d you get the Pogo moniker?” Pax asked.

“Don’t have a clue.”

“You really don’t know—or the nickname is nobody’s business, just like Kanani’s missing fingers?”

“I never punched out anyone who asked me. I’ve been called Pogo as long as I can remember, and no one’s ever taken credit for pinning it on me.”

“There was a cartoon character way back, in the funny pages.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think that’s where it came from. Everyone in my family’s too serious to read the funny pages, and anyway that was before their time.”

Kanani brought their food, and they ate with enthusiasm for a while before Pogo said, “I don’t feel right, scarfing up tacos and beer, while Beebs needs us to be doing something.”

“Except there’s nothing to do right now. You want to call the AV god and see if he’s got the tape recorder working?”

“At least that’s something,” Pogo said, and put down a taco to pick up his smartphone.

Earlier, on the way to see Dr. St. Croix in Laguna Beach, they stopped at the house of a guy named Ganesh Patel, a surfer whose passion for designing audio-video systems flowered into a business that he hadn’t really wanted, that eventually he had sold for enough money to spend his life beachside. He’d explained that microcassette recorders of that type were long out of style, largely replaced by digital systems with greater storage capacity, but that he could fix their example of pathetic Neanderthal technology because he could fix anything.

Ganesh answered the call. For a minute or so, Pogo listened, saying only, “Uh-huh, okay, uh-huh, mmmm, cool, uh-huh, uh-huh. Latronic, dude,” before he terminated the call.

Having been around the Blair family long enough to pick up some surfer lingo, Pax knew that latronic meant later on or see you later.

“He’s taken it apart, he’s got it spread out on his workbench,” Pogo said, “and now he just needs to find the kink and put it back together right. Man, when he talks about this stuff, you’d think it was some hot chick he had laid out on that workbench.”

“Everyone to his thing. Don’t get me talking about the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle.”

“Is that something that blows things up?”

“Beautifully,” Pax confirmed.

They were nearly finished eating and thinking about a second beer when Pogo said, “You really think it’s a possibility?”

“What is?”

“That wherever Beebs is, I mean besides the hospital, something could happen and she could die there and die here, too.”

“She’s got brain cancer, Pogo. Whether or not something really bad happens to her out there in the Twilight Zone, she could die from the glioma.”

“Yeah. I guess. I mean, yeah, I know.” He looked around at the yellowing photographs of the long-dead surfers, up at the sharks in their motionless but perpetual hunt, as if those familiar sights were new to him, as if the restaurant had become as strange as the surreal angles and metamorphic flow of a dreamscape. “But then…what’s going to happen to us if she dies?”