Mahu Surfer by Neil Plakcy Page B

attracted these predatory males? A kind of naiveté? I wasn’t some confused teen-ager. I was thirty-two years old, a cop. I had no trouble facing down the toughest criminals, but a guy who wanted to get in my pants still scared the crap out of me. It reminded me of a William Styron quote, from Sophie’s Choice , something about being six feet of quivering nerve. That was how I felt, even though I knew it was dumb. Really, really dumb.
     
     
     
     
     

Down Mexico Way
     
    I surfed all day Friday, then returned to The Next Wave with my laptop to use their internet connections. I sent a quick email to Harry about the waves, and then a check-in message to Terri, who had just lost her husband a few weeks before. I felt bad that I had left town when she or her young son Danny might need me.
     
    I wrote to my parents, too, a quick note about the surf and how the North Shore had changed in the past ten years. I sent Lieutenant Sampson a longer message about surf bags, rifles, and talking to surfers.
     
    I sat back and thought about the case. If the only thing that connected the three victims was surfing, then maybe if I learned more about them as surfers, I’d find a clue. The dossier I’d been given didn’t have much detail, but I found that by searching for all three names online, I could find out which events they had competed in and what their results were. The only pad I could buy at The Next Wave was one in the shape of an aloha shirt, but with that and a surfboard-shaped pen, I began making notes. Soon there were shirt-shaped pieces of paper piling up, and I built a matrix, looking for any events where they might all have been entered.
     
    Pratt was the best surfer of the three. He was twenty-five, and had been surfing competitively since he was a teenager on the Jersey shore. He’d placed in the top ten in a number of contests, including Mexpipe in Puerto Escondido, on the Pacific Coast of Mexico.
     
    Lucie Zamora had also competed at Mexpipe, though she hadn’t placed anywhere near the top. And way at the bottom of the men’s list I found Ronald Chang’s name.
     
    Interesting, I thought, sitting back. All three had been at Mexpipe. Was it just a coincidence, or a real connection? I couldn’t know for a while if it meant anything. I jumped over to email, and sent a message to my brother Lui, asking if he could dig up any video footage of the Mexpipe championship. I told him I was interested in studying form, but I thought perhaps I could see one or more of the murder victims there.
     
    I printed out a list of the top 100 finishers at Mexpipe; hopefully a couple would be around the North Shore, and I could ask them some questions. I also spent some time on the competition web site, learning about the races and the atmosphere surrounding them.
     
    The three dead surfers had been at very different places in the surf hierarchy. Pratt was at the top, a real competitor. Lucie Zamora was struggling to make it out of the pack. Ronald Chang was a weekend surfer who would probably never have finished in the money.
     
    Where did I fit, on that scale? I had to put myself somewhere between Lucie Zamora and Ronald Chang, though without Lucie’s obvious drive and determination. I had some natural ability as a surfer, and I’d been doing it nearly all my life. But to be the best at anything, you have to pour yourself into it, heart and soul. Dario Fonseca had shown me that I couldn’t do that, not while I was hiding my sexuality. I guessed I ought to be grateful for that, but gratitude was a hard emotion to feel around him.
     
    I saw him pass by a couple of times while I worked at the computer. I don’t know why, but I tried to look busy each time, so that he wouldn’t stop and chat. I wasn’t comfortable with him, and I didn’t want to give him another opportunity to proposition me.
     
    I found one interesting piece of information about Mike Pratt that I hadn’t seen in his dossier. He rowed with the