Hard Tide

5. Ari

CHAPTER 5

ARI

So, this is Zach Torres.

On my first day in California, I watched from a spot on the cliff as he paddled out to sea on a surfboard, flat on his stomach. Fog hung low over the water, and at times I had to squint to see him, but his lime-green shortie wetsuit was a beacon in the otherwise grey sea.

A week had passed since my meeting with Digby Rennick, a week spent researching my target, studying surfing jargon, brainstorming possible cover stories, and studying maps of Santa Cruz. Oh, and getting my car fixed. It still made a weird knocking noise whenever I turned left, but at least the temperature gauge wasn’t jammed in the red anymore.

When I left Rennick’s office, I’d assumed that my biggest challenge would be tracking Torres down and then spying on him without being caught, but now I was reconsidering. Why? Because Zach Torres seemed to love attention. He positively basked in it. Last night, he’d announced his plans for this morning on i********: and invited the whole damn world to join him at Pleasure Point. Around half of them had taken him up on the offer, despite it being seven a.m. and cloudy. Hundreds of people packed the sidewalk along the edge of the cliffs, the sliver of beach below, and various rocky outcrops in between. Dozens of surfboards bobbed on the waves while jet skis waited to the side. A drone buzzed around our heads, and there was even a helicopter in the distance. The Zach Torres circus was in town, and I was a pesky fly on the wall of the tent—barely noticeable but potentially annoying at some point in the future.

Torres stopped paddling and sat up on his board, one leg dangling into the water on each side. Didn’t he realise there were sharks around here? The drone zoomed in for a close-up, and he waved.

The purple-haired girl standing next to me, the one who’d squeezed over to give me space to watch, sighed. “He’s so rad.”

“Do you mean Zach Torres?”

“Who else? I mean, Kai Kealoha’s cool too, but Zach has this…this magic.” She leaned forward as Torres caught the wave and stood up. “Look at that drop.”

Torres carved back and forth across the water, defying gravity as the wave carried him to the shore. Spectators whooped and hollered, and a girl in a bikini rollerbladed past, handing out tins of ZT-branded surf wax. The purple-haired girl grabbed one and kissed it.

“You’re a big fan, huh?”

“Since I was fifteen.” She didn’t look much older now. “I mean, he’s the best surfer in the world, and he’s right here on my doorstep. Well, almost. I mean, I had to drive for ninety minutes, but Santa Cruz is closer than Hawaii.”

“Isn’t he ranked the third-best surfer in the world at the moment?”

Oops, wrong thing to say. Her mouth set in a thin line, and she put her hands on her hips.

“So you know how Google works, huh? Congratulations. Now try using your eyes instead. How many other surfers have that flair? That connection to the ocean? He always finds the right waves.”

I could accept that Google didn’t tell the whole story. From what I’d seen, Torres either won in spectacular style or wiped out with equal drama. Which fit with Rennick’s throwing-the-contests theory.

“I don’t actually know much about surfing,” I told the girl clutching the tin of wax.

She gave me a once-over. “Figures. Your shirt says ‘Beach Bum,’ but your complexion says you don’t get out much.”

Was it that obvious? Honestly? Yeah, of course it was, but I’d always found it easier to analyse other people than myself.

“You come to the beach a lot?”

“Every chance I get. Which isn’t often enough, seeing as—” The girl ducked behind me as the drone came closer. “Oh, shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

“My boss’ll kill me if he sees me here. I told him I had period pains. Can you tell me when it’s gone?”

“Uh, sure.”

“I’m Erin, by the way.”

The drone circled, and I shifted left to block her from view. “I’m Ari. Where will they broadcast this footage?”

“YouTube, Zach’s website, the sponsor’s website, social media. Maybe the local news if it’s a slow day. And my boss’s son spends most of his time watching TV in the break room, so…”

“The drone is circling away now. Where do you work?”

“In a grocery store. Someone has to sell the big-tech crowd their organic carrots and wheatgrass smoothies.”

“I thought they were all about the avocado toast?”

“This month, they’re eating asparagus with poached quail eggs and microgreens. Hey, Kai’s joining the line-up.”

Kai Kealoha was one of Torres’s buddies and a fellow pro on the World Surf Tour. The two of them hung out with a third guy, Tyler Peralta, but I hadn’t seen him in the water today. Erin probably knew where he was, but I didn’t want to ask. After all, I was meant to be clueless about surfing in general and Zach Torres in particular.

But as Erin oohed and aahed at the next person to catch a wave, I did spot Maya Torres on the beach below, speaking to a guy holding a clipboard. Torres’s younger sister worked as his personal assistant, according to an article I’d read. Torres had credited his support team with being instrumental in his success—Maya; Kai; Tyler, who shaped his surfboards; the Sal’s Army safety crew; his trainer, Chuku; and his many sponsors. Special thanks had gone to Zed Nelson, promoter and head honcho of the World Surf Tour. No mention of a girlfriend or other family, and his parents had both passed away. I’d found little information on his mother, but his father had also been a surfer before he famously drowned a stone’s throw along the coast from here.

Torres had vanished from the surfing circuit after that, just abandoned his upcoming contests and disappeared. Occasionally, he’d been mentioned as a footnote in a surfing article: Whatever happened to Zach Torres? How tragic that a promising junior career was cut short.

Over four years had passed before he popped up again, this time in Virginia as a player in the Blackstone House mystery. The cops had cleared him, but conspiracy theories still abounded—had the wrong man gone to jail for the murder?

Another year, and Torres had exploded back into the surfing world. Quite literally—he’d blasted out of a barrel wave on the cover of Surf Style magazine, bare-chested, flicking back his hair as he grinned at the camera. Two more years of gruelling contests later, he’d qualified for the World Surf Tour, and now here I was—standing on a cliff, clutching a small tin of wax with his photo on it.

I’d had worse jobs—searching through a guy’s garbage at three a.m. for evidence of infidelity was no fun, let me tell you—but I’d also had better jobs. Sure, my bills were taken care of for the next couple of months at least, and I no longer had to serve fries to perverts, but I missed my family already. Saying goodbye to Haven had been the hardest thing. When I worked for Morty, I’d occasionally gone away for a night or two, a week max—he took the longer jobs because he didn’t have a family of his own—but now I’d be in Santa Cruz for what seemed like an eternity. In an ideal world, I’d return home for visits, but with a sixteen-hour round trip and a deadline, the chances seemed slim. Haven was on summer break. Not only was I missing out on precious time with her, but I also felt guilty that Nana wouldn’t get any rest. Taking care of an energetic eight-year-old was a full-time job.

Plus I still had no idea how I’d get close enough to Torres to carry out meaningful surveillance.

My research told me he didn’t do the groupie thing, not anymore—although he was often spotted chatting with the girls who followed him around—and he seemed to spend most of his time in the water. Yesterday evening, I’d scouted out his home in Seagrass Point, and surfing clearly paid better than PI work because he lived in an architect-designed masterpiece overlooking the ocean in a small enclave to the north of Santa Cruz. If I worked three lifetimes and didn’t eat, buy clothes, or go out—ever—I might be able to afford the secondary suite over the garage. Modern Living magazine had done a feature on the property last year, and the inside was as stunning as the outside.

Erin squealed in my ear as Torres caught another wave and leapt up on his board, arms stretched out to balance himself. There was something strangely hypnotic about watching him carve his way across the water. I’d brought a camera with me, a DSLR with a zoom lens, and I snapped a photo or two. Nothing unusual about that—half the people watching were filming Torres on their phones. Okay, yes, I was meant to be keeping a record of the people he talked to, not Torres himself, but there was no harm in practising, right?

And Torres sure didn’t have a problem with being on camera. After he’d glided to shore and picked up his board, he shook the water out of his hair in a move that he must have rehearsed, then flashed a grin at a female reporter waving at him from the high-tide mark. Erin sighed, and I had to admit that—objectively speaking—Zach Torres was hot. s*x on a surfboard. A real— Urgh. Thankfully, he derailed that totally inappropriate train of thought by spitting onto the sand.

“Gross,” I muttered.

“It was probably a nurdle,” Erin told me. “The sea around here is full of them.”

“A what?”

“They’re, like, little plastic pellets. A bunch of containers fell off a ship last year, and now the nurdles are everywhere.”

“I’ve never heard of them.”

“Tell me you’ve never spent time on the beach without telling me you’ve never spent time on the beach.” She rolled her eyes. “Nurdles are a big problem for wildlife. Sea creatures eat them and get sick.”

“Can’t somebody clean them up?”

“Who? The plastic companies don’t care, and there are billions of nurdles out there. Trillions. I volunteered on a count last year—damn, it was boring—and we found thousands on one small stretch of sand alone. Cleaning them up would take forever.”

“You just sat on the beach and counted nurdles?”

“Yup.”

Boring or not, it gave me an idea… “How did you get involved with that?”

“There’s a website where you sign up. OMG! Zach’s taking off his wetsuit. Can I borrow your camera?”

“Huh?”

When I didn’t answer fast enough, Erin grabbed it and zoomed in. “Wow, this lens is great. You can see, like, every detail of his abs.”

True. I’d lived on ramen for three months to afford that lens, but over the years, it had repaid me with interest.

“Uh, the drone’s coming back.”

“Who cares? This is so totally worth getting fired.”

Okay, maybe there was one small plus point to this job—I was getting paid, and paid well, to watch Glamour magazine’s Bachelor of the Month. But damn, I missed my daughter.