Leashed

By J.F. Phillips

Marin County Sheriff's Detective Patrick Nolan files a report on what appears to be the tragic accidental drowning of a local surfer. Two days later he finds himself forty-eight hours behind murderers who have left few clues in their wake.

With no motives or witnesses, Nolan begins talking to the local residents as he tries to reconstruct the final weeks of Jacob Hickley's life. Wrestling with his own demons and unwilling to acknowledge his own needs drives Nolan deeper into himself as the investigation leads him from Marin County, to Hawaii, to Los Angeles, and back to the tiny coastal town that champions its tolerances for personal freedoms.

"A straightforward murder mystery in the California surf...the story feels authentic...Sustains enough momentum to satisfy mystery fans looking for a little literary escapism." - Kirkus Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.F. Phillips
• Release date: May 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458198754

J.F. Phillips

I was born in Buffalo, NY and raised in Ohio and California. I took my first creative writing course at the University of Hawaii and have undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of San Francisco. I own a small residential construction company and live with my wife in Northern California. We have four grown children.

Book preview

LEASHED

By

J.F. Phillips

Published by J.F. Phillips at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 J.F. Phillips

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Daniel A. Phillips, M.D.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Prologue

Jacob couldn’t even remember when he first started coming down to the sea wall at the foot of the Brighton Avenue ramp to relax. Tonight was much like any of the hundreds of winter evenings he’d sat in this same spot with his legs dangling above the two ton boulders that stood guardian like to buffer the century-old concrete wall against the relentless pummeling of the Pacific.

The jagged spheres sat jumbled atop one another nearly five feet below his bare feet as he stared at the foamy salt water swirling in and out of the voids. Every time the boulders seemed ready to pull themselves free from the ocean, the next wave would crash off shore and rush relentlessly into and around the rocks almost giving the boulders a sense of animation as the shadows and surface planes changed to cast random reflections onto the rocks and the water’s surfaces. At times it was just as easy to imagine the boulders surging forward to meet the wall of whitewater as it was to know that it was the whitewater that was moving toward the boulders. Was it illusion? Was it a loss of focus? Or was it exhaustion?

A top ten finish in a surfing contest at Haleiwa was a decent result. But he was expected to make it to the final heat, if not win the contest. This was his third year on the qualifying circuit. He was a seasoned veteran and his late charge at the end of last season was seen as proof of his maturation and competitive toughness. Qualifying for the ASP was more than probable; his coach and his sponsors expected it. Hell, for the first time since his rookie season he actually believed his time had come.

He’d landed at Oakland International Airport only four hours ago. From the eighty degree temperature of Oahu to the mid-forty degree evening temperature of Northern California was hard enough to take. Add to that the two hour plus, rain soaked drive out to Bolinas in his beater van and dealing with the quiver of six new boards Dylan surprised him with at Honolulu International; was it any wonder he’d thrown his bag into his room, given his Mom a quick kiss on the cheek, stuffed his lucky leash into his back pocket, and made his way down to the sea wall for some decompression and reflection?

He’d argued with Dylan about the cost of bringing the boards back to the mainland, getting them at baggage claim, moving them to the shuttle, getting them onto the shuttle, then fitting them into the van. The damn things probably wouldn’t even work worth shit in the surf the mainland had been having so far this winter. Dylan told him to stop being such a pussy.

Hell, with the crap result you just had, you should be thankful we even sponsor your worthless ass. You take the boards home. The boys will pick them up.

He’d tried to wipe the confrontation from his mind during the flight home. Didn’t happen.

He got angrier with each step toward the baggage claim area. Oakland’s baggage system sucked. God only knew how long he’d have to wait before the boards showed up. He was tired. He was disappointed. He just wanted to go home. So he paid to have the boards trucked out to Bolinas the following day. He had an expense account.

Fuck it! he said to no one and everyone.

Sitting on the sea wall was beginning to work its magic. He could feel the tension ebbing. It was almost like every wave that came at him took a little of the anger and hurt out of him and ran with it out to sea toward Duxbury Reef. The roar of the waves was being absorbed into the quiet of the night. The stars were dancing, the moon was speaking of a dying wind, glassy conditions, and a twelve foot swell at eighteen second intervals coming in from the Gulf of Alaska.

He lost track of the time as he sat on the edge of the wall absorbing the ocean’s energy and the sudden stillness of the night.

He couldn’t tell which came first, the hands that pulled him upright, or the sting at the base of his head. Jacob struggled against the gripping hands until the pain radiating from the back of his head exploded in a light brilliant enough to dim the stars in the sky. His heart lost its rhythm as the hands set him free.

He felt himself soaring above the silent boulders. The water felt so real as he reached out and pierced its glossy surface.

The stars went still. The moon went silent. The blackness of the ocean swallowed Jacob Hickley, all of his troubles, and his last breath ran with the receding tide.

Chapter 1

Pat Nolan straddled his board about 35 yards offshore and just to the Seadrift side of the Bolinas Lagoon channel, facing almost due south, watching the next set march toward him after refracting off Duxbury Reef.

Winter storms brought waves. How clean the waves were and how large they would be once they got to Bolinas depended on how far away the winds started up, the direction the swell came from, and how well the waves merged and spread themselves out as they consolidated their powers.

The farther away the storm began, the better chance the waves would be well spaced and clean. As the intervals got closer to twenty seconds, the more powerful the wave and the more the building sand bar would come into play at the channel.

Last night’s storm had dumped nearly two and a half inches of rain, and the winds had gusted well over thirty miles an hour. There had been a lot of leaves and branches strewn over the roofs and roadway as Pat made his way down to the end of Wharf Road in the pre-dawn darkness. By 5:30 the wind had blown itself out, and the clouds had been pushed to the east as the storm set its sights on the Sierra Nevada and the Tahoe ski resorts that had been running at capacity for months already. This latest storm has the third sizable one since the holidays. The first two storms had provided some of the best winter surf in the last couple of years and, if the first four waves Pat had ridden this morning were any indication, the next few days were doing to be great.

Surf in northern California was best in the winter. But, while the waves were faster, bigger, and more powerful than any other time of the year the air temperature averaged 45 degrees in the mornings, and the water temperature wasn’t much better. Winter was also prime season for the ‘men in the grey suits’; great white sharks. Carcharodon carcharias.

Northern California surfers had proved to be a pretty hearty crew. Year round water temperature rarely exceeds 53 degrees, the wind and fog don’t often take time off from visiting the coast at least once during the day, and the ragged coastline often calls for hiking in to some of the more reliable and enjoyable breaks.

That being said, the ones who surfed regularly during the winter sessions, male and female alike, were borderline masochists. They often fought through pounding closing-out shore break for the chance to catch overhead frames in 45-degree water.

Being in the water actually felt pretty good in comparison to the 39-degree air temperature and drizzle they often stood in to change into their wetsuits while standing next to their cars.

Then, no matter how good the session was, no matter how many times they were held under in the impact zone, they still had to make their numbed fingers retrieve their hidden car keys, and then try to dress themselves while shivering like a chicken dancing to survive in a fox den. Nolan couldn’t remember how many times he’d started his winter workdays with the top two buttons of his Levi 501’s undone.

All this for just a few precious seconds carving on a six to seven foot piece of fiberglass covered foam or epoxy in the grasp of one of nature’s most beautiful, frightening, and dangerous powers.

These untamed waves may have had five thousand miles to garner and perfect their efficiency in preparation of hurtling themselves against the coastline. And it was during those precious final moments of a wave’s existence that a surfer dared to intrude in an attempt to experience the exhilaration and beauty of this purest of forces.

Maybe at first a surfer tried it because it looked like fun. Then maybe he kept at it because it was fun. But those who continued to ride for the rest of their lives did so because surfing had begun to take control of their souls and the ocean had began to replenish their spirit and their energies.

There are those who surf and there are surfers. Surfers, who connect with the ocean from only one focus; respect. Respect for the ocean’s power, her beauty, her creatures, her spirit and life-giving gifts. Nolan was a surfer. Good days, bad days, it didn’t matter. The ocean healed.

Nolan had been in the water fifteen minutes, and no one had come out yet. The six to eight foot frames were holding their form pretty well as the surface continued to glass-off due to the disappearing wind. If the waves got much bigger, they would need some help from an offshore wind to keep from closing out. The left shoulders were peeling in makeable sections toward the Groin on Brighton Beach. Pat’s 6-9 single-fin ‘Design by Russell Lewis’ was perfect for these waves.

Russell had presented him with the board on his most recent trip to Kauai. Russell had started out as a surf instructor for Nolan’s kids on an early trip to Hanalei, became a coach for Nolan, then a good friend. Russell, an Australian, was the long-time youth coach for the Hanalei Surf Club. He had guided a number of youngsters to the men and women’s professional surfing circuit.

Getting Russell to make him a board had taken just about all of Pat’s persistence. Nolan had worked diligently to overcome every excuse that Russell had tossed in his path. According to Russell, Pat had only the second ‘Design by Russell Lewis’ on the mainland.

Nolan slowly paddled toward mid-channel, keeping track of where he thought the edge of the sand bar was formed and trying not to venture too far into the drop off outside the sand bar.

Outside the sand bar, the ocean floor dropped off radically and marked the real beginning of the sharks’ territory. While it was the sudden end of deep water at the sand bar that caused the waves to jack up and pitch forward, it was also the deep water that offered the sharks their greatest advantage when hunting the sea lions that lived and bred in the lagoon that the channel fed into.

To feed their young, the sea lions had to use the channel to enter the open ocean. The sharks knew where the food was. It just so happened that the sea lions, sharks, and surfers all needed to be in the same general vicinity, and it was the surfers who needed to be aware of their surroundings to keep from being mistaken for a sea lion.

The best way to do that was to keep as little water as possible underneath you and take off deep and steep. Taking off deep and steep, close to the breaking curl, not only meant Nolan didn’t have to paddle as much to catch a wave, but the drop to the bottom turn also gave him the sling shot speed he needed to make those first two sections of the wave. That little rule, combined with checking the beach for ‘chomped’ sea lions before entering the water, watching the behavior of the sea lions in the line-up, and constantly scanning the water’s surface would usually keep a surfer out of harm’s way. Nolan had no interest in being a participant in the ocean’s food chain.

His eyes locked on the third wave of an approaching set. He pulled back on his board and spun just as he began to slide up the jacking face. Two digs and the wave grabbed the board. As he popped up, he realized he’d taken off farther behind the peak than planned.

He dropped straight down the seven-foot face and threw his left arm back to start a carving bottom turn into the rapidly forming left. Like any goofy footer, or screw foot, he loved facing the wave as he rode. He dug his left rail into the base of the wave, freeing his right rail, lessening the friction on the bottom of the board and using the sling shot effect to accelerate off the bottom and up the steepened face.

Whipping the board off the bottom and pumping with his trailing left arm gave him the acceleration to climb up the face and at the same time race past the collapsing curl just over his head. Halfway up the face, he ducked to let the curl pitch out and over his shoulders. He eased his arm forward and settled the board into trim just under the projecting lip.

He pumped just enough to keep the nose of the board under the curl. Sounds of the breaking waves momentarily went silent as he stooped in the tube and the quiet of the green room enveloped him. He imagined being in the tube was much like riding through the eye of a hurricane, an Eden of tranquility surrounded by the chaos of nature. Slowly the pallet of grays that dominated the sky in the lineup had been replaced by swirling and ever-changing brush strokes of greens and whites.

While he would prefer to stay in the room indefinitely, he was nearing the end of the fastest sections and the curl was closing in on the slower building shoulder as the wave moved into slightly deeper water. The curl began to lose projection as it collapsed. Pat was shot out of the closing tube and onto the face of the next section.

Stiffening his back leg, he threw his left arm forward and his right arm backwards. The twist to the right by his upper body jammed weight to the back outside rail and sent him and the board into a carving cutback that sent a spraying sheet of water off the bottom of the board as it snapped off the lip and began descending down the face and back toward the once again building face of the collapsed section.

He thought for a moment about pulling back his left arm and making a face side cutback toward the rapidly building section.

Instead, he chose to finish off the backside cutback riding up into the curling whitewater, completing the 360 degree maneuver.

The momentary stall on the lip set up the second drop of the ride. He dropped his left knee onto the deck of the board as he pulled into the curl from the back door and got covered up.

He’d ridden well into the channel, and it was time to think about the exit strategy. Something flamboyant? Something daring? Something that maybe wouldn’t leave him sorely crawling out of bed tomorrow morning? As he exited the collapsing tube Pat simply stood and rode the momentum out, up, and over the small rounding shoulder, as the wave entered the deeper channel water, and let the mouth of the lagoon absorb the dissipated energy.

As Nolan was lowering himself onto the board, he caught a flash of light from just outside his right shoulder. He turned his head back to see the headlights of his VW bus blinking at him.

Nolan’s bus sat parked in the second to last slot at the end of Wharf Road, about two hundred yards due east from where he was sitting on his board. He never took the last slot, even if it was available. The last slot pretty much belonged to Tim Calvin.

Calvin was in his late fifties and looked at least fifteen years older. Nobody was certain what he’d done for a living, only that he’d started renting just outside of town in the late eighties and picked up a couple of retirement or disability checks each month at the post office on Brighton Avenue.

People knew about the checks because Shirley O’Key, the postmistress, had made a comment regarding Tim’s unwavering schedule of visiting his post office box Monday through Friday at 10:45 in the morning. She felt, however, that to divulge any further information about the checks, the sender, the type of envelope, the postmark, would be in violation of her sworn duties as a management level federal employee for the last 41 years.

All Nolan knew was that every morning Calvin picked up a cup of black coffee from the kiosk outside The Coast Café, dropped coins on top of the stack of San Francisco Chronicle newspapers that lay bundled in front of the doors of the yet to open Bolinas Market, then drove his battered 1993 Toyota pick-up down to the end of Wharf Road to enjoy the vista, the news, and the coffee.

Nolan’s bus was a pristine 1963 VW van with the bench seat removed so that surfboards could be easily thrown through the opened back hatch, and the fully made-up twin size mattress on the floor could be easily reached through the side cargo doors. Other than the missing bench seat and simple curtains, the only modification Nolan had made to the bus was to replace the chassis, suspension, engine, and transmission with the corresponding parts of a 1996 Porsche 911. Not an easy task, but one of his high school buddies was a Porsche guru with his own shop up north.

Nolan had bought the scarred, wrecked Porsche from a sniveling banker who had left the oxidizing car to sit in his mother’s barn in Inverness only to find