One of the divers came up near the boat and spit out his regulator. "There's nowhere to look. It's just blue to fucking infinity."

"Yeah," Nate said. "I know."

Clay saw blue-green breasts gently bobbing before his face and was convinced that he had, indeed, drowned. He felt himself being pulled upward and so closed his eyes and surrendered.

"No, no, no, son," said Papa. "You're not in heaven. The tits are not blue in heaven. You are still alive."

Papa's face was very much smashed against the glass of his helmet, wearing the sort of expression he might have had if he'd run full speed into a bulletproof window and someone had snapped a picture at maximum mash, yet Clay could see that his eyes were smiling.

"My little Cleandros, you know it is not time for you to join me?"

Clay nodded.

"And when it comes time for you to join me, it should be because you are old and tired and ready to go, not because the sea is wanting to crush you."

Clay nodded again, then opened his eyes. This time there was a stabbing pain in his head, but he squinted through it to see Amy's face through her dive mask. She held his regulator in his mouth and was gripping the back of his head to make him look at her. When she was sure that he was conscious and knew where he was, she gave him the okay signal and waited until he returned it. Amy then let go of Clay's regulator, and they swam slowly upward, to surface four hundred yards from where they'd first submerged.

Clay immediately looked around for the boat and found nothing where he expected it, the closest vessels being a group of boats too far away to be the Always Confused. He checked his dive computer. He'd been down for an hour and fifteen minutes. That couldn't be right.

"That's them," Amy said. She looked down into the water. "Oops. Let me get my top off of your face."

"Okay," Clay mumbled into the rebreather.

Kona was in tears, wailing like Bob Marley in a bear trap — inconsolable. "Clay gone. The Snowy Biscuit gone. And I was going to poke squid with her, too."

"You were not," said Nate.

But the artificial Hawaiian didn't hear. "There!" Kona shouted as he leaped onto the shoulders of the stocky whale cop to get a better view. "It's the white wahine! Praise to Jah! Thanks be to His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie. Go there, Sheriff. A saving be needed."

"Handcuff this kid," said the cop.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Here's My Coupon, He Said,

Singing the Redemption Song

Normally, if the whale cops found an unauthorized person on a research vessel, they would simply record the violation, write a ticket, then remove the person from the boat and take him back to Lahaina Harbor. A fine was paid and violations were considered the following year when the permit came up for renewal. By contrast, Kona was delivered to the Maui county jail with both his wrists and ankles shackled and a swath of duct tape over his mouth.

Nate and Amy were waiting in the lobby of the Maui county jail in Wailuku, sitting in metal chairs designed to promote discomfort and waffled butt skin. "It's really okay if he has to stay in overnight," said Nate. "Or for a week or so if it would be easier."

Amy punched Nate in the shoulder. "You creep! I thought it was Kona that got them to let you come to us."

"Still, jail builds character. I've heard that. It might do him good to be off his herb for a few days." Kona had slipped his fanny pack full of pot and paraphernalia to Nate before he'd been taken away.

"Character? If he starts with his native-sovereignty speech stuff in there the real Hawaiians will pound him."

"He'll be okay. I'm worried about you. Don't you want to go get checked?" Clair had taken Clay to the hospital to get a CAT scan and have his scalp stitched up.

"I'm fine, Nate. I was only shaken up because I was worried about Clay."

"You were down a long time."

"Yes, and I went by Clay's dive computer. We decompressed completely. The worst part was I froze my ass off."

"I can't believe you had the presence of mind to decompress with Clay unconscious. I don't know if I would have. Hell, I couldn't have. I'd have run out of air in ten minutes. How did you manage —»

"I'm small, Nate. I don't use air like you. And I could tell that Clay was breathing okay. I could tell that the cut on his head wasn't that bad either. The biggest danger to both of us was decompression sickness, so I followed the computer, breathed off of Clay's rescue supply when I ran out, and nobody got hurt."

"I'm really impressed," said Nate.

"I just did what I was supposed to do. No big deal."

"I was really scared — I thought you — You had me worried." He patted her knee in a grandmotherly fashion, and she looked at his hand.

"Careful, I'll get all sniffly over here," Amy said.

They led the surfer into the holding tank, where everyone was wearing the same orange jumpsuit that he was. "Irie, bruddahs," Kona said, "we all shoutin' down Sheriff John Brown in these Great Pumpkin suits, Jah." They all looked up: a giant Samoan who had beaten an Oldsmobile to death with a softball bat when it stalled in the middle of the Kuihelani Freeway, an alcoholic white guy who had fallen asleep on the Four Seasons' private beach in Wailea and made the mistake of dropping his morning business in one of the cabanas, a bass player from Lahaina who had been brought in because at any given time a bass player is probably up to no good, an angry bruddah who had been caught doing a smash-and-grab from a rental car at La Perouse Bay, and two up-country pig hunters who had tried to back their four-wheeler full of pit bulls down a volcano after huffing two cans of spray paint. Kona could tell they were huffers by the glazed look in their eyes and the large red rings that covered their mouths and noses from the bag. "Hey, brah, Krylon?"

One of the pig hunters nodded and briefly lost control of the motion of his head.

"Nothin' like a quality red."

"I hear dat," said the pig hunter. "I hear dat."

Then Kona made his way to the corner of the cell, the guard locked the door, and everyone resumed looking at his shoes, except for the Samoan guy, who was waiting for Kona to make eye contact so he could kill him.

"Ye know, brah," Kona said to him in a friendly, if seriously flawed fake Jamaican accent, "I be learning from my science dreadies to look at tings with the critical eye, don't ya know. And I think I know what the problem with taking a stand against da man on Maui."

"Whad dat?" ask the Samoan.

"Well, it's an island, ain't it, mon? You got to be stone stupid going outlaw here wid nowhere to escape."

"You callin' me stupid, haole?"

"No, mon, just speaking the truth."

"An' what you in for, haole girl?"

"Failing to give a humpback whale the proper scientific handjob, I tink."

"Goin' ta fuck ya and kill ya now."

"Could ya kill me first?"

"Whadeva," said the Samoan, climbing to his feet and expanding to his full Godzilla proportions.

"Thanks, brah. Peace in Jah's mercy," said the doomed surfer.

Forty-five minutes later, after Nate had filled out the requisite papers, the jailer, a compact Hawaiian with weightlifter shoulders, led Kona through the double steel doors into the waiting room. The surfer shuffled in, head down, looking ashamed and a little lopsided. Amy put her arm around his shoulders and patted his head.

"Oh, Sistah Amy, 'twas heinous." He put his arm around Amy, then let his hand slip to the curve of her bottom. "Heinous most true."

The jailer grinned. "Had a disagreement with a big Samoan guy. We stopped it before it got too far. The holding cells are monitored on closed-circuit video."