The Seventh Wave

by Fred Galvin

  They’d rather chat up the girls saying how these waves were too small. Then they would brag about the “big ones” they had ridden in the fall when the Atlantic storms went by to the east and sent their fifteen- to twenty-foot swells crashing onto Long Island’s south shore barrier islands. No one had ever witnessed these phonies riding anything but the highways with their surfboards on the roof racks of their cars. We called them highway surfers or concrete surfers. Most of the girls saw through them and those who didn’t weren’t worth our time or efforts.

  Since we had no use for such pseudo surfers, we vowed to find a spot we could call our own. Several of us had been searching the beaches east of Gilgo until one day we saw almost perfectly shaped waves rolling in from a sandbar about a hundred yards offshore. The wind and tide conditions that day were the same as I described above: offshore breeze, incoming tide, sets of six-foot swells steadily rolling in and breaking consistently rather than sectioning out. And no one was there! So we claimed the spot as ours and vowed to keep it our secret as long as we could.

  That weekend we took the girls out for some evening surfing (a “Surfari”) followed by roasted hotdogs and toasted marshmallows, all washed down with Pepsi-Colas (hey, it was the early sixties and we were pretty clean kids!) and maybe a little fooling around if we were lucky. And Garbage Cove was born.

  The present-day surfer has it pretty easy when it comes to recovering a surfboard after a wipeout, which is surfer-speak for losing control of your ride and falling off your board, sometimes in spectacular fashion. The board nowadays is tethered to an ankle so it will always be nearby for recovery, no matter how severe the wipeout.

  However, in my day, no one had been bright enough to tether board to ankle, just as no one yet had the brains to put wheels on luggage. Why either idea took so long to develop is the million-dollar question. Another is why weren’t chocolate and peanut butter married when I was a kid?

  I digress, albeit briefly.

  As with a piece of bread falling to the floor with the peanut butter side down, a universal rule when I surfed seemed to be that when you wiped out, you went in one direction and your board went in the 180-degree opposite direction. If your wipeout happened a fair distance from the shoreline, and if the surf was particularly up that day, and if the wind was blowing across rather than onshore or offshore, then your board may well come ashore several hundred yards or more down or up the beach. This would result in a rather long swim to shore for the wiped-out surfer followed by a long walk on the beach to where the board finally came in.

  I remember one day in October, I think it was 1964, after my buddy and I finally found the courage to go out and tackle one of the twenty-plus footers that were rolling in from a hurricane that had passed far out at sea. We always used the buddy system when surfing the big ones. I started down the face of a wave more than three times my height. A quick glance told me that my friend had not made the wave, so I was solo. I rapidly accelerated downward, approaching the bottom of the wave at a frightening speed. I moved to the back of my board and put all my weight on the tail in order to keep the nose from “pearling,” that is, driving straight into the water at a nearly vertical angle. I was too late and I ended up doing a face plant into the bottom of the wave while my board indeed pearled and shot back skyward.

  My surfboard was made of polyurethane covered by fiberglass and therefore was extremely buoyant, which resulted in its shooting straight up into the air as though the wave had spit out a rotten piece of food. Instinctively, I dove as far down as I could manage in the tempest in order to avoid being skewered by my own board, or worse, being sliced by the skeg (the rudderlike fin on the underside) as it returned from its flight. Such a fate could result in serious injury or even be fatal since skegs were very sharp. I stayed down as long as I could, fortunately unscathed, until I figured the board must have returned to the water and I would live to ride again.

  When I finally surfaced, gasping for air and trying not to swallow too much salt water, I looked around for my board, hoping it was nearby. Not to be. It was nowhere to be seen. I had to be at least seventy-five yards out from shore and it would be a long swim fighting the crosswind and the continuing big waves. To make matters worse I was wearing a wetsuit, which weighed me down. It was like swimming with a tight raincoat on.

  Some fifty-plus years later, I sat on the dunes watching the Garbage Cove kids surfing on that early June day, waiting for the seventh wave of each set just like we used to do.

  ~~~

  My name is Dan Deckler. I’m a semi-retired NYPD homicide detective. I suppose that last sentence is technically inaccurate. I am actually a fully retired detective and no longer hold that professional title. I am a “consultant with detective skills to the NYPD.” I had honed said skills over the course of a forty-seven-year career, thirty-plus years of which I proudly wore the gold shield of an NYPD Detective, shield number 647, eventually attaining the rank of Detective First Grade. My base for my entire career was the city’s 7th Precinct on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, headquartered on the corner of Pitt and Delancey Streets in the shadow of the WB (the Williamsburg Bridge), which connected lower Manhattan to Brooklyn. Now, as a consultant, I was technically an independent contractor, a.k.a. my own boss, and free to provide my services to the highest bidder.

  I will speak more later on how and why I became a consultant rather than remain fully retired.

  After retiring about two years ago, I briefly did some PI (private investigator) work. The upside of being a PI was I could cherry-pick my cases from those clients who came to me with their tales of woe that required professional investigation. The downside was that regardless of the case, most of the work was overwhelmingly boring. Whatever you may have seen or think you know from TV shows and movies involving PIs, believe half of that and then maybe ten percent of what’s left just may be close to accurate. There were no beautiful mysterious women wanting you to find a valuable package or spies lurking around every corner ready to thwart your attempts to save the city, the country, or the world.

  I had wanted to embrace my inner Humphrey Bogart and be Sam Spade tracking down the Maltese Falcon and uttering lines like “When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it,” or maybe Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep protesting that “She tried to sit on my lap while I was standing up.”

  Alas, it was not to be.

  I was just Dan Deckler of Double-D Investigations, no cool quotes or memorable lines, unless you count this one after I observed some idiot train surfing (standing on the top of a moving train): “I’ll bet at some point his last words will be ‘Hey guys, watch this!’” At the precinct we would call such idiots Darwin Award Winners in that their demise automatically increased the average IQ of the human species and thus enhanced the chances of survival for the rest of us.

  My very first case involved following a client’s beautiful and cheating wife to the Waldorf Astoria for a not-very-discreet nooner with her health club trainer. I snapped a few pics of her hailing a cab outside her Upper West Side apartment building. Then I hailed my own hack and actually instructed the driver to “follow that cab,” wondering if Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe ever really said that. What a cliché.

  I snapped more pics of her exiting the cab at the Waldorf, excessively tipping the doorman with a message something like, “If anyone ever asks, I was never here.” I happened to know the doorman from previous cases and he rolled his eyes when he showed me the fifty she had given him and relayed her message. I then took more pics of the trainer’s arrival (no tip for the doorman). After he took the elevator to the sixteenth floor, I hung around the lobby with the New York Daily News as my companion while I waited for the two of them to exit the lobby elevator, actually together. They made no effort to hide a kiss, which I digitally recorded as she had the doorman hail a cab (probably followed up with another “tip of discretion”) and the trainer headed for the nearest subway station. Why is it people having an affair think they’re invisible? Th
ey aren’t. In fact, they’re probably more conspicuous, as my digital camera would attest with these two.

  Like I said, boring.

  Anyway, I digress again.

  ~~~

  More pertinent is how and why I came to be sitting on the sand dunes of Garbage Cove watching the kids surfing.

  I was growing tired of tailing cheating spouses and lovers, foiling embezzlement schemes, and spying on healthy people trying to scam disability insurance. I recorded one guy who actually forgot which of his legs was supposed to have the limp and switched in midstride. I believe his disability checks stopped rather abruptly, followed by a summons for restitution for fraud.

  My latest case had taken me to a Long Island summer cottage where I was supposed to find a cheating husband with a suspected teenaged girlfriend. I had managed to install a hidden camera the previous evening (I’d prefer you didn’t ask how). I followed the husband out to the cottage and sat in my car parked nearby and monitored the live feed on my phone. To my initial amusement, the husband’s lover was indeed teenaged but turned out to be a he instead of a she. What I soon saw finished off my days as founder, CEO, and sole employee of Double-D Investigations. There just had to be another way! I drove off in a hail of gravel trying to unsee what I had just seen and, failing that, wondering if there was a brain scrubber app available from the Android Play Store.

  Now, I feel compelled to add that I am not homophobic by any standard. I have no problem with gay people, male or female. In fact, I’m rather ambivalent on that topic. There were two gay cops in the 7th, that I knew of, and I considered them both friends. My reaction was the result of seeing something totally unexpected and, I must admit, shocking to me. I had never even imagined what went on between gay lovers and witnessing it shook me up a bit.

  As I drove, I decided I needed to clear my head and either come up with another line of work or retire fully. I pulled over, parked, and walked over the dunes that separated the Great South Bay from the Atlantic. I stopped and took some deep breaths. When my heart had finally recovered to its usual pace, I shook my head and started laughing. I decided I would tell my client, the wife, that her husband was simply using the cottage for seclusion. No teenaged girl was involved. At least that part was true. In good conscience, I would charge her only for out-of-pocket expenses and waive my fee for the gig saying, “I’m just glad it all worked out for you.”

  Finally I was calm enough to take in the vista before me. I felt serene. My PI days were over, which was actually a relief. I’d have to find some other way to spend my time, but no rush.

  A steady surf was rolling in and I saw at least a half dozen surfers straddling their boards and looking over their shoulders for the next wave suitable to ride. As if on signal, they all flopped back down on their boards in unison and began paddling furiously toward shore. A good wave lifted all but two of them and they started down the face of a perfectly shaped seven-footer. Instinctively I nodded and figured it must have been the seventh wave of the set.

  One by one the kids kicked out close to shore. I looked around me a full 360 degrees and realized, much to my delight, that I could very well be standing at Garbage Cove. I just sat down on a dune, oblivious to the fact that I was dressed for work in my suit and tie (old habits die hard), and watched the kids catching waves.

  As I sat there, the images from the cottage recording were thankfully pushed way back in my mind’s eye to some secure vault which I vowed never to open again. I was totally relaxed.

  I had focused on one particular young surf rider, maybe because he was a “goofy footer” like I was back in the day. By way of explanation, the standard surfing stance was left foot toward the front of the board and right foot to the rear like a right-handed hitter’s batting stance. But since I had batted left handed my entire baseball career, I instinctively rode my board right foot forward, left to the rear. In surfer-speak, this was goofy footing. This surfer also stood out from the others in that he managed to stay on the faces of his waves longer, resulting in rides that took him nearly parallel down the beach.

  As I was watching and admiring his latest controlled ride, he kicked out of the wave earlier than usual. I thought this was strange since it looked to me like he had another good forty or fifty yards to go before the wave would break on the shore. I saw him almost immediately get back on his board, but instead of starting to paddle out for another ride, he just sat and straddled the board as he stared in toward shore. He seemed to straighten up, evidently focused on something that had gotten his attention. At first I thought shark, the surfers’ worst nightmare, but immediately dismissed that notion since he was so close to shore. Most shark incidents occurred farther out.

  He was slightly angled to my right, downwind. My vantage point was about one hundred feet away. I tried to follow the line of his gaze toward shore. Then I saw it. Something was half submerged in the water between him and the shoreline. As the waves rolled in, the object would ride up and over each one until finally a wave broke before it and carried the object toward the beach where it finally settled.

  I shuddered. I knew what had commanded the young surfer’s attention. Thirty-plus years of experience had enabled me to recognize a human corpse when I saw one whether it was in a dark alley or beached by waves.

  I immediately rose and ran toward the body, arriving just as the surfer was wading knee-deep toward shore carrying his board under his right arm. When he finally understood what he was looking at, he stopped abruptly.

  I waded to the body and stood over it, oblivious to the fact that my wingtips were probably permanently ruined by the salt water, not that the sea air and sand had done them any good anyway.

  The surfer looked down at the corpse and then up at me. “Holy shit! Is that what I think it is? Is he … is he dead?”

  Wow, an unmoving body facedown in the surf. He got it on his first try. Good surfer but a bit lacking upstairs. “I’m afraid so on both counts,” I said.

  The body had rolled onto its front with its face buried downward into the wet beach sand. It was facedown and clearly male. Remnants of his pants were still present, held there by a brown belt. There were remnants of cloth on the upper torso which showed signs that marine life had been snacking on it. Frankly, I was surprised at how much of the body had survived its journey to Garbage Cove.

  The young man moved closer and bent down to get a better view.

  I held out my hand. “Hold on, son. Don’t touch.”

  “I wasn’t going to touch, no way.” Then he looked up at me, apparently noticing for the first time how incongruous I looked in my rumpled suit, tie askew, hair blowing, standing in water up past my ankles, in dress shoes. “Dude, who the hell are you?”

  I smiled at him then looked back down at our new friend. “The better question is, who the hell is he?”

  “I have no idea, man. I just saw something in the whitewater rolling in toward shore. It looked, you know, somehow odd, maybe a dead whale or whatever. So I thought I’d just check it out. Man! He’s dead, right? I wonder where he came from.”

  Then he looked at me again, this time his head cocked to one side kind of like a dog hearing a strange sound. I guess I set off some stereotypical trigger in his mind. “Who are you, man? You a cop? You kinda look like a cop. Where’d you come from anyway? Why are you here on this beach?”

  I nodded, still looking down at our waterlogged friend. “Yeah, I’m a cop, at least I used to be.” Then I looked up at him. “I also used to be you a long time ago.” I straightened up and looked up and down the beach and out at the waves continuing to roll in, oblivious to the fact that what their predecessors had just delivered to Garbage Cove’s shore was about to have a rather significant impact on my life.

  “What? What are you talking about? You used to be me? You some kind of time traveler? You an older version of me?” He stepped back, a horrified look on his face. “Oh shit! Please tell me you’re not me, like a hundred years from now, come back to now!”


  I realized he might actually be serious and that I had an opportunity to really mess with this kid’s mind but it just didn’t seem like the right time, not that I didn’t want to for my own amusement. I can be kind of weird that way sometimes. Sarcasm is a habit that’s hard to break.

  With mock hurt in my voice, “A hundred years? Really? No, I’m not future you. But I guess you could say I’m a time traveler in a way. A long time ago my friends and I found this surfing spot and named it Garbage Cove.”

  “You used to surf? Here? You discovered Garbage Cove? You’re shittin’ me, right?”

  I took slight umbrage but understood his skepticism. Smiling, “Yeah, hard to believe, huh? Well, I haven’t been this old my whole life, you know.” I held out my hand. “Dan Deckler.”

  He put down his board, wiped the sand off his hand on his shorts, and we shook. “Dante Immelman.” (Dante? Seriously? Who the hell names their kid Dante?) Dante looked back down at the corpse at our feet. “What do we do now, man?”

  “I’ll take it from here, Dante. I’ll need your contact information. At some point we’ll need to get a brief statement from you.”