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change.”
    Kai got out of the hearse, walked across the sidewalk and stepped into the shop. Dick Dale’s “Miserlou,” the anthem of 1960s California surf culture, was playing on a boom box. It was clear that Pat had jumped on the surf craze bandwagon that was currently selling millions of dollars of surf apparel to kids in landlocked states thousands of miles from the ocean who wouldn’t have known a beer keg from a board skeg.
    Even more amazing, there was actually a line to the cash register where Pat was merrily ringing up sales while Sean rushed to and from the back office where, Kai assumed, he was running off extra credit card slips for Pat’s “business associates” in Nevada.
    Kai caught his father’s eye, but knew better than to interrupt him when he was doing business. The Alien Frog Beast gave his son a hard look, and Kai knew he was ticked off that he hadn’t been around that evening to assist in the scam. Kai wandered over to a rack loaded with rash guards. He still hadn’t been able toscrape together the money to buy one for himself, and instead had been surfing bare-chested or in a T-shirt. The one he liked at Sun Haven Surf, an aqua blue polyolefin/spandex long-sleeve made by O’Neill, was listed at close to seventy-five dollars—far more than he could afford.
    Kai thumbed through the rack. All the familiar brands were there. He stopped at an aqua blue long-sleeved O’Neill rash guard almost exactly like the one at Sun Haven Surf, except his father was selling this one for thirty-four ninety-five. How could they sell the same garment for half what Buzzy sold it for? Kai pulled the rash guard off the rack. Up close he could see that the O’Neill logo wasn’t quite the right size or in quite the same place as the one he’d seen in Sun Haven Surf. The seams were loosely sewn and the material felt thin and rough.
    Kai slid the rash guard back into the rack. After two years of living with a crook like Pat, he could pretty easily figure out what the story was. These items weren’t manufacturer’s seconds, made of the same material but with a flaw that kept them from being sold in regular stores. These garments were knockoffs,imitations made as cheaply as possible out of inferior materials, and stamped with counter-feit logos.
    Leave it to his father to concoct a scam like this.
    Kai went into the back office where Sean was running extra credit card slips.
    â€œHey, Kai, where ya been?” his half brother asked. “Dad’s ticked that you didn’t come back after dinner.”
    Kai shrugged. “Looks like the new scam is a big success.”
    â€œIt ain’t a scam,” Sean said. “He explained the whole thing to me. Manufacturer’s seconds?”
    It always amazed Kai that his half brother was so gullible. “And where’d he get these so-called seconds?”
    â€œYou know,” Sean said. “That place in Brooklyn.”
    â€œThe place where the guys have those strange bulges under their shirts near their waists?” Kai said.
    â€œI asked Dad about that,” Sean said. “He told me Brooklyn’s a really dangerous place. Those guys need guns to protect themselves.”
    Kai had serious doubts about that, but didn’t see the point in arguing. Nor did he think itwas worth pointing out that the guys with the strange bulges under their shirts insisted on dealing only in cash and avoided all forms of paperwork—not exactly the typical way of doing business.
    Sean went out to the front of the store and closed the door behind him. Kai stayed in the back. He didn’t want to be out front where he would be expected to help sell this bogus crap to unsuspecting tourists. Instead he sat down at the computer and clicked onto Ethan’s Web site. Ethan, his mom’s boyfriend until her death two years before, was a photographer back on Kauai.
    Ethan’s site uploaded slowly.