Johnny Utah could have been a great quarterback, but he blew out his knee in the Rose Bowl. Now, he takes the skin off chicken. His partner Angelo Pappas greeted him first day on the job, “welcome to Sea World, kid.” He was an undercover F. B. I. agent learning to surf at twenty-five. BRAH. He made up a story about his parents dying in a car crash to get in good with a surfer girl named Taylor. That came back to bite him in his rookie ass. When he got in a fight for being shit on the waves, Bodie the surf guru came to the rescue and said, “Back off, Warchild. Seriously.” Johnny got in deep with a band of bank robbing surf bums called The Ex-Presidents, though for a while he didn’t realize. They were under his nose the whole time, but he didn’t see it. The lines between good and bad, wrong and right, blurred. It was all about the mantra of the life of riding waves. That’s when the epiphany struck, these guys are The Ex-Presidents! WOAH. During a stakeout of a bank Johnny had a hunch about, Pappas said, “Utah, get me two.” He meant meatball sandwiches. He was so hungry he could “eat the ass end out of a dead rhino.” Johnny’s hunch was right, they had The Ex-Presidents right where they wanted them. “You ain’t got, shit,” the one wearing a Nixon mask said in the middle of a car chase. Eventually they got away. Johnny almost chased Bodie down on foot, but his bad knee betrayed him. He fired his clip into the air. He’d given away his undercover identity. The next day they all went skydiving like nothing happened. Before they went up, Bodie showed Johnny a ransom video. He’d kidnapped Taylor. They went skydiving anyway. Inside the twin-engine Cessna, Johnny said “You gotta go down, man.” Bodie responded, “I know it’s hard on you, Johnny. You want me so bad it’s like acid in your mouth, but not this time.” There weren’t enough parachutes for Johnny. Bodie tossed him a pistol and jumped. Johnny took a little time to rough up the plane, kicking and punching the seats and walls before he mustered courage and jumped without a parachute. “You are one radical son of a bitch,” Bodie said when Johnny latched onto his back. They plummeted in a half-Mexican stand-off. Johnny with his hand on the trigger, Bodie refusing to pull the cord on the parachute. “Pull it!” “No, you pull it!” “Pull it!” “Drop the gun and pull it!” Johnny dropped the gun and pulled the cord. On the ground, Johnny was reunited with Taylor, but Bodie escaped into Mexico. It didn’t matter, Johnny knew where Bodie would be the following summer. Bells Beach, Australia for the fifty-year storm when Bodie believed the planet’s greatest waves would present themselves as a result of a cold front coming off Antarctica. When the time came, Johnny was there. He walked to the beach in a catastrophic downpour. Bodie stood on the sand wearing a hoodie watching the giant waves. They fist fought in the surf. Eventually, Johnny managed to handcuff Bodie to his arm while Bodie tried to drown him. “No!” Bodie screamed. “I can’t handle a cage, man!” “You gotta pay!” Johnny said. “One wave, Johnny!” Bodie pleaded. “Where am I gonna go, man?! Cliffs on both sides? What am I gonna do? Paddle to New Zealand?” Johnny looked out at the waves crashing violently. “Okay, brah.” He unlocked the cuffs and Bodie paddled out. Johnny tossed his F. B. I. badge in the ocean and left. He tossed his gun in the water, too. The re-enforcements arrived. “What the hell did you do, Utah?” one agent said. “We will get him when he comes back in,” said another. “He’s not coming back,” Johnny said and kept walking.

Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His work is forthcoming in Fiction on the Web, Gargoyle and Bull: Men’s Fiction. When he’s not writing, which is most of the time, he can be found dropping GIFs on posts all over twitter where he tweets @WKoewing and is occasionally tolerable.