Dawn Patrol (5 page)

And perhaps becoming a lawyer was yet more of an effort to earn her father’s approval, but doing it in California had been her American mother’s idea. “If you pursue your career in England,” her mother said, “you will always be Simon Hall’s daughter to everybody, including yourself.”

So Petra took a first at Somerville College in Oxford, but then had crossed the water to Stanford for law school. Burke’s talent spotters had plucked her easily from the crowd and made her an offer to come to San Diego.

“Your off-the-cuff psychoanalysis,” she says with a smile, “is all the more amusing coming from a man whose parents named him Daniels, Boone.”

“They liked the TV show,” Boone says. It’s a lie. Actually, it was Dave the Love God who, back in junior high, gave him the “Boone” tag, but Boone is not about to reveal this—or his real first name—to this pain in the butt.

“And what
are
you putting on your body?” she asks.

“Rash guard.”

“Oh, dear.”

“Ever had wet suit rash?” Boone asks.

“Nor a rash of any other kind.”

“Well, you don’t want it,” Boone says.

“I’m sure. Towel?”

Boone takes the towel, wraps it around his waist, and shuffles out into the office.

“What’s the state of the nation?” Boone asks Cheerful.

Cheerful punches a few more numbers into the adding machine, looks at the result, and says, “You can either eat or pay rent, but not both.”

This is not an unusual short list of options for Boone. His perpetually shallow cash flow isn’t because Boone is a bad private investigator. The truth is, he’s a very
good
private investigator; it’s just that he’d rather surf. He’s totally up front about the fact that he works just enough to get by.

Or not, because he is now three months late on the rent and would be facing eviction if not for the fact that Cheerful is not only his business manager but also his landlord. Cheerful owns the building, Pacific Surf, and about a dozen other rental properties in Pacific Beach.

Cheerful is, in fact, a millionaire several times over, but it doesn’t make him any more cheerful, especially not with tenants like Boone. He’s taken on the redemption of Boone’s business affairs as a quixotic challenge to his own managerial skills, sort of Edmund Hillary trying to summit a mountain of debt, fiscal irresponsibility, unpaid bills, unfiled taxes, unwritten invoices, and uncashed checks.

For an accountant and businessman, Boone Daniels is Mount Everest.

“As your accountant,” he tells Boone now, “I strongly advise you to take the case.”

“How about as my landlord?”

“I strongly advise you to take the case.”

“Are you going to evict me?”

“You have negative cash flow,” Cheerful says. “Do you know what that means?”

“It means I have more money going out than I have coming in.”

“No,” Cheerful says. “If you were
paying
your bills, you’d have more money going out than coming in.”

Boone performs the complicated maneuver of putting on jeans while still keeping the towel wrapped around him as he moans, “Twelve to twenty feet … double overheads …”

“Oh, stop whinging,” Petra says.
Whinge
is one of her favorite Brit words—a combination between a whine and a cringe. “If you’re as good as your reputation, you’ll find my witness before your swelling goes down.”

She proffers a file folder.

Boone pulls a North Shore T-shirt over his head, followed by a hooded Killer Dana sweatshirt, slips into a pair of Reef sandals, takes the file, and walks downstairs.

“Where are you going?” Petra calls after him.

“Breakfast.”

“Now?”

“It’s the most important meal of the day.”

Despite his name, Dan Silver always wears black.

For one thing, he’d look pretty stupid dressed in silver. He knows this for a fact, because back when he was a professional wrestler, he dressed all in silver and he looked pretty stupid. But what the hell else was a wrestler named Dan Silver going to wear? He started off as a good guy, but soon found out that the wrestling fans didn’t buy him as a hero. So he traded the silver for black and became a villain by the name of “Vile Danny Silver,” which the fans
did
buy.

And, anyway, bad guys made more money than good guys.

A life lesson for Danny.

He did about five years in the WWE, then decided that it was easier dealing with strippers than getting the shit kicked out of you three nights a week, so he cashed out and opened his first club.

Now Dan has five clubs, and he still dresses in black because he thinks the black makes him look sexy and dangerous. And slim, because Dan is starting to get that fifties tire around his waist, some heavy jowls, and a second chin, and he doesn’t like it. He also doesn’t like that his rust red hair is starting to thin and black clothes can’t do a thing about it. But he still wears a black shirt, black jeans, and a thick black belt with a wide silver buckle, as well as black cowboy boots with walking heels.

It’s his trademark look.

He looks like a trademark asshole.

Now he goes to meet the guy down on Ocean Beach near the pier.

The sea is kicking up like a nervous Thoroughbred in the starting gate. Dan could give a shit. He’s lived by the water all his life, never been in it above his ankles. The ocean is full of nasty stuff like jellyfish, sharks, and waves, so Dan’s more of a Jacuzzi man.

“You ever hear of anyone drowning in a hot tub?” he asked Red Eddie when the subject of getting into the ocean came up.

Actually, Red Eddie had, but that’s another story.

Now Dan walks up the beach and meets Tweety.

“You take care of it?” Dan asks.

Dan is a big guy, six-four and pushing 275, but he looks small standing face-to-face with Tweety. Fucking guy is built like an industrial-size refrigerator and he’s just as cold.

“Yeah,” Tweety says.

“Any trouble?” Dan asks.

“Not for
me
.”

Dan nods.

He already has the cash, twenty one-hundred-dollar bills, rolled into one of his thick hands.

Two grand to pitch a woman off a motel balcony.

Whoever said life is cheap overpaid.

It’s too bad, Dan thinks, because that was one hot chick, and a little freak to boot. But she’d seen something she shouldn’t have seen, and if there’s one thing Dan’s learned about strippers after twenty-plus years of trying to manage them is that they can’t keep their legs or their mouths shut.

So the girl had to go.

It’s no time for taking chances.

There’s another shipment due in, and the merchandise is worth a lot of money, and that kind of money you don’t let some dancer jeopardize, even if she is a freak.

Dan slips Tweety the money and keeps walking, making sure to stay far away from the water.

Boone usually eats breakfast at The Sundowner.

For one thing, it’s next door to his office. It also serves the best eggs
machaca
this side of … well, nowhere. Warm flour tortillas come on the side, and, as we’ve already established, everything …

Although mobbed with tourists in the afternoon and at night, The Sundowner is usually inhabited by locals in the morning, and it has a congenial decor—wood-paneled walls covered with surfing photos, surfing posters, surfboards, broken surfboards, and a television monitor that runs a continuous loop of surf videos.

Plus, Sunny works the morning shift, and the owner, Chuck Halloran, is a cool guy who comps Boone’s breakfast. Not that Boone is a freeloader; it’s just that he deals largely in the barter economy. The arrangement with Chuck has never been formalized, negotiated, or even discussed, but Boone provides sort of de facto security for The Sundowner.

See, in the morning it’s a restaurant full of locals, so there is never a problem. But at night it’s more of a bar and tends to get jammed up with tourists who’ve come to PB for the raucous nightlife and to provoke the occasional hassle.

Boone is often in The Sundowner at night anyway, and even if he isn’t, he lives only two blocks away, and it just sort of evolved that he deals with problems. Boone is a big guy and a former cop and he can take care of business. He also hates to fight, so more often than not he uses his laid-back manner to smooth the rough alcoholic waters, and the hassles rarely escalate to physical confrontations.

Chuck Halloran believes that this is the best kind of problem solving, taking care of a situation before it becomes a problem, before damage is done, before the cops get involved, before the Liquor Licensing Board gets to know your name.

So one night a few years back, Chuck’s eyeballing a situation where a crew of guys from somewhere east of the 5 (doesn’t matter specifically where—once you’re east of Interstate 5, it’s all the same) are about to leave with a young
turista
who’s about three sips from unconscious. Chuck overhears the word
train
.

So, apparently, does Boone, because he gets up from his seat at the bar and sits down at the booth with the guys. He looks at the one who is clearly the alpha male, smiles, and says, “Dude, it’s not cool.”

“What isn’t?” The guy is big; he puts his time in at the gym, takes his supplements. One of those barrel-chested chuckleheads, his shirt opened to his chest and a chain with a crucifix nestled into his fur. He’s got enough brew down him to think it’s a good idea to get hostile.

“What you have in mind,” Boone says, jutting his chin at the young lady, who is now taking a brief nap with her head on the table. “It’s not cool.”

“I dunno,” Bench Press says, grinning at his crew. “I think it’s cool.”

Boone nods and smiles. “Bro, I’m tellin’ ya, it’s not on. We don’t do that kind of thing here.”

So Bench Press says, “Who are you, like the sheriff here?”

“No,” Boone says. “But she’s not leaving with you.”

Bench Press stands up. “
You
gonna stop me?”

Boone shakes his head, like he can’t believe this walking cliché.

“That’s what I thought, bitch,” Bench Press says, mistaking Boone’s gesture. He reaches down and grabs the
turista
by the elbow and shakes her awake. “Come on, babe, we’re all gonna party.”

Then suddenly he’s sitting down again, trying to breathe, because Boone has jammed an open hand into his chest and blown all the air out of it. One of his boys starts to go for Boone, then looks up and changes his mind because a shadow has fallen over the table. High Tide is standing there with his arms crossed in front of his chest, and Dave the Love God is right over his shoulder.

“S’up, Boone?” Dave asks.

“Nuch.”

“We thought maybe there was a problem.”

“No problem,” Boone says.

No there’s not, because the sight of a 350-pound Samoan tends to have a tranquilizing effect on even the most hostile drunks. Truly, even if you’re more or less totally faced and you’re thinking about throwing down, one sight of Boone backed by High Tide and an evilly grinning Dave the Love God (who
does
like to fight and is very,
very
good at it) will usually make you go Mahatma Gandhi. If that crew shows you the door, the other side of that door is going to knock Disneyland off the Happiest Place on Earth throne.

“I gotta pay the check,” Bench Press says.

“I got it,” says Boone. “Peace.”

Bench Press and his crew go out like March lambs. Boone pays their bill; then he, High Tide, and Dave revive the
turista
long enough to find out what motel she’s in, take her back, put her in bed, and go back to The Sundowner for an aloha beer.

The next morning, Boone went in for breakfast, and no bill was forthcoming.

“Chuck says no,” Sunny explained.

“Listen, I don’t expect—”

“Chuck says no.”

And that was that. The unspoken deal was in place. Boone’s breakfast is on the house, but he always leaves a tip. Lunch or dinner, he pays, and still leaves a tip. And if a situation occurs in or around The Sundowner, Boone settles it before it becomes a problem.

Now, Boone comes into The Sundowner, slides into a booth, and is annoyed but not surprised when Petra takes a seat across the table.

Dave the Love God, sitting at the counter as he packs down a stack of blueberry panckakes, notices her, too.

“Who’s the betty with Boone?” he asks Sunny.

“Dunno.”

“Bother you?”

“No,” Sunny says. “Why should it?”

Petra may not bother her—which is a lie anyway—but she’s sure as shit bothering Boone. “I should have thought,” Petra’s saying, “given the urgency, that you would want to get right at it.”

“There’s a limit,” Boone says, “to what you can accomplish on an empty stomach.”

Actually, Petra thinks that there’s a limit to what he can do on a full stomach, too, but she refrains from saying so. There must be something to this oceangoing Neanderthal that I’m missing, she thinks, because with all the reputable detective firms in San Diego, Alan Burke was adamant about hiring him, and Alan Burke may be the best trial lawyer in captivity. So he must have a high opinion of Mr. Daniels, or perhaps it’s just that Alan thinks that Mr. Daniels is simply the man to call when you need to locate a stripper.

Chuck E. Cheese’s, my aching teeth.

Sunny comes over and asks him, “The usual?”

“Please.”

For the inland betty’s benefit, Sunny recites Boone’s usual order, “Eggs
machaca
with jack cheese, corn
and
flour tortillas, split the black beans and home fries, coffee with two sugars.”

Petra stares at Boone. “Have you
no
restraint?”

“And throw in a side of bacon,” Boone says.

“And for you?” Sunny asks Petra.

Petra picks up the edge in her voice right away and knows without doubt that Boone Daniels and this woman have slept together. The waitress is drop-dead gorgeous, a stunner with long blond hair, longer legs, a figure to kill for, and a golden suntan. No, Surf Boy is most decidedly not a stranger to this lovely creature’s bed.

“Would you like to order?” Sunny asks.