The Gentlemen's Hour (9 page)

Boone's cell phone rings.

Hang set it to play the first bar of Dick Dale's “Misirlou.”

“S'Boone.”

“Boone—Dan. I have those records you asked for.”

“Cool,” Boone says. “Meet me on the pier.”

“Ten minutes?”

“Sounds right.”

Boone makes the rest of the drive back to Crystal Pier, parks the Deuce in the narrow slot by his cottage, and walks out to the end of the pier. Dan Nichols is already out there, leaning against the railing, staring out at the ocean. Something you probably do a lot, Boone thinks, if you suspect your wife is cheating on you.

Dan hands him the phone record and e-mail printouts.

“Did you look at them?” Boone asks.

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Nothing jumps out,” Dan says. “No repeated calls to the same number, except to Melissa.”

“Who's—”

“Her best friend.”

“Do me a favor?” Boone says. “Cross out
any
of these you can explain.”

“You could run the numbers, couldn't you?”

“Yup,” Boone says, “any you don't cross out. Trying to save me some time and you some cash.”

“Money isn't my problem in life, Boone.” Dan looks sad, really beaten down. He runs down the sheet of phone numbers, crossing out line after line.

Boone says, “Dan, maybe this means you're wrong about this. Which is, like, a
good
thing, you know?”

“I just
feel
it.”

“Okay.” He takes the records from Dan. “I'll shout you.”

“Thanks.”

“De nada.”

Boone walks back to the office, hands the phone records to Hang. “Want to make a little extra jack?”

“Deeds.”

Surfbonics for “yes.”

“Run these phone numbers,” Boone says. “Names and addresses.”

“Moly.”

Momentarily.

Boone goes upstairs. Hang Twelve can not only make a computer sing, he can also make it perform Puccini arias standing on a basketball while juggling burning torches.

Cheerful is banging the adding machine.

“Didn't have a chance to tell you,” Boone says. He shoves some old mags off his chair and sits down. “I took the Corey Blasingame gig.”

Cheerful doesn't look happy. Which, of course, is his default setting anyway, but now he turns the color up on the unhappy dial. “I'm not sure that's such a smart move.”

“It's a macking dumb move,” Boone says. “Why I'm qualified.”

“Petra talk you into it?”

“Sorta.”

“It's not going to make you very popular around here,” Cheerful says.

Boone shrugs. “Keep it to yourself for a while.”

Hang Twelve bounds up the stairs. “I zipped the Arabics, got tags and cribs for every sat reach-out—totally squeezy, tube blast—and went Amish for you. Foffed?”

Translation: I ran the numbers, Boone dude, and got names and addresses for every cell-phone call—it was really easy and very fast—and I printed out a hard copy for you. Happy?

“Mahalo.”

“Nurries.”

No worries.

“Late, yah?”

“Latrons.”

Hang bounces back down the stairs.

Boone looks at the printout. It has nothing to offer—calls to grocery stores, her masseuse, a boutique in Solana Beach . . . routine stuff with very few repeats. So if Donna Nichols has a lover, she isn't communicating with him over the phone.

Sucks.

Now he'll have to wait for Dan to go out of town and then follow her.

Boone's place is the last cottage on the north side of Crystal Pier.

It's worth a freaking fortune and Boone couldn't have come close to affording it, but Cheerful insisted on giving it to him as a reward for helping disentangle him from a marriage with a twenty-five-year-old alimony hunter.

Despite its more than prime location, it's a simple place. A small living room with a kitchen area, one bedroom, one bath. All the plank boards painted white. The very cool thing for Boone is that it sits literally right over the water. He can even open a window, stick a pole out, and fish right from his bedroom.

Boone comes in, goes to the fridge for a cold Dos Equis, and sits down at the kitchen table with a fresh notepad, a pen, and the Blasingame file.

The two remaining eyewitness statements are key. Alan Burke can knock some of the sting out of the Rockpile Crew testimony because the other members have something to gain, but two objective eyewitnesses are far more damaging.

Jill Thompson is twenty-one years old, a part-time student at SDSU, and a
barista
at Starbucks. The night of the killing, she and a friend of hers, Marissa Lopez, had been club-hopping along Garnet Street.

Marissa hooked up with a guy, Jill didn't.

She was walking west on Garnet when she saw a man walk east and cross the street to the parking lot.

“Then these four guys came out of the alley. They seemed pretty drunk to me. One of them just walked up to the man and hit him. The man fell. The guys got in their car and drove away. I went over to the man. He was unconscious. I used my cell phone to dial 911, but I guess it was too late.”

Simple, straightforward, Boone thinks, and consistent with the other witness statements, as baked as they might be.

Jill Thompson gave the police a detailed, accurate description of Corey and what he was wearing, and later picked him out of a lineup as the man who had punched Kelly Kuhio.

The other witness is George Poptanich, a fifty-four-year-old cabdriver who was parked in the lot that night. It was common for taxis to wait in that lot for their dispatchers to send them to bars to pick up fares too drunk to drive.

Poptanich was sitting in his cab when he heard the Rockpile Crew come out of the alley to his left. He noticed the pedestrian because he thought he might be a possible fare. Then he saw one of the “punks” walk up to the pedestrian “aggressively.” He started to get out to help but there wasn't time before one of the kids punched the pedestrian in the face.
Poptanich yelled at them, but the punks jumped into a car. Poptanich noted the license number, jotted it down in his log, and called 911. Then he went to assist the girl who was with the pedestrian. By this time, people were coming out of the bars.

A police cruiser picked the Rockpile Crew up five minutes later on the PCH, ostensibly on their way to La Jolla.

Poptanich also picked Corey out of the lineup as the kid who threw the punch.

There's a knock at the door.

Boone opens it.

“You wanna get dinner?” Dave asks.

He has a speargun in his hand.

Forty-five minutes later they jump into the water of La Jolla Cove.

Boone has a mask with a lamp, a snorkel, duck fins, and his Ogie speargun, and now he and Dave, similarly equipped, swim out toward underwater caves, the aforementioned “holes” that gave the place, at least in Boone's mind, its name.

Caves and underwater holes are good, because that's where the fish are.

The swim feels good, just a little cold and refreshing on a soft night. Most of the year they'd wear wet suits because the deep current runs cold, but it's still warm enough in August to go with just trunks.

It's a fine thing to do, night spear fishing, and they owe it all to a group of nonagenarians collectively called the Bottomscratcher's Club. These were a bunch of WWII vets who had crashed in planes, sank in ships, and
survived amphibious assault landings, and came home to San Diego to find that their adrenaline-hyped systems weren't being sufficiently fed. So they started free diving in the underwater caves of La Jolla Cove.

If the tight caves, heavy surf, and tricky currents weren't dangerous enough; it's worthwhile to note that the only creatures that previously hunted under these waters were the great white sharks attracted by the numerous sea lions, their favorite meal, and that a free diver in a wet suit and fins looks an awful lot like a sea lion.

Actually, spear fishing had been against the law in San Diego up until the formation of the Bottomscratcher's Club, when a lawmaker observed that if any man had light enough brains and heavy enough balls to tempt great whites in their home territory, he should damn well have the right to do it. The Bottomscratcher's Club recently disbanded, due to age, but Boone and Dave feel that they're upholding a fine tradition of courage and stupidity.

And free food.

“Free food tastes better,” is an article of faith in Dave's cosmology, and Boone can only agree. There is something about the taste of food that you haven't laid out bucks for that is just, well,
better.

Now Boone and Dave swim over to the cave where they think they'll have the best luck. Boone spits into his mask, swishes some water around the glass, and fits it snugly onto his face. Then he lays out, swims around for a second, and dives.

They call it free diving because you're free of most equipment—crucially, air tanks and regulators. What you're free to do is hold your breath for as long as you can and get as deep as you can, leaving yourself with enough reserve in your lungs to make it back up. Both Boone and Dave are certified scuba divers, and sometimes do that, but on a summer evening it's easier to just jump in and go.

Boone flicks on his lamp and dives down toward the mouth of a narrow cave. He moves his head to shine the light around but doesn't see anything
but tiny fish, so he comes back up, grabs a breath, and dives again.

He spots Dave about fifty feet away, treading above a small crack in a reef. You want to stay close enough for visual contact but far enough away for safety; the last thing you want is to shoot your buddy with a spear.

Some movement catches Boone's eye. Turning back to a crack in an underwater rock, he sees a “swish” disappear into it, leaving a roil of bubbles that shine in the lantern light. Boone swims down to the crack and feels it. It's narrow, but wide enough, and he turns sideways and pushes himself through.

The crack opens into an underwater chamber, and Boone sees the yellowtail tuna below him, flipping its tail back and forth, motoring away. Boone is almost out of breath—he feels that tightness in his chest and the slight physical panic that always comes with running out of air—but he relaxes and pushes through it, diving down closer to the tuna. He raises the speargun to his shoulder and squeezes the trigger. The spear shoots out and strikes the fish behind the gills. The tuna thrashes violently for a moment, then is still, as a cloud of blood billows into the water. Boone pulls in the cord and brings the fish closer to his body.

Time to get going.

Boone turns and heads up toward the narrow chamber.

Except he can't find it.

A slight problem.

It was perfectly obvious from above, but it must look different from below and in poor light, and as he gropes his way around the chamber for an opening he feels really stupid. This would be a bad, dumb way to go out, he thinks, trying to keep his movements steady and unhurried, fighting the physical reflex to hurry.

But he can't see it and he can't feel it.

So he listens for it.

Small waves are coming into the cove, against the cliffs, and the water
will go out the chamber and make a sound. He stops still and listens, and then he hears a faint whooshing sound and heads toward it.

Then he sees the light.

Not the light that they say you see before you go to heaven, but Dave's lantern shining into the chamber from the other side.

Why you dive with a buddy.

Especially a buddy like Dave the Love God.

These guys are
tight
, they've hung together since grade school, ditching classes through junior high and high school to go surfing, diving or just roaming the beach. It was like they didn't have separate houses—if Boone was at Dave's at suppertime, that's where he ate; if Dave was at Boone's at night, that's where he crashed. They'd sit up half the night anyway, playing video games, watching surf videos, talking about their heroes—and, yeah, one of those was Kelly Kuhio.

Some of the old guys on the Gentlemen's Hour called them the “Siamese Idiots,” a double dose of gremmie obnoxiousness joined at the hip. (Yeah, but those men looked out for them, made sure that their stupidity didn't cost them their lives, made sure they never crossed the line.)

Boone and Dave pooled their cash to buy that first van, used it to go cruising the coast together looking for the best waves, and took turns on a Friday/Saturday-night rotation system for dates. The van died a natural death after two years (Johnny B opined that its suspension just gave up the will to live), and the boys sold it for scrap and used the money to buy scuba gear.

Diving, surfing, hogueing, chasing girls. Long days on the beach, long nights on the beach, it builds a friendship. You're in the ocean with a guy, you learn to trust that guy, trust his character and his capabilities. You know he's not going to jump your wave or do something kooky that would get you hurt or even killed. And you know—you
know
—that if you're ever lost in the dark, deep water, that guy is coming to look for you, no matter what.

So Dave's down there with a lantern, showing him the way up and out.

Boone swims toward the light, then sees the crack and squeezes through, pulling his catch behind him. Then he plunges up to the surface and gets a deep breath of beautiful air.

Dave comes up beside him.

“Nice catch.”

“Thanks.”

“You're an idiot.”

“It's been said.”

“Accurately,” Dave says. “We should head in.”

Because there's blood in the water, and if there's anything more attractive to a shark than a sea lion, it's blood. If any sharks are within a hundred-yard radius, they'll be coming. Best to be onshore when they do.