by Don Winslow
“Cheerful's always aggravated,” Boone replies. “That's what makes him Cheerful. Who's the woman?”
“Dunno.” Hang Twelve shrugs. “But, Boone, she's smokin' hot.”
Boone goes upstairs. The woman isn't smokin' hot; she's smokin' cold.
But she is definitely smokin'.
“Mr. Daniels?” Petra says.
“Guilty.”
She offers her hand, and Boone is about to shake it, when he realizes that she's handing him her card.
“Petra Hall,” she says. “From the law firm Burke, Spitz and Culver.”
Boone knows the law firm of Burke, Spitz and Culver. They have an office in one of the glass castles in downtown San Diego and have sent him a lot of work over the past few years.
And Alan Burke surfs.
Not every day, but a lot of weekends, and sometimes Boone sees him out on the line during the Gentlemen's Hour. So he knows Alan Burke, but he doesn't know this small, beautiful woman with the midnight hair and the blue eyes.
Or are they gray?
“You must be new with the firm,” Boone says.
Petra's appalled as she watches Boone reach behind his back and pull the cord that's connected to a zipper. The back of the wet suit opens, and then Boone gently peels the suit off his right arm, then his left, then rolls it down his chest. She starts to turn away as he rolls the suit down over his waist, and then she sees the flower pattern of his North Shore board trunks appear.
She's looking at a man who appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties, but it's hard to tell because he has a somewhat boyish face, made all the more so by his slightly too long, unkempt, sun-streaked brown hair, which is either intentionally unstylishly long or has simply not been cut recently. He's tall, just an inch or two shorter than the saturnine old man still banging away on the adding machine, and he has the wide shoulders and long arm muscles of a swimmer.
Boone's oblivious to her observation.
He's all about the swell.
“There's a swell rolling down from the Aleutians,” he says as he finishes rolling the wet suit over his ankles. “It's going to hit sometime in the next two days and High Tide says it's only going to last a few hours. Biggest swell of the last four years and maybe the next four. Humongous waves.”
“Real BBM,” Hang Twelve says from the staircase.
“Is anyone watching the store?” Cheerful asks.
“There's no one down there,” Hang Twelve says.
“‘BBM’?” Petra asks.
“Brown boardshorts material,” Hang Twelve says helpfully.
“Lovely,” Petra says, wishing she hadn't asked. “Thank you.”
“Anyway,” Boone says as he steps into the small bathroom, turns on the shower, and carefully rinses not himself but the wet suit, “everyone's going out. Johnny Banzai's going to take a mental-health day, High Tide's calling in sick, Dave the Love God's on the beach anyway, and Sunny, well, you know Sunny's going to be out. Everyone is stoked. ”
Petra delivers the bad news.
She has work for him to do.
“Our firm,” Petra says, “is defending Coastal Insurance Company in a suit against it by one Daniel Silvieri, aka Dan Silver, owner of a strip club called Silver Dan's.”
“Don't know the place,” Boone says.
“Yeah you do, Boone,” Hang Twelve says. “You and Dave took me there for my birthday.”
“We took you to Chuck E. Cheese's,” Boone snaps. “Back-paddle.”
“Aren't you going to introduce me?”
It's amazing, Boone thinks, how Hang Twelve can suddenly speak actual English when there's an attractive woman involved. He says, “Petra Hall, Hang Twelve.”
“Another nom de idiot?” Petra asks.
“He has twelve toes,” Boone says.
“He does not,” says Petra. Then she looks down at his sandals. “He has twelve toes.”
“Six on each foot,” says Boone.
“Gives me sick traction on the board,” Hang Twelve says.
“The strip club is actually immaterial,” Petra says. “Mr. Silver also owns a number of warehouses up in Vista, one of which burned to the ground several months ago. The insurance company investigated and, from the physical evidence, deemed it arson and refused to pay. Mr. Silver is suing for damages and for bad faith. He wants five million dollars.”
“I'm not an arson investigator,” Boone says. “I can put you in touch with-”
“Mr. Silver was having a relationship with one of his dancers,” Petra continues. “One Ms. Tamara Roddick.”
“A strip club owner banging one of his dancers,” Boone says. “Just when you think you've seen it all…”
“Recently,” Petra says, “Mr. Silver broke off the relationship and suggested that Ms. Roddick find employment elsewhere.”
“Let me finish this for you,” Boone says. “The spurned young lady, in a sudden attack of conscience, decided that she couldn't live with the guilt anymore and came forward to the insurance company to confess that she saw Silver burn his building down.”
“Something like that, yes.”
“And you bought this shit?” Boone asks.
Alan Burke is way too smart to put this Tammy babe on the stand, Boone thinks. The opposing lawyer would shred her, and the rest of Burke's case with her.
“She passed a polygraph with flying colors,” Petra says.
“Oh,” Boone says. It's the best he can think of.
“So what's the problem?” he asks.
“The problem,” Petra says, “is that Ms. Roddick is scheduled to testify tomorrow.”
“Does she surf?” Boone asks.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Then there's no problem.”
“When I tried to contact her yesterday,” Petra says, “to make arrangements for her testimony-and to bring her some court-appropriate clothes I bought for her-she didn't respond.”
“A flaky stripper,” Boone says. “Again, brave new world.”
“We've made repeated attempts to contact her,” Petra says. “She neither answers her phone nor returns messages. I rang her current employer, Totally Nude Girls. The manager informed me that she hasn't shown up for work for three days.”
“Have you checked the morgue?” Boone asks.
Five million dollars is a lot of money.
“Of course.”
“So she's taken off,” Boone says.
“You have a keen grasp of the obvious, Mr. Daniels,” Petra says. “Therefore, you should have no trouble discerning what it is that we require of you.”
“You want me to find her.”
“Full marks. Well done.”
“I'll get right on it,” Boone says. “As soon as the swell is over.”
“I'm afraid that won't do.”
“Nothing to be afraid of,” Boone says. “It's just that this.. ”
“Tamara.”
“… Tammy babe could be anywhere by now,” Boone says. “It's at least an even bet that she's at a spa in Cabo with Dan Silver. Wherever she is or isn't, it's going to take a while to find her, so whether I start today, or tomorrow, or the day after, it really doesn't matter.”
“It does to me,” Petra says. “And to Mr. Burke.”
Boone says, “Maybe you didn't understand me when I was talking about the big-”
“I did,” Petra says. “Something is in the process of ‘swelling,’ and certain people with sophomoric sobriquets are, for reasons that evade my comprehension, ‘stoked’ about it.”
Boone stares at her.
Finally he says, as if to a small child, “Well, Pete, let me put it to you in a way you can understand: Some very big waves-the sort of waves that come only about once every other presidential administration-are about to hit that beach out there, for one day only, so all I'm going to be doing for those twenty-four hours is clocking in the green room. Now go back and tell Alan that as soon as the swell passes, I'll find his witness.”
“Th
e world,” Petra says, “doesn't come to a screeching halt on account of ‘big waves’!”
“Yes,” Boone says, “ it does.”
He disappears into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. The next sound is that of running water. Cheerful looks at Petra and shrugs, as if to say, What are you going to do?
10
Petra walks in to the bathroom, reaches into the shower, and turns on the cold water.
“Naked here!” Boone yells.
“Sorry-didn't notice.”
He reaches up and turns off the water. “That was a sketchy thing to do.”
“Whatever that means.”
Boone starts to reach for a towel but then gets stubborn and just stands there, naked and dripping wet, as Petra looks him straight in the eyes and informs him, “Mr. Daniels, I intend to make partner within the next three years, and I am not going to achieve that goal by failing to deliver.”
“Petra, huh?” Boone says. He finds a tube of Headhunter and rubs it over his body as he says, “Okay-your dad was Pete and he wanted a boy child, but that didn't work out, so he glossed you Petra. You figured out pretty young that the best way to earn Daddy's affection was to add a little testosterone to the mix by growing up to be a hard-charging lawyer, which sort of accounts for that log on your shoulder but not the analretentiveness. No, that would be the fact that it's still the law firm of Burke, Spitz and Culver, not Burke, Spitz, Culver and Hall.”
Petra doesn't blink.
Actually, Daniels's shot in the dark isn't far off. She is an only child, and her British father, a prominent barrister, had wanted a son. So, growing up in London, she had kicked a football around the garden with her dad, attended Spurs matches, and accompanied him to British Grand Prix at Silverstone.
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.
11
“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.”
12
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.
13
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 free-loader; 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.
