Dawn Patrol

by Don Winslow

  Then I can shed you, Boone thinks, get my big-wave gear rigged out, and be in the water in plenty of time for the big swell.

  The first thing he sees when he pulls the van into the Crest parking lot is an alarming band of yellow caution tape.

  Police tape.

  With police behind it.

  Including Johnny Banzai of the SDPD Homicide Squad.

  This can't be good, Boone thinks.

  19

  That's what Johnny Banzai thinks, too.

  When he sees Boone.

  Normally, Johnny likes to see Boone. Normally, most people do. But not here, not now. Not when there's a dead woman who dived off a third-floor balcony and missed, her body now sprawled a scant two feet from the swimming pool, her red hair splayed on her outstretched arm, her blood forming a shallow, inadequate pool of its own.

  A tiny angel is tattooed on her left wrist.

  Behind the pool are the four floors of the Crest Motel, built in two angular wings, one of a dozen ugly, indistinct hotels thrown up in the early eighties, catering to budget-minded tourists, economy-priced hookers, and anonymity-seeking adulterers. Each room has a tiny “balcony” overlooking the “pool complex,” with its small rectangular swimming pool and requisite Jacuzzi, which Johnny thinks of as basically a swirling, bubbling mass of potential herpes infections.

  Now he ducks under the tape and steps into Boone's way. “Get out of here before the lieutenant sees you,” Johnny says.

  Boone looks over his shoulder at the body. “Who is she?”

  “What are you doing here anyway?”

  “Matrimonial.”

  Johnny sees the woman in Boone's van. “With the wife in tow?”

  “Some people have to see for themselves,” Boone says. He juts his chin at the crime scene, where the ME is squatting by the body, doing his voodoo. Lieutenant Harrington squats beside him, his back to Boone. “Who's the jumper?”

  In his gut he already knows the answer, but being an optimist, he hopes his gut is wrong.

  “One Tammy Roddick,” Johnny says.

  Gut one, optimism zero, Boone thinks.

  “She checked in early this morning,” Johnny says. “Checked out a little while later.”

  “You calling it a suicide.”

  “I'm not calling it anything,” Johnny says, “until we get the blood work back.”

  Sure, Boone thinks, to see what drugs are running through her system. Happens all the time in a party town like San Diego-a girl starts thinking the drugs are Peter Pan and she's Wendy, and Neverland starts looking not only good but reachable. The problem is… well, one of the problems is that the second she jumps she already knows it's a mistake, and she has those long seconds to regret her impulse and know she can't take it back.

  Gravity being gravity.

  Every surfer knows the sensation.

  That big wave you get in, and get in wrong, but then it's too late and you're just up there knowing you're about to go down and there's nothing you can do about it but take the fall. And you just have to hope that the water's deep enough to slow you down before you hit the bottom.

  Like maybe Tammy was hoping she'd make it to the pool.

  “Now get out of here before Harrington scopes you,” Johnny is saying.

  Too late.

  Harrington straightens up, turns around to look for Johnny Banzai, and sees him talking to Boone Daniels.

  A cat and a dog, a Hatfield and a McCoy, Steve Harrington and Boone Daniels. Harrington comes across the tape, looks at Boone, and says, “If you're looking for cans and bottles, sorry, the trash guys already came.”

  Harrington's got a face like barbed wire-his bones are so sharp, you think you could cut yourself on them. Even his blond hair is sharp, cut short and gelled wiry, and his mouth looks like it was slashed with a knife between his thin lips. He wears a gray herringbone jacket, a white shirt with a brown tie, black trousers, and highly shined black shoes.

  Harrington is hard-core.

  Always has been.

  “What are you doing at my scene, surf bum?” Harrington asks him. “I thought you'd be too busy getting little girls killed.”

  Boone goes for him.

  Johnny Banzai grabs Boone.

  “Let him go,” Harrington tells him. “Please, John, do me a favor, let him go.”

  “Do me a favor,” Johnny says to Boone. “Back-paddle.”

  Boone backs off.

  “Good choice,” Harrington says, then adds, “Pussy.”

  Boone's head clears enough for him to see Petra breezing past all of them, striding right toward the scene.

  “Hey!” Harrington yells, but it's too late. Petra is standing over the body. Boone sees her look down, then straighten up and walk real fast back to the van. She lays both hands on the car as if she's being frisked. Her head is down.

  Boone walks over to her. “Go ahead and throw up,” he says. “Everyone does, the first time.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Go on,” he says. “You can be human; it's all right.”

  But she shakes her head again and says something, although he can't quite make it out.

  “What?” he asks.

  She speaks a little louder.

  “That's not Tammy Roddick,” she says.

  20

  Boone hustles Petra into the van.

  The thing starts up first try and he drives for two blocks before he pulls over and asks, “What?”

  “That's not Tammy Roddick,” Petra repeats.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I'm sure,” she says. “I interviewed her half a dozen times, for God's sake.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I didn't have to vomit,” she says. “I was just trying to get you away from the police officers so I could tell you.”

  “Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you were a flesh-and-blood human being,” he says. But she does look paler, if that's possible. “Look, you want my advice?”

  “No.”

  “We should go back right now and tell them they've got a wrong ID,” Boone says. “You're an officer of the court, and if you withhold information that's material to the investigation of an unattended death-”

  “Hello?” she says, waving her hand. “ I'mthe attorney? Stanford Law? Top of my class?”

  “And if I withhold information, they could yank my license.”

  “Then forget I told you,” she says. “Look, I'll swear that I didn't tell you, all right?”

  “How did you do in ethics class?” Boone asks.

  “An A, ” she says. Like, What else?

  “What, did you cheat on the final?”

  “When did you become such a Goody Two-sandals?” she asks. “I thought you were so laid-back.”

  “I need my PI license to eke out a meager living,” Boone says, realizing as it comes out of his mouth that it makes him sound totally lame. The rules were not made to be broken, but they were made to be bent, and any PI who doesn't bend them into pretzels isn't going to be in business for long.

  Besides, Boone thinks, there's a solid reason for not telling the SDPD that the dead woman at the Crest Motel isn't Tammy Roddick. The deceased checked into the motel, pretending for some reason to be Tammy. It's possible that someone bought the act and killed her because of it. So the real Tammy, out there somewhere, is safe until the truth gets out.

  The problem is to find her before the killer realizes his mistake.

  Petra is saying something about “… could put her in danger.”

  “I'm there already,” Boone says.

  Which, to his surprise, shuts her up.

  Must be the shock, he thinks. Seeing as how he's ahead of her in the wave, he decides to ride it out. “Then the first step is to find out, if the dead woman isn't Tammy-”

  “She isn't.”

  “I got that,” Boone says, thinking, Well, it was nice while it lasted. Then: “Who was she?”

  “I don't know.”

  Boone shakes h
is head to make sure he heard her say that she didn't know something, then he says, “We'd better find out.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  “ We'renot,” Boone says. “ Iam.”

  Because Boone knows:

  You want to find out about physics, you go to Stephen Hawking; you want to learn about basketball, you go to Phil Jackson; you want to know about women who take their clothes off for a living, you go to

  21

  Dave the Love God sits on his lifeguard tower at Pacific Beach and intently scopes two young women making their way up the beach.

  “Visible tan lines, fresh,” Dave tells Boone, who's sitting beside him on the tower, in violation of God knows how many rules. The two women, one a slightly overweight blonde with a big rack, the other a taller, skinnier brunette, are walking past now. “Definitely Flatland Barbies. I say Minnesota or Wisconsin, secro-receptionists, sharing a double room. Which makes for a challenge, but not one without its rewards.”

  “Dave…”

  “I have needs, Boone. I'm not ashamed of them.” He smiles. “Well, I am ashamed of them, but-”

  “It doesn't stop you.”

  “No.”

  Dave is a living legend, both as a lifeguard and a lover. In the latter category, Dave's a tenth-level black belt of the horizontal kata. He's been spread over more tourist flesh than Bain de Soleil. Johnny Banzai insists that Dave is actually listed in Chamber of Commerce brochures as an attraction, right alongside SeaWorld.

  “No, really,” Johnny has said. “They go see the Shamu show, they check out the pandas at the zoo, and they fuck Dave.”

  “You know what I love about tourist women?” Dave now asks Boone.

  The list of possible answers is staggering, so Boone simply says, “What?”

  “They leave.”

  It's the truth. They come for a good time, Dave gives them one, and then they go home, usually thousands of miles away. They go away, but they don't go away mad. They like Dave every bit as much when they go to bed with him as when he doesn't drive them to the airport.

  They even give him references.

  Truly, they go home and tell their girlfriends, “You're going to San Diego? You have to look up Dave.”

  And they do.

  “Doesn't it make you feel cheap and used?” Sunny asked him one morning out in the lineup.

  “Yes,” Dave said. “But there are drawbacks, too.”

  Although he couldn't think of any at the moment.

  It was Dave the Love God who actually coined the term betty, and this is how it happened.

  The Dawn Patrol was out one glassy morning, and there were long waits between sets, so there was ample time for a now-infamous and admittedly sick conversation to kick up about which cartoon character they'd most like to have sex with.

  Jessica Rabbit got a lot of run, although Johnny Banzai went with Snow White, and Hang Twelve admitted to having a thing for both the girls in Scooby-Doo. Sunny was torn between Batman and Superman (“mystery versus stamina”), and while she was trying to make up her mind, Dave made himself an immortal in surf culture by chiming in, “Betty Rubble.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence.

  Then Boone said, “That's sick.”

  “Why is that sick?” Dave asked.

  “Because it is.”

  “But why?” Johnny Banzai asked Dave. “Why Betty Rubble?”

  “She'd be great in the sack,” Dave replied calmly, and it was chillingly clear to everyone that he had given this considerable thought. “I'm telling you, those petite sexual hysterics, once they cut loose…”

  “How do you know she's a sexual hysteric?” Sunny asked, already having forgotten they were discussing a literally one-dimensional character that existed only in the fictional prehistoric town of, uh, Bedrock.

  “Barney's not getting the job done,” Dave replied with supreme confidence.

  Anyway, it was just about a half hour later when a petite black-haired woman came down the beach and Johnny Banzai scoped her, grinned at Dave, and pointed.

  Dave nodded.

  “A real betty,” he said.

  It was done.

  Dave's specific figment of perverted imagination entered the surfing lexicon and any desirable woman, regardless of hair color or stature, became a “betty.”

  But Dave is also legendary as a lifeguard, and for good reason.

  Kids in San Diego talk about lifeguards the way NYC kids discuss baseball players. They're role models, heroes, guys you look up to and want to be like. A great lifeguard, male or female, is simply the best waterman around, and Dave is one of the greats.

  Take the time that riptide hit-on a weekend, like they always seem to do, when there are a lot of people in the water-and swept eleven people out with it. They all made it back in because Dave was out there almost before it happened. He was already running for the water as it started, and he commanded his crew with such cool efficiency that they got a line out beyond the tide and netted the whole eleven in.

  Or the time that snorkler got caught up underwater in the kelp bed that had drifted unusually close to shore. Dave read it by the color of the water, got out there with a knife, dived down, and cut the guy loose. Got him back to shore and did CPR, and the snorkler, who would have drowned or at least suffered brain damage if Dave hadn't been such a powerful swimmer, was just freaked out instead.

  Or take the famous tale of Dave's shark.

  Dave's out one day showing a young lifeguard some of the finer points. They're on those lifeguard boards, bright red longboards the size of small boats, paddling south, cutting across the long bend of coast from La Jolla Shores to La Jolla Cove, and suddenly the young lifeguard sits upright on his board and looks deathly pale.

  Dave looks down and sees blood flowing into the water from his boy's right leg and then he sees why. A great white, cruising the cove for its favorite dish, has mistaken the rookie's black wet-suited leg for a seal and taken a chunk out of it. Now the shark is circling back to finish the meal.

  Dave paddles between them-and you get this story from the rookie, not from Dave-sits up, kicks the shark in the snout and says, “Get out of here.”

  Kicks it again and repeats, “I said get your skanky shark ass out of here.”

  And the shark does.

  It does a dorsal flip and scoots.

  Then Dave cuts the leash off his board, ties it off as a tourniquet for the newbie's leg, and tows him to shore. Gets him into an ambulance, announces he's hungry, and walks over to La Playa for a burger at Jeff's Burger.

  That's Dave.

  (“You know what I did after I had that burger?” Dave told Boone privately. “I went to the can by tower thirty-eight and threw it all up. I was that scared, man.”)

  Lifeguard candidates go to great lengths either to get into Dave's training classes or to dodge them. The ones who aspire to be great want him as their instructor; the ones who just want to get by avoid him like wet-suit rash.

  Because Dave is brutal.

  He tries to wash them out, doing everything this side of legal to expose their weaknesses-physical, mental, or emotional.

  “If they're going to fail,” he said one day to Boone as they watched one of his classes do underwater sit-ups in the break, “I want it to be now, not when some poor kook who's about to drown needs them to succeed.”

  That's the thing: It doesn't matter if there's twenty people taken out by the undertow or blood in the water and sharks circling; a lifeguard has to arrive in the middle of that chaos as cool as a March morning and ask in a mellow tone if people would like to work their way to shore now, but there's, like, no rush.

  Because the thing that kills most people in the water is panic.

  They brain-lock and do stupid things-try to fight the tide, or swim in exactly the wrong direction, or start flapping their arms and wearing themselves out. If they'd just chill out and lie back, or tread water, and wait for the cavalry to arrive, ninety-nine times out
of a hundred, they'd be okay. But they panic and start to hyperventilate and then it's over-unless that calm, cool lifeguard is out there to bring them back.

  This is why Dave keeps trying to recruit Boone.

  He knows that BD would make a great lifeguard. Boone's a natural waterman with genius-level ocean smarts, an indefatigable swimmer, his body ripped from daily surfing. And as for cool, well, Boone is the walking definition of cool.

  The panic gene just skipped Boone.

  And it's not just speculation on Dave's part. Boone was out there that day the riptide took all those people. Just happened to be there shooting the shit with Dave and deliberately swam out into a riptide and paddled around, calming the terrified tourists, propping up the ones who were about to go under, and smiling and laughing like he was in a warm wading pool.

  And Dave will never forget what he heard Boone saying to the people as the lifeguard and his crew were desperately struggling to save lives: “Hey, no worries! We've got the best people in the world out here to bring us in!”

  “What brings you to my realm?” Dave asks him now.

  “Business.”

  “Anytime you're ready to sign on the dotted,” Dave says, “I have a gig for you. You could be wearing a pair of these way-cool Day-Glo orange trunks inside a month.”

  It's a joke between them-why lifeguard trunks, life jackets, and even life rafts are manufactured in the exact color that research has shown is most tantalizing to sharks. Day-Glo orange is just catnip to a great white.

  “You have an encyclopedic knowledge of local strippers,” Boone says.

  “And a lot of people think that's easy,” Dave says. “They don't realize the long hours, the dedication-”

  “The sacrifices you make.”

  “The sacrifices,” Dave agrees.

  “But I do.”

  “And I appreciate that, BD,” Dave says. “How can I be of service to you?”

  Boone's not sure he can, but he's hoping he can, because the dead woman at the pool had that stereotypical teased-out stripper hair, and a stripper body. And it's been Boone's experience that strippers have stripper friends. This is because of the odd hours, and also because women who aren't strippers usually don't want to have friends who are because they're afraid the dancers will steal their boyfriends.