Dawn Patrol

by Don Winslow

  So he's playing the odds that say the Jane Doe is a stripper.

  “I need to ID a dancer,” Boone says. “Redhead, an off-the-rack rack, an angel tattoo on her left wrist.”

  “Gimme putt,” Dave says. “Angela Hart.”

  “Angel Heart?”

  “A nom de strip,” Dave says. “What about her?”

  “She a… uh, friend of yours?”

  “A gentleman doesn't tell, BD,” says Dave. “But that's a serious tone you've adopted. What's underneath it?”

  “She's dead.”

  Dave stares out over the ocean. The waves are starting to get bigger, and choppy, and the color of the water is a dark gray.

  “Dead how?” Dave asks.

  “Maybe suicide.”

  Dave shakes his head. “Not Angela. She was a force of nature.”

  “She ever work at Silver Dan's?”

  “Didn't they all?”

  “Was she friends with a girl named Tammy?”

  “They were tight,” Dave says. “What's she got to do with this?”

  “I don't know yet.”

  Dave nods.

  He and Boone sit and look at the water together. Boone doesn't rush things. He knows his friend is working through it. And the ocean never gets boring-it's always the same and always different.

  Then Dave says, “Angela was pure nectar. You need any help finding out who killed her, you give me a shout.”

  “No worries.”

  Dave's back on the 'nocs, scoping the Flatland Barbies back to their hotel room.

  Boone knows that he's looking but he isn't, you know.

  22

  Boone doesn't get far from the lifeguard tower.

  He's on the boardwalk, heading back toward his ride, when who should he see, on a kid's dirt bike with tires thicker than a Kansas prom queen, than Red Eddie.

  Red Eddie is a Harvard-educated, Hawaiian-Japanese-Chinese-Portuguese-Anglo-Californian with traffic-cone red hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah-traffic cones aren't red, they're orange, and Eddie's first name isn't Eddie, it's Julius. But there isn't a soul on this earth who has the stones to call the dude “Orange Julius.”

  Not Boone, not Dave the Love God, not Johnny Banzai, not even High Tide, because Red Eddie is usually surrounded by at least a six-pack of super size Hawaiian moke guys and Eddie don't think nothing about letting the dogs out.

  Red Eddie deals pakololo.

  His old man, who owned a few dozen grocery stores in Oahu, Kauai, and the Big Island, sent Eddie from the north shore of Oahu to Harvard and then to Wharton Business School, and Eddie returned to the island with a sound business plan. It was Eddie who put the Wowie in Maui, the high in hydro. He brings massive amounts of the stuff in by boat. They drop it offshore in watertight plastic wrap, and Eddie's guys go out at night in Zodiacs, the small double-pontoon motorboats, and bring it in.

  “I'm a missionary,” Eddie said to Boone one night at The Sundowner. “Remember how missionaries sailed from America to Hawaii to spread the good word and totally fuck up the culture? I'm returning the favor. Except my good news is benevolent and your culture needs fucking up.”

  Benevolence has been good to Red Eddie, giving him an ocean-view mansion in La Jolla, a house on the beach in Waimea, and a 110-foot motor yacht docked in San Diego Harbor.

  Red Eddie is totally Pacific Rim, the epitome of the current West Coast economic and cultural scene, which is a mйlange of Cali-Asian-Polynesian. Like a good salsa, Boone thinks, with a little mango and pineapple mixed in.

  Boone and Eddie go back.

  Like a lot of stories in this part of the world, it starts in the water.

  Eddie has a kid from a high school indiscretion.

  The kid doesn't live with Eddie-he lives with his mother in Oahubut Keiki Eddie comes for visits. He was about three years old on one of these visits, when a big swell hit the coast and Keiki Eddie's idiot nanny decided it would be a good idea to take her charge for a walk on La Jolla Cove to see the big waves. (Like he had never seen them on the North Shore, right?) One of the big waves smashed into the jetty and took Keiki Eddie back with it, so the kid was really getting a close-up look at the big mackers.

  These things usually end badly. Like, the best news is they find the body.

  Call it luck, call it God, call it karma-but Boone Daniels, designed by DNA for just this situation, was also there checking out the big waves, using the long view from La Jolla to scope the best break. He heard a scream, saw the nanny pointing, and spotted Keiki Eddie's head bobbing in the surf. Boone jumped into the next wave, grabbed Keiki Eddie, and kept them both from being smashed into the rocks.

  It made the Union-Tribune.

  LOCAL SURFER RESCUES CHILD.

  Next day, Boone was hanging at home, chilling out from the big wave session he'd done after hauling the kid out of the water, when the doorbell rang. Boone opened the door to see this diminutive guy with red hair, tattoos on every part of his exposed skin except his face.

  “Anything you want,” the guy said. “Anything you want in this world.”

  “I don't want anything,” Boone said.

  Eddie tried to lay cash on him, dope on him; Eddie wanted to buy him a freaking house, a boat. Boone finally settled for dinner at the Marine Room. Eddie offered to buy him the Marine Room.

  “I don't see myself in the restaurant business,” Boone said.

  “What do you see yourself in?” Eddie asked. “You want in my business, brah, speak the word, I'll set you up.”

  “I play for the other team,” Boone said, not meaning that he was a lesbian all-female outrigger canoe paddler, but a freaking police officer.

  Not that it got in the way of their friendship. Boone wasn't on the narc squad and he didn't make judgments. He had done a little herb in his grom past, and even though he'd grown out of it, he didn't much care what other people did.

  So he and Eddie started hanging out a little bit. Eddie became sort of an adjunct member of The Dawn Patrol, although he didn't turn up too often because dawn for Eddie is about one p.m. But he did come around, got to know Dave and Tide, Hang, Sunny and even Johnny, who kept a little distance, due to the potentially adversarial nature of their professions.

  Boone, Dave, and Tide would go over to Eddie's house and watch MMA matches on his flat-screen plasma. Eddie's really big into the mixed martial arts, which sprang up in Hawaii anyway, and sponsors his team of fighters, named, unsurprisingly enough, Team Eddie. So they'd hang and watch the fights, or go in Eddie's entourage to the live shows in Anaheim, and Eddie even got Boone to voyage as far away from the ocean as Las Vegas to catch some fights with him and Dave.

  And most of The Dawn Patrol was present at Eddie's notorious housewarming party in La Jolla.

  Eddie's sprawling modernist mansion occupies an acre on a bluff overlooking the ocean at Bird Rock. The neighbors were, like, appalled, what with the moke guys coming and going, and the parties, and the pounding music, the sounds from Eddie's skateboard tube (Eddie has been known to board off the roof of his house into the barrel), his skeet-shooting range, and his racing up and down the street on his mountain bike while screened by a squadron of heavily armed bodyguards. So the pink polo shirt, yellow golf trouser set that live around Eddie was seriously geeked by him, but what were they going to do about it?

  Nothing, that's what.

  Nada.

  They weren't going over there to complain about the noise; they weren't going to call the police; they weren't going to go to the zoning board with questions about whether a skeet-shooting range or private skateboard park were even allowed in their heretofore quiet neighborhood.

  They weren't going to do any of these things, because the neighbors were scared shitless of Red Eddie.

  Eddie felt bad about this and tried to alleviate their anxieties by inviting the whole neighborhood over for a luau one Sunday afternoon.

  Of course, it turned into a shipwreck.

  And one of the first people Eddie invited aboard
the Titanic was Boone.

  “You gotta come,” Eddie said into the phone after he'd explained the purpose behind the invitation. “Moral support. Bring your whole hui, the ohana. ”

  By which he meant The Dawn Patrol.

  Boone was reluctant, to say the least. It doesn't take a weather vane to know which way the wind blows, and it didn't take a Savonarola to predict how this little Sunday afternoon gathering was going to turn out. But misery does love company, so Boone brought the subject up at the very next meeting of The Dawn Patrol and was surprised when most of them actually expressed enthusiasm about going.

  “You're kidding, right?” Boone asked.

  “I wouldn't miss this circus for the world,” Johnny Banzai said.

  Yeah, well, circus was about right.

  The hula dancers were fine, the ukulele, slack-key guitar, and surf-reggae combo was interesting, if somewhat esoteric, and the sumo wrestlers were, well, sumo wrestlers. High Tide, a late entry, nevertheless took the bronze, while Cheerful wondered aloud just what the hell fat men in diapers were doing bumping bellies in a circle of sand.

  So far so good, Boone thought. It could be a lot worse.

  But maybe it was when Eddie-blissed-out on a buffet of ecstasy, Maui Wowie, Vicodin, rum colas, and the sheer joy of neighborlinessdemonstrated his walking-over-hot-coals meditation technique and insisted that some of his guests share in the transcendental experience that things got seriously weird.

  After the EMTs left, Eddie persuaded the surviving guests to lie down side by side between two ramps and then knieveled them on his mountain bike, after which he released his psychotic rottweiler, Dahmer, from its cage and went mano-a-pawo with it, the two of them rolling around on the patio-blood, saliva, fur, and flesh flying until Eddie finally pinned the dog in a rear-naked chokehold and made it bark uncle.

  As the guests offered some weak, somewhat stunned applause, Eddie- sweating, bleeding, huffing, but flushed with victory-muttered to Boone, “Jesus, these haoles are hard to entertain. I'm busting a hump, bruddah. ”

  “I dunno,” Boone said, “I guess some people just don't have an appreciation for the finer points of human-canine combat.”

  Eddie shrugged, like, Go figure. He leaned over and scratched Dahmer's chest. The dog, panting, bleeding, huffing, and embarrassed by defeat, nevertheless looked up at Eddie with unabashed adoration.

  “So what should I do now?” Eddie asked Boone.

  “Maybe just chill,” Sunny suggested. “Dial it down a little, let people enjoy their food. The food is great, Eddie.”

  Sunny looks great, Boone thought, with her long flower-print sarong, a flower in her hair, and a dot of barbecue sauce on her upper left lip.

  “I had it flown in,” Eddie said.

  Yes, he had, Boone thought. Mounds of poi, huge platters of fresh ono and opah, pulled pork, chili rice, grilled Spam, and several pigs, the baking pits for which had been dug out of Eddie's back lawn with backhoes.

  “Maybe it's time for the tattoo artist,” Eddie said.

  “Maybe not so much,” Sunny said.

  “Fire-eater?” Eddie asked.

  “There you go,” Boone said. He looked at Sunny raising her eyebrow. “What? Everyone likes a fire-eater.”

  Well, maybe not everybody. Maybe not a La Jolla crowd whose usual entertainment tended more toward chamber orchestras playing in museum foyers, cocktail-bar pianists warbling Cole Porter tunes, or investment-fund managers pointing toward every upward-climbing diagonal line.

  The La Jollans stared at the performer-who was clad only in ankle-to-neck tattoos and something resembling a loincloth as he shoved rods of fire down his throat with a Lovelacian dexterity that would have sent a porno superstar into a paroxysm of envy-and prayed to a host of Episcopal saints that Eddie was not going to ask for any more volunteers from the audience. They surreptitiously eyed the front gate, with its promise of relative safety and sanity, but none of them wanted to earn Eddie's attention by being the first to leave.

  Boone found Eddie a little later out by the saltwater wading pool (“‘Bad for the glass. Bad for the glass, ’” Johnny B. delighted in repeating) in a conversation with Dave.

  “Eddie and I were just talking about The Searchers, '” Dave said. “He has it below High Noon but above Fort Apache?”

  “Above them both, but nowhere near Butch Cassidy, ” Boone said.

  “Ah, Butch Cassidy, ” Dave said. “Good flick.”

  Dave had dressed for the party in an expensive-looking silk Hawaiian-print shirt in reds and yellows, featuring parrots and ukuleles, and a pair of white slacks over his best dress sandals. His blond hair was neatly brushed back and he was wearing his “social,” as opposed to his “business,” shades, a pair of wraparound Nixons.

  “Shane,”said Eddie.

  “Another one,” Dave said.

  The party was definitely winding down, as was Eddie, whose constant toking had finally soothed his manic drive toward being the perfect host.

  The guests-who were much more afraid of Eddie than when they'd arrived-departed in possession of stolen property, their white-knuckled hands clutching gift bags that contained, among other things, boxed sets of Izzy Kamakawiwo'ole CDs, iPods, Rolex watches, little balls of hashish wrapped in festively colored foil, gift certificates for a hot-rock massage at a local spa, Godiva chocolates, ribbed condoms, a selection of Paul Mitchell hair-care products, and ceramic bobblehead dolls of hula dancers withAHOLA (mis)printed on their stomachs.

  Dave left in possession of a gift bag and two of the other guests.

  Eddie thought the party a great success, and was surprised, disappointed, and even a little hurt when a forest of for sale signs went up on his block and none of the guests ever came back, not even for a cup of coffee or a breakfast blunt. In fact, the neighbors would actually cross the street while walking their dogs, for fear of bumping into Eddie and being invited inside.

  Not that living in Eddie's proximity was all negative-it wasn't. The residents had Neighborhood Watch, but they didn't need Neighborhood Watch, not with the twenty or so hui guys armed like Afghan warlords constantly peering from the walls of Eddie's estate. No B and E guy in his remotely right mind would take a chance on robbing any of the houses, lest he fuck up and break into Red Eddie's. You may, may, may break in, but you ain't ever breaking out, and the only fate worse than being an invited guest is being an uninvited one, what with Eddie already having trouble finding playmates for Dahmer.

  Now Eddie does a couple of 360 wheelies on his bike and throws the bike sideways, squeaking the front tire an inch from Boone's feet.

  23

  “Boone Dawg!”

  Red Eddie's retro-Afro orange hair is jammed under a brown Volcom beanie; he has a sleeveless Rusty shirt over a pair of cargo pants that are at least three sizes too big for him. No socks, Cobian sandals, Arnette shades that have to go two bills.

  And he reeks of the chronic.

  “Eddie,” Boone says.

  “S'up?”

  “Not much.”

  “That's not what I hear,” Eddie says.

  “Okay, what do you hear?”

  “I hear,” Eddie says, flashing Boone forty g of cosmetic dentistry, “that you're dogging some stripper who thinks she saw something she didn't see.”

  “That didn't take long.”

  “Time is mo-naaay.”

  Well, Boone thinks, time is money if you actually make money. If you don't, time is just time.

  “So, bruddah, ” Red Eddie says, “can you back out dis wave?”

  Which rings some alarm bells in Boone's head. Like, why does Eddie care? Eddie goes to Dan's clubs from time to time, but they're not, like, boys. That Boone knows of anyway. So he asks, “What's it to you, Eddie?”

  “I come to a bruddah with an ask,” Red Eddie says. “I have to have a reason?”

  “It would help.”

  “Where's your aloha? Where's da love?” Red Eddie asks with a tone of hurt disappointment. “Y
ou can be very haole sometimes, Boone.”

  “I am a haole, ” Boone says.

  “Okay,” Red Eddie says. “Talking story now, Dan Silver is a degenerate gambler, bruddah Boone, bad at picking basketball games. He got in deep water, I pulled him out; now he can't pay me. He owes the big dog a pile of bones he don't have, which he ain't going to have if he doesn't win his lawsuit against the insurance company. We on the same wave, coz?”

  “It's beach break.” Straight, simple, easy to read.

  “So,” Red Eddie says, “you would be showing me your aloha if you would sit out on the shoulder for a while. Now I'm hip that you need to rake lettuce to live, Boone brah, so whatever the haoles are paying you to do, I'll double you to don't. You know me, coz-I never come with my hand out, I don't have something in the other.”

  Yeah, but what? Eddie wonders. It brings up the age-old Christmas shopping conundrum: What do you give to the man who has everything? More precisely, what do you give to the man who wants nothing? That's the problem with trying to bribe the Boone Dawg: He's unique in the fact that his needs are simple, basic, and already met. The man needs cash, but it doesn't mean enough to him to be a swaying factor. So what's the tipping point? What can you offer B-Dog that would move him off his perfectly balanced ball?

  Boone looks down at the weathered wood of the boardwalk, then back to Red Eddie. “I wish you'd come to me a couple of hours ago,” he says. “Then I could have said yes.”

  “What happened then and now?”

  “A woman was murdered,” Boone says. “That puts it over the line.”

  Red Eddie doesn't look happy.

  “So much as I hate to say no to you,” Boone says. “I have to ride this one through, bro.”

  Red Eddie looks out to the ocean.

  “Big swell coming,” he says. “There's gonna be some real thunder crushers out there. Wave like that can suck you in and take you over the falls. Man's not careful, Boone Dawg, he could get crushed.”

  “Yeah,” Boone says, “I know a little about big waves sucking people in, Eddie.”