by Don Winslow
He walks out of the bedroom and heads out, stopping to take the bottle of nail polish and put it in his pocket. He also shuts the slider door.
Even in San Diego, you never know when it might rain.
32
“Well?” Petra asks when he gets back to the van.
“You're sort of a woman,” Boone says. “Do you remember what kind of scent Tammy wears?”
“CK,” Petra replies, ignoring the insult. “Why?”
He pulls out the bottle of nail polish and shows it to her.
“That's what she wore to our meeting.”
“She was just there,” Boone says, slamming his hand into the wheel. “She was just there. ”
Petra is a bit surprised, and pleased, to see him display a little frustration. My God, she thinks, could it be a sign of some drive in the man? She's also amused, and a little intrigued, that he has a knowledge of women's perfumes.
“They might have her,” Boone says. He explains what he saw in Angela's apartment.
“What do we do?” she asks.
“We cruise the neighborhood,” he says, “in case she's still around, not knowing what to do or where to go next. If we don't see her, you take a taxi back to your office while I canvass the neighborhood.”
He would have just said “while I hang out and talk to people,” but he thought she'd like “canvass the neighborhood” better. Besides, it might distract her from the “back to your office” part.
It doesn't.
“Why is my absence required?” she asks.
“Because no one will talk to you,” Boone says. “And they won't talk to me if I'm with you.”
“I'm some sort of social leper?”
“Yes.”
Sort of a woman, she thinks. Social leper. Then she says, “Men will talk to me.”
Pleased by his lack of response, she adds, “Hang Twelve talked to me. Cheerful talked to me. They gave you up to me in a heartbeat.”
They did, Boone thinks. In less than a heartbeat.
“Okay,” he says. “You can hang.”
Lovely, she thinks. I can hang.
33
Yeah, she hangs, but that doesn't produce Tammy Roddick.
If Tammy is walking the streets of Ocean Beach, she's disguised as a wino, an old hippie, a middle-aged hippie, a young retro hippie, a white rasta dude with blond dreads, an emaciated vegan, a retired guy, or one of the dozen or so surfers waiting for the big swell to go off at Rockslide.
Petra talks to all of them.
Having established the point that she can talk to men, she feels obligated to do just that, and she gets a lot of useful information.
The wino (for two dollars) tells her that she has a lovely smile; the old hippie informs her that rain is nature's way of moistening the earth; the middle-aged hippie hasn't seen Tammy but knows a wonderful place for green tea; the young retro hippie hasn't seen Tammy, either, but offers to give Petra a Reiki massage to ease her obvious tension (and his). The white rasta guy knows exactly where Tammy is and will take Petra there for the price of a cigar, except that he describes Tammy as a five-foot-four blonde, while the vegan informs her that his clean diet makes his natural essences taste sweet, and the retired guy hasn't seen Tammy but offers to spend the rest of his life helping Petra look for her.
The surfers tell her to come back after the big swell.
“Guys will definitely talk to you,” Boone says when Petra tells him about her conversations. “No question.”
“And I suppose you, on the other hand, have produced a definite lead.”
Nope.
Nobody's seen anybody who looks like Tammy. Nobody on the street saw her leaving Angela's building. Nobody saw nothing.
“So now what do we do?” Petra asks.
“We go to her place of employment,” Boone says.
“I hardly think she's at work,” Petra snaps.
“I hardly think so, either,” Boone says. “But someone there might know something?”
“Oh,” Petra says. She looks at her watch. “But it's only two in the afternoon. Don't we want to wait until evening?”
“Strip clubs are open twenty-four/seven.”
“They are?” Petra says. Then: “Of course, I suppose you'd know.”
“Believe it or not,” Boone says as he gets back into the Boonemobile, “I really don't spend that much time in strip clubs. As a matter of fact, I rarely go to them at all.”
“Sure you don't.”
Boone shrugs. “Believe what you want.”
But it's the truth, he thinks. Strip clubs are interesting for about five minutes. After that, they're about as erotic as wallpaper. Besides which, the music is terrible and the food is worse. You'd have to be basically mentally ill to eat in a strip club anyway, “naked asses” and “buffet line” being two phrases that should never, ever, be matched in the same sentence. Guys who are coming off a prison hunger strike won't eat at a strip club unless they're actually brain-damaged.
Speaking of which, Hang Twelve had eaten like a starved baboon when they took him to Silver Dan's for his birthday. The kid scarfed the buffet like a vacuum cleaner, from one end of the table to the other.
“It's amazing,” said High Tide, no stranger to the sin of gluttony himself, watching him. “It's almost admirable, in a disgusting kind of way.”
“I feel like I'm watching something on the Nature Channel,” Dave said as Hang stacked a handful of luncheon meats on a Kaiser roll, spread a huge glob of mayonnaise over the meat, and started to eat with one hand while dipping a spear of broccoli into a tub of onion dip with the other.
“Animal Planet?” Tide asked.
“Yeah.”
“At least he's eating his vegetables,” Johnny said. “That's good.”
“Yeah?” Dave asked. “I wonder if he saw the guy that just had his hand on his package get to the broccoli first.”
“Over the jeans or under?” Johnny asked.
“Under.”
“God.” Then Johnny said, “He's going for the shrimp, guys. Guys, he's going for the shrimp.”
“I'll just dial 9-1-1 now,” Boone said. “That extra second could save his life.”
Hang came back to the table and set the heaping plate of food down. His goatee was festooned with crumbs, mayonnaise, onion dip, and some substance that nobody even wanted to try to identify. “Shrimp, anybody?”
They all passed. Hang consumed a couple of dozen shrimp, two huge sandwiches, some unidentifiable hors d'oeuvres that nobody even bothered to make the obvious pun about, twenty miniature pigs in a blanket (ditto), a pile of cottage fries, three helpings of Silver Dan's “pasta medley,” and some strawberry Jell-O with grapes (and God knows what else) floating around in it.
Then he wiped his chin and said, “I'm going back.”
“Go for it,” Boone said. “It's your birthday.”
“His last, ” Johnny said as they watched Hang work his way down the table again like a piece of machinery on a mass-production line.
“Over/under on the number of hairs he's swallowed?” Dave asked.
“Scalp or pubic?” asked Johnny.
“Forget it,” Dave said.
Hang came back to the table with a plate of food that would have dismayed a Roman orgiast. “Good thing I went back,” he said. “They put out fresh cheese.”
Boone looked at the fresh cheese. It was sweating.
“I need a little air,” he said.
But he hung in, staring at Hang Twelve with a mixture of awe and horror. The kid never came up to breathe; he just kept robotically shoveling food into his mouth as his eyes never left the stage. Hang's wholehearted devotion to free food and naked women was almost touching in its religiosity.
“We could get him a lap dance,” Dave suggested.
“Could kill him,” Tide said.
“But quickly,” Johnny said.
But none of the girls-any one of whom would have cheerfully ground her ass on Adolf Eichmann's crotch for
twenty bucks-would go anywhere near Hang's lap.
“He's going to puke,” Tawny said.
“Puke?” Heather said. “He's going to erupt. ”
“Do you know there's a whole magazine devoted to that?” Dave said. “People who vomit to express their love? It's a whatchamacallit.
…”
“Mental illness,” Boone said.
“Fetish,” Johnny said. “And, Dave? Shut up.”
“I'm not going to puke,” Hang said through a mouthful of penne carbonara.
“What did he say?” Johnny asked.
“He said he's not going to puke,” Boone said.
“The fuck he isn't,” said a guy from the next table.
Tide instantly took up for Hang. “The fuck he is.”
“Here we go,” Boone said.
“Oh, yeah,” said Dave. “It's on.”
Yeah, it was. Ten minutes later, The Dawn Patrol (sans Sunny, who had adamantly refused to come and bought Hang an ice-cream cake instead) had five hundred and change on the table that Hang could consume another plate of food and keep it down for a period-established after a tough and bitter negotiation-of forty-five minutes. A number of side bets bypassed that issue altogether and focused on which would come up first, the shrimp, the penne, or the cheese.
“I have fifty on the cheese,” Johnny confided to Boone as Hang was devouring his third plate of buffet food.
“You have seventy-five that he's not going to throw up at all,” Boone said.
Johnny said, “I'm trying to make some of it back.”
“You think he's going to yank?”
“You don't?”
Well, yes, but you have to take up for your guy.
The next hour made its way into San Diego strip club lore as everyone in the entire club-horny guys, plain degenerates, sailors, marines, bartenders, waitresses, bouncers, and naked women-stopped what they were doing to observe a twenty-one-year-old soul surfer struggle to keep the contents of his bloated stomach right there in his stomach. Even Dan Silver took a break from counting money in his office to check out the scene.
Boone watched as Hang's face turned a little green and beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. Hang shifted in his chair; he reached down and touched his toes. He took deep breaths-at Johnny's suggestion, based on two trips to the labor room with his wife-he panted like a dog. At one point, he let out an enormous belch…
“No vomit, no vomit,” High Tide quickly said as several of the official judges looked closely at the front of Hang'sJERRY GARCIA IS GOD T-shirt.
Hang managed to, well, hang.
The crowd counted down the entire last minute. It was a triumph, a ticker-tape parade, New Year's Eve in Times Square with Dick Clark as half of the onlookers counted the numbers and the other half chanted, “Hang Twelve, Hang Twelve, Hang Twelve…”
Hang's face shone with victory.
Never before in his life had he been the object of this much attention; he had never won anything, certainly never won a lot of money for himself or other people. He had never been the hero, and now he was. He was glowing, accepting the pats on the back, the congratulations, and the shouts of “Speech, speech, speech.”
Hang smiled modestly, opened his mouth to speak, and spewed trajectory vomit all over the innocent bystanders.
Johnny won his initial bet, plus the fifty on the cheese.
It was the only even semi — fun time that Boone had ever spent in a strip club.
But if Tammy were a nurse, he thinks, we'd be going to the hospital; if she were a secretary, we'd be going to an office building. But she's a stripper, so…
“You don't have to come,” he tells Petra, praying she'll take him up on the bailout offer.
“No, I want to.”
“Really, it's pretty sleazy,” Boone says, “especially in the daytime.”
If a strip club at night is tedious, in the daytime it's the birth of the blues-third-string strippers grinding halfhearted “dances” to a mostly empty room scarcely populated with lonely alcoholics coming off graveyard shifts, or horny losers figuring (wrongly) they have a shot with the C-team girls.
It's horrible, and, annoyed as he is with Petra's type A bullshit, he still wants to spare her the full hideousness.
She's having none of it.
“I'm going with you,” she insists.
“There won't be any male strippers,” he says.
“I know,” she says. “I still want to go.”
“Oh.”
“What do you mean, ‘Oh’?” she asks.
“Look,” Boone says, “there's nothing wrong with it. Personally, I think that-”
Petra's eyes widen.
Totally striking. Amazing.
“Oh, ‘Oh,’” she says. “I understand. Just because I'm immune to your Neanderthal anticharm, you jump to the conclusion that I therefore just have to be-”
“You're the one who wants to go to a-”
“On business!”
“I don't know why you're getting so worked up,” Boone says. “I thought you were this politically correct-”
“I am.”
“Look, around here it's all good,” Boone says. “I'll bet half the women I know… well, not half, okay, a tenth anyway… of the women I know play for the other-”
“I do not play for…” Petra says. “It's none of your business whom I play for.”
“For whom I play,” Boone says, correcting her. “Dangling… uh
…”
“Preposition,” she says.
Otherwise, she doesn't talk to him the whole way to the strip club.
Which makes him wish he'd thought up the lesbian thing a lot sooner.
34
Petra's quiet for the whole drive.
Which is a relatively long one, because the club, TNG, is all the way up in Mira Mesa, in North County.
Boone takes the 8 east, then turns north on the 163, through the broad flatland of strip malls, fast-food joints, and wholesale outlets. He turns onto Aero Drive, just south of the Marine Corps air-training base, and pulls into the parking lot of TNG.
TNG is the name of the club, and the stripper cognoscenti know that the initials stand for “Totally nude girls”-as opposed, Boone thinks as he parks the van, to partially nude girls, or sort-of nude girls. No, the owners of TNG wanted to make sure that prospective customers knew that the girls were completely, absolutely, totally nude.
“It's not too late for you to wait in the van,” he tells Petra.
“And potentially miss meeting my Alice B. Toklas?” she asks as she gets out. “No way.”
“Is she a friend of Tammy's or something?” Boone asks.
“Never mind.”
They go in.
All strip clubs are the same.
You can dress them up all you want, create any dumb gimmick you can think of, go for the down-low sleazy or the “gentlemen's club” faux sophistication, but at the end of the day it all amounts to a girl on a stage with a pole.
Or, in this case, one totally nude girl on a pole and another totally nude girl unenthusiastically writhing on the stage without the benefit of a pole.
TNG has no pretense at sophistication. TNG is a bare-bones, stripped-down (as it were) stroke joint (same) where guys come to look at naked women, maybe get a lap dance, or, if they're feeling fat, go with a dancer behind a beaded curtain into the VIP Room to get a “deluxe lap dance.”
The club is pretty empty at this time of the day. This is a working guy's hang, and most of the working guys are working. Two marines, judging by their haircuts, sit on stools at the stage-side bar. A depressed-looking salesman type, playing hooky from his calls, sits alone, one hand on a dollar bill, the other on his lap. Other than that, it's just the bartender, the bouncer, and a totally nude waitress serving her apprenticeship on the floor before she can make the giant leap to the stage.
The bouncer makes Boone right away.
Boone sees the flicker of recognition, and then he sees
the guy move away a little bit and make a cell phone call. So we're working on a clock, Boone thinks as he steers Petra away from the stage-side stool and into a booth along the back wall.
The waitress comes over and stands expectantly.
“What would you like?” Boone asks Petra.
“A wet wipe?” she asks.
“I meant like a drink.”
“Yes, hemlock with an arsenic twist, please.”
“The lady will have a ginger ale,” Boone says, “and I'll have a Coke.”
The waitress nods and walks away.
Petra looks at the stage.
“I thought you said this was a strip club,” she says.
“I did. It is.”
“But don't you have to have some clothing on,” she asks, “in order to strip it off?”
“I guess so.”
“But they're already nude.”
“Totally.”
“So they just stand there,” Petra says, “and sort of dance, and that's all they do?”
No, that's not all they do, Boone thinks. But he really doesn't want to get into that, and he's relieved when the waitress comes with their drinks. Petra reaches into her bag, comes out with a linen handkerchief, with which she carefully wipes the rim of her glass, then uses the handkerchief to hold the glass.
Well, we all have our own brand of paranoia, Boone thinks. Hers is catching a venereal disease from a glass; mine is getting knocked into tomorrow by a date-rape drug that the bouncer told the bartender to slip into my drink. Except the purpose wouldn't be to take sexual advantage of me; it would be to drag me out in the alley and beat me half to death.
Because clearly the bouncer got a “Be on the lookout for Boone Daniels” notice and he's called Dan Silver to get his instructions.
That's the bad news.
The good news is, if they're protecting something here, it means that there's something to protect.
He thinks about sharing that gem with Petra, then thinks better of it.
Anyway, she's staring at the girls on the stage.
“Either of them do anything for you?” Boone asks.
