by Don Winslow
You’ve got Moondoggies, the PB Bar & Grill, the Tavern, the Typhoon Saloon, and of course, The Sundowner. On weekend nights—or any nights in the summer, spring, or fall—Garnet is rocking with a young crowd, many of them locals, a lot of them tourists who’ve heard about the party all the way from Germany, Italy, England, Ireland, Japan, and Australia. You’ve got a drunk and horny United Nations General Assembly down there, and the bartenders on Garnet have probably done more for world peace than any ambassador ever double-parked outside Tiffany’s.
Yeah, except that something different has been creeping up the past few years as gangs from other parts of the city have been drawn to the PB nightlife, and fights have broken out in the clubs and on the street.
It’s a shame, Boone thinks as he drives past the strip of nightclubs and bars, that the laid-back surfer atmosphere is giving way to alcohol- and gang-fueled rage, scuffles in bars that turn into fights in the streets outside. It’s weird—where you used to see signs that read NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE and might just as well have added AND NO ENFORCEMENT, now you see signs in the club doorways banning gang colors, hats, hooded sweatshirts, and any gang-related gear.
PB is getting a seedy, almost dangerous reputation, and the family tourist trade is starting to move to Mission Beach or up to Del Mar, leaving PB to the young and single, to the booze hounds and the gang bangers, and it’s all too bad.
Boone has never much liked change anyway, certainly not this change. But PB has changed, even from the time Boone was growing up in it. He saw it explode in the Reagan eighties. A hundred years after its first real estate boom, Pacific Beach hit another one. But this time it wasn’t lots of land for little one-story cottages; this time it was condo complexes and big hotels that bulldozed the little cottages into memories and robbed the few survivors of their sunlight and ocean views. And with the condos, the chain stores moved in, so a lot of Pacific Beach looks like a lot of everywhere else, and the small businesses that gave the place its charm—like The Sundowner and Koana’s Coffee—are now exceptions.
And prices continued to rise, to the point where the average working person, the man or woman who built the town, can’t even think about buying a place anywhere near the beach and will soon be priced out of the market entirely—threatening to turn the beachfront area into that weird dichotomy of a rich person’s ghetto, where the rich lock themselves inside at night when the streets are taken over by drunk tourists and predatory gangs.
Now Boone drives east on Garnet, past all the clubs and bars and into the area of coffee shops, ethnic restaurants, tattoo parlors, palm-reading joints, used-clothing stores, and fast-food restaurants, then into the mostly residential neighborhood of the flats. He crosses the 5, where Garnet becomes Balboa Avenue, and pulls into the parking lot of Triple A Taxi.
Just around the corner from the old Consolidated Aircraft factory, where Reuben Fleet won the war and Pacific Beach got lost.
18
The taxi office is a small, formerly white clapboard building in need of a paint job. A metal security screen is open, revealing the company logo stenciled in fading red on the front window. Off to the left is a garage, where a taxi is up on a rack. Another half a dozen cabs are parked haphazardly around the parking lot.
“Wait in the van, okay?” Boone says as he turns off the engine.
“And flirt with hepatitis C for what reason?” Petra asks.
“Just stay in the van,” Boone says, “and try to look aggro.”
“ ‘Aggro’?”
“Aggravated,” Boone translates. “Angry, annoyed, pissed off.”
“That shouldn’t be difficult,” she says.
“I didn’t think so.” He takes his watch off and hands it to her. “Take this. Keep it in your lap.”
“You want me to time you?”
“Just do it. Please?”
She smiles. “Cheerful said you’d have a sundial.”
“Yeah, he’s a hoot.”
Boone walks across the parking lot into the dispatch office. A young Ethiopian guy has the chair tipped back and his feet on the desk. Almost all the cab companies in San Diego are run by East African immigrants. Triple A Taxi is a strictly Ethiopian operation, Boone knows, while United Taxi is Eritrean. Sometimes they get into border skirmishes in the taxi line at the airport, but usually they get along okay.
“Can I help you?” the dispatcher asks as Boone walks in. He’s a kid, barely out of his teens. Skinny, dressed in a ratty brown sweater over new 501 jeans that look freshly pressed. He doesn’t take his Air Jordans off the desk. Boone isn’t dressed so you’d have to take your feet off the desk for him.
“Dude,” Boone drawls, so it sounds more like “Duuuuuuude.” “I’m in trouble.”
“Breakdown?”
“Breakup,” Boone replies. “See the chick in the van?”
The dispatcher swings his feet off the desk, brings the chair down on its wheels, adjusts his thick glasses on his nose, and looks out the window into the parking lot. He sees Petra sitting in the van’s passenger seat.
“She’s pissed off,” the dispatcher says.
“Way.”
“How come?”
Boone holds his left wrist out, showing white skin in the exact shape of a watch and band.
“Your watch is missing,” the dispatcher says.
Boone nods in Petra’s direction. “She gave it to me for my birthday.”
“What happened to it?”
Boone sighs. “You keep a secret?”
“Yes.”
I hope not, Boone thinks, then says, “My boys and me partied last night? Some girls dropped in and I got a little friendly with one, maybe a little too friendly, you know what I’m saying, and I wake up and she’s gone. Dude, with the watch.”
“You’re fucked.”
“Totally,” Boone says. “So I told my girlfriend that it was my roommate Dave who was with the stripper but that he was in my room because Johnny was in his and I passed out by the pool, you know, but I’d left the watch in my room and the dancer, this Tammy chick, just, like, took it, you know, because she thought it was Dave’s and she’s pissed he called her a cab. So I was wondering maybe you could tell me where she went?”
“I’m not supposed to do that,” the dispatcher says. “Unless you’re the police.”
“Bro,” Boone says, pointing out the window, “I ain’t nailing that again until I get that watch back. I mean, check her out.”
The dispatcher does. “She’s hot.”
“She’s filthy.”
“You shouldn’t have gone with that other girl,” the dispatcher says, looking indignantly outraged for the pretty girl in the van.
“I was hammered,” Boone says. “But you are right, brother. So you think you can toss a drowning man a rope here? See if you sent a cab to 533 Del Vista Mar, chick named Tammy? Where you took her? I’ll do a solid for you sometime.”
“Like what?”
Nice to see that the Ethiopians have adapted to the American way of life, Boone thinks. MTV, fast food, capitalism. Cash on the barrelhead. He takes his wallet out of his pants and holds out a twenty. “It’s all I have, bro.”
Which is pretty much the truth.
The dispatcher takes the twenty, goes into his log, and comes back with “You say her name was Tammy?”
“Yeah, Gilooley … Gilbert …”
“Roddick?”
“That’s it,” Boone says.
“One of our drivers took her to the Crest Motel.”
Well, I’ll be damned, Boone thinks. He says, “Right here in PB.”
“Five o’clock this morning.”
A stripper on the move at five a.m.? Boone thinks. Strippers aren’t up at five, unless they’re still up at five. He says, “Hey, thanks, brah.”
“Your girlfriend …”
“Yeah?”
“She’s beautiful.”
Boone looks out the window to where the dispatcher is staring. Petra’s sitting erect in t
he seat, looking into the mirror as she carefully applies fresh lipstick.
Yeah, Boone thinks, she is.
He walks back to the van and gets in.
“Six minutes and thirty-eight seconds,” she says, consulting the watch.
“What?”
“You wanted me to time you,” she says. “It took rather longer than I would have expected from a professional of your reputation.”
“Tammy went to the Crest Motel,” Boone says, “right here in Pacific Beach. You owe me twenty bucks.”
“I’ll need a receipt.”
“You want a bribe receipt?”
She considers this. “Just get me any kind of receipt, Boone.”
“Cool.” In fact, it’s the first cool thing he’s heard her say. “Let’s go pick up your witness.”
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’m the 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 th
at 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 his 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’re not,” Boone says. “I am.”
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.
