The Dawn Patrol

by Don Winslow

  His connections to the Japanese community, though, are tenuous. He retains enough Japanese to be an annoyance in a sushi bar, he goes to the Buddhist temple with less and less frequency, and he’s even missed one or two of the monthly visits to his grandfather at the old farm. It’s just the way things are in this modern American, Southern California life. The Kodanis are just busy people—Beth puts in brutal hours at the hospital and Johnny works his files like a machine with no off switch. Then there’s all the stuff with the kids—soccer games, Little League, karate, ballet, tutoring sessions—it’s small wonder there’s little room in the schedule for the old traditions.

  Now the good detective opens the cheap, lightweight sliding door, which reveals a narrow closet. No clothes on the wire hangers, no shoes on the floor. A woman’s suitcase—more of an overnight bag—is set on a freestanding rack, and now Johnny goes through it. A pair of jeans, a folded blouse, some underwear, the usual assortment of cosmetics.

  Either Tammy Roddick wasn’t planning on being gone long or she didn’t have time to pack. But why would a woman contemplating suicide pack an overnight bag?

  Johnny goes into the bathroom.

  It hits him right away.

  Two toothbrushes on the sink.

  One of them is pink, and small.

  A child’s.

  25

  The girl walks on the trodden dirt path on the side of the road.

  Her skin is a rich brown, her hair black as freshly hewn coal. She trips over a brown beer bottle that was thrown out the window of a car the night before, but she keeps walking, and as she does, she fingers a small silver cross held by a thin chain around her neck. It gives her courage; it’s her one tangible symbol of love in an unloving world.

  In shock, not really sure where she’s going, she keeps the ocean to her left because it’s something she recognizes, and she knows that if she keeps the water to her left, she will eventually reach the strawberry fields. The fields are bad, but they are the only life she has known for the past two years, and her friends are there.

  She needs her friends because she has nobody now. And if she can find the strawberry fields, she will find her friends, maybe even see the guero doctor, who was at least nice to her. So she keeps walking north, unnoticed by the drivers who rush past in their cars—just another Mexican girl on the side of the road.

  A gust of wind blows dirt and garbage around her ankles.

  26

  Boone stops off at The Sundowner for a jolt of caffeine and a delay in trying to explain the inexplicable to Petra Hall, attorney-at-law and all-around pain in the ass.

  High Tide’s there, his bulk perched with surprising grace on a stool at the bar, his huge hands clutching a sandwich that should have its own area code. He wears the brown uniform of the San Diego Public Works Department, in which he’s a foreman. Tide is basically in charge of the storm drains in this part of the city, and with the oncoming weather, he knows he could be in for a long day.

  Boone sits down beside him as Sunny looks up from wiping some glasses, walks over to the coffeepot, pours him a cup, and slides it down the bar.

  “Thanks,” Boone says.

  “Don’t mention it.” She turns back to wiping the glasses.

  What’s she torqued about? Boone wonders. He turns to Tide. “I just had a conversation with one of the more interesting members of the greater Oceania community.”

  “How is Eddie?” Tide asks.

  “Worked up,” Boone says. “I thought you island types were supposed to be all laid-back and chill and stuff.”

  “We’ve picked up bad habits from you haole,” Tide says. “Protestant work ethic, Calvinist predetermination, all that crap. What’s got Eddie’s balls up his curly orange short hairs?”

  “Dan Silver.”

  Tide takes a bite of his sandwich. Mustard, mayonnaise, and what Boone hopes is tomato juice squirt out the sides of the bread. “Don’t make no sense. Eddie don’t go to strip clubs. When he wants all that, the strip club comes to Eddie.”

  “Says Dan owes him a big head of lettuce.”

  Tide shakes his head. “I ain’t ever heard that Eddie puts money on the street. Not to haoles anyway. Eddie will front to Pac Islanders, but that’s about it.”

  “Maybe he’s expanding his customer base,” Boone says.

  “Maybe,” Tide says, “but I doubt it. Way it works, you owe Eddie money and you don’t pay, he don’t take it up with you; he takes it up with your family back home. And it’s a disgrace, Boone, a big shame, so the family back on the island usually takes care of the debt, one way or the other.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “Welcome to my world,” Tide says. It’s hard to explain to a guy, even a friend like Boone, what it’s like straddling the Pacific. Boone’s literally lived his whole life within a few blocks of where they’re sitting right now; there’s no way he, or Dave, or even Johnny can understand that Tide, who was born and bred just up the road in Oceanside, is still answerable to a village in Samoa that he’s never seen. And the same thing applies to most of the Oceania people living in California—they have living roots back in Samoa, Hawaii, Guam, Fiji, what have you.

  So you start making some money, you send some of it “home” to help support relatives back in the ville. A cousin comes over, he stays on your couch until he makes enough scratch at the job you got him to maybe get his own place, where he’ll have another cousin crash. You do something good, a whole village five thousand miles away celebrates with pride; you do something bad, the same village feels the shame.

  All that’s a burden, but … your kids have grandmas and grandpas, aunties and uncles, who love them like their own kids. Even in O’side, the children go back and forth between houses like they were huts in the village. If your wife gets sick, aunties you never knew you had show up with pots of soup, cooked meat, fish, and rice.

  It’s aiga—family.

  And if you ever get in trouble, if someone outside the “community” takes you on, threatens your livelihood or your life, then the whole tribe shows up over your shoulder; you don’t even have to ask. Just like The Dawn Patrol—you call the wolf, you get the pack.

  Back in the day, Tide was a serious gang banger, a matai—chief—in the Samoan Lords. S’way it was, you grew up in Oceanside back then, especially in the Mesa Margarita neighborhood: You played football and you g’d up with your boys. Thank God for football, High Tide thinks now, remembering, because he loved the game and it kept him off the drugs. Tide wasn’t your drive-by, gun-toting banger hooked on ma’a. No, Tide kept his body in good shape, and when he went to war with the other gangs, he went Polynesian-style—flesh-to-flesh.

  High Tide was a legend in those O’side rumbles. He’d place his big body in front of his boys, stare down the other side, then yell “Fa’aumu!”—the ancient Samoan call to war. Then it was on, hamo, fists flying until it was the last man standing.

  That was always High Tide.

  Same thing on the football field. When High Tide came out of the womb, the doctor looked at him and said, “Defensive tackle.” Samoan men play football, period, and because O’side has more Samoans than anyplace but Samoa, its high school team is practically an NFL feeder squad.

  High Tide was where running games went to die.

  He’d just eat them up, throw off the pulling guard like a sandwich wrapper, then plow the ball carrier into the turf. Teams that played O’side would just give up on the ground game and start throwing the ball like the old Air Coryell Chargers.

  Scouts noticed.

  Tide would come home from practice to stacks of letters from colleges, but he was interested only in San Diego State. He wasn’t going to go far from home—to some cold state without an ocean to surf in. And he wasn’t going far from aiga, from family, because for a Samoan, family is everything.

  So Tide started for four years at State. When he wasn’t slaughtering I-Backs, he was out surfing with his new friends: Boone Daniels, Johnny Banzai, Dav
e the Love God, and Sunny Day. He gave up the gang banging—it was just old, tired, dead-end shit. He’d still go have a beer with the boys sometimes, but that was about it. He was too busy playing ball and riding waves, and became sort of a matai emeritus in the gang—highly respected, listened to and obeyed, but above it all.

  He went early third round in the NFL draft.

  Played one promising season, second string for the Steelers, until he got locked up with a Bengals center and the pulling guard came around and low-jacked him.

  Tide heard the knee pop.

  Sounded like a gunshot.

  He came home to O’side depressed as hell, his life over. Sat around his parents’ house on Arthur Avenue, indulging himself in beer, weed, and self-pity, until Boone swung by and basically told him to knock that shit off. Boone practically dragged him back down to the beach and pushed him out into the break.

  First ride in, he decided he was going to live.

  Used his SDSU glory days to get a gig with the city. Found himself a Samoan woman, got married, had three kids.

  Life is good.

  Now he explains to Boone some of the intricacies of Oceania business protocol.

  “That’s why Eddie only deals with the ohana, bro,” Tide says. “He knows if he goes to a haole family with a debt, they say, ‘What’s it got to do with us?’ Family’s a different concept on this side of the pond, Boone.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Boone eyes Sunny, who’s very deliberately not eyeing him back.

  “What’s her problem?” he asks Tide.

  Tide has heard all about the British betty from Dave. He slides off his stool, shoves the last bite of the sandwich into his mouth, and pats Boone on the shoulder. “I got work to do. For a smart man, Boone, you’re a fucking idiot. You need any more anthropological insights, give me a ring.”

  He pulls his brown wool beanie onto his head, slips on his gloves, and goes out the door.

  Boone looks at Sunny. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Not much,” Sunny says, not looking at him. “What’s up with you?”

  “Come on, Sunny.”

  She walks over to him. “Okay, are you sleeping with her?”

  “Who?”

  “Bye, Boone.” She turns away.

  “No, she’s a client, that’s all.”

  “All of a sudden you know who I’m talking about,” Sunny says, turning toward him again.

  “I guess it’s obvious.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “She’s a client,” Boone repeats. Then he starts getting a little pissed that he has to explain. “And, by the way, what’s it to you? It’s not like we’re …”

  “No, it’s not like we’re anything,” Sunny says.

  “You see other guys,” Boone says.

  “You bet I do,” Sunny shot back. And she has, but nobody even close to serious since she and Boone split up.

  “So?”

  “So nothing,” Sunny says. “I just think that, as friends, we should be honest with each other.”

  “I’m being honest.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.” She walks away and goes back to wiping glasses.

  Boone doesn’t finish his coffee.

  27

  Dan Silver and Red Eddie are also having an unhappy conversation.

  “What did you do, Danny?” Eddie asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “Killing a woman is ‘nothing’?”

  Well, apparently.

  Danny drops his head, which is a mistake because Eddie shoots a wicked slap across his cheek. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out? I have to hear this from Boone when I go to him with an ask for you? You let me do that, not tell me you went ahead like some kind of cowboy you dress up like?”

  “She was going to talk, Eddie.” Dan can still feel the burn on his cheek, and for a nanosecond he considers doing something about it—he’s about twice Eddie’s size and could toss him against the wall like a Ping-Pong ball—then decides against it because Eddie’s hui boys linger on the edge of the conversation like sharks.

  “That’s why you were going to take her out of town, wasn’t it?” Eddie asks. “Nobody ever said nothin’ ’bout killing nobody.”

  “Things got a little out of hand,” Dan says.

  Eddie looks at him incredulously. “They hook her to you, they hook you to me, I’m gonna cut you loose like tangled fish line, Danny boy.”

  Dan’s getting a little tired of Eddie’s superior shit. So the tattooed little freak went to Harvard, so fucking what? There’s a lot of things you can’t learn at Harvard. So he decides to educate Eddie a little. “A stripper takes a walk off a motel balcony. How long you think that’s going to occupy the cops? An hour? Hour and a half? Nobody gives a crap, Eddie.”

  “Daniels does.”

  “Is he going to back off?”

  “Probably not,” Eddie says. “Backing off ain’t Boone’s best thing.”

  Dan shrugs. “Daniels is a low-rent surf bum who couldn’t cut it with the real cops. He’s fine for a skip trace or throwing a drunk out of The Sundowner, but he’s in over his head here. I wouldn’t worry about it, I were you.”

  “Well, you ain’t me,” Eddie says. “You’re you, and you better fucking worry about it. Let me tell you something about that surf bum—”

  Dan’s cell phone rings.

  “What?”

  He listens. It’s a cop from downtown, a sergeant who drinks free at Silver Dan’s and gets a lap dance comped every once in a while. He wants to let Dan know that one of his girls has been positively ID’d, DOA from a jump at a Pacific Beach motel.

  Her name is Angela Hart.

  Dan thanks the guy and clicks off.

  “What was that?” Eddie asks.

  “Nothing.”

  But it’s a big freaking nothing. Dan’s head is whirling, his stomach doing trampoline routines.

  Tweety killed the wrong piece of ass.

  28

  Petra starts to ask something, then changes her mind.

  “What?” Cheerful asks.

  As pretty as the woman is, Cheerful’s getting tired of her sitting around the office waiting for Boone to get back. It’s a bad idea, clients involving themselves in the minute-by-minute of a case. They should pay the bill, back off, and wait for results. He mumbles something to that effect.

  “Sorry?” Petra asks.

  “If you have something on your mind,” Cheerful says, “get it off.”

  “Boone used to be a police officer?” Petra asks.

  “You already knew that,” Cheerful says. This girl does her homework, Cheerful thinks. She’d have done due diligence on Boone.

  “What happened?” Petra asks.

  “Why do you think that’s any of your business?” Cheerful asks.

  “Well … I don’t.…”

  Cheerful looks up from the adding machine. It’s the first time he’s seen this girl nonplussed. “What I mean is,” he says, “are you asking as a client, or as a friend?”

  Because there’s a difference.

  “I’m not asking as a client,” Petra says.

  “Boone pulled his own pin,” Cheerful says. “He wasn’t thrown out. It wasn’t for taking money or anything like that.”

  “I didn’t think that,” Petra says. She saw the interaction between Boone and the detective at the motel. She didn’t hear what was said, but she saw that Boone had to be restrained. It was rather intense. “Money doesn’t seem to be a priority for him.”

  “Boone’s too lazy to steal?” Cheerful says.

  “I’m not trying to pick a fight. I was just wondering.”

  “It had to do with a girl,” Cheerful snaps.

  Of course, Petra thinks. Of course it did. She looks at Cheerful as if to say, Go on, but Cheerful leaves it at that.

  She seems like a good person, but it’s ea
rly.

  Some stories have to be earned.

  29

  Rain Sweeny was six years old when she disappeared from the front yard of her house.

  Just like that.

  Gone.

  Her mother had been out there with her, heard the phone ring, and went in to answer it. She was only gone a minute, she’d say between sobs at the inevitable press conferences later. A beautiful summer day, a little girl playing out in her yard in a nice middle-class neighborhood in Mira Mesa, and then—

  Tragedy.

  It didn’t take long for the cops to get a lead on who did it. Russ Rasmussen, a two-time loser with a “short eyes” sheet, was renting a room in a house just down the street. When the detectives went to interview him, he was gone, and the neighbors said that they hadn’t seen his green ’86 Corolla parked on the street since the afternoon that Rain went missing.

  Coincidence, maybe, but no one believes in that kind of coincidence.

  An APB went out on Russ Rasmussen.

  Boone had been on the force for three years. He loved his job; he loved it. It was just perfect for him—active, physical, something new happening every night. He’d come off his shift and go straight to the beach in time for The Dawn Patrol, then get some breakfast at The Sundowner and go home to his little apartment to grab some sleep.

  Then get up and do it all over again.

  It was perfection.

  He had his job, he had Sunny, and he had the ocean.

  Never turn your back on the ocean.

  That’s what Boone’s dad always taught him: Never get relaxed and turn your back on the ocean, because the second you do, that big wave is going to come out of nowhere and smack you down.

  A week after Rain Sweeny was kidnapped, Boone was cruising one night with his partner, Steve Harrington, who had just tested out and was headed to the Detective Division. It had been a quiet night, and they were taking a spin down through the east part of the Gaslamp District, over near the warehouses that the tweekers liked to break into, when they spotted a green ’86 Corolla parked in an alley.