The Dawn Patrol

by Don Winslow

  “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’s JERRY 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.

  “It’s fascinating,” Petra says. “Sort of the car crash phenomenon—you don’t want to look, but you can’t look away.”

  Yeah, you can, Boone thinks, feeling his thirty-second curiosity clock running down.

  The girl twisted on the pole is your stereotypical blond knockout with big hair and bigger boobs. She’s too attractive for the day shift and she knows it. But she must have done something to piss the manager off—shorted him on his kickback, refused to give him a blow job, or maybe she was just getting uppity and talking about moving to a better club downtown—and now she’s being punished by having to slog it out for the low-money losers in the afternoons. Now she’s working the salesman hard, hoping that he’s drunk enough to spring a hundred for a trip to the VIP Room so she can start earning her way back to nights.

  The other girl is strictly day shift. She’s petite, her face really isn’t pretty, and she’s small-chested. Her best feature is her long brown hair, and she’s working it hard to make up for her other deficiencies. She has that look of a girl who’s been told by everyone everywhere that she just isn’t good enough, so she works her ass off making up for it. She works harder at being a better lay; she gets up early to make her latest boyfriend his breakfast; she bails him out of jail after he’s beaten her up. She’s the kind of girl who’ll end up doing bottom-of-the-barrel porn videos because some producer tells her she’s pretty.

  She’s looking down at the stage, in her own world, grinding her hips to the music—but in reality, she’s moving to a private sound track of her own. She glances up and sees Boone, then looks right back down again as she turns, flinging her long hair across her back like a flogger, then looks over her shoulder at him again.

  Sure enough, when the song ends and a new one begins, she dances off the stage, down onto the floor, and over to his booth.

  “I’m Amber,” she says. “Would you like a lap dance?”

  “Would you like a lap dance?” Boone asks Petra, aware that she probably thinks a lap dance is something they do in Lapland.

  Amber turns her attention to Petra. “I find girls so sensual,” she says. It’s a rehearsed line and comes off that way.

  “No, thank you,” Petra says, and Boone can tell she’s actually trying not to hurt the girl’s feelings.

  Which is nice, Boone thinks.

  “How about you?” Amber asks Boone. “Would you like a lap dance? Or, for a hundred, we can go into the VIP Room. Wouldn’t you like to have some private time with me?”

  “Yeah, I would,” Boone says.

  “You what?” says Petra.

  “I’ll make you happy,” Amber says.

  “Give me two hundred,” Boone says to Petra.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Give me two hundred dollars,” Boone repeats. “I want to go into the VIP Room.”

  “Twice?”

  “Just shut up and give me the money.”

  Amber doesn’t react to any of this. She totally gets digging into her purse and giving her boyfriend money.

  “It’s going on your expense account,” Petra says, slapping two bills into Boone’s outstretched palm. “You can explain to Alan Burke why you—”

  “No worries.”

  He takes the two hundred and follows Amber through the beaded curtain into the VIP Room.

  35

  The VIP Room has a line of easy chairs against one wall, kind of like an old shoe-shine shop.

  Amber sits Boone down in one of them as the waitress comes in with a glass of cheap champagne. She hands it to Amber, who, in turn, hands it to Boone as she says, “You can feel my tits, but no kissing, and no touching below the belt.”

  The belt? Boone wonders.

  She starts to climb on his lap.

  “You feel good,” she says.

  Boone lifts her up by the arms and puts her back on the floor.

  “Forget about the dance,” he says. “I want to ask you some questions.”

  She rolls her eyes. “No, I wasn’t molested as a child. No, I’m not a victim of incest. No, I’m not putting myself through college. No, I don’t—”

  “Do you know Tammy Roddick?”

  Amber says, “I’m not supposed to talk about her.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I don’t want to get in trouble,” she says. “Look, I need this job. I have a kid at home.…”

  Of course you do, Boone thinks. Of fucking course.

  “A hundred for the dance,” Boone says. “Another hundred for anything you can tell me.”

  “I can’t tell you anything.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Both.” She glances through the curtain to see if the bouncer is there.

  He isn’t.

  “Did you know Angela Hart?”

  “What do you mean, ‘did’?”

  “She’s dead,” Boone says. “They threw her off a motel balcony. It’ll be on the news tonight.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “They’ll do the same to Tammy,” Boone says. “I’m trying to find her before they do. If you know anything that can help me, you’ll be helping her.”

  He keeps an eye on the curtain and an eye on her while she tries to make up her mind. Then she says, “I don’t want the money. Angela used to watch my kid sometimes when I couldn’t find a sitter.”

  “What’s your kid look like?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “It might help.”

  “He’s—”

  “Never mind.”

  “All I know about Tammy,” she says, “is that she has a boyfriend.”

  “Who?”

  “His name is Mick,” Amber says. “He hangs out here a lot.”

  “Does Mick have a last name?”

  “Penner?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” Amber says.

  Boone asks, “Has he been in to
day?”

  “I haven’t seen him in a while,” Amber says; then she looks over Boone’s shoulder.

  Boone turns and recognizes Tweety.

  He’s a PB local, hanging around the gym, the GNC store, the bars. Tweety is a juiced-up roid freak with a head even bigger than his huge body. Big flat face with small blue eyes. And he’s gigantic—six-six and large-framed already, and whatever shit he’s shooting into himself, it’s working. He wears a Gold’s Gym muscle shirt on the “if you got it, flaunt it” fashion theory. Gray sweatpants over Doc Martens. Tweety sports short-cropped yellow hair: not blond—bright yellow.

  Hence the “Tweety” tag.

  “Out,” he says to Boone.

  “I didn’t kiss her or touch her below the figurative belt,” Boone says.

  “Out. Now.”

  Boone hands Amber a hundred-dollar bill. “Thanks for nothing, bitch. Way to help your friend.”

  “Fuck you, asshole.”

  Tweety grabs Boone by the elbow. “You don’t understand ‘out’?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Boone says. “For example, are you out of the closet yet? Is your skull going to pop out of your skin? Has your dick shrunk out of sight yet? Oh, here’s another one: Have you thrown a girl out of a building lately?”

  Tweety would be the perfect candidate for the job. He could easily have “pressed” Angela and heaved her off the balcony.

  Tweety’s face turns red.

  Guilt, roid rage, or both? Boone wonders.

  “Well, have you,” Boone asks, adding, “Tweety?”

  Tweety pops a beautiful right cross, plenty of leverage in the hips, weight balanced and coming forward.

  Boone isn’t there to take it.

  He steps to the left, feels the air whoosh by his nose as the heavy fist comes through, then smashes the blade of his foot down into the side of Tweety’s kneecap, which dislocates with a sickening pop. Tweety crashes to the floor, rolls into a fetal position, grabs his knee, and howls in pain.

  Boone’s not exactly eaten up with sympathy. He reaches down, gets his middle and index fingers into Tweety’s nostrils, and pulls, because:

  There are no weights you can pump to strengthen your nose.

  Steroids might make your head big, but they don’t make your nostrils any stronger.