About The Author
Don Winslow has worked as a movie theatre manager, a production assistant, and as a private investigator. In addition to being a novelist he now works as an independent consultant in issues involving litigation arising from criminal behaviour. His novels include The Death and Life of Bobby Z, California Fire and Life, The Power of the Dog and The Winter of Frankie Machine.
Also by Don Winslow
The Winter of Frankie Machine
The Power of the Dog
California Fire and Life
The Death and Life of Bobby Z
While Drowning in the Desert
Isle of Joy
A Long Walk up the Water Slide
Way Down on the High Lonely
The Trail to Buddha’s Mirror
A Cool Breeze on the Underground
Cover
About the Author
Also by Don Winslow
Title Page
Copyright
The Dawn Patrol
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153
Chapter 154
Chapter 155
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Epub ISBN 9781446410493
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Arrow Books 2009
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Copyright © Don Winslow 2008
Don Winslow has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Lyrics from ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ by John Lennon, Paul McCartney © 1967 Sony/ATV Music Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
This book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by William Heinemann
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099510147
wave (n): a disturbance that travels through a medium from one location to another location.
Let me take you down, ’cause I’m going to,
Strawberry Fields….
Lennon/McCartney
The marine layer wraps a soft silver blanket over the coast.
The sun is just coming over the hills to the east, and Pacific Beach is still asleep.
The ocean is a color that is not quite blue, not quite green, not quite black, but something somewhere between all three.
Out on the line, Boone Daniels straddles his old longboard like a cowboy on his pony.
He’s on The Dawn Patrol.
The girls look like ghosts.
Coming out of the early-morning mist, their silver forms emerge from a thin line of trees as the girls pad through the wet grass that edges the field. The dampness muffles their footsteps, so they approach silently, and the mist that wraps around their legs makes them look as if they’re floating.
Like spirits who died as children.
There are eight of them and they are children; the oldest is fourteen, the youngest ten. They walk toward the waiting men in unconscious lockstep.
The men bend over the mist like giants over clouds, peering down into their universe. But the men aren’t giants; they’re workers, and their universe is the seemingly endless strawberry field that they do not rule, but that rules them. They’re glad for the cool mist—it will burn off soon enough and leave them to the sun’s indifferent mercy.
The men are stoop laborers, bent at the waist for hours at a time, tending to the plants. They’ve made the dangerous odyssey up from Mexico to work in these fields, to send money back to their families south of the border.
They live in primitive camps of corrugated tin shacks, jerry-rigged tents, and lean-tos hidden deep in the narrow canyons above the fields. There are no women in the camps, and the men are lonely. Now they look up to sneak guilty glances at the wraithlike girls coming out of the mist. Glances of need, even though many of these men are fathers, with daughters the ages of these girls.
Between the edge of the field and the banks of the river stands a thick bed of reeds, into which the men have hacked little dugouts, almost caves. Now some of the men go into the reeds and pray that the dawn will not come too soon or burn too brightly and expose their shame to the eyes of God.
It’s dawn at the Crest Motel, too.
Sunrise isn’t a sight that a lot of the residents see, unless it’s from the other side—unless they’re just going to bed instead of just getting up.
Only two people are awake now, and neither of them is the desk clerk, who’s catching forty in the office, his butt settled into the chair, his feet propped on the counter. Doesn’t matter. Even if he were awake, he couldn’t see the little balcony of room 342, where the woman is going over the railing.
Her nightgown flutters above her.
An inadequate parachute.
She misses the pool by a couple of feet and her body lands on the concrete with a dull thump.
Not loud enough to wake anyone up.
The guy who tossed her looks down just long enough to make sure she’s dead. He sees her neck at the funny angle, like a broken doll. Watches her blood, black in the faint light, spread toward the pool.
Water seeking water.
“Epic macking crunchy.”
That’s how Hang Twelve describes the imminent big swell to Boone Daniels, who actually understands what Hang Twelve is saying, because Boone speaks fluent Surfbonics. Indeed, off to Boone’s right, just to the south, waves are smacking the pilings beneath Crystal Pier. The ocean feels heavy, swollen, pregnant with promise.
The Dawn Patrol—Boone, Hang Twelve, Dave the Love God, Johnny Banzai, High Tide, and Sunny Day—sits out there on the line, talking while they wait for the next set to come in. They all wear black winter wet suits that cover them from their wrists to their ankles, because the early-morning water is cold, especially now that it’s stirred up by the approaching storm.
This morning’s interstitial conversation revolves around the big swell, a once-every-twenty-years burgeoning of the surf now rolling toward the San Diego coast like an out-of-control freight train. It’s due in two days, and with it the gray winter sky, some rain, and the biggest waves that any of The Dawn Patrol have seen in their adult lives.
It’s going to be, as Hang Twelve puts it, “epic macking crunchy.”
Which, roughly translated from Surfbonics, is a term of approbation.
It’s going to be good, Boone knows. They might even see twenty-foot peaks coming in every thirty seconds or so. Double overheads, tubes like tunnels, real thunder crushers that could easily take you over the falls and dump you into the washing machine.
Only the best surfers need apply.
Boone qualifies.
While it’s an exaggeration to say that Boone could surf before he could walk, it’s the dead flat truth that he could surf before he could run. Boone is the ultimate “locie”—he was conceived on the beach, born half a mile away, and raised three blocks from where the surf breaks at high tide. His dad surfed; his mom surfed—hence the conceptual session on the sand. In fact, his mom surfed well into the sixth month of her pregnancy, so maybe it isn’t an exaggeration to say that Boone could surf before he could walk.
So Boone’s been a waterman all his life, and then some.
The ocean is his backyard, his haven, his playground, his refuge, his church. He goes into the ocean to get well, to get clean, to remind himself that life is a ride. Boone believes that a wave is God’s tangible message that all the great things in life are free. Boone gets free every day, usually two or three times a day, but always, always, out on The Dawn Patrol.
Boone Daniels lives to surf.
He doesn’t want to talk about the big swell right now, because talking about it might jinx it, cause the swell to lie down and die into the deep recesses of the north Pacific. So even though Hang Twelve is looking at him with his usual expression of unabashed hero worship, Boone changes the subject to an old standard out on the Pacific Beach Dawn Patrol line.
The List of Things That Are Good.
They started the List of Things That Are Good about fifteen years ago, back when they were in high school, when Boone and Dave’s social studies teacher challenged them to “get their priorities straight.”
The list is flexible—items are added or deleted; the rankings change—but the current List of Things That Are Good would read as follows, if, that is, it were written down, which it isn’t:
“I propose,” Boone says to the line at large, “moving fish tacos over all-female outrigger canoe teams.”
“From ninth to eighth?” Johnny Banzai asks, his broad, generally serious face breaking into a smile. Johnny Banzai’s real name isn’t Banzai, of course. It’s Kodani, but if you’re a Japanese-American and a seriously radical, nose-first, balls-out, hard-charging surfer, you’re just going to get glossed either “Kamikaze” or “Banzai,” you just are. But as Boone and Dave the Love God decided that Johnny is just too rational to be suicidal, they decided on Banzai.
When Johnny Banzai isn’t banzaiing, he’s a homicide detective with the San Diego Police Department, and Boone knows that he welcomes the opportunity to argue about things that aren’t grim. So he’s on it. “Basically flip-flopping them?” Johnny Banzai asks. “Based on what?”
“Deep thought and careful consideration,” Boone replies.
Hang Twelve is shocked. The young soul surfer stares at Boone with a look of hurt innocence, his wet goatee dropping to the black neoprene of his winter wet suit, his light brown dreadlocks falling on his shoulder as he cocks his head. “But, Boone—all-female outrigger canoe teams?”
Hang Twelve loves the women of the all-female outrigger canoe teams. Whenever they paddle by, he just sits on his board and stares.
“Listen,” Boone says, “most of those women play for the other team.”
“What other team?” Hang Twelve asks.
“He’s so young,” Johnny observes, and as usual, his observation is accurate. Hang Twelve is a dozen years younger than the rest of The Dawn Patrol. They tolerate him because he’s such an enthusiastic surfer and sort of Boone’s puppy; plus, he gives them the locals’ discount at the surf shop he works at.
“What other team?” Hang Twelve asks urgently.
Sunny Day leans over her board and whispers to him.
Sunny looks just like her name. Her blond hair glows like sunshine. A force of nature—tall, long-legged—Sunny is exactly what Brian Wilson meant when he wrote that he wished they all could be California girls.
Except that Brian’s dream girl usually sat on the beach, whereas Sunny surfs. She’s the best surfer on The Dawn Patrol, better than Boone, and the coming big swell could lift her from waitress to full-time professional surfer. One good photo of Sunny shredding a big wave could get her a sponsorship from one of the major surf-clothing companies, and then there’ll be no stopping her. Now she takes it upon herself to explain to Hang Twelve that most of the females on the all-female outrigger canoe teams are rigged out for females.
Hang Twelve lets out a devastated groan.
“You just ripped a boy’s dreams,” Boone tells Sunny.
“Not necessarily,” Dave the Love God says with a smug smile.
“Don’t even start,” Sunny says.
“Is it my bad,” Dave asks, “that women love me?”
It’s not, really. Dave the Love God has a face and physique that would have caused a run on marble in ancient Greece. But it’s not even so much Dave’s body that gets him sex as it is his confidence. Dave is confident that he’s going to get laid, and he’s in a profession that puts him in a perfect position to have a shot at every snow-zone turista who comes to San Diego to get tanned. He’s a lifeguard, and this is how he got his moniker, because Johnny Banzai, who completes the New York Times crossword in ink, said, “You’re not a ‘life guard’; you’re a ‘love god.’ Get it?”
Yeah, the whole Dawn Patrol got it, because they have all seen Dave the Love Guard crawl up to his lifeguard tower while guzzling handfuls of vitamin E to replace the depletion from the night before and get ready for the night ahead.
“They actually give me binoculars,” he marveled to Boone one day, “with the explicit expectation that I will use them to look at scantily clad women. And some people say there’s no God.”
So if any hominid with a package could get an all-female outrigger canoe team member (or several of them) to issue a gender exemption for a night or two, it would be Dave, and judging by the self-satisfied lascivious smile on his grille right now, he probably has.
Hang Twelve is still not convinced. “Yeah, but, fish tacos?”
“It depends on the kind of fish in the taco,” says High Tide, né Josiah Pamavatuu, weighing in on the subject. Literally weighing in, because the Samoan crashes the scales at well over three and a half bills. Hence the tag “High Tide,” because the ocean level rises anytime he gets in the water. So High Tide’s opinion on food commands respect, because he obviously knows what he’s talking about. The whole crew is aware that your Pacific Island types know their fish. “Are you talking about yellowtail, ono, opah, mahimahi, shark, or what? It makes a difference, ranking-wise.”
“Everything,” Boone says, “tastes better on a tortilla.”
This is an article of faith with Boone. He’s lived his life with it and believes it to be true. You take anything—fish, chicken, beef, cheese, eggs, even peanut butter and jelly—and fold them in the motherly embrace of a warm flour tortilla and all those foods respond to the love by upping their game.
Everything does taste better on a tortilla.
“Outside!” High Tide yells.
Boone looks over his shoulder to see the first wave of what looks to be a tasty set coming in.
“Party wave!” hollers Dave the Love God, and he, High Tide, Johnny, and Hang Twelve get on it, sharing the ride into shore. Boone and Sunny hang back for the second wave, which is a little bigger, a little fuller, and has a better shape.
“Your wave!” Boone yells to her.
“Chivalrous or patronizing, you decide!” Sunny yells back, but she paddles in. Boone gets on the wave right behind her and they ride the shoulder in together, a skillful pas de deux on the white water.
Boone and Sunny walk up onto the beach, because the morning session is over and The Dawn Patrol is coming in. This is because, with the exception of Boone, they all have real j-o-b-s.
So Johnny’s already stepping out of the outdoor shower and sitting in the front seat of his car putting on his detective clothes—blue shirt, brown tweed jacket, khaki slacks—when his cell phone goes off. Johnny listens to the call, then says, “A woman took a header off a motel balcony. Another day in paradise.”
“I don’t miss that,” Boone says.
“And it doesn’t miss you,” Johnny replies.
This is true. When Boone pulled the pin at SDPD, his lieutenant’s only regret was that it hadn’t been attached to a grenade. Despite his remark, Johnny disagrees—Boone was a good cop. A very good cop.
It was a shame what happened.
But now Boone is following High Tide’s eyes back out to the ocean, at which the big man is gazing with an almost reverential intensity.
“It’s coming,” High Tide says. “The swell.”
“Big?” Boone asks.
“Not big,” says High Tide. “Huge.”
A real thunder crusher.
Like, ka-boom.
What is a wave anyway?
We know one when we see one, but what is it?
The physicists call it an “energy-transport phenomenon.”
The dictionary says it’s “a disturbance that travels through a medium from one location to another location.”
A disturbance.
It’s certainly that.
Something gets disturbed. That is, something strikes something else and sets off a vibration. Clap your hands right now and you’ll hear a sound. What you’re actually hearing is a sound wave. Something struck something else and it set off a vibration that strikes your eardrum.
The vibration is energy. It’s transported through the phenomenon of a wave from one location to the other.
The water itself doesn’t actually move. What happens is one particle of water bumps into the next, which bumps into the next, and so on and so forth until it hits something. It’s like that idiot wave at a sports event—the people don’t move around the stadium, but the wave does. The energy flows from one person to another.
So when you’re riding a wave, you’re not riding water. The water is the medium, but what you’re really riding is energy.
Very cool.
Hitching an energy ride.
Billions of H20 particles work together to transport you from one place to another, which is very generous when you think about it. That last statement is, of course, airy-fairy soul-surfer bullshit—the wave doesn’t care whether you’re in it or not. Particles of water are inanimate objects that don’t know anything, much less “care”; the water is just doing what water does when it gets goosed by energy.
It makes waves.
A wave, any kind of wave, has a specific shape. The particles knocking into one another don’t just bump along in a flat line, but move up and down—hence the wave. Prior to the “disturbance,” the water particles are at rest, in technical terminology, equilibrium. What happens is that the energy disturbs the equilibrium; it “displaces” the particles from their state of rest. When the energy reaches its maximum potential “displacement” (“positive displacement”), the wave “crests.” Then it drops, below the equilibrium line, to its “negative displacement,” aka, the “trough.” Simply put, it has highs, lows, and middles, just like life its own self.
Yeah, except it’s a little more complicated than that, especially if you’re talking about the kind of wave that you can ride, especially the kind of giant wave that’s right now rolling toward Pacific Beach with bad intent.
Basically, there are two kinds of waves.
Most waves are “surface waves.” They’re caused by lunar pull and wind, which are sources of the disturbance. These are your average, garden-variety, everyday, Joe Lunchbucket waves. They show up on time, punch the clock, and they range in size from small to medium to, occasionally, large.
Surface waves, of course, give surfing its name, because it appears to the unenlightened eye that surfers are riding the surface of the water. Surfers are, if you will, “surfacing.”
Despite this distinction, surface waves are the mules of the surfing world, unheralded beasts of burden not incapable, however, of kicking their traces from time to time when whipped into a frenzy by the wind.
A lot of people think that it’s strong winds that make big waves, but this really isn’t true. Wind can cause some big surf, blowing an otherwise-average wave into a tall peak, but most of the energy—the disturbance—is on the surface. These waves have height, but they lack depth. All the action is on top—it’s mostly show; it’s literally superficial.
And wind can ruin surf, and often does. If the wind is blowing across the wave it will ruin its shape, or it can make the surf choppy, or, if it’s coming straight in off the ocean, it can drive the crest of the wave down, flattening it out and making it unridable.
What you want is a gentle, steady, offshore wind that blows into the face of the wave and holds it up for you.
The other kind of wave is the subsurface wave, which starts, duh, under the water. If surface waves are your middleweight boxers, dancing and shooting jabs, the subsurface wave is your heavyweight, coming in flat-footed, throwing knockout punches from the (ocean) floor. This wave is the superstar, the genuine badass, the take-your-lunch money, walk-off-with-your-girlfriend, give-me-those-fucking-sneakers, thank you for playing and now what parting gifts do we have for our contestant, Vanna wave.
If surface waves lack depth, the subsurface wave has more bottom than a Sly and the Family Stone riff. It’s deeper than Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein combined. It’s heavy, my friend; it ain’t your brother. It’s the hate child of rough sex at the bottom of the sea.
There’s a whole world down there. In fact, most of the world is down there. You have enormous mountain ranges, vast plains, trenches, and canyons. You have tectonic plates, and when they shift and scrape against each other, you have earthquakes. Gigantic underwater earthquakes, violent as a Mike Tyson off meds, that set off one big honking disturbance.
At its most benign, a big beautiful swell to ride; at its most malevolent, a mass-murdering tsunami.
This is a disturbance, a mass transportation of energy phenom, that will travel thousands of miles either to give you the ride of your life or fuck you up, and it doesn’t care which.
This is what’s rolling toward Pacific Beach as The Dawn Patrol gets out of the water this particular morning. An undersea earthquake up near the Aleutian Islands is hurtling literally thousands of miles to come crash on Pacific Beach and go—
Ka-boom.
Ka-boom is good.
If you’re Boone Daniels and live for waves that make big noises.
He’s always been this way. Since birth and before, if you buy all that stuff about prenatal auditory influences. You know how some mothers hang out listening to Mozart to give their babies a taste for the finer things? Boone’s mom, Dee, used to sit on the beach and stroke her belly to the rhythm of the waves.
To the prenatal Boone, the ocean was indistinguishable from his mother’s heartbeat. Hang Twelve might call the sea “Mother Ocean,” but to Boone it really is. And before his son hit the terrible twos, Brett Daniels would put the kid in front of him on a longboard, paddle out, and then lift the boy on his shoulder while they rode in. Casual observers—that is, tourists—would be appalled, all like, “What if you drop him?”
“I’m not going to drop him,” Boone’s dad, Brett, would reply.
Until Boone was about three, and then Brett would intentionally drop him into the shallow white water, just to give him the feel of it, to let him know that other than a few bubbles in the nose, nothing bad was going to happen. Young Boone would pop up, giggling like crazy, and ask for his dad to “do it again.”
Every once in a while, a disapproving onlooker would threaten to call Child Protective Services, and Dee would reply, “That’s what he’s doing—he’s protecting his child.”
Which was the truth.
You raise a kid in PB, and you know that his DNA is going to drive him out there on a board, you’d better teach him what the ocean can do. You’d better teach him how to live, not die, in the water, and you’d better teach him young. You teach him about riptides and undertow. You teach him not to panic.
Protect his child?
Listen, when Brett and Dee would have birthday parties at the condo complex pool, and all Boone’s little friends would come over, Brett Daniels would set his chair at the edge of the pool and tell the other parents, “No offense, have a good time, have some tacos and some brews, but I’m sitting here and I’m not talking to anybody.”
Then he’d sit at the edge of the kid-crowded pool and never take his eyes off the bottom of the pool, not for a single second, because Brett knew that nothing too bad was going to happen on the surface of the water, that kids drown at the bottom of the pool when no one is watching.
Brett was watching. He’d sit there for as long as the party lasted, in Zen-like concentration until the last kid came out shivering and was wrapped in a towel and went to wolf down some pizza and soda. Then Brett would go eat and hang out with the other parents, and there were no irredeemable tragedies, no lifelong regrets (“I only turned my back for a few seconds”) at those parties.
The first time Brett and Dee let their then seven-year-old boy paddle out alone into some small and close beach break, their collective heart was in their collective throat. They were watching like hawks, even though they knew that every lifeguard on the beach and every surfer in the water also had their eyes on young Boone Daniels, and if anything bad had happened, a mob would have showed up to pull him out of the soup.
It was hard, but Brett and Dee stood there as Boone got up and fell, got up and fell, got up and fell—and paddled back out, and did it again and again until he got up and stayed up and rode that wave in while a whole beach full of people played it casual and pretended not to notice.
It was even harder when Boone got to that age, right about ten, when he wanted to go the beach with his buddies and didn’t want Mom or Dad showing up to embarrass him. It was hard to let him go, and sit back and worry, but that was also a part of protecting their child, to protect him from perpetual childhood, to trust that they had done their job and taught him what he needed to know.
So by the time he was eleven, Boone was your classic gremmie.
A gremmie is nature’s revenge.
A gremmie, aka “grom,” is a longhaired, sun-bleached, overtanned, preadolescent, water-borne, pain-in-the-ass little surfer. A gremmie is karmic payback for every annoying, obnoxious, shitty little thing you did when you were that age. A gremmie will hog your wave, ruin your session, jam up the snack bar, and talk like he knows what he’s talking about. Worse, your gremmie runs in packs with his little gremmie buddies—in Boone’s case, this had been little Johnny Banzai and a young Dave the yetto-be Love God—all of them equally vile, disgusting, smart-mouthed, obscene, gross little bastards. When they’re not surfing, they’re skate-boarding, and when they’re not surfing or skateboarding, they’re reading comics, trying to get their filthy little mitts on porn, trying (unsuccessfully) to pull real live girls, scheming to get adults to buy beer for them, or trying to score weed. The reason parents let their kids surf is that it’s the least sketchy thing that the board monkeys get up to.
As a gremmie, Boone got his fair share of shit from the big guys, but he also got a little bit of a pass because he was Brett and Dee Daniels’s kid, glossed “the Spawn of Mr. and Mrs. Satan” by a few of the crankier old guys.
Boone grew out of it. All gremmies do, or they’re chased out of the lineup, and besides, it was pretty clear early on that Boone was something special. He was doing scary-good things for his age, then scary-good things for any age. It wasn’t long before the better surf teams came around, inviting him onto their junior squads, and it was a dead lock that Boone would take home a few armloads of trophies and get himself a sweet sponsorship from one of the surf-gear companies.
Except Boone said no.
Fourteen years old, and he turned away from it.
“How come?” his dad asked.
Boone shrugged. “I just don’t do it for that,” he said. “I do it for …”
He had no words for that, and Brett and Dee totally understood. They got on the horn to their old pals in the surf world and basically said, “Thanks but no thanks. The kid just wants to surf.”
The kid did.
Petra Hall steers her starter BMW west on Garnet Avenue.
She alternately watches the road and looks at a slip of paper in her hand, comparing the address to the building to her right.
The address—111 Garnet Avenue—is the correct listing for “Boone Daniels, Private Investigator,” but the building appears to be not an office but a surf shop. At least that’s what the sign says, a rather unimaginative yet descriptive pacific surf inscribed over a rather unimaginative yet descriptive painting of a breaking wave. And, indeed, looking through the window she can see surfboards, body boards, bathing suits, and, being that the building is half a block from the beach, 111 Garnet Avenue would certainly appear to be a surf shop.
Except that it is supposed to be the office of Boone Daniels, private investigator.
Petra grew up in a climate where the sun is more rumor than reality, so her skin is so pale and delicate that it’s almost transparent, in stark contrast to her indigo black hair. Her charcoal gray, very professional, I’m-a-serious-career-woman suit hides a figure that is at the same time slim and generous, but what you’re really going to look at is her eyes.
Are they blue? Or are they gray?
Like the ocean, it depends on her mood.
She parks the car next door in front of The Sundowner Lounge and goes into Pacific Surf, where a pale young man behind the counter, who would appear to be some sort of white Rastafarian, is playing a video game.
“Sorry,” Petra says, “I’m looking for a Mr. Daniels?”
Hang Twelve looks up from his game to see this gorgeous woman standing in front of him. His stares for a second; then he gets it together enough to shout up the stairs, “Cheerful, brah, civilian here looking for Boone!”
A head peers down from the staircase. Ben Carruthers, glossed “Cheerful” by the PB crew, looks to be about sixty years old, has a steel gray crew cut and a scowl as he barks, “Call me ‘brah’ one more time and I’ll rip your tongue out.”
“Sorry, I forgot,” Hang Twelve says. “Like, the moana was epic tasty this sesh and I slid over the ax of this gnarler and just foffed, totally shredded it, and I’m still amped from the ocean hit, so my bad, brah.”
Cheerful looks at Petra and says, “Sometimes we have entire fascinating conversations in which I don’t understand a word that is said.” He turns back to Hang Twelve. “You’re what I have instead of a cat. Don’t make me get a cat.”
He disappears back up the stairs with a single word, “Follow.”
Petra goes up the stairs, where Cheerful—a tall man, probably six-six, very thin, wearing a red plaid shirt tucked into khaki trousers—is already hunched over a desk. Well, she takes it on faith that it’s a desk because she can’t actually see the surface underneath the clutter of papers, coffee cups, ball hats, taco wrappers, newspapers, and magazines. But the saturnine man is punching buttons on an old-fashioned adding machine, so she decides that it is, indeed, a desk.
The “office,” if you can grace it with that name, is a mess, a hovel, a bedlam, except for the back wall, which is neat and ordered. Several black wet suits hang neatly from a steel coatrack, and a variety of surfboards lean against the wall, sorted and ordered by size and shape.
“Forty-some years ago,” Cheerful says, “a bra was something I tried with trembling fingers and little success to unsnap. Now I find that I am a brah. Such are the insults of aging. What can I do for you?”
“Would you be Mr. Daniels?” Petra asks.
“I would be Sean Connery,” Cheerful replies, “but he’s already taken. So is Boone, but I wouldn’t be him even if I could.”
“Do you know when Mr. Daniels will be in?”
“No. Do you?”
Petra shakes her head. “Which is why I asked.”
Cheerful looks up from his calculations. This girl doesn’t take any crap. Cheerful likes that, so he says, “Let me explain something to you: Boone doesn’t wear a watch; he wears a sundial.”
“I take it Mr. Daniels is somewhat laid-back?”
“If Boone was any more laid-back,” Cheerful says, “he’d be horizontal.”
Boone walks up Garnet Avenue from the beach in the company of Sunny.
Nothing unusual about that—they’ve been in and out of each other’s company for coming on ten years.
Sunny originally flashed onto The Dawn Patrol like daytime lightning. Paddled out, took her place in the lineup like she’d been born there. Boone was about to launch into a six-foot right break when Sunny jumped in and took it from him. Boone was still poised on the lip when this blond image zipped past him as if he were a buoy.
Dave laughed. “Man, that babe just ripped your heart out and fed it to you.”
Boone wasn’t so freaking amused. He caught the next wave in and found her coming back out through the white water.
“Yo, Blondie,” Boone said. “You jumped my wave.”
“My name isn’t ‘Blondie,’” Sunny said. “And when did you buy the beach?”
“I was lined up.”
“You were late.”
“My ass I was.”
“Your ass was late,” Sunny said. “What’s the matter, the big man can’t take getting beat by a girl?”
“I can take it,” Boone said. Even to himself, it sounded lame.
“Apparently not,” Sunny said.
Boone took a closer look at her. “Do I know you?”
“I don’t know,” Sunny said. “Do you?”
She lay out on her board and started to paddle back out. Boone had no choice but to follow. Catching up with her wasn’t easy.
“You go to Pac High?” Boone asked when he got alongside.
“Used to,” Sunny said. “I’m at SDSU now.”
“I went to Pac High,” Boone said.
“I know.”
“You do?”
“I remember you,” Sunny said.
“Uh, I guess I don’t remember you.”
“I know.”
She kicked it up and paddled away from him. Then she spent the rest of the session kicking his ass. She took over the water like she owned it, which she did, that afternoon.
“She’s a specimen,” Dave said as he and Boone watched her from the lineup.
“Eyes off,” Boone said. “She’s mine.”
“If she’ll have you.” Dave snorted.
Turned out she would. She outsurfed him until the sun went down, then waited for him on the beach until he dragged his ass in.
“I could get used to this,” Boone said to her.
“Get used to what?”
“Getting beat by a girl.”
“My name’s Sunny Day,” she said ruefully.
“I’m not laughing,” he said. “Mine’s Boone Daniels.”
They went to dinner and then they went to bed. It was natural, inevitable—they both knew that neither one of them could swim out of that current. As if either one of them wanted to.
After that, they were inseparable.
“You and Boone should get married and produce offspring,” Johnny Banzai told them a few weeks later. “You owe it to the world of surfing.”
Like, the child of Boone and Sunny would be some sort of mutant superfreak. But marriage?
Not happening.
“CCBHS” is how Sunny explained herself on this issue. “Classic California broken home syndrome. There ought to be a telethon.”
Emily Wendelin’s hippie dad had left her hippie mom when Emily was three years old. Her mom never got over it, and neither did Emily, who learned not to give her heart to a man because men don’t stay.
Emily’s mom retreated into herself, becoming “emotionally unavailable,” as the shrinks would say, and it was her grandmother—her mother’s mother—who really raised the girl. Eleanor Day imbued Emily with her strength, her grace, and her warmth, and it was Eleanor who gave the girl the nickname “Sunny,” because her granddaughter lit up her life. When Sunny turned eighteen, she changed her surname to Day, regardless of how pseudohippie it sounded.
“I’m matrilineal,” she explained.
It was her grandmother who persuaded her to go to college, and her grandmother who understood when, after the first year, Sunny decided that higher education, at least in a formal setting, wasn’t for her.
“It’s my fault,” Eleanor had said.
Her house was a block and a half from the beach, and Eleanor had taken her granddaughter there almost every day. When eight-year-old Sunny said that she wanted to surf, it was Eleanor who saw that a board was under the Christmas tree. It was Eleanor who stood on the beach while the girl rode wave after wave, Eleanor who smiled patiently when the sun went down and Emily would wave from the break, holding up one imploring finger, which meant “Please, Grandma, one more wave.” It was Eleanor who went to the early tournaments, who sat calmly in the ER with the girl, assuring her that the stitches in her chin wouldn’t leave a scar, and that if they did, it would be an interesting one.
So when Sunny came to her and explained that she didn’t want to go to college, and tearfully apologized for letting her down, Eleanor said that it was her fault for introducing Emily to the ocean.
“So what do you intend to do?” Eleanor asked.
“I want to be a professional surfer.”
Eleanor didn’t raise an eyebrow. Or laugh, or argue, or scoff. She simply said, “Well, be a great one.”
Be a great surfer, not marry one.
Not like the options were mutually exclusive, but neither Sunny nor Boone was interested in getting married, or even living together. Life was just fine the way it was—surfing, hanging out, making love, and surfing. It was all one and the same thing, one long, unbroken rhythm.
Good days.
Sunny waited tables in PB while she worked on her surfing career; Boone was happy being a cop, a uniformed patrolman with the SDPD.
What busted it up was a girl named Rain Sweeny.
Things changed after Rain Sweeny. After she was gone, Boone never really came back. It was like there was this distance between Boone and Sunny now, like a deep, slow current pulling them apart.
And now this big swell is coming, and they both sense that it’s bringing a bigger change.
They stand outside Boone’s office.
“So … late,” Sunny says.
“Late.”
Walking away, Sunny wonders if it’s too late.
Like she’s already lost something she didn’t even know she wanted.
Boone walks into Pacific Surf.
Hang Twelve looks up from Grand Theft Auto 3 and says, “There’s an inland betty upstairs looking for you. And Cheerful’s way aggro.”
“Cheerful’s always aggravated,” Boone replies. “That’s what makes him Cheerful. Who’s the woman?”
“Dunno.” Hang Twelve shrugs. “But, Boone, she’s smokin’ hot.”
Boone goes upstairs. The woman isn’t smokin’ hot; she’s smokin’ cold. But she is definitely smokin’.
“Mr. Daniels?” Petra says.
“Guilty.”
She offers her hand, and Boone is about to shake it, when he realizes that she’s handing him her card.
“Petra Hall,” she says. “From the law firm Burke, Spitz and Culver.”
Boone knows the law firm of Burke, Spitz and Culver. They have an office in one of the glass castles in downtown San Diego and have sent him a lot of work over the past few years.
And Alan Burke surfs.
Not every day, but a lot of weekends, and sometimes Boone sees him out on the line during the Gentlemen’s Hour. So he knows Alan Burke, but he doesn’t know this small, beautiful woman with the midnight hair and the blue eyes.
Or are they gray?
“You must be new with the firm,” Boone says.
Petra’s appalled as she watches Boone reach behind his back and pull the cord that’s connected to a zipper. The back of the wet suit opens, and then Boone gently peels the suit off his right arm, then his left, then rolls it down his chest. She starts to turn away as he rolls the suit down over his waist, and then she sees the flower pattern of his North Shore board trunks appear.
She’s looking at a man who appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties, but it’s hard to tell because he has a somewhat boyish face, made all the more so by his slightly too long, unkempt, sun-streaked brown hair, which is either intentionally unstylishly long or has simply not been cut recently. He’s tall, just an inch or two shorter than the saturnine old man still banging away on the adding machine, and he has the wide shoulders and long arm muscles of a swimmer.
Boone’s oblivious to her observation.
He’s all about the swell.
“There’s a swell rolling down from the Aleutians,” he says as he finishes rolling the wet suit over his ankles. “It’s going to hit sometime in the next two days and High Tide says it’s only going to last a few hours. Biggest swell of the last four years and maybe the next four. Humongous waves.”
“Real BBM,” Hang Twelve says from the staircase.
“Is anyone watching the store?” Cheerful asks.
“There’s no one down there,” Hang Twelve says.
“‘BBM’?” Petra asks.
“Brown boardshorts material,” Hang Twelve says helpfully.
“Lovely,” Petra says, wishing she hadn’t asked. “Thank you.”
“Anyway,” Boone says as he steps into the small bathroom, turns on the shower, and carefully rinses not himself but the wet suit, “everyone’s going out. Johnny Banzai’s going to take a mental-health day, High Tide’s calling in sick, Dave the Love God’s on the beach anyway, and Sunny, well, you know Sunny’s going to be out. Everyone is stoked.”
Petra delivers the bad news.
She has work for him to do.
“Our firm,” Petra says, “is defending Coastal Insurance Company in a suit against it by one Daniel Silvieri, aka Dan Silver, owner of a strip club called Silver Dan’s.”
“Don’t know the place,” Boone says.
“Yeah you do, Boone,” Hang Twelve says. “You and Dave took me there for my birthday.”
“We took you to Chuck E. Cheese’s,” Boone snaps. “Back-paddle.”
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?”
It’s amazing, Boone thinks, how Hang Twelve can suddenly speak actual English when there’s an attractive woman involved. He says, “Petra Hall, Hang Twelve.”
“Another nom de idiot?” Petra asks.
“He has twelve toes,” Boone says.
“He does not,” says Petra. Then she looks down at his sandals. “He has twelve toes.”
“Six on each foot,” says Boone.
“Gives me sick traction on the board,” Hang Twelve says.
“The strip club is actually immaterial,” Petra says. “Mr. Silver also owns a number of warehouses up in Vista, one of which burned to the ground several months ago. The insurance company investigated and, from the physical evidence, deemed it arson and refused to pay. Mr. Silver is suing for damages and for bad faith. He wants five million dollars.”
“I’m not an arson investigator,” Boone says. “I can put you in touch with—”
“Mr. Silver was having a relationship with one of his dancers,” Petra continues. “One Ms. Tamara Roddick.”
“A strip club owner banging one of his dancers,” Boone says. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all …”
“Recently,” Petra says, “Mr. Silver broke off the relationship and suggested that Ms. Roddick find employment elsewhere.”
“Let me finish this for you,” Boone says. “The spurned young lady, in a sudden attack of conscience, decided that she couldn’t live with the guilt anymore and came forward to the insurance company to confess that she saw Silver burn his building down.”
“Something like that, yes.”
“And you bought this shit?” Boone asks.
Alan Burke is way too smart to put this Tammy babe on the stand, Boone thinks. The opposing lawyer would shred her, and the rest of Burke’s case with her.
“She passed a polygraph with flying colors,” Petra says.
“Oh,” Boone says. It’s the best he can think of.
“So what’s the problem?” he asks.
“The problem,” Petra says, “is that Ms. Roddick is scheduled to testify tomorrow.”
“Does she surf?” Boone asks.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Then there’s no problem.”
“When I tried to contact her yesterday,” Petra says, “to make arrangements for her testimony—and to bring her some court-appropriate clothes I bought for her—she didn’t respond.”
“A flaky stripper,” Boone says. “Again, brave new world.”
“We’ve made repeated attempts to contact her,” Petra says. “She neither answers her phone nor returns messages. I rang her current employer, Totally Nude Girls. The manager informed me that she hasn’t shown up for work for three days.”
“Have you checked the morgue?” Boone asks.
Five million dollars is a lot of money.
“Of course.”
“So she’s taken off,” Boone says.
“You have a keen grasp of the obvious, Mr. Daniels,” Petra says. “Therefore, you should have no trouble discerning what it is that we require of you.”
“You want me to find her.”
“Full marks. Well done.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Boone says. “As soon as the swell is over.”
“I’m afraid that won’t do.”
“Nothing to be afraid of,” Boone says. “It’s just that this …”
“Tamara.”
“… Tammy babe could be anywhere by now,” Boone says. “It’s at least an even bet that she’s at a spa in Cabo with Dan Silver. Wherever she is or isn’t, it’s going to take a while to find her, so whether I start today, or tomorrow, or the day after, it really doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” Petra says. “And to Mr. Burke.”
Boone says, “Maybe you didn’t understand me when I was talking about the big—”
“I did,” Petra says. “Something is in the process of ‘swelling,’ and certain people with sophomoric sobriquets are, for reasons that evade my comprehension, ‘stoked’ about it.”
Boone stares at her.
Finally he says, as if to a small child, “Well, Pete, let me put it to you in a way you can understand: Some very big waves—the sort of waves that come only about once every other presidential administration—are about to hit that beach out there, for one day only, so all I’m going to be doing for those twenty-four hours is clocking in the green room. Now go back and tell Alan that as soon as the swell passes, I’ll find his witness.”
“The world,” Petra says, “doesn’t come to a screeching halt on account of ‘big waves’!”
“Yes,” Boone says, “it does.”
He disappears into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. The next sound is that of running water. Cheerful looks at Petra and shrugs, as if to say, What are you going to do?
Petra walks in to the bathroom, reaches into the shower, and turns on the cold water.
“Naked here!” Boone yells.
“Sorry—didn’t notice.”
He reaches up and turns off the water. “That was a sketchy thing to do.”
“Whatever that means.”
Boone starts to reach for a towel but then gets stubborn and just stands there, naked and dripping wet, as Petra looks him straight in the eyes and informs him, “Mr. Daniels, I intend to make partner within the next three years, and I am not going to achieve that goal by failing to deliver.”
“Petra, huh?” Boone says. He finds a tube of Headhunter and rubs it over his body as he says, “Okay—your dad was Pete and he wanted a boy child, but that didn’t work out, so he glossed you Petra. You figured out pretty young that the best way to earn Daddy’s affection was to add a little testosterone to the mix by growing up to be a hard-charging lawyer, which sort of accounts for that log on your shoulder but not the anal-retentiveness. No, that would be the fact that it’s still the law firm of Burke, Spitz and Culver, not Burke, Spitz, Culver and Hall.”
Petra doesn’t blink.
Actually, Daniels’s shot in the dark isn’t far off. She is