Dawn Patrol
Authors: Don Winslow
Praise for Don Winslow’s
The Dawn Patrol
“The action revs up to a pulsating pace.… A rousing thriller with a sense of morality.”
—
The Oregonian
“A great book.… Winslow fills his prose with a staccato, manic energy, stitching words into paragraphs like an expert surfer riding the waves.
The Dawn Patrol
is that smooth and seemingly effortless, a book that deserves to be a bestseller if ever there was one.”
—
The Providence Journal
“Entertaining.… Finds seamy secrets lurk even in idyllic places.”
—
Pittsburgh Tribune Review
“I’m hoping this changes things for Don Winslow, that this is a huge success, and that he is hereafter mentioned in the same breath as modern giants such as Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos, because this new book is one of the best private-eye novels I’ve read in years.”
—Cameron Hughes,
January Magazine
“Winslow peels back the layers, showing the corrupt soul of a city paying the price for paradise.”
—
Crimespree Magazine
“A high-octane tale [and] a stellar meditation on one of California’s favorite pastimes: surfing. Winslow’s measured pitch-perfect sentences bring to life the aching dreams and disappointments, both causal and devastating, that befall Boone and his close-knit circle of wave-riding friends.”
—
Newsday
“A powerful, elbow-in-the-throat book.… Pounds its story forward like a relentless surf.”
—
The Plain Dealer
“Don Winslow is like a wave-riding Elmore Leonard.”
—
Outside
“The perfect summer hybrid novel.… Can’t make it to the beach? No worries. Don Winslow brings the beach right to you.”
—
Dayton Daily News
“A tasty combo plate of laid-back surfing, Southern California weirdness and motley ethnic groups—plus passionate love songs to the monster ocean waves and bitchin’ fish tacos.”
—
The Seattle Times
DON WINSLOW
The Dawn Patrol
Don Winslow is a former private investigator and consultant. He lives in California.
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
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
FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, JUNE 2009
Copyright © 2008 by Don Winslow
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2008.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Winslow, Don.
The dawn patrol / by Don Winslow. —1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Surfers—Fiction. 2. Private Investigators—Fiction. 3. California—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3573.I5326D38 2008
813’.54—dc22
2008006531
eISBN: 978-0-307-79379-9
v3.1
wave (n): a disturbance that travels through a medium from one location to another location.
Let me take you down, cos I’m going to, Strawberry Fields.…
Lennon/McCartney
1
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.