Dawn Patrol (13 page)

The subject of Rain Sweeny didn’t come up.

Boone spent most of the month on Sunny’s couch.

He’d get up by eleven in the morning, drain a couple of beers, and lie there watching television, looking out the window, or just sleeping. It drove Sunny nuts. This was a Boone she’d never seen—passive, morose, angry.

One day when she gently suggested that he might want to go out for a surf session, he replied, “Don’t
handle
me, okay, Sunny? I don’t need
handling
.”

“I wasn’t handling you.”

“Fuck.”

He got up off the couch and went back to bed.

She was hoping things would get better when he went back to work.

They didn’t. They got worse.

The department took him off the street altogether and put him behind a desk, filing arrest reports. It was a prescription to drive an active, outdoor man crazy, and it did the trick. Eight to five, five days a week, he sat alone in a cubicle, entering data. He’d come home bored, edgy, and angry.

He was miserable.

“Quit,” Dave the Love God told him.

“I’m not a quitter,” Boone replied.

But three months into this bullshit, he did quit. Pulled his papers, turned in his badge and gun, and walked away. No one tried to talk him out of it. The only word he heard was from Harrington, who literally opened the door for him on the way out.

The word was “Good.”

Two hours later, Boone was back on Sunny’s couch.

Surfing was out. Boone went AWOL from The Dawn Patrol. He never showed up anymore. He didn’t go out at all.

One night, Sunny came home from a long shift at The Sundowner, found him stretched out on the sofa in the sweatpants and T-shirt that he’d had on for a week, and said, “We have to talk about this.”

“Which really means
you
have to talk about this.”

“You’re clinically depressed.”

“ ‘Clinically depressed’?” Boone asked. “You’re a shrink now?”

“I talked to one.”

“Fuck, Sunny.”

It got him off the couch anyway. He went out to her little porch and plopped down on one of the folding beach chairs. She followed him out there.

“I know you’re angry,” she said. “I don’t blame you.”

“I do.”

“What?”

“I do,” Boone repeated, staring out toward the ocean. She could see tears running down his face as he said, “I should have done what Harrington said. I should have helped him hold that guy under the water … beat him … hurt him … whatever it took to make him give up what he did with Rain Sweeny. I was wrong, and that girl is dead because of me.”

Sunny thought that this was a cathartic moment, that he’d start to heal after this, that things would get better.

She was wrong.

He just sank deeper into his depression, slowly drowning in his guilt and shame.

Johnny Banzai tried to talk to him. Came over one day and said, “You know that girl was almost certainly dead before you picked up Rasmussen. All the data show that—”

“Sunny ask you to come over?”

“What difference—”

“Fuck your ‘data,’ Johnny. Fuck you.”

The whole Dawn Patrol tried to work him out of it. No good. Even Red Eddie came by.

“I have all my people out,” Eddie said, “looking for your girl, looking for that sick bastard. If he raises his head anywhere, Boone, I’ll have him.”

“Thanks, Eddie,”

“Anything for you,
bruddah
,” Eddie said. “Anything in this world.”

But it didn’t happen. Even Eddie’s soldiers couldn’t find Russ Rasmussen, couldn’t find Rain Sweeny. And Boone sank deeper and deeper into his depression.

A month later, Sunny gave him an ultimatum. “I can’t live like this,” she said. “I can’t live with
you
like this. Either you go get some help or …”

“Or what? Come on, say it, Sunny.”

“Or find another place to live.”

He took the “or.”

She knew he would.

You don’t give a guy like Boone an ultimatum and expect any other result. The truth was, she was relieved to see him go. She was ashamed of it, but she was glad to be alone in her place. Alone was better.

Better for him, too.

He knew that he was just taking her down with him.

If you’re going to sink, he told himself, at least have the decency to sink alone. Go down with your own ship.

Alone.

So he left the police force, he left Sunny, he left his friends, The Dawn Patrol, and he left surfing.

Never turn your back on the ocean.

You may think you can walk away from it, but you can’t. The pull of
the tide brings you back; the water in your blood yearns for its homecoming. And one morning, after two more months of lying around his apartment, Boone picked up his board and paddled out alone. He didn’t think about it, had no
intention
of going out that morning; he just went.

The ocean healed him—slowly and not completely, but it healed him. He went out in the roughest, baddest surf he could find; he wandered from break to break like Odysseus trying to navigate his way home. At Tourmaline, Rockslide, Black’s, D Street, Swami’s, Boone sought the pounding he felt that he deserved, and the ocean gave it to him.

It beat him, battered him, scrubbed his skin with salt and sand. He’d trudge home exhausted and sleep the sleep of the dead. Get up with the sun and do it again. And again and again, until one morning he reappeared at The Dawn Patrol.

It was nothing dramatic—there was no moment of decision—it was just that he was there in the lineup when the rest of them paddled out. Johnny, High Tide, Dave, and Sunny. Nobody said anything to him about it; they just picked up where they’d left off, as if he’d never been gone.

On the beach at the end of that session, Johnny asked him, “What are you going to do now?”

“You’re looking at it.”

“Just surf?”

Boone shrugged.

“Did you win the lottery?” Johnny asked. “You need to make a living, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

Dave offered to get Boone on as a lifeguard. He’d need to take a couple of courses, Dave said, but it should only take about six months. Boone declined; he figured he wasn’t that good at guarding people’s lives.

It was Johnny’s idea for Boone to get his PI’s license.

“All kinds of work for ex-cops,” Johnny said. “Insurance investigations, security, bond jumpers, matrimonial stuff.”

Boone went with it.

He wasn’t thrilled about it, but that was the point. He didn’t want a job that he loved. You love something, it hurts when you lose it.

Which is what worried Sunny. To the rest of his world, Boone was back, same as he ever was—laid-back, joking, refining the List of Things
That Are Good, grilling fish on the beach at night, making supper for his friends, wrapping everything in a tortilla. Among The Dawn Patrol, Sunny was the only one who knew that Boone
wasn’t
back, not fully. She suspected that he now inhabited a world of diminished expectations, both of himself and of other people, of life itself. That Boone only wanted to work enough to support his surfing jones might have seemed hip, but she understood it as the disappointment that it was.

Disappointment in life.

In himself.

They stayed close; they stayed tight. They even slept together now and then for old times’ sake or out of loneliness. But they both knew it wasn’t going anywhere and they both knew why—Sunny knew that Boone was still missing a piece of himself, and neither she nor he was willing to settle for anything less than the whole man.

The ironic thing was that it was Boone who pushed her to be everything she could be. Boone who did for her what she couldn’t do for herself, and what she couldn’t do for him. It was Boone who told her that she couldn’t settle for anything less than her dream. When she was discouraged and ready to sell out, get a real job, it was Boone who told her to hang in, keep waiting tables so that she could surf, that success was riding the next wave her way.

Boone wouldn’t let her quit.

The way he quit on himself.

What Sunny doesn’t know is that Boone’s still trying to find Russ Rasmussen. In those soulful hours of the morning, he sits at his computer at home, tracking him down. Trying to find a trail—a Social Security number showing up on a job, a rental application, a gas bill, anything. When he runs into skells, he asks them if they’ve heard anything about Rasmussen, but none of them have.

When the man disappeared, he disappeared.

Maybe he’s dead, taking the truth with him.

But Boone doesn’t give up. Boone Daniels, one of the most peaceful creatures in the universe, keeps a .38 in his apartment. He never takes it out, never carries it. He just saves it for the day when he finds Russ Rasmussen. Then he’s going to walk the man to a quiet place, make him talk, and then put a bullet in his head.

Boone walks back to the office.

To the office, not
into
the office.

What he’s going to do is just get in his van and take off to Angela Hart’s place. If Angela took Tammy’s place, there’s a good chance that Tammy took Angela’s. Anyway, it’s the best shot he has. And he needs to hurry, because Johnny Banzai’s gonna figure out on the quick that he’s got the wrong ID and he’ll be
on
it.

So will Danny Silver, Boone thinks. Cops get comped at strip bars, for the same reasons he gets free nosh at The Sundowner, so there’s any number of guys who could have given Danny the heads-up.

It doesn’t really matter who it is, Boone thinks; it only matters
that
it is, and now we’re in a race to get to Tammy Roddick. So if Tammy’s lying low in Angela’s place, Boone thinks, I’d better get over there first. And I sure as hell don’t need Pete coming with me, endlessly busting balls, getting in the way. Better she busts Cheerful’s balls. He likes being miserable—they’re perfect together.

But when he gets to the Boonemobile, Petra’s sitting in the passenger seat like a dog that knows it’s going for a ride.

“I’ve been meaning to get that lock fixed,” Boone says as he gets behind the wheel.

“So,” Petra asks, “where are we going?”

Boone heads south through Mission Beach.

“Why do they call this Mission Beach?” she asks. “Is there a mission here?”

“Sure,” Boone says. He knows what the mission is, too. Lie on the beach all day, pound beer, and get laid.

“Where is it?” Petra asks.

“Where’s what?”

“The mission,” Petra says. “I’d like to see it.”

Oh,
that
kind of mission.

“They tore it down,” Boone tells her, lying. “To build
that
.”

He points seaside—to Belmont Amusement Park, where the old wooden roller coaster looms over the landscape like a funky man-made wave. It’s been there a long time and is one of the last of the old-style wooden coasters. There used to be a lot of them, all up and down the coast. Seemed like the first thing people did when they settled a beach town was to build a wooden roller coaster.

Of course, that was before the Hawaiians taught us to surf, Boone thinks. Speaking of missionaries … We sent people over there with Bibles, and they sent guys back with boards.

The Hawaiians sure got the shitty end of that stick.

Anyway, thank you,
mahalo
.

Boone heads to Ocean Beach.

Ocean Beach is not a place that time actually forgot. It’s more like time got up to about 1975 and said fuck it.

OB, as the Obeachians call it, has old hippie shops where you can buy crystals and that shit, bars that still do black-light effects, and used-record
stores that sell actual records, including ones by a staggering variety of obscure reggae bands. The only thing that ever roused the Obeachians from their usual “Peace, dude,” torpor was when Starbucks wanted to move into the neighborhood.

Then there was civil insurrection, or the Obeachian version of it anyway.

“The Frisbees will be flying tomorrow,” Johnny Banzai had correctly predicted, and, indeed, there was a mass Frisbee demonstration, a marathon Hacky Sack show of force, and a sit-in along Newport Avenue, which didn’t really work because a bunch of people sitting on the sidewalk doing nothing looked pretty much like any other day. So corporate culture, in the personification of Starbucks, won out, but it’s really there for tourists because the Obeachians won’t go near the place. Neither will Boone.

“I respect all local taboos,” he says.

And you have to love a community that named one of its major streets after Voltaire, and that Voltaire Street leads to a beach set aside for dogs. Dog Beach occupies a prime piece of real estate that curls around from the floodway onto the open ocean, and you can see some of the best quadrupedal Frisbee athletes in the world there. Of course, they can’t throw the disk, but they can sure as hell run and catch it, doing sometimes spectacular leaps and spins to bring it down. You also have surfing dogs at Dog Beach. Some of them ride in tandem in front of their masters, but others actually ride on their own, their masters setting them on the board just in front of the white water.

All of which inspired a conversation the day The Dawn Patrol went down to check out the Frisbee demonstration, got bored, and walked over to watch dogs surf.

“Have you ever pulled a dog out of the water?” Boone asked Dave.

“No. Dogs are generally smarter than people.”

“Plus, they have better traction,” Johnny observed. “Lower center of gravity and four feet on the board instead of two.”

“Paws,” Sunny said.

“Huh?”

“Not feet,” Sunny said. “Paws.”

“Right.”

“But they can’t paddle,” Hang Twelve said, maybe a little jealous
because prior to this conversation he held the “most toes on a board” honors.

“Dogs can’t paddle?” High Tide asked.

“No,” Hang said.

“You ever heard of the ‘dog paddle’?” Tide said.

“That thing little kids do in swimming pools?” Hang asked.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”

“Where did they get the name?” Tide asked.

Hang thought about this for a few seconds, then said, “But dogs can’t paddle
boards;
that’s what I meant. Dogs weren’t meant to surf.”