Dawn Patrol (14 page)

“That thing that runs from the board to your ankle,” Tide said. “What’s it called?”

“The leash,” Hang replied.

“End of story,” said Tide.

They eventually resolved that if dogs
could
paddle boards, they’d be the world champion surfers every year, because dogs
never
fall. They jump off at the end of the ride, shake the water out of their fur, and wait to go back out again.

“Kind of like you,” Dave said to Tide. “You jump off, shake your fur, and go back out again.”

Because Tide is one hairy guy.

“They’ve been looking for Bigfoot all over those remote forests,” Johnny chimed in. “They should have just come out to PB and looked into the water.”

“Surfing Sasquatch,” Sunny said. “Film at eleven.”

Anyway, they hung out for a while, watched dogs surf and chase Frisbees, then went back to Newport Street, to find that the protestors had gotten bored sitting around there and had gone to find another place to sit around and maybe get some coffee.

You gotta love Ocean Beach.

Now Boone turns inland onto Brighton Avenue, pulls up in front of Angela Hart’s four-story apartment building, and tells Petra to—

“I know,” she says. “ ‘Wait in the van.’ ”

“You’re an officer of the court,” Boone says, digging around the back of the van for his burglary tools. “Do you really want to witness breaking and entering? Stay here, be a lookout.”

He finds the thin metal jimmy.

“What should I do if I see something?” Petra asks.

“Warn me.” He gets out of the van.

“How?”

“Honk?”

“How many—”

“Just freaking
honk
, okay?”

He goes into the building and walks up to the third floor, ready to slip the lock, but someone already has. Boone listens for a few seconds but doesn’t hear anyone moving around. Unless, he thinks, whoever’s in there heard me coming up the stairs and is staying still, waiting behind the door to blast me when I come in.

Boone opens the door a little, then quickly shuts it again. Doesn’t hear anything, so he kicks the door wide open and goes in hard, hands up and ready.

Nothing.

Whoever was here came and went. Which is really bad news, because whoever was here might have taken Tammy with him.

Boone has a sickening thought.

Killers usually kill the same way. They don’t mix it up. A guy who fucked up and tossed the wrong woman off a balcony would probably try to redeem himself by tossing the right woman off a balcony.

Boone sees the slider that opens off the small living room. The slider is open; a slight breeze blows the curtain back.

He walks across the room, steps out onto the balcony, and looks down.

Nothing but the little garden.

No woman’s body, splayed and broken.

Boone takes a deep breath and steps back inside. It’s your typical one-bedroom San Diego apartment—a living room with a small kitchenette attached, separated by a breakfast bar. Furniture from Ikea. There are, as Boone might have noted in his cop days, no signs of a struggle. Everything looks tidy—magazines neatly arranged on the coffee table, no drag marks on the blue carpet.

If someone took her, she went without a fight. Which she would have done, Boone thinks, if they had a gun pointed at her.

The bad news is that whoever broke in didn’t toss the place. Wasn’t
looking for clues to Tammy’s whereabouts, maybe because he already had her.

He steps into the kitchenette. Most of a pot of coffee sits in the white Krups automatic maker. The little red light shows it’s still on. A half-full cup sits on the counter. Cute little mug with smiling hippos holding red balloons. Coffee with milk in it. A half piece of wheat toast, no butter, on a small orange plate.

And a small jar of nail polish.

The lid on, but not tight.

She left, willingly or not, in a hurry.

He goes into the bedroom.

The bed’s unmade.

And smells like a woman.

What is it Johnny B. calls me when he wants to bust my chops? “Sheet sniffer”? It’s true. And the bed does smell like a woman slept in it recently. One woman, alone. It’s a double bed, but the covers are only pulled back on the left side.

The room is very feminine. Frilly, girlie, pink. A teddy bear with a red ribbon around its neck sits on the right side of the bed, up against the headboard. Strippers, Boone thinks, and their stuffed animals.

He checks out the framed photos on top of the chest of drawers. Angela and what looks to be her mother. Angela and a sister. Angela and Tammy. It’s weird, sad, to look at these pictures of a smiling woman with her family and friends and think of the body lying by the pool, her head in a halo of blood.

Boone studies the picture of Tammy—long red hair, a chiseled face with a long nose that totally works for her, thin lips.

But it’s her eyes that get to you.

Cat-shaped green eyes that glow out of the photo.

Like a big dangerous cat staring at you from out of the dark. A lot of strength in those eyes, a lot of power. It surprises him. Her MySpace photo that he’d had Hang pull up had showed the typical dumb stripper. This picture shows something else, and he’s not sure what that is.

She’s smiling in this picture, her arms around Angela’s shoulders. The picture looks like it was taken on some sort of outing—biking, maybe. Angela has a white ball cap jammed on her head, her red ponytail sticking out through the back. She’s laughing, happy—Boone can understand why
she framed this picture. A good memory of good times. He’d bet that he’d find the same picture at Tammy’s place.

He opens the closet and flips through the clothes. They’re all in Angela’s size, not Tammy’s, who’s a good couple of inches taller, and also a little thinner. So if Tammy was here, she brought an overnight bag, didn’t unpack it, and left with it. Which is a good sign, because kidnappers don’t usually let their victim take along luggage. Unless they played her, told her she was just going on a vacation until things blew over, let her take her bag to reassure her.

Boone goes into the bathroom.

Opens the shower curtain. It’s still wet on the inside, as are the shower walls. The toothbrush on the sink is still moist. So is the cap on the tube of facial cleanser.

She slept alone, Boone thinks, got up late, showered, cleaned up, made toast and coffee, and sat down on a stool at the kitchen counter to do her nails while she ate.

But she didn’t finish.

Neither her nails nor the meal.

He opens the medicine cabinet. The usual array of girl stuff on the shelves. Only one prescription bottle for Biaxin, written for Angela—an antibiotic that she didn’t finish taking. Some Tylenol, aspirin, makeup bottles … no birth-control pills, which he would have expected to find.

He walks out of the bedroom and heads out, stopping to take the bottle of nail polish and put it in his pocket. He also shuts the slider door.

Even in San Diego, you never know when it might rain.

“Well?” Petra asks when he gets back to the van.

“You’re sort of a woman,” Boone says. “Do you remember what kind of scent Tammy wears?”

“CK,” Petra replies, ignoring the insult. “Why?”

He pulls out the bottle of nail polish and shows it to her.

“That’s what she wore to our meeting.”

“She was just there,” Boone says, slamming his hand into the wheel. “She was
just there
.”

Petra is a bit surprised, and pleased, to see him display a little frustration. My God, she thinks, could it be a sign of some drive in the man? She’s also amused, and a little intrigued, that he has a knowledge of women’s perfumes.

“They might have her,” Boone says. He explains what he saw in Angela’s apartment.

“What do we do?” she asks.

“We cruise the neighborhood,” he says, “in case she’s still around, not knowing what to do or where to go next. If we don’t see her, you take a taxi back to your office while I canvass the neighborhood.”

He would have just said “while I hang out and talk to people,” but he thought she’d like “canvass the neighborhood” better. Besides, it might distract her from the “back to your office” part.

It doesn’t.

“Why is my absence required?” she asks.

“Because no one will talk to you,” Boone says. “And they won’t talk to me if I’m with you.”

“I’m some sort of social leper?”

“Yes.”

Sort of a woman
, she thinks.
Social leper
. Then she says, “Men will talk to me.”

Pleased by his lack of response, she adds, “Hang Twelve talked to me. Cheerful talked to me. They gave you up to me in a heartbeat.”

They did, Boone thinks. In less than a heartbeat.

“Okay,” he says. “You can hang.”

Lovely, she thinks. I can hang.

Yeah, she hangs, but that doesn’t produce Tammy Roddick.

If Tammy is walking the streets of Ocean Beach, she’s disguised as a wino, an old hippie, a middle-aged hippie, a young retro hippie, a white rasta dude with blond dreads, an emaciated vegan, a retired guy, or one of the dozen or so surfers waiting for the big swell to go off at Rockslide.

Petra talks to all of them.

Having established the point that she can talk to men, she feels obligated to do just that, and she gets a lot of useful information.

The wino (for two dollars) tells her that she has a lovely smile; the old hippie informs her that rain is nature’s way of moistening the earth; the middle-aged hippie hasn’t seen Tammy but knows a wonderful place for green tea; the young retro hippie hasn’t seen Tammy, either, but offers to give Petra a Reiki massage to ease her obvious tension (and his). The white rasta guy knows exactly where Tammy is and will take Petra there for the price of a cigar, except that he describes Tammy as a five-foot-four blonde, while the vegan informs her that his clean diet makes his natural essences taste sweet, and the retired guy hasn’t seen Tammy but offers to spend the rest of his life helping Petra look for her.

The surfers tell her to come back after the big swell.

“Guys will definitely talk to you,” Boone says when Petra tells him about her conversations. “No question.”

“And I suppose you, on the other hand, have produced a definite lead.”

Nope.

Nobody’s seen anybody who looks like Tammy. Nobody on the street saw her leaving Angela’s building. Nobody saw nothing.

“So now what do we do?” Petra asks.

“We go to her place of employment,” Boone says.

“I hardly think she’s at work,” Petra snaps.

“I hardly think so, either,” Boone says. “But someone there might know something?”

“Oh,” Petra says. She looks at her watch. “But it’s only two in the afternoon. Don’t we want to wait until evening?”

“Strip clubs are open twenty-four/seven.”

“They are?” Petra says. Then: “Of course, I suppose you’d know.”

“Believe it or not,” Boone says as he gets back into the Boonemobile, “I really don’t spend that much time in strip clubs. As a matter of fact, I rarely go to them at all.”

“Sure you don’t.”

Boone shrugs. “Believe what you want.”

But it’s the truth, he thinks. Strip clubs are interesting for about five minutes. After that, they’re about as erotic as wallpaper. Besides which, the music is terrible and the food is worse. You’d have to be basically mentally ill to eat in a strip club anyway, “naked asses” and “buffet line” being two phrases that should never, ever, be matched in the same sentence. Guys who are coming off a prison hunger strike won’t eat at a strip club unless they’re actually brain-damaged.

Speaking of which, Hang Twelve had eaten like a starved baboon when they took him to Silver Dan’s for his birthday. The kid scarfed the buffet like a vacuum cleaner, from one end of the table to the other.

“It’s amazing,” said High Tide, no stranger to the sin of gluttony himself, watching him. “It’s almost admirable, in a disgusting kind of way.”

“I feel like I’m watching something on the Nature Channel,” Dave said as Hang stacked a handful of luncheon meats on a Kaiser roll, spread a huge glob of mayonnaise over the meat, and started to eat with one hand while dipping a spear of broccoli into a tub of onion dip with the other.

“Animal Planet?” Tide asked.

“Yeah.”

“At least he’s eating his vegetables,” Johnny said. “That’s good.”

“Yeah?” Dave asked. “I wonder if he saw the guy that just had his hand on his package get to the broccoli first.”

“Over the jeans or under?” Johnny asked.

“Under.”

“God.” Then Johnny said, “He’s going for the shrimp, guys. Guys, he’s going for the
shrimp
.”

“I’ll just dial 9-1-1 now,” Boone said. “That extra second could save his life.”

Hang came back to the table and set the heaping plate of food down. His goatee was festooned with crumbs, mayonnaise, onion dip, and some substance that nobody even wanted to try to identify. “Shrimp, anybody?”

They all passed. Hang consumed a couple of dozen shrimp, two huge sandwiches, some unidentifiable hors d’oeuvres that nobody even bothered to make the obvious pun about, twenty miniature pigs in a blanket (ditto), a pile of cottage fries, three helpings of Silver Dan’s “pasta medley,” and some strawberry Jell-O with grapes (and God knows what else) floating around in it.

Then he wiped his chin and said, “I’m going back.”

“Go for it,” Boone said. “It’s your birthday.”

“His
last
,” Johnny said as they watched Hang work his way down the table again like a piece of machinery on a mass-production line.

“Over/under on the number of hairs he’s swallowed?” Dave asked.

“Scalp or pubic?” asked Johnny.

“Forget it,” Dave said.

Hang came back to the table with a plate of food that would have dismayed a Roman orgiast. “Good thing I went back,” he said. “They put out fresh cheese.”

Boone looked at the fresh cheese. It was sweating.

“I need a little air,” he said.

But he hung in, staring at Hang Twelve with a mixture of awe and horror. The kid never came up to breathe; he just kept robotically shoveling food into his mouth as his eyes never left the stage. Hang’s wholehearted devotion to free food and naked women was almost touching in its religiosity.