Dawn Patrol (34 page)

The cargo is down below.

Terrified.

Crying, whimpering, vomiting.

Up on top, Juan Carlos says to Esteban, “This thing’s going under!”

He might be right, Esteban thinks. The boat is a dog, a bottom-heavy tub built for calm seas and sunny days, not for sledding down the face of mountains. It’s bound to capsize. They’d be better off in the lifeboat.

Which is what Juan Carlos is thinking. Esteban can see it in the older
man’s eyes. Juan Carlos is in his forties but looks older. His face is lined with more than the sea and the sun; his eyes show that he’s seen some things in his life. Esteban is just a teenager—he’s seen nothing—but he knows he doesn’t want to carry this memory on the inside of his eyelids for the rest of his life.

“What about them?” Esteban yells, pointing below.

Juan Carlos shrugs. There isn’t room in the life raft for them. It’s a shame, but a lot of things in life are a shame.

“I’m not doing it,” Esteban says, shaking his head. “I’m not just leaving them out here.”

“You’ll do what I tell you!”

Esteban plays the trump card. “What would Danny say? He’d kill us, man!”

“Fuck Danny! He’s not out here, is he?” Juan Carlos replies. “You’d better worry about not dying out here; then you can worry what Danny’s going to do!”

Esteban looks down at the children below.

It’s wrong.

“I’m not doing it.”

“The fuck you’re not,” Juan Carlos says. He whips the knife out from beneath his rain slicker and thrusts it toward Esteban’s throat. Two will have a much better chance handling the lifeboat in these seas than one.

“Okay, okay,” Esteban says. He helps Juan Carlos unlash the lifeboat and swing it over the side. It takes a while because they have to wait several times as the boat slides and then crests, almost tipping over. He and Juan Carlos have to grip the rails with all their strength just to hang on and not be pitched into the sea.

They swing the boat out, but they can’t climb into it because the boat rolls in that direction, almost lying flat on the water, the sea just inches from the gunwales. Juan Carlos slides toward the water but catches himself on the rail, his strong hands gripping for his life.

Esteban kicks at the older man’s hands.

Holding on himself, he kicks again and again as Juan Carlos screams at him. But Esteban keeps kicking him. Juan Carlos never breaks his grip, but Esteban’s feet break his fingers and the older man loses his hold and slips into the ocean. He tries to grab Esteban’s leg and take the boy with him, but his hands are too smashed to hold on and the ocean takes him.

Juan Carlos can’t swim.

Esteban watches him struggle for a moment and then go under.

When the boat rights itself again, Esteban hauls himself up, staggers to the wheel, and turns the boat back into the oncoming wave. With his other hand, he unties his rope belt, then uses it to fasten himself to the column of the wheel.

And prays.

San Andrés, I have fallen so far into evil that I would sell children. But I would not kill them, so I beg you for mercy. Have mercy on us all.

The sea rises up in front of him.

Dave can’t believe what he’s looking at.

He crests the top of a wave and sees the boat sitting in the trench, sideways to the oncoming wave, dangerously low in the water, sitting like a log to be rolled. The lifeboat dangles to the starboard side on its davits, as if the “Abandon ship” order had been given but not executed.

Where the hell is the captain? Dave wonders. What’s he thinking?

Dave surfs the Zodiac down the wave, racing the break to the boat. He gets there seconds before, enough time to jump on, tie on, and hold on as the wave smashes into the side and knocks the boat on its side.

Miraculously, it bobs back up again, and Dave makes his way to the wheelhouse.

The pilot’s unconscious, lying on the deck, next to the wheel, blood running from a cut on his head. Dave recognizes young Esteban from several of these pickups, but what the fuck is the boy doing tied to the wheel? And where is Juan Carlos?

Dave turns the boat back into the surf, locks the wheel on that setting, and kneels down beside Esteban. The kid’s eyes open, and he smiles.

“San Andrés …”

Saint Andrew, my ass, Dave thinks.

Then he hears voices.

It’s a night for weird voices. It could be the wind playing tricks, but these voices seem to be coming from below.

He walks around and opens the hatch.

Can’t fucking believe what he sees:

Six, maybe seven young girls huddled together.

Dave gags.

Even standing on deck in the sea air, the bottom reeks of vomit, urine, and shit, and Dave has to fight not to gag. Dave the Love God is seriously shaken up, maybe for the first time in his entire life. “Stay there,” he yells, shoving his palms out to make his point. “Just stay there!”

He strides back to the wheelhouse. Esteban is picking himself up off the deck. Dave grabs him by the front of the shirt and shoves him against the wheel.

“What the
fuck
?” Dave yells.

Esteban just shakes his head.

“I didn’t sign up for
this
!” Dave hollers. “Nobody told me about
this
!”

“I’m sorry!”

“Where’s Juan Carlos?”

Esteban points to the water. “He fell over.”

Good, Dave thinks. Adi-fucking-os. He’d just as soon toss Esteban over the side, too, but he needs him to help get these kids off the sinking boat and into the Zodiac.

It isn’t easy.

The girls are sick, dizzy, and scared to death, reluctant to leave what little safety they have on the boat for the pitching sea. It takes all of Dave’s lifeguard demeanor to calm them down and get them into his boat. He gets in first and stretches up his arms while Esteban hands them down one by one. He settles them into the Zodiac, carefully arranging them to balance the weight.

The boat is going to be too heavy and sit too low in the water to be
really safe, but there isn’t really a choice. He either leaves them out here or he does his best to get them all in. He’s not so worried about the open sea—the storm is calming down and he can negotiate the swells. The critical moment is going to be busting through the shore break, where the overloaded boat could easily flip or swamp. He doubts any of these kids are strong swimmers. If he doesn’t bring the boat in upright, most of them will probably drown in the heavy white water that comes with the big swell.

Esteban hands the last girl down and then starts to climb in.

Dave stops him.

“You’re not on the list,
pacheco
.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Turn the boat around and take it back to Mexico,” Dave says. “What do you usually do?”

“I can’t go back,” Esteban says.

“Why not?”

Esteban hesitates, then says, “I killed Juan Carlos. He was going to leave them out here.”

“Get in.”

Dave works his way to the aft of the boat.

There’s no place for him to sit down, so he stands.

Boone pulls into Teddy’s driveway and gets out of the car.

The night air is wet, somewhere between mist and gentle rain. The light coming from Teddy’s living room window looks soft and warm.

Boone can see them through the window. Teddy’s at the bar, fixing a stiff and dirty martini. Tammy paces the room. He tries to give her the drink, but she won’t take it, so Teddy sips it himself.

He looks startled when Boone rings the doorbell.

Looks to Tammy, who looks back at him and shrugs.

Boone waits as Teddy opens the door a crack, the chain link left on. Boone shoves the pistol through the crack and says, “Hi. Can I come in?”

Yeah, he can.

A gun is its own invitation.

Teddy unhooks the chain lock and opens the door.

Boone goes in and kicks it shut behind him.

Teddy’s house is as beautiful as he’d expected. Huge living room with a vaulted ceiling. Expensive custom paint with faux brush techniques. Expensive modern paintings and sculpture, a grand piano.

The center of the room is taken up with a floor-to-ceiling column that’s a saltwater aquarium. A startlingly bright panoply of tropical fish circle serenely around the column. Tall green undersea plants stretch up toward the surface and wave like thin fingers in the mild, motor-driven current. At the back of the room, a slider gives a view of a huge spotlighted deck and, beyond that, the open ocean.

“Nice,” Boone says.

“Thanks.”

“Hi, Tammy.”

She glares at him. “What do you want?”

“Just the truth.”

“Trust me, you don’t want it.”

“There’s a little girl involved,” Boone says. “Now you’re going to tell me the truth or, I swear, I’ll splatter both of you all over this pretty room.”

Teddy walks back toward the bar. “Would you like a drink?” he asks. “You’re going to need one.”

“Just the story, thanks.”

“Suit yourself,” Teddy says, “but I’m sitting down. It’s been an exhausting couple of days, as you know.”

He sits down in the large leather easy chair and looks at the fish in his tank. “Tell him, Tammy. It’s almost over now anyway.”

Tammy tells her story.

Tammy grew up in El Cajon, out in East County.

The usual stereotypical stripper back story: Her dad wasn’t around a lot; her mom made an unsteady living as a waitress in a local restaurant and usually stayed for a few beers after her shift was over.

She was a lonely little girl. A latchkey kid who made herself instant macaroni and cheese, which she ate while watching celebrity shows on television and dreaming about becoming one of the actresses on the red carpet. It didn’t seem likely then—she was skinny and gangly and had red hair, which the boys made fun of.

They stopped making jokes around the time she turned fourteen. Tammy didn’t blossom—she
exploded
into a sexuality that seemed to happen overnight and was scary and confusing to her. Suddenly, boys wanted her, and she saw the way that grown men looked at her when she’d go to the restaurant to say hello to her mom. She wanted to say to them, I’m fourteen years old; I’m a kid. But she was afraid to speak to or even look back at them.

A good thing. Men would see the intensity in those incredible green eyes and mistake it for something else.

Okay, she learned to use it, she admits it freely. Why not? High school was a nightmare. She was never good at school—there were diagnoses of dyslexia and ADD—so being an actress wasn’t going to happen. She couldn’t read a script out loud and never got cast in the Drama Club productions. She thought about being a model, but you don’t exactly bump into Eileen Ford in El Cajon, and she couldn’t afford the money for photographers to create a portfolio. She did a little modeling for a local “sportswear” catalog and made a couple hundred dollars, but that was about it.

Tammy graduated from high school with a C-minus average, and it looked like waiting tables was her future. She did it for a year or so, enduring the crappy tips, the leers, the comments, and the offers, and then one day when she was twenty, she was walking home in the hundred-plus heat along the flat sunbaked sidewalk and decided that she had to do something, anything, to get out of there. So she took her red hair, amazing green eyes, and long legs, got on a bus to Mira Mesa, walked into a strip club, and auditioned.

She thought it would be hard, but it wasn’t so hard, taking her clothes off. Okay, so it wasn’t the red carpet; it was a platform and a pole. And yes, it was a cliché. But Tammy learned quickly that if she paused in her dance and cast those eyes out over the front row, she would get tips; if she picked out one guy and trained those cat eyes on him, she could easily get him into the Champagne Room, or the VIP Room, or whatever the hell room where the bigger money got made.

A year or so later, she found her way to Silver Dan’s.

A couple of weeks after that, Dan Silver found his way to her.

Of course he did.

The owner of a strip club—in this case, a chain of strip clubs—has a sort of droit du seigneur when it comes to the girls. They don’t have to date him, and if they do date him, they don’t have to sleep with him, but it’s a good professional move if they do.

You sleep with the boss, you don’t have to blow the night manager to get a good shift. The bartenders pour your drinks without coming on to you or wanting a cut. The other girls find space for you in front of the mirror. The really creepy customers pick up on the vibe and keep their distance.

Tammy had been around long enough to know that, and even if she hadn’t, Angela would have told her. Angela was her best friend at Silver Dan’s. They hit it off right away—similar background, similar outlook, same tough attitude. It was Angela who told her that if the boss came calling, she’d better open the gates, or life could get impossible for her at the club.

So she dated Dan.

Yeah, but it was more than that, wasn’t it, if she really wants to look at the truth of herself. Dan wasn’t just a convenient lay or a good dinner—like most pimps, he was a daddy. He was that fucking father figure she’d
been missing. Cliché, cliché, stereotype, and cliché but there it was. He treated her like a daughter and a fuck, incest sans the DNA and felony concerns, made her obey him and wear the clothes he picked out, made her call him “Daddy” as he did her from behind and pulled her hair like you’d jerk on the reins of a recalcitrant filly. She hated it and she loved it.

She started sleeping with Mick Penner as rebellion. He was the opposite of a daddy—a boy-child lady-killer who fucked up and fell in love with her. She’d still come when Dan beckoned—and God knows how many other women he was doing on the side—but she’d go bang Mick and play house with him, and Mick treated her gently and with consideration, and she couldn’t get too much of that.

She
was
with Danny the night of the fire. He told her to wait in the car, but she got bored and impatient. She stood outside and smoked a cigarette, but when that was done, she thought, Fuck Danny, and went inside.