Dawn Patrol (9 page)

Or take the famous tale of Dave’s shark.

Dave’s out one day showing a young lifeguard some of the finer points. They’re on those lifeguard boards, bright red longboards the size of small boats, paddling south, cutting across the long bend of coast from La Jolla Shores to La Jolla Cove, and suddenly the young lifeguard sits upright on his board and looks deathly pale.

Dave looks down and sees blood flowing into the water from his boy’s right leg and then he sees why. A great white, cruising the cove for its favorite dish, has mistaken the rookie’s black wet-suited leg for a seal and taken a chunk out of it. Now the shark is circling back to finish the meal.

Dave paddles between them—and you get this story from the rookie,
not from Dave—sits up, kicks the shark in the snout and says, “Get out of here.”

Kicks it again and repeats, “I said get your skanky shark ass out of here.”

And the shark does.

It does a dorsal flip and scoots.

Then Dave cuts the leash off his board, ties it off as a tourniquet for the newbie’s leg, and tows him to shore. Gets him into an ambulance, announces he’s hungry, and walks over to La Playa for a burger at Jeff’s Burger.

That’s Dave.

(“You know what I did after I had that burger?” Dave told Boone privately. “I went to the can by tower thirty-eight and threw it all up. I was that scared, man.”)

Lifeguard candidates go to great lengths either to get into Dave’s training classes or to dodge them. The ones who aspire to be great want him as their instructor; the ones who just want to get by avoid him like wet-suit rash.

Because Dave is brutal.

He
tries
to wash them out, doing everything this side of legal to expose their weaknesses—physical, mental, or emotional.

“If they’re going to fail,” he said one day to Boone as they watched one of his classes do underwater sit-ups in the break, “I want it to be
now
, not when some poor kook who’s about to drown needs them to succeed.”

That’s the thing: It doesn’t matter if there’s twenty people taken out by the undertow or blood in the water and sharks circling; a lifeguard has to arrive in the middle of that chaos as cool as a March morning and ask in a mellow tone if people would like to work their way to shore now, but there’s, like, no rush.

Because the thing that kills most people in the water is panic.

They brain-lock and do stupid things—try to fight the tide, or swim in exactly the wrong direction, or start flapping their arms and wearing themselves out. If they’d just chill out and lie back, or tread water, and wait for the cavalry to arrive, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they’d be okay. But they panic and start to hyperventilate and then it’s over—unless that calm, cool lifeguard is out there to bring them back.

This is why Dave keeps trying to recruit Boone.

He knows that BD would make a great lifeguard. Boone’s a natural waterman with genius-level ocean smarts, an indefatigable swimmer, his body
ripped
from daily surfing. And as for cool, well, Boone is the walking definition of cool.

The panic gene just skipped Boone.

And it’s not just speculation on Dave’s part. Boone was out there that day the riptide took all those people. Just happened to be there shooting the shit with Dave and
deliberately
swam out into a riptide and paddled around, calming the terrified tourists, propping up the ones who were about to go under, and smiling and laughing like he was in a warm wading pool.

And Dave will never forget what he heard Boone saying to the people as the lifeguard and his crew were desperately struggling to save lives: “Hey, no worries! We’ve got the best people in the world out here to bring us in!”

“What brings you to my realm?” Dave asks him now.

“Business.”

“Anytime you’re ready to sign on the dotted,” Dave says, “I have a gig for you. You could be wearing a pair of these way-cool Day-Glo orange trunks inside a month.”

It’s a joke between them—why lifeguard trunks, life jackets, and even life rafts are manufactured in the exact color that research has shown is most tantalizing to sharks. Day-Glo orange is just catnip to a great white.

“You have an encyclopedic knowledge of local strippers,” Boone says.

“And a lot of people think that’s easy,” Dave says. “They don’t realize the long hours, the dedication—”

“The sacrifices you make.”

“The sacrifices,” Dave agrees.

“But
I
do.”

“And I appreciate that, BD,” Dave says. “How can I be of service to you?”

Boone’s not sure he can, but he’s hoping he can, because the dead woman at the pool had that stereotypical teased-out stripper hair, and a stripper body. And it’s been Boone’s experience that strippers have stripper friends. This is because of the odd hours, and also because women who aren’t strippers usually don’t want to have friends who are because they’re afraid the dancers will steal their boyfriends.

So he’s playing the odds that say the Jane Doe is a stripper.

“I need to ID a dancer,” Boone says. “Redhead, an off-the-rack rack, an angel tattoo on her left wrist.”

“Gimme putt,” Dave says. “Angela Hart.”

“Angel
Heart
?”

“A nom de strip,” Dave says. “What about her?”

“She a … uh,
friend
of yours?”

“A gentleman doesn’t tell, BD,” says Dave. “But that’s a serious tone you’ve adopted. What’s underneath it?”

“She’s dead.”

Dave stares out over the ocean. The waves are starting to get bigger, and choppy, and the color of the water is a dark gray.

“Dead how?” Dave asks.

“Maybe suicide.”

Dave shakes his head. “Not Angela. She was a force of nature.”

“She ever work at Silver Dan’s?”

“Didn’t they all?”

“Was she friends with a girl named Tammy?”

“They were tight,” Dave says. “What’s she got to do with this?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Dave nods.

He and Boone sit and look at the water together. Boone doesn’t rush things. He knows his friend is working through it. And the ocean never gets boring—it’s always the same and always different.

Then Dave says, “Angela was pure nectar. You need any help finding out who killed her, you give me a shout.”

“No worries.”

Dave’s back on the ’nocs, scoping the Flatland Barbies back to their hotel room.

Boone knows that he’s looking but he
isn’t
, you know.

Boone doesn’t get far from the lifeguard tower.

He’s on the boardwalk, heading back toward his ride, when who should he see, on a kid’s dirt bike with tires thicker than a Kansas prom queen, than—

Red Eddie.

Red Eddie is a Harvard-educated, Hawaiian-Japanese-Chinese-Portuguese-Anglo-Californian with traffic-cone red hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah—traffic cones aren’t red, they’re orange, and Eddie’s first name isn’t Eddie, it’s Julius. But there isn’t a soul on this earth who has the stones to call the dude “Orange Julius.”

Not Boone, not Dave the Love God, not Johnny Banzai, not even High Tide, because Red Eddie is usually surrounded by at least a six-pack of super size Hawaiian
moke
guys and Eddie don’t think nothing about letting the dogs out.

Red Eddie deals
pakololo
.

His old man, who owned a few dozen grocery stores in Oahu, Kauai, and the Big Island, sent Eddie from the north shore of Oahu to Harvard and then to Wharton Business School, and Eddie returned to the island with a sound business plan. It was Eddie who put the Wowie in Maui, the high in hydro. He brings massive amounts of the stuff in by boat. They drop it offshore in watertight plastic wrap, and Eddie’s guys go out at night in Zodiacs, the small double-pontoon motorboats, and bring it in.

“I’m a missionary,” Eddie said to Boone one night at The Sundowner. “Remember how missionaries sailed from America to Hawaii to spread the good word and totally fuck up the culture? I’m returning the favor. Except my good news is benevolent and your culture
needs
fucking up.”

Benevolence has been good to Red Eddie, giving him an ocean-view
mansion in La Jolla, a house on the beach in Waimea, and a 110-foot motor yacht docked in San Diego Harbor.

Red Eddie is totally Pacific Rim, the epitome of the current West Coast economic and cultural scene, which is a mélange of Cali-Asian-Polynesian. Like a good salsa, Boone thinks, with a little mango and pineapple mixed in.

Boone and Eddie go back.

Like a lot of stories in this part of the world, it starts in the water.

Eddie has a kid from a high school indiscretion.

The kid doesn’t live with Eddie—he lives with his mother in Oahu—but Keiki Eddie comes for visits. He was about three years old on one of these visits, when a big swell hit the coast and Keiki Eddie’s idiot nanny decided it would be a good idea to take her charge for a walk on La Jolla Cove to see the big waves. (Like he had never seen them on the North Shore, right?) One of the big waves smashed into the jetty and took Keiki Eddie back with it, so the kid was really getting a close-up look at the big mackers.

These things usually end badly. Like, the best news is they find the body.

Call it luck, call it God, call it karma—but Boone Daniels, designed by DNA for just this situation, was also there checking out the big waves, using the long view from La Jolla to scope the best break. He heard a scream, saw the nanny pointing, and spotted Keiki Eddie’s head bobbing in the surf. Boone jumped into the next wave, grabbed Keiki Eddie, and kept them both from being smashed into the rocks.

It made the
Union-Tribune
.

LOCAL SURFER RESCUES CHILD
.

Next day, Boone was hanging at home, chilling out from the big wave session he’d done after hauling the kid out of the water, when the doorbell rang. Boone opened the door to see this diminutive guy with red hair, tattoos on every part of his exposed skin except his face.

“Anything you want,” the guy said. “Anything you want in this world.”

“I don’t want anything,” Boone said.

Eddie tried to lay cash on him, dope on him; Eddie wanted to buy him a freaking house, a boat. Boone finally settled for dinner at the Marine Room. Eddie offered to
buy
him the Marine Room.

“I don’t see myself in the restaurant business,” Boone said.

“What do you see yourself in?” Eddie asked. “You want in my business, brah, speak the word, I’ll set you up.”

“I play for the other team,” Boone said, not meaning that he was a lesbian all-female outrigger canoe paddler, but a freaking police officer.

Not that it got in the way of their friendship. Boone wasn’t on the narc squad and he didn’t make judgments. He had done a little herb in his grom past, and even though he’d grown out of it, he didn’t much care what other people did.

So he and Eddie started hanging out a little bit. Eddie became sort of an adjunct member of The Dawn Patrol, although he didn’t turn up too often because dawn for Eddie is about one p.m. But he did come around, got to know Dave and Tide, Hang, Sunny and even Johnny, who kept a little distance, due to the potentially adversarial nature of their professions.

Boone, Dave, and Tide would go over to Eddie’s house and watch MMA matches on his flat-screen plasma. Eddie’s really big into the mixed martial arts, which sprang up in Hawaii anyway, and sponsors his team of fighters, named, unsurprisingly enough, Team Eddie. So they’d hang and watch the fights, or go in Eddie’s entourage to the live shows in Anaheim, and Eddie even got Boone to voyage as far away from the ocean as Las Vegas to catch some fights with him and Dave.

And most of The Dawn Patrol was present at Eddie’s notorious housewarming party in La Jolla.

Eddie’s sprawling modernist mansion occupies an acre on a bluff overlooking the ocean at Bird Rock. The neighbors were, like,
appalled
, what with the
moke
guys coming and going, and the parties, and the pounding music, the sounds from Eddie’s skateboard tube (Eddie has been known to board off the roof of his house into the barrel), his skeet-shooting range, and his racing up and down the street on his mountain bike while screened by a squadron of heavily armed bodyguards. So the pink polo shirt, yellow golf trouser set that live around Eddie was seriously geeked by him, but what were they going to do about it?

Nothing, that’s what.

Nada.

They weren’t going over there to complain about the noise; they weren’t going to call the police; they weren’t going to go to the zoning board with questions about whether a skeet-shooting range or private skateboard park were even allowed in their heretofore quiet neighborhood.
They weren’t going to do any of these things, because the neighbors were scared shitless of Red Eddie.

Eddie felt bad about this and tried to alleviate their anxieties by inviting the whole neighborhood over for a luau one Sunday afternoon.

Of course, it turned into a shipwreck.

And one of the first people Eddie invited aboard the
Titanic
was Boone.

“You
gotta
come,” Eddie said into the phone after he’d explained the purpose behind the invitation. “Moral support. Bring your whole
hui
, the
ohana
.”

By which he meant The Dawn Patrol.

Boone was reluctant, to say the least. It
doesn’t
take a weather vane to know which way the wind blows, and it didn’t take a Savonarola to predict how this little Sunday afternoon gathering was going to turn out. But misery does love company, so Boone brought the subject up at the very next meeting of The Dawn Patrol and was surprised when most of them actually expressed enthusiasm about going.

“You’re kidding, right?” Boone asked.

“I wouldn’t miss this circus for the world,” Johnny Banzai said.

Yeah, well, circus was about right.

The hula dancers were fine, the ukulele, slack-key guitar, and surfreggae combo was interesting, if somewhat esoteric, and the sumo wrestlers were, well, sumo wrestlers. High Tide, a late entry, nevertheless took the bronze, while Cheerful wondered aloud just what the hell fat men in diapers were doing bumping bellies in a circle of sand.