The Gentlemen's Hour (10 page)

“Let me catch a little more air,” Boone says.

“Weak unit.”

Again, accurate, Boone thinks. He takes in a couple more lungfuls and then they swim to shore and climb out on a shelf of rock.

“Beautiful night,” Dave says.

Too true.

The three decapitated bodies lie in a drainage ditch.

Johnny Banzai shines a flashlight on them, fights off the urge to vomit, and slides down into the ditch. From the relative lack of blood he can tell that the men were killed somewhere else and dumped out here to be seen.

What happens to people who fuck with Don Cruz Iglesias.

Steve Harrington slaps the back of his hand to his forehead and says with a moan,
“¡Ohhh, mi cabeza!”

Funny guy, Harrington.

Johnny checks one of the dead men's wrists for tattoos and finds just what he expected—a tattoo depicting a skull with wings coming out of each side. Los Ángeles Muertos, the Death Angels, are an old-line Barrio Logan street gang who've been revived by hooking up with the Ortega drug cartel across the border. The Criminal Intelligence guys had given Homicide a heads up that the Ortegas had taken a shot at Cruz Iglesias yesterday and missed.

The decapitations are his response, Johnny thinks.

“Any ID on the Juan Does?” Harrington asks.

“Death Angels.”

“Well, they sure are now.”

Johnny's no particular lover of gangbangers, but at the same time he's not happy that the cartels' war for Baja has spilled over into San Diego and threatens to start a full-blown gang war like they haven't seen since the nineties. The Ortegas recruited the Death Angels, Iglesias signed up Los Niños Locos, the Crazy Boys, and now it won't be long before stupid kids and innocent bystanders start getting killed. So he'd just as soon the Mexican cartels kept their shit in Mexico.

The border, he thinks.

What border?

“I guess we're going to have to start looking for the heads,” Harrington says.

Johnny says, “My guess is that they're in dry ice and on their way to Luis Ortega in a UPS package.”

“What Brown can do for you.”

A gory, media-feeding triple is not what I need right now, Johnny thinks. Summer is the busy homicide season in San Diego. The heat shortens emotional
fuses and then lights them. What would be arguments in the autumn become fights in the summer. What would have been simple assaults become murders. Johnny has a fatal stabbing over a disputed bottle of beer, a drive-by that happened after an argument at a taco stand, and a domestic killing that occurred in an apartment after the air-conditioning broke down.

Then there's the Blasingame case headed for trial and Mary Lou all over his ass to make sure his “ducks are in a row.” Whose fucking ducks are ever in a row, anyway? Five eyewitnesses and little Corey clinging to his strong, silent type routine, Mary Lou should just relax. Then again, it's not Mary Lou's nature to relax.

I wouldn't relax either, he admits, with Alan Burke on the other side.

He makes himself focus on the case at hand, even though he knows they're never going to make an arrest on it. This was a professional hit, and the pros who did it are already down in Mexico, knocking back a few beers.

But we have to go through the motions, he thinks.

“Hey,” Harrington says, “what do you call three Mexican gangbangers with no heads?”

“What?” Johnny asks only because it's required.

He already knows the tired punch line.

A good start.

Boone spreads some old newspaper out on the deck and lays the tuna down on it. Taking his fillet knife, kept honed to a fine edge, he slices down the underbelly. He pulls out the guts and throws them over the railing into the ocean. Then he slices up behind the gills on both sides, cuts off the head, and likewise gives it to the sea.

Then he takes the first two fillets he sliced and cuts them into thick steaks and washes them under a spigot. He goes into the kitchen, puts two of the steaks into a Ziploc plastic bag, and puts them in the freezer.

He takes the other two, sprinkles them with a little salt and pepper, rubs some olive oil on, and carries them outside to the little propane grill that is set beside the cottage. He turns the heat up high to get the fish a little crisp, then turns it down to low, goes back inside, and slices up some red onion and a lime, then comes back outside, squeezes some lime juice on the fish, turns it, cooks it for just another minute, then takes it off the grill and goes back inside. He slides each piece of the fish into a flour tortilla, adds a thick slice of red onion on the fish, goes back outside, and sits down in a deck chair beside Dave, handing him one of the tacos.

If, as Dave believes, free food tastes better; and if, as is Boone's motto, “everything tastes better on a tortilla,” then free fish on a tortilla is out of this world. The truth is that if you've never eaten fish that has just been taken out of the ocean, you've never eaten.

Add a couple of ice-cold Dos Equis and two ravenous appetites to the mix and life doesn't get any better. Throw in a soft summer night with a yellow moon and the stars so close you could hit them with a slingshot, and you might be in paradise. Toss a lifelong friendship into that mix, and take the “might” right out of it.

They both know it.

Sit silently and savor it.

When they finish eating Dave asks, “So how's it with Pete?”

“Yeah, good.”

“You close the deal yet?”

Boone doesn't answer and they both laugh. It's an old joke between them. For all the lineup talk about sex, when it comes down to individual women, no one talks. It's just something you don't do.

“When and if you do close the deal,” Dave says, “it's over anyway.”

“Thanks for the good wishes.”

“No,” Dave says, “I mean, right now you have that whole opposites-attract,
Moonlighting
sexual tension thing going for you. Once that's released . . . adiós, my friend.”

“I don't know,” Boone says.

“Get real,” Dave says. “You and the Brit are totally SEI.”

“SEI?”

“Socio-Economically Incompatible,” Dave explains. “She's downtown, you're Pacific Beach. She likes to dine out in great restaurants, you hit Jeff's Burger or Wahoo's. She's all foodie, the next great chef, tasting menu, fusion; you're fish tacos, grilled yellowtail, and peanut butter and jelly on a tortilla. She likes getting dressed up and going out, you like dressing down and staying in.”

“I get it.”

“That's just the Socio, I haven't even hit the Economic,” Dave says. “She makes more a day than you do a month.”

“There are months when I make zero.”

“There aren't months when
she
makes zero,” Dave says. “You don't have the jack to take her to the places she likes to go, and you're not going to accept her picking up the check time after time, gender-enlightened as you like to think you are. Right now she thinks it's all liberated and postfem, but shortly after the first time your board and her wave slap together she's going to start wondering—and all her professional friends are going to tell her to wonder—if you're SEI.”

Boone pops open two more beers and hands one to Dave.

“Mahalo,” Dave says. Then, “And I guarantee you that one night you're going to be lying there postcoit, she's going to gently bring up the possibility . . . No, I can't.”

“Jump.”

“She's going to ask if you wouldn't really be happier going to law school.”

“Jesus, Dave.”

“On that day, my friend,” Dave says, “you bail. You don't even stop to get dressed or pick up your clothes—you can always get a new T-shirt. You backpaddle, flailing your arms like a drowning barney. We will all come racing to your rescue.”

“Can't happen,” Boone says.

“Uh-huh.”

Law school?
Law school?
Boone thinks. The first step to becoming a
lawyer
? Show up at an office every day at nine in a suit and tie? Spend your time shuffling documents and arguing with people. People who
like
to argue?

Hideous.

They sit quietly for a few minutes, drinking in the night and the warm salt air.

Summer was slowly coming to an end, and with it the torpid sea and the days of lassitude. The Santa Ana winds would be blowing in, with bigger surf-and-fire danger, and then the swells of autumn and the colder weather, and the air would be cool and clear again.

Still, there's a certain sadness to the coming end of summer.

The two friends sit and talk bullshit.

Boone doesn't tell Dave that he's working on the Corey Blasingame case.

The case that Boone
still
works on is the Rain Sweeny case.

Rain was six years old and Boone was a cop when she disappeared from the front yard of her house.

The chief suspect was a short-eyes named Russ Rasmussen. Boone and his then partner, Steve Harrington, found Rasmussen. Harrington wanted to beat the answers out of the suspect, but Boone hadn't let him do it. Boone left the force shortly after that but Harrington stayed and worked his way up to sergeant in the Homicide Division.

Rasmussen never told what he did with Rain Sweeny.

He walked and went off the radar.

Rain Sweeny was never found.

Boone became a pariah on the SDPD and pulled the pin shortly after.

That was five years ago, and Boone hasn't stopped trying to find Rain Sweeny, even though he knows that she's almost certainly dead.

Now he sits at his computer and checks a special e-mail file for any updates on the list of Jane Does that would match Rain's age and description. He pays annually for computer constructions of what Rain would look like at her current age, and now he compares her eleven-year-old “photo” with pictures from morgues in Oregon and Indiana.

Neither of the poor girls is Rain.

Boone's relieved. Every time a photo pops up, it stops his heart; every time it's not Rain, Boone feels a bittersweet contradiction of emotions. Glad, of course, that the girl has not been confirmed dead; sad that he can't give her parents closure.

Next he goes to another address and checks for messages about Russ Rasmussen.

Through Johnny Banzai and his own connections, Boone has reached out to the sex crimes units in most major cities and state police forces. Creeps like Rasmussen don't strike just once, and sooner or later he's going to get picked up strolling a park or a schoolyard.

When he does, Boone is going to be there soon after.

He keeps a .38 in a drawer just for the occasion.

Tonight, like all the other nights, there's nothing.

Rasmussen has disappeared.

With Rain.

Gone.

Nevertheless, Boone writes to three more police forces, e-mailing photos of Rain and Rasmussen, the latter in case the skell has managed to change identities and is in custody under a different name.

Then Boone hits the sack and tries to sleep.

It doesn't always come easily.

The next morning's Dawn Patrol is another dull session, surfwise.

The sea is flat glass—any half-competent surgeon could do delicate brain surgery sitting on a longboard in this ocean. Michelangelo could lie on a board and paint the Sistine . . . ahh, you get the idea.

Johnny tries to bust up the monotony.

“Do ducks,” he asks, “really line up in a row?”

“Ducks?” Dave asks. “In a row? Why?”

“Why do I ask, or why do they line up in a row?”

“We haven't established yet that they
do
line up in a row,” Tide says, “so Dave is asking why you're asking. Is that what you're asking, Dave?”

“Yeah, I'm asking why JB wants to know whether ducks line up in a—”

Boone dips his head into the water. When he comes back up Johnny is saying, “You know the expression ‘ducks in a row'? I'm seeking input whether that reflects a zoological reality, or it's just bullshit.”

“It would be an ‘ornithological' reality,” Boone says, “not a ‘zoological' reality.”

“Good pickup, B,” Dave says. “We finally know the question that Banzai missed on his SATs.”

“Let it go, Dave.”

“So?' Johnny asks. “Has anyone actually ever seen ducks in a row?”

“I believe that ducks,” Boone says, “are freshwater creatures. Hence, I don't know that I've actually ever seen
ducks
, in a row or otherwise.”

“I've seen ducks in a row,” Tide offers.

“You have?” Johnny asks.

“At the Del Mar Fair,” Tide says. “At one of those booths where you shoot the BB guns. The ducks were all in a row.”

“This is just what I mean,” Johnny says. “Is that an imitation of actual nature, or the perpetuation of an ornithological myth?”

“An avian stereotype?” Boone asks. “Pelicans are gluttons, seagulls are filthy, ducks are anal-retentive—”

“Can you be politically incorrect about birds?” Dave asks.

“Only birds of color,” Tide says. “Or female birds. White male birds you can trash. This Irish seagull waddles past a bar and—”

Hang Twelve sits up on his board and in a tone of unusual authority pronounces, “When the mother duck has
baby
ducks, the baby ducks swim behind her in a precise row.”

“You've personally witnessed this?” Johnny challenges.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Where what?”

They stare at each other for a second, then Johnny says, “We have to get some waves.”

“We really do.”

“We're pathetic,” High Tide says.

“We are,” Boone agrees.

He's not sure whether it's the absence of waves or the absence of
Sunny that is the main source of this malaise. Probably both, but Sunny would have put a quick and witty end to this idiot discussion with some deadly accurate barb.