by Don Winslow
That’s the thing about aging, Duke thinks now as he goes over the file again. Behavior that was cute when you were in your twenties becomes aggravating in your thirties, pathetic in your forties and tragic in your fifties.
Nobody loves a fifty-four-year-old child.
Especially not when he’s a dirtbag.
A three-time loser:
One conviction for possession.
Another for burglary.
A third for felony possession with intent to sell.
And now Terry has skipped.
Didn’t show for trial.
Duke has to find him before the cops do or take a hit for three hundred large. Which would be financially irresponsible, which Duke never is. Especially now that he’s looking at the end of his business and has to make sure that he takes care of the files that he has out there before the new law goes into effect.
Duke calls Boone.
About the last thing Boone Daniels wants to do is put Terry Maddux in prison for the rest of his life.
Terry was one of his heroes.
Boone grew up hearing Terry Maddux stories. As a grem he once pedaled his bike furiously up to Bird Rock when he heard that Terry Maddux had gone out there, stood on the bluff for hours just to get a glimpse of the legend. Remembers to this day when Maddux came in, his board under his arm, nodded at Boone as he passed by.
The next day Boone went out and tried to imitate what he saw Maddux do in the waves.
Couldn’t, of course, but that wasn’t the point.
Boone was a rookie patrolman the next time he saw Terry Maddux.
They say “Never meet your heroes,” and maybe they’re right. Maddux was so drunk he could barely stand up, never mind ride a wave. The owner of the bar wanted him out of there, and Boone and another cop walked Terry to the car, where he threw up all over Boone’s shoes and then apologized with such humble sincerity that Boone couldn’t stay mad at him. They didn’t take him to the house—because he was Terry freakin’ Maddux—but to his girlfriend’s place, because he couldn’t remember where he’d parked his van.
It was maybe three years later, a cloudy winter’s morning, when Boone went out to surf at his home break north of Crystal Pier and saw Terry standing there sipping from a cardboard cup of coffee and looking kind of sick.
“You going out?” Terry asked.
“Yeah,” Boone said, a little stunned. “You?”
Terry grinned his famous grin. “I seem to have misplaced my stick.”
“You can borrow one of mine,” Boone said.
“Yeah?” Terry said. “That’s very decent of you.”
Boone walked him over to his van, opened the rear door and showed Terry his quiver. Terry picked out a six-foot tri-fin. “You sure you don’t mind?”
“I’d be honored.”
Terry stuck out his hand. “Terry Maddux.”
Clearly he didn’t remember Boone, much less puking on his shoes.
“Yeah, I know,” Boone said, feeling like some stupid fanboy. “Boone Daniels.”
“Nice to meet you, Boone.”
They paddled out, and Boone introduced Terry to the rest of the Dawn Patrol, the regulars who surfed that break about every morning before going to work—Johnny Banzai, High Tide, Dave the Love God, Hang Twelve, and Sunny Day. When Terry caught a wave, Dave paddled over to Boone. “You know Terry Maddux?!”
Boone didn’t mention hauling Maddux out of a bar. “I just met him. Just now.”
“Isn’t that one of your boards?”
“He misplaced his.”
The first of many excuses Boone would end up making for Terry, but all that came later. Right then Boone just surfed with his hero.
It was amazing.
Even with his diminishing skills, Terry surfed with a grace that was ethereal. He made the most difficult moves look easy, the most mundane moves look like art.
“I don’t know how to describe it,” Boone said later to Duke, trying to put it in terms that the older man would appreciate. “It was like, I don’t know, a young sax player doing a session with Miles Davis.”
“I think you mean Charlie Parker,” Duke said. “But I get the idea.”
They say never meet your heroes. They should have added and for God’s sake, never make them your friends.
Not a friend like Terry anyway.
A friend who could be so charming in one moment, then try to pick up your girlfriend in the next (albeit with such boyish charm that both you and the girlfriend instantly forgave him) and then stick you with the check.
Who started crashing on your couch and eating your food.
All of which was tolerable, if increasingly annoying.
Then other things started to happen.
The crumpled dollar bills you left on your dresser started finding their way into Terry’s pocket. You’d find Terry curled up not on your couch but outside your front door in a pool of his own vomit. He called you for bail money not from a barroom brawl but for a burglary charge.
Duke took the bond.
Boone put up the money.
That charge didn’t stick.
The next one did, Terry went away for a year and a half, and Boone had to reluctantly admit to himself that it was a relief not having his hero randomly show up and do embarrassing, tiresome shit.
But it was Boone that Terry called to pick him up when he gated out.
Boone’s couch he crashed on until he could get “set up again.”
Boone to whom he swore he was kicking the junk for good this time.
It was Boone who found him OD’d on his floor.
Boone who rushed him to the E-Room.
It was Boone who, the next time Terry called him for bail, swallowed real hard and told him no.
Tough love and all that shit.
And now it’s Boone who Duke calls to track Terry down.
“You put up the guarantee?” Boone asks.
“A woman named Samantha Harris put up the ten,” Duke says, “but yeah, I guaranteed the rest. I can’t afford to lose the money. Especially not now.”
“No, I get it,” Boone says. Duke is about to lose his business, his employees are going to lose their livelihoods, and Boone is going to lose a big chunk of his own income. And he knows Duke, he knows the man is not going to let his employees go out the door without fat envelopes in their hands to help tide them over.
Terry doesn’t have the right to take food off their tables.
“I’ve given the guy every break,” Duke says.
“True.”
“I know he’s your friend,” Duke says, “but you’re the best guy to find him.”
Also true, Boone thinks. He knows the surf community, he knows most of the people that Terry knows—the people who worship Terry and the people Terry has fucked over, often the same set of people. He knows how Terry thinks, the places he goes, the places where he’s no longer welcome, which is the larger set.
And Duke knows Boone’s standing among surfers. They’ll tell him things they wouldn’t tell an average bounty hunter, because Boone is not a bounty hunter who surfs, he’s a surfer who sometimes hunts bail jumpers, a private investigator who does jobs for Duke (not an unknown personage among the San Diego surf community) and a well-respected “sheriff” on his stretch of beach, one of those guys who keeps things copacetic, ruling with a light but firm hand.
Boone Daniels is a legend in his own right.
So is his crew, the Dawn Patrol, several of whom also help bring in jumpers for Duke, because they are very physical people who tend to stay cool in any circumstance. They won’t run hot and get unnecessarily violent, but they won’t run at all when confronted by an angry jumper.
Dave the Love God (a play on “Life Guard”) moonlights for Duke, usually partnering up with Boone. So does High Tide, the three-hundred-pound Samoan city worker whose very appearance will often persuade the most recalcitrant jumper to step peacefully into the back of the car. Even Sunny Day, five-eleven with a negative b
ody-fat percentage, will sometimes help bring in a female jumper.
The rules of his job prevent Johnny Banzai, the Japanese-American police detective, from moonlighting for a bail bondsman, but he’s been known to pass along a tip from time to time.
So when Duke hires Boone, he gets the whole Dawn Patrol as a bonus.
And they’re thick, tight together, in the way that people who trust each other with their lives in deep water are.
“He could be in Mexico,” Boone says.
One of the big problems of being a bail bondsman in San Diego is that the international border is a few miles away and easy to cross. But if you dive into Mexico, you’d better dive deep, because Duke has excellent relations with the Tijuana cops and the Baja state police, both of which have been known to grab one of his jumpers, stuff him in the trunk of a car, and drop him back across the border into the arms of one of Duke’s bounty hunters.
Dump the jumper, pick up some cash, and be home for dinner.
Terry Maddux knows this.
He’s not going to hang around TJ or Ensenada or even Todos Santos, all places he knows well, because they know him well there, too, and Duke’s short, stubby fingers can reach out and grab him in any of his old hangs. No, if he’s jumped south of the border, he’ll be running hard down to Guanajuato, maybe even to Costa Rica.
But that takes money, and Boone doesn’t think Terry has any.
“Why don’t you drop in on Ms. Harris?” Duke says.
Normally Duke would telephone the other person on the bond, but in this case it might be better to have Boone show up at her place and see if Terry’s there.
Because a lot of times, the same person who can be conned into putting down for the bond can also be talked into harboring a fugitive.
The con uses pretty much the same tactic.
Guilt.
“If you love me, you’ll do this for me.”
In Duke’s experience, mothers are the worst. They almost always go for this one, or if they start to object, there’s the similar argument, “If you love me, don’t do this to me.”
That is, throw him out or turn him in.
Girlfriends are the next worst.
Generally, they fall into one of two categories: an otherwise straight woman who falls in love with a criminal she thinks she can save from himself, or the woman is herself a criminal—usually a drug addict like the boyfriend—so she’ll hide him out of habit.
But usually the second category of girl doesn’t have $10K to put up for bail.
Then there are the wives. Unless they’re the aforementioned co-criminals, they’re pretty likely to give up the spouse because they have responsibilities—kids, rent, mortgages—and they can’t afford to lose the bond money. To a lot of wives, it’s almost a relief when the husband gets picked up—it stops the chaos for a while.
Duke checks her address.
For a short assemblage of letters and numbers, addresses can tell stories. This one—135 Coast Lane, La Jolla—tells an interesting one.
First of all, it’s La Jolla, the coastal town that’s one of the most expensive zip codes in the country. Second, Coast Boulevard is, as the name would indicate, oceanfront property—the difference between “oceanfront” and “ocean view” moving the needle from six zeroes to seven.
Boone knows right where the place is, just off Nicholson Point, south of the Tide Pools, north of La Jolla Medical Clinic.
Absolutely prime real estate.
Samantha Harris has money.
It’s a good news/bad news joke. The good is that Samantha Harris has the money to put down for bail, the bad is that she can afford to lose it. There’s probably no financial pressure on her to turn Terry in, which is how you catch most fliers. If she owns property at 135 Coast, she could even be bankrolling him.
It takes money to go off the radar.
Boone rolls up to Samantha Harris’s house in his van.
Which is known in the greater San Diego surfing community as the “Boonemobile,” but whatever it’s called, it’s pretty much a disgrace.
Twenty years old, rusted along the edges, stuffed to the gills with boards, wet suits, fins, masks, towels, sandals and the remnants of meals taken from taco stands, In-N-Outs and Rubio’s, the Boonemobile looks, to say the least, out of place in La Jolla. If you see the Boonemobile parked on the street in front of 135 Coast, you’re going to assume he’s there to cut the lawn, fix a leak, or make an ill-advised, meth-inspired effort to rob the place.
The house is a Spanish Neocolonial with pink stucco and a blue-tiled roof. The door is a huge carved wooden Spanish antique.
Boone gets out, walks up, notes the security camera noting him, and rings the bell.
A maid, in an honest-to-God, no-kidding maid’s uniform, opens the door. “Yes?”
“I’m here to see Ms. Harris?”
“Is she expecting you?” Her accent is Latina, maybe Mexican, maybe Guatemalan or Honduran. She looks to be in her early thirties.
“No,” Boone says. That’s the idea.
“Ms. Harris does not see salesmen.”
“Tell her it’s about Terry Maddux,” Boone says.
The maid shuts the door and is gone for about a minute. Then the door opens and she ushers him into a living room five times the size of Boone’s whole cottage. She points to a white sofa and says, “Wait there, please.”
An enormous window looks out at a garden, a pool and, beyond, the beach. Boone has never understood what people who live a few steps from the ocean want with a swimming pool, which doesn’t do anything. But he can picture Terry lying out there on a chaise lounge, shades on, sipping on a drink.
Samantha Harris comes in a few minutes later.
She’s beautiful in that specific way that wealthy San Diego women are beautiful. Blond hair pulled back tightly into a golden helmet, a black sweater—because it’s a California winter—over black slacks. Layers of gold bracelets wrap around her wrists, a large pair of sunglasses hides her eyes.
A PI and a former cop, Boone knows what that too often means.
Samantha gets right to it. “What about Terry?”
“He’s missing.”
“Isn’t he always?” She gestures for Boone to sit back down and then sits in an overstuffed wing chair.
“But this time he’s jumped bail,” Boone says.
“And you’re what?” she asks. “Some kind of bounty hunter?”
“Some kind,” Boone says.
“Well, he’s not here.”
“Do you know where he is?” Boone asks.
She smiles and shakes her head.
“When did you last see him?”
“Are you a police officer, Mr. . . . ?”
“Daniels.”
“Mr. Daniels?”
“No,” Boone says.
“So I don’t have to answer your questions,” she says.
“You don’t,” Boone says. “But it’s in your interest to help us find him. If we don’t, you forfeit your ten thousand dollars.”
She shrugs.
Boone’s aware that she’s wearing more than that on her wrists. And that, if he knows Terry like he does, ten grand was probably the least of her contributions to the ELT Fund.
“It’s in Terry’s interest, too,” Boone says.
“And how is that?”
“It’s better for him if we find him before the police do.”
“I hardly believe that,” she says.
Boone’s getting tired of her La Jolla Ice Maiden routine. It’s one of the pat San Diego personas—Laid-Back Surfer Girl, Hot Soccer Mom, La Jolla Ice Maiden. They’re set pieces. She does it exceptionally well, but it’s still a tired stereotype.
He stands up and sets one of Kasmajian’s cards on the side table by her chair. “Hardly believe what you want. If you have information to give us, call this number. Thank you for your time.”
He starts to leave.
“Wait,” she says. Then adds, “Please.”
He turns and looks at her. Shrugs.
“Do you think they’d really hurt him?” she asks.
“They might not want to,” Boone says, “but any arrest has risks, especially with someone who is as erratic as Terry can be.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Was it Terry who hit you?” Boone asks.
She takes off the shades to show a deep purple bruise that swells under her left eye. “I provoke him.”
“There’s never a reason for a man to lay his hands on a woman in anger,” Boone says. A guy does that, he rips up his man card.
Samantha says, “I think he does it when he feels bad about himself.”
“He has a lot to feel bad about,” Boone says. “You should help us find him before he hurts someone else.”
“Another woman, you mean?”
Now Boone shrugs.
“I know he has other women,” Samantha says. “But I really don’t know where he is. The last time I saw him was two days ago. He spent the night. Well, most of it—when I woke up, he’d already gone.”
“What did he take?”
She looks at him as if reappraising. “How did you know?”
“I know Terry.”
“Some loose cash,” she says. “A diamond necklace. A watch.”
“Worth . . . ?”
“Forty thousand?”
“How much cash?”
“Just a few hundred,” she says.
“You should file charges,” Boone says.
“I can’t prove it was him.”
“You can when he tries to move it.”
“I don’t want to get him into trouble,” she says. “I love him, Mr. Daniels. If he came back, I would take him back. Sad, isn’t it?”
Yes, it is, Boone thinks.
Because sometimes I feel the same way.
“Can you give me a description of the necklace and the watch?” he asks.
“I have photos,” she says. “For insurance purposes.”
“If you report this loss,” Boone says, “your insurance company will make you file charges.”
“Did I say I was reporting it?” She leaves for a few minutes and returns with photos, which she hands to Boone.
“I’ll get these back to you,” Boone says. “Do you mind if I make copies?”