by Don Winslow
Look at your belt, so you don’t hit the back of your head.
Boone looks at his belt.
A second later he slams onto the canvas half a second before Boyd drops all his weight on him. The air goes out of Boone’s lungs, he feels like his back might be broken, and the world is doing this funny spinning thing.
Yeah, but he’s been here before, at the bottom of a big wave that weighs a hell of a lot more and is even meaner than Mike Boyd, so he knows he can survive it. He hears a couple of the onlookers yell excitedly that Boyd is “achieving full mount,” and is a little concerned what that might be, recalling the time that he and Dave attended Dave’s little brother’s high school wrestling match and agreed that any sport that gave points for “riding time” and didn’t involve either a horse or a bull was at least a little homoerotic. And now Boyd is sitting upright on his chest, like the classic schoolyard bully—“full mount”—and starts to rain elbow strikes down on Boone’s face.
“Ground and pound!” Boone hears someone say, and that about sums it up as he tries to move his head to avoid the “pound” component. It sort of works—Boyd’s elbows glance off Boone’s face instead of splitting it open and breaking his cheekbones. Boone gets his forearms up around his head and Boyd switches to roundhouse punches, trying to find an open spot to hit.
Boone waits until Boyd leans in to give his punch more leverage, then bucks up and throws Boyd forward, over his own head. Now Boone’s face is jammed into Boyd’s crotch, which isn’t pleasant, but at least puts it out of punching range. Boone slithers out from under, rolls, gets to his feet, and turns, just in time to see Boyd getting up. Timing his punch, Boone rolls his right shoulder and lets it go just as Boyd turns. The punch connects hard on the jaw. Boyd sprawls backward, bounces off the ring, and slumps down on his ass, half out of it.
“Jump on him!” Dan screams from the “corner.”
Boone doesn’t. He just stands there, sort of confused. Any other martial art he ever dicked around with—hell, in life itself—you don’t hit a man when he’s down. You just don’t, and now he gets the diff between MMA and all the rest—in MMA, the whole point is to hit the dude when he’s down.
Boyd gets up, shakes his head to clear it, and comes toward Boone.
“Three minutes!” Dan yells.
Three minutes?!
Boone thinks. Three minutes left? He would have thought it was maybe twenty seconds. Anyone who doesn’t believe Einstein’s take on relativity has never gone a round in the ring. Time doesn’t slow down or even stop, it slams it into reverse and goes backward.
Now Boone totally gets it—he should have jumped on Boyd and pounded him into total unconsciousness. Boyd is coming toward him, the lights are back on in his eyes, and now—as the joke goes about Jesus’s return—he’s pissed.
But definitely more cautious, almost respectful. He’s seen Boone survive the slam, the ground and pound, escape, and rock him with a single punch. The surfer has heavy hands—one-punch hands—and he doesn’t look tired or even winded.
He isn’t—you want a cardio workout, paddle a surfboard. Boone launches two more low kicks, aiming one at the inside of Boyd’s thigh to smack the femoral artery. Boyd winces at each one but keeps coming forward. Boone moves backward, circling so as not to get trapped against the ropes. Shooting jabs to keep Boyd at a distance, he keeps moving, trying to gain space, trying to waste time.
“He’s a pussy!” someone yells. “He don’t want any part of you, Mike!”
True on both counts, Boone thinks. He goes in for another kick, but Boyd is ready and grabs Boone’s leg, lifts it, and throws him to the mat. Boone covers up to ward off the ground and pound, but it doesn’t come. Boyd drops on to him, but rolls over so that Boone’s on top, his back against Boyd’s chest.
Boone feels Boyd’s thick right forearm slide under his chin and tighten on his throat, then Boyd’s left hand press against the back of his head. Boyd arches his back, stretching Boone out and tightening the grip like a noose.
“Tap out! Tap out!” Dan yells.
Boone twists to loosen the grip but it’s in too tight. Boyd’s forearm is locked onto his throat. Boone can see the thick muscles knotted and, just above the wrist, a small tattoo.
The number “5.”
Boyd hisses, “Tap, Daniels.”
Fuck that, Boone thinks.
Then he’s out.
40
He’s on the mat when he comes to.
Dan looks down at him with concern.
“What happened?” Boone asks.
“Rear-naked choke,” Dan says.
Sounds ugly, Boone thinks, especially the “rear” and “naked” parts.
“Why didn’t you tap out?” asks Dan.
After a little bit of thought, Boone remembers what “tap out” means and what happened to put him in the position to do it. Or not, as the case may be. Dan and another student help him to his feet. His legs feel shaky. He looks across the ring and sees Boyd looking at him. Boone takes some small satisfaction that Boyd has an ice pack pressed against his jaw.
“Why didn’t you tap?” Boyd asks.
It seems to be the question of the day.
“Didn’t feel like it.”
Boyd laughs. “You’re no bitch, Daniels. Only a real freak would rather
black
out than
tap
out.”
“Real freak” apparently being high praise.
“Thanks.”
Boone walks toward the door on legs that are still objecting to being given so much responsibility. Then he stops, turns around, and says, “There is something you can teach me.”
“Shoot.”
The Superman Punch.
41
You have to have your legs under you to do it, which Boone doesn’t, but Boyd demonstrates on a heavy hanging bag.
It’s basically simple, but it’s harder to do than it looks. You jump off one foot, toward your opponent, then while in midair, execute a downward chopping punch with the opposite hand. The impact is incredible because of the momentum of the whole body being thrown into the punch.
Boyd does it and the heavy bag hops on its chain, comes back down, and shakes.
“It’s not a move you want to try a lot,” Boyd explains after he does it, “because both feet are off the ground and that leaves you vulnerable to any kind of counter. If you miss with it, you’re truly fucked. But if you connect—”
“So you teach this,” Boone says.
“Sure.”
“Did you teach it to Corey Blasingame?”
“Maybe,” Boyd says. “I don’t know.”
Yeah, maybe, Boone thinks. He takes two steps toward the bag, then launches himself. Twisting his hip in midair, he throws everything into the punch and can feel the energy surge all the way up his arm as his fist makes contact.
A wild adrenaline surge.
Superman.
The heavy bag sags in the middle and pops back.
Mike Boyd seems impressed. “You can come train here anytime,” he says, then adds, “We need men like you.”
Boone walks out of the dojo. After a day of dipping his spade in the sad, barren soil of Corey Blasingame’s life, his question isn’t how the kid could have beaten someone to death, but how it didn’t happen sooner.
He gets into the Deuce and heads for the Spy Store.
42
The small shop is a creepy little place in a strip mall in Mira Mesa, its customer base being a few actual PIs, a lot of wannabes, hard-core paranoids, and not a few of the grassy-knoll, wrap-your-head-in-tinfoil-the-government-is-attacking-you-with-gamma-rays set who won’t buy off the Internet because the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and Barbara Bush are all tracking their downloads. The store usually is filled with a lot of browsers who just like electronic gadgets and cool spy shit.
And there’s a lot of cool spy shit in there—bugs, listening devices, cameras that look like anything other than cameras
, computer cookie devices, computer anticookie devices, computer antianticookie devices . . .
Boone finds his first item: a LiveWire Fast Track Ultrathin Real-Time GPS tracking device. It’s a black box about 21/2 inches square, with a magnet attachment. He picks up a ten-day battery to go with it, then looks for the next item on his mental list.
The Super Ear BEE 100 Parabolic is a nasty and effective piece of intrusive work, a cone-shaped listening device capable of picking up a conversation from a good city block away. Boone picks out a compatible digital recorder with the appropriate cord and plug-in, and decides that he has what he needs for the job. He already has the camera—it came with the basic Private Investigator Starter Kit along with the cynicism, a manual of one-liners, and a saxophone sound track.
He walks up to the counter and says to the clerk, “You talk to me in Vulcan, I’m puking on your floor.”
“Hey, Boone.”
“Hey, Nick,” Boone says. When Nick isn’t working, he’s playing Dungeons and Dragons. It’s just the way it is. Boone hands Nick two credit cards, one his business, the other personal, and asks Nick to run the tracker and the listening device separately. He’ll toss a little time onto his hourly billing to cover the cost of the Super Bee and hopefully Dan will never have to find out about it.
It’s a little sleazy, but it’s really for Dan’s protection. He hasn’t asked Boone for audio evidence of his wife’s alleged infidelity, but Boone’s going to get it anyway, even though it creeps him out.
What usually happens is that the wronged party confronts the cheater (“I had you followed by a private investigator”) and the guilty spouse just gives it up. But every once in a while the philandering partner goes the “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it” route, just stonewalls and denies it all, which puts both the PI and his client into a bad situation.
(Get a group of PIs in a bar after a few stiff pops and they’ll tell you some beauties, the responses ranging from the simple
“Nu-unnnh”
—that is, it just didn’t happen—all the way to Boone’s personal favorite, “She’s an event planner and we were working on your birthday party. Surprise, honey!”)
Most people don’t want to believe that their loved one is cheating on them, some of them so desperately that they’ll jump at any out. Even showing them photos or video of their beloved going into and out of a house or hotel room won’t do it, because they’ll cling to the flimsiest excuses. One that seems to be really popular lately is “We’re just emotional friends.”
Emotional friends. You gotta love the phrase. The rationale is that the cheatee hasn’t met the cheater’s emotional needs, so he/she had to go “outside the relationship” to feel “emotionally validated.” So the cheatee is asked to believe that their loved one and the other man/woman spent the hour in the motel or the night in the house just talking about their feelings, and the desperate cheatee goes for it.
Unless you have a tape of the spouse working out more physical feelings. The grunts, the moans, the heavy breathing (“What, honey, you were planning my party at the
gym
?”), the sweet whispered nothings, are the collective, cliché smoking gun, but no decent PI wants to lay that on an already hurting spouse unless he has to.
So what you do is record the main event and stick it away somewhere unless or until you absolutely have to pull it out. You don’t tell the client that you have it, because most of them can’t resist the temptation to listen to it, even though you advise them against it.
But you have it if you need it. It’s for your client’s protection and your own.
So Boone puts the eavesdropping technology on his own card so Dan doesn’t see the expense, ask about it, and end up with the sounds of his wife’s illicit lovemaking on his mental playlist.
Nick runs the item across the scanner and says, “You got the software for this?”
“Hang hooked me up.”
“Cool,” Nick says. “This new version of this tracker? You can set it for one-, five-, or ten-second blings, it has a motion alarm and a detachable motion alert. And it keeps a record of every place the vehicle goes. One eighty-one and sixty-three cents, please.”
Boone pays cash, takes the receipt, and gets out of there before he has to listen to a conversation about how the Venusians are systematically injecting truth serum into your Quaker Instant Oatmeal packages.
He’s back in the parking lot when two guys come up to him and one of them sticks a gun in his ribs.
43
“Hello, Rabbit,” Boone says.
“Howzit, Boone?” Rabbit says. “Red Eddie, he wants to see you.”
“Wants to see you,” Echo says.
The origin of Echo’s name is pretty obvious. So is Rabbit’s, actually, but no one likes to talk about it. Rabbit and Echo are sort of the Mutt and Jeff, the Abbott and Costello, the Cheney and Bush, of Red Eddie’s squadron of thugs. Rabbit is tall and thin, Echo is short and thick. Both the Hawaiian gangsters wear flower-print shirts over baggy shorts and sandals. The shirts run about three bills each and come from a store in Lahaina. Red Eddie pays his muscle well.
“I don’t want to see him,” Boone says.
He knows it’s useless to refuse, but he just feels he has to give them a little aggro anyway. Besides, his ribs already hurt from when Mike Boyd tried to enfossilize them into the canvas.
“We have our instructions,” Rabbit says.
“Our instructions.”
“That’s
really
annoying, Echo.”
“Get in the ride,” Rabbit says.
“In the—”
“Shut up.” But Boone goes with them and gets into the black Escalade. Rabbit gets behind the wheel and turns the ignition. Fijian surf reggae music comes blasting out of the speakers.
“You think you have enough bass?!” Boone yells.
“Not enough?!” Rabbit yells back. “I didn’t think so!”
“Didn’t think so!”
The Escalade goes throbbing down the street.
All the way to La Jolla.
44
Red Eddie stands on his skateboard, perched at the lip of the twenty-foot-high half pipe he had built in his backyard.
One of the many reasons his stuffy La Jolla neighbors love having Eddie in the hood.
Red Eddie is shirtless over black
hui
board trunks, the black being a symbol of extreme localism back in the islands. If you’re a haole and you pull up to a break full of guys with black trunks on, pull out. What Eddie isn’t wearing is a helmet, or elbow or knee pads, because he thinks they make him look stupid.
Now he points to the bracelet attached to his right ankle.
“You see this?” he says as Rabbit and Echo usher Boone into the backyard. “This is
your
bad.”
Boone isn’t exactly eaten up with guilt. For one thing, if you had to be under house arrest, Red Eddie’s is a pretty nice crib to do it in. His little nest is seven thousand square feet overlooking Bird Rock Beach, with a horizon pool, Jacuzzi, skateboard half pipe, four bedrooms, a living room with a 260-degree view of the Pacific, a state-of-the-art kitchen where Eddie’s personal chef does new and progressive things with Spam, and a home theater with its enormous flat-screen-plasma, Bose sound system and every piece of video-game techno known to postmodern man.
Second, Eddie should be in an eight-by-seven hole in a FedMax facility on some cold, rainy stretch of northern coast instead of his sunny mansion in La Jolla, because the Harvard-educated, Hawaiian-Japanese-Chinese-Portuguese-Anglo-Californian
pakololo
magnate was importing underage Mexican girls along with his usual marijuana shipments, and Boone is more than happy to accept responsibility for busting him.
Therefore, third, Red Eddie is damn lucky to be under house arrest as his lawyers drag out the criminal proceedings against him while persuading the judge that Red Eddie
, who owns houses in Kauai, Honolulu, the Big Island, Puerto Vallarta, Costa Rica, and Lucerne, is no flight risk because of his ties to the community. “Ties to the community”—no shit, Boone thinks. Eddie’s ties to the community are stored in numbered accounts all over Switzerland and the Cook Islands.
“Do you know, Boonedoggle,” Eddie says, “that I can’t go more than seventy-five feet from my house except to go to the doctor? And did you further know, Bonnie-boone, that I have developed a chronic condition that requires frequent medical attention?”
“You’re a perpetual dickwad?” Boone asks.
Which indicates massive testosterone levels on his part.
Red Eddie just smiles at the insult, but his Doberman, Dahmer, likewise perched on the edge of the half pipe, looks down at Boone and growls.
“You’re starting to look alike,” Boone says. “He has a collar, too.”
They do kind of look alike—short hair; thin, wiry bodies; long, sharp noses. Except that Eddie’s hair is orange while Dahmer’s is jet black, and Eddie’s body is festooned with tattoos whereas Dahmer has retained the natural look. The other big difference is internal—as a dog, albeit a vicious dog, Dahmer possesses a genetically encoded set of moral restraints.
Eddie launches himself off the platform, flies down the pipe, gets air, does a 180, lands on the opposite platform, and asks, “You know what your problem is, Ba-Boone?”
“Why do I have a feeling that you’re going to tell me?”
“You’re
lolo
,” Eddie says. “Stupid. You’re a bus laugh, you really crack me up. Number the first—you had a chance to end my game and you passed on it. Stupid. Number the second—you thought I was guilty of child prostitution when I didn’t know those sick taco fucks were sticking little girls in between my bales of healthful herbal products. Stupider, and, may I add, personally hurtful. Number the third—you actually had the temerity to try to put me into prison for this misapprehension. Stupidest. And just when I think you have achieved the summit of stupidityness, you surpass yourself.”