by Don Winslow
So they, like, hung around the break and the gym, and they helped keep it pure at Rockpile, you know. It was their water, their turf, and they tagged themselves the Rockpile Crew, and they were hanging in the gym one night and Mike asked if they’d like to check out some Web sites and they said sure, they thought he was talking about porn or something, but then he logged on and it was all about the white race and how they had to fight to preserve it, and Mike asked what they thought and they said they thought it was cool.
Mike said it was like the white race was their tribe and they were warriors, and warriors fight to protect their tribe, and were they willing to fight? And they said they were, and Mike said that’s what they were all about, training as warriors to protect their tribe. He told them about Alex Curtis going to prison and what Alex said and the number 5 and Corey went out after a few beers one night and got that ink and Mike said he was becoming a warrior . . .
And a warrior fights for his people.
“San Diego used to be white,”
Mike said,
“now it’s mud. They’re crowding us out. Pretty soon there won’t be room for white guys anymore on our street, at our beaches, in our own waves.”
And Trev said,
“Somebody should do something about it.”
That night,
that
night, they were cruising that night, club-hopping, looking for trouble. If you wanted to be a fighter, okay, you had to fight, and you just couldn’t get enough fights in the gym, not unless you were one of the stars, which Corey wasn’t. But a lot of MMA guys had a lot of street fights, beach fights . . . man, they just kicked asses wherever they could find asses to kick.
So they went out.
Corey, Trevor, Billy, and Dean.
The Rockpile Crew.
They hit a bunch of bars but couldn’t get anything going. Then they rolled up on The Sundowner. By this time they’d had a lot of beers, and downed some speed, so they were torqued, ready to go, and that’s when that lifeguard guy came and threw them out.
Like we didn’t belong, Corey said. There was all kinds of mud in there—tacos and slants and even niggers—and they wouldn’t let white men stay?
That was bullshit.
So they went riding around, high and stoked, adrenaline pumping, and Trev just wouldn’t let it go, wouldn’t let it go, just kept at it, like:
“We have to take care of this, we can’t let them disrespect us like that.”
“It ain’t right.”
So they went back and waited outside, across the street, in the alley. They got themselves worked up, started duking with each other, really throwing down, and that’s when Trev spotted the nigger coming out of The Sundowner.
And Trev was all, like, “Let’s go show him, let’s mess him up a little, fuck with him, sweep the mud off our street.” So they went up to the guy, and they didn’t know it was K2—he had on this hooded poncho and it was dark and there was like blood in the back of Corey’s eyes, sloshing around inside his head, boiling hot . . . all he could see was that red. And then there was yelling. The next thing he knew he was sitting in the back of the car, and they were all stoked and shit, and Trev was slapping him on the back, yelling, “You got him good, man. You took him out! Did you guys see our boy Corey hit him with that Superman?” And then Billy and Dean were saying, like, “Yeah, we saw you, Corey. We saw you do him.”
And Corey was like . . .
Proud.
Like, proud that he’d defended his turf, you know? Stood up and fought like a warrior for his tribe.
They drove around some more, and then the cops found them. Put them in cuffs and took them down to the station, and that’s when Corey confessed.
“I hit him with a Superman Punch.”
102
“Come
on
, Mary Lou!” Alan says in her office.
“I don’t,” she says. “I don’t see how this really changes things. Except that your client has now confessed to a hate crime.”
Alan tries to blow right through that little problem. “He hasn’t confessed to anything. This wipes out his prior so-called confession.”
“Not necessarily,” she says. “It’s a new story he tells now that he’s closer to the reality of prison, but the original confession has immediacy.”
“I’ll put him on the stand,” Alan says, “and the jury will believe him.”
Yes, they will, she tells herself. Because even you think you believe him. Face it, you like Trevor Bodin for the killing now. It’s like Alan’s living in her head because he says, “Reduce Corey to manslaughter, rip up Bodin’s deal on the basis that he lied to you, and raise the charge on him.”
Right, she can hear the defense attorney cross-examine her already.
“You originally charged Corey Blasingame with the killing, didn’t you? And you charged him because you were confident that he did it. Just as you say you’re confident now that my client did it?”
She looks at Alan and says, “You know I can’t do that.”
“I know you can’t hold this charge on a kid you know is not guilty,” Alan says softly. “Isn’t in you, Mary Lou.”
“Don’t push it,” she snaps. “Your kid isn’t exactly a martyred innocent, is he? He went out looking for a fight, he found one, he went over in a gang, and they beat a man to death because the man wasn’t white. He has to do some time for that, Alan.”
“I agree,” Alan says. “But not life without parole.”
“Let me think about it.”
“Hours,” Alan says. “Not days.”
When he leaves, Mary Lou stands in the window and looks out at downtown San Diego, a city that will not react well to a reduction of the charges against Corey Blasingame. She’s already heard the refrains in reference to the other three: “Rich white kids get slapped on the wrist.” “If it had been Mexicans or Samoans who did this, they’d be under the jail.” Maybe they’re right, she thinks. And maybe Alan’s right when he implies that we’re making a scapegoat of Corey Blasingame.
But explaining the reduction to the powers will be brutal. She has to tell them something, give them some reason, and the only one she can give is that the confession was bogus, the witness statements hinky, and the investigation botched. Rush to judgment and all that. It’s Harrington and Kodani who’ll take the fall.
She couldn’t give a shit about Harrington, a loose cannon who has it coming, but John Kodani is a good detective, smart, ethical, hardworking. He had a suspect who confessed and he believed the confession, that’s all. Now it could cost him an otherwise brilliant career.
It’s a shame.
Then again, it’s all a shame, isn’t it?
Her intercom buzzes.
“Yes?”
“There’s a George Poptanich to see you?”
103
Dave the Love God climbs down from the tower.
Another uneventful day of watching tourists not drown. And tourists not drowning, as has been amply explained to him by the Chamber of Commerce, is a very good thing. Earlier in the year, a swimmer had been killed by a great white, which is a very bad thing—obviously for the swimmer but also for business, and also explained to the lifeguards by the Chamber.
Short of getting Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss and heading out in a boat, Dave’s not sure what he’s supposed to do about shark attacks, although he did actually foil a great white one time by kicking it in the nose. The fact is that the ocean does have sharks—and riptides and big waves—and people are going to be attacked, just as they’re going to drown; but statistically the most dangerous activity
by far
that people do in connection with the beach is to drive to it.
Anyway, he decides to grab a beer at The Sundowner. Johnny B might be there on his way to the night shift, High Tide is coming off his day, and Boone . . .
Who knows where Boone might be?
Boone is on some kind of strange, weird trip. Maybe it’
s Sunny being gone, or his infatuation with the British betty—who is definitely, unquestionably,
hot
—or maybe it’s just that he’s tired of surfbumdom, but the Boone he knows is 404. It’s funny because Boone, more than any of them, could always find the through line of a wave, and would hold that line like he was laser-guided. Now he’s flapping around all over the water like some newbie kook, headed for a bad wipeout.
Sure enough, Johnny Banzai and Tide are holding the bar in place, although JB is nursing a Diet Coke.
“S’news?” Dave asks.
“Nuttin’,” Tide says.
“S’up, Johnny?”
“S’up, Dave?”
There’s nothin’ up in August, man—not the surf, not their spirits. Only thing that’s up is the temp.
And the tension, because Johnny B looks worked.
“Boone is helping Alan Burke fuck me,” Johnny explains.
“What?” Dave asks. Boone fucking over a friend? Not poss.
“It’s true,” Tide says. He tells Dave about Boone joining the Blasingame defense team.
“Backpaddle,” Dave says. “You’re telling me that Boone is trying to rescue the little bastard who killed K2? No freaking way.”
Johnny shrugs, like, it’s true, go figure.
“Whoa,” Dave says. What the crud is happening to us? he wonders. What’s happening to the Dawn Patrol?
It’s shrinking for one thing, he thinks.
Sunny is gone.
And face it, Boone may be on his way out, if he’s not adiós already.
What’s that old cliché about (shudder) marriages—“We just drifted apart?” Are we just drifting apart, Dave wonders, or is it more than that?
Too bummed for a beer, Dave just heads home.
104
Boone goes back to Schering’s office at 10:00 p.m.
Parks the van down the road and walks up to the office complex. The lock is easy—it only takes him a couple of minutes to get in.
He turns the little flashlight on, sticks it in his mouth, and hits Schering’s desk. The computer is on “sleep,” and, to Boone’s relief, Schering was still logged on. Boone double clicks on an icon marked “Billings” and is soon scrolling through Schering’s recent time records. Boone sticks a thumbdrive in the port in back of the hard drive, drags and clicks, then removes the thumb, peeks out the window, and goes out the door.
Thanks to technology, he thinks, rifling records is so much easier than it used to be.
105
Back in his own office, Boone switches on his computer, sticks in the thumbdrive, and peruses Schering’s billing records.
He seems to have been working on four cases at the time of his death.
One of them is a multimillion-dollar house on a ridge in Del Mar that appears to have developed a serious slab crack in the foundation, with further cracking in the driveway. The second apparently involves major stucco cracking throughout a strip mall in Solana Beach. The third features a condo complex on the bluffs overlooking the beach. The bluff, as far as Boone can discern, appears to be sliding away.
The fourth is the infamous La Jolla sinkhole.
106
What spices were to the early Portuguese navigators, what gold was to the Spanish conquistadors, tobacco to Virginian plantation owners, and opium to Afghani warlords, real estate is to Southern California businesspeople.
Real estate—land, houses, and business parks—is the bottom-line source of wealth on the golden, coastal strip. It’s the basis for investment, lending, exchange, retail, money laundering, you name it.
So when eighteen expensive homes suddenly drop into a hole, the symbolic value is enormous.
The bottom, literally and metaphorically, falls out.
Someone is going to pay.
The question is, who?
Which, Boone thinks, is a very pertinent question when you want to know who had a motive for wanting Phil Schering in the past tense, because the late Phil was a soils engineer, not only a soils engineer but also an expert witness soils engineer, not only an expert witness soils engineer but also a very effective expert witness soils engineer who could potentially have a big say in determining . . .
. . . who pays.
Phil was billing an insurance company.
107
“Insurance companies don’t generally kill people,” Cheerful says, “in the physical sense. They hire lawyers who kill people in the financial sense.”
At first, Cheerful wasn’t, well, cheerful about Boone waking him up late at night, which for him is anything after 9:00 p.m. So when Boone rang his bell at the unheard-of hour of eleven twenty-three, Cheerful expected that someone had better be dead. Well, yeah, someone was, but it was Phil Schering, and Cheerful didn’t give a damn about that, except for how it might affect Boone.
Cheerful has a very simple philosophy about humanity. He loves his few friends—basically the Dawn Patrol—and would do anything to help them. The rest of the human race exists solely to make him money.
Which it does.
And money is the topic that Boone came to seek his advice about. Cheerful looks at the copy of Schering’s bill and says, “Technically, Hefley’s is not an insurance company. It’s a reinsurer.”
“Meaning that it insures again?”
Correct, Cheerful instructs him. Sometimes a primary insurance company takes on a risk that is too large for it to cover on its own, so it mitigates some of that risk by insuring it with a “reinsurer.”
“Kind of like a small bookie laying off a piece of a large bet?” Boone says.
“That’s a rough but adept analogy,” Cheerful admits.
“So a bunch of expensive homes drops into a hole,” Boone says. “The insurance company can’t handle the whole loss, so they turn to the reinsurer to pick up the bill.”
It’s not that simple, Cheerful explains. For one thing, it’s highly unlikely that all the homes, or even a majority of them, would have the same insurance company, and even less likely that each of those carriers would reinsure with Hefley’s. The company probably had one or more of the destroyed homes, which, as total losses, would stack up into the tens of millions of dollars, and hired Schering to determine the cause of the loss.
“But the cause of the loss is simple,” Boone says. “The landslide.”
“That’s ignoring the question,” Cheerful grumbles, “of what caused the landslide. What was the cause of the cause?”
“Why does that matter?”
“It matters a lot,” Cheerful says.
Insurance companies do not write coverage for earth movement. It’s right there in the small print under “Excluded Coverages.” What the underwriting gurus would tell you is that insurance is meant to protect you from accidental, sudden events—storms, floods, fires—and that earth movement is neither sudden nor accidental. It takes a long time and it’s no accident. The earth is always moving—that’s what dirt does.
“So Hefley’s is off the hook anyway. The earth moved.”
“Not so fast,” Cheerful says. “You can’t just look to the cause of the loss, you have to find the ‘proximate cause.’”
“You mean, what sort of caused it?”
“Not the approximate cause, surf bum,” Cheerful says. “The proximate cause.”
“What’s that?”
“Go to the library,” Cheerful says. “Preferably a law library. You know any good law firms?”
“Yes.”
“Good night.”
“Good night,” Boone says. “Are those baby hippos on your pajamas?”
“Yes. So what?”
“Nothing. It’s just funny, that’s all.”
“Is it?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so. Get out.”
Boone gets out.
108
Petra was amazed at how quickly Boone became adept at researching case law.
He’d phoned her and asked her to meet him at her office,
saying that he needed her help, and she’d come. Without saying how he’d come about the information, which might have compromised her as an officer of the court, he told her what he’d learned about Phil Schering and why he needed to research something called “proximate cause.”
She showed him how to use the search vehicle on the computerized case law, and he was at it like a Supreme Court clerk. Truly impressive. They worked at it all night. By the time a pink sky snuck through the east-facing window, Boone had for himself a good grasp of the existing California case law regarding earth movement and coverage.
“There’s a chain of events leading up to any loss,” he says. “Some causes of loss are either implicitly or explicitly covered under the insurance contract, and some are specifically excluded. California case law states that if a cause of loss isn’t specifically excluded by the contract, then that cause is covered and the insurance company has to pay for the damages.
“‘Proximate cause’ doctrine—which is basically an amalgam of a number of decisions in cases—states that the insurance company, in analyzing coverage, has to determine the nearest, most important cause of the loss—the ‘proximate cause,’ if you will. Unless the ‘proximate cause’ of the loss is specifically excluded, the loss is covered.”
“So,” Petra says, “in the case of houses that were destroyed by falling into the sinkhole, the ‘proximate cause’ is earth movement, which is specifically excluded, so the insurance company is not liable.”
“Not so fast, counselor,” Boone says. “ ‘Proximate cause’ doctrine used to be the precedent, but in more recent cases, such as Neeley v. Firemen’s, the law has evolved to now state that while the proximate cause of the loss must be decided, if any event in the chain of events leading to the loss is not specifically excluded, then the loss is covered and the insurance company has to pay.”
Christ, that’s sexy, Petra thinks. She leans in a little closer and asks, “So, what impact does that have on your analysis of these cases?”
“The real issue seems to be negligence.”
“Negligence?”