by Don Winslow
Dan Silver's first punch goes into Mick's liver and crumples him. Mick's on his knees, hunched over in agony, sucking for air, when the kick comes into his solar plexus and makes breathing an impossibility.
Mick flops on the floor like a fish on the dock.
Then they're kicking him, shoes and boots smashing into his thighs, his shins, his ankles, his ribs. He rolls over on one side and pulls his arms over his head and manages to blurt out, “Not my face. Please, not my face.”
His face is his living, and he knows it. Knows now in one of those stark moments of clarity that he's never going to be “SCRNRITR,” no matter what his license plate reads, that the best he can hope for is a few more years of being a parking valet/male whore.
But he doesn't even get that if they fuck up his face.
They pick him up and set him down on the sofa.
“You don't want your pretty face messed up?” Dan asks. “You better tell me what I want to know.”
“Anything, man.”
Except what he wants to know is how to find Tammy.
Love is a powerful thing.
Elusive, ephemeral, enigmatic-love can make you do some fuckedup shit. It can drive you to depths you never thought you'd go; it can lift you to heights you never knew you could climb. It will show you the worst and the best in yourself. Love can strip you down to bare shame; love can reveal pure nobility.
Mick holds out a long time.
He loves her, he knows that these guys want to hurt her, will hurt, maybe kill her, and he loves her. In the end, he gives them everything they want, but it takes them a while to get it. He gives them Teddy, gives them the motel in Oceanside, gives them Boone.
He gives up everything and hates himself for it.
Dan leaves almost admiring the dumb shit.
Had to fuck him up real bad before he caved.
50
When he comes to, they start beating him, kicking him, cursing him.
Barely conscious, Boone rolls into a fetal position and covers up his head as the boots, fists, and the shotgun butt rain down on him.
And the words:
Pendejo, lambioso, picaflor.
A shotgun butt slams into his ankle. A few more of these, Boone thinks, and I'm never walking out of here. He opens his eyes, sees a pair of feet, grabs them, and lifts. The feet go flying, and Boone pushes himself up and topples over on the man. Boone's real lucky, because this turns out to be the guy holding the shotgun, who doesn't really know what he's doing because the safety is still on, so Boone is able to rip the gun out of his hands.
Boone rolls onto his back, points the shotgun up, and flips off the safety. It's only a little. 410, the kind farmworkers use to shoot crows, but at this range it would do the job.
There are three men-campesinos-Mexican farmworkers.
The man who was holding the shotgun looks about forty, maybe a little younger. Deep brown weather-worn face and a black mustache already flecked with silver. His black eyes glare at Boone as if to say, Go ahead and pull the trigger, pendejo. I've seen worse.
The kid standing beside him looks scared. Eyes wide, long black hair stuffed under an old Yankees cap. Dirty long-sleeved T-shirt, jeans, and ancient, torn New Balance sneakers. He's holding a machete, wondering what to do with it.
The old man has his machete ready to strike, poised beside his white straw hat. He wears the old-style campesino shirt under overalls. And old cowboy boots-Boone felt the sharp pointed toes digging into his ribs.
If they wanted to kill me, I'd be dead, Boone thinks as he struggles to his feet, holding the shotgun on them. They could have blown my head off, or chopped me to pieces with the machetes. But they didn't. What they wanted to do was to give me a good beating, which they sure as hell did.
Teach me a lesson.
But what?
Boone thrusts the shotgun out a little, like, I will shoot you, and backs his way to the clearing in front of the reed caves. A little girl sits there, her arms wrapped around her knees, rocking herself. Her legs are dirty under her cheap cotton dress. Her hair is long and stringy. She looks terrified, and fingers a small crucifix that hangs around her neck from a thin chain.
“It's okay,” Boone says.
She scoots back deeper into the cave.
“Don't be scared,” Boone says. Fucking moron, he tells himself. You really think she's not going to be scared by a gьero holding a shotgun? He reaches his hand down for her.
The teenage boy rushes in with the machete.
I don't want to shoot you, Boone thinks, backing off. But the boy keeps coming, the blade of the machete gleaming gold in the light of dusk. Boone takes another step back and raises the gun, then, at the last second, ducks under the blade and swings the gun butt into the boy's stomach.
The boy collapses onto his knees. Boone sees that the boy is sobbing, more in frustration than pain. He kicks the machete away from the kid's hand, hauls the boy up, wraps a forearm lock around his throat, and sticks the shotgun barrel into the side of his head. “I'm leaving now. Take one step toward me, I'll paint the air with him.”
He turns around, puts the boy's body between him and the two campesinos and backs out of the reeds. When he gets to the clearing, he shoves the boy away. The boy turns and stares at him. A look of pure hatred. The kid spits on the ground, then turns and walks back through the reeds. Boone watches him for a second.
When he turns around, Petra is standing there.
51
“My God,” she says, “what happened?”
Blood drips from the corner of his mouth and from his nose, and he looks like he's been rolled in the dirt.
“You're supposed to be watching the motel,” he says.
“I was concerned about you,” she replies. “Apparently for good reason. Where did you get a shotgun?”
“Someone gave it to me.”
“Voluntarily?”
“Sort of.”
He walks back up the road to the motel.
Teddy's car is still there.
“Did you find Teddy?” Petra asks.
“No,” he says.
“We should get you to a hospital.”
“Not necessary.”
He opens the side door of the van and digs around until he finds a small first-aid kit. He gets into the front seat, twists the rearview mirror, and looks into it as he cleans the cuts and scratches on his face, swabbing them with pads and then rubbing in antiseptic. Then he places a Band-Aid on the cut over his left eye.
“Can I help?” Petra says.
“I asked you for help,” Boone says. “You were supposed to be watching the motel.”
“I already apologized for that.”
He finishes applying the Band-Aid, then grabs a vial of pills, shakes one out, and swallows it.
“What-”
“Vicodin,” he says. “Karate candy. I didn't find Teddy or Tammy. All I found was a mojado camp.”
“A…”
“Mojados,”Boone repeats. “‘Wetbacks.’ Illegals. They work the fields; some of them live in camps. Usually, the camps are tucked up in the canyons; this one was in the reeds along the river. I wasn't exactly welcome.”
But it's weird, he thinks, that the mojados were so aggressive. Usually, they'll do anything to avoid attention. The last thing in the world they want is trouble, and beating up a white guy is definitely trouble.
Boone leans forward and rubs the back of his neck, annoyed at the ache but grateful that the shotgun hadn't snapped a vertebra.
And what was Teddy doing in there? Boone asks himself. There aren't a lot of cosmetic surgery candidates in the mojado camps, not any that could afford Teddy anyway. And why did Teddy apparently get a pass while I got a shotgun butt to the neck? Or maybe Teddy didn't get a free ticket; maybe he's lying in a heap somewhere. Maybe worse. But what the hell was Teddy doing there in the first place?
Well, the only thing to do is wait and ask him. Boone grabs a beanie from the back and pulls it over his hea
d. Then he slides down in his seat, rests his neck against the back of it, and closes his eyes.
“What are you doing?” Petra asks.
“Grabbing a few z's,” he says, “until Teddy gets back from doing whatever he's doing.”
“But what if you fall asleep?”
“I am going to fall asleep,” Boone says. “That's the idea.”
Besides, it's Rule number four.
These are Boone's four basic rules about stakeouts:
1. If you have a chance to eat, eat.
2. If there's a place to go to the bathroom, go.
3. If there's a space to lie down, lie down.
4. If you can sleep, sleep.
Because you never know when you're going to have a chance to do any or all of the four things again.
“But aren't you worried about being asleep when Teddy comes back?” Petra asks.
“No,” Boone says, “because you're going to wake me up.”
“What if I fall asleep?”
Boone laughs.
“And what if-”
“You should give up those what-ifs,” Boone says. “They're gonna kill you.”
He slides farther down in the seat, pulls the beanie over his eyes, and falls asleep.
52
Sunny spreads the mat out on the polished floor of her little house in Pacific Beach and lies down.
The old bungalow is just a half block from the beach. It was her grandparents' house; they bought it back in the twenties, when average people could afford something like that. Her grandfather died a long time ago; her grandmother passed just a few years back, after a long, sad struggle with Alzheimer's.
Eleanor Day had been quite a woman. Sunny holds on to the memories of long walks on the beach with her, and building sand castles, and how her grandmother bought Sunny her first surfboard and called her “Gidget,” like the TV show. Sunny loved to stay with Grandma at the beach. It was her favorite place in the world.
Sunny visited her a lot in the home. Some days, Eleanor would know who Sunny was; other days, she'd get her confused with her daughter, or her sister, or an old friend from college. It made Sunny sad, but it didn't stop her from visiting.
She knew who Eleanor was.
Sunny was living in a small apartment when she got the word that her grandmother was gone. The Dawn Patrol came to the funeral, and no one was more surprised than Sunny when the lawyer told her that she had inherited the old two-bedroom bungalow near the beach.
Her grandmother had wanted Sunny to have it because she knew that she would appreciate it.
She does, of course.
It holds a lot of memories, a lot of love.
Now she takes a few deep breaths, then launches into the rigorous Pilates exercises that make up her daily routine. She goes at it hard for an hour-stretching, twisting, moving into heavy aerobic drills, then stretching it down.
Then she moves over to the old surfboard that she stretched across two cinder blocks. She lies down on the board, jumps to her knees, then instantly up to her feet; then she lies back down again. She does this a hundred times, until the movement is as smooth, powerful, and automatic as it can be. Her heart pounding, a fine sheen of sweat coating her skin, she moves to the free weights and lifts, first working her upper body and arms. She wants the arm and shoulder strength for paddling and for that sudden burst of speed and energy needed to get into a big wave. Then she works the trapezium and neck muscles, which will help keep her neck from getting snapped in the worst-case scenario of going over the falls headfirst.
After that, she straps weights to her ankles and does leg lifts, then picks up a bar and does toe lifts and deep squats, strengthening her quads, calves, and thighs, which will help keep her on the board in the big waves. While her long legs are an advantage in swimming, they work against her in staying on the board, so she has to make sure that they're like steel.
Sunny is a finely honed athlete, five-eleven, big-boned, with a swimmer's broad shoulders, negligible body fat, and those long legs.
“You're a gazelle,” Dave the Love God once said to her as he watched her walk in from the water.
“She's not the gazelle,” Boone said correcting him. “She's the lioness.”
Sunny's always loved Boone for saying that. Well, for a lot of things, but his saying that was enough to love him.
And she keeps her body in superb shape with running, swimming, lifting, stretching. Truth be told, it's not the ideal surfer's body. Most of the best woman surfers have smaller, more compact frames-easier for balance and for the lightning-quick turns and shifts that win competitions.
But Sunny plans to turn her size to her advantage.
A big body, she thinks, for the big waves.
So far, big-wave riding has been pretty much a male preserve. There are a few women starting to ride them, but still plenty of room for a female surfer to stand out in a male lineup. She knows she has the size, weight, and strength to handle the thunder crushers.
Up to now, she's been caught in a vicious circle: You need money to travel to the big waves in Hawaii and Tahiti, but without sponsorship, she doesn't have the money, but she can't get a sponsorship until she rides the big waves, but in order to ride the big waves, she has to travel…
But now the big waves are coming to her. Almost literally to her back door, and all she has to do is walk outside, paddle out, and catch one of the big mackers. The beaches and bluffs will be lined with photographers and video guys, and all she needs is one ride, one monster ride, with her tawny hair waving like her personal flag against the black wave, and she knows that her picture will be on the front cover of the mags.
And the sponsorship will follow.
So lift, she tells herself. Push past the pain; it's only pain. Every fiber-ripping lift will help you stay up in that wave. This is what you've been training for for months, for years, all your life. So do one more, one more, one more…
The lifting done, she goes back on the mat and stretches some more, then lies back, breathes, and imagines herself riding the big wave.
It's not mere fantasizing; she carefully breaks it down, moment by moment, from the paddle in to the drop to the heavy right break, into the tube, then out again with the blast of spray. She imagines it again and again, each time in more detail, and in each repetition she does it stronger and better. She never imagines missing the wave, or wiping out, or getting sucked over the falls.
Sunny keeps it rigorously positive.
The sound of her moment coming to her.
She gets up, wipes herself down with a towel, and sits and listens to the ocean.
53
Petra watches Boone sleep.
It's a somewhat edifying experience, in that she's never actually watched a man sleep before.
Not that there haven't been men in her bed, but she has typically fallen asleep before they have, or, preferably, they have gotten up and left after the sexual act and a decent period of “cuddling,” although, truth be told, she could do without the latter. It seems to be expected, however, even though she suspects that the man could dispense with it as well.
If she's in the man's bed, she gets up and leaves after the polite interval, because she prefers to sleep alone, and, especially, wake up alone. She's hardly decent-physically, emotionally, or psychologically-until she's had that first cup of Lapsang souchong, and besides, the last thing she wants to be doing in the morning is looking after a man's needs, feigning cheerfulness as she makes him coffee, eggs, sausages, and the like.
That's what restaurants are for.
Now she watches Boone Daniels sleep and she's fascinated.
One moment the man was totally, utterly awake and one second later he was just as totally, utterly asleep, as if he didn't have the proverbial care in the world. As if he weren't financially bereft, as if he didn't have a crucial witness to locate, as if an apparently violent gangster wasn't out to harm him, as if…
I weren't even here, she admits to herself.
Ridiculous, she tells herself. Why would you care if this… primitive doesn't find you as fascinating as, let's face it, most men do? It's not as if you have any interest in him, not as if you've made the slightest effort to attract him.
Of course, you never make the slightest effort, she thinks. Be truthful, woman, you're very lazy when it comes to that. Lazy because you can be, because a frank assessment in the mirror tells you so, and because men tell you so.
They act like idiots and they're ridiculously easy to bring into your bed, if that's what you want.
Not that there have been that many.
A few well-selected, well-heeled, polite, appropriate sexual partners, one or two of whom she had considered as potential husbands and who, she supposes, have evaluated her as a potential wife.
But they are all much too career-oriented and, face it, selfish for marriage. At least at this point in her life, in any case. Perhaps after she makes partner, she might seek out a more serious relationship, perhaps find a man who might be a suitable husband. In the meantime, she's content to find the occasional young lawyer or banker who's appropriate to take to company dinners and, even more occasionally, to bed.
Or am I, she wonders, so content?
You are lonely, she admits to herself. It isn't a sudden revelation, an epiphany of sorts, but more of a creeping realization that she's been missing something, something she never thought she wanted-a close emotional connection with another person. The realization shocks her. She's always been, as long as she can remember, totally self-sufficient.
Which is the way she likes it.
But now she's beginning to feel that she needs somebody, and she doesn't like the feeling.
At all.
She regards Boone again.
How can the man sleep at a time like this?