The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  She was walking west on Garnet when she saw a man walk east and cross the street to the parking lot.

  “Then these four guys came out of the alley. They seemed pretty drunk to me. One of them just walked up to the man and hit him. The man fell. The guys got in their car and drove away. I went over to the man. He was unconscious. I used my cell phone to dial 911, but I guess it was too late.”

  Simple, straightforward, Boone thinks, and consistent with the other witness statements, as baked as they might be.

  Jill Thompson gave the police a detailed, accurate description of Corey and what he was wearing, and later picked him out of a lineup as the man who had punched Kelly Kuhio.

  The other witness is George Poptanich, a fifty-four-year-old cabdriver who was parked in the lot that night. It was common for taxis to wait in that lot for their dispatchers to send them to bars to pick up fares too drunk to drive.

  Poptanich was sitting in his cab when he heard the Rockpile Crew come out of the alley to his left. He noticed the pedestrian because he thought he might be a possible fare. Then he saw one of the “punks” walk up to the pedestrian “aggressively.” He started to get out to help but there wasn’t time before one of the kids punched the pedestrian in the face. Poptanich yelled at them, but the punks jumped into a car. Poptanich noted the license number, jotted it down in his log, and called 911. Then he went to assist the girl who was with the pedestrian. By this time, people were coming out of the bars.

  A police cruiser picked the Rockpile Crew up five minutes later on the PCH, ostensibly on their way to La Jolla.

  Poptanich also picked Corey out of the lineup as the kid who threw the punch.

  There’s a knock at the door.

  Boone opens it.

  “You wanna get dinner?” Dave asks.

  He has a speargun in his hand.

  25

  Forty-five minutes later they jump into the water of La Jolla Cove.

  Boone has a mask with a lamp, a snorkel, duck fins, and his Ogie speargun, and now he and Dave, similarly equipped, swim out toward underwater caves, the aforementioned “holes” that gave the place, at least in Boone’s mind, its name.

  Caves and underwater holes are good, because that’s where the fish are.

  The swim feels good, just a little cold and refreshing on a soft night. Most of the year they’d wear wet suits because the deep current runs cold, but it’s still warm enough in August to go with just trunks.

  It’s a fine thing to do, night spear fishing, and they owe it all to a group of nonagenarians collectively called the Bottomscratcher’s Club. These were a bunch of WWII vets who had crashed in planes, sank in ships, and survived amphibious assault landings, and came home to San Diego to find that their adrenaline-hyped systems weren’t being sufficiently fed. So they started free diving in the underwater caves of La Jolla Cove.

  If the tight caves, heavy surf, and tricky currents weren’t dangerous enough; it’s worthwhile to note that the only creatures that previously hunted under these waters were the great white sharks attracted by the numerous sea lions, their favorite meal, and that a free diver in a wet suit and fins looks an awful lot like a sea lion.

  Actually, spear fishing had been against the law in San Diego up until the formation of the Bottomscratcher’s Club, when a lawmaker observed that if any man had light enough brains and heavy enough balls to tempt great whites in their home territory, he should damn well have the right to do it. The Bottomscratcher’s Club recently disbanded, due to age, but Boone and Dave feel that they’re upholding a fine tradition of courage and stupidity.

  And free food.

  “Free food tastes better,” is an article of faith in Dave’s cosmology, and Boone can only agree. There is something about the taste of food that you haven’t laid out bucks for that is just, well, better.

  Now Boone and Dave swim over to the cave where they think they’ll have the best luck. Boone spits into his mask, swishes some water around the glass, and fits it snugly onto his face. Then he lays out, swims around for a second, and dives.

  They call it free diving because you’re free of most equipment—crucially, air tanks and regulators. What you’re free to do is hold your breath for as long as you can and get as deep as you can, leaving yourself with enough reserve in your lungs to make it back up. Both Boone and Dave are certified scuba divers, and sometimes do that, but on a summer evening it’s easier to just jump in and go.

  Boone flicks on his lamp and dives down toward the mouth of a narrow cave. He moves his head to shine the light around but doesn’t see anything but tiny fish, so he comes back up, grabs a breath, and dives again.

  He spots Dave about fifty feet away, treading above a small crack in a reef. You want to stay close enough for visual contact but far enough away for safety; the last thing you want is to shoot your buddy with a spear.

  Some movement catches Boone’s eye. Turning back to a crack in an underwater rock, he sees a “swish” disappear into it, leaving a roil of bubbles that shine in the lantern light. Boone swims down to the crack and feels it. It’s narrow, but wide enough, and he turns sideways and pushes himself through.

  The crack opens into an underwater chamber, and Boone sees the yellowtail tuna below him, flipping its tail back and forth, motoring away. Boone is almost out of breath—he feels that tightness in his chest and the slight physical panic that always comes with running out of air—but he relaxes and pushes through it, diving down closer to the tuna. He raises the speargun to his shoulder and squeezes the trigger. The spear shoots out and strikes the fish behind the gills. The tuna thrashes violently for a moment, then is still, as a cloud of blood billows into the water. Boone pulls in the cord and brings the fish closer to his body.

  Time to get going.

  Boone turns and heads up toward the narrow chamber.

  Except he can’t find it.

  A slight problem.

  It was perfectly obvious from above, but it must look different from below and in poor light, and as he gropes his way around the chamber for an opening he feels really stupid. This would be a bad, dumb way to go out, he thinks, trying to keep his movements steady and unhurried, fighting the physical reflex to hurry.

  But he can’t see it and he can’t feel it.

  So he listens for it.

  Small waves are coming into the cove, against the cliffs, and the water will go out the chamber and make a sound. He stops still and listens, and then he hears a faint whooshing sound and heads toward it.

  Then he sees the light.

  Not the light that they say you see before you go to heaven, but Dave’s lantern shining into the chamber from the other side.

  Why you dive with a buddy.

  Especially a buddy like Dave the Love God.

  These guys are tight, they’ve hung together since grade school, ditching classes through junior high and high school to go surfing, diving or just roaming the beach. It was like they didn’t have separate houses—if Boone was at Dave’s at suppertime, that’s where he ate; if Dave was at Boone’s at night, that’s where he crashed. They’d sit up half the night anyway, playing video games, watching surf videos, talking about their heroes—and, yeah, one of those was Kelly Kuhio.

  Some of the old guys on the Gentlemen’s Hour called them the “Siamese Idiots,” a double dose of gremmie obnoxiousness joined at the hip. (Yeah, but those men looked out for them, made sure that their stupidity didn’t cost them their lives, made sure they never crossed the line.)

  Boone and Dave pooled their cash to buy that first van, used it to go cruising the coast together looking for the best waves, and took turns on a Friday/Saturday-night rotation system for dates. The van died a natural death after two years (Johnny B opined that its suspension just gave up the will to live), and the boys sold it for scrap and used the money to buy scuba gear.

  Diving, surfing, hogueing, chasing girls. Long days on the beach, long nights on the beach, it builds a friendship. You’re in the ocean with a
guy, you learn to trust that guy, trust his character and his capabilities. You know he’s not going to jump your wave or do something kooky that would get you hurt or even killed. And you know—you know—that if you’re ever lost in the dark, deep water, that guy is coming to look for you, no matter what.

  So Dave’s down there with a lantern, showing him the way up and out.

  Boone swims toward the light, then sees the crack and squeezes through, pulling his catch behind him. Then he plunges up to the surface and gets a deep breath of beautiful air.

  Dave comes up beside him.

  “Nice catch.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re an idiot.”

  “It’s been said.”

  “Accurately,” Dave says. “We should head in.”

  Because there’s blood in the water, and if there’s anything more attractive to a shark than a sea lion, it’s blood. If any sharks are within a hundred-yard radius, they’ll be coming. Best to be onshore when they do.

  “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.

  26

  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.

  27

  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.”