The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  “I’m committed to this, Boone.”

  Famous last words. Like guys who commit to the wrong line on a wave—once you’re in it you might realize that you made the wrong choice, but it’s too late. You’re going to ride that line all the way to the wipeout.

  “Just put it under the bumper,” Boone says, “onto anything metal. I can track her movements from my van.”

  “A 007 kind of thing.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Boone says. “How long are you out of town?”

  “Two or three days. Depends.”

  “I have your cell?”

  “Yup.”

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Thanks for this, Boone.”

  Thanks for nothing, Boone thinks as Dan heads out.

  And speaking of thanks for nothing . . .

  47

  Boone meets Johnny at The Sundowner.

  Now, Boone has met Johnny at The Sundowner, like, a lot. You wanna run the numbers, Boone has probably met Johnny at The Sundowner more days than he hasn’t. And he usually looks forward to it. Why not? The Sundowner is cool, Johnny is cool, it’s all skippy.

  Not gonna be this time.

  So Boone is the opposite of stoked about it.

  “You rang?” Johnny asks as he sits down at the table across from Boone. Johnny has his summer homicide detective uniform on—blue cotton blazer, blue shirt, khaki pants. He takes one look at Boone and says, “You’ve been in a fight.”

  “A couple of them.”

  “Did you win anyway?”

  “Neither one.”

  “Then it hurts worse, huh?”

  Boone doesn’t know if it hurts worse, but it definitely hurts. As does what he’s about to tell Johnny.

  “You want a beer?” Boone asks.

  “Oh, yes, I want a beer,” Johnny says. The G2 on the street is that Cruz Iglesias has slipped into San Dog to escape the heat in TJ, and if that’s true, it’s alcohol-motivating news. It means that the Death Angels will be on the hunt, and they’re not exactly SEAL-like in their target selection process. It could get sloppy ugly bloody. So Johnny would like a lot of beers. “Most definitely I want a beer, but I’m going on duty so I can’t have a beer.”

  Boone signals the waiter and orders a couple of Cokes.

  Johnny says, “You wanted to see me about something?”

  “Yeah. Thanks for coming.”

  “Are we in the business or personal realm here?”

  “Business,” Boone says, although he’s worried it’s going to get personal. Murky border there, as easy to cross as the one with Mexico just a few miles to the south and, just like that border, hard to cross back from.

  “Shoot,” Johnny says.

  “Red Eddie told me he’s going to kill Corey Blasingame,” Boone says.

  “Okay,” Johnny says, taking it in. “How did you come by this information? You and Eddie don’t exactly hang.”

  “He sent a gunpoint invitation.”

  “And how could you say no?”

  “How could I say no?”

  Johnny nods, then gives Boone a long look. ‘So here’s the big question—why does Eddie give you the word? Let me rephrase that; why does Eddie give you the word?”

  Boone takes a deep breath and then says, “I’m working on the Blasingame defense team.”

  Johnny stares at him. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  Boone shrugs.

  “Putting my Sherlock Holmes hat on here,” Johnny says, “let me deduce: Alan Burke is representing Corey. Burke’s second chair is a certain British woman you’ve been dating. Hence . . . and it’s elementary, my dear Watson . . . you’re whipped.”

  “It’s not that.” It’s hard to be whipped by something you haven’t . . . he doesn’t finish the thought. Let Johnny think what he wants. There are tougher topics to take on and you might as well get it over with and jump. So he says, “You coached the Rockpile boys to write their statements, J.”

  Johnny looks at him for what seems like an hour. Then he says, “That Blasingame bitch is guilty. You know it, I know it, he knows it, Burke knows it, even that tea bag you’re banging knows it.”

  “Easy, now.”

  “You go easy,” Johnny says. “You back way off. Unless, that is, you’re going to choose a betty over your friends.”

  “It isn’t about her,” Boone says.

  “Then what’s it about?”

  “The first-degree charge is jacked up.”

  “You want Mary Lou’s number?”

  “The witness statements—”

  “—say what they say,” Johnny insists. “Did I let them know how the system works? You bet I did. Did that change what happened out there that night? Not even a little.”

  “Come on, J—you have Trevor Bodin putting intent in Corey’s mouth.”

  “He had intent in his mouth!” Johnny yells. “He said what he said, and he wrote it down. What are you saying, Boone?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you saying that I cooked the statements? The confession?” Johnny asks. “Is that the tack that you and your new best friends are going to take? You can’t try the facts so try the cop?”

  “Johnny—”

  “You know what that would do to my career?” Johnny asks.

  Boone knows. As fast as his own descent in the force was, Johnny had been that fast in the upward direction. Johnny’s rising with a rocket, there’s talk of chief of detectives someday, and Banzai takes his career very seriously.

  “I’m not trying to hurt you,” Boone says.

  “Yeah?” Johnny says. “Well, I don’t want to be collateral damage when your do-gooder, misplaced, pussy-whipped meddling goes off.”

  He walks over to the bar and sits down, his back to Boone.

  A shaft of sunlight pierces the room as the door opens and High Tide comes in for his End of the Workday Beer, a ritual that he practices with religious devotion. He sits down at the table with Boone and then notices Johnny sitting by himself at the bar.

  “What’s with Johnny B?” Tide asks.

  “We had a spat.”

  “Over a boy?” Tide asks, raising a fat finger to the waiter. “Tell you what, why don’t you girls come over tonight, we’ll make popcorn, put on a nice, goopy movie, and the two of you can have a good cry and make up. We could even make brownies.”

  “I’m helping defend Corey Blasingame.”

  Tide looks at him in disbelief, sees he’s serious, and then says, “Maybe I’ll have my beer at the bar.”

  “You know where it is.”

  “Late.”

  “Late.”

  Tide lifts his bulk out of the chair, shakes his head, walks away, and settles himself on a stool next to Johnny.

  Well, Boone thinks, this has been a good day.

  48

  Well, it has been for Jones.

  Nothing not to like, moving from one fine hotel to another, checking in twice a day to see if they want him to interview someone, with or without a terminal conclusion.

  Jones prefers to be active. He enjoys his work, but a little leisure doesn’t go down so hard, either. Apparently his employer and the powers that be are trying to work this particular problem out “amicably.” If so, Jones gets a free vacation in San Diego; if not, he does a job of work and takes a fatter envelope home with him.

  In the meantime he strolls the beach boardwalk, slathers himself with sunblock, observes the lovely young ladies in their swimsuits, and imagines them grimacing in pain.

  All in all, a good day.

  49

  Boone goes home.

  Pulls a yellowtail steak out of the fridge, gets it ready, and tosses it on the grill.

  Sunny always used to bust him for his ability to eat the same thing over and over again, day after day, but Boone never got what the problem was. His logic was simple: if something is good on Tuesday, why isn’t it good on Wednesday? All that’s changed is the day, not the food.

  “But what about variet
y?” Sunny pressed.

  “Overrated,” Boone answered. “We surf every day, don’t we?”

  “Yeah, but we change up the place sometimes.”

  He steps outside, turns the fish over, and sees High Tide coming up the pier. Boone goes outside to meet him.

  “Big man,” Boone says. “S’up?”

  “We need to talk.”

  Boone unlocks his door and says, “Come on in.”

  He’s known Tide since college days, when the big man was a star lineman at SDSU, headed for the pros. He was there to pick him back up when a knee injury ended that career. Boone didn’t know him in his gangbanging days, when Tide was the lord of the Samoan gangs in O’Side, before he found Jesus and gave all that up. He’s heard the stories, though—not from Tide but from other people.

  They go into Boone’s. Tide gently lets himself down on the sofa.

  “You want anything?” Boone asks.

  Tide shakes his big head. “I’m good.”

  Boone sits in a chair across from him. “What’s up?”

  High Tide is usually a pretty funny guy. Not now. Now he’s dead serious. “You’re on the wrong side of this, Boone.”

  “The Blasingame case.”

  “See, we don’t look at it as ‘the Blasingame case,’” Tide says. “We look at it as the ‘Kuhio murder.’”

  “‘We’ being the island community?” Bundling together the Hawaiians, Samoans, Fijians, and Tongans who have moved in greater numbers to California.

  Tide nods. “We fight among ourselves, but when an outsider attacks the calabash, the community, we bond together.”

  “I get that.”

  “No,” Tide says, “if you got that, you wouldn’t be lining up on the other side. We’re talking about Kelly Kuhio . . . K2. You know how many islanders the kids have to look up to? A few football players, a couple of surfers. You remember when the Samoan gangs were going at each other?”

  “Sure.”

  “K2 went street to street, block to block, with me,” Tide says. “He put himself on the line to bring the peace.”

  “He was a hero, Tide, I’m not arguing that.”

  Tide looks bewildered. “Then—”

  “They’re out to lynch that kid,” Boone says. “It’s not right.”

  “Let the system work it out.”

  “That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Without you,” Tide says. “Burke can hire any PI he wants. It doesn’t have to be you. I’m telling you, it’s personally hurtful to me that you took this case. I’m asking you, as your friend, to step out of it.”

  High Tide is not only a friend, but also one of the most fundamentally decent people whom Boone has ever known. He’s a man who rebuilt his life—not once, but twice—a family man whose view of family extends to his whole community. He’s gone back and worked with the gangs he used to lead in fights, he’s created peace and a little hope. An intelligent, sensitive man who wouldn’t have come with this request unless he’d given it a lot of thought.

  But he’s wrong, Boone thinks. Every lawyer, every investigator in town, could take a pass on this case on the same basis, and even the Coreys of the world—especially the Coreys of the world—need help. If Kelly taught us anything, he taught us that.

  “I’m sorry, Joshua, I can’t do that.”

  Tide gets up.

  Boone says, “We’re still friends, right?”

  “I don’t know, B,” Tide says. “I’ll have to think about that.”

  First Johnny, now Tide, Boone thinks after the big man has left. How many friendships do I have to put on the line for piece-of-shit Corey Blasingame?

  Then he smells his fish burning.

  He runs outside but the tuna has already gone Cajun style on him. He brings it back in, lays it in a tortilla with the red onion, finds some hot sauce in the fridge, pours it all over the fish, and then scarfs down the whole mess in a few big bites.

  Food is food.

  Then he calls Pete.

  She’s still at the office, of course.

  You don’t make partner working nine to five, or even nine to nine.

  “Hall,” she says.

  “Daniels.”

  “Hi, Boone, what’s up?”

  He fills her in on his day looking for the soul of Corey Blasingame, leaving out his fight at the dojo, Red Eddie’s threat, and the fact that he’s pissing off half his friends. There’d be time to tell her about that later.

  When he’s finished his account she says, “There’s really not a lot there we can use. The father is an alternately overbearing and neglectful horror show, and Corey was a mediocre surfer and a poor martial artist. Unfortunately, not poor enough. I think it does knock the ‘gang’ thing back a bit, though.”

  “There is no Rockpile ‘gang’ outside the four of them,” Boone says. “And their only criminal activity seems to be going around trying to start fights.”

  Yeah, except, he thinks. There’s always a freaking “except,” isn’t there? The except in this case being the two points of contact. Corey and the other Mouseketeers surf at Rockpile, a spot notorious for its localism, and the sheriff there is Mike Boyd. Corey and the boys trained at Boyd’s gym, where Corey learned the punch that killed Kelly Kuhio. The freaking Superman Punch.

  “. . . a late dinner or something?” she’s saying.

  “Uhh, Pete, yeah, I’d like to, but I have to work.”

  “The w word?” she asks. “From the self-proclaimed surf bum?”

  She keeps it light, but he can hear that she doesn’t quite believe him, thinks it’s payback from last night.

  “Yeah, you never know, huh?” Boone says. “But listen, another night . . .”

  “Another night. Well, I won’t keep you.”

  He punches out.

  50

  Dan Nichols is also on the phone.

  Saying, “. . . I understand. . . . I understand. . . . No, I understand.” Dan understands.

  51

  Bill Blasingame sets down the phone.

  His hand is shaking.

  He looks at it, surprised. Tells himself to quit being a pussy and stop his hand from quivering.

  It doesn’t.

  Bill’s freaked.

  52

  Well, he paid me back, Petra thinks. She gets out of the elevator and walks into the parking structure of the office building. Apparently an appreciation for subtlety is too much to expect from a man whose idea of sophistication is a shirt with buttons.

  Petra hits the unlock button on her remote key, flinches at the responding honk of the horn, and reminds herself again to take it into the dealer to have that particularly annoying “feature” removed.

  She gets in, turns the ignition, and heads toward the exit, driving down level after level of switchback turns until she comes to the gate, rolls down the window, and touches her card to the little machine.

  What passes for human contact, she thinks.

  Well done, girl, she tells herself. Another evening of dining alone over a microwave “dinner” or a take-out Chinese, and God, would that there were a decent Indian in downtown San Diego that delivered, just to mix it up a little.

  She steers the car onto the street.

  I should start walking to work, she thinks. The streets are relatively safe at night, it’s foolish going to the gym and hitting the treadmill, and God knows I’m not in a particular hurry to get home. Where I usually do the same things I do in the office, only with my shoes off and the television on for background noise. Read documents, take notes . . . go to bed.

  Alone.

  Again.

  Yes, well done, girl.

  She goes down the ramp into the parking structure of her building.

  Damn him, damn him, damn him.