The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

53

  A few students are hanging out in Team Domination, sparring, getting in a little bagwork, lifting weights.

  One of them is Boone’s “corner,” Dan.

  “Hey,” Boone says. “Mike around?”

  “He took off.”

  “Any idea where?”

  Dan has this funny little look on his face, like he knows where Boyd is but also knows that he shouldn’t say. The other gym rats have their ears pricked up, too. So apparently “Mike around?” is an interesting question.

  “I say something funny?” Boone asks.

  A guy yanking kettle weights in the corner sets them down and comes over. Boone recognizes him from this afternoon. The guy says, “Mike said you might come around.”

  “And here I am.”

  “He said we could use a guy like you.”

  “Well, I’m a useful guy.”

  I can surf, I can burn fish . . .

  “Mike’s out in Lakeside,” the guy says. “The 14 Club.”

  The 14 Club? Boone thinks. He remembers the “5” tattoo on Mike’s thick forearm. The boy has this number thing going.

  “I’ll go check it out,” Boone says.

  “You go check it out,” the kettle-weight guy says with this weird, smarmy smile.

  So I guess we agree on that, Boone thinks.

  I’ll go check it out.

  54

  It’s an article of faith among surfers in SoCal that you journey east of Interstate 5 at your own risk.

  Nowhere is this more true than in San Diego County.

  In fact, a lot of people make a clear distinction between San Diego County and the fictional “East County,” its eastern portion, the latter, rightly or wrongly, having a rep for crystal meth, biker bars, and the Southern California version of rednecks. Sticking with the stereotypes for the moment, west of the 5 you have stoned-out surfers smoking weed, east of the 5 you got jacked-up gearheads spitting tobacco.

  So Boone drives east, thirty miles out to the town of Lakeside, up in the barren hills just north of Interstate 8.

  Lakeside is cowboy country.

  No, actual, real cowboys—hats, boots, big-belt-buckle cowboys—forty-five minutes from downtown San Diego. The bars out here have pickup trucks in the gravel parking lots, built-in toolboxes in the beds, and dogs chained to eyebolts to keep people from lifting the tools while the owner’s inside having a few beers.

  The 14 Club is your classic cinder-block bunker. The small windows have been painted black to keep cops, wives, and girlfriends from peeking in. The small “14” sign is hand-lettered, red on black. There’s dozens of these joints in “East County”—hard-drinking caves for hardworking guys looking to blow off a little steam at the end of the day.

  Yeah, except—

  Boone walks through the door and the music is blasting.

  Bass like resuscitation paddles.

  And it ain’t Merle Haggard, either, or Toby or Travis or who the hell ever. It’s slamming heavy-metal “punk,” for lack of a better description, and the clientele aren’t cowboys, they’re skinheads. Doc Martens, suspenders, T-shirts, tatts, the whole nine.

  Which is surprising to Boone because he thought that scene died a well-deserved death years ago. Great, he thinks, now we have retro skinheads. I guess everything comes back in style sooner or later.

  Boone, in his faded Bullhead jeans, black Hurley T-shirt, and an old pair of Skechers, feels distinctly out of place.

  SEI.

  The skins are slamming to the music and they are jacked on beer and speed. This scene could get ugly—uglier, Boone reconsiders—in a heartbeat. He looks around and spots Mike Boyd leaning backward on the bar, a bottle of beer in his hand, watching the scene, and nodding with approval.

  Boone pushes his way through the crowd and makes his way to Boyd.

  “Hey!” Boone shouts over the music.

  Boyd looks only a little surprised to see him, but then again, he also looks about half shit-faced. “Three times in one day! To what do I owe the honor?! And how’s your neck?!”

  “Still attached to my head!” Boone answers. “Just barely!”

  “Tap out next time!”

  Yeah, “next time,” Boone thinks. Ain’t gonna be no next time, Mikey.

  “How’d you find me?!” Mike yells.

  “Your boys clued me! I hope that’s cool!”

  “You’re welcome here!” Mike says, tapping his fist to Boone’s. “Very welcome!”

  “What is here?!” Boone asks. “What is this?!”

  “You know ‘14’?!” Boyd asks.

  Boone shakes his head.

  “You will!” Boyd says. “When you find yourself, who you really are, your identity!”

  Okay, Boone thinks, this is getting seriously weird.

  “Why did you come here, Boone?!”

  Good question, Boone thinks, his head already throbbing from the concussive noise. Boone’s musical tastes run to Jack Johnson, Common Sense, Dick Dale, maybe a little surf reggae or some good Hawaiian slack key. This shit is killing him. I must be getting old, he thinks, grousing about how loud the kids play their so-called music.

  Next stop, the Gentleman’s Hour.

  He doesn’t know how to answer Boyd’s question. Like, what’s he supposed to say—that he’s hinky Boyd has shown up twice in the same case? That he wonders what the nexus is among the Rockpile Crew, Team Domination, and Corey Blasingame?

  As it turns out, Boyd answers his own question.

  “You came here,” he says, “for the same reason that salmon swim upstream!”

  “To spawn?!” Boone asks. “I don’t think so, Mike!”

  There are some girls here, but they’re way too young and not at all Boone’s type. Pale, skinny, blond “East County” chicks, wearing black jeans over boots and hanging all over their skinhead boyfriends? No spawning for me, Mike.

  “To fulfill your natural destiny!” Boyd answers.

  Seriously, seriously, grim weird.

  Anyway, Boone thinks, my natural destiny is to surf until I have to gum my fish tacos and hopefully topple over in a wave.

  West of the 5.

  Speaking of 5, what’s the tatt about?

  And what’s up with this “14” shit?

  The music picks up—picks up—in intensity and the skins start slamming each other, chest-bumping, head-butting—retro, retro, retro—as the lead guitar wails the same chord over and over again, and then Boone picks up on the lyrics.

  Wham!

  Show ’em who I am!

  Wipe the mud off my feet,

  Hose the mud off the street

  So I can walk again

  Like a white man!

  Okaaaay, Boone thinks. Rhymes, anyway. Boyd leans over and yells into Boone’s ear. “Fourteen! Fourteen words!”

  Which turn out to be, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

  Boone counts them—fourteen words, all right. “The man who said that,” Boyd hollers, “died in prison!” Good idea, Boone thinks.

  Wham!

  The taco’s head goes bam!

  What do I see?

  Another block is free!

  Where I can walk again

  Like a white man!

  “He gave his life for the cause!” Boyd yells. He has fucking tears in his eyes. “We all have to be prepared to give our lives for the cause!”

  Yeah, no, Boone thinks.

  Not me.

  Not for this cause.

  White supremacist, neo-Nazi, needle-dick, double-digit IQ, mouth-breathing, bottom-feeding, off-the-chart dismo, sick bullshit.

  The skins are rocking out now—the adrenaline is pumping, the blood is flowing.

  Good, Boone thinks.

  Bleed out.

  55

  As Boone drives away, his ears are still ringing from the music and Boyd’s parting words.

  “You’ll be back, Daniels! When you figure it all out, you’ll be back!”

&nbs
p; Yeah.

  Boone drives west until he spots a Starbucks sign—no big trick there—and pulls off. He digs out the laptop and Googles.

  The fourteen words—“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”—were the Nathan Hale of one David Lane, founder of the neo-Nazi group the Order, who was sentenced to a buck ninety in prison for murder, bank robbery, and other happy crap. He tapped out in the joint in 1997.

  So good things do happen in prison, Boone thinks.

  He types in “5 + white supremacist.”

  What comes up makes him sick to his stomach.

  In white-supremo code, “5” stands for “the Five Words”:

  I have nothing to say.

  56

  Turns out to be a white supremacist slogan coined by a local San Diego buttplug, Alex Curtis, at his trial for violating people’s civil rights. Boone sort of remembers the whole thing. Curtis was a young creep from “East County” who had a Web site and a streaming podcast to spew his drool. Was a big proponent of the “lone wolf” tactic—which said that the racists should act alone to foil law enforcement—go out solo to kill Jews and blacks and the rest of the “mud people.”

  Curtis went to jail back in—was it 2006?—and became kind of a cult hero-martyr for the knuckle-dragger set, and according to the story on the Web site, his words in court “I have nothing to say” became a slogan.

  Encoded in the number 5.

  Good, Corey, Boone thinks.

  Real good.

  I guess you found something you could belong to.

  57

  Regarding the next morning’s Dawn Patrol, there’s dawn . . .

  . . . but not much of a patrol.

  Boone, Dave, and Hang are out there, but Johnny and Tide are 404.

  “Johnny must have got hung on a case,” Dave observes.

  “Probably,” Boone says.

  “Yeah, but where’s Tide?” Hang asks.

  “He was at The Sundowner last night,” Dave says.

  “He say anything?” Boone asks.

  “About what?”

  “I dunno,” Boone says. “Anything.”

  Great, he thinks. Lie to the friends you have left.

  “He was quiet,” Dave says. “A big Buddha statue sitting at the bar, banging beers. I left early, had a date with a nurse from Frankfurt. The Euros are here in force, man. The beach is like the freaking UN.”

  “Weak dollar,” Boone says.

  “I guess.” Dave looks at Boone funny, like, What aren’t you telling me?

  Boone sees it and ignores it. Can’t tell you what I can’t tell you, bro, and you’ll find out about it soon enough anyway.

  58

  Corey Blasingame sits slumped across the table from Boone.

  “I have noth——”

  “Save it.”

  Corey shrugs and reaches for the plastic bottle of water by his right hand. Boone gets to it first and moves it out of reach. When Corey stretches his arm out to get the bottle, Boone grabs his wrist and holds it down on the table.

  Then he reaches over and slides Corey’s sleeve up.

  Sees the “5” tattoo.

  He lets Corey’s wrist go. The kid jerks his arm back and smirks at Boone.

  “I killed him,” Corey says, “because I thought he was a nigger.”

  59

  Corey freaking Blasingame.

  Total loser.

  Even when he tries to do something hatefully stupid and stupidly hateful, he fucks it up. Sees a dark-skinned man come out of a bar, thinks he’s African American, kills him, and then finds out his victim is Hawaiian.

  Well done, C. Good job.

  You killed one of the finest men I’ve ever known because you “thought he was a ‘nigger.’”

  Excellent.

  The rest of the scenario is easy to put together—Corey originally confessed to the crime but, realizing he’d fucked up, didn’t cop to his real motive. Then the Aryan Brotherhood boys got to him in the lockup and let him know that he could do his time in one of two ways—as a snitch or as a race hero. Even a fucking idiot like Corey figured out he’d better take door number two. So he fell back on the ‘I have nothing to say’ mantra, which made him more of a hero. But then he just couldn’t keep it inside—something forced him to make himself look as bad as possible.

  “I killed him because I thought he was a nigger.”

  Hateful and stupid.

  Boone goes down the ramp below the big office building on Broadway and Sixth, takes a ticket from the machine, and makes several orbits of the parking structure before he finds a vacant space. He locks up the Deuce, gets into the elevator, and goes up to the fourteenth floor, to the door marked “Law Offices of Burke, Spitz, and Culver,” and goes inside.

  He’s known Becky Hager for years. Middle-aged; very attractive; long, curly red hair, she’s the sentinel at Alan’s castle gate. If Becky doesn’t want you to get in to see Alan, you’re not getting in to see Alan.

  “Daniels,” she says. “Long time no.”

  “Busy, Becky.”

  “Surf up?”

  “Not lately,” Boone says.

  “You here to see Mary Poppins? Blasingame?”

  “Yup.”

  Becky gives just enough of a smirk to inform him that she knows there’s a little more between him and Petra than a purely professional relationship, then pushes a couple of buttons and says into her mouthpiece, “Petra? There’s a ‘Boone Daniels’ here for you?”

  She listens, then looks up at Boone and says, “She’ll be out in a minute. The new Surfer arrived.”

  Boone sits down and looks at the magazine. Petra comes out two minutes later, looking cool and lovely in a white lawn self-stripe blouse over a light tan skirt.

  “This is a surprise,” she says.

  “Sorry I didn’t call.”

  “That’s quite all right,” she says. “Come on back.”

  “Nice to see you, Daniels.”

  “And you, Becky.”

  Petra’s office is midway down the hall. It has a nice view of the city, dominated by the aircraft carriers docked at the navy base with Point Loma as a backdrop, but Boone knows that she covets the corner office that comes with being made partner.

  She sits behind her desk, which is as neat and tight as she is.

  “I have motive for Corey,” Boone says.

  “Do tell.”

  “He was making his bones with the white supremacist movement,” Boone says, “and went after Kelly because he thought he was black.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “He told me.”

  “You asked him if he did it?”

  “Of course not,” Boone says. “He volunteered it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a fuckup, Pete,” says Boone. “A total loser. I hate him. Anyway, that’s what I was doing last night when you called, checking it out. I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, I’m sorry for the last-minute invitation. It was presumptuous of me.”

  “Look, you can presume . . . what you want to . . . presume.”

  “I don’t know what to presume about us, Boone,” she says. “Are we colleagues, or friends, or more than friends, or—”

  Before he knows what he’s doing he’s standing up, leaning over her desk, and kissing her on the mouth. Her lips flutter under his, something he’s never experienced before, and they’re fuller and softer than he would have thought. He pulls her out of her chair, and papers spill off the desk onto the floor.

  He lets her go.

  “So that would be more than friends?” she says, smoothing her skirt. “I presume?”

  What the hell are you doing? he asks himself. One second you’re ready to take her head off, the next second you’re kissing her.

  “I’d better go tell Alan the good news,” she says.