The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  Shut it down.

  Actually, shut it the fuck down.

  “You came in here,” Lieutenant Romero said, “and we talked about baseball. The Pads have no middle relief, I’m glad we agree on that. You left.”

  “But—”

  “But fucking nothing, Kodani,” Romero said. “You push on that, you know what pushes back? Weight comes from above, my ambitious friend, and do you know who’s between you and the above? That would be me. Shut it the fuck down.”

  “Burke will pursue it,” Johnny argued, “even if we don’t. One way or the other.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” the lieutenant said. “Far as I’m concerned, this is one multimillionaire against another. Let them rip each other to shreds and we’ll pick up the pieces. But you don’t, repeat for emphasis, you do not go anywhere near Bill Blasingame. People are going to think you have some kind of hard-on for that family, John.”

  So now Johnny is on his way to roust Bill Blasingame.

  He finds him at home.

  With dirt in his mouth.

  134

  “We found the bitch.”

  Jones sighs. The young gangsters his client provided—what is their collective moniker? the Crazy Boys—are efficient and suitably cold-blooded, but must they always be so vulgar? And vague.

  “Which bitch?” he asks into the phone, “given that we are looking for not one, but two, women.”

  “The British bitch, no se, Petra.”

  “Pick her up,” Jones says. “Bring her to me.”

  A woman, he thinks.

  And a man.

  Conceivably a couple?

  The possibilities are tantalizing.

  135

  Boone feels the water embrace him.

  Not scary, not scary at all.

  He doesn’t struggle but lets himself sink until he feels the bottom, then uses it to push off. Then he “seals” it, flaps his bound legs back and forth, propelling himself up until he breaks the surface and gets a breath of air.

  He kicks gently to keep himself from sinking and listens.

  The shore break is behind him.

  If anyone could make it to shore blind, with his arms and legs tied, it’s Boone freaking Daniels.

  Except . . .

  There’s a boat right there where he comes up.

  He hears the water hit the hull.

  Then he feels a hand grab him by the hair, hold him, and push him back under. But not before he hears the guy say, “Let’s see how long you can hold your breath.”

  136

  A long time, as it turns out.

  A long time, over and over again, as the hand holds Boone down until his lungs are about to explode, then lifts him above the water while Boone gets as much air as he can through his nose, then pushes him down again.

  They do several cycles of this before the guy asks, “Where are they?”

  Doesn’t wait for an answer before shoving him down again.

  When he pulls Boone back up, he asks again, “Where are the records that she gave to you?”

  He leans down and rips the tape off Boone’s mouth. “Tell me, and we can stop all this.”

  As soon as I do tell, Boone thinks, I’m a dead man, so he shakes his head and opens his mouth to swallow a lungful of air before the guy pushes him down again. Boone struggles and thrashes to shake himself loose of the grip but can’t do it, and then stops, knowing that he’s burning up precious air. So he stays still and tries to relax, knowing that they’ll pull him up before he actually drowns.

  They can’t get what they want if I’m dead, he tells himself.

  And they don’t know who they’re playing with here.

  The Breath-Holding Champion of the Dawn Patrol, that’s who.

  We practice for this, asshole. We go to the bottom, pick up heavy rocks, and walk.

  I beat Johnny Banzai . . .

  High Tide . . .

  Dave the Goddamn Love God . . .

  Even Sunny Day . . .

  Then his body overrules his mind and his feet start jerking like a hanged man’s and they lift him up again. He gasps for air as Jones says, “You’re being very foolish.”

  And pushes him down again.

  They say that drowning is a peaceful death.

  137

  They’d tortured him.

  Blasingame is duct-taped to a chair by the wrists and ankles. The fingers of his neatly severed hands, laying on the floor, are all broken. So are the bones in his feet.

  His dead eyes are wide with horror and pain.

  Johnny can’t tell if they’d stuffed the dirt in his mouth before or after planting the two bullets in his forehead, but maybe the ME will be able to establish that.

  Two victims shot in the forehead, he thinks. Unusual for a pro, who would usually shoot his marks in the back of the head. But this one was no crime of passion, it was a professional job. So maybe this pro is a sicko—likes to see the look on the victim’s face before he dies.

  The dirt is odd, though. He’s seen the severed-hands bit before—a Mexican drug cartel punishment for someone who got greedy and put his hands where they shouldn’t be. They broke his fingers first to get information, then punished him as a lesson to others, then finished him off.

  But the dirt?

  What is that about?

  Like he got greedy and built Paradise Homes on bad dirt, and certain people are going to lose a lot of money, so they decided to make him accountable?

  Fucking Boone, Johnny thinks.

  138

  Boone starts to go to sleep.

  When he stops thrashing, the world gets very still and peaceful, like Mother Ocean has him in her lap, singing him a lullaby, a pulsing hum like the sounds of whales or dolphins. He feels warm, almost cocooned, and he remembers that he has often said that he would like to die in the ocean instead of in a bed with tubes sticking out of him. Many times said in those conversations on the Dawn Patrol that when his time came, he would just swim out until he was exhausted and couldn’t swim anymore and let the ocean take care of the rest. And maybe this is a little sooner than he hoped for, but it’s like getting into a wave, better too early than too late.

  Remembers now his mother telling him that she surfed when she was pregnant with him, took him out with her in the gentler waves, dove underwater so he could feel the pulse and pull, he in the water of his mother, she in the water of hers. They say this is where we came from anyway, crawled from brackish waters onto land, and maybe all of living is a quest to go back, not from dust to dust but from salt to salt. The tide comes and goes out and one day it takes us with it, people say they are going up into the sky that’s where heaven is up there with the father but maybe you don’t go up but down not into hell but into the deep belly of your mother, the deep, impossibly deep blue and that would be okay that would be good a world away from air because you are so tired of holding your breath hoping for air a world beyond struggle and hope, a world of perfect silence you’ve had good times and good friends it’s been a good ride on this wave let it go . . .

  Except he hears K2 say:

  Not yet.

  139

  Johnny Banzai’s eating shit.

  From Steve Harrington, for starters.

  “You just stumble onto this?” he asks Johnny. “Decided you’d take a ride over to a perp’s father’s house and . . . bingo-bango! ‘Look, Ma, no hands’?”

  “I had a lead,” Johnny admits.

  “Partners?” Harrington asks. “We’re ‘partners,’ remember? You ever seen any movies? Cop shows on TV? We’re closer than brothers . . . than married couples. Starsky and Hutch? Any of this ring a bell?”

  The ME is doing his thing on Blasingame’s body. A rookie uniform is puking into a white plastic bag. Johnny wants to get the hell out of there, not because of the puke or catching shit from Harrington, but to get to Boone and tell him a Mexican drug cartel might be looking for him.

  Just because he hates the guy doesn’t mean he wa
nts him tortured to death.

  Johnny really wants to get out of there when Lieutenant Romero arrives, takes one look at the scene, and pulls him out on the street.

  “Tell me you’re deaf,” Romero says.

  “Lieutenant—”

  “Because you must not have heard me say, ‘You do not go anywhere near Bill Blasingame.’ Or did you hear me say, ‘You do not go anywhere near Bill Blasingame,’ and interpret it to mean, ‘You do go near Bill Blasingame.’ Which is it?”

  Johnny ignores what he assumes to be a rhetorical question and, seeing how his career is swirling around the toilet anyway, says, “It looks like Mexican drug stuff to me. The severed hands, the—”

  “Why do my people,” Romero asks, “catch the blame for every nasty, violent, sick activity that happens in this city? A guy gets his hands sliced off and you just assume the beaners did it?”

  “I said, it looks like—”

  Romero gets right up in his face and says with a hiss, “I told you to stay away from this. I told you to keep some distance so we could duck and cover, and you put me right into it. You want my job, Kodani, is that it? I swear, I’ll take you right down with me.”

  “I already figured that, sir.”

  “Yeah, you’re a smart bastard, aren’t you?” Romero asks. “See how smart you feel checking up on paroled pedophiles the rest of your career.”

  “Am I off this case, Lieutenant?”

  “You’re fucking right. Get out of here.”

  Johnny gets in his car and heads for Boone’s.

  140

  Boone comes to on the deck of the boat.

  Water gushes out of his mouth, and he takes a deep breath of air.

  Someone says quietly, “Did you think you had died?”

  Boone nods.

  “You’re going to wish you had,” Jones says.

  141

  On the way to Boone’s place, Johnny hits him on the cell a few times, but the asshole doesn’t answer.

  Classic Boone anyway—he goes into his crib-slash-cave and forgets the rest of the world exists, doesn’t answer his phone. Johnny just drives over to Crystal Pier. The Deuce is there, so Johnny goes to the door and knocks. Boone doesn’t answer. Johnny walks around and bangs on the windows.

  No Boone.

  Johnny calls Dave.

  “You seen Boone around?”

  “Man, I haven’t seen Boone in a long time.”

  “I hear that,” Johnny says. “But do you know where he might be?”

  “Try the Brit’s place.”

  Johnny heads over to Petra’s.

  142

  Boone bounces on the bottom of the boat like a gaffed fish.

  Exhausted and scared, he forces himself to think. First try to gauge the boat’s speed and direction. It’s moving fast for its size, maybe twenty . . . as for direction, it’s beating upwind, and the last he remembers, the wind was coming out of the south. Which scares him worse. If they’re headed south, for Mexico, that’s a one-way trip. If it’s somewhere north of the border, he still has a slim chance.

  He keeps time by counting the seconds in his head, and then multiplying by the estimated speed. Shivering from his enforced dives, he tries to force himself to relax and concentrate. The constant monologue from what he’s come to call the Voice doesn’t help.

  “Let me tell you what you’re thinking,” the Voice says. “You are thinking that you know something that we want to know, and as long as you don’t give us that information, we have no choice but to keep you alive. That is correct thinking, as far as it goes. As soon as you tell us what we want to know, your usefulness to us ends and we will kill you.

  “But here is the flaw in that thinking: it makes the assumption that life is a desirable state of being. I grant you, that assumption is valid—the instinct to survive, the inability to imagine the state of nonexistence, is common to all sensate species—except in the most extraordinary of circumstances. But you are about to experience the most extraordinary of circumstances. That is, a state of being in which life is an intolerable burden, and your one wish will be for it to cease. When that condition is reached, as it will be, you will no longer wish to withhold your precious information. Rather, you will seek to release it, as in its release you will find your own.

  “The only question for us now is, do you believe me when I tell you this, or will you force me to prove it to you? In the interest of fairness I should perhaps tell you that I derive no small amount of pleasure—both intellectual and sensual—from reducing beings to a state where they no longer wish to exist.

  “Interestingly, we shall each occupy a counterintuitive position at polar opposites: You will yearn for death instead of life. I will hope that you prolong your life as your suffering prolongs my pleasure.

  “And you do present a particular challenge—most men, when faced with drowning, quickly beg to tell what we wish to know. You, on the other hand, seem quite adapted to a state that reduces other subjects to abject panic. Clearly, water is not a reductive element for you, so we must turn to other things. I assure you, there is no shortage of options, and I am keen to try them all.

  “But in the interest of professionalism, as I have been retained to procure this information from you, I put it to you now—will you tell me what I want to know? Gentleman to gentleman: Where are the records?”

  Petra has them, Boone thinks. I left them with Petra. He says, “What records?”

  “Oh, good,” says the Voice. “I was so hoping for that answer.”

  Boone hears the engine throttle down, and feels the boat slow as it turns port, toward land. A few minutes later, he feels it bump into something solid and then the scrape of metal against wood.

  We haven’t gone nearly far enough, he thinks, to be in Mexico.

  They lift him out of the boat and start dragging him along the dock—he can feel the slightly swaying wood under his feet—then up a slope.

  Boone feels a hand above each of his elbows, but they have a loose grip, as if confident that he’s been totally cowed. A reasonable assumption, he thinks, seeing as how his wrists are taped behind him and his ankles are taped together.

  He asks, “Where are we going?”

  “To a place,” the Voice says, “of serene quiet and exquisite pain.”

  Boone gauges the angle and distance of the Voice, then jerks up out of the grasp at his elbows and throws his body as horizontally as he can get into the air, bends his knees, and then kicks out. He feels his feet make contact and hears the Voice grunt, “Ooof” before there’s the sound of something heavy hitting the dock. Then he hears the Voice scream, “My knee! My knee!”

  Boone tucks his chin into his chest as they start beating him.

  Gun butts, boots, and fists—but on the shoulders, the ribs, the legs, not in the head. They don’t want to kill him and they don’t want him to lose consciousness, so he lies there and focuses on the Voice’s whimpers.

  “Get him in the van,” the Voice says eventually.

  He hears a van door slide open and they lift him up and push him inside. The door closes.

  143

  Petra sits on her living-room floor with her laptop set between her splayed legs, a mug of tea at her right hand, and does what she knows best how to do.

  Organize.

  Entering data from Nicole’s blackmail material, she cross-references every entry until the program starts to create a spider diagram of names, companies, properties, inspectors, geologists, politicians, City Council members, judges, and prominent citizens.

  The software program assigns a discrete color to each linear connection, and within a couple of hours the screen is a dense, motley web—a Jackson Pollock canvas of corruption, with Bill Blasingame and Paradise Homes at its center.

  She pushes a command button and the Web starts to create webs of its own, spinning out, as it were, multiple webs within webs. Switching imagery, she feels as if she’s looking through a high-resolution microscope, watching a cancer spre
ad at hyperspeed.

  The intercom buzzer startles her.