The Dawn Patrol

by Don Winslow

  “Don’t even start,” Sunny says.

  “Is it my bad,” Dave asks, “that women love me?”

  It’s not, really. Dave the Love God has a face and physique that would have caused a run on marble in ancient Greece. But it’s not even so much Dave’s body that gets him sex as it is his confidence. Dave is confident that he’s going to get laid, and he’s in a profession that puts him in a perfect position to have a shot at every snow-zone turista who comes to San Diego to get tanned. He’s a lifeguard, and this is how he got his moniker, because Johnny Banzai, who completes the New York Times crossword in ink, said, “You’re not a ‘life guard’; you’re a ‘love god.’ Get it?”

  Yeah, the whole Dawn Patrol got it, because they have all seen Dave the Love Guard crawl up to his lifeguard tower while guzzling handfuls of vitamin E to replace the depletion from the night before and get ready for the night ahead.

  “They actually give me binoculars,” he marveled to Boone one day, “with the explicit expectation that I will use them to look at scantily clad women. And some people say there’s no God.”

  So if any hominid with a package could get an all-female outrigger canoe team member (or several of them) to issue a gender exemption for a night or two, it would be Dave, and judging by the self-satisfied lascivious smile on his grille right now, he probably has.

  Hang Twelve is still not convinced. “Yeah, but, fish tacos?”

  “It depends on the kind of fish in the taco,” says High Tide, né Josiah Pamavatuu, weighing in on the subject. Literally weighing in, because the Samoan crashes the scales at well over three and a half bills. Hence the tag “High Tide,” because the ocean level rises anytime he gets in the water. So High Tide’s opinion on food commands respect, because he obviously knows what he’s talking about. The whole crew is aware that your Pacific Island types know their fish. “Are you talking about yellowtail, ono, opah, mahimahi, shark, or what? It makes a difference, ranking-wise.”

  “Everything,” Boone says, “tastes better on a tortilla.”

  This is an article of faith with Boone. He’s lived his life with it and believes it to be true. You take anything—fish, chicken, beef, cheese, eggs, even peanut butter and jelly—and fold them in the motherly embrace of a warm flour tortilla and all those foods respond to the love by upping their game.

  Everything does taste better on a tortilla.

  “Outside!” High Tide yells.

  Boone looks over his shoulder to see the first wave of what looks to be a tasty set coming in.

  “Party wave!” hollers Dave the Love God, and he, High Tide, Johnny, and Hang Twelve get on it, sharing the ride into shore. Boone and Sunny hang back for the second wave, which is a little bigger, a little fuller, and has a better shape.

  “Your wave!” Boone yells to her.

  “Chivalrous or patronizing, you decide!” Sunny yells back, but she paddles in. Boone gets on the wave right behind her and they ride the shoulder in together, a skillful pas de deux on the white water.

  Boone and Sunny walk up onto the beach, because the morning session is over and The Dawn Patrol is coming in. This is because, with the exception of Boone, they all have real j-o-b-s.

  So Johnny’s already stepping out of the outdoor shower and sitting in the front seat of his car putting on his detective clothes—blue shirt, brown tweed jacket, khaki slacks—when his cell phone goes off. Johnny listens to the call, then says, “A woman took a header off a motel balcony. Another day in paradise.”

  “I don’t miss that,” Boone says.

  “And it doesn’t miss you,” Johnny replies.

  This is true. When Boone pulled the pin at SDPD, his lieutenant’s only regret was that it hadn’t been attached to a grenade. Despite his remark, Johnny disagrees—Boone was a good cop. A very good cop.

  It was a shame what happened.

  But now Boone is following High Tide’s eyes back out to the ocean, at which the big man is gazing with an almost reverential intensity.

  “It’s coming,” High Tide says. “The swell.”

  “Big?” Boone asks.

  “Not big,” says High Tide. “Huge.”

  A real thunder crusher.

  Like, ka-boom.

  5

  What is a wave anyway?

  We know one when we see one, but what is it?

  The physicists call it an “energy-transport phenomenon.”

  The dictionary says it’s “a disturbance that travels through a medium from one location to another location.”

  A disturbance.

  It’s certainly that.

  Something gets disturbed. That is, something strikes something else and sets off a vibration. Clap your hands right now and you’ll hear a sound. What you’re actually hearing is a sound wave. Something struck something else and it set off a vibration that strikes your eardrum.

  The vibration is energy. It’s transported through the phenomenon of a wave from one location to the other.

  The water itself doesn’t actually move. What happens is one particle of water bumps into the next, which bumps into the next, and so on and so forth until it hits something. It’s like that idiot wave at a sports event—the people don’t move around the stadium, but the wave does. The energy flows from one person to another.

  So when you’re riding a wave, you’re not riding water. The water is the medium, but what you’re really riding is energy.

  Very cool.

  Hitching an energy ride.

  Billions of H20 particles work together to transport you from one place to another, which is very generous when you think about it. That last statement is, of course, airy-fairy soul-surfer bullshit—the wave doesn’t care whether you’re in it or not. Particles of water are inanimate objects that don’t know anything, much less “care”; the water is just doing what water does when it gets goosed by energy.

  It makes waves.

  A wave, any kind of wave, has a specific shape. The particles knocking into one another don’t just bump along in a flat line, but move up and down—hence the wave. Prior to the “disturbance,” the water particles are at rest, in technical terminology, equilibrium. What happens is that the energy disturbs the equilibrium; it “displaces” the particles from their state of rest. When the energy reaches its maximum potential “displacement” (“positive displacement”), the wave “crests.” Then it drops, below the equilibrium line, to its “negative displacement,” aka, the “trough.” Simply put, it has highs, lows, and middles, just like life its own self.

  Yeah, except it’s a little more complicated than that, especially if you’re talking about the kind of wave that you can ride, especially the kind of giant wave that’s right now rolling toward Pacific Beach with bad intent.

  Basically, there are two kinds of waves.

  Most waves are “surface waves.” They’re caused by lunar pull and wind, which are sources of the disturbance. These are your average, garden-variety, everyday, Joe Lunchbucket waves. They show up on time, punch the clock, and they range in size from small to medium to, occasionally, large.

  Surface waves, of course, give surfing its name, because it appears to the unenlightened eye that surfers are riding the surface of the water. Surfers are, if you will, “surfacing.”

  Despite this distinction, surface waves are the mules of the surfing world, unheralded beasts of burden not incapable, however, of kicking their traces from time to time when whipped into a frenzy by the wind.

  A lot of people think that it’s strong winds that make big waves, but this really isn’t true. Wind can cause some big surf, blowing an otherwise-average wave into a tall peak, but most of the energy—the disturbance—is on the surface. These waves have height, but they lack depth. All the action is on top—it’s mostly show; it’s literally superficial.

  And wind can ruin surf, and often does. If the wind is blowing across the wave it will ruin its shape, or it can make the surf choppy, or, if it’s coming straight in off the ocean, it can drive th
e crest of the wave down, flattening it out and making it unridable.

  What you want is a gentle, steady, offshore wind that blows into the face of the wave and holds it up for you.

  The other kind of wave is the subsurface wave, which starts, duh, under the water. If surface waves are your middleweight boxers, dancing and shooting jabs, the subsurface wave is your heavyweight, coming in flat-footed, throwing knockout punches from the (ocean) floor. This wave is the superstar, the genuine badass, the take-your-lunch money, walk-off-with-your-girlfriend, give-me-those-fucking-sneakers, thank you for playing and now what parting gifts do we have for our contestant, Vanna wave.

  If surface waves lack depth, the subsurface wave has more bottom than a Sly and the Family Stone riff. It’s deeper than Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein combined. It’s heavy, my friend; it ain’t your brother. It’s the hate child of rough sex at the bottom of the sea.

  There’s a whole world down there. In fact, most of the world is down there. You have enormous mountain ranges, vast plains, trenches, and canyons. You have tectonic plates, and when they shift and scrape against each other, you have earthquakes. Gigantic underwater earthquakes, violent as a Mike Tyson off meds, that set off one big honking disturbance.

  At its most benign, a big beautiful swell to ride; at its most malevolent, a mass-murdering tsunami.

  This is a disturbance, a mass transportation of energy phenom, that will travel thousands of miles either to give you the ride of your life or fuck you up, and it doesn’t care which.

  This is what’s rolling toward Pacific Beach as The Dawn Patrol gets out of the water this particular morning. An undersea earthquake up near the Aleutian Islands is hurtling literally thousands of miles to come crash on Pacific Beach and go—

  Ka-boom.

  6

  Ka-boom is good.

  If you’re Boone Daniels and live for waves that make big noises.

  He’s always been this way. Since birth and before, if you buy all that stuff about prenatal auditory influences. You know how some mothers hang out listening to Mozart to give their babies a taste for the finer things? Boone’s mom, Dee, used to sit on the beach and stroke her belly to the rhythm of the waves.

  To the prenatal Boone, the ocean was indistinguishable from his mother’s heartbeat. Hang Twelve might call the sea “Mother Ocean,” but to Boone it really is. And before his son hit the terrible twos, Brett Daniels would put the kid in front of him on a longboard, paddle out, and then lift the boy on his shoulder while they rode in. Casual observers—that is, tourists—would be appalled, all like, “What if you drop him?”

  “I’m not going to drop him,” Boone’s dad, Brett, would reply.

  Until Boone was about three, and then Brett would intentionally drop him into the shallow white water, just to give him the feel of it, to let him know that other than a few bubbles in the nose, nothing bad was going to happen. Young Boone would pop up, giggling like crazy, and ask for his dad to “do it again.”

  Every once in a while, a disapproving onlooker would threaten to call Child Protective Services, and Dee would reply, “That’s what he’s doing—he’s protecting his child.”

  Which was the truth.

  You raise a kid in PB, and you know that his DNA is going to drive him out there on a board, you’d better teach him what the ocean can do. You’d better teach him how to live, not die, in the water, and you’d better teach him young. You teach him about riptides and undertow. You teach him not to panic.

  Protect his child?

  Listen, when Brett and Dee would have birthday parties at the condo complex pool, and all Boone’s little friends would come over, Brett Daniels would set his chair at the edge of the pool and tell the other parents, “No offense, have a good time, have some tacos and some brews, but I’m sitting here and I’m not talking to anybody.”

  Then he’d sit at the edge of the kid-crowded pool and never take his eyes off the bottom of the pool, not for a single second, because Brett knew that nothing too bad was going to happen on the surface of the water, that kids drown at the bottom of the pool when no one is watching.

  Brett was watching. He’d sit there for as long as the party lasted, in Zen-like concentration until the last kid came out shivering and was wrapped in a towel and went to wolf down some pizza and soda. Then Brett would go eat and hang out with the other parents, and there were no irredeemable tragedies, no lifelong regrets (“I only turned my back for a few seconds”) at those parties.

  The first time Brett and Dee let their then seven-year-old boy paddle out alone into some small and close beach break, their collective heart was in their collective throat. They were watching like hawks, even though they knew that every lifeguard on the beach and every surfer in the water also had their eyes on young Boone Daniels, and if anything bad had happened, a mob would have showed up to pull him out of the soup.

  It was hard, but Brett and Dee stood there as Boone got up and fell, got up and fell, got up and fell—and paddled back out, and did it again and again until he got up and stayed up and rode that wave in while a whole beach full of people played it casual and pretended not to notice.

  It was even harder when Boone got to that age, right about ten, when he wanted to go the beach with his buddies and didn’t want Mom or Dad showing up to embarrass him. It was hard to let him go, and sit back and worry, but that was also a part of protecting their child, to protect him from perpetual childhood, to trust that they had done their job and taught him what he needed to know.

  So by the time he was eleven, Boone was your classic gremmie.

  A gremmie is nature’s revenge.

  A gremmie, aka “grom,” is a longhaired, sun-bleached, overtanned, preadolescent, water-borne, pain-in-the-ass little surfer. A gremmie is karmic payback for every annoying, obnoxious, shitty little thing you did when you were that age. A gremmie will hog your wave, ruin your session, jam up the snack bar, and talk like he knows what he’s talking about. Worse, your gremmie runs in packs with his little gremmie buddies—in Boone’s case, this had been little Johnny Banzai and a young Dave the yet-to-be Love God—all of them equally vile, disgusting, smart-mouthed, obscene, gross little bastards. When they’re not surfing, they’re skateboarding, and when they’re not surfing or skateboarding, they’re reading comics, trying to get their filthy little mitts on porn, trying (unsuccessfully) to pull real live girls, scheming to get adults to buy beer for them, or trying to score weed. The reason parents let their kids surf is that it’s the least sketchy thing that the board monkeys get up to.

  As a gremmie, Boone got his fair share of shit from the big guys, but he also got a little bit of a pass because he was Brett and Dee Daniels’s kid, glossed “the Spawn of Mr. and Mrs. Satan” by a few of the crankier old guys.

  Boone grew out of it. All gremmies do, or they’re chased out of the lineup, and besides, it was pretty clear early on that Boone was something special. He was doing scary-good things for his age, then scary-good things for any age. It wasn’t long before the better surf teams came around, inviting him onto their junior squads, and it was a dead lock that Boone would take home a few armloads of trophies and get himself a sweet sponsorship from one of the surf-gear companies.

  Except Boone said no.

  Fourteen years old, and he turned away from it.

  “How come?” his dad asked.

  Boone shrugged. “I just don’t do it for that,” he said. “I do it for …”

  He had no words for that, and Brett and Dee totally understood. They got on the horn to their old pals in the surf world and basically said, “Thanks but no thanks. The kid just wants to surf.”

  The kid did.

  7

  Petra Hall steers her starter BMW west on Garnet Avenue.

  She alternately watches the road and looks at a slip of paper in her hand, comparing the address to the building to her right.

  The address—111 Garnet Avenue—is the correct listing for “Boone Daniels, Private Investigator,”
but the building appears to be not an office but a surf shop. At least that’s what the sign says, a rather unimaginative yet descriptive PACIFIC SURF inscribed over a rather unimaginative yet descriptive painting of a breaking wave. And, indeed, looking through the window she can see surfboards, body boards, bathing suits, and, being that the building is half a block from the beach, 111 Garnet Avenue would certainly appear to be a surf shop.

  Except that it is supposed to be the office of Boone Daniels, private investigator.

  Petra grew up in a climate where the sun is more rumor than reality, so her skin is so pale and delicate that it’s almost transparent, in stark contrast to her indigo black hair. Her charcoal gray, very professional, I’m-a-serious-career-woman suit hides a figure that is at the same time slim and generous, but what you’re really going to look at is her eyes.

  Are they blue? Or are they gray?

  Like the ocean, it depends on her mood.

  She parks the car next door in front of The Sundowner Lounge and goes into Pacific Surf, where a pale young man behind the counter, who would appear to be some sort of white Rastafarian, is playing a video game.

  “Sorry,” Petra says, “I’m looking for a Mr. Daniels?”

  Hang Twelve looks up from his game to see this gorgeous woman standing in front of him. His stares for a second; then he gets it together enough to shout up the stairs, “Cheerful, brah, civilian here looking for Boone!”

  A head peers down from the staircase. Ben Carruthers, glossed “Cheerful” by the PB crew, looks to be about sixty years old, has a steel gray crew cut and a scowl as he barks, “Call me ‘brah’ one more time and I’ll rip your tongue out.”

  “Sorry, I forgot,” Hang Twelve says. “Like, the moana was epic tasty this sesh and I slid over the ax of this gnarler and just foffed, totally shredded it, and I’m still amped from the ocean hit, so my bad, brah.”

  Cheerful looks at Petra and says, “Sometimes we have entire fascinating conversations in which I don’t understand a word that is said.” He turns back to Hang Twelve. “You’re what I have instead of a cat. Don’t make me get a cat.”