The Dawn Patrol

by Don Winslow

  “I haven’t missed any payments,” Boone says, placing himself between the hook and the van. “Okay, one.”

  “Two, dude.”

  “I’m good for it,” Boone says.

  Tow Truck Guy shrugs, like, Not so far you ain’t good for it. Boone looks like he’s going to cry as Tow Truck Guy starts to tighten the chain. You put the hook on the Boonemobile, he thinks, it might not be able to take the strain.

  “Stop!”

  Petra’s voice freezes Tow Truck Guy in his tracks. Then again, Petra’s voice could freeze a polar bear in its tracks.

  “If,” she pronounces, “you damage this rare vintage automobile by as much as a scratch, I’ll keep you in litigation until you are no longer capable of recalling exactly why your personal and professional life is in such a shambles.”

  “ ‘Rare vintage automobile’?” Tow Truck Guy laughs. “It’s a piece of shit.”

  “In which case, it is a rare vintage piece of shit,” Petra says, “and unless you are in possession of the appropriate seizure orders, I shall have you arrested for grand theft auto.”

  “The papers are in my truck.”

  “Kindly go fetch them?”

  Tow Truck Guy kindly goes and fetches them. He hands them to Petra and stands there nervously while she peruses them.

  “They seem to be in order,” she says. She pulls her checkbook out of her purse and asks, “How much is owed?”

  Tow Truck Guy shakes his head. “No checks. He writes checks.”

  “Mine don’t bounce,” Petra says.

  “Says you.”

  She gives him the full benefit of the withering glare to which Boone has become so quickly accustomed. “Don’t get cheeky with me,” she says. “Simply enlighten me as to the required amount and we shall all be on our separate ways.”

  Tow Truck Guy is tough. “My boss told me, ‘Don’t take a check.’ ”

  Petra sighs. “Credit card?”

  “His?” This strikes Tow Truck Guy as pretty funny.

  “Mine.”

  “I’ll have to call it in.”

  She hands him her cell phone. Five minutes later, Tow Truck Guy has driven off and the cold sweat of terror has evaporated from Boone’s face.

  “I must say, I’m shocked,” Petra says.

  “That I’m behind in the payments?”

  “That you have payments.”

  “Thanks for what you did,” Boone says.

  “It’s coming out of your fee.”

  “I’ll write you a receipt,” Boone says as he settles himself into the comforting familiarity of the well-worn driver’s seat, the upholstery of which is held together by strips of duct tape. “So you think this is a rare vintage automobile?”

  “It’s a piece of shit,” Petra says. “Now may we please go and collect Ms. Roddick?”

  That would be good, Boone thinks.

  “Collecting” Tammy Roddick would be really good.

  Epic macking good.

  16

  Two minutes later, Boone’s still trying to get the engine to turn over while he balances a Styrofoam go-plate on his lap and tries to eat eggs machaca with a plastic fork.

  He turns the ignition key again. The engine moans, then grudgingly starts, like a guy with a hangover getting up for work.

  Petra sweeps some Rubio’s and In-N-Out wrappers off the seat, takes a handkerchief from her purse, wipes the cushion, then delicately sits down as she considers how this might fit into her dry-cleaning schedule.

  “Stakeouts,” Boone says.

  Petra looks behind her. “This is a hovel on wheels.”

  “Hovel” is a little harsh, Boone thinks. He prefers “randomly ordered.”

  The van contains North Shore board trunks, a couple of sweatshirts, a dozen or so empty go-cups from various fast-food establishments, a pair of Duck Feet fins, a mask and a snorkel, an assortment of sandals and flipflops, several plaid wool shirts, a blanket, a lobster pot, a stick of deodorant, several tubes of sunblock, a six-pack of empty beer bottles, a sleeping bag, a tire iron, a sledgehammer, a crowbar, an aluminum baseball bat, a bunch of CDs—Common Sense, Switchfoot, and the Ka’au Crater Boys—numerous empty coffee cups, several containers of board wax, and a torn paperback copy of Crime and Punishment.

  “Doubtless you thought it was an S and M novel,” Petra says.

  “I read it in college.”

  “You went to college?”

  “Almost a whole semester.”

  Which is a lie.

  Boone got his B.S. in criminology from San Diego State, but he lets her think what she wants. He doesn’t inform her that when he goes home (which doesn’t contain a television set) pleasantly tired from a day of surfing, his idea of bliss is to sit with a cup of coffee and read to the accompaniment of the sound of the surf.

  But it’s the sort of thing you keep to yourself. You don’t trot this out for The Dawn Patrol or anyone else in the greater Southern California surfing community who would consider any overt displays of intellectuality to be a serious social faux pas, not that any of them would admit to knowing the term faux pas, or anything else in French, for that matter. It’s all right to know that stuff; you just aren’t supposed to talk about it. In fact, having someone find a skanky porn book in the back of your van would be less embarrassing than a volume of Dostoyevsky. Johnny Banzai or Dave the Love God would give him endless shit about it, even though Boone knows that Johnny is at least as well read as he is, and that Dave has an almost encyclopedic and very sophisticated knowledge of early Western films.

  But, Boone thinks, let the Brit chick indulge in stereotypes.

  Speaking of which—

  “Is this actually your vehicle,” Petra asks, “or the primary residence for an entire family of hygienically challenged amphibians?”

  “Leave the Boonemobile alone,” Boone says. “You may be old, rusty, and need Bondo yourself someday.”

  Although he doubts it.

  “You named your car?” Petra asks.

  “Well, Johnny Banzai did,” Boone says, feeling about as adolescent as he sounds.

  “Your development isn’t just arrested,” Petra says. “It’s been arrested, tried, and summarily executed.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “So am I,” Boone says. “Get out.”

  She digs in. “I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not,” Boone says.

  “Why not?”

  He doesn’t have a good answer for this. She is the client, after all, and it’s not like finding some wayward stripper is exactly dangerous. The best he can come up with is, “Look, just get out, okay?”

  “You can’t make me,” Petra says.

  Boone has the feeling that she’s uttered these words many times, and that she’s usually been right. He glares at her.

  “I have pepper spray in my bag,” she says.

  “You don’t need pepper spray, Pete,” says Boone. “Some dude attacks you? Just talk at him for a minute and he’ll take himself out.”

  “Perhaps we should take my car,” Petra says.

  “Let me ask you something, Pete,” says Boone. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “I don’t see how that is—”

  “Just answer the question,” Boone says.

  “I’m seeing someone, yes.”

  “Is he, like, miserable?”

  Petra’s a little surprised that this remark actually hurts her feelings. Boone sees the little flinch in her eyes and the slight flush of color on her cheeks, and he’s as surprised as she is that she’s capable of hurt.

  He feels a little bad about it.

  “I’ll try one more time,” he says; “then we’ll take your car.”

  He cranks the key again and this time the engine starts. It’s not happy—it coughs, gags, and sputters—but it starts.

  “You should have your mechanic check the gaskets,” Petra says as Boone pulls out onto Garnet Avenue.
r />   “Petra?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please shut up.”

  “Where are we going?” Petra asks.

  “The Triple A cab office.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Roddick now dances at TNG, and that’s the cab service the TNG girls always use,” Boone replies.

  “How do you know?”

  Boone says, “It’s the sort of specialized local knowledge you’re paying the big bucks for.”

  He doesn’t bother to explain to her that most bars—strip clubs included—have arrangements with certain cab companies. When tourists ask a Triple A driver to take them to a strip club, he’ll take them to TNG. In exchange, whenever the bartender or bouncer at TNG has to call a cab for a customer who might otherwise be charged with DUI, he returns the courtesy. So if Tammy Roddick called a taxi to pick her up at her place, she probably called Triple A.

  “How do you know she didn’t have a friend pick her up?” Petra asks. “Or that she didn’t just walk?”

  “I don’t,” Boone replies. “It just gives me a place to start.”

  Even though he doesn’t think that Roddick took a cab anywhere. What he thinks is that Silver, or some of his muscle, or all of the above came and took her on a long trip to somewhere.

  And that they’ll never find Tammy Roddick.

  But he has to try.

  When you get on a wave, you ride the wave.

  All the way to the end, if it lets you.

  He drives through Pacific Beach.

  17

  Pacific Beach.

  PB.

  The old beach town sits just a few miles northwest of downtown San Diego, just across Mission Bay from the airport. The marshlands that used to separate it from the city were drained, and now the old swamp is the site of SeaWorld, where thousands of people come to see Shamu.

  On the coastline itself, running south to north, you have the great playground stretch of Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, and Pacific Beach—OB, MB, and PB to locals, people too busy to speak in entire words, or to readers of windshield decals. Ocean Beach is cut off from the other two by the Mission Bay Channel, but Mission Beach runs seamlessly into Pacific Beach, the only division being the arbitrary border of Pacific Beach Drive at the head of Mission Bay.

  Pacific Beach started as a college town.

  Back in 1887, the real estate speculators who had bought the barren stretch of dirt, then a long carriage ride from the city, were trying to figure out how to attract people and came up with the idea of higher education, so they built the San Diego College of Letters. This was during the great boom of the late 1880s, when the railroads were offering six-dollar fares from Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin and midwesterners flocked to San Diego to play real estate hot potato.

  Things did boom in Pacific Beach for the first couple of years. The railroad stretched from downtown, so the city dwellers could come out to the beach to play, and new pilgrims lived in tents on the beach while their gingerbread cottages were being built on lots, some of which doubled in value between morning and noon. A weekly newspaper came into being, largely funded by real estate ads. The American Driving Park was built alongside the beach, where The Sundowner and Boone’s office now sit, and Wyatt Earp, on the run from an Arizona murder indictment, came out to race his horses.

  It was all good for about a year; then the boom went bust. In a single day, lots that had been worth hundreds were finding no buyers at twenty-five dollars, the San Diego College of Letters shut its doors, and the American Driving Park slowly yielded to the salt air, the hot sun, and sad abandonment.

  Wyatt Earp left for Los Angeles.

  A few committed hangers-on kept their lots and built cottages, a few of which still cling to life among the hotels and condo complexes that line Ocean Boulevard like fortresses. But for the most part, Pacific Beach slid into decline.

  Well, as the trite saying goes, When God hands you lemons …

  Plant lemon trees.

  Left with little but dirt and sun, the developers of Pacific Beach used them both to plant lemon trees, and around the turn of the century, the community proclaimed itself “the Lemon Capital of the World.” It worked for a while. The flats now occupied by rows of houses were then rows of citrus trees until cheap steamship rates and relaxed import laws made Sicily the Lemon Capital of the World instead; the lemon trees of Pacific Beach were no longer worth the water it took to irrigate them, and the community was back to a search for an identity.

  Earl Taylor gave it one. Earl came out from Kansas in 1923 and started buying up land. He built the old Dunaway Drugstore, now the on the corner of Cass and Garnet, a block east of Boone’s current office, and then put up a number of other businesses.

  Then he met Earnest Pickering, and the two of them conspired to build Pickering’s Pleasure Pier.

  Yeah, Pleasure Pier.

  Right at the end of present-day Garnet Avenue, the pier jutted out into the ocean, and this wasn’t a pier for docking ships; this was a pier for, well, pleasure. It had a midway with all kinds of carnival games and cheap food treats, and a dance hall, replete with a cork-lined dance floor.

  It opened for business on the Fourth of July, 1927, to flags, fanfare, and fireworks and was a massive success. And why not. It was a beautifully simple, hedonistic idea—combine the beauty of the ocean and the beach with women in “bathing costumes,” junk food, and then the nocturnal Roaring Twenties pleasures of illegal booze, jazz, and dancing, with sex to follow at the beachside hotels that sprang up around the pier.

  All good, except that Earl and Earnest forgot to creosote the pilings that supported the pier, and “water-born parasites” started eating the thing. (The uncharitable would have it that water-born parasites—that is, surf bums—still infest Pacific Beach.) Pickering’s Pleasure Pier started crumbling into the ocean and, a year after opening, had to be closed for safety purposes. The party was over.

  Truly, because with exquisite Pacific Beach timing, the town had reinvigorated itself just in time for the Great Depression.

  The tents went up again, but the Depression wasn’t as severe in San Diego as it was in a lot of the country, because the navy base in the harbor cushioned the unemployment. And a lot of people loved Pacific Beach in those years for precisely what it didn’t have: a lot of people, houses, traffic. They loved it precisely because it was a sleepy, friendly little town with one of the best stretches of beach in these United States, and the beach was free and accessible to everyone, and there were no hotels or condo complexes, no private drives.

  What changed Pacific Beach forever was a nose.

  Dorothy Fleet’s sensitive nose, to be exact.

  In 1935, her husband, Reuben, owned a company called Consolidated Aircraft, which had a contract with the U.S. government to design and build seaplanes. The problem was that Consolidated was located in Buffalo, and it was hard to land seaplanes on water that was usually ice. So Reuben decided to move the company to warm and sunny California, and he gave his wife, Dorothy, a choice between San Diego and Long Beach. Dorothy didn’t like Long Beach because of the “smelly oil wells” nearby, so she picked San Diego, and Fleet built his factory on a site near the airport, where he and his eight hundred workers came out with the great PBY Catalina.

  Airplanes had a lot to do with creating modern Pacific Beach, because Japanese bombers hitting Pearl Harbor launched the Consolidated factory into high gear. Suddenly faced with the job of producing thousands of PBYs plus the new B-24 bomber, Fleet imported thousands of workers—15,000 by early 1942, 45,000 by the war’s end. Working 24/7 they pumped out 33,000 aircraft during the war.

  They had to live somewhere, and the nearby empty flats of Pacific Beach made the perfect location to put up quick, cheap housing.

  And it wasn’t just Consolidated Aircraft, for San Diego became the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet, and between the navy bases around San Diego Harbor and the marine training bases at Elliott and Pendleton, up by Oceanside, the whol
e area became a military town. The city’s population jumped from 200,000 in 1941 to 500,000 by 1943. The government built a number of housing projects in Pacific Beach—Bayview Terrace, Los Altos, Cyanne—and a lot of the men and women who came to live in them temporarily never went home. A lot of the sailors and marines who were stationed in San Diego on their way to and from the Pacific front decided to come back and build lives there.

  Much of PB, especially inland from the beach, still has that blue-and-khaki-collar mentality—unlike its tonier neighbor to the north, La Jolla—and a fiercely egalitarian ethic that is a holdover from the close-living, pooled ration card, and backyard party days of the war. Notoriously casual, PB residents aren’t at all bothered by the fact that two of their major streets are actually misspelled: Felspar should be Feldspar and Hornblend should be Hornblende, but nobody cares, if they even know. (So much for the San Diego College of Letters.) Nobody seems to know why the major east-west streets were named after precious stones in the first place, except that it seemed to be some kind of lame effort to suggest that PB was the gem of the West Coast. And you know a PB locie by the way he or she pronounces Garnet Avenue. If they say it correctly—“Garnet”—you know right away they’re from out of town, because the locals all mispronounce it, saying “Garnette.”

  Anyway, if you drive west on Garnet, however the hell you say it, you’re going to run into Pickering’s old Pleasure Pier, renamed Crystal Pier, another PB landmark revived by the PBY and B-24. The midway is gone, and so is the dance hall, replaced by the white cottages with blue shutters that line the north and south edges of the pier, then give way to empty space for fishermen who have been known to hook the occasional surfer trying to shoot the pilings.

  But the concept of pleasure remains.

  PB is the only beach in California where you can still drink on the sand. Between noon and eight p.m., you can slam booze on the beach, and for that reason PB had become Party Town, USA, Beach Division. The party is always on, at the beach, along the boardwalk, in the bars and clubs that line Garnet between Mission and Ingraham.