by Don Winslow
So far so good, Boone thought. It could be a lot worse.
But maybe it was when Eddie—blissed-out on a buffet of ecstasy, Maui Wowie, Vicodin, rum colas, and the sheer joy of neighborliness—demonstrated his walking-over-hot-coals meditation technique and insisted that some of his guests share in the transcendental experience that things got seriously weird.
After the EMTs left, Eddie persuaded the surviving guests to lie down side by side between two ramps and then knieveled them on his mountain bike, after which he released his psychotic rottweiler, Dahmer, from its cage and went mano-a-pawo with it, the two of them rolling around on the patio—blood, saliva, fur, and flesh flying until Eddie finally pinned the dog in a rear-naked chokehold and made it bark uncle.
As the guests offered some weak, somewhat stunned applause, Eddie—sweating, bleeding, huffing, but flushed with victory—muttered to Boone, “Jesus, these haoles are hard to entertain. I’m busting a hump, bruddah.”
“I dunno,” Boone said, “I guess some people just don’t have an appreciation for the finer points of human-canine combat.”
Eddie shrugged, like, Go figure. He leaned over and scratched Dahmer’s chest. The dog, panting, bleeding, huffing, and embarrassed by defeat, nevertheless looked up at Eddie with unabashed adoration.
“So what should I do now?” Eddie asked Boone.
“Maybe just chill,” Sunny suggested. “Dial it down a little, let people enjoy their food. The food is great, Eddie.”
Sunny looks great, Boone thought, with her long flower-print sarong, a flower in her hair, and a dot of barbecue sauce on her upper left lip.
“I had it flown in,” Eddie said.
Yes, he had, Boone thought. Mounds of poi, huge platters of fresh ono and opah, pulled pork, chili rice, grilled Spam, and several pigs, the baking pits for which had been dug out of Eddie’s back lawn with backhoes.
“Maybe it’s time for the tattoo artist,” Eddie said.
“Maybe not so much,” Sunny said.
“Fire-eater?” Eddie asked.
“There you go,” Boone said. He looked at Sunny raising her eyebrow. “What? Everyone likes a fire-eater.”
Well, maybe not everybody. Maybe not a La Jolla crowd whose usual entertainment tended more toward chamber orchestras playing in museum foyers, cocktail-bar pianists warbling Cole Porter tunes, or investmentfund managers pointing toward every upward-climbing diagonal line.
The La Jollans stared at the performer—who was clad only in ankle-to-neck tattoos and something resembling a loincloth as he shoved rods of fire down his throat with a Lovelacian dexterity that would have sent a porno superstar into a paroxysm of envy—and prayed to a host of Episcopal saints that Eddie was not going to ask for any more volunteers from the audience. They surreptitiously eyed the front gate, with its promise of relative safety and sanity, but none of them wanted to earn Eddie’s attention by being the first to leave.
Boone found Eddie a little later out by the saltwater wading pool (“ ‘Bad for the glass. Bad for the glass,’ ” Johnny B. delighted in repeating) in a conversation with Dave.
“Eddie and I were just talking about The Searchers,’ ” Dave said. “He has it below High Noon but above Fort Apache?”
“Above them both, but nowhere near Butch Cassidy,” Boone said.
“Ah, Butch Cassidy,” Dave said. “Good flick.”
Dave had dressed for the party in an expensive-looking silk Hawaiianprint shirt in reds and yellows, featuring parrots and ukuleles, and a pair of white slacks over his best dress sandals. His blond hair was neatly brushed back and he was wearing his “social,” as opposed to his “business,” shades, a pair of wraparound Nixons.
“Shane,” said Eddie.
“Another one,” Dave said.
The party was definitely winding down, as was Eddie, whose constant toking had finally soothed his manic drive toward being the perfect host.
The guests—who were much more afraid of Eddie than when they’d arrived—departed in possession of stolen property, their white-knuckled hands clutching gift bags that contained, among other things, boxed sets of Izzy Kamakawiwo’ole CDs, iPods, Rolex watches, little balls of hashish wrapped in festively colored foil, gift certificates for a hot-rock massage at a local spa, Godiva chocolates, ribbed condoms, a selection of Paul Mitchell hair-care products, and ceramic bobblehead dolls of hula dancers with AHOLA (mis)printed on their stomachs.
Dave left in possession of a gift bag and two of the other guests.
Eddie thought the party a great success, and was surprised, disappointed, and even a little hurt when a forest of FOR SALE signs went up on his block and none of the guests ever came back, not even for a cup of coffee or a breakfast blunt. In fact, the neighbors would actually cross the street while walking their dogs, for fear of bumping into Eddie and being invited inside.
Not that living in Eddie’s proximity was all negative—it wasn’t. The residents had Neighborhood Watch, but they didn’t need Neighborhood Watch, not with the twenty or so hui guys armed like Afghan warlords constantly peering from the walls of Eddie’s estate. No B and E guy in his remotely right mind would take a chance on robbing any of the houses, lest he fuck up and break into Red Eddie’s. You may, may, may break in, but you ain’t ever breaking out, and the only fate worse than being an invited guest is being an uninvited one, what with Eddie already having trouble finding playmates for Dahmer.
Now Eddie does a couple of 360 wheelies on his bike and throws the bike sideways, squeaking the front tire an inch from Boone’s feet.
23
“Boone Dawg!”
Red Eddie’s retro-Afro orange hair is jammed under a brown Volcom beanie; he has a sleeveless Rusty shirt over a pair of cargo pants that are at least three sizes too big for him. No socks, Cobian sandals, Arnette shades that have to go two bills.
And he reeks of the chronic.
“Eddie,” Boone says.
“S’up?”
“Not much.”
“That’s not what I hear,” Eddie says.
“Okay, what do you hear?”
“I hear,” Eddie says, flashing Boone forty g of cosmetic dentistry, “that you’re dogging some stripper who thinks she saw something she didn’t see.”
“That didn’t take long.”
“Time is mo-naaay.”
Well, Boone thinks, time is money if you actually make money. If you don’t, time is just time.
“So, bruddah,” Red Eddie says, “can you back out dis wave?”
Which rings some alarm bells in Boone’s head. Like, why does Eddie care? Eddie goes to Dan’s clubs from time to time, but they’re not, like, boys. That Boone knows of anyway. So he asks, “What’s it to you, Eddie?”
“I come to a bruddah with an ask,” Red Eddie says. “I have to have a reason?”
“It would help.”
“Where’s your aloha? Where’s da love?” Red Eddie asks with a tone of hurt disappointment. “You can be very haole sometimes, Boone.”
“I am a haole,” Boone says.
“Okay,” Red Eddie says. “Talking story now, Dan Silver is a degenerate gambler, bruddah Boone, bad at picking basketball games. He got in deep water, I pulled him out; now he can’t pay me. He owes the big dog a pile of bones he don’t have, which he ain’t going to have if he doesn’t win his lawsuit against the insurance company. We on the same wave, coz?”
“It’s beach break.” Straight, simple, easy to read.
“So,” Red Eddie says, “you would be showing me your aloha if you would sit out on the shoulder for a while. Now I’m hip that you need to rake lettuce to live, Boone brah, so whatever the haoles are paying you to do, I’ll double you to don’t. You know me, coz—I never come with my hand out, I don’t have something in the other.”
Yeah, but what? Eddie wonders. It brings up the age-old Christmas shopping conundrum: What do you give to the man who has everything? More precisely, what do you give to the man who wants nothing? That’s the probl
em with trying to bribe the Boone Dawg: He’s unique in the fact that his needs are simple, basic, and already met. The man needs cash, but it doesn’t mean enough to him to be a swaying factor. So what’s the tipping point? What can you offer B-Dog that would move him off his perfectly balanced ball?
Boone looks down at the weathered wood of the boardwalk, then back to Red Eddie. “I wish you’d come to me a couple of hours ago,” he says. “Then I could have said yes.”
“What happened then and now?”
“A woman was murdered,” Boone says. “That puts it over the line.”
Red Eddie doesn’t look happy.
“So much as I hate to say no to you,” Boone says. “I have to ride this one through, bro.”
Red Eddie looks out to the ocean.
“Big swell coming,” he says. “There’s gonna be some real thunder crushers out there. Wave like that can suck you in and take you over the falls. Man’s not careful, Boone Dawg, he could get crushed.”
“Yeah,” Boone says, “I know a little about big waves sucking people in, Eddie.”
“I know you do, brah,” Eddie says. “I know you do.”
Red Eddie does a doughnut and pedals away. Shouts over his shoulder, “E malama pono!”
Take care of yourself.
24
Johnny Banzai goes back into room 342 at the Crest Motel.
It’s your basic Pacific Beach motel room away from the water. Cheap and basic. Two twin beds, a television set bolted to a counter, the remote control bolted to a bedside table beside a clock radio. A couple of sunfaded photographs of beach scenes hang on the walls in cheap frames. A glass slider opens out to the little balcony. It’s open, of course, and a light breeze blows the thin curtain back inside the room.
It took Johnny a while to settle Harrington down. You put Boone Daniels in front of Harrington, it’s the proverbial red cape before a bull. The lieutenant wanted to know just what the fuck Boone was doing there, and, truth be told, so does Johnny.
For a PI, Boone is a shitty liar, and besides, he does very little matrimonial work. And no PI in his right mind brings the wife along to see live and in color what the husband’s been up to. Not to mention the fact that the woman is a real looker who is not likely to be cheated on, and that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
So Boone’s story is bullshit totale, and one of the very next things that Johnny is going to do is track Boone down and find out what he was doing at a motel where a woman played Rocky the Flying Squirrel with tragic results.
Now, Johnny Banzai and Boone Daniels are boys.
They go way back together, all the way to fifth grade, where they would drop their pencils at the same time so they could duck under their desks together, look at Miss Oliveira’s legs, and giggle.
That was before Johnny got into the soft-core porn business.
What Johnny would do was buy back issues of Playboy from an older cousin, cut out the pictures, and slip them into the lining of his three-ring binder, which he had carefully sliced and covered over for the purpose. Then he’d sell them in the boys’ room for fifty cents to a dollar each.
Johnny was doing a brisk trade in the boys’ room one day when some ninth graders came in and decided to take him off. Boone came in like “Here I am to save the day,” the surfer dude ready to rescue his little yellow brother, except that Johnny didn’t exactly need rescuing.
Boone had heard the word judo before, but he had never seen judo, and now he watched in sheer awe as Johnny literally wiped the floor with one of his attackers, while a second sat against the wall trying to remember his name, and the third just stood there rethinking the whole idea.
Boone punched him in the stomach, just to help the thought process along a little bit.
That was it—he and Johnny had been friends before, but now they were friends. And when Johnny took his porn money down to Pacific Surf and bought a board with it, they were locked in. They’ve been buddies ever since, and when all the shit went down with Boone, Johnny was the only cop who stood by him. Johnny would kill for Boone and knows that Boone would do the same for him.
But—
They inhabit roughly the same professional sphere, and there are times when the Venn diagram intersects. Usually when this happens they’re on the same side—they cooperate, share information. They’ve even done stakeouts together. But there are other times when they find themselves on opposite sides of a case.
Which is a problem that could fuck up a friendship. Except, being friends, they work it through what they call “the jump-in rule.”
The jump-in rule states the following:
If Johnny and Boone find themselves on the same wave—following the metaphor, it’s just like when someone jumps in on your wave—it’s on. You do what you have to do and it’s nothing personal. Johnny and Boone will go at it like the sheepdog and the coyote in those old cartoons, and, at the end of the day, when they punch out, they’ll still meet at the beach, grill some fish together, and watch the sunset.
It’s the jump-in rule, and if one guy asks a question the other guy can’t answer, or asks the other guy to do something he can’t do, all the other guy has to say is “jump-in rule,” and enough said.
Game on.
This is what Johnny plans to say when he finds Boone—ask him some very pointed questions, and if Boone doesn’t have some very good answers, then Johnny’s going to arrest his ass for impeding an investigation. Doesn’t want to do it, won’t like doing it, but he will do it and Boone will understand. Then Johnny will go in and spring for bail money.
Because Johnny has a thing about loyalty.
Of course he does. If you’re Japanese and you grew up anywhere in California, you have a thing about loyalty.
Johnny’s too young to remember it—Johnny was a long way from even having been born—when the U.S. government accused his grandparents of disloyalty and hauled them off to a camp in the Arizona desert for the duration of the war.
He’s heard the stories, though. He knows the history. Hell, the cop shop that he works out of is just blocks away from what used to be “Little Japan,” down on Fifth and Island, on the south edge of the Gaslamp District.
San Diego’s Nikkei community had been in the area since the turn of the century, first as immigrant farmworkers, or tuna fishermen down in Point Loma. They’d worked their asses off so that the next generation could buy land in Mission Valley and up in North County near Oceanside, where they became small, independent farmers. Hell, Johnny’s maternal grandfather still grows strawberries up east of O’side, stubbornly hanging in there against the dual enemies of age and urban development.
Johnny’s paternal grandfather moved into Little Japan and opened up a bath and barber shop, where the Japanese men came in to get their hair cut and then take long hot baths in the steaming furo down in the basement.
Johnny’s father has walked him through the old neighborhood, pointing out the buildings that still survived, showing him where Hagusi’s grocery store was, where the Tobishas had their restaurant, where old Mrs. Kanagawa kept her flower shop.
It was a thriving community, mixed in with the Filipinos and the few Chinese who stayed after the city tore down Chinatown, and the blacks and the whites, and it was a nice place to be and to grow up.
Then Pearl Harbor happened.
Johnny’s father heard it on the radio. He was seven years old then, and he ran to the barbershop to tell his father. By the next morning, the FBI had rounded up the president of the Japanese Association, the faculty of the Japanese School, the Buddhist priests, and the judo and kendo instructors and thrown them in a cell with the common criminals.
Within a week, the fishermen, the vegetable growers, and the strawberry farmers had been arrested. Johnny’s father still remembers standing on a sidewalk downtown and watching as they were marched—in handcuffs—from one jail to another. He remembers his father telling him not to look, because these men—leaders of their community—were looking down at
the ground in their humiliation and their shame.
Two months later, the entire Nikkei community was forced out of its homes and taken by train to the racetrack at Santa Anita, where they stayed for almost a year behind wire before being moved to the internment camp in Poston, Arizona. When they returned to San Diego after the war, they found that many of their homes, businesses, and farms had been taken over by whites. Some of the Nikkei left; others yielded to reality and started over; some—like Johnny’s maternal grandfather—began the long and tortuous legal process to recover their property.
But Little Japan was no more, and the once-tight Nikkei community scattered all over the county. Johnny’s father went to college, on to medical school, and then set up a successful practice in Pacific Beach.
He always thought his son would join the practice and take it over, but Johnny had other ideas. Young Johnny was always a little different from his siblings—while he dutifully fulfilled the stereotype of the diligent Asian student, Johnny preferred action to academics. He got through the school day to get to the baseball field, where he was an All-City second baseman. When he wasn’t on the diamond, he was in the water, a hard-charging grom ripping waves. Or he was in the dojo, learning judo from the older Japanese men, Johnny’s one real bow to his heritage.
When it came time for Johnny to choose a career path, he had the grades to go premed but went prelaw instead. When it came time to go to law school, Johnny checked out of that wave. He dreaded more hours at the library, more days behind a desk. What he craved was action, so he took the police exam and shredded it.
When Johnny told his father about his decision to become a cop, his father thought about the police who had led his own father in handcuffs through the streets of downtown San Diego, but he said nothing. Heritage, he thought, should be a foundation, not an anchor. Johnny didn’t become a doctor, but he married one, and that helped to ease the sting. The important thing was that Johnny become a success in his chosen field, and Johnny rocketed through the uniformed ranks to became a very good detective indeed.