by Don Winslow
Boone leans forward and rubs the back of his neck, annoyed at the ache but grateful that the shotgun hadn’t snapped a vertebra.
And what was Teddy doing in there? Boone asks himself. There aren’t a lot of cosmetic surgery candidates in the mojado camps, not any that could afford Teddy anyway. And why did Teddy apparently get a pass while I got a shotgun butt to the neck? Or maybe Teddy didn’t get a free ticket; maybe he’s lying in a heap somewhere. Maybe worse. But what the hell was Teddy doing there in the first place?
Well, the only thing to do is wait and ask him. Boone grabs a beanie from the back and pulls it over his head. Then he slides down in his seat, rests his neck against the back of it, and closes his eyes.
“What are you doing?” Petra asks.
“Grabbing a few z’s,” he says, “until Teddy gets back from doing whatever he’s doing.”
“But what if you fall asleep?”
“I am going to fall asleep,” Boone says. “That’s the idea.”
Besides, it’s Rule number four.
These are Boone’s four basic rules about stakeouts:
If you have a chance to eat, eat.
If there’s a place to go to the bathroom, go.
If there’s a space to lie down, lie down.
If you can sleep, sleep.
Because you never know when you’re going to have a chance to do any or all of the four things again.
“But aren’t you worried about being asleep when Teddy comes back?” Petra asks.
“No,” Boone says, “because you’re going to wake me up.”
“What if I fall asleep?”
Boone laughs.
“And what if—”
“You should give up those what-ifs,” Boone says. “They’re gonna kill you.”
He slides farther down in the seat, pulls the beanie over his eyes, and falls asleep.
52
Sunny spreads the mat out on the polished floor of her little house in Pacific Beach and lies down.
The old bungalow is just a half block from the beach. It was her grandparents’ house; they bought it back in the twenties, when average people could afford something like that. Her grandfather died a long time ago; her grandmother passed just a few years back, after a long, sad struggle with Alzheimer’s.
Eleanor Day had been quite a woman. Sunny holds on to the memories of long walks on the beach with her, and building sand castles, and how her grandmother bought Sunny her first surfboard and called her “Gidget,” like the TV show. Sunny loved to stay with Grandma at the beach. It was her favorite place in the world.
Sunny visited her a lot in the home. Some days, Eleanor would know who Sunny was; other days, she’d get her confused with her daughter, or her sister, or an old friend from college. It made Sunny sad, but it didn’t stop her from visiting.
She knew who Eleanor was.
Sunny was living in a small apartment when she got the word that her grandmother was gone. The Dawn Patrol came to the funeral, and no one was more surprised than Sunny when the lawyer told her that she had inherited the old two-bedroom bungalow near the beach.
Her grandmother had wanted Sunny to have it because she knew that she would appreciate it.
She does, of course.
It holds a lot of memories, a lot of love.
Now she takes a few deep breaths, then launches into the rigorous Pilates exercises that make up her daily routine. She goes at it hard for an hour—stretching, twisting, moving into heavy aerobic drills, then stretching it down.
Then she moves over to the old surfboard that she stretched across two cinder blocks. She lies down on the board, jumps to her knees, then instantly up to her feet; then she lies back down again. She does this a hundred times, until the movement is as smooth, powerful, and automatic as it can be. Her heart pounding, a fine sheen of sweat coating her skin, she moves to the free weights and lifts, first working her upper body and arms. She wants the arm and shoulder strength for paddling and for that sudden burst of speed and energy needed to get into a big wave. Then she works the trapezium and neck muscles, which will help keep her neck from getting snapped in the worst-case scenario of going over the falls headfirst.
After that, she straps weights to her ankles and does leg lifts, then picks up a bar and does toe lifts and deep squats, strengthening her quads, calves, and thighs, which will help keep her on the board in the big waves. While her long legs are an advantage in swimming, they work against her in staying on the board, so she has to make sure that they’re like steel.
Sunny is a finely honed athlete, five-eleven, big-boned, with a swimmer’s broad shoulders, negligible body fat, and those long legs.
“You’re a gazelle,” Dave the Love God once said to her as he watched her walk in from the water.
“She’s not the gazelle,” Boone said correcting him. “She’s the lioness.”
Sunny’s always loved Boone for saying that. Well, for a lot of things, but his saying that was enough to love him.
And she keeps her body in superb shape with running, swimming, lifting, stretching. Truth be told, it’s not the ideal surfer’s body. Most of the best woman surfers have smaller, more compact frames—easier for balance and for the lightning-quick turns and shifts that win competitions.
But Sunny plans to turn her size to her advantage.
A big body, she thinks, for the big waves.
So far, big-wave riding has been pretty much a male preserve. There are a few women starting to ride them, but still plenty of room for a female surfer to stand out in a male lineup. She knows she has the size, weight, and strength to handle the thunder crushers.
Up to now, she’s been caught in a vicious circle: You need money to travel to the big waves in Hawaii and Tahiti, but without sponsorship, she doesn’t have the money, but she can’t get a sponsorship until she rides the big waves, but in order to ride the big waves, she has to travel.…
But now the big waves are coming to her. Almost literally to her back door, and all she has to do is walk outside, paddle out, and catch one of the big mackers. The beaches and bluffs will be lined with photographers and video guys, and all she needs is one ride, one monster ride, with her tawny hair waving like her personal flag against the black wave, and she knows that her picture will be on the front cover of the mags.
And the sponsorship will follow.
So lift, she tells herself. Push past the pain; it’s only pain. Every fiberripping lift will help you stay up in that wave. This is what you’ve been training for for months, for years, all your life. So do one more, one more, one more.…
The lifting done, she goes back on the mat and stretches some more, then lies back, breathes, and imagines herself riding the big wave.
It’s not mere fantasizing; she carefully breaks it down, moment by moment, from the paddle in to the drop to the heavy right break, into the tube, then out again with the blast of spray. She imagines it again and again, each time in more detail, and in each repetition she does it stronger and better. She never imagines missing the wave, or wiping out, or getting sucked over the falls.
Sunny keeps it rigorously positive.
The sound of her moment coming to her.
She gets up, wipes herself down with a towel, and sits and listens to the ocean.
53
Petra watches Boone sleep.
It’s a somewhat edifying experience, in that she’s never actually watched a man sleep before.
Not that there haven’t been men in her bed, but she has typically fallen asleep before they have, or, preferably, they have gotten up and left after the sexual act and a decent period of “cuddling,” although, truth be told, she could do without the latter. It seems to be expected, however, even though she suspects that the man could dispense with it as well.
If she’s in the man’s bed, she gets up and leaves after the polite interval, because she prefers to sleep alone, and, especially, wake up alone. She’s hardly decent—physically, emotionally, or psychological
ly—until she’s had that first cup of Lapsang souchong, and besides, the last thing she wants to be doing in the morning is looking after a man’s needs, feigning cheerfulness as she makes him coffee, eggs, sausages, and the like.
That’s what restaurants are for.
Now she watches Boone Daniels sleep and she’s fascinated.
One moment the man was totally, utterly awake and one second later he was just as totally, utterly asleep, as if he didn’t have the proverbial care in the world. As if he weren’t financially bereft, as if he didn’t have a crucial witness to locate, as if an apparently violent gangster wasn’t out to harm him, as if …
I weren’t even here, she admits to herself.
Is that what’s bothering you? she asks herself. That this man can simply ignore you to the extent of actual unconsciousness?
Ridiculous, she tells herself. Why would you care if this … primitive doesn’t find you as fascinating as, let’s face it, most men do? It’s not as if you have any interest in him, not as if you’ve made the slightest effort to attract him.
Of course, you never make the slightest effort, she thinks. Be truthful, woman, you’re very lazy when it comes to that. Lazy because you can be, because a frank assessment in the mirror tells you so, and because men tell you so.
They act like idiots and they’re ridiculously easy to bring into your bed, if that’s what you want.
Not that there have been that many.
A few well-selected, well-heeled, polite, appropriate sexual partners, one or two of whom she had considered as potential husbands and who, she supposes, have evaluated her as a potential wife.
But they are all much too career-oriented and, face it, selfish for marriage. At least at this point in her life, in any case. Perhaps after she makes partner, she might seek out a more serious relationship, perhaps find a man who might be a suitable husband. In the meantime, she’s content to find the occasional young lawyer or banker who’s appropriate to take to company dinners and, even more occasionally, to bed.
Or am I, she wonders, so content?
You are lonely, she admits to herself. It isn’t a sudden revelation, an epiphany of sorts, but more of a creeping realization that she’s been missing something, something she never thought she wanted—a close emotional connection with another person. The realization shocks her. She’s always been, as long as she can remember, totally self-sufficient.
Which is the way she likes it.
But now she’s beginning to feel that she needs somebody, and she doesn’t like the feeling.
At all.
She regards Boone again.
How can the man sleep at a time like this?
She briefly considers waking him up but then rejects the idea.
Maybe I’m just jealous she thinks, envious at this ability to sleep so easily.
She doesn’t fall asleep easily or sleep particularly well. Instead, she lies awake thinking about cases, about things she needs to do, second-guessing herself about decisions she’s made, worrying about them, worrying about how she’s perceived at the firm, whether she’s working hard, whether she’s working too hard and arousing dangerous jealousies. She worries about her wardrobe, her hair. She worries about worrying. Half the time, she can’t sleep because she’s worrying about not getting enough sleep.
If it weren’t for Ambien, she might not sleep at all.
But this waterlogged Cro-Magnon with a PI license, she thinks, he sleeps like a baby. It must be true, then: Ignorance is bliss.
Her mind turns to the girl at the restaurant that morning. The tall, athletic creature with the tawny hair. Clearly, he’s sleeping with her, and who could blame him? She’s gorgeous. But what on earth could she see in him? She could have any man she wanted, so why does she choose this? Could he be that good in bed? Worth having to wake up to? Certainly not.
It’s a mystery.
She’s working it through when she sees Teddy walking up the road.
54
“Ouch.”
Boone’s awake even before he feels Petra’s elbow dig into his ribs.
You develop a sixth sense on stakeouts after a while. You can be asleep, but there’s an internal alarm clock that will wake you up when something’s going down.
Boone pulls his beanie up and sees Petra pointing down the road at Teddy.
He has a little girl with him.
The girl from the reeds.
55
“Stay in the van.”
“But—”
“I said, stay in the fucking van,” Boone snaps in a voice that even Petra doesn’t question. He gets out of the van and walks toward the cabin.
It has a central front door with a small window on either side. A front sitting room leads into a back bedroom and a bath. The curtain is open on one of the windows and Boone sees Teddy sitting on the bed next to the girl, shaking some pills from a vial into his hand.
Boone feels like kicking the motel door in, then beating the uncouth piss out of Teddy until the good doctor needs a cosmetic surgeon for himself.
Because Teddy D-Cup, with access to literally hundreds of beautiful women, is feeding roofies to a little girl in a motel room preparatory to raping her. And now Boone knows what the good Dr. Cole was doing in the strawberry fields—shopping for a family so fucking desperate, they’d sell their daughter to him. And the mojados who worked Boone over in the reeds were taking his back.
It’s a beautiful world.
Boone throws his shoulder into the door, which splinters around the bolt lock and opens. He’s into the bedroom in three long strides and has Teddy by the shirtfront on the fourth. He lifts Teddy up and holds him in the air.
The girl screams and runs out the door.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” Teddy says.
Christ, Boone thinks, does every fucking child molester have to say that every fucking time? No, dude, it’s always what it looks like. Boone pivots and slams Teddy into the wall. Pulls him in toward his own chest and then slams him again.
Teddy yells, “I’m helping her!”
Yeah, I’ll bet you are, Boone thinks. He takes his right hand off Teddy’s shirt, clenches it into a tight fist, and cocks his arm, ready to blast Teddy’s face into oatmeal. Except suddenly it isn’t Teddy’s face; it’s Russ Rasmussen’s. Boone’s world goes red. Tilting crazily, like a bad wipeout.
“Boone!”
Through the red haze, he hears Petra, gets that she disapproves, but he doesn’t care.
“Boone!”
He turns around to tell her to butt out.
Dan Silver is holding a gun to her head. Two of his boys stand behind him.
“Let him go, Boone,” Dan says.
The world comes level again, back into focus. Boone says, “He’s a short eyes.”
“We’ll take care of him,” Dan says. “Let him go now or I’ll put two in her pretty head before I do you.”
Boone looks at Petra. Her pale skin is absolutely white, her eyes are big and full of tears, and her legs quiver. She’s scared to death. Boone lowers his clenched fist but then jams his palm into Teddy’s ribs before releasing his grip on the man.
Teddy slides to the floor.
“Good thing for you I showed up,” Dan says to him, “before this barbarian beat the shit out of you. I feel like the cavalry riding in. Nick of time and all that happy bullshit. You’re coming with me voluntarily, aren’t you, Dr. Cole?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Help him up.”
Dan’s boys take Teddy by the arms and walk him out the door.
“This isn’t over, Teddy,” says Boone.
Dan gestures at Petra. “You banging this, Daniels?”
Boone doesn’t answer.
“No, you ain’t,” Dan says. “She’s much too juicy for you.”
He turns to Petra. “You get tired of slummin’, you want a real man, you come see me, honey. I’ll take good care of you.”
She hears herself say, “I’d rather fuck a
pig.”
Dan smiles, but his face turns red. “Maybe we can work that out for you, bitch.”
“Enough,” Boone says.
“You’re in no position to—”
“I said, ‘Enough,’ ” Boone repeats. Something in his voice tells Dan to back off before he has to shoot this guy. And this guy is Eddie’s asshole buddy, something about him pulling Eddie’s brat out of the drink or something. And the last thing in the world Dan needs right now is more problems with Red Eddie.
“Stay in here for a few minutes,” Dan says. “You come out, ‘Friend Of Eddie’ or not, I’ll smoke you. Her, too.”
He takes a moment to leer at Petra and then walks out.
“You okay?” Boone asks Petra.
She sits down heavily on the bed and puts her head in her hands. Boone understands it. You get a gun pointed at your head, it changes you. It makes you realize how quickly you could not exist anymore. In that second, all you want is your life—desperately, fervently—and you’d give almost anything for it. And that moment of realization changes you as a person. You’re never quite the same after you realize you’d do almost anything to live.
But talk about guts. “I’d rather fuck a pig”? To a guy who has a gun pointed at your head! That’s a crazy, sick kind of courage. He walks over and puts his hand on her head, strokes her hair a little, and says, “It’s all right. You’re okay.”
“I was so afraid,” she says.
Then Boone realizes that she’s crying. “You were amazing,” he says. “Really brave.”
A second later, they hear two shots.
Pop.
Pop.
What they call “execution-style.”
56
The girl runs back into the reeds, because she doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
Her name is Luce.
She doesn’t find anyone in the reeds. They’re all gone now, so she crawls into one of the little caves, huddles there, and says the Rosary as she rubs the little crucifix. It will be a cold night, she knows, but the other girls will be back at dawn.