by Don Winslow
RAIN.
The girl’s name.
Bastard, Petra thinks. He never told me he had a daughter. He never even mentioned that he’d been married. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe the girl is a love child and Boone never married her mother. Still, he might have mentioned it. Be fair, she tells herself. He had no obligation to tell you.
She digs deeper.
More pictures of the girl. Carefully preserved in plastic sleeves. Photos of her playing, at a birthday party, opening presents in front of a Christmas tree. Oddly, not a single photo of Rain with Boone. Not a single daddy-daughter shot that one would expect.
And the pictures seem to stop when the girl is around the age of five or six.
So Boone Daniels has a six-year-old daughter, Petra thinks. Whom he clearly adores but doesn’t talk about.
Disregarding the better angels of her nature, Petra digs under the photos and finds a file folder. She opens it, to see some pencil sketches, “artist’s renderings” some would call them, of a girl as she would look as she got older.
Her name is Rain.
“Rain at seven,” “Rain at eight,” “Rain at nine” …
Is Boone not allowed to see his daughter anymore? Petra wonders. They’re so sad, these sketches—all he has of his little girl.
There are other files in the drawer, all labeled “Rasmussen.” Must be another case he’s working on, Petra thinks, although Boone hardly seems to be the type to bring work home.
You are full of surprises, Mr. Daniels, she thinks.
Feeling ashamed, she quickly puts everything back in order and goes into the living room.
“I’ve been told I belong in the bedroom,” Tammy says. She gets up from the couch, goes into the bedroom, and shuts the door behind her.
“She wants to talk with Teddy,” Petra says, sitting down on the couch.
“She mentioned that,” Boone replies.
The sweatshirt—a black Sundowner—is huge on her, and she’s had to roll the legs of the sweatpants way up. But Boone thinks she looks prettier than hell.
“You look good,” he says.
“You’re a liar,” she says. “But thank you.”
“No,” he says. “You should go with that look.”
“Hardly lawyerly.”
“Maybe that’s it.”
The doorbell rings.
78
Boone takes the .38, moves to the side of the door, nudges the curtain aside, and looks out.
Sunny stands at the door.
Her blond hair, shiny in the moist night air, peeks out from under the hood of a dark blue sweatshirt. Arms folded inside the waist pouch, she hops up and down with chill and anxiety.
Boone opens the door, yanks her inside, and shuts it behind her.
“Boone, Tide told me—”
She sees Petra sitting on the couch.
In Boone’s sweats.
Which she used to wear herself, in happier times, after long mornings in the water and afternoon lovemaking.
“Excuse me,” Sunny says, her voice colder than the water. “I didn’t realize—”
“It’s not—”
“What it looks like?” She glares at Boone for a second, then slaps him hard across the face. “I thought you were dead, Boone! You let me think you were dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head. “I’ll tell Cheerful and Hang. They were worried about you.”
“You have to get out of here, Sunny,” Boone says.
“No kidding.”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant.”
It’s not safe, Boone thinks, is what I meant.
But she’s already walking away. He looks out the window and sees her taking long strides down the pier, into his past, out of his life.
79
“I’m sorry,” Petra says a moment after the door slams.
“Not your fault,” Boone says.
“I’ll talk to her if you’d like,” Petra says. “Explain the misunderstanding.”
Boone shakes his head. “It’s been over with us for a long time. Maybe it’s good this happened.”
“Clean break sort of thing.”
“Yeah.”
Petra feels bad, but not as bad as she thinks she should. A door has been opened, and she wonders if she should step through it. Not immediately—that would be inappropriate and tawdry, to say the least. But the door is open, and she has this feeling it will stay open for a while.
But she does take a small, tentative step forward. “Is Sunny the mother?”
“What?”
“Rain’s mother?”
The door slams shut.
“Try to get a little sleep,” Boone says. “In the morning, you can go out and get Tammy some decent clothes. We’ll take her to court; she can testify and we’ll be done with this shit.”
He pulls a chair up near the door, his back to her, and sits with the .38 on his lap.
80
“No bodies,” the fireman says to Johnny Banzai.
“You’re sure,” Johnny says.
The fireman gives him a hard, sarcastic look. He’s real thrilled to be out on the beach on a cold, damp night with the surf spitting spray into his face. To put out a fire on a piece-of-crap van that some clown apparently pushed off the bluff for shits and giggles. He says, “I’m going to send this joker a hell of a bill.”
“Do it,” Johnny says.
He leaves the scene and walks back up the stairs to Shrink’s, where Teddy D-Cup is still sitting in the Lotus Cottage. Johnny has no real reason to hold Teddy, but he didn’t tell him that, and the doctor seems to be in a cowed and obedient frame of mind. He’s also about half shit-faced, which makes Johnny wonder what’s in an organic martini that makes it organic.
Johnny sits down across from Teddy.
The plasma television has a Lakers game on, the purple and gold of their uniforms as vivid as a Mardi Gras parade.
“So?” Johnny asks.
It’s a standard opening of his. Never start by asking a witness a closed-ended question. Just get them talking and they’ll tell you the first thing on their minds.
Doesn’t work with Teddy. He looks blankly at Johnny and repeats, “ ‘So?’ ”
“So what are you doing here?” Johnny asks.
“Visiting a patient.”
“Would that patient be Tammy Roddick?” Johnny asks. In the background, Kobe totally works a defender, blows around him, and slams the ball home.
“What if it is?” Teddy says.
“Where is she?” Johnny asks.
He sees a different look come over Teddy’s face. An expression that looks like … is it relief?
“I don’t know,” Teddy says. “She wasn’t here when I got here.”
“How did you get here?”
“Huh?”
“How did you get here?” Johnny asks. “Your car isn’t in the lot.”
“That’s a good question,” Teddy says.
“That’s why I asked it,” Johnny says. Kobe has the ball again and he’s dribbling around. Will not pass it. Typical, Johnny thinks. “Doctor?”
Teddy looks serious and thoughtful. He looks Johnny in the eye and says, “I don’t really have an answer to that question.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why don’t you have an answer?”
There’s a long silence; then Teddy says, “I don’t really have an answer to that question, either.”
“Look, asshole,” Johnny says. “I have a dead woman in the morgue who was carrying the ID of a stripper you’re probably banging. Now the real Tammy Roddick is missing, Boone’s vehicle is Iraq war footage, and I find you in Tammy’s room, which you certainly arranged for. Now you can answer my questions in this civilized setting, or I can take you down to the precinct, leave you in a smelly interview room for a few hours, and then see if you can get your thoughts collected.”
It sobers Teddy up a little.
Which turns out not to be a good thing, because it seems as if he suddenly remembers that he’s a high-priced surgeon with connections. He looks at Johnny and calmly says, “It’s not illegal for a doctor to visit a patient, and I can’t control the fact that she wasn’t here. As for exploding vans—”
“How did you know it was a van?”
“I have no idea about it,” Teddy says. “As I will explain to the beautiful wife of your chief when I see her. She has a beautiful smile, don’t you think? And those eyes …”
“I’ve never met her.”
“I’d be happy to introduce you.”
The banzai part of Johnny would like to whip the cuffs on Teddy, take him to the house, and show him the other side of life in San Diego, but his more rational side knows that it would be futile and self-defeating. Teddy will have a high-priced lawyer there in five minutes, who will make the correct point that Johnny has no reason to hold his client, no reason at all. So Johnny swallows the smarmy power play about the chief’s wife, along with the hard facts about being a cop in a city where great wealth lives alongside great poverty.
Johnny Banzai is neither naïve nor idealistic. He generally takes life as he finds it and doesn’t waste his time or energy tilting at windmills. But sometimes it gets to him, the knowledge that if Teddy, for instance, was Mexican, black, Filipino, Samoan, or just plain old white trash, he’d be in the back of Johnny’s car already. But Teddy is rich and white, with a good address in La Jolla—substitute Del Mar, Rancho Santa Fe, or Torrey Pines if you want—so he skates.
An obvious fact of life, Johnny thinks—the next time a rich white guy gets worked by the cops will be the first time. So get over it. But sometimes he’d like to take the badge, wing it into the ocean, and join Boone on the beach, rather than take any more shit from any of the beautiful people.
Now he says, “Dr. Cole, I have reason to believe that Tammy Roddick’s life is in immediate danger. I’m trying to find her before the bad guys do. If you have any knowledge that would help me do that, you should give it to me right now.”
“I really don’t,” Teddy says.
“Can you get home all right?” Johnny asks.
“They have a courtesy car,” Teddy says.
“With a driver?” Johnny asks, jutting his chin at the martini.
“Of course.”
Of course, Johnny thinks.
81
Boone gets up to make another cup of coffee.
He’s trashed, aching from the beating he got back by the strawberry fields, and the adrenaline surge from the beach is long gone. His body screams for sleep, but it’s just going to have to wait until he delivers Tammy to the courtroom, so he goes for more caffeine.
Petra’s out.
Sound asleep on the sofa, snoring softly.
Boone tries to work up some righteous indignation over Sunny’s false, unspoken accusation, but he can’t. The truth is that he does feel some attraction to Pete, and if Sunny hadn’t come to the door when she did, he might have done something about it.
He looks over at Pete.
Angelic when she sleeps.
But he’s pissed off at her for snooping in his room. Looking at his books, digging up the stuff about Rain. Women, he thinks—it’s always a mistake letting them into your space, because they prowl it like cats, check it out to see if they can make it their own.
So he’s pissed at her but attracted to her at the same time. What is that? he wonders. Is it that “opposites attract” thing? He always thought that was some cheesy Paula Abdul song attached to some cartoon, but here it is. If you had to pick a woman who’s totally wrong for him, out of every woman in the entire world, you’d choose Pete: ambitious, elitist, snobbish, career-oriented, fashion-conscious, argumentative, belligerent, sarcastic, ball-busting, high-maintenance, nosy.…
But there it is.
Fuck.
Too complicated for me, he thinks.
Just get this case over, deliver Tammy Roddick to court, get back in time to get into the big swell. The ocean is simple—not easy, but simple—and a wave is something you know how to handle.
Just stay in the water, never come out.
But it isn’t that simple, is it?
A woman’s been killed, a pedophile is out there, and somebody has to do something about both those things. Dan Silver has to go down for Angela Hart’s murder—Johnny will be on that until he gets it done—and Teddy D-Cup has to get squared for his little trips to Mister Roger’s Neighborhood.
First things first, though, Boone tells himself as the water starts to boil. He takes the kettle off the heat before it whistles and wakes Pete up. First get through the night, then get Tammy to testify, then clean your head out in the big waves.
Then see to Dan and Teddy.
Yeah, except …
He sees movement through the edge of the kitchen window.
Out on the pier.
He pulls the curtain back for a better view and sees them out there, moving like cats hunting in the night. One of them is edging along the pier railing on the near side; another one takes the opposite side. Boone thinks he can make out two more on the base of the pier, but he’s not sure.
And now a Hummer rolls slowly past in the street.
It’s hard to really see them in the dark and the mist, but just by the way they move, Boone can see they’re Hawaiians.
He touches Petra’s arm and wakes her up.
She looks around the room, not knowing where she is.
“Go into the bedroom,” Boone says. “Shut and lock the door behind you, lie down on the floor.”
“What—”
“Just listen,” Boone says, and to her surprise, she does. “If you hear shooting, take Tammy and go out the window. You can swim into shore easily.”
“All right,” she says. “Will you—”
“I’ll be fine,” he says. “Go.”
He waits until she goes into the bedroom and he hears the lock click. Then he walks over to the cottage door, checks that he has a round chambered, and waits.
Tide, he thinks, what did Eddie offer you?
82
Love’s a funny goddamn thing.
Makes you do shit you’d never thought you’d do.
Then suddenly you’re doing it.
In Teddy Cole’s case, it makes him take the chauffeured ride home, go to his garage instead of the house, take one of his other Mercedeses and head straight for the strawberry fields. He knows he’s not going to find her there at night—she’s never there at night—but it’s the best shot he has, so that’s what he does.
Love is a funny goddamn thing.
83
Red Eddie sits in the back of the Hummer and watches the guys move up the pier toward Boone’s cottage. He checks out the two others lingering around the base of the pier and knows that for every one he sees, there are probably two he can’t.
Large respect for the Samoans guarding Boone Dawg from harm. They’re good at what they do.
Respect to Josiah Pamavatuu also.
The guy went the other way. Bad for his icehead cousin, to be sure, but good for him. Gonna be rough on the big man, though; Samoans are huge on family.
And Boone Daniels is a cockroach—you just can’t kill the kanaka.
Eddie had actually been very relieved when he got the word that Boone wasn’t charcoal. It’s a blessing. What is a curse is Dan Silver, who is gripping.
“She testifies tomorrow,” Dan says. “She saw everything—she’ll kill us.”
Red Eddie draws the herb smoke deep into his lungs, holds it for the count of three, then exhales. He passes the blunt to Dan as he sings, “Oh, Danny Boy, the lights, the lights are shining.… Relax, Daniel Spaniel.”
“You relax,” Dan snaps, shaking his head to refuse the smoke.
Red Eddie shrugs. “I will.”
Relax and think.
Relaxation, Red Eddie knows, is the prerequisite for efficient thought. No sense in getting all geeked
up—you just cut off the flow of blood to your brain exactly when you need it the most. So he takes another hit of the weed to boost his intellectual capability, and then comes to a conclusion.
Eddie turns to Dan Silver and says, “Sorry, chief. You’re out of luck.”
Danny doesn’t want to accept it. “You telling me your guys can’t take a bunch of Sammy gang bangers?”
The Hummer is full of very moke hui boys and another car, also packed with muscle, waits just a block away. Doubtless they could do some serious damage to the Sammies and blow their way into Boone Dawg’s crib, Eddie knows, but that’s the problem—the last thing in the world Eddie wants is to trigger a transoceanic war.
And that’s what it would be, too. Let one of these Sammy guys get scratched, it would start a blood feud, with obligations for revenge. So the Sammies would crack a Hawaiian, then Eddie would have to crack back, and it would never end. And not just here, either; it would speed back to Honolulu in a heartbeat, and there’d be aggro there and in freaking Pago Pago, too. It would get out of freaking control, cause a lot of heartache, and interfere with business.
And Eddie’s all about the business.
No, the High Tide dude was smart, Eddie thinks. He figured all this out and put a screen around his boy Boone. A screen of ohana that he knew I would never attack.
Round to you, Tide.
“Sorry,” he says to Dan. “It just ain’t on, man.”
“That cunt’s going to testify in the morning,” Dan says. “God knows what’s going to come out of her stupid fucking mouth.”
“You better hope,” Eddie says, “she confines her remarks to the little pig roast at your dumb-ass warehouse.”
Because Dan has dumped him in the shit, letting this wahine see things she shouldn’t have seen. And the timing couldn’t be worse—he has a shipment due to come in tomorrow night, and he doesn’t want Dan’s sloppy business practices shining a spotlight on that part of his business.
“That’s why I’m saying,” Dan says. “Let’s go in and take her now.”
Eddie shakes his head. Ain’t gonna happen. Not only are the Samoans standing in the way, but there’s Boone to consider. No way is Boone going to stand aside and let Danny cancel that girl’s reservation. Eddie’s already told his boys: If they have a clean shot at the wahine, take it, but nothing, nothing, better happen to Boone Daniels.