The Dawn Patrol

by Don Winslow

  “Twice,” she says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is twice I’m asking for a lawyer,” she says.

  Johnny pushes his luck. “Who was the kid, Tammy?”

  “What kid? I want a lawyer.”

  “The kid in the room with Angela, a little girl, pink toothbrush?”

  “I don’t know. I want a lawyer.”

  But she knows. Johnny sees it in her eyes. Dead as stone until he mentioned the kid, and then there was something in there.

  Fear.

  You’re a cop for more than a few weeks, you know fear when you see it. He leans over the table and says real quietly, “For the kid’s sake, Tammy, tell me the truth. I can help. Let me help you. Let me help her.”

  She’s at the tipping point.

  Again, he knows it when he sees it. She could go either way. She’s going toward Johnny’s when—

  There’s a commotion in the hall.

  “I’m her attorney! I demand access!”

  “Get out of here,” Harrington says.

  “Has she asked for a lawyer? She has, hasn’t she?”

  Tammy sets her jaw and looks at the ceiling. Johnny gets up, opens the door, and sees Todd the Rod standing in the hallway. The lawyer looks over his shoulder at Tammy.

  “It’s okay now,” he says. “I’m here. Not … one … more … word.”

  He has her out of there in thirty minutes.

  103

  Boone’s in a lot longer.

  After all, he hit a cop.

  A detective, no less.

  In a courthouse hallway.

  And Boone didn’t just punch Harrington once. He went off on him—big heavy hands and muscles hard from years of surfing slamming punch after punch into Harrington’s face, ribs, and stomach until Johnny Banzai managed to get some kind of judo hold on him and choke him out.

  Now Boone lies on a metal bench in the cell and nobody fucks with him. He shares the cell with mostly blacks, Mexicans, and some white-trash drunks, bikers, and tweekers and nobody fucks with him.

  He hit a cop.

  A detective, no less.

  In a courthouse hallway.

  Boone could run for president of the cell and win by acclamation. They love him in there. Guys are offering him their bologna sandwiches.

  He’s not hungry.

  Too fucking miserable to eat.

  It’s over, he thinks. I took Harrington’s bait like the chump fish I am, and now I’m looking at a felonious assault rap on a law enforcement officer. That means certain jail time, and my PI card is gonzo.

  Half The Dawn Patrol’s pissed at me and the other half must think I’m a total barney, and they’re totally correct in that. I let this Roddick babe play me like a fish, make me chase her like she didn’t want to be caught, and then, bang, she turns around and rams a hole in the boat.

  And we’re all going down with it.

  Roddick set us up. She was never going to testify against Danny. She sold the insurance company a story so it would deny Silver’s claim. Then he could sue for the big bucks when she changed her story. The whole chase thing was to make us want her more. And it worked.

  Judge Hammond will deny Alan’s motion for a mistrial and grant Todd’s motion for a directed verdict. When court reconvenes in the morning, he’ll instruct the jury that the insurance company has already been found guilty and that all they need to decide is how much to award in punitive damages.

  Which will be in the millions.

  And Alan will be referred to the State Bar Association for ethics charges, not to mention the district attorney’s office for suborning perjury. So will Pete.

  Her career is fucked. She’ll be lucky if she keeps her Bar card, never mind make partner. If she does manage to stay in the law biz, she’ll be doing fender benders and slip-and-falls until her hair is gray.

  A skinny white tweeker approaches Boone and shoves a couple of pieces of stale bread at him. “You want my sammich?”

  “No, thanks.”

  The tweeker hesitates, his shrunken meth-reduced mouth trembling with anxiety. “You want a blow job?”

  “Get away from me.”

  The tweeker sidles off.

  But this is what life’s going to be, Boone thinks. Stale “sammiches,” tweekers for friends, and offers of jailhouse love.

  He rolls over and faces the wall, his back to the cell.

  No one’s going to fuck with him.

  104

  Petra sits on a plastic chair bolted to the wall of the receiving station at the downtown jail.

  She’s glad to be there, though, glad to be anywhere that isn’t in the proximity of Alan Burke, who’d gone off on her like a pit bull on crank.

  “Good job,” he’d said, storming down the street outside the courthouse.

  “I didn’t know,” she said, working hard to keep up with him.

  He stopped and whirled on her. “It’s your job to know! It’s your job to get witnesses ready to testify! For our side, Petra! Not the other side! It’s my fault for not having mentioned that earlier, I guess!”

  “You’re right, of course.”

  “I’m right?” he yelled, holding his arms out like Christ crucified, spinning in a 360 and yelling to everybody on Broadway, “Hey, I’m right! Did you hear that? The associate attorney who’s never tried a case in her fucking life tells me I’m right! Does it get any better? Does life get any happier than this?”

  People walked by them, chuckling.

  “I’m sorry,” Petra said.

  “Sorry’s not good enough.”

  “My resignation will be on your desk by the end of the business day,” Petra said.

  “No, no, no, no,” Alan said. “Too easy. You’re not walking away from this. No. You’re going to stay for the whole long, miserable march to death, humiliation, and destruction. Right by my side.”

  “All right. Certainly. Yes.”

  “Are you sleeping with him?” Alan asked.

  “With whom?”

  “With Todd the Rod!” Alan yelled. “Boone! Who did you think I meant?”

  Petra turned beet red and stared at him, mouth agape. Then she said, “I don’t think that’s an appropriate question for an employer to ask an employee.”

  “Sue me,” Alan said, and walked away. Then he turned around, came back, and said, “Look, we fell for a trick older than dirt. It’s not your fault, I should have spotted it. They set us up. Burned a cheap building down, produced a phony arson witness, then had her flip on us in court to get a punitive damages award. They win; we lose. It happens. Now go bail Boone out. We don’t shoot our wounded.”

  So now Petra sits on the plastic chair waiting for the desk sergeant to process paperwork. He seems to be working at glacial speed.

  105

  It’s a Beauty and the Beast scene.

  Tammy Roddick walking down Broadway in the company of Todd the Rod. Draws smirks from passersby whose sole thought is that the ugly fat man has maxed out an AmEx black card for a matinee at the Westgate Hotel.

  They go to the Westgate, all right, but not up to a room.

  Todd the Rod walks her into the parking structure, right to a gold Humvee, where Red Eddie sits in the backseat eating a fish taco smothered in salsa. He stops chewing long enough to say, “Get in, pretty lady.”

  Tammy balks.

  Todd the Rod is already sleazing his way toward the elevator.

  “No worries, sistuh,” Eddie says. “No one going to touch a hair on your head. On the life of my child.”

  She gets into the backseat with him.

  “Where is she?” she asks.

  He holds up a white paper bag. “Taco?”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s safe.”

  “I want to see her,” Tammy says.

  “Not yet.”

  “Right fucking now.”

  “You’re a real tita, huh?” Eddie says. “You know tita, Hawaiian for ‘tough girl’? I like that. We got so
me time to kill, tita, maybe we can kill it together. Oooh, look at them green cat eyes, getting so angry. Gets me hot, tita, gives me wood.”

  “I held up my end of the deal,” Tammy says.

  “And we’ll hold up ours,” Eddie replies. “Just not yet. You have to develop a little patience, tita. It’s a virtue.”

  “When?”

  “When what?” Eddie asks, taking a huge bite of the taco. The salsa drips from the side of his mouth.

  “When do you hold up your end of the deal?”

  “Some things have to happen first,” Eddie says. “Things go as planned, you keep that sexy mouth shut … tomorrow morning.”

  “Where?”

  Eddie smiles, wipes the salsa from his lips, and sings, “ ‘Let me take you down, cos I’m going to …’ ”

  106

  Boone can’t let go of Teddy D-Cup.

  Lying there on the metal bench, his mind keeps going back to Teddy in the motel room with the little mojada girl. Natch you can’t let go of it, he tells himself. Face it, you have a serious jones going for pedophiles. Don’t let it twist your thinking on this.

  Yeah, but it’s not, Boone thinks. There’s something there, something about the Teddy-Tammy connection that doesn’t jive.

  Work through it.

  Tammy leaves Mick Penner for Teddy. No surprise there—she’s trading up, except most of Teddy’s strippers work him for some cosmetic work, and Tammy hasn’t had a stitch of plastic surgery. Okay, maybe she just didn’t want any or they haven’t gotten around to it yet.

  Mick knows his girl is doing Teddy because he followed them to the cheap motel up near the strawberry fields. Which doesn’t make any sense, because Teddy could do his matinees at any upscale hotel in La Jolla, or even at Shrink’s, and a girl like Tammy would expect—in fact, insist on—a little luxury.

  So why does he take her to the cheap joint all the way up in O’side?

  Because it’s near the strawberry field where he picks up a little mojada girl. But that doesn’t make any sense. You’d think that’s the last place he’d take Tammy; you’d think the good doctor would want to keep that little assignation way deep on the down low.

  It doesn’t make sense on another level: Pedophiles are pedophiles because they like little girls, not grown women. But Teddy is notorious for banging fully grown strippers and got his nickname for giving them big, fully grown, triple-X adult boobs.

  Teddy D-Cup likes women.

  Yeah, except, you saw him in the room with the child, so …

  A guy’s staring at him from across the cell. Big guy who looks like he hits the weight room pretty regularly.

  “What?” Boone asks.

  “You remember me?”

  The whole cell is quiet, watching this develop, hoping for a little relief from the mind-numbing monotony of jail.

  “No,” Boone says. “Should I?”

  “You tossed me out of The Sundowner once.”

  “Okay.” Like, big freaking deal, Boone thinks. I’ve thrown a lot of idiots out of The Sundowner.

  The guy gets up and stands over Boone. “But you ain’t got your big Samoan buddy or that other guy with you now, do you?”

  Boone sort of remembers him now. East County guy who got a turista drunk and was going to take her somewhere for a gang bang. He makes a point of looking around the cell, then says, “No, I don’t see either of them here. So?”

  “So, I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

  “I don’t want any trouble.”

  The guy sneers. “I don’t give a fuck what you want.”

  A biker sitting against the wall asks Boone, “You want us to take care of this?”

  “No, but thanks,” Boone says. He’s had a bad day, a really bad day that’s not going to get any better. He hasn’t had any sleep, he’s aching and tired and irritable, and now this pumped-up kook is trying to make his day even worse.

  “Get up,” the guy says.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Pussy.”

  “Okay, I’m a pussy,” Boone says.

  “You’re my bitch.”

  “If you say so,” Boone says, folding his arms across his chest and closing his eyes. He feels the guy reach out to grab him, flicks his hands out to separate the guy’s arms, then knife-edges both his own hands into the guy’s neck.

  The guy is done now; he just doesn’t know it yet. Stunned from the double strike to the carotids, he can’t react quickly enough as Boone slides his hands around the back of his neck, holds his head, and brings his knee up three times into his chin. Boone lets go, pushes, and the guy slides to the floor unconscious, blood trickling from his mouth.

  Boone lies back down.

  There’s a short pause; then the tweeker who had offered Boone a bologna sandwich and a blow job scoots over to rob the unconscious man. He reaches inside his shirt and yanks out a small chain with a little crucifix on it, holds it up to Boone, and asks, “You want this?”

  Because jailhouse law says it belongs to Boone by right of conquest.

  Boone shakes his head.

  Thinking, You’re an idiot, Daniels.

  A total barney.

  He gets up from the bench, steps over a few guys to get to the bars, and calls out to the jailer. “Yo, bro! Any word on me getting out of here?”

  107

  Yeah, as a matter of fact.

  Ten minutes later he walks out of the building with Petra. She tries to put a brave face on things. “At least now,” she says, “you can catch your ‘big swell.’ ”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Boone says.

  It doesn’t? Petra thinks. Because it certainly seemed to matter a great deal just a day ago. My God, could it have been just a day?

  Boone asks, “Can I borrow your car?”

  To go to the beach? she wonders. She starts to ask, but there’s an energy to him that makes her stop. It’s a man she hasn’t seen before—intense, focused. It’s admirable, but also a little frightening.

  “You’re not going to push it off a cliff, are you?” she asks.

  “Not planning on it.”

  She digs into her purse and hands him the keys.

  “Thanks,” Boone says. “I’ll get it back to you.”

  “I’m taking that to mean,” Petra says, “that you don’t want me to go with you.”

  He looks at her with seriousness that, again, she hasn’t seen in him before, and again, that simultaneously scares and excites her.

  “Look,” he says, “there are some things you have to do alone. Can you dig that?”

  “I can.”

  “I’m going to make this all right.”

  “I know you are.”

  He leans down and kisses her lightly on the cheek, then turns and walks away with a stride that she can only describe to herself as “purposeful.”

  She gets it.

  Thinks, You have a few things to make right, yourself.

  Petra calls a cab and tells the driver to take her to The Sundowner.

  108

  Boone drives to Tammy’s place.

  She won’t be home—Danny will have whisked her away somewhere by now. He parks Petra’s car right out front, takes the stairs up to Tammy’s place, and picks the lock.

  The apartment’s the usual usual. He heads right for the bedroom because that’s where people keep their secrets, there or in the bathroom. Tammy’s bedroom looks a lot like Angela’s, right down to the same framed picture of the two of them on top of the bureau.

  And you’re an idiot, Boone thinks. You look at her in those pictures, she hasn’t changed a bit. Teddy didn’t do any work on her, so what’s up between them?

  He goes into the bathroom and opens the medicine cabinet. Nothing on the shelves of any interest, but a small wallet-size photo is carefully wedged into the seam between the glass and the frame on the lower left corner of the inside of the cabinet door.

  It’s a face shot of a young girl. The picture was taken outdoors, but the backgro
und is indistinct due to low light and the close-up on the face, but—

  The girl from the strawberry fields, the reeds.

  The girl in the motel room with Teddy.

  Probably Latina, judging from the brown skin, long, straight black hair, and dark eyes. But she could be Native American, hard to tell. What she definitely is, is a very pretty, sweet-looking little girl with a shy, hesitant smile, wearing a cross on a thin silver chain.

  The same cross and chain that Dan Silver took out of his pocket just before Tammy flipped on her testimony.

  So it was no setup, Boone thinks, at least not on Tammy’s part. She was responding to a threat. Silver has the girl, whoever she is, and he was letting Tammy know that the right words had better come out of her mouth.

  Boone takes the picture out and looks on the back. A child’s handwriting.

  Te amo,

  Luce

  Well, at least we have a name now, Boone thinks. At least the kid has a name.

  But who is she? Boone wonders. And why is her picture on the inside of a medicine cabinet door? Why do you hide a picture but want to be reminded of it every day? How does a stripper meet a mojada girl? And why does she care?

  Think, think, he tells himself, trying to fight through the fatigue that’s smacking at him as the adrenaline drains. Tammy left Mick and went to Teddy. Why?

  Go back to your cop days, he thinks. Chronology. Do the time line. Tammy leaves Mick just after the fire at Danny’s warehouse. She becomes obsessed with making money; she spends her time with Angela; she goes to Teddy.

  Teddy and she start going up to Oceanside. But if they’re not having sex, what are they doing? Teddy knew right where to go to find the girl. Right down into the reeds by the old Sakagawa strawberry fields. Obviously, he’d been there before … with Tammy.

  And not just once, but lots of times between the fire and … the arson trial.

  At which Tammy does a 180.

  If you’d seen what I’ve seen.

  What, Tammy, what did you see?