The Dawn Patrol

by Don Winslow

  109

  Sunny takes a moment to watch the sun go down.

  A bright red ball today, painting the sea a carmine red. Beautiful, dramatic, but somehow a little ominous. Tonight is the last night of your old life sort of thing. Indeed, the ocean’s kicking it up. Getting it into gear. She can feel it in the air, in her blood. It makes her heart pound.

  She watches it for a few moments and then starts to walk to her house. Chuck wanted her to work a double, but she wants to go home and get some rest before the big day tomorrow. She’s walking home along the boardwalk when Petra catches up with her.

  “Could I have a word with you?”

  “Depends on the word,” Sunny says without stopping or even slowing down. Petra has to struggle to keep up with her long-legged stride.

  “Please?”

  “That always worked when I was a kid,” Sunny says. She stops and turns to look at Petra. “What do you want?”

  Her subtext is clear to Petra: What do you want now? You already have the man I love. Sunny Day is a beautiful woman, Petra thinks, even more beautiful in the soft dusk that casts a glow on her face. Even clad in old jeans and a thick sweatshirt, and not wearing a bit of makeup, the woman is simply lovely.

  “I just wanted to tell you,” Petra says, “that what you saw at Boone’s cottage wasn’t truly indicative of the reality of the situation.”

  “In English?”

  “Boone and I haven’t been together. Sexually.”

  “Well, yippee for you, Girl Scout,” Sunny says. “But don’t let me stop you.”

  She starts to walk away again.

  Petra reaches out and grabs her elbow.

  “If you want to keep that hand …” Sunny says.

  “Oh, stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “The tough-girl act.”

  “You’re going to find out it’s no act,” Sunny says, “if you don’t let go of my arm.”

  Petra gives up. She drops her hand and says, “I just came to tell you something about Boone.”

  She turns away. She’s a few steps down the boardwalk when she hears Sunny call after her, “Hey, flatland babe? You don’t have anything to tell me about Boone.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Petra says. “My apologies.”

  Sunny blows out a stream of air, then says, “Look, I’ve been slinging plates to a restaurant full of testosterone cases all day. I guess I’m a little aggro.”

  “Aggravated.”

  “Right,” Sunny says. “So what did you want to say about Boone?”

  Petra tells her about Boone attacking Harrington.

  “I’m not surprised,” Sunny says. “That’s where it all started.”

  “Where what all started?”

  “Boone’s …” She searches for words. “Boone going adrift, I guess.”

  Petra asks, “What is his story, anyway?”

  “What’s his story?”

  “I mean, I don’t understand him,” Petra says. “Why he’s so … underemployed … beneath his abilities. Why he left the police department …”

  Sunny says, “It didn’t work out.”

  “What happened?”

  Sunny gives a long sigh, thinks about it, and says, “Rain.”

  “His daughter.”

  “What?” Sunny says.

  “Doesn’t Boone have a daughter named Rain?” Petra asks. “I mean, I thought he had her with you, actually.”

  “Where did you get that?” Sunny asks.

  “I saw some pictures at his place.”

  Sunny tells her the story of Rain Sweeny.

  “I understand,” Petra says.

  “No, you don’t,” Sunny replies. “Boone still works that case. He never stops trying to find her. It eats him up.”

  “But surely the poor girl is dead.”

  “Yes, but Boone won’t let it go.”

  “Closure,” Petra says.

  “Well,” Sunny replies, “Boone wouldn’t know that word, or he’d pretend not to. But between you and me? Yeah, I guess ‘closure’ gets it done. Anyway, that’s Boone’s ‘story.’ As for you and him … Boone and me? We don’t own each other. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a wave to catch.”

  Petra watches her walk away.

  A golden girl on a golden beach.

  Wonders how, and if, Boone could ever let her go.

  110

  Sunny wonders the same thing.

  She gets back to her place, peels off her sweatshirt, and flings it against the wall. Is it really over over with Boone and me? Can he just let me go like this?

  I guess so, she thinks, recalling the image of the little Brit curled up on Boone’s couch. Even if what she said about not having sex with Boone was true, it’s only a matter of time. The woman is pretty, Sunny thinks. A total betty. Of course Boone would want her.

  Yeah, but it’s more than sex, isn’t it? Sunny thinks as she goes to her computer to log on to the surf report. She’s so different, this chick, and maybe that’s the point. Maybe Boone wants something totally different for his life, and that’s fair.

  So do I.

  And it’s coming. She sees it on the screen. A big whirling splash of red spinning its way toward her, bringing the hope of a different life.

  The hope and the threat, she thinks.

  Am I ready for this?

  Ready for change?

  I guess that’s what Boone wants.

  Is it what I want?

  She sits down in front of her little statue of Kuan Yin—the female personification of the Buddha and the Chinese goddess of compassion—and tries to meditate, clear all this relationship shit out of her head. There’s no room for it right now. The big swell is coming, it will be here tonight, and she’ll be in the water at first light and will need every ounce of concentration and focus she possesses to ride those waves.

  So breathe, girl, she tells herself.

  Push out the confusion.

  Breathe in the clarity.

  It’s coming.

  111

  Dave the Love God tries to tell Red Eddie the same thing.

  He sits on the deck of the new lifeguard station at PB, looking out at an ocean that is getting sketchier by the second, and tries to tell Eddie that, basically, it’s not a fit night for man or beast, or boatloads of boo.

  Eddie’s not buying it. He thinks it’s shaping up to be a perfect night to do this—black, foggy, and the Coast Guard sticking close to shore. “You are Dave the motherfucking Love God!” he says. “You’re a freaking legend. If anyone can do this …”

  Dave’s not so sure. Freaking legend or no, he’s going to have all he can handle tomorrow, and more. The water is going to be a freaking zoo, with every big-name surfer and a few dozen wannabes out there in surf that should be black-flagged anyway, trying to ride waves that are genuinely dangerous. People are going to go into the trough, get trapped in the impact zone under the crushing weight of the big waves, and someone is going to have to go in there and pull them out, and that someone is probably going to be Dave. So being out all night and then coming into a situation where he needs to be absolutely on top of his game is not a good idea.

  He doesn’t want to lose anyone tomorrow.

  Dave the Love God lives his life by the proposition that you can save everybody. He couldn’t get up in the morning if he didn’t think that, all evidence and personal experience notwithstanding.

  The truth is that he has lost people, has dragged their blue and swollen bodies in from the ocean and stood watching the EMTs trying to bring them back, knowing that their best efforts will be futile. That sometimes the ocean takes and doesn’t give back.

  He doesn’t sleep those nights. Despite what he teaches his young charges—that you do your best and then let it go—Dave doesn’t let it go. Maybe it’s ego, maybe it’s his sense of omnipotence in the water, but Dave feels in his heart that he should save everybody, get there in time every time, that he can always snatch a victim out of the ocean’s clu
tches, never mind what the moana wants.

  He’s lost four people in his career: a teenager who got sucked out on a boogie board and panicked; an old man who had a heart attack outside the break and went under; a young woman distance swimmer who was doing her daily swim from Shores over to La Jolla Cove and just got tired; a child.

  The child, a little boy, was the worst.

  Of course he was.

  The screaming mother, the stoic father.

  At the funeral, the mother thanked Dave for finding her son’s body.

  Dave remembered diving for him, grabbing him, knowing the instant he touched the limp arm that the boy was never going home. Remembered carrying him to shore, seeing the mother’s hopeful face, watching the hope dissolve into heartbreak.

  The night of the funeral, Boone came by with a bottle of vodka and they got good and drunk. Boone just sat there and poured as Dave cried. Boone put him to bed that night, slept on the floor beside him, made coffee in the morning before they went to The Sundowner for breakfast.

  Never talked about it again.

  Never forgot it, either.

  Some things you don’t forget.

  You just wish you could.

  And the chances of losing another one tomorrow are very real, Dave thinks, running through his mind the list of highly skilled, experienced surfers who have died in recent years trying to ride big waves. There were lifeguards out there those days, too, great watermen who did everything they could, but everything wasn’t enough.

  What the ocean wants, it takes.

  So now he interrupts Eddie’s stream-of-consciousness, polyglot rap and says, “Sorry, bro, it’s not on for tonight.”

  “Gots to be tonight,” Eddie says.

  “Get someone else, then.”

  “I want you.”

  He mentions the price—three months of Dave’s salary for plucking people out of the current. Three freaking months of sitting on the tower looking out for other people who go home to their houses, their families, their bank accounts, their trust funds.

  Then he says, “You take a walk on me tonight, David, you keep walking. You retire on a lifeguard’s pension, take a job delivering the mail or flipping burgers, bruddah.”

  Fuck it, Dave thinks.

  I ain’t no George Freeth.

  112

  There’s a world out there you know nothing about.

  Boone’s thinking about this as he leaves Tammy’s apartment, gets back in the BMW, and starts to drive. It’s getting dark and the streetlights are coming on; the ocean is going slate gray and headed toward black.

  What were you trying to say, Tammy? Boone thinks.

  Okay, back it up again.

  Tammy has a picture of a girl named Luce in her apartment. Teddy goes into the reed beds by the strawberry fields and, protected by a bunch of armed mojados, comes out a little while later with the same girl. He takes her to a motel room, feeds her drugs, and is about to rape her, when you bust in. You put Teddy into the wall.

  The girl runs, Danny’s muscle comes in. They grab Teddy and he leads them right to where he’s stored Tammy at Shrink’s. You get there first. They try to shoot her, but it doesn’t work. You get her back to your place, tell her about Angela, and …

  She’s not surprised.

  Tammy knew already.

  She didn’t send Angela to the Crest Motel to switch places; she went with her. She was in the motel the night Angela was murdered. Was it a jealousy thing? Did Tammy set Angela up? Did she kill her herself? Tammy’s a big, strong girl; she could have pitched Angela off that balcony.

  That would be crazy, because when she left the motel, she went to Angela’s place. She took a shower; she lay down. Made coffee she didn’t drink, toast she didn’t eat. Then she called Teddy, who hid her out at Shrink’s. You put some heat on him and he ran, not to Tammy but to …

  The strawberry fields, looking for the girl.

  And Teddy knew right where to look for her because he’d been there before. He drove right to the strawberry fields, and when I tried to follow him, I got the shit beat out of me by a trio of very angry mojados kicking and punching me and calling me a—

  Pendejo, lambioso …

  Bastard, ass-licker …

  … picaflor.

  Child molester.

  So they were used to guys coming to the reeds to look for little girls. That’s what they thought I was doing there, so that must be a place where pedophiles go. And the guy with the shotgun, the kid with the machete, the old man, they were fed up with it. They saw a chance to do something about it and they did it, except …

  It was okay for Teddy to go to the strawberry fields to find a little girl, but not me. They let him through, but they stopped me, so … You’re a moron, Daniels, he tells himself. The mojados weren’t selling the kid; they were protecting her. But they let Teddy take her to the motel room.

  He pulls onto Crystal Pier, gets out of the car, and goes into his place. Walks into the bedroom, goes to the desk, and opens the drawer.

  Rain Sweeny looks up at him.

  She has a silver chain with a cross around her neck.

  “Talk to me,” Boone says. “Please, honey, talk to me.”

  There’s a world out there you know nothing about.…

  … If you’d seen what I’ve seen.

  Boone sets the picture of Rain down and gets the pistol from his night-stand. Sticks it in the waistband of his jeans and heads back out.

  He’s going to make this right, but he has one place to stop first.

  Make that right, too.

  113

  Sunny goes over to the wall to inspect her quiver of boards.

  Her quiver is her toolbox, her fortune, her biggest investment. Every spare dollar left after food and rent has gone into boards—short boards, long ones of different shapes and designs for different kinds of surf. Now she selects her big gun, pulls it off the rack, takes it from its bag, and lays it on the floor.

  It’s a real rhino chaser—ten feet long, custom-shaped for her, it cost twelve hundred dollars, a lot of tips at The Sundowner. She examines it for nicks or hairline cracks; then, finding none, she checks the fins to make sure they’re in solidly. She’ll wait until morning to wax it, so she puts it back in its bag and up on the rack. Then she takes down her other big gun, a spare, because waves like this could easily snap a board in half and, if that happens, she wants to have another ready to go so she can get right back out there.

  Then she checks her leash, the five-foot cord that attaches at one end to the board, on the other end to a Velcro strap around her ankle. The invention of the leash made it possible to ride big waves, because the surfer could retrieve the board before it crashed into the rocks.

  But it’s a double-edged sword, the leash. On the one hand, it helps potential rescuers find a surfer trapped underwater in the impact zone, because the board will pop to the surface and “headstone,” and divers can follow the leash down to the surfer. On the other hand, though, the cord can get tangled on rocks or coral reefs and trap the surfer under the water.

  Hence the Velcro “easy release” strap, and now Sunny practices her release. She straps the leash to her ankle and lies flat on the floor, then bends all the way forward and rips the Velcro off, removing the leash. She does this ten times from a lying-flat position, then rolls onto her side and does it ten more times each from the right and left side. Then she puts her feet up on the back of her couch, lies on the floor, and pulls herself up to rip the Velcro off. The routine builds the abdominal strength that could one day save her life if she’s trapped underwater and has to do one of these “sit-ups” against a strong current of water pushing her back. It’s a mental discipline, too, practicing in the calm, dry apartment so that the move will become so automatic that she can do it underwater, with her lungs burning and the ocean exploding over her.

  Satisfied with the maneuver, she gets up, goes into the narrow kitchen, and makes herself a cup of green tea. She takes the tea t
o the table, turns on her laptop computer, and logs on to www.surfshot.com to check the progress of the big swell.

  It’s a swirling red blotch on the electronic map of the Pacific, building now up around Ventura County. The crews up there will be in the water in the morning, getting their big rides, making the mags.

  But the swell is clearly moving south.

  She stays on the site and checks buoy reports, water temperatures, weather reports, wind directions. It takes the perfect combination to produce the really big swell. All the kite strings have to come together at the same moment; a failure of any single element could destroy the whole thing. If the water gets too warm, or too cold, if the wind changes from offshore to onshore, if …

  She leaves the table and sits in front of the little shrine, made of a pine plank over cinder blocks. The plank supports a statue of Kuan Yin, a small bust of the Buddha, a photo of a smiling Dalai Lama, and a small incense burner. She lights the incense and prays.

  Please, Kuan Yin, please, don’t let it stall out there, blow itself out in the sweeping curve of the South Bay. Please, compassionate Lord Buddha, let it come rolling to me. Please don’t let it lose its anger and its force, its life-changing potential, before it gets to me.

  I’ve been patient, I’ve been persistent, I’ve been disciplined.

  It’s my turn.

  Om mani padme hum.

  The jewel is in the lotus.

  Life is going to change, she thinks, whatever happens tomorrow.

  If I get a sponsorship, go out on the pro circuit—no, she corrects herself, not if—when I get my sponsorship, go out on the pro circuit, I’ll be traveling a lot, all over the world. I won’t be at The Sundowner, I won’t be at The Dawn Patrol.

  And Boone?

  Boone will never leave Pacific Beach.

  He’ll say he will, we’ll promise that we’ll make time for each other, we’ll talk about him coming out to where I am, but it won’t happen.

  We’ll drift, literally, apart.

  And we both know it.

  To be fair to Boone, he’s been supportive.

  She remembers the conversation they had two years ago, when she was struggling with the decision of where to go with her life. They were in bed together, the sun just creeping through the blinds. He had slept, as always, like a rock; she had tossed and turned.